Hog Butcher to the World

Just back from a whirlwind of a visit to the Windy City forty hours which included three gigs in a span of twenty hours.

I was invited by the Chicago Humanities Festival to speak on my new book Well Defined: Vocabulary in Rhyme.  The theme of the festival this year was humor and festival director Mary Kate Barley-Jenkins found my book amusing after someone at the Chicago Poetry Center sent her a copy. So they brought me in.

Now the life of an independent teaching artist is somewhat similar to that of an airline pilot whose vocation I have heard described as hours of monotony interspersed with seconds of near cardiac inducing panic.  As the old adage goes when it rains it pours so after what seemed like weeks and weeks holed up in my home office I found myself in a blizzard of travel and engagements.  Since Halloween I’ve been in Boston, the greater Cincinnati area, Wooster Ohio and Chicago Illinois visiting schools, signing books, taking walking tours, driving, flying and riding.

After the school work in Boston I was the guest of Christine and Larry Charbonneau who walked Sara and me all over historic Boston. We visited Paul Revere’s abode, ate lunch at the celebrated Parker House hotel where Malcolm X was a busboy and JFK proposed to Jackie, visited the grave of Mother Goose (I didn’t realize she really existed either) ,and ate some pretty damn good cannolis at Mikes bakery on the North End.

Returning from Bean Town we immediately drove to Mason Ohio as chronicled in the post below. Then it was home for a couple days and off to the Buckeye Book Fair where not only did I sell out of books but got my pic taken with Big Chuck whom I mention in the post Boom Boom Boom.  Immediately afterwards I drove to Cleveland Hopkins and hop a plane to Chicago to participate in the 2009 Chicago Humanities Festival –  the past few weeks becoming a serendipitous swirl culminating in the visit to the city of the big shoulders.

I slip into Chicago as if putting on a tailored suit jacket. The city fits me well – it’s like a bigger better equipped version of Cleveland, same basic ethnic makeup, same weather, same Midwestern unpretentiousness plus the added bonus of hotdogs that are a meal. I landed with just enough time to check into the nice suite at the Seneca Hotel provided by the festival then grab a cab to catch the final half hour of a cocktail party being held in honor of the CHF’s presenters and organizers.

I am forever finding myself in water than is a little deeper than I belong and looking around this party seeing the likes of Matt Groening let me know I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. I just managed to muster the restraint to keep from whipping out my Blackberry and requesting photos with the luminaries present thus not appearing the country rube in the big city – but betraying my true lack of sophistication I do kind of regret it. I did feel a little vindicated the next morning in the hospitality suite where I helped the award winning and apparently technologically challenged  New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren  print out his boarding pass for his flight back to Vermont after chatting about bikes and running.

My presentation the next afternoon went pretty well – I was not 100% happy with it but the organizers and attendees seemed to feel no need for violence afterward and to torture  the pilot metaphor a bit more – any landing you can walk away from is a good one. I even had folks line up for me to sign books afterwards so it must have been OK. I was especially happy to meet up with a former student of mine Jonathan Lykes who now goes to the University of Chicago and we had dinner following my presentation. That evening I was a featured performer at the Green Mill – the Mecca for Slam poets.

I don’t know what it is about that club but it brings out the best in me. A lot of the credit goes to Marc Smith the man who invented Poetry Slam who has cultivated and nurtured the show for over twenty years – the audiences are smart, attentive and vocal.  No wonder I ran into such slam luminaries as Roger Bonair-Agard, Marty McConnell and Robbie Q Telfer there.  It was one of the best sets I’ve done in a long time – it was good to get back to my roots per se and somewhat consoling to know I still had some chops left. I think I kinda identify a smidgeon now of how the Buddha faced Foreman felt the last time he grabbed the belt.

The next morning I visited Von Steuben High School on Chicago’s North Side where I was joined by Jonathan and we talked about poetry and performed some pieces for an assembly of students.  The kids were receptive (they even took notes!) and I was given a pretty hep t-shirt emblazoned with the school’s panther mascot. Then Mary Kate her silver Honda Civic and I chased down a yellow taxi piloted by a Sudanese driver who took me to the airport where I was able to get on an earlier flight pretty much walking into O’Hare and directly onto a plane.

