Sarah getting reviewed on Rhubarb is Susan endemnifies her to join this blog, so says me (e-mail me if you need an invite, Ms. Trott). Equally endemnified is Jeffrey Schrader, because I agreed to do PSD at Mills this year (check your inbox, J-bones).

Blog promise, will submit to 'there' three new oakland poems, packaged perhaps with a few older ones, as I'm taking up the mantle on that project again. here's a preview (hot off the press, as in I actually got some writing done today):

I am driving around the lake
and it is sunset

and NPR is telling me that 50% of Oakland youth (surveyed) think tomorrow is going to be worse
than today


Other than that, in my break from grading 39 portfolios, I practiced a little bit of drums, and did some research on Rousseau's opera Les Muses Galantes for my class tomorrow. The beginning of this quarter is kicking my motherfucking ass, but hopefully by tonight I will have closed the book son last quarter, albeit two weeks late, which should be a major boon to getting any art done.

I assigned my students a quarter-long creative project of their choosing, and vowed to do it with them. What I asked, as mentioned earlier, is "what is the problem that faces you?" My answer to that question is related to the above poem- Oakland saw 148 people murdered last year, the vast majority young and male and killed on public street corners, and yet I live in relative comfort and ease and enjoy the hell out of this city. All my previous writing on Oakland has taken a mostly impersonal tract, trying to broadly talk about its history or metaphysical character (or something, I don't know what). In part inspired by early bits of a project Charles Legere launched, in part inspired by a re-examination of just what is entailed in a personal/lyric poetics, I'm going to step into these poems in the first person, so as not to hide my subjectivity behind any smoke screen of "historical research" or "abstract poetics".

So, old project, new clothes- Oakland writing 'yal