Oh the Humanities!

Trust me.  I'm a doctor.

Albeit not the kind Jewish mothers kvell about.  

More the kind lavender ladies croon about. 

Which is just (closer to) fine with me.

The best thing about getting a Ph.D.?  The tiara I bought myself to celebrate finishing the damn degree.  After spending a year writing a fascinating and insightful dissertation that I'm pretty sure nobody has ever read (and yes, I am including my advisor in that assessment), I figured I ought to have something to show for it.

So why not something sparkly and glamorous and likely to be coveted by drag queens?

Who says a girl has to be biologically a boy just to wear herself a crown?

Are you a princess or a queen?  the neighborhood crazy lady queried, as I marched into the post office, tiara-clad, to mail something off on my way to school to file my dissertation, that fateful long ago day.

Neither I answered, only slightly put off that the person calling me out on weird wardrobe was the neighborhood crazy lady I am a doctor.

These days, seldom having any occasion to dissert, profess, or

 serve as a beauty pageant runner-up, I only find cause to don the tiara once a year.

My birthday.

Because everything, even chocolate cake, is better with rhinestones.

And, apparently, a bra strap hanging out.

Ah well, it was mostly a glamorous birthday bash we had here at Dutchboy this past Saturday.  

Even if it was a little lacking in the sexpertise of yore.  

And my actual birthday, which was Monday, was pretty rocking too.  

My boss brought me a cupcake. And she didn't even pretend to have baked it herself.

Then I Delved into some Shakespeare. 

Specifically, into the final class of the Shakespeare seminar I've been teaching.  

Because, you know, having a new full time job plus my usual twelve thousand hobbies just didn't seem like enough to fill my days, without a good dozen hours of reading Elizabethan English every week.

The seminarians were really great.  One of them said she took the class because she liked my article in Bitch magazine critiquing the global politics of Viacom's Dora the Explorer franchise.   Si, se puede, as Caesar Chavespeare might have put it.

Another seminarian told me I was the first good teacher she ever had.  The fact that she has a graduate degree is perhaps more a statement about the lows of higher education than the heights of my Delving.  But I do not look a gift horse in the mouth.

Or, in this case, a Greek bearing gifts.  Which she was, both in terms of Hellenic heritage and in terms of giving me a handcrafted, locally grown, chocolate vodka.

If that wasn't enough of a Jewish girl's dream day, I came home to discover the postal carrier had delivered the latest issue of Bridges, which in case you never heard of it is like Bitch mit a bissel Yiddish thrown in.  And there, right on pages 75-77, was a poem by little old me.

About a course I had to take to get my Ph.D.

So now, in addition to being a doctor, a tiara-donner, a righteous 9 to 5-er, a Dora-critiquer and an intrepid Delver, I am also a published poet.  

Next thing you know, we'll be seeing Robert Pinsky traipsing around in a rhinestone crown with his bra strap hanging out.

From the Mouths of Bards. Well, Only One Bard. And Thus One Mouth.

I meant to do a Happy Hallotween post.  

It involved an Erev Halloween voicemail from our favorite tween, in which she shrieks in terror.

Terror because her father walks into the room while she is leaving us a message about how she can't hang out with us on Halloween because she is going on a six hour trick or treat binge with her peers, and tells her in that cruel way parents do that she totally not going trick or treating for six hours.  She is only allowed to go trick or treating for like four hours.  Five max.

Then Halloween actually happened.  And the Walloon of Walgreens and his Wuvely Wife surprised the whole block by dressing up as me and the Cheez.

That Is Not My Beautiful Walloon

So I kind of lost the thread of the Hallotween post.  And apparently of the All Saint's Day, Election Day, and Veteran's Day posts as well.

But now I've got a surefire idea for a post topic.  

Plagiarism.

Only, that's an ugly word.  Let's go with Literary Tribute instead.

That's much nicer.  And appropriate, as I am plagiarizing a literary treasure.

So here, without further ado (i.e., more crap photoshop) are the quotable quotes from the eight-week-minus-that-one-I-was-with-my-Schwinstress-in-San-Francisco poetry workshop I took this fall with Peter Sears.

My Own Personal Sears Catalogue:

We do depend on narrative to some degree, especially here in Oregon.

Read the cummings poem and have a glass of wine.

Hot language beats everything.  Deep meaning--leave that to John Donne.  Or whoever.

We have a right wing in poetry that is kind of formal  But they're just stodgy.  They don't really write.

That's what poets do.  They don't want characters chapters, plot.  Screw it.  They want language.

Where can I get a pink tshirt?

You have a real strength in things.  The thingness of the poem. [said in response to a poem we were critiquing, not, alas, one of mine.  Apparently I'm a little thing-lite when it comes to poesy]

We call that in the business POETICIZING.  Poeticizing, a nasty way of saying what she just said.

There he is throwing up in the john, or having angst, or looking out the window.   Whatever it is.

Are we talking your talk, honey?

Sounds like a Ronald Reagan speech.

All the poems work that way Peter declares.  Dubious, workshop student responds, All?.  Peter considers.  A lot of poems he concedes.

Wallace Stevens wrote a few good poems, you know.  And he did philosophy up and down.

On lyric: That's a place, especially with males, where things strut.

Also, the soul is only one syllable, so I like it much better than spirituality.

By young, I mean under fifty.