Sometimes things just fall together and it just looks like you know what you’re doing…

GO PANTHERS!

Poetry in Motion

There are times  

when a teaching artist walks into a school introduces themselves to the secretary at the front desk and receives a blank stare similar to that of a caged bird. They are looking at you but you know they have no idea why you are there. This was not the case during the two days I just spent in Mason Ohio - just north of Cincinnati in the shadows of the roller coasters of Kings Dominion Amusement Park.

Sara (my partner in rhyme) and I were greeted out front by Laura Palmer – not the Twin Peaks character but a 7th grade language arts teacher - and her compatriot Joe Carraher who whisked us into the school, handed us updated agendas, a choice of lunch menus, provided a basket of bottled water and snacks made sure all the tech stuff was clicking and whirring at an acceptable rate and pretty much treated us like we were way more important than we think we are. We did three large assemblies of around six hundred kids each, got a few of them onstage with us and had a generally swell time. After lunch we split up and led a couple writing workshops apiece. I got in a little trouble when my group made a teensy weensy tiny bit too much noise (admittedly at my direction) in the media center - but I think the writing that they produced was well worth the minor insubordination . Joe stepped in and offered his classroom for our subsequent sessions and a grand time was had by all.

Day two we started out by leading a three-hour teacher workshop and again followed up in the afternoon with a couple student workshop sessions. After the teacher’s PD session we were thrilled when the secondary language arts curriculum coordinator, Jenny May, complimented us on how well we kept up with the latest pedagogy in the field. We were just as delighted by the staff’s enthusiasm for teaching and their participation during the session. I was pleasantly impressed with the genuine interest and appreciation showed when I recommended the vocabulary acquisition book Word Play by our friend Sandra Whitaker to one of the teachers with whom we were having lunch. Thanks for the great pizza by the way and thanks to the staff and parent volunteers who helped to make our visit to Mason Middle School one that we will remember fondly.

extra credit points if you get this reference...

But that’s not all!

Spent two days at Pierce Middle School in Milton Massachusetts working with the eighth graders in Christine Charbenneau’s class doing vocabulary acquisition and helping Sara out with a couple school assemblies and a family literacy night.

I led the kids in writing some infomercials for vocabulary words ala Billy Mays (one of the exercises forthcoming in our new vocabulary book)  the first day and then participated in said family literacy event in the evening. We finished up the writing projects the second day and then Sara and I spent the rest of the weekend scoping out nearby Boston with Christine and her husband (this adventure will be expounded upon in detail in an upcoming post.)

The family Literacy night was a real cool event. Sara and I kicked the thing off with a keynote reading – performing some of our family oriented poems – then the English department lead a selection of half hour breakout sessions from which the parents could choose where they were treated to book talks and other good reading promoting positive propaganda. After the mini classes a book fair was set up in the library with the prerequisite PTO bake sale goods outside in the hallway and a good time was had by all!

INSERT TITLE:

The household here has been buzzing – we’re scheduling and writing and planting trees and cooking turkey sausage - washing dogs - takin’ cats to the vet going for walks/runs and rides fishing for steelhead after running into old friends in restaurants - dropping kids off at the bus station - sending e-mails twittering and facebooking while applying for visas - nursing chronic injuries - cutting down trees - talking to teachers - going to the gym and streaming movies. 

What does a beagle say?

OOOHWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Got up at the ungodly hour of 5am yesterday to drive down to Dover Ohio – a suburb just north of Columbus where Sara and I  spoke with a class full of pre-service teachers.  Pre- service means they have not yet graduated. We were visiting the class of  Dr. Amy McClure on the campus of Ohio Wesleyan University -OWU.

We talked about using poetry and performance as a tool in the classroom and we wrote some definition poems. I also used the opportunity to debut a new PowerPoint presentation I have been working on for my appearance at the Chicago Humanities Festival coming up in early November.

Now – did we remember to bring a camera to document this wonderful visit. of course we did – did we remember to take pictures – no way José.  So I have no visual aids to share of the bright eyed students all aglow and soaking up ideas like some late night headset microphoned sham wow salesman.

