child left behind

P.S. 112 stands on the corner of a what passes for a "quiet residential street" in Astoria, Queens, just west of several blocks of industrial-looking warehouses. It is bordered on the north by a large and welcoming playground, where some of the younger students go to play during pleasant weather.

The building itself is standard-issue mid-20th century brown brick. An iron fence ensures that all who enter go through the side door, which is monitored by a serious yet mercurial woman in a blue uniform and yellow-dyed hair.

The walls are, unbelievably, institutional green of a shade you'd think was too cliche to still be sold by the paint companies. The hallways echo with students' voices, the after-lunch movie from the auditorium, the occasional loudspeaker paging.

I am here to meet with my daughter Stella's teacher and therapists. This is our third meeting, and we began to get together in the fall when her physical therapist was concerned about Stella's lack of participation in the activities. In addition to Debbie, the physical therapist, and Pat, her teacher, the menage consists of Mindy, the speech therapist, and Rose, the occupational therapist, and the adaptive physical educator, a lovely young woman whose name escapes me at the moment.

They are all concerned about Stella, as we are. On previous visits my husband and I went together, and he felt as if too much time had been spent talking about what we could do at home to help her adjust to the routine, and not enough about what they were doing to help her learn. On this occasion, I am alone (Bob has a rehearsal), and I am anxious. We'd scheduled a meeting for the two weeks prior, but I was sick and Bob had a rehearsal and we both forgot to call and cancel. That was the day, too, that Stella was sent home sick, and was subsequently out of school for eight days (including the long weekend). As it is, I am running late, and Debbie calls my cell phone to make sure I haven't forgotten again.

The room is not large, but there is space enough. After brief greetings, we sit in small chairs, in a circle. I have removed my coat, hat, scarf, and taken out a notebook and pen. There is a palpable tension, and to break it, I ask about the daily routine, taking careful notes. It has occurred to me that I have a very unclear idea of what my daughter does every day, and somehow it seems important that I remedy that.

[more later]

Boy, Uninterrupted

Please pardon the horrible pun in my title. Yeah, I just watched that movie starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie's lips on the tube. Well, part of it--I toggled back and forth between that and Revenge of the Nerds, not because I was particularly enjoying it, but because I was morbidly fascinated by the way it deals with race. There's a thesis in there for someone at Bowling Green.

Anyway, I spent some uninterrupted time with my amazing son this evening, beginning with "Curriculum Night" at his school. I had to face the fact that I have not yet entered his classroom this year, stuff the guilt and move on. It was enjoyable--they have been studying the rain forest, so there was some reading aloud by students, a little quiz, and an art project: we made "rain sticks" with paper towel tubes into which we drove nails (!), poured an assortment of buttons, and then closed off with foil at each end. They worked!

Afterwards, we went to the stylish diner down the street for dessert (him) and dinner (me). I took a picture on my cell phone of him preparing to eat his cupcake, looking angelic-like.

You press your hands together as if in prayer,
eyes closed, poised over the cupcake that lasts
about ninety seconds. Sipping the lemonade
you bargained for, you mention the baby
that died before it was born--I didn't remember
telling you--I told you why it happened, how
mothers find out--and then we talked about Stella,
your sister--"Stella made it" her heart, why the hole
was there when she was born. In the cab home,
I tell you how they fixed it, the Gore-tex patch,
the stitch, the perfect results, the cardiologist
who moved to New Jersey. We're home, and the driver
says, "Smart boy. You'll be a doctor someday,"
and before bed we watch a comedy about doctors
singing and dancing for a patient because her brain
is broken, and then they fix it and she doesn't
hear the music anymore.

My Brilliant Son

This appropos of a discussion of nakedness, after I reminded him that I have seen him naked since he was born:
"People come out naked--they need to find their size."
Spoken like the true son of a shopaholic.

In other news, Stella is down with a virus, my poor baby! Feverish, mucus-y, doing this thing that is a cross between coughing and vomiting--ugh!

