During my first semester in college, Jonathan Katz, one of the poets on the faculty at Wichita State, made the two and a half-hour trip north to Cloud County Community College to read his poems, some of which included one-word poems. I have come up with some of my own one-word poems over the years, and I have included them below. A word qualifies as a one-word poem if it resonates with meaning--literal and, occasionally, figurative. It is the reader’s responsibility to ascertain the denotation for each word if it isn’t already known. Each poem acquires even greater significance if you can add where you first encountered the word. I encountered the word callipygian in Catch 22; rime comes from Dr. Zhivago, and mizzle comes from a Thomas Hardy novel.
One to Two Syllable One-Word Poems
Brume
Mizzle
Sough
Rime
Multi-Syllabic One-Word Poems
Ensorcel
Troglodyte
Bafflegab
Callipygian
Ultimately, these kinds of poems cause the reader to return to the dictionary with renewed interest. As an onground instructor, I encouraged my students to make a close friend of their dictionary. I even set aside a few minutes in my first-semester composition classes to have the class learn more about dictionaries and to evaluate the ones that they brought to class. Students usually left class that day resolved to buy a larger dictionary.
When I was taking a linguistics class at Wichita State as an undergraduate, I became aware of how deficient my own dictionary was. I was using a college edition of the Webster’s New World, one that was copyrighted in 1964. When my dad gave it to me in 1965, he inscribed it with the following comment, “May you one day have knowledge of most of the contents of this book.” By 1979, I recognized the necessity of acquiring a dictionary with a more detailed pronunciation key and with more words than the 142,000 in the older Webster’s New World.
After my summer class in linguistics had ended, I was browsing through a secondhand bookstore on West Douglas when I discovered a first edition of the unabridged Random House, priced for $15.00, and copyrighted 1969. I lugged that ten-pound dictionary home on the bus and kept it near me when I was studying or even just watching television, occasionally looking up a word that I heard but didn’t know. Sometimes I found enough entertainment opening up the dictionary on a table in front of me and randomly flipping from one page to another, making a new discovery on each page.
Although I later acquired the second edition of the unabridged Random House, it has never carried the same emotional attachment as the first edition. Its cloth cover now contains several rips along the length of its spine and is about ready to fall off; even so, that first edition remains a treasured book in my library. It helped me get through college at a time when I had doubts that I would ever finish my undergraduate degree.
Instead of using an abridged dictionary now, I have my needs met by a recent edition of the Random House Webster’s, College Dictionary. It’s only those more obscure words, like omphaloskepsis, that cause me to open one of the unabridged dictionaries.
My kid will eventually inherit these dictionaries of mine. He currently much prefers to use the Internet when asked to look up words in Language Arts. He hasn’t yet learned the tactile pleasure of rubbing his hands over the open pages of an unabridged dictionary.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Militarism and Video Games
The other night I attended a lecture and demonstration in which one of the software engineers for the US Army outlined how video game technology is being put to use. The lecturer mentioned, for example, that the update for "America’s Army," a full fledged video game, will be available soon and serves as a recruitment tool. Video game technology is used in other instances as a means of thinking through various scenarios so that the troops will be prepared when confronting a similar situation overseas. The Army, he says, doesn’t want the soldier to discern a difference between the video game scenario and the actual event itself. Once one has become suitably brainwashed, he/she reacts in ways that have been predetermined, in other words.
One scenario duplicated what was meant to happen in Mogadishu, that is, a number of soldiers entering a structure and kidnapping a terrorist leader. The scenario goes much smoother than what occurred in Black Hawk Down; in fact, once the troops get pinned down by a sniper in a building, they call in an airstrike from an A10 Warthog circling overhead, allowing the equivalent of a Bunker Buster to destroy the entire ten-story building and everyone else inside.
Most depressing of all is that the lecturer disclosed that he is currently working on video game scenarios that won’t be released for another four years. One clip revealed that the US Army expects to remain in the Middle East for much longer than has been disclosed in the corporate media at least. This revelation duplicates the ideas expressed today at the Information Clearing House where the article Corporate Globalization and Middle East Terrorism argues that Cheney and Rumsfeld articulated their intentions six years ago in a white paper “call[ing] for permanent military bases throughout the [Middle East]…[because] America has no intentions of leaving until the last drop of oil runs dry, and Iraq’s [and Iran’s] natural wealth has been privatized.”
Don’t let your children download and play “America’s Army.” Don’t be tempted to purchase a copy when the updated version is released for the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 in a few more months. Boycott militarism and vote to make a difference in November (assuming, of course, that our votes count and that the election hasn't been decided by the voting machines already in place).
One scenario duplicated what was meant to happen in Mogadishu, that is, a number of soldiers entering a structure and kidnapping a terrorist leader. The scenario goes much smoother than what occurred in Black Hawk Down; in fact, once the troops get pinned down by a sniper in a building, they call in an airstrike from an A10 Warthog circling overhead, allowing the equivalent of a Bunker Buster to destroy the entire ten-story building and everyone else inside.
