Miracles

Something about it just sticks in my craw, even though the longer I think about it, the less surprised I am. Shoot, I could have guessed. Still.

According to NPR, a company called Music Intelligence Solutions--and that makes sense--has created a computer program that assesses a pop tune's marketability. If you're a singer/songwriter--and there are millions--you fork over a hundred bucks or so, submit your latest to their software, and its crystal ball lays out your success or lack thereof. A low score, and you do some tinkering. Creating and selling music isn't hocus-pocus, and writing it isn't magic. It's science. A computer can do it. Art by algorhythm.

There's something repulsive about that, even if it isn't shocking. After all, I could dang well increase the sales of my novels if I scribbled out a full-blown bodice ripper: say, under a yellow, harvest moon an aging, paunchy college English professor/werewolf hunts down young couples taking late night walks in the shadowy cottonwood grove just behind the President's house--no, make that "President's mansion." Hmmm. I'd bet good money I'd increase sales locally a hundred fold. Cut the werewolf and make him a vampire, and I'll do even better these days.

Aging, paunchy, scar-faced English prof mysteriously transforms his American lit class into attack-dog zombies, who march en masse on Wal-Mart singing Ms. Emily's "Because I could not stop for death" to the tune of "Amazing Grace"? That'll get some attention.

Still.

There's just something disappointing about artists sticking their work in a computer and altering thereby. I know, it's done all the time. People used to say that the most-read Iowa novel of all time, The Bridges of Madison County, was written by a marketing formula--by a business prof, too. It was schmaltzy and steamy, but good night did it sell copy--and a movie.

It's not rocket science, after all, to guess how my two favorite novels of the last few years became so. One, Marilyn Robinson's Gilead, is basically the reflections of small-town Iowa preacher who calls himself a Calvinist. The other, Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, is a series of short stories connected, basically, by a retired teacher in a small town in Maine. Hmmm.

Of course, I'm not alone in my leanings. Both won Pulitzers.

Maybe I ought to be the machine that calls winners.

Here's my take. Maybe algorhythms can predict platinum, but not every last winner. There's always going to be those stories and tunes that come out of nowhere. There's always going to be the outsider, the shocker, the one that no one would ever have guessed. There's always going to be a dark horse. There has to be. I wouldn't want to live in that other world.

Here's what I think--there's always going to be the miracle.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE ENGLISH MAJORS GONE?

What happens to English majors after they leave Dordt? Now and then, alum visits and emails brighten our days. This year I've received quite a few.

Last this summer, Melissa Drake ('05) walked into my office. Last I'd heard, she'd completed her MDiv at Drew Seminary in Madison, NJ. When this imposing women appeared out of nowhere, I was struck by her exuberance, the trait she always brought to my classes. Our conversation went like this:

"Melissa Drake, what on earth?" (Big hugs). I recalled she loved to run summer youth camps and write academic papers.

"I'm Pastor Melissa now, for two churches in Iowa, one with over 200 members, the other with about fifteen. My favorite time is Sunday night--I host all the young people at my place for food and conversation."

After exchanging stories, I asked "How did Dordt affect you?"

"It was a good experience, and it prepared me for seminary--we did a lot of deconstructing texts [she smiled]. It also helped me see things in a different way, though I'm still a Methodist.
I mostly want my people to love Jesus.

"What are your plans, Pastor Melissa?"

"I'm ready to go or stay, wherever the church needs me."

In a recent email, she wrote that she is taking two online courses and will start teaching a Lay-Speakers class on Hospitality and Leadership. As to the women of '05 she writes, "I have as of yet to encounter again a group of such intelligent and wonderful girls all in one place. I believe those relationships and that group, along with the practice of getting together to engage in serious and silly discussion, will always be one of the most important experiences of my Dordt Career!" No doubt, Pastor Melissa will lead her congregations with the same infectious fervor she brought to Dordt.

A few weeks later, I heard from Jeff Gutierrez ('06). Last spring, he completed his Masters in Arts and Letters at Drew University, with a thesis on Thornton Wilder's structure of time in several plays. He's currently working on a second Masters at Boston College in English (or Interdisciplinary Studies, not sure which) and is considering Princeton for his Ph.D. A lover of scholarship, he writes that he "gave a conference paper on Tolkien at UC Riverside, and right before graduation...received the Robert Campbell Prize for Excellence in and Commmitment to Literature." Now at Boston College, Jeff is a Writing Fellow. He'll be giving a paper on C.S. Lewis at a conference in Boston later this year. Closing with, "Good times, keeping busy, sleeping when I can," he lives in Boston with wife Beth (Ochsner), who completed her Masters in Social Work at Columbia U last spring.