Her brother is actually jealous because she gets to stay home from school...

Getting Focused

The sun is high, the sky Magritte blue-accented-with-puffy-white. It finally feels like winter, although after a real cold snap, today's temps would seem balmy.

So many ideas, so many projects I could start, unfinished ones I could finish. I actually started writing in the green notebook again--that's the one I was feeling uncomfy about, felt the words needed to be more polished there. Bah! It's just paper.

Yesterday, I was scheduled to participate in a focus group about Gap.com. I was actually excited at the possibility of talking about my shopping habits with a group of other New Yorkers. It was just a few blocks from FIT, where I was planning to go that day anyway, and they were going to pay me $125 cash.

I started a journal entry (in the green notebook) in anticipation of making some interesting observations about our culture, the marketplace, my fellow humans. The words were workaday, as if I were reporting to some supervisor. No matter, I thought, the experience will surely spark something more lively.

As it turned out, the whole thing was a non-event. I showed up right at 3:15, signed in, got a little table tent with "Amy L." printed on it, filled out a brief questionnaire, and went to the waiting area. After about five minutes, a young blond woman with a clipboard came and asked me some of the questions I'd already answered over the phone the previous week in order to "qualify." She thanked me and left. I continued to enter contact numbers into my new cell phone. Around 3:45, a petite dark-haired woman came in and called some names. Three women went with her. "Amy? I'll be back to talk to you in a little bit," she reassured.

I was struck by how this was and wasn't like waiting in the doctor's office: the surroundings were about as enticing--gray carpet, white walls, gray plastic chairs--but I wasn't feeling the sense of frustration. I had a slight concern that, since I hadn't started yet, they would be keeping me after the designated time of 5 p.m., but that was all.

At 4 p.m. sharp, the young man from the front desk came in and asked me to come with him. I initialed the last column of the sign-in sheet, he handed me an envelope, and the young folks at Advanced Focus bid me goodbye.

Yes, the envelope contained the promised cash. I made a hundred and twenty-five bucks for sitting around for forty-five minutes. End of story. Capitalism rules.

Note to Self Apropos of Rejection and Acceptance of One's Work

From our current U.S. Poet Laureate, Donald Hall:

"Though we may work for potential love or fame, applause for our old work is nothing if we are not making new poems."

I found this in "Writing Poems," an essay published in an out-of-print gem called Creativity and the Writing Process, edited by Olivia Bertagnolli and Jeff Rackham. It was required by my undergraduate Creative Writing prof, Bob Flanagan, and speaks to me now more than ever.

I found the above passage underlined, and it's extremely apt for me today (I will not say why precisely, Dear Reader).

Hall goes on to say:

"When we are not in the midst of working, applause is almost a curse; it is a reminder that we are no longer the person who did the old work... the pleasure of writing the poetry is one-fiftieth in the praise, and the rest in the act of making a metaphor."

It is time to do the work: begin now, little by little throughout these bumpy holidaze, and focus more and more, create more space in the new year for the work. The work, the work, the work.

Gabriel David Custer, 1975-2006

My youngest sister Katy, her husband, and their 7-month old son were in a serious car accident yesterday. Katy and Seth are uninjured, but Gabe did not survive.
Fortunately, their older son Sammy was at my parents' house and not in the car.
Gabe was a wonderful husband, father, brother-in-law, uncle. His curiosity and good nature added so much to all of our family gatherings, and we had just spent time with them on our vacation in August.
He was one of Stella's godparents--we chose him because he has two younger brothers with Down syndrome, and his parents, Bob and Midge Custer, were so supportive right after Stella was born.
Here is a photo of the family right after Seth was born in March.
The full obituary can be read at this website.
Gabe's loss is immeasurable and I don't know what else to say.

After Long Silence

I've been buried. I focus on work, my family. Not much else. Interactions are mainly with students, coworkers, the kids, my husband, random strangers. I have begun to enjoy exchanges with shopkeepers, food delivery workers, the security officers who check IDs at the entrances to FIT's buildings.

