Read.

While waiting for my Coco Tofu at The Loving Hut, I read a few poems from The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing by Marge Piercy.

She is one of my all-time favorites, and today, since I was merely perusing this oft-read text, I looked on the back and came across this lovely, lovely quotation:

"The year is a wheel that turns but does not return us to where we were. An issue is as real to me as the apples on my trees, and that they sometimes have worms in them is political action, as is loving, as is talking, as is shaping these poems from the energy that comes through me from and for so many people, whose lives cross and touch, as we struggle enmeshed, sometimes blind and sometimes seeing and sometimes seeing each other."

As I come around to the Spring of things, and I could not agree more. We are back to where we've been, but we are not where we've been at all. We are somewhere else entirely.

That's a little overly esoteric for a blog about Verbs.

Plan.

It is nearing the end of our fourth project of the school year, and as the students get involved in the daily doings of their project, I am left sitting wondering, What am I supposed to do now? It is actually a very beautiful in-between feeling, and I didn't know how to recognize it until my second year of teaching.

This moment when I feel that all there is to do is twiddle my thumbs is the moment when I have a beautiful opportunity to look ahead to what's coming next.

After Lisa showed me this gorgeous Ted Talk by Sarah Kay, and after the gloriousness of sharing creative writing with my students during the past week, I realized that I wanted to pursue a spoken word poetry project.

So I started gathering my resources, and in so doing, found these delightful and almost completely unrelated musical experiments. The first is called In B Flat, and you really have to experience it to understand. It began as an experiment by Darren Solomon, composer and music producer, and many other people contributed to it, besides.

That, and the related experiment Marker/Music were the best tangential finds of my project planning for the day.

Ink.

It's funny to me how I've never really done a comic page before. I mean, on some level, I've done 56 comic pages, and I've taught students how to ink, but I'd never really did it on my own.

The first comic page I inked was with Patrick one day when we were drawing our feelings (an activity not dissimilar from what I did in writing on Wednesday). I inked for, oh, an hour and then got tired.

After I learned how to ink, I realize that inking is much more soothing than that. It almost feels like descending a mountain. You can't look too far ahead. You have to just concentrate on the next step. And step. And step. And when I was doing the bricks, that's all I was thinking. Brick. Brick. Brick.

And then my hand smeared an ink bubble, and I emerged from my waking dream. Boo on the penultimate panel of this page! But yay for all the others. My favorite panel is the establishing shot, because it just looks very nice. I also love the African mask. I am excited to finish the rest, but it is very time-consuming. It will probably carry over into the next week. I'll try to finish another page tomorrow. I probably spent 4-6 hours on inking all told.

And I got Lisa into it. :D

Draw.

I am turning the writing below into a four-page comic. I finished the first page yesterday, and the second one today. Well, just the sketches. But I will work on inking this weekend. I am using real inking tools, and not just inking pens.

I am discovering that I like drawing,
and I can impressively draw anything I want to draw.

I remember when I was 4 and how I couldn't draw shoulders. Drawing was so much more frustrating when I didn't understand perspective, and I didn't have fine motor skills. I'll post pictures later.

Write.

The students and I began doing Experiences and Experiments in Writing (developed by Diane Tabor and Richard Herrmann, and edited and revised by Rob Riordan, my idol). Since I am not merely a writing teachers, I am connecting about ten of the writings with a project that we do for festival, and we are calling it the Meta-Project (the story of my life in the IDM Project). The writings are powerful, and wonderful, and the process by which we write and discuss is inspiring and making me wish I only taught writing, because writing is so, so wonderful and I want to say more about it, but mainly I want to share the bit that I wrote during the "Spontaneous Image."

The way that this writing works is that you begin to write your feelings and thinkings, only as you do it, you turn them into an image. As soon as I set my pen to paper, the image began and I went with it, just like a dream.

In fact, I felt like I was dreaming the entire time.
I was in a waking dream.

And this is what I saw:

There is a parade of a million random objects. An Africa mask made of wood, a duck that is attacking a 9th grade. There are people with arms raised like zombies and red eyes, they are chasing a lamb. An innocent lamb. They corner the lamb in an alleyway with a thousand doors -- all unlocked, or maybe not. The lamb turns into a human, a little baby girl with pigtails and white footie pajamas. She unzips her pajamas and then you realize that she is a woman. A woman holding a blue teddy bear. She is crying. "I want to go to sleep. I am so tired. Please make the parade stop!" But it continues.

The parade must go on.

There is a giant foot float casted in orange, and balloons shaped like question marks. It starts to rain. It is raining, pouring, it is raining and pouring. But everyone keeps walking. There is no escaping this parade because it is everywhere.

The crowds jeer and the paparazzi takes pictures and the girl, the woman, screams and pleas, "Let me rest! Please stop!"

Suddenly, from nowhere, there are a billion birds that swoop down from the thunderclouds and they swarm around the audience, begging bread, begging bits of bread.

"I have nothing left to give you," she insists, holding up her empty hands like a surrender. "There is nothing else to offer." So the birds begin to snap at her shoes, and when those are bitten into pieces, they snap at her toes until they have eaten off her feet and she collapses on the street.

Men in white coats pick up the pieces and place them on a float and her remains become a part of the colorful parade. The music gets louder, and so does the screaming from the audience. The world won't stop for coffee. The world won't stop to pray to think to wonder if it should have been any other way.

I almost cried while writing this. The image was so intense. I love to share my writing with my students, and to hear the lines that strike them. It is so honoring to be heard.

Listen.

Tonight I went to a poetry reading, featuring my dear friend Lilah Sugarman. It was at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in La Jolla, and it was the culmination of a series of poetry presentations, and open mic nights. The average age of attendance was oh, I'd say, 48 or so.

Ilya Kaminsky was the featured poet of the night, and he was absolutely amazing. Lilah has told me much about him before, and had given me his book, Dancing in Odessa, but I had never had the opportunity to see him perform.

This was my favorite poem of the evening,
but reading it in your mind in no way compares to how it sounded read aloud.

Author’s Prayer

BY ILYA KAMINSKY

If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over,
for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.

If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge
of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through rooms without
touching the furniture.

Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking “What year is it?”
I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.

Submit.

Today - oh, today - I completed and submitted my application to become a fellow with Teach With Africa. One week ago, I got an email about an infosession for this program, and I checked out the website, reviewed the terms, and thought, Eh, all summer? I don't think so. I promptly archived the email and continued with my day.

The next day, my director sent me a cryptic email saying, "Can we talk for a few minutes? It's nothing 'bad'" (a disclaimer that always makes you feel like it is something bad, even so).

I went to check in with her in the morning, but she was nowhere to be found, and I think it was already the end of the day when I happened to bump into her and we sat down to talk in her office.

She told me about an opportunity to participate with Teach With Africa. Somehow, coming from Colleen, it sounded different. I heard it better. More importantly, I saw myself there.

The next day, I went to the infosession, and while I was driving to Point Loma, I remembered that this had been a dream of mine since I was like, 20. I worked tirelessly on a Fulbright application in 2006 and developed a proposal to do exactly the things that this program does. Only now I had an in.

So over the weekend, in addition to writing my thesis and transcribing 2+ hours of tape, I drafted my application, updated my resume, and collected my references. Yesterday, after my mother fortunately told me the word I meant was "elicit" and not "illicit" (really changes the meaning of "feedback"), I submitted my application, and now we'll see.