Cheryl Korthuis Hiemstra ('08 grad and editor of the Canon) also wrote this September, from her first year in law school: "Just wanted to say I'm using so many things I learned from you (and the rest of the English Dept, too) in law school. Already we've used Derrida's deconstruction in parsing out definitions of statutes and common law phrases." She reports thata her case briefs "are getting great reviews by the professor" and that she's "editing a Civil Procedure text written by one of [her] professors." This future attorney encourages us to be "just as thorough with your students this year."

Here are several other alums you might have wondered about. Andrew De Young ('05) completed his Masters in English at St. Thomas U, worked a year for a publishing company, and has started his own publishing company, Replacement Press, with his wife Sarah (Versluis). Rosemarie Grantham ('05) manages an Apple Computer store in the "silicon valley" of California. When we last talked, she laughed at her resistance to teaching, now admitting she loves to teach her customers how to use their computers, to solve problems for her company, and to manage the "boys" who work in her store. Gloria Ayee ('06) emailed in February to say she'd finished her Masters in Liberal Studies at Duke and works as a research associate with the Center on Globalization, Governance, and Competitiveness at Duke. She began her Ph.D. in Political Science at Duke this fall. She writes, "Although I have diverged from my English LIterature roots somewhat, I continue to see tremendous value in the wonderful Engish classes I took as an undergraduate." Linda Van Wyk ('07) emailed me last week from Kosin University in Busan, Korea, where she teaches English. "I've been here for over a year now, and I love it. I adore my students and it's been a lot of fun to teach them. I've even been able to teach a couple of lit. classes, which have been a joy to me." More recent grads, Julie Ooms and Jessica Assink ('08) are working on their Masters in English at Baylor University. When I saw Julie in San Antonio last fall, she raved about her program and said we'd prepared her well.

Sharla Dirksen Kattenberg ('04) met me in the Children's Park last week to talk about the lit. course she teaches in a small Christian school in Hull, Iowa. As her young son Willem endangered himself every minute with mud cakes, slides, and swings, she told how she loves being a mother of two toddlers and teaching high school English and chemistry. Mostly we talked about Shelley's Frankenstein and Austen's Pride and Prejudice, works she's currently teaching. She especially wonders what the women in Austen novels did with "all their time!"

I'll end this litany with news from '09 graduate Rachel De Smith. When Rachel began her Masters at Creighton U this fall, neither of us knew that Creighton houses the Center for Henry James Studies, which means Rachel's been reading much of his work. Though she doesn't sing his praises as loudly as I do (yet), she does appreciate his work. Good news is that she received a full scholarship as well as an assistantship. One of her favorite courses in one in editing texts. She writes that she holds a key to the HJ Center and will happily give any of us a tour. Way to go Rachel.

All you English major alums out there, let us hear from you!

ColecoVision Vs. Crayfish

(Pictures by Christina Van Singel)

I had a ColecoVision as a child. If you don’t know what a ColecoVision is, it’s one of the missing links between the Atari and the Nintendo, and its run lasted from 1982 until about 1985. I spent my fair share of hours in front of the ColecoVision, “turning over” Donkey Kong, and Donkey Kong Jr., as well as classics games such as Mr. Do and War Games. “Turning it over” meant running the score out of digits, turning it over just like you do the odometer on a car, back to all zeros; it meant complete and utter mastery of those incredibly sophisticated games.

I also spent my fair share of time down by the creek (Elgersma insists on calling it a crick, that hick) as a child. In and along this creek, I came upon minnows and pheasants, ducks and even a beaver once—and crayfish.

Crayfish looked cool. With their beady eyes, many legs, stellar armor and oversized claws, they were veritable monsters of the deep. Here I was, about as landlocked in midcontinent as I could get, and in the creek in my backyard lived Leviathan.

Crayfish became my mortal enemy. I spent hours scouring the mud bottom of the crick—creek—in order to catch a blue-green crayfish on its ominous march to wherever it was going. When I spotted one, I’d prod it with a stick and get it to flip its powerful tail backwards into a net which I had positioned for just such a move, and then I’d haul them up onto shore. The crayfish, like a fish out of water (hmm, weak simile there), would go into battle mode and I would proceed to be petrified (I was 17—no, like 12). Eventually, I’d smash it to goo with my walking stick and take the claws for souvenirs, which stunk up my bedroom in a day or two and so I’d throw them out.

Fast-forward a dozen or so years. One Sunday, I walked into my mother-in-law’s kitchen, and there in a bowl were perhaps fifty bright red crayfish. Yes, you can eat crayfish, my mother-in-law and wife informed me, and then they showed me how: break off the tail, peel off the shell and you’ve got a tiny white piece of meat, sweet and pure—like lobster but in miniature.

