I patted myself on the back for forcing everyone to re-evaluate how they write about tragedy. A classmate handed in work that dealt with tribe on tribe genocide in West Africa. Lucia does this VERY well, but more importantly , she is the only one trying! Another classmate, Conna, tried to write about the 9/11 tragedy and got chided by the class (though I admire her for trying). While the rest of us wage war on subjectivity or on the omnipresent patriarchy or just ramble about our pathetic little lives, Lucia takes daily tragedy and puts it on the page.

My way of conveying the difficulty in this was to give each person in the class a report about a real world tragedy and letting each of us do a free-write on the topic.

As predicted, most of the class resorted to familiar forms and techniques, thus failing to capture any of the emotion a genocide should create. My hero is Robin, who gave up trying to do any free writes at all. We should not call ourselves poets until we can truthfully address the tragedies that occur in our lives. Cataclysmic events don’t require a poet’s distance, they require a complete involvement, an obsessive desire to throw one’s self into life’s events. We must not shy away from peril! Or else we’ll continue to mutter about dreams and subjectivity and seek to cast off the comfortable narrative techniques. Crouch we here and mutter awhile while the poet becomes obscelete..

The final part of the class was the discussion of Ann Lauterbach in which the class fell to either side of the DMZ. The butt-kissers in the class thought she was a great poet while the (obviously better looking and more intelligent) side disliked the poet for most of the reasons I outlined in my post two days ago. If the avant garde needs to "disregard comfortable narrative technique" as a call to avoid stereotypes and received language, so why do the avant gardists of the class support language so burdened by sentimental baggage? How can "Sequences of Dream Structures" be construed as an innovative use of language? I was writing about Dream Structures when I was fifteen. I submit to you, humble reader, didn’t all of you write about dreams and their elusive qualities when you first started writing poetry/fiction/journaling? I propose that moving beyond the dream narrative is one of the first steps a beginning writer must to do to improve one’s self. Dreams are by their very nature meaningless to all but the dreamer and to suppose that one’s own dream experiences are so profound that they must be documented is arrogant. Of course they are profound –ALL dreams are somehow profound. Let’s go beyond that. Shake your ass and show me with what you are working.

I made my tenth CD for Missy last night. She starts her drive to Los Angeles this week and there’s not much I can do except give her my music and lots of "Space Ghost Coast to Coast" SoundBits. I’ll be single again, o vey meir. I think there's a good chance she'll let me get to second base...

To end this on a happy note, I am planning on going to Europe for a few weeks this summer. Probably mid-June to mid-July, then I’ll come back and go to the Clarion reunion. Afterwards, I may or may not go to the National Poetry Slam in Minneapolis, MN, which is in the second week in August. I’d love to go to the Nationals, but a whole summer is a long, long time to go without a job. If any readers have extra money, please send it my way. I promise to use it only for Europe-related expenses.

I’M A JUICE DOG.