Most depressing of all is that the lecturer disclosed that he is currently working on video game scenarios that won’t be released for another four years. One clip revealed that the US Army expects to remain in the Middle East for much longer than has been disclosed in the corporate media at least. This revelation duplicates the ideas expressed today at the Information Clearing House where the article Corporate Globalization and Middle East Terrorism argues that Cheney and Rumsfeld articulated their intentions six years ago in a white paper “call[ing] for permanent military bases throughout the [Middle East]…[because] America has no intentions of leaving until the last drop of oil runs dry, and Iraq’s [and Iran’s] natural wealth has been privatized.”
Don’t let your children download and play “America’s Army.” Don’t be tempted to purchase a copy when the updated version is released for the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 in a few more months. Boycott militarism and vote to make a difference in November (assuming, of course, that our votes count and that the election hasn't been decided by the voting machines already in place).
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Starting Another Semester
Ninety-two students are enrolled in my classes for the fall semester. Just thinking of that number makes me incredibly tired because of the amount of essays that I’ll be grading. Probably the best thing about this time of the semester when my classes are just now underway, having been open and available since Sunday at midnight, is the relative peace before the influx of student essays. It’s possible to have a real life, that is, regular hours and sufficient amounts of sleep for these first few weeks.
I’m hoping to get most of my grading done during the day this semester. I’m also hoping to start the grading earlier because it has usually taken me a week before I can even begin to face the essays that I have to grade. Feelings of disappointment at the quality of the writing keep me from reading them with alacrity. It takes time to approach student essays with the ability to lend praise occasionally; the temptation when approaching them too soon is to identify the faulty mechanics and to find reasons for not giving them much attention, such as brevity, not fulfilling the assignment, plagiarism, and errors in documentation. Simply telling the student how awful his/her essay is is not teaching.
I’m hoping to get most of my grading done during the day this semester. I’m also hoping to start the grading earlier because it has usually taken me a week before I can even begin to face the essays that I have to grade. Feelings of disappointment at the quality of the writing keep me from reading them with alacrity. It takes time to approach student essays with the ability to lend praise occasionally; the temptation when approaching them too soon is to identify the faulty mechanics and to find reasons for not giving them much attention, such as brevity, not fulfilling the assignment, plagiarism, and errors in documentation. Simply telling the student how awful his/her essay is is not teaching.
Friday, August 11, 2006
Memoirs and Kathleen Norris: An Appreciation
Memoirs can often be disturbing. As a writing teacher, I have encountered students who make revealing personal disclosures in their essays. One of my supervisors when I first started teaching encouraged students to write about their personal pain; probably encountering those kinds of essays assisted her in mothering her students as they made the transition from expressive to referential writing. I now caution my students against writing about incest and rape; otherwise, I am open in terms of topics, even when the students describe abortions or drug use, for example. The students, of course, are not writing for me as their audience, but I still dislike having to encounter incest and rape in their essays. All I can do is encourage the student to seek professional help while grading the essay in terms of how well the student has fulfilled the assignment. When I taught prisoners at the United States Disciplinary Barracks, the maximum security prison on Fort Leavenworth, I got one or two essays containing intimate descriptions of rough sex. That topic probably proved cathartic for the writer.
Published memoirs can be disturbing as well. William Kittredge goes into obsessive detail regarding his drinking in Hole in the Sky. David Ray gives a lot of attention to the sexual abuse he encountered as a young person in The Endless Search. A full understanding of the person requires this disclosure. As readers, we wouldn’t want these details to be kept out of the narrative. The redundant detail can prove either overwhelming or embarrassing at times, however.
Kathleen Norris shocked her audience in The Virgin of Bennington (2001). Having grown familiar with her work from reading The Cloister Walk (1996) and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (1998), her audience expected the same religious themes in subsequent books. The Virgin of Bennington, on the other hand, traces Kathleen Norris’ life from her undergraduate years to her apprenticeship with the Academy of American Poets, particularly her relationship with Betty Kray, and her decision to leave New York for South Dakota. Reviewers of The Virgin of Bennington tended to caution readers because of the frankness in which Norris describes her adulterous liaisons with a professor and her abundant drug use. The narrative places an equal amount of attention on Norris’ encounters with various poets, such as James Wright and Galway Kinnell, and on her own literary success. Most of all, the memoir describes the assistance that Norris received from Betty Kray; it’s this relationship with Betty Kray, combined with Norris’ fascination with poetry, that kept the narrative from becoming a strict confessional mixed with tears and recriminations.
Used copies of The Virgin of Bennington are listed at Amazon, starting at the price of one cent. Apparently, some of her readers couldn’t accept that change occurs in the course of one’s life. Those of us familiar with Norris’ poetry recognized that she has always embraced the full range of human experience. Long before Norris attracted an audience of those exploring their religious faith, she embraced physical passion in The Middle of the World, a collection of poems that U of Pittsburgh P released in 1981.