My friends--those whom I do not see in my daily travels, or around the office--are probably starting to wonder. I want to stay in touch, but the routine is exhausting. Email is the only way for now, because I can't take a break during the day and by the time we get the kids down in the evening I have no energy left for phone calls.

I need to maintain these relationships with those who are important to me, but I am in a whirlwind. It will pass. Things will shift again. I will be back in touch.

Juiced

In case you haven't heard, our dear neighborhood has experienced severe power losses for the past week. (I've also received evidence that it is not the little hunky-dory diversity paradise I alluded to in my previous post over a month ago, but that's another story.) Although things are much better now, a thousand people are still without power today, going on Week Two. If you need the details from a news source, go here.

We were fortunate: our electricity did not disappear, but we did lose our phone, internet, and cable TV for five days (thank you, RCN! I'm namin' names now.) In fact, it seemed almost a conspiracy to keep us from getting any work done during regular business hours, as the services were magically restored at 5 p.m. Friday almost on the dot.

Our little shopping district, 31st Street and Ditmars (which the Brits would call "the high street"), was devastated. The Key Food was closed. So was the Rock, our gym (not that I've set foot in there for several months, but I really was going to start up again). The post office. Even the Starbucks. CVS was open, lines long as ever, thanks to a dumpster-sized generator they had apparently rented for the duration. Our health food store, which we patronize quite religiously, was still digging out on Friday. I hope they survive this setback.

The neighborhood has been crawling with Con Edison trucks all week, scrambling to at least look like they're trying to fix this disaster. No manhole unopened, no block without jackhammers tearing into pavement to search for decrepit cables lurking in tangles, ancient cobras poised to strike, burn, melt.

Saturday night I came home from my friend Lee's art opening at Westbeth Gallery to find a truck parked on the sidewalk in front of the corner store, lights flashing as if anyone could miss it. I hope they found what they needed. By morning they were gone.

On Sunday we got out of the city, to Bear Mountain State Park in Rockland County. Played frisbee, rode the merry-go-round, ate ice cream, and rented a rowboat, which Bob very skillfully navigated around Hessian Lake. Then had dinner at Schades in lovely Highland Falls (home of West Point).

When we arrived home with two soundly sleeping children, the answering machine was blinking (a sight we had just started getting used to after the long dialtone-less dry spell). It was a lovely message from our dear benevolent Con Edison asking us to call them (and doubtless wait on hold for hours) to let them know if we had power. "Con Edison cares about your health," the recorded female voice said.

I hit Erase. Thank you, Con Ed!

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

I love my neighborhood. Where else can you wait on line at Othello's Deli with gruff scruffy men reeking of Pall Mall, picking up their egg sandwiches with mayo, and then see a trim young guy in an Armani Exchange t-shirt walk in, brushing past with a crisp "Excuse me"?

Where else can you walk past a tiny Greek corner restaurant that used to be a private social club and now has signs advertising vegetarian offerings? Then a few paces away see young Williamsburg/Greenpoint hipsters lining up around the block to get into the Bohemian Hall Beer Garden?

Where else do Italian grandmas sweep their patch of sidewalk while their next-door neighbors sit on the stoop smoking and discussing their latest off-off-Broadway project in twangy Midwestern accents?

Unfortunately, my beloved neighborhood has been "discovered." Astoria is the new Park Slope, rife with transplanted Manhattanites looking to buy and real-estate venturers driving the market sky high. We've been in the same tiny 2-bedroom since we moved here, a decade ago in August, grad students, newlyweds without kids or steady jobs. We're spilling out the seams but have to stay put a little longer, I suppose.

Why I Write

Came across this today, written in 2004. It was inspired by a short essay by Terry Tempest Williams, collected in Writing Creative Nonfiction (ed. Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard). It still feels pretty true to me right now.