After out session with the kids at OWU we drove down to the city to have lunch with my oldest son Max – a botany major @ OSU. He suggested we swing into Germantown and hit Schmidt's Sausage Haus.  Well I do like me some sausage hence this was a welcome  proposition. I had the old world sausage sampler with sauerkraut – tart and tangy -  and a cup of potato soup.

So – Schmidt’s get’s a thumbs up in my book as does OWU – now if only there were a train between Cleveland and Columbus…

Buy one poet get second half off!

One of the absolute best

parts of my life being a teaching artist is the travel that comes with it. I’ve worked in twenty five different countries so far and Sara and I are adding at least three new ones in ’10.

So far we are booked in January for Morocco and Abu Dhabi and then in March we’re headed for South Korea. These visits are always eye opening and exciting. Scroll down to the bottom of this blog and click on the travel tag if you want to read about some of the places we’ve been. People ask us how we get the gigs overseas and whether or not we speak all these foreign languages.

Well here’s what we do in a nutshell: Sara and I have built our careers on teaching literacy and comprehension skills using poetry and performance as a tool towards that end. This is where we differ from a lot of poets who work with kids. Our goal is not to create more poets – at least not directly. Our goal is to create better communicators, readers and writers. Quite frankly – I’m sure a lot of readers out there would agree that the world already has plenty of poets. We use poetry as an implement to teach all the writing standards as well as lessons across the curriculum. Now if our students decide they want to become poets fine and good – but we count our real successes amongst the kids who would rather be on the soccer field or taking headshots at zombies who learn expressing themselves in a bit more detail or understand the Bill of Rights a little deeper. We get kids to write better in all their subjects and teachers like that.

So, how did we end up working overseas so much? First, you have to have something to teach. We’ve written a couple professional books - a professional book is a book written for teachers to help them in their profession. Now even though the books are written and available – school systems, administrators and teachers still like to the authors visit their schools to teach the lessons within them. There are two types of visits – PD (Professional Development) where we speak exclusively to teachers and administrators explaining the research and theory backing our lessons and then there are workshop days spent actually teaching the lessons to living breathing students, sometimes with just the classroom teacher present – sometimes with a group of teachers watching the model lesson. There are links to the books somewhere on this blog…

We also have the added bonus of books published for kids. Lots of schools bring in authors to talk with their students and we have the added capability to help enhance the curriculum when we arrive for these visits. Published work is the foot in the door.

In order to be successful we need to keep ourselves abreast of the latest pedagogy and we do so when presenting our ideas at teacher’s conferences. While attending these conferences we take the opportunity to sit in on sessions and keynotes – to listen and meet the folks behind all the research we use to back the ideas in our books. I like to consider myself an emissary for the classroom teachers who can only go to one maybe two conferences a year. Sometimes the best idea comes from a colleague over dinner – one needs to put oneself in the position to be part of these conversations. I am attending a dozen or so of these each year and I try to bring back all the best ideas and share them (giving credit to the originator when due) with the educators I work with.

Here’s a quick aside – I once had a performance poet send me an e-mail telling me how much an arts council liked the proposal sent in using the exercises from my book Outspoken. This poet was accepted into a visiting artist program using those exercises – I doubt that any credit was given to the actual developer of the lessons – but that’s one of the hazards of the profession. I am very careful to cite the source of all my lessons if I am not the originator because I know the hard work that goes into crafting them.

It is my job to be current – ideas change and evolve. I would be doing a disservice to the people I work with if I didn’t keep up with the latest studies. We are constantly updating our presentations adding new ideas. Think of everything that has changed in the last twenty years - the idea of a blog would have been unfathomable not to mention brain based learning theory or comprehension strategies. A good teaching artist keeps up with the research and then they hide it in their work like a vitamin in a glob of peanut butter.

Anyway – Sara and I presented at one of these conferences being held overseas in Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam. Now – the conference was for English speaking schools in Southeast Asia. See, there are English language schools all over the world. They cater to the families of folks working for multinational corporations, American Embassies, and locals looking to send their kids to the US for college. The schools are full English immersion and they are literally all over the world. These are the schools we teach in when we go abroad and that first conference half a dozen years ago is what set us on our way. We were now part of the circuit of writers who are willing to go anywhere. And the rest has been history.

