Reckonings: Reflections of a Teacher-Poet

Reckonings

Reflections of a Teacher-Poet

Thomas Zimmerman

This is a digital version of a chapbook that was assembled for the Community College Humanities Association’s 2013 National Conference, in Louisville, KY, October 24-26.

Copyright © 2013 by Thomas Zimmerman The author wishes to thank the publications in which the following works first appeared, sometimes in different form: The Apple Tree: “Advice for Essay Writers” and “Teaching Shakespeare” The Big Windows Review: “Zimmerman and Poetry” Carnival: “Hunters” Curio Poetry: “Stars Adorn Our Ankles” The Community College Humanist: “A One-Sonnet Shakespeare Course” and “Sonnet for Freshman Comp” Leaves of Ink: “Another Night My Wife Is Gone” Michigan Writing Centers Association Newsletter: “Sonnet for the Writing Center Tutors” Stone Path Review: “Submersion” This book was produced on a Dell computer using Microsoft Publisher.

Fonts used are Century Schoolbook, Courier New, and Tahoma.

Photographs and book design by the author.

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Reckonings Reflections of a Teacher-Poet

Thomas Zimmerman Contents Reckonings Another Night My Wife Is Gone Sonnet for Freshman Comp Submersion Teaching Shakespeare Hunters Advice for Essay Writers Stars Adorn Our Ankles A One-Sonnet Shakespeare Course Zimmerman and Poetry Sonnet for the Writing Center Tutors Why I’m Here

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

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Reckonings I’m navigating place and time and change.

I’m living on a pulpy edge, I’ve got a paper cut, I’ve joined a cult so strange that we believe that anything that’s not ambiguous is false. The metaphors are easy when you see that everything’s connected. Rivers everywhere, and shores on any margin, where a mermaid sings, then morphs to Jesus spearing fish that fall like maple leaves, like human hands that slap a moving mirror. Shadows suckle all us infants cradled in our mother’s lap: in womb, in tomb, in school, in temple lit with love, an elder enters, then we sit.

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Another Night My Wife Is Gone My teeth do float more loosely in my head these days. I’m tired, home from work, just dead awake, a beer in front of me. That’s good guitar I hear: a new, discordant disc is on the stereo, but words, for mood, are raging bores tonight. I feel no risk, my journal’s out, I write what comes to blind me: “Dots of mist are drying on my new blue coat, each one a dying world.” My mind is all puffed up with fakes of things a few cool poems by other men have said. I close the new Selected Blah-Blah-Blah of Soand-So, rethink my foredoomed plan to lose myself in verse. The dog wants out. Let’s go.

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Sonnet for Freshman Comp From brain to hand(s): that’s how it starts. Just try a freewrite, brainstorm, cluster, outline, list.

Don’t overthink it. Now think hard: on why and who and how and . . . anything you’ve missed.

Select a topic. Narrow it. Now what will be your point? To entertain? Inform?

Persuade? You’ll need a thesis statement, but relax: you’ll tweak it later. That’s the norm.

Now spin your yarn or build your case. Belief is what your reader needs. Assemble stats and details, anecdotes and facts. Be brief in telling, more expansive showing. That’s the theory. Proofread. Spellcheck. Pare down. Add. The goal is not write well; it’s not write bad.

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Submersion A dish of potpourri beside the lamp and light enough to see. The ink-pen’s had its squat, but you’re not into this. So bad the art-impulse sometimes. Aesthetic cramp, creative bends. You try to rise too fast.

You need to stay submerged awhile: a fish, a stone, a fountain penny with a wish, the rust that chews a chain to velvet, last year’s brandied cherries. Read Neruda, Bly, or Rilke. Listen to the blues of Hurt or Hooker. Surrogates and sources, dirt and forking roots: to sleep so deep in high and blackened waters, rich and strange, to let the darkness fill you, empty in its net.

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Teaching Shakespeare The sonnets are subversive, written to A man. I like to start with that, or with Will’s will, or puns on genitals might do.

I try to skip the old deer-poaching myth.

As comedy embraces tragedy, So I assuage the students’ fear of verse: Relax. Remember Hamlet’s words: “Let be.”

Then, like a pack of Calibans, they curse.

We plumb Midsummer’s dream of love, of life; Find truth in Twelfth Night’s gender-bending maze.

Macbeth, we think, is rite disguised as strife; And Henry V debunks its glory days.