On William Stafford:  That's why a lot of people hate his poetry.  They can't figure out how the hell he does it.

Sex, war, and some good meals.  There's a title for your first book.

As you can imagine, it was a deeply edifying experience.  

Maybe because I have so much to learn about writing poetry.

But at least I know where you can get a pink shirt.

Right over at the Walgreens.  Which is just the place to go when you're celebrating having your second ever poem accepted for publication anyplace that isn't your high school literary magazine.  

Rhymes with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Day 14 of the Obama Presidency, and my government-issued unicorn still hasn't arrived.

I know, he has a lot to do, what with restoring the Constitution and achieving world peace and enacting job stimulus and all.  

But think about this for job stimulus:  UniCorps, a sort of domestic peace corps, employed to clean the poop from all our brand-new unicorns out of the streets.  

Really brings new meaning to the phrase make work project.  And since unicorns poop gold nuggets, the economy will go from in the dumps to propelled by dumps in no time at all.

So what has been slipping through my mail slot, if not gold-pooping, government-issued unicorns?  

Poems!  Yes, I have signed up for a Poetry Pyramid Scheme.   Or, as those of you who were paying a little too much attention during 11th grade English class might think of it, iambway.

But it's not all just sitting around waiting for the mailwoman (speaking of job stimulus, there's a title which sounds very trans-trans; at least it's less apocalyptic than calling the carrier a post-person).  If you want to be part of Ponzi poetry, you have to pen the poems too.

Which I have thus far done in several manic moments.  I'll spare you the first result, a rant against cancer and the ironic timing with which it killed off my friend Gloria, who was a professor of Africana history, the day before a certain unicornilicious president took office.

It's not a bad poem, but this is after all a humor blog. So here's some of the more light-hearted verse I've dashed off.

Genetic Indisposition

In my family

having kids

is like a disease

that skips generations

Well, I thought that was funny.  Of course, in my family, killing off the relatives can also be funny.

And speaking of dark humor, here's another ditty:

The Patient Rooms

When I ride my bike

past the Alzheimer

care facility,

I wonder

about the mementos

lining the windows

of the patient rooms.

I sense I'm not the only one.

My squeeze the Cheez said those were both kind of depressing.  But the Canadians have no sense of humor.  Or, as they would put it, that's humour, and it's not funny.

Of course, some people believe poetry should be more obscure, less narrative.  

For those of you who have been diligently reading this blog for a year, just hoping for an obscure, less narrative poem, today is your lucky day!

Philology Recapitulates Poetry

Professor

Donka Minkova,

world's leading

export on the

schwa.

That's an A-B-C-B-A rhyme scheme, if you pronounce the as thə (those of you too prosaic to enjoy the obscurity of poetry can read up on my obsession with Donka Minkova elsewhere).

But clearly my best postcard-poetry product so far was the truly inspired verse. 

Inspired by me thinking what the hell shall I wrote a poem about now, then looking out the window and writing about the first thing I saw.

Walloon at Walgreen's

Nobody loves the

24-hour

neon-lit drugstore

more than the

Belgian immigrant

next door.

Okay, so I admit, my efforts so far are more chapstick than chapbook.  But at least I am reading great poetry, if not writing it.

And not just reading it, I am teaching it.  In the perfect course:   fantastic topic (Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and the invention of an American poetic voice), motivated students, glamorous setting, and no grading.  

The very antipode of academia, to use a word I had to look up when I came across it in Song of Myself.  (If there really is an afterlife, I can only hope that somewhere my friend Gloria is teaching such a class herself; after years as a department chair, she earned it). 

Yes, it is nice to dwell in the highbrow world of literature.  Which for me means obsessing about the shopping mall and singing the Gilligan's Island theme song.  Both of which I managed to cover in the first class meeting.

By the second class meeting, which was last night, we had moved on to Dr. Seuss.

Portland does seem ripe for a Green Eggs and Ham parody

I am Sam.

Sam-I-am. 

 

I am in a 

political jam.

I did not do Beau here or there.

I did not do Beau anywhere.

Well, I guess I kissed him in the john,

But only in the john with clothes on.

I did not do Beau when a minor!

I did not do Beau dressed as a Shriner!

Okay, so maybe that isn't exactly Whitman's Calamus.  

I guess it's less poetic when there is an entire media frenzy documenting who you've soused with spray.

But the real reason my poetry is so wanting may be that I've never taken a poetry-writing class.  Which is hardly my fault.  When I was in graduate school, the department's poetry professor was also the department's most egregious sexual harasser (although academia being what it is, he had plenty of competition for the title).   

In addition to teaching poetry and sexually harassing every female under the age of his-own-age-minus-twenty-years (which on the campus of a large public university gives the aging professor an awful lot to do), his job duties included judging the annual poetry prize.  One year I considered making an anonymous entry, entitled Do All Great Poets Sleep With Their Students?  

The original is, alas, lost to posterity, but I think I can whip up something that will give you the basic gist:

Do all great poets sleep with their students?

Is the genus of genius

such a drive undeniable?

O how the pen is 

a tool to be reckoned with!

And what is spilled 

upon pages, unto the ages?

When gripped by the muse,

what doth the poet grip and use?

It's no small feat to coerce

true genius in verse

When he goes about it

he needs sexual outlet.

Tis a measure of talent

to be so carnally spent.

So do all great poets sleep with their students?

Or only the mediocre ones?