International Schools in Kazakhstan, Jakarta, Bahrain, Croatia, Shanghai, Istanbul, Singapore, Bangkok, Bali, Cairo to name a few have been gracious enough to host us and we look forward to visiting many more in the coming months and years. So – just in case you are reading this from some far flung academic outpost (or even not so far flung) – Ya need a couple poets?

Could you please speak more clearly?

“I was going to tell you about the rattlesnakes.”

Just back from a working vacation at our editor Smokey Daniels’ Santa Fe Rabbit Moon Ranch. He and his more than lovely wife Elaine should be working on their own professional development book titled Best Practices for Hosts. Harvey “Smokey” Daniels is our editor on the vocabulary acquisition book Sara and I are currently writing and our publisher ponied up some cash to send us to confer with him giving the project a booster shot in the arm.

The first morning I was up, still living two hours in the future thanks to hopping two time zones, and took a stroll with my coffee in hand around the Daniels’ spread. Scrub grasses, tumbleweeds, wild sage and prickly pears dotted the desert along with other anonymous flowering flora benefitting from two or three days of uncharacteristic rains. I saw a couple lizards, some cottontails and a few murders of crows while the sun hoisted itself into the big sky over the mountains to the east.

Smokey joined me outside informing me about the aforementioned rattlesnakes. Having been a bit of an amateur herpetologist in one of my earlier incarnations I had already figured we were in snake country and was already keeping a wary eye peeled to where I was stepping. A little prior knowledge can go a long way. Then again, one can know just enough to be dangerous.

Based on past experience I purchased Chuck Palahniuk’s (pronounced like two first names Paula + Nick) new novel Pygmy to read on the flight out. He is the author of the cult classic Fight Club and I have always found his stuff to be accessible plot driven and quirky. This novel promised to be more of the same. Publishers Weekly described it as: A gang of adolescent terrorists trained by an unspecified totalitarian state (the boys and girls are guided by quotations attributed to Marx, Hitler, Augusto Pinochet, Idi Amin, etc.) infiltrate America as foreign exchange students. A perfect set of criteria for occupying one’s mind while being blasted through the sky at five hundred miles an hour in an aluminum tube.

So, the plane begins to nose up off the runway I pull my new book from my backpack read the accolades on the inside of the dust flaps and started in to chapter one. I found the book unreadable. Not that it was written poorly – but rather that the syntax Palahniuk had decided to use was impossible to decode for me. Chuck decided to write the thing in the broken English of his protagonist and in my opinion he failed. Well, let me re-phrase that – he DID write it in the broken English of his adolescent terrorist – unfortunately for the reader this prose is harder to understand than the well intentioned directions of that fourteen year old Bangladeshi trying to walk you through installation of a wireless router.

Here’s an example: "Location former chew gum, chocolate snack, salted chips of potato, current now occupy with cylinder white paraffin encase burning string, many tiny single fire."

It never gets better – I skipped ahead to see. I am not one to shy away from complex construction: I love William Burroughs cut up work, Clockwork Orange is a favorite as is Motherless Brooklyn and Foer’s Everything is Illuminated is one of my all-time favorites but sorry Chuck – as far as I am concerned you owe me twenty five bucks. There is a difference between complex and complicated. Where these other books I have mentioned use malapropos and twisted syntax to add an additional layer of meaning on their work Pygmy’s construction wraps the story in razor wire. Not impenetrable but you’re gonna be messed up once you get inside and I just don’t think the payoff is worth the blood.

I have been rendered illiterate recently while travelling through various countries overseas. Standing on a corner in Almaty, Kazakhstan cocking my head at a Cyrillic street sign – wandering about in the death star of a fabric market in Shanghai or squinting at the oscilloscope like lines of an Arabic menu in a Cairo restaurant – but this is the first time in a long time I have had this experience with English.