I write out of necessity, out of desperation. I write because there is no other viable alternative. I write because there is a hole in my heart even though the hole in my daughter’s was repaired years ago. I write because my son has heard me screaming and has started screaming at me. I write because my husband is sad a lot of the time, and it makes me sad, and it makes him less able to help me when I’m sad, and vice versa. I write because there are things I never got to do as a child, as a teenager, as a young adult in her twenties. I write because I always pictured myself in the turret study of a Victorian mansion, typing or scribbling away, sending page after page off into the world, wearing glasses and being a Famous Author. I write because when I was five I thought I would be an artist but I can’t draw to save my life. I write because my dream was always to be an actress, like Julie Andrews. I write because my singing voice is subpar, because my violin is dusty and my calluses gone, because I have given up on music, because there is something to say and I get tired of hearing it in my own head, and sometimes there is just no one else who will listen.

I write because I am good at grammar, because I was the Spelling Bee Champion of my school in both seventh and eighth grades, because English was always my favorite subject. I write because I am obsessed with words, and with books, and because reading is a way for me to get lost and get out of this rattling cage of a mind-body when I feel stuck. I write to thank my favorite authors, the patron saints looking down upon me from literary heaven, and to bless the muse, who may or may not exist in any real sense, but who gives us something to believe in other than the blank page, the pale screen wavering on the monitor, the too-crisp notebook with uncreased spine.

I write to take up space, to say I AM HERE, or later perhaps, I WAS HERE. I write for my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, my children’s children. I write because I have living blood relatives to whom I have not spoken in nearly a decade. I write because the little brothers and sisters I diapered and bounced on my knee now are bouncing their own children on their own knees, and they all live so far away. I write because my parents, my siblings, and even my closest brother have all been taken by a belief I cannot relax into, though I have tried several times because it seems to explain things in a way that satisfies them. I write to understand the way I understand the universe, to distinguish this way from all the other ways.

I write because it hurts. I write because it takes the pain away. I write to stir things up. I write to quiet down. I write to stimulate, even to anger. I write to placate, to ameliorate (that word so close to my own name), to make people like me or at least not be angry with me anymore. I write because I can’t help myself, because it is what I do, because I can’t imagine living any other way.

I write for me, I write for you. I write by hand, I write on a machine and print it out on another machine. I write in the morning, at lunchtime, late at night. I write in the kitchen, in a café, on the subway, in the dentist’s waiting room. I write in summer, fall, winter, and spring. I write in the bright sun, in the rain and snow, in the cold, on the elevated train platform with my gloves on, the ink freezing in the pen. I write because I have no choice, because I have to, because I can’t think of anything else to do, because I can.

What the bleep do I know about Louise Bogan?

OK, so I really have to get this paper finished for the West Chester Poetry Conference. I'm presenting first thing Thursday morning, for pity's sake! It would be nice if I didn't also have to facilitate a discussion on Writing Across Disciplines tomorrow at FIT from 9-12, then run up 8th Avenue to Penn Station for a 1 p.m. train. And if I didn't have some sort of upper respiratory crud in my chest (yes, a cough! a lovely touch as I head to a place where I will be sitting quietly for hours listening to presentations and poetry readings). And if I had more sleep. Etc. etc. etc.

Anyway, I do know a few things about my dear Louise:

