It's mid-semester, practically, meaning the class honeymoon is over. It is like the Real World in here, right around the time people stop being polite and start being migraine producing. The recent outbreak of Name Drop Syndrome has become an epidemic, resulting in the distinct feeling that though there are technically only 14 of us in the class, it feels like everyone has grown second heads and there are 40 or so voices-opinions present at any given time, more than half of whom are famous poets ... of whom I have never heard. It reminds me a bit of when I didn't have a TV and everyone related things to Brady Bunch episodes. [Yep, I was ignorant then and, well, now .... so be it.] Though I wonder, is it good or bad to have announced each poem as containing cosmic twins in the universe of Apparently Brilliantly Famous Unfamiliar Names? Hard to know, since all such pronouncements are unerringly followed by the omnipresent class choral hmmmmm.
Concerned our class is becoming too big for our britches, the quite adore-worthy Professor Palm-Sweats-On-Both-Sides has us read for our opening poems (kinda the equivalent of the sacrificial poet at a reading - but published and not present, etc.) a selection of amazon.com reviews done by some well-known San Francisco writer Kevin Killian (whom I'd of course never heard of because I apparently came of literary age in a metaphorical cold wet cement tunnel.... refer back to the Brady Bunch childhood 'problem' if I have lost you). So this Kevin Killian fella had had a heart attack and pulled himself back into writing just for the love of it by writing amazon.com reviews, inadvertently (perhaps) building himself some funny cult following for reviews on such things as Alien Green Belly Button Rings or Doctor Zhivago or Khaki Shorts with Yellow Stitching. Deeply unhelpful reviews that seemingly at best 1 out of 1 people found helpful. Which mostly served to show me that Poets should maybe not write reviews and post them and eventually have them bound into a book because (1) those reviews are sometimes not so much buyerly helpful (not that I care so much) as they are aurally interesting and (2) poets lie for the sake of their writing, which is decidedly not helpful in a review and (3) the presence of such work serves to enrage a certain test group of MFA candidates, who become inspired to debate what "constitutes" poetry ad nauseam for an hour or so while I grow hungrier.
And it really didn't help that for our assignment we had to write from a "controversial" piece of art, which turned out to be weirdly specifically interpreted to mean artists seemingly known by everyone in the class but your resident M.Ed. alien, who as usual missed the unspoken subtext of the assignment and wrote from this absolutely grotesque french ceramic piece that really looks like what a midwestern grandma giant would collect as a little porcelain figurine for her living room hutch. It was a poorly glazed life-sized 'one amber glass-eyed goat walking its way up another goat to get tall enough to see whatever it was looking at' item. I was informed that I'd missed the "controversial" part of the project, though I'd argue that such a hideous, neither artist-associated nor functional piece should be controversial in the sense that really should it be called art at all because wasn't that a slap in the face to artists, ceramicists, children who play in clay, sculptors, and goats everywhere or should it just be quietly hurled from a large building in which you could still open the windows?
So, in keeping with particular amazon.com reviewers, Teacher Palm Poet has sought to deflate our class by assigning us the task of creating frivolous, fluffy, superficial, and mediocre poems for next week. Flabby, dull poetry with no hidden subtext? No problem! 'Tis, of course, my area of expertise.
Til then...
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