April, We Hardly Knew Thee

So April's pretty much done with. Bad news: National Poetry Month is coming to an end. Good news: so is the school year. And don't get me wrong, I'm fully aware how lucky I am to be paid to talk about writing all day, to get to interact with kids and endeavor (usually, in vain) to get them to care about a poem or story; but, that said, I'm eager to get to this summer. Why? Well, I'm starting to get excited about this move; about my east coast farewell tour (oh yeah, it's happening); about the possibility of the idea of maybe one day writing another poem; about the prospect of trekking across these United States with my Redbone Coonhound in the front seat, windows cracked, u-haul trailer clonking along behind. Is that so bad?

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Even with the aforementioned excitement, I'm genuinely digging teaching my 12th graders The Things They Carried. For starters, it gives me a chance to closely read a book I love and try and figure out just exactly why I love it so damn much. Also--it's really illuminating to teach this book to the handful of students I have who are headed for the armed forces. In general, they seem to really be loving it, though I wonder sometimes if that's more posturing than anything else. Lastly (but not least-ly), the book says so much about the nature of story-telling and, perhaps, why we writer-types are so driven:

"And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."

I was lucky to have dinner with Tim O'Brien when I was a student at Elon. Not sure how finagled that, but it was cool. He mentioned, more than once, that he always writes wearing nothing but underwear. He signed my copy of his book right underneath a big stamp that says "Property of Lansing High School."

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Killer first line of the moment:

"Shall the water not remember Ember"

from Fred Chappell's "Narcissus and Echo"

(Shadow Box, LSU Press, 2009)

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He's crisscrossed the country to meet with state and local officials in coastal areas, urging them to start planning now for the slow-motion flood. Yet his warnings have mostly fallen on deaf ears. "We were often told by mid-level officials that their bosses did not want to plan for anything past the next election," he says.

via Slate

Half-interesting, half-terrifying.

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Arizona Iced Tea Shows Its Papers

via NYT

On the real, though, this whole thing in Arizona seems surreal. I have a hard time understanding how anyone can not see this legislation as anything but hateful and dangerous. Hey, people of Arizona, remember when your state was, um, part of Mexico? But the immigrants are the interlopers, right? Unbelievable...

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Whoa. Calm down, Eminem. Nonetheless--crazy. Definitely not a freestyle...