• She was the poetry critic at the New Yorker for nearly four decades.
• She published a very small body of poems as a result of writing all that criticism (she needed the money, didn't have an independent income like Marianne Moore and other contemporaries).
• She never completed university but clearly received an extraordinary education, mostly at Boston Latin Girls' School. Yet she had somewhat of a chip on her shoulder about her "lack of schooling."
• In high school, she came home every day and wrote "a long poem or sonnet sequence." Every day. She was greatly influenced at the time by the Pre-Raphaelites, especially Swinburne.
• Despite Louise's literary prowess, the principal of her school spoke with her mother and told her "No Irish girl could be editor of the school magazine." She suffered greatly from discrimination she experienced as a "mick" in Yankee New England.
• She was praised by (mostly male) critics for her skill with rhyme and meter, and for her decorous, reserved, poems unsullied by messy "confessions."
• Whatever the apparent "detachment" in her work (and I query this notion), her life was at least as tumultuous and racy as that of bohemian goddess Edna St. Vincent Millay (about whom my friend Moira is presenting on our panel).
• She suffered horribly from depression and was hospitalized three times. One of these visits resulted in the poem "Evening in the Sanitarium." (There is life left: the piano says it with its octave smile.)
• Her adult ills can be connected to some trauma in her early life: her mother, a handsome and high-spirited woman married to a worker-bee five inches shorter than herself, had numerous affairs and would sometimes leave the family for days or weeks at a time. Also, her brother was killed in WWI when she was a teenager.
• She was not the most attentive mother herself; after separating from her first husband, who subsequently died, she left her small daughter Maidie with her parents and took a Greenwich Village apartment, immersing herself in the literary scene of the day. Later, friends (including Margaret Mead) chided her for failing to mention she had a child.
• Her poems are perfected with lapidary skill, polished like gems, precious to the reader, "talismans" according to one critic. I find that many of her lines stick with me, and have for years.

Well, there is much more to say, but I will let Louise have the last word.

Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell
At midnight, tears
run into your ears.

Write it! like disaster

Here is what happened. We were watching There's Something About Mary on TV. Contractions had started, mild, far apart, irregular. I couldn't read, couldn't concentrate. I knew it was starting to happen. The baby would be coming soon. The Matt Dillon character, trying to impress Cameron Diaz's character, tells her how involved he is in working with "retards." I cringe, as I am supposed to. I am supposed to think this guy is a jerk. I feel funnier than usual, though, because I am going to have a baby.

Fast forward to a bright sunny room, Segovia playing Bach streaming around, pain and pushing and more pain and pushing pushing pushing "Poosh the baby out," says Anna, the Swedish-Czech midwife who had also been there for our first. The baby comes out. She is on my chest. She is a dark purplish color. I make the midwife and nurse take her to get the color better. They make her pink and give her back to me. I see her face, I feel the roundness and chubbiness of her body. I see her eyes. "Does she have Down syndrome?" I ask. "I think yes," says Anna, too quickly, the wrong answer entirely, so wrong it feels like a slap.

There is a black and white photograph that I believe was taken right at that moment; I am holding the baby, a sheet partially covering my body, and the expression on my face has nothing to do with the pain of childbirth. This is a new sort of anguish, the crashing of worlds, the death of all kinds of particular visions, the beginning of a raw opening into whatever will be the future.

Sometimes we have to go back to those moments, to that point where everything changed forever. Even though it is the last place we want to go, or think our readers (if indeed we have them) want to go. So blogging it? Why not? A good place to start. I am inspired in this by Paul Guest's post , which I read yesterday and cannot get out of my mind. Sometime you just gotta write it. Memoir is life and writing is living. Wherever it happens.

Sudden Shower

It's raining. In fact, there's a bit of thunder. I should be turning off the computer, unplugging and all that, but it's been so long since I posted that I just can't resist.

Final grades are done (as of 8 a.m. today), and I am ready to throw myself wholeheartedly into an exploration of the poetry of Louise Bogan. Specifically, I'm looking at her use of form. I'll also, I'm sure, be thinking about her writer's block when it came to poetry (she focused on writng literary criticism for so long that, Mary Kinzie suggests in A Poet's Prose, she became too self-critical).

It's good to be back in a somewhat scholarly mode, for a little while at least.

I'll Take Manhattan

It's that time of semester. The grades are slowly, slowly getting done. The sun has come out and the air is a little warmer. I am starting to feel as if there is an end to the madness, very very soon.

I'm posting this image purely as an incentive to get through all the piles of work. . .
Cheers!

