peaches, moths, spiders, and zinnias

Now Playing: "Bethena", by Scott Joplin. This is one of my all-time favorite ragtime pieces.

This morning I didn't go running (feeling wheezy and achy and dizzy! augh!). Rachel went to bed really late last night, so when the alarm clock went off, though I managed to drag myself upright and get dressed, she stayed in bed for awhile, until I turned on one of the lights.

For breakfast, I shared a peach with her, one of the peaches my mother and I bought at Wal-Mart last weekend. So far, these peaches have been perfect: firm, juicy, sweet, round and full. While I ate my peach, I scrambled to tie off some of the odds and ends left lying around from yesterday. Then I hurried off to practice my flute for an hour. Peeking into the lounge at the end of the basement hall in search of a music stand, I saw someone asleep on the sofa--probably a worn-out pianist.

After piano practice (during which I read "Othello", and was suitably disgusted), I went upstairs for Music Theory. Today the School of Music was holding a bake sale in the first floor hall outside the secretary's office. Donuts, cookies, brownies, cinnamon rolls, and other sweet pastries were laid out on a couple of tables. I stood and read studiously until class started. In class today: the circle of fifths, building scales, etc.

After theory, I headed over to Zink for Honors class. We're finishing up "Hamlet". Today we talked about various matters: Whether the ghost is real (one of the ridiculous questions that modern literary criticism loves to raise--of course the ghost is real--it's on the list of dramatis personae!), what the role of governance plays in the tale (and what people are governed by), etc.

Flute lesson after Honors. It went fairly well. Dr. R assigned a whole bunch of material for me to photocopy and read about trills. Since I'm playing Telemann, it seems natural to work on trills, but it's also a bit frustrating because they're (apparently) such a minute part of the music.

Lunch next. I was going to sit by myself and read "Othello", but David and Asher invited me to sit with them at one of the round tables. They started out being calm enough--swapping stories about our morning, laughing at professors (Asher has had Dr. M, my theory teacher, for classes before), etc. Then the boys launched into silliness--Asher brandishing bananas like light sabres, and David singing ridiculous ditties, until they were laughing so hard that they couldn't stop. Asher was almost crying from laughter. Tara, Rachel, Alisha, and another girl I don't know drifted down and sat with us. The boys managed to collect themselves somewhat when the other girls showed up, but whenever I glanced in Asher's direction, he'd burst out laughing again.

Rachel and I walked back to our room together after lunch. She showed me a little bit of a Marx Brothers show--absolutely hilarious. Then she read part of a spoof of "Hamlet" to me. She did an excellent job acting out the different parts, even to the fake Italian accent belonging to one of the Marx Brothers--a one-girl comedy act. I perched on my bed and laughed and laughed, especially when the Three Stooges appeared. Apparently, someone wrote a spoof of "Hamlet" with a variety of famous comedy groups in place of some of the characters (not all the characters--many of the characters are left serious, which highlights the silliness of the comedians). I've put the link to the script down under links.

We settled into a serious afternoon after that. I listened to the Brahms "Requiem" and violin concerto while I attempted to write a poem for P&P. Unfortunately, it didn't happen. We had two assignments this week. I'd already completed one of the assignments, but the other one gave me fits. The assignment was to take one poem from an author we'd read the first week, and one poem from one of the 19th-century authors mentioned in the lecture last week, and use the words from their poems to create a new poem of our own. I sat down and tried to wrestle with various poems by Dana Gioia, Emily Dickinson, and Alfred Tennyson. At first, the trouble was that I didn't know what to make the words mean--and then the trouble was that I couldn't find words to say what I meant. Halfway through this excruciating process, I decided it was too much for me. So I curled up on my bed by the open window with Book 3 of Paradise Lost, and read it straight through, taking notes along the way. Milton has an "interesting" (you know how I say the word :o) set of theological values--some of which seem Calvinist, and some of which don't quite fit. I lay and puzzled over them and dozed and puzzled some more. Rachel came back from her one o'clock class to find me in the midst of this.

