Rumpshaker Network

Honkymagic:  Introduction to "Practicing"

Posted 16 hours ago

I first heard this poem when Orlean Anderson read it at a Northern Virginia Writing Project party in the summer of – what was it, 2002? 2003? I remember her reading it to us as we sat on the floor of someone else’s living room, the lot of us, for the summer, if not forever, writers, professionals, teachers, committed to ... [Link]

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Honkymagic:  Marie Howe -- "Practicing"

Posted 16 hours ago

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:
That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each others’ mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody ... [Link]

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Honkymagic:  Introduction to "Keeping Things Whole"

Posted 41 hours ago

Mark Strand’s poetry confuses me. It’s often, though not always, a pleasant confusion, but a confusion nonetheless. This might be what that AP prompt from twenty years ago refers to as a “healthy mix of pleasure and disquietude,” though I have a feeling they mean something more along the lines of the fractured chronology of, say, Catch-22, or the fantastic ... [Link]

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Honkymagic:  Mark Strand: "Keeping Things Whole"

Posted 41 hours ago

In a field
I am the absence
Of field.
This is
Always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
And always
The air moves in
To fill the spaces
Where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
For moving.
I move
To keep things whole. [Link]

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Honkymagic:  Beloved - 2009-10

Posted 2 days ago

Students sometimes ask whether it gets dull teaching the same books over and over again.

And it doesn't, really.

Or, to be more precise, when I find that teaching a book is dull, I take a year or two off of it and see if it returns to life again.

But books that I return to again and again tend to stay alive, ... [Link]

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Honkymagic:  Introduction to "What Work Is"

Posted 5 days ago

I love the turn that Phillip Levine’s “What Work Is” takes, how it opens, essentially, with “You know what work is” and (assuming that you read on, that you’re not left behind either because you’re not old enough or because you know what work is but don’t do it) then ends with “You don’t know what work is.” And in ... [Link]

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Honkymagic:  Philip Levine: "What Work Is"

Posted 5 days ago

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your ... [Link]

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Honkymagic:  Poetry Anthology

Posted 5 days ago

The other thing I'm working on, at the moment, is an anthology of poetry. My AP Seniors are putting together "Personal Poetry Anthologies," and I'm participating, too. Each student spends almost two weeks reading poetry in class, finding, over the course of those class periods, poems that speak to him or her, poems that matter to him or her, and ... [Link]

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Honkymagic:  Sgt. Pepper

Posted 6 days ago

In 1989, as I discovered an obsession with music that ran as strongly as any other obsession I had in high school, college, or after, I had two guides that kept me hunting for albums that I hadn’t heard, or might not otherwise have heard. Both were mainstream, unconcerned with too much out of the ordinary or in what Neil ... [Link]

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Honkymagic:  Writing Again

Posted 6 days ago

Two ongoing assignments: for one, I’m working on the Personal Poetry Anthology that my AP Seniors are completing; and for the other, I’m taking a look back at Rolling Stone’s 1987 list of “The Greatest Albums of the Last 27 Years.” Onward. [Link]

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