We learn, as well, that couplets close an act Or click a sonnet shut with measured tact.

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Hunters Orion poised above the roof; the moon a scythe, a pendulum; my breath a wife engendering pale wraiths that die too soon for me to ask about that other life. . . .

The night is strange, and so am I: I read too much, or not enough. Dear Percy’s here with me, as black as I am white; he’s peed and had a treat, still innocent of where we end: like me. His snuffling in the brush, his belly-consciousness: mere metaphors for my more abstract quests. His headlong rush at rabbit, squirrel, mouse: how he adores the kill; or is it merely sustenance?

Like finding God unarmed, asleep, by chance.

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Advice for Essay Writers It’s best to have a thesis statement if you’re writing for a grade. Make items in a series parallel. Don’t split infinitives. Your nouns should be concrete, specific. Watch your fragments, slang, and dashes. Learn to love the Oxford comma. Know your audience. Prefer the classic to the mod.

Don’t break words off at ends of lines. Don’t burn your notes and drafts. Revise. Intuit. Be concise. Break any rule provided you have thought it through. Remember to/too/two.

Be clear about your ambiguity.

Be careful with imperatives. Take time.

Don’t plagiarize. Don’t be a slave to rhyme.

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Stars Adorn Our Ankles Magnetic is the dark abyss, and strong the wind on northern plains, the land so flat, the sky so big that, nights, the stars adorn our ankles. “Veils of topsoil,” reads a poem I wrote in North Dakota, “dancing black and naked for the plaid-backed farmers.” You were lying on that hotel bed, in shock on our arrival, TV chained against the ceiling, stars around its ankles. Blue as atlas interstates, crabbed veins adorn my ankles now, and so much laid out flat behind, beside, in front, inside of me: my mother grown into a hoop I keep on jumping through, my father’s eyes the earth so torn it blurs the far horizon line.

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A One-Sonnet Shakespeare Course The Sonnets are subversive: four-fifths praise a young man for his beauty, mourn the curse of both men being male. Midsummer plays with love as fleeting dream; the woods reverse the state’s proprieties. And Henry V is our Afghanistan: at what cost war?

In Hamlet, there’s to be or not to be avenging angel, scholar, whining bore, or saint. Twelfth Night bends genders, mocks the minds of narcissists in love with mouthing love.

Macbeth shrieks “Thou shall not kill!” while it binds the fates of man and wife to powers of infernal force. The Tempest presses hard: Forgive your foes? Is Prospero the Bard?

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Zimmerman and Poetry I google Zimmerman and poetry when I feel low. The point? A poet is a junkyard dog; the published poem, a bone.

Most readers give you twenty seconds. Then you’d better give them something back, or else you’ll end up teaching, never to atone.

I drink an ale called Anger. Two-thirds gone.

What’s next? That cheap Shiraz that vibrates by the stereo? I’ll workshop now. Alone.

Next time you want to die, remember just how good you feel right now. This jagged verse has snagged a drifting petal, scratched a stone.

So what’s a poem? A rhythm, and a tone.

So what’s this flesh I lug around? A loan.

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Sonnet for the Writing Center Tutors The sentence fragment, comma splice, and runon sentence; passive voice, omitted word, and dangling modifier; overdone expressions, wordiness, verb tenses blurred; the thesis unsupported, paragraphs in disarray, citations misaligned. . . .

With all these common errors, it’s the staff’s good will and generosity of mind that guide the student writer—sad, afraid, or mad as hell—to greater clarity, to self-awareness, pride in things well made, the thought that beauty’s not a rarity. . . .

Let’s call it mission, love, a calling; ranks of writers helping writers. Let’s give thanks.

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Why I’m Here Reducing suffering remains the goal I seek, the thing that keeps me here. The work itself is sometimes work: to play the role of parent, sibling, psychic, shrink, or jerk can take its toll; but most days—dare I say it?—I’m euphoric. Love redeems us all; and here the love I give, receive each day renews me, makes me whole. Right now, the tall and silent evergreens are white with snow; on other days, the tulips blaze with red and pink and gold. These lovely changes show me all’s in flux, remind me not to dread the thought of death but think of all that’s grown, that’s thrived—and one such life has been my own.

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Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits two literary magazines at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, MI. His chapbook In Stereo: Thirteen Sonnets and Some Fire Music was published by the Camel Saloon Books on Blog in 2012.

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