I heard about it on the metro. I was on my way to Foggy Bottom in the morning, and a group of cultured retired people – probably on their way to a Smithsonian museum – sat near me.

One of them said, “Did you see that poetry thing in the Post? The Bernie Sanders guy who’s an English professor? Who sends poetry to Senate staff members? It renews your faith…”

Everybody nodded; they’d all read it and they all approved.

So here’s the article. Sanders, a senator from Vermont, has a chief of staff who in real life is an English professor.

[Hank Gutman lobs] poems into the e-mail inboxes of every chief of staff in the Senate. Each note offers escape through verse. Meaty, challenging, thought-provoking lines, accompanied by pages and pages of Gutman’s analysis. Poetry that has nothing to do with cloture votes or amendments or motions to recommit. Poetry intended to get his BlackBerry-addicted, tunnel-visioned, life-as-a-treadmill colleagues to think about the “huge dimensions of life that get shortchanged” in the grinder that is Capitol Hill.

Gutman’s engaged in Action Poetry, whose Wikipedia page says this:

Action Poetry is the active use of poetry, often spreading in a community. It might include painting poetry on murals, or distributing poetry. It can also involve the encouragement of live poetry recitings and distribution of free poetry.

External link:

“Action Poetry as an Empowering Art: A Manifesto for Didaction in Arts Education” by Francois Victor Tochon, University of Wisconsin-Madison, International Journal of Education & the Arts, Volume 1 Number 2, May 15, 2000

UD loves empowering didactions. She herself is a one-woman empowering didaction machine. Nonetheless, there are ethical questions worth posing about the act of lobbing (the Post‘s word) unasked-for poetry plus reams of your own analysis of that poetry (Here’s a sample of Gutman’s prose.) into the email of people who work in the same building you do.

The Post article about Gutman is full of insults about people with jobs on the Hill. BlackBerry addicts, tunnel-visioned… It goes on and on like that. These people are soulless… mere fragments… robots rather than humans…

Gutman is there to make them whole:

Despite the myriad interactions of government process, Washington often undermines deep human connection; poetry is his attempt to make the fractional city whole.

You can sort of see the Post writer thrashing about here, can’t you, since this sentence makes no effing sense whatsoever.

But my larger point is that when Garrison Keillor comes on the radio to recite the same inescapable lyric Gutman recites in the Post article —

“It is difficult/to get the news from poems,” Gutman says. “Yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.”

— we can turn off the radio. We can recall August Kleinzahler’s definitive take on these lines:

A pretty sentiment, to be sure, but simply untrue, as anyone who has been to the supermarket or ballpark recently will concede. Ninety percent of adult Americans can pass through this life tolerably well, if not content, eating, defecating, copulating, shopping, working, catching the latest Disney blockbuster, without having a poem read to them by Garrison Keillor or anyone else.

We can turn off the radio, but it’s harder to absorb the repeated impact of poetry lobbed into our email by a colleague. It’s demoralizing to feel that you’ve got to read the shit or he’ll ask you about it and you won’t know what he’s talking about and you need his guy’s vote on some piece of legislation, etc. So you automatically forward the you’re-a-tool-who-needs-me-to-explain-poetry-to-you emails to your assistant, some intern from George Washington University, and she forwards it to her English professor, and…

You get the idea.

… Les UDs will be able to spend three weeks in their little house in the New York mountains. UD‘s excited about this, because the setting is peaceful and beautiful during the day, and breathtaking at night, with the massive summer canopy overhead.

There are long country walks, operas at Glimmerglass, visits to Woodstock, and UD‘s traditional birthday dinner at the Bear Cafe…

It’s all very exciting. But if you live there year-round, I suspect life can get dull.

Perhaps this explains the propensity of professors in that region to have marijuana businesses. Not only does getting high alleviate boredom (I’ve heard), but running the enterprise is probably fun and interesting.

Just a couple of days ago a SUNY Cobleskill professor was arrested; and today, it’s a guy who teaches marketing at SUNY Albany.

Have you been following that study featured in the New York Times which argues that professors are almost all from the political left because of job “typecasting”?

The academic profession “has acquired such a strong reputation for liberalism and secularism that over the last 35 years few politically or religiously conservative students, but many liberal and secular ones, have formed the aspiration to become professors,” [the study’s authors] write in the paper, “Why Are Professors Liberal?” That is especially true of their own field, sociology, which has become associated with “the study of race, class and gender inequality — a set of concerns especially important to liberals.”

For sure these SUNY guys are doing their bit to tighten our typecasting. Think of it this way: If you can’t imagine starting a marijuana growing business at home, you’re probably not cut out to be a professor.

… the T.S. Eliot Prize.

The poem made me think of another poem, by James Merrill, probably because they’re both about art and air. Let’s take a look.

First, Philip Gross, this year’s winner.

Opera Bouffe

The count of cappuccino,
the marquise of meringue,
all the little cantuccini…
and what was the song they sang?

