Poetry
Poetry
Whitman in Fukushima
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/06/2015 - 20:38This evening, the Walt Whitman class I have been taking online comes to an end. As a final exercise, we were encouraged to write a poem in the style of Whitman.
Last night, I went to the opening of "A Body in Fukushima" at Wesleyan. It is a powerful show, that I highly recommend. As I thought about the show, and thought about my assignment for the Whitman class, I thought it would be good to writemy thoughts about the show, al a Whitman.
So,
A Body in Fukushima
Who were you that rode your bike to the train station, now abandoned to the radiation?
Who were you that steamed your rice, in a cooker now too hot with a different type of heat?
Who were you that mended the boats, the boats damaged by the tsunami, the boats that can no longer be repaired?
Who were you that danced by the one ton bags of radioactive dirt or photographed the dancer?And those of you in years past who helped build the nuclear power plants. You saw Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did you not worry that those promises of prosperity to your impoverish properties would be empty?
It is all part of a giant dance of survival, the deals we make to escape mind numbing subsistence work. But sometimes, the deals go bad.
Now, the cherry trees, that your ancestors nurtured so lovingly, bloom each spring, but the radiation keeps away the visitors, keeps away the former inhabitants. Their flowers, their smells, their beauty hidden behind the warning signs.
And what can we learn from the photographs? And what will those who come many years hence, after the radiation has decayed, what will they learn?
Banks of Snow
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/31/2015 - 17:45Another winter storm watch is in effect for parts of New England, starting Sunday evening at 7 PM, shortly after kickoff for the Superbowl. I suspect many Patriots fans are hoping for a snow day on Monday, and also hoping, perhaps without the thought having yet crossed their mind, that we don’t lose power during the game. Others will hope that a travel ban doesn’t go into effect until after the game ends.
I am not a big football fan. I’ll watch the game at home with my family. No, we won’t be traveling during the storm. And throughout the storm, I expect that I’ll be working to get the message out about any closings or other considerations for my co-workers.
It is bitter cold outside today, at least by New England standards, with wind chill factors around zero. I did make the trip to the dump, not because there was a lot of trash, but in case I can’t go next week and the trash piles up.
I glance outside as I hear the latest gust and the creaking of the house. I see light snow blowing from roof to drift to driveway.
A child said What is the snow? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I’ve spent my day, besides the time I spent going to the dump, resting, and participating in online courses. This afternoon, I read section six of “Song of Myself” and watched a video of teachers talking about the poem. Leaves of Grass, Banks of Snow.
As I listen to the teachers speak, the words of Emerson come to mind:
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.
Are these teachers, critiquing Whitman as a teacher about grass forgetting Whitman’s educational experience, who ended his formal schooling at age eleven?
I made it further. I didn’t end my formal education until I was twenty, just shy of getting a college degree. Yet I find my thoughts about education closer to those of Emerson and Whitman, perhaps tinted with a little Piaget, Papert, and now, perhaps, George Siemens.
Besides the Whitman class that I’m taking online, I’m taking a course on Teaching with Moodle. As part of the class, I needed to set up my own course using Moodle, so I set up Moodle and Connectivism. The course, currently, has a link to Siemens’ paper, and a sample quiz and assignment; the parts of the course needed for the teaching course.
Of course, it is something that I’m constructing as I go, and learn more about Connectivism. It is also set up for other students to connect in, so that we can all learn together, and perhaps that is part of what Whitman is talking about anyway.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
“All goes onward and outward…”
Literature, Legal Decisions, and the Plastic Palimpsest
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/27/2015 - 20:56As part of the Walt Whitman course I’m taking online, I watched a fascinating interview between Supreme Court Justice Elena Kegan and Harvard professor Elisa New. I’ve often blog about court decisions, but I’ve rarely thought about them as a literary form and the interplay of court decisions and other literature.
At one point, Justice Kagan, speaking about a poem said,
So reading this made me think a little bit harder about what I was seeing every day, in a way, that I guess, great poetry can do-- is to make you notice things that you don't notice in the world.
It struck me that we need Judges and Justices that read poetry; that notice things that normally aren’t noticed.
In another section she talks about quoting other judges
All the time, I use what other judges have said. And if I'm a judge and I have this amazing quote from Louis Brandeis-- man, I make sure to use that quote, right? Because it's an amazing quote, and because Louis Brandeis said it gives me a kind of credibility.