From there, my passion for crayfish has multiplied. It turns out my wife’s cousin has a seining net. It turns out there are crayfish to be had in the Rock River, and that there are wonderful Cajun-based recipes for what’s called a seafood boil with ingredients that include corn on the cob and potatoes and andouille sausage. It turns out my wife’s cousin and I will do anything for a haul of crayfish and a seafood boil, including walking the Rock River up to our waists in mud, snagging snapping turtles in the net—my standard joke is to call this process southwest Minnesota’s somewhat dangerous catch—all to get at these Rock River lobsters. It is indeed a sort of love affair.

Robert Frost knew about love affairs with nature. His poem “Birches” pictures for us a boy who lives “too far from town to learn baseball,/ Whose only play was what he found himself.” Frost waxes nostalgic over “swinging birches” in that poem, admitting that “So was I once myself a swinger of birches;/ And so I dream of going back to be,” and ending with the benediction that “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”

If my mom had held onto it, I don’t doubt the ColecoVision would fetch a modest price on ebay these days. Today, I myself have a daughter and two sons, and they already know of the wonder of video games. We have a couple of Walmart cheapies that you plug directly into the TV on which we play some throwback games: Pole Position and Dig Dug and Ms. Pacman.

But my kids also like to tag along on the seining runs, to touch minnows and to catch frogs and to see turtles and to step in cow pies and be scared of bulls. And they know how to eat crayfish, to peel the tails and get the sweet white meat. Soon, they’ll know how to catch them: to dig the poles of the net down into the mud bottom, to chase crayfish from out of the weeds along the bank, to pluck them out of the net just behind the head so they don’t pinch you with their mortally fearsome claws. Needless to say, I’m biased toward which one of these two pastimes I think is more important to their development, their sense of the world.

One could do worse than be a lover of crayfish.

1st Annual English Department Crawdad Boil/Pot Luck*

The highlight--without a doubt--was Prof. Howard Schaap's bowl full of crawdads, still clawing over each other, only recently netted from the nether depths of the Rock River.

But those crawdads weren't the whole story. Food and fun were in gracious supply, all of it on a windblown hill in Oak Grove Park. A bunch of students and profs had a joyous pot luck with, as fortune would have it, more than enough grub for the multitudes.

A great time was had by all.

*photos by Christina Van Single

Milton, Poetry and Christian Ambition

I've recently been reading Anna Beer's new biography of John Milton, Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot. Beer paints of a compelling portrait of Milton as a young man, wrestling between his religious faith and his own ambitions for fame through poetry. In the metaphors of Milton's day fame was imbued with all the vibrant pagan imagery of Ovid and Virgil, while the newly Protestant England was busy stripping its altars of any imagery or ritual that smacked of Catholicism. What imaginative and voracious yet devout reader wouldn't be torn between the two?

In fact, this tension really never ends for Milton. Many have noted that in Paradise Lost Satan, who is selfish ambition unincarnate, often makes a more compelling case than many of the angels. Every reader asks at least once, "Is Satan the hero of PL?" It's difficult to sort out, especially because Milton was trained extensively in rhetoric and in presenting arguments for both sides. It is hard to tell in almost all of Milton's poetry what he really thinks (if that's your particular interpretive interest!) because he often makes such a strong case for every position.

As a poet myself, I am often worried about the tension between my Christian faith (and its virtues of humility and servanthood) and seeking out creative success in the world. What I've learned is that this tension cannot be simply a theoretically question but it must be lived. Beer takes pains to portray Milton not as some austere, aloof prophet but a man who has his hands dirty with the ink of printing presses, his nostrils filled with the odors of constant urban disease and plague, his ears filled with the noisy chatter of London streets.

I believe instead of removing ourselves from the world to devote ourselves to God, we are called to set our faces to Jerusalem--the loud, dirty, complicated marketplace of the world. Unlike his Protestant brothers Milton does not strip his poetry of all paganism. He brings his Christian faith into that world and transforms it. Truly that is where all the friction (and therefore energy) is in Milton's work. Lycidas is a pastoral elegy in which resurrection explodes onto the scene. In Paradise Lost the poet's muse is transformed into the Holy Spirit. For Milton all things are drawn up and into the divine order. Perhaps it's not a solution to the tension but a way of bringing that tension into the Kingdom of God.

A morning's joy in pink

One could do worse than start the day with a poem. If you're connected to Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, that's what you do. Sign up, and a poem is delivered courteously to your inbox doorstep every morning.

This morning it was "Pink," by my good friend Luci Shaw, a wonderful Christian poet from Bellingham, Washington. To hear her voice this early morning was a joy.