Oh, the best of us is nothing
but a sweetening of the air,
a tryst between the teeth and tongue:
we meet and no one’s there

though the café’s always crowded
as society arrives
and light glints to and fro between
the eyes and rings and knives.

We’ll slip away together,
perfect ghosts of appetite,
the balancing of ash on fire
and whim—the mating flight

of amaretti papers,
my petite montgolfiere,
our lit cage rising weightless
up the lift shaft of the air.

So the count of cappuccino,
the marquise of not much more,
consumed each other’s hunger.
Then the crash. And then the war.

************************************

Next, Merrill.

Farewell Performance

for DK

Art. It cures affliction. As lights go down and
Maestro lifts his wand, the unfailing sea change
starts within us. Limber alembics once more
make of the common

Lot a pure, brief gold. At the end our bravos
call them back, sweat-soldered and leotarded,
back, again back – anything not to face the
fact that it’s over.

You are gone. You’d caught like a cold their airy
lust for essence. Now, in the furnace parched to
ten or twelve light handfuls, a mortal gravel
sifted through fingers,

Coarse yet grayly glimmering sublimate of
palace days, Strauss, Sidney, the lover’s plaintive
Can’t we just be friends? which your breakfast phone call
Clothed in amusement,

This is what we paddled a neighbor’s dinghy
out to scatter – Peter who grasped the buoy,
I who held the box underwater, freeing
all it contained. Past

Sunny, fluent soundings that gruel of selfhood
taking manlike shape for one last jeté on
ghostly – wait, ah! – point into darkness vanished.
High up, a gull’s wings

Clapped. The house lights (always supposing, caro,
Earth remains your house) at their brightest set the
scene for good: true colors, the sun-warm hand to
cover my wet one …

Back they come. How you would have loved it. We in
turn have risen. Pity and terror done with,
programs furled, lips parted, we jostle forward
eager to hail them,

More, to join the troupe – will a friend enroll us
one fine day? Strange, though. For up close their magic
self-destructs. Pale, dripping, with downcast eyes they’ve
seen where it led you.

********************************************

Both poets are getting at something having to do with the separation between art and life; both poets notice our immense pull toward fantasy, beauty, intensity, toward the distillation of real experience into imaginative perfection. Both caution us about the danger of that pull.

In the Gross poem, the frothy delicious escapism of light opera, light-as-air opera, sweetens the actual air, sweetens our lives. It’s adorable, yummy, we eat it up, this spectacle of counts and marquises warbling in bustling, brightly lit cafes.

But it’s all pretend, of course: we meet and no one’s there. The performers are ghosts of appetite, apparitions carrying in flight a reflection of their audience’s hunger for art to be life.

When the play’s over, when the performers float away in their absurd confectionery balloon, reality resumes in all its dark heft. Perhaps there’s the suggestion here that our addiction to fantasy weakens our capacity to survive reality.

The simple exact end rhyme, the Mother Goosey feel of the thing, lends a clever contradiction to the Gross poem. Its surface is as light as light opera, a happy sing-songy lilt; yet its content’s increasingly bleak – ghosts, ash, and then the final crash and burn. The contradiction captures our denialist draw toward art as escape. We don’t want to see what’s beneath these happy lines.

Merrill’s is an elegy; it’s written in memory of a friend of his. The poem has three acts, as it were: an opening act describing a dance company performance the poet attends not long after his friend’s death; a middle act recalling the poet and other people taking a boat out to scatter his friend’s ashes into the water of a sound (the word ‘sound’ allows the poet lovely pun-latitude); and a final return to the performance as the dancers take their bows.

As in the Gross poem, art both “cures affliction” and causes it — “You’d caught like a cold their airy / lust for essence.” Art changes us; its transformative alembics spin our lives into gold, and we desperately don’t want its magic to end, don’t want dismissal into the painful chaos of real life.

So the poet’s friend tried to import art to his life, to lead the life of an aesthete — “palace days, Strauss, Sidney…”

We too want to “join the troupe,” though truly living that airy essence exacts a toll – it “self-destructs.”

will a friend enroll us / one fine day?

Will our sublimate too be rolled out onto the water some sunny afternoon?

Seton Hill professor Mike Arnzen puts his texting policy in the course syllabus: If students place his class in the background by texting, he marks them as absent.

“Because they’re not attending,” explained Arnzen, 42, chair of the school’s division of humanities.

… just keeping track.

********************

Update:

UD thanks James, a reader, for pointing out that MN Daily has taken down this article, which tracks “a slew of off-field incidents” involving Minnesota’s way-bad football team.

UD guesses that the reporter is rewriting the piece — with so many incidents, errors will happen.

*******************

Another update:

Try this link.

UD thanks Bill.

One guy with a gun killed forty-four deer in one night on Vassar’s campus earlier this month. He was a sharpshooter hired by the school to reduce its rampaging herds.

In Big Buck Zone, hunters debate the merits of snipers.

… Bertrand Goldgar. Here are details of his memorial service.

A SUNY Cobleskill professor was arrested Wednesday for allegedly growing marijuana at his home.