This book made me mad. Mad because I felt betrayed by an author who I thought I could count on. Mad because I had wasted time and money and mad because not being able to decode this thing made me feel stupid. But, it did provide one valuable lesson. It granted me a little insight and a whole lot of empathy for struggling readers. How frustrating it has to be for that kid in the class who just isn’t getting it.

I passed the book on to our host Smokey who read a couple pages and apologized to me for enjoying it. This made things worse. I’m no idiot but now I was playing one on TV. I mean if Smokey could understand it what was wrong with me? I felt embarrassed. My ego was only marginally bandaged when Smokey and Elaine’s twenty something daughter – a big Palahniuk fan – gave the book a shot and agreed with my findings. Then again she may have simply been mirroring the considerable graciousness modeled by her heroically empathic mother.

So, Mr. Palahniuk, I will probably pick up your next book but I’ll sure as hell read a half dozen pages before I pay for it because after all – once bitten twice shy.

If at first you don’t succeed…

Ran my final tri of the season yesterday. The swim went a little better but I still panicked a bit – I was able to calm myself down and actually finished with a good time out of the water. I’m thinking it’s going to take a couple more times in open water with a crowd to get my composure back. That feeling of drowning (see my Lorain tri post) is a hard one to get over.

But – I didn’t want to end my season on the downer that the Lorain tri turned into so I found another race – this one down in Akron which I figured would be a nice little event to finish the year off.

Well, when we got there we found out that this race was the culminating event of a championship series that had been going on all summer. This was the biggest triathlon I have ever competed in. The swim was the longest that I had done this year in a race – the bike course was the hilliest as was the run.

In the end though – I did manage to grab third place in my division – so still no first place finishes, but as any Cleveland sports fan knows – there’s always next year!

Look at all the egg heads!

The water temp in the low seventies was higher than the air’s which was somewhere in the 60s

Smiling for the camera - (sara’s taking the pics)

Passing someone ten years younger than me right at the finish (ages are magic markered on the backs of our calves)

Suzi met a fox terrier who looked just like her minus the fur coat.

BOOM BOOM BOOM!

October 8^th, 1977 was a pivotal day in the development of my psyche. It was a Saturday night and I was a fifteen year old tenth grader living in a suburb east of Cleveland Ohio. In fact, even with all the travelling and moving about I’ve done I am still just six miles away from that house.

Like most adolescent males I was a bit of a night owl and I had a habit of staying up late on the weekends watching whatever was on the idiot box until the American flag streamed across the cathode tube around two thirty am or so and the television signed off for the night. You old enough to remember that? The TV used to sign off every night to the strains of some military band playing the Star Spangled banner.

Of course this was decades before a hopped up soap pushing Billy Mays ruled the wee hours of the day. Heck, good portions of the shows I would watch were in black and white. The hosts who commanded the late night roost were local folks like Big Chuck and Hoolihan and my personal favorite The Ghoul. (I missed the infamous Ghoulardi by a couple years) Big Chuck was a producer of the earlier Ghoulardi show and Hoolihan was an AWOL weatherman – the pair took over the late night slot when Ghoulardi (Ernie Anderson) left the Cleveland market for greener fields and network TV in LA.

These cats would play whatever cheap horror flick they could get their hands on and sprinkle comedy skits in during intermissions. The Ghoul, Ron Sweed – who coincidentally was also a production assistant on the Ghoulardi show – a gig he landed by showing up at one of Anderson’s appearances dressed in a gorilla suit subsequently received permission from Anderson to resurrect the character) was an aficionado of blowing things up on set with fireworks and inserting sound effects into the terrible movies that he showed.

I remember one occasion when a viewer had sent in a homemade volcano with a fuse at the top with the instructions to only light the IED outside in an open space. The Ghoul debated with the camera – should I light it or not? I was yelling at the screen “Light it Light it!” And I’m sure due to my prodding; he fired the homemade Vesuvius up. The thing filled the studio with smoke and sparks and Sweed, choking gagging and laughing, had to cut to commercial – truly great television.

