"Unmediated Experience," Bob Hicok

Unmediated Experience 

She does this thing. Our seventeen-

year-old dog. Our mostly deaf dog.

Our mostly dead dog, statistically

speaking. When I crouch.

When I put my mouth to her ear

and shout her name. She walks away.

Walks toward the nothing of speech.

She even trots down the drive, ears up,

as if my voice is coming home.

It’s like watching a child

believe in Christmas, right

before you burn the tree down.

Every time I do it, I think, this time

she’ll turn to me. This time

she’ll put voice to face. This time,

I’ll be absolved of decay.

Which is like being a child

who believes in Christmas

as the tree burns, as the drapes catch,

as Santa lights a smoke

with his blowtorch and asks, want one?

Bob Hicok

Today's work: Your Spartan Reader "Short List"

 We are just figuring out this class magazine project.  Whatever it ends up looking like, it will be something you made, and that alone makes it worth trying.  

For the next two days, we are going to spend our time exploring options for our first article, which will be due not this Friday, but next.  For this Friday, your job is to create a single post, a "short list" of three possible articles you are considering for your first submission.  

Simply provide a list that identifies, for each possible article, the subject/title of the piece, a link, if it is available online, and a 25-50 word description of the subject and why it intrigues you.  Pictures would be nice, but aren't necessary.  

To help you with this process, I have put together a list of links to online destinations that provide an internet's worth of possibilities.  It is saved on class web page as "Spartan Reader Links," and it is a list that we will update as new sites are pointed out to us.  

You may want headphones to listen to some of the audio and video possibilities.  Your job these next two days is to engage yourself in the process of reading deeply.  Let me know what cool stuff you find.

Jim Harrison and Friday Blog assignment

"I Believe"
I believe in steep drop-offs, the thunderstorm across
the lake in 1949, cold winds, empty swimming pools,
the overgrown path to the creek, raw garlic,
used tires, taverns saloons, bars, gallons of red wine,
abandoned farmhouses, stunted lilac groves,
gravel roads that end, brush piles, thickets, girls
who haven’t quite gone totally wild, river eddies,
leaky wooden boats, the smell of used engine oil,
turbulent rivers, lakes without cottages in the woods,
the primrose growing out of a cow skull, the thousands
of birds I’ve talked to all of my life, the dogs
that talked back, the Chihuahuan ravens that follow
me on long walks. The rattler escaping the cold hose,
the fluttering unknown gods that I nearly see
from the left corner of my blind eye, struggling
to stay alive in a world that grinds them underfoot.
--Jim Harrison


Your Friday Post: Our blogs should be established by now, so let's spend a day having a look around to see what people have done with theirs. Do more than skim and click through these pages--read them deeply, looking at their literacy narratives, their reading responses, their overall look, and do the following:

(1) leave comments for at least three different posts, reacting briefly but sincerely to something the author said in it.

(2) Compose a new post on your own blog that does two things: First, name 1 or 2 blogs that you think are the most interestingly made so far. Link to them, quote them, and discuss briefly what you think makes these blogs above average.

(3) Second, in your post you should name the blog that you think has the most impressively written Dead Poets Society response and discuss what is good about it: its opening claim, the way it describes its observations, or its discussion of the tone. Quote it, too, if you like.

Let me know if you have any questions.

"Things," by Liesl Mueller.

Tony Hoagland, "History of Desire"

When you're seventeen, and drunk
on the husky, late-night flavor
of your first girlfriend's voice
along the wires of the telephone

what else to do but steal
your father's El Dorado from the drive,
and cruise out to the park on Driscoll Hill?
Then climb the county water tower

and aerosol her name in spraycan orange
a hundred feet above the town?
Because only the letters of that word,
DORIS, next door to yours,

in yard-high, iridescent script,
are amplified enough to tell the world
who's playing lead guitar
in the rock band of your blood.

You don't consider for a moment
the shock in store for you in 10 A.D.,
a decade after Doris, when,
out for a drive on your visit home,

you take the Smallville Road, look up
and see RON LOVES DORIS
still scorched upon the reservoir.
This is how history catches up—

by holding still until you
bump into yourself.
What makes you blush, and shove
the pedal of the Mustang

almost through the floor
as if you wanted to spray gravel
across the features of the past,
or accelerate into oblivion?

Are you so out of love that you
can't move fast enough away?
But if desire is acceleration,
experience is circular as any

Indianapolis. We keep coming back
to what we are—each time older,
more freaked out, or less afraid.
And you are older now.

You should stop today.
In the name of Doris, stop.

Richard Siken, "Scheherezade"

John Ashbery, "At North Farm"

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

Roberty Bly, "Surprised by Evening"

There is unknown dust that is near us
Waves breaking on shores just over the hill
Trees full of birds that we have never seen
Nets drawn with dark fish.

The evening arrives; we look up and it is there
It has come through the nets of the stars
Through the tissues of the grass
Walking quietly over the asylums of the waters.

The day shall never end we think:
We have hair that seemed born for the daylight;
But at last the quiet waters of the night will rise
And our skin shall see far off as it does under water.