Police executed a search warrant at 59-year-old Peter H. Van Deusen’s Sharon Springs home on State Route 10. There, they found an indoor growing operation and seized extensive growing equipment and a small amount of marijuana.

Van Deusen was not home at the time of the search, but turned himself in to troopers in Cobleskill Wednesday. He was issued an appearance ticket for the Town of Sharon Court Thursday.

He was charged with unlawful growing of marijuana, an unclassified misdemeanor.

Police say Van Deusen was a professor in the Agriculture and Engineering Division at SUNY Cobleskill.

Was? He’s a professor at SUNY at the beginning of the article, and has gone emeritus by the end? Wow.

And isn’t this like the four hundredth story UD‘s covered about a professor growing marijuana? Once pot’s legalized, expect a mass exodus from the universities…

… a lawsuit over excessive compensation.

Next up: Mark Emmert!

… When companies seek to work with university faculty, …it is generally on the basis of the faculty’s expertise in particular areas of research relevant to the company’s activities. It is difficult to see what special interest the Nike Corporation could possibly have in Phyllis Wise’s research expertise in obstetrics and gynecology….

The American Association of University Professors chapter at the University of Washington wonders what, besides greed and cynicism, puts their provost on Nike’s board.

I couldn’t do it.

Or… maybe I could do it, if I got one pomegranate martini per reading.

It’s taken awhile – 13 years to be exact – but the “Finnegans Wake’’ Reading Group has finally finished James Joyce’s famously long and difficult novel. Formed by serious fans of the Irish writer, the group has been meeting weekly to read a page or so of the convoluted work of comic fiction. The uncommon exercise, which began at the Thirsty Scholar in Cambridge, concluded this week at the Corrib in Brighton. Published in 1939, “Finnegans Wake’’ begins with the last half of a sentence and ends with the first half of the same sentence. To mark the end of the marathon reading, the group’s members raised their glasses and ritually chanted the entire completed sentence.

Here are the initial and final phrases united:

A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Philip Larkin at the Hull Festival

The ghost of the poet from Hull
Found his festival terribly dull.
“Exhibits, a play…
What is there to say?
Nix naught nonexistent and null.”

… the Finance and Investment Advisory committees is bankrupt.

… Faylene Owen and her husband Larry Owen filed for bankruptcy protection in December. Some colleagues say Trustee Owen should step back from some of her leadership roles. Court documents show her million dollar East Lansing home is in foreclosure, and she and her husband owe more than $100,000 in taxes…

*****************************

Update: A couple of reactions to the story from locals. The first one, from a comment on an article in the Lansing State Journal, is mainly of interest to Scathing Online Schoolmarm:

Perhaps those that live in glass houses should not be heaving stones. … Those that publicly attempt to drag her through the proverbial “mud” only resurrect the historical predisposition of the MSU family to provide fodder to its detractors.

Only two sentences, but they manage to do so much — insanely mixed metaphors, absolutely pointless quotation marks, and, overall, a spectacular combination of pomposity and idiocy.

Here’s another response, from an MSU student:

Both the State News editorial board and Larry Owen attempt to group the Owens in with the thousands of working Michigan families who are facing bankruptcy and other financial troubles. How ridiculous! As Michigan workers lose their jobs, face layoffs and have their salaries slashed, the Owens reported their monthly expenditures are more than $7,000. The Owens are a classic example of greed and corruption gone awry and are not to be confused with the real victims of Michigan’s current financial recession.

Ah. That’s better. Unlike the first writer – probably a member of MSU’s board of trustees – this college junior can think and write.

Egypt’s biggest public university has banned female students who wear the niqab from replacing the full-face veil with surgical masks in examination halls, the local media reported on Tuesday.

Officials at Cairo University said that replacing the niqab with facemasks violates a recent ruling by the Administrative Court, which upheld a ban on the full veil in examination halls.

The controversy over the niqab in this predominantly Muslim country erupted last October when Mohammad Tantawi, the Grand Shaikh of Al Azhar, the leading Sunni seat of learning, banned the niqab in female-only classes and dormitories.

The top cleric said that the costume is not an Islamic duty. A few days later, Minister of Higher Education Hani Hilal followed suit, citing security reasons.

He explained that several men were caught donning the niqab to enter university hostels.

Later, Hilal barred niqab-dressed students from taking their exams. He also ordered that niqab-dressed female lecturers should not be allowed in classes…

What’ll they wear next?

Background here.

FORT WORTH — A Wedgwood Middle School coach was fired after displaying a knife and threatening to castrate a student, according to documents released by the Fort Worth school district.

Eugene R. Jennings, a social studies teacher and coach who worked in the district for 20 years, has insisted that he was joking, according to the report by the district’s Office of Professional Standards.

According to the report, Jennings entered another teacher’s classroom in September and noticed a student misbehaving. At that point, he pulled a student aside and threatened to castrate him, according to a witness’s statement in the report….

UD thanks Bill for the link.