Pink
　

Not a color I've wanted to wear--too
innocently girlish, and I'm not innocent,
not a girl. But today the gnarled cherry trees
along Alabama Street are decked out
like bridesmaids--garlands in their hair,
nosegays in their hands--extravagant,

finally the big spring wedding to splurge,
and hang the cost. Each really wants to be
the bride so she can toss her bouquet until,
unaccustomed, the gutters choke
with pink confetti that flies up and whirls
in the wake of cars going west,

flirting shamelessly with teenage boys on
the crosswalks. The pale twisters,
the drifts of petals, call out to me, "Let go;
it's OK to be giddy, enchanted, flighty,
intoxicated with color. Drive straight
to the mall and buy yourself a pink Tee."

This old buck male says that Luci's "Pink" is a determinedly female poem. What's more, yesterday, for the first time this term, I wore corduroys because it's just now officially fall and we're an entire gray winter from Ms. Shaw's sporty spring. Sorry, Luci, but right now this old man isn't about to run out and buy a cute little pink Tee--just wouldn't be me.

No matter. I love it--the poem that is, nature's gaudiness begging us not only to take note, but to change course altogether, to doll up on our own lives, to run out to the mall and hunt down some showy stuff ourselves quick-a-minute.

Maybe a new button-d0wn shirt. I'll check Eddie Bauer. Maybe even pink. Some guys wear it.

You’ve Got Mail

Throughout literary history, the rejection letter has received more than its fifteen minutes of fame. In fact, a book by Andre Bernard, Rotten Rejections: The Letters that Publishers Wish They’d Never Sent (Robson Books, 2002) recounts several now embarrassing letters written to authors of what became famous books. Here’s a sampling: on Silvia Plath, “There certainly isn’t enough talent for us to take notice”; on The Diary of Anne Frank, “The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift the book above the ‘curiosity’ level”; and even on Stephen King’s Carrie, “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell” (http://www.writersservices.com/mag/m_rejection.htm).

As an aspiring writer, I was often told of authors who kept a file—some several files—of their rejection letters. Once they became popular, these files became the great moral to the writing story which naturally goes like this: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Everyone, it seems, can be the little writer that could.

Now, as the recipient of several of them myself, I would argue that rejection letters are largely overrated. Not because they take the wind out of one’s creative sails, or because filthy lucre blinds publishers to the genius of one’s work, or because the letters themselves are often written in cold, not even calculated language. No, rejection letters are overrated simply because they pale in comparison to the real king of the publishing process: anticipation.

At least, that is, in publishing poetry. The publishing process is greatly simplified in the publishing of poetry. To send out individual poems, you don’t need to write a “query letter” asking permission to send your work, and you definitely don’t need some agent ferrying your work back and forth across whatever River Styx it must cross. All you need to publish poetry is an address, a few sheets of paper, and two envelopes. You take one envelope and put in the following: a cover letter telling about yourself and your poetry; the poems you want to include, typically 3-5; and an SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) in which the editor will return his or her verdict. You put these in the mail and wait. The longer the better. This is where anticipation comes in.

Snail mail may be old school. It may often contain junk. It may even be unstewardly. But it’s awesome nonetheless. My children love to get the mail. They take turns getting it, opening the mailbox in anticipation, mainly because their grandmother sends cards at the faintest whiff of a holiday.

The mailbox is the present we get to open every day. When you send out poems, every day you go to the mailbox is a day of possibility, and every day that you don’t get a response means the possibility is still out there. Where is your poem? Is it being opened at this moment? Is someone bringing it to the attention of another for input? Is it jarring a memory, a thought, a conversation? Actually, I’d never thought of these possibilities until just now. Personally, when I send out poems, I let them out of my imaginative reach and just enjoy the wait.

Last spring, I required that my poetry students send off poems to publishers at least two separate times: once to the Lyrical Iowa competition and once to another publication of their choice. Several balked at the requirement for various reasons. Then, to the surprise of at least eight of those budding poets, they got accepted and will be published this October in Lyrical Iowa.

One particular poet from the class, after she found out that her poem got accepted, confessed to feeling a bit ornery at being forced to send a poem off in the first place. “I thought ‘What’s the point?’” she later told me. In this case, of course, the publishing made a bit of a difference.

Still, the point in my mind was not publication—it was anticipation. Writing is communication. We write things so that there is some account of our lives, to show that we were here. What we write is ultimately completed by a reader on the other end. And so, to complete the process, we must put our writing before others.

Next time, for those who balk at marketing their work, I will offer another alternative: they may send out their poems to at least 15 family members or friends, thereby gifting their poetry. Yes, I’ll allow them to use email to do it. But how much better would it be for 15 people to open the present of their mailbox to find a gift of words?

One could live on that sort of anticipation for days.