Notice the following poem taken from The Middle of the World. This poem also appears in Journey (2001), her collection of new and selected poems.
The Dancers
We are curious about one another’s bodies
But courtly now,
Assume the prescribed position:
Your hand on my back,
Our fingers meeting, holding in air.
We move where instinct moves us
On the stage-lit dance floor,
The strong farmer’s son
And preacher’s daughter
Holding each other gingerly,
Keeping distance, like possibility,
Between us. I would like to feel your blond head
Between my legs, hear animals breathe
In the fields around us
As we get up shivering
And the moon steps down, still hungry,
In the pale grass.
Kathleen Norris.
The Middle of the World. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1981. 47.
Not a religious person, only having entered a church for weddings and funerals since 1969, I still followed Norris’s career as she explored her spiritual interests. An appreciation of Donne doesn’t end with his poems of married love, e.g., “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” and “The Relic”; a full appreciation of his work includes “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” and the “Holy Sonnets” as well as “The Flea” and “The Good-Morrow.” Similarly, one cannot turn away from Norris’ explorations in her poetry and prose. I suspect that she will continue to reveal the truth of her experience and will find those allusions that allow her to articulate those truths.
Even if Norris were to lose all of those readers who have taken an interest in her work since The Cloister Walk, she will remain as a writer of the Great Plains. She proves an inspiration for students who think that this region has nothing of value because it lacks a beach or mountains. Occasionally, the relative absence of people and the extreme fluctuations in weather cause us to explore an interior world. Norris has dealt with the Great Plains in her own unique way.
Published memoirs can be disturbing as well. William Kittredge goes into obsessive detail regarding his drinking in Hole in the Sky. David Ray gives a lot of attention to the sexual abuse he encountered as a young person in The Endless Search. A full understanding of the person requires this disclosure. As readers, we wouldn’t want these details to be kept out of the narrative. The redundant detail can prove either overwhelming or embarrassing at times, however.
Kathleen Norris shocked her audience in The Virgin of Bennington (2001). Having grown familiar with her work from reading The Cloister Walk (1996) and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (1998), her audience expected the same religious themes in subsequent books. The Virgin of Bennington, on the other hand, traces Kathleen Norris’ life from her undergraduate years to her apprenticeship with the Academy of American Poets, particularly her relationship with Betty Kray, and her decision to leave New York for South Dakota. Reviewers of The Virgin of Bennington tended to caution readers because of the frankness in which Norris describes her adulterous liaisons with a professor and her abundant drug use. The narrative places an equal amount of attention on Norris’ encounters with various poets, such as James Wright and Galway Kinnell, and on her own literary success. Most of all, the memoir describes the assistance that Norris received from Betty Kray; it’s this relationship with Betty Kray, combined with Norris’ fascination with poetry, that kept the narrative from becoming a strict confessional mixed with tears and recriminations.
Used copies of The Virgin of Bennington are listed at Amazon, starting at the price of one cent. Apparently, some of her readers couldn’t accept that change occurs in the course of one’s life. Those of us familiar with Norris’ poetry recognized that she has always embraced the full range of human experience. Long before Norris attracted an audience of those exploring their religious faith, she embraced physical passion in The Middle of the World, a collection of poems that U of Pittsburgh P released in 1981.
Notice the following poem taken from The Middle of the World. This poem also appears in Journey (2001), her collection of new and selected poems.
The Dancers
We are curious about one another’s bodies
But courtly now,
Assume the prescribed position:
Your hand on my back,
Our fingers meeting, holding in air.
We move where instinct moves us
On the stage-lit dance floor,
The strong farmer’s son
And preacher’s daughter
Holding each other gingerly,
Keeping distance, like possibility,
Between us. I would like to feel your blond head
Between my legs, hear animals breathe
In the fields around us
As we get up shivering
And the moon steps down, still hungry,
In the pale grass.
Kathleen Norris.
The Middle of the World. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1981. 47.
Not a religious person, only having entered a church for weddings and funerals since 1969, I still followed Norris’s career as she explored her spiritual interests. An appreciation of Donne doesn’t end with his poems of married love, e.g., “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” and “The Relic”; a full appreciation of his work includes “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” and the “Holy Sonnets” as well as “The Flea” and “The Good-Morrow.” Similarly, one cannot turn away from Norris’ explorations in her poetry and prose. I suspect that she will continue to reveal the truth of her experience and will find those allusions that allow her to articulate those truths.
Even if Norris were to lose all of those readers who have taken an interest in her work since The Cloister Walk, she will remain as a writer of the Great Plains. She proves an inspiration for students who think that this region has nothing of value because it lacks a beach or mountains. Occasionally, the relative absence of people and the extreme fluctuations in weather cause us to explore an interior world. Norris has dealt with the Great Plains in her own unique way.
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