My plate runneth over

If you are tired of all these images in every post, too bad! I don't have time to really write anything, and here's why:

• commenting on 38 poems, 19 short stories, and 19 manuscripts and finishing participation grades for my online Creative Writing class
• grading 18 6-8 pp. case study papers and presentations for my Creative Imagination class
• marking 22 research paper drafts and presentations for my Poetry class
• class prep, answering emails from students, updating my classes' Blackboard sites
• actually teaching the classes with some semblance of sanity and order (oh, yeah)
• finishing a proposal for a new course
• Assistant Chair, English & Speech Department administrative schtuff (don't ask)
• meetings, meetings, meetings (ditto)
• introducing Sally Ball at Barrow Street reading/Marymount Manhattan College, Wed. 5/10
• Poetry Club flea market Thurs. 5/11 (please come by and buy some stuff!)
• family in town for my sister-in-law Rita's commitment ceremony (next weekend)
• rehearsing to sing at said ceremony
• helping Bob finish the lyrics for the song he's writing for Rita and her partner Matt
• finding something for Bobby, Stella, and myself to wear
• [your request here--c'mon, pile it on!]

What goes by the wayside?

• quality time w/kids and Bob
• sleeping
• eating (if only)
• breathing
• exercising
• and, of course, writing
  

I wish I could quit you. . .

Dear Procrastination,

My faithful friend and paramour throughout these many years, we have known each other for so long now. Aren't you tired of torturing me yet? Why do you hang around at the worst times, when my desk is piled with ungraded papers, my notebook is gathering dust, and deadlines are whizzing past?

If I could only break free of you, of my obsession with your enticements--the random googling, the elaborate snack I just have to prepare and subsequently devour, the other email I desperately need to send, the fascinating New Yorker article that is just so important I can't wait to read it, the latest VH1 junk TV show--

I would have finished that novel, the memoir, dozens of poems, and probably a couple of book proposals. The circles under my eyes would vanish. My temperament would even out (right!) and everyone would find me much more pleasant to be around--especially my longsuffering husband.

So how about it, Procrastination? Can you give me a break? You can keep the horse. . .

Love,

your Pardner

Duhamelmania!

I've just had the distinct pleasure of spending a great deal of the past two days in the presence of that poetic force of nature, Denise Duhamel. She had a sort of mini-residency at FIT this week--a reading, a Q&A session, and four classroom visits. Whew! Good thing she has as much energy as her poems!

So much more to say, but I'll have to post later. For now, just know that she was excellent and inspiring to all!

Blog envy

As a poet and sometime blogger I felt compelled to read about the furor over the Publisher's Weekly article on poetry and blogs.

I've been reading a bunch of these blogs for awhile now and there are some I go back to over and over for their humor, perspicacity, and downright wackiness. And, of course, there's the ever attractive gossip factor. Not to mention cute baby pictures (e.g., Reb and Deb). Others, however, feel like homework, and I have enough of that already.

I do admire the poet-bloggers who are able to incorporate cogent discussions of craft, current aesthetic debates, their favorite new work, recent literary mags, and so forth. And I admit that I find it all quite intimidating. How, I wonder, do they find the time and brain space??? I guess I have to accept the fact that I'm just not that kind of blogger. . .

Breaking the silence. . .

I've been rereading Tillie Olsen's Silences and Woolf's A Room of One's Own in preparation for teaching them in my creativity honors class. The timing is perfect because I'm trying to get into a more regular writing routine while FIT is on spring break. And these women remind me how essential it is not to give up, even though the odds are very, very discouraging.

I particularly love this quotation from Margaret Walker:

People ask me how I find time to write with a family and a teaching job. I don't. . . . It is humanly impossible for a woman who is a wife and mother to work on a regular teaching job and write.

OK, so that's my problem. Here's to doing the impossible!

Family Portrait

This is the most recent photo of all four of us--taken on Christmas Day at my parents' in Ohio. Notice Stella's winning smile and little black dress, and Bobby's pensive look. (Come to think of it, Dad looks a little glum, too.) Probably just tired after all the family festivities!
You can click on the image to see a larger version. Notice one of the photographers--my brother-in-law Steve--in the mirror.