Now after The Ghoul’s show was over the station would play one more horror flick – this time no sound effects or gags at intermission. Actually there were very few intermissions – ad time between one and three in the morning must have been a hard sell in Cleveland Ohio during the seventies. Most times these movies weren’t too scary; the choppy editing making the plot almost impossible to follow sometimes the movies just stopped – no credits nothing and up popped the flag. But every now and then a gem would flicker by. I saw the original Little Shop of Horrors, the Omega man, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre in The Pit and the Pendulum and Burn Witch Burn.

Burn Witch Burn – I have absolutely no memory of what the movie was about and it doesn’t matter. I could look it up on the IMDB but I would probably be disappointed because all I know is that as far as I was concerned it was the scariest thing I had ever seen. The movie ends, the star spangled banner plays, an announcer informs me that “we now end our broadcast day” and I watch the screen revert to a test pattern accompanied by a 400 hertz sine wave tone. I’m sitting in a chair – my knees pulled up to my chest two feet or so away from the screen. Eventually the test pattern and tone disappear too leaving only a static and snowy image the sound reverted to a rasping fuzz.

“mom,” I whimper. Then again a little louder, “Mom.” This continues each vocalization getting a bit louder – Mom, MOM, MOOOM!! My mother finally appears in my doorway. “What the hell is wrong with you watching that garbage so late? Go to bed!” So I did.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about – this little event above happened a few years before October 8^th 1977. See on the date in question I was watching Saturday Night Live and the musical guest was a 23 year old British singer songwriter named Elvis Costello. I’d never seen anything like it before – he sang “Watching the Detectives”. Well he didn’t really sing it – he snarled it like he hated the camera. He jerked around, knock kneed ducking and diving as if he were trying to escape from the screen, baring his crooked and gapped teeth, giant Buddy Holly type glasses – anti fashionable on purpose – his image evoking lyrics “She’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake…” and I distinctly remember thinking that this was important – that this was something new and I liked it. Elvis Costello turned me into a punk that night.

So yesterday – I’m in the grocery store picking up some organic chicken breasts and what do I hear coming over the Muzak? Watching the Detectives - barely audible, I stopped my cart to be sure and there it was. Not a sanitized string version either – it was the single, Costello’s singing backed by the Attractions. Thirty two years from life altering moment to background music for shopping. You know, I wonder if Burn Witch Burn is available on Netflix, maybe I do want to see it again.

Tri not to drown next time!

Ran the Lorain tri today – I came in second in this race last year so I had pretty high hopes for this one considering the time and effort I have been putting in this summer. Whenever I am talking to someone about running these races almost invariably they say - “I could do the run and bike but I don’t know about the swim.’ To which I reply, “The important part about the swim is not to drown.”

Well – today I drowned. As I was moving up through the pack of swimmers I took a foot squarely to the face and then was subsequently dunked under as I was paused in pain. My heart raced and I never did get my composure back I even contemplated throwing in the towel (or asking for one) and calling it a day. Fortunately I was able to grab a rock on a nearby break wall and catch my breath a bit – but my time was shot. (you can see me disappointedly checking it as i finally get out of the water above.) Usually I build my lead on the swim and bike portion but I ended up over four minutes behind my swim time of last year. Sara said she knew something was up when I didn’t pop out from behind the break wall when she expected me. There’s no panic like the panic of oxygen deprivation.

I got my feces collected during the bike portion and had a really great ride. Got in with a pack traveling 20-21 mph it was so much fun I didn’t even mind the rain or the water streams that were spun into my face from the tires in front of me. We were flying along as a group taking turns chasing down the folks in front of us and chatting along the way.

The run was as good as I could expect – I’ve got my mile time down to around 8:30 and i don’t think it is going to go any lower. I ran with my iPod listening to the Beastie Boys, Rob Zombie, Motorhead, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Yep, I ran a pretty god race minus that drowning part – SOOOOO – I can’t end the season on such a downer. I signed up for one more race to be run on Sept. 13. Not only do they have a Clydesdale division (200+lb)– but they even have an over 40 Clydesdale division. Now if they would add an over 40, Clydesdales who also are published poets division…

UPDATE: Turns out I took 4th place this year. If I had matched my swim time from last year I would have taken 2nd again behind the same guy (20 years younger than me.)

pics by sara