When I'd finished Book 3, I picked myself up and brewed a cup of blueberry green tea for Rachel, and a cup for myself. Bending over the steaming cup, I settled myself down to work on the poem. It took me two hours (and another cup of tea). The poem moved through various iterations: autumn, saying good-bye, planting tulips with Laura (a fictional experience pieced together from real experiences), drought, etc., all rolled into one. Brahms didn't work, so I put on Loreena McKennitt and decided to write a poem that evoked a place, using Gioia's "Planting a Sequoia" and Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" (no, I did not choose "The Lady of Shalott" because it's long and has lots of words). In the end, the poem turned out being not at all what I'd expected.

Rachel came with me for supper. We didn't talk much. I tried asking questions about her siblings and about "Hamlet", but my brain was fried after doing poetry all afternoon. Crystal sat with us and ate in haste. Rachel walked with Crystal and me as far as the library, then went off about her own affairs.

Crystal and I walked into P&P five minutes before six o'clock. The first half of the discussion today was about the difference between "radical" and "conservative" poetry as delineated by Barbara Guest in her essays. Dr. G pointed out that Guest's thesis is that there is no difference really--both styles use imagination. I was mostly silent for this part, wanting to weigh and consider everything that was said. The discussion started out with a recap of Gioia's poetry (we hadn't gone over it last week), and one girl said some pretty nasty things about Gioia. For me, the trouble was that I recognize in my poetry some of his tendencies. Such criticism always makes me wonder if I should even be trying to write poetry, if this should be my field, or if I should just get out of here and let the "experts" do what they think they know how to do. A bleak thought.

The professors let us have a break at about seven-thirty. I stood outside for a little while, as I always do, to see what sky and weather are doing.

The second half of the discussion was more interesting, and I participated more. We discussed Barbara Guest's poetry. The more we talked about it, the more I understood and began to be able to enjoy it. Her poetry is abstract, expressionist--like those modern paintings that consist of splatters (think Pollock). She writes in response to these paintings a lot of the time, though the poems we studied tonight were written in response to paintings by Matisse. But she uses words the way a painter uses color--a palette of words, arranged to evoke emotion. I don't like her poetry because there's no structure or determinate meaning, but she has beautiful little images, like bits of mosaics taken from the paintings, and the images alone are pretty.

We also talked a bit about Jackson MacLow. This particular chap takes text, fits it into a computer, and the program spits out "poetry". Detestable stuff. No meaning whatsoever, unlike Guest--not even any beautiful images. Just words strung together. Ick.

After class, Crystal and I walked over to Lottie together, discussing class, as usual. We've come to the decision that we're going to be forced to write free verse in this class. The professors certainly don't structure any of the assignments to be conducive to traditional poetry with rhyme and rhythm.

As we passed the chapel, I paused in a moment of childish wonder. A huge moth was fluttering around one of the tall lamps. The moth dashed itself against the glass bulb, then spiraled to the ground, swerving around the black lamppost like a comet swirling out of orbit. Its danced off to batter itself against the sandstone wall of the chapel, its rounded silhouette flickering over the angular shadows of the pale stones. It fluttered away to rest, exhausted, on one of the branches of an oak tree in the library plaza. I could see its wings rising and falling like a gasping body.

We parted ways--she went over to visit the girls in the Penthouse (as Tara/Jenny S./Alisha's apartment is called now), and I walked to Lottie. As I passed through the front door, I paused again. A fat spider with long legs was weaving a perfect web between the supports of the entry area. The strands of the web shone glossily under the porch light, which shone right in that corner. Unfortunately for the spider, there were absolutely no bugs buzzing around the light. But the spider didn't seem to realize. Persistently, it scrambled from spoke to spoke, threading its silk from its spinerettes with its hind legs. The web was perfect, jeweled with light where the main spokes met. The spider's legs glowed copper under the strong light. I stood for a long while, admiring the spider's handiwork, before I went inside.

In the dorm, I came upstairs to the room, where I found a message from Rachel telling me that she won't be back until ten-thirty. So I've been sitting up here with the door open, writing and listening to various things--"Nickel Creek" now.