It was a wonderful discussion.
Today, I have been cleaning up some of the dangling fragments of ideas for blog posts on my computer. There are so many ideas bouncing around in my head that I would like to explore. I decided I would write a blog post exposing and exploring some of these ideas.
I was going to title the post something like, palimpsest. It is a wonderful word, dating back to Cicero, talking about writing over something, such as on a parchment that has been scraped off and is being reused.
Yet the idea of palimpsest that I always go to is from Judge John Woolsey in his decision about James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Joyce has attempted — it seems to me, with astonishing success — to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious.
It is such a wonderful quote, and I often think about this blog, with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions and the penumbral zone residua of my own past impressions, sometimes written about, sometimes, just in fragments, sometimes not even yet in fully formed thoughts.
But now, I’ve written my blog post of the day, exploring literature, legal decisions, and the plastic palimpsest underlying my own blog, so I’ll have to explore the incomplete fragments in a later post.
A Post Structural Whitman
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/25/2015 - 18:08How curious it is to be writing a blog post about an online course on Walt Whitman taught by a Harvard professor, shortly before the blizzard hits; so much further than Whitman’s mediations could ever have led him.
I, too, was once a student of modest means. I, too, once lived in Brooklyn. I, too, once walked the streets of Manhattan, visited the theatres and sailed the waters of the East River.
How different things might have been, if I had read Whitman, perhaps mixed with a little Foucault before heading off to college, before those long nights walking with an artist friend the back streets of industrial Ohio.
The railroad tracks, the blast furnace, the tree full of bats shrieking off into the night, and the fried onion rings at the all night truck stop might have made more sense against a palimpsest of Foucault and Whitman.
We were the flaneurs of twentieth century industrial America, and should have claimed our heritage of Whitman’s wandering around Manhattan or Baudelaire’s Paris.
But I was not so full of myself. I could not sing a song of myself, as much as I loved Giovanni’s Ego Tripping, I disliked self-referential pop music, and restricted my poetry to quaint imagism.
Years later, I took to the technology of my generation. Writing computer software became my poetry and my gateway to the penny presses of the twenty first century, the blog.
Like Franklin and Whitman, I went from working the presses to writing the content, fueled by a love of democracy. As a blogger, I hung out with the politicians, became a politician, and sought for words to make a difference.
But now, I must post my thoughts about Whitman, about the poems we’ve been reading before the blizzard hits, for like another poet that impacted me early, I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.
Hacking Brooklyn Ferry
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/17/2015 - 18:27It is Saturday, a day of rest. I am visiting my brother-in-law and his family in Hanover, New Hampshire. Fiona is off hanging out with her cousins. I have just gotten back from a walk around the Dartmouth campus, playing Ingres, hacking portals.
I pause to read Crossing Brooklyn Ferry as part of the MOOC that I am taking. How curious it would all be to Walt Whitman, a MOOC, the internet, this laptop. How curious it would all be to Walt Whitman, Ingress, GPS, cellphones. Hacking Brooklyn Ferry.
Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not,
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island,
I first lived in Brooklyn in the days before the cellphone, when the internet was limited to a select few. I commuted from Brooklyn to New York, not by ferry, but by subway. Years later, I lived on a sailboat, a sloop, Whitman would have said, on the west side of Manhattan. I often sailed the waters Whitman wrote about, jibing and tacking amongst the vessels in the bay. Again, years later. I walked the streets, hacking portals in Ingress.
Yes, how curious it would all be to Walt Whitman, and yet, to hop to a different poet,
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
I return to Whitman. Later, I come across “ as I lay in my bed” and my mind wanders to Wordsworth.
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
I sit on my brother-in-law’s couch, and think about Wordsworth’s daffodils and Whitman’s “ curious abrupt questionings” and then my phone buzzes to notify me that a portal I had captured is now under attack. My resonators will be destroyed and the portal will be captured again by the resistance.
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,
Of course, this is not just in the game of Ingress. It is also in the game of life and struggling to write something meaningful. Yet I continue to struggle, continue to write, continue to hack portals only to be recaptured.
“Flow on, river!” Whitman exclaims, and Joyce replies, “riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay…”
