Reckonings

Reflections of a Teacher-Poet

Thomas Zimmerman

This is a digital version of a chapbook that was assembled for

the Community College Humanities Associations 2013 National Conference, in Louisville, KY, October 24-26.

Copyright 2013 by Thomas Zimmerman

The author wishes to thank the publications in which the following

works first appeared, sometimes in different form:

The Apple Tree: Advice for Essay Writers and Teaching Shakespeare The Big Windows Review: Zimmerman and Poetry Carnival: Hunters Curio Poetry: Stars Adorn Our Ankles The Community College Humanist: A One-Sonnet Shakespeare Course

and Sonnet for Freshman Comp Leaves of Ink: Another Night My Wife Is Gone Michigan Writing Centers Association Newsletter: Sonnet for the

Writing Center Tutors Stone Path Review: Submersion

This book was produced on a Dell computer using Microsoft Publisher.

Fonts used are Century Schoolbook, Courier New, and Tahoma.

Photographs and book design by the author.

zetataurus press | ann arbor mi zetataurus@comcast.net

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Reckonings

Reflections of a Teacher-Poet

Thomas Zimmerman

Contents

Reckonings 4

Another Night My Wife Is Gone 5

Sonnet for Freshman Comp 6

Submersion 7

Teaching Shakespeare 8

Hunters 9

Advice for Essay Writers 10

Stars Adorn Our Ankles 11

A One-Sonnet Shakespeare Course 12

Zimmerman and Poetry 13

Sonnet for the Writing Center Tutors 14

Why Im Here 15

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Reckonings

Im navigating place and time and change. Im living on a pulpy edge, Ive got a paper cut, Ive joined a cult so strange that we believe that anything thats not ambiguous is false. The metaphors

are easy when you see that everythings connected. Rivers everywhere, and shores

on any margin, where a mermaid sings,

then morphs to Jesus spearing fish that fall

like maple leaves, like human hands that slap

a moving mirror. Shadows suckle all

us infants cradled in our mothers lap: in womb, in tomb, in school, in temple lit

with love, an elder enters, then we sit.

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Another Night My Wife Is Gone

My teeth do float more loosely in my head

these days. Im tired, home from work, just dead awake, a beer in front of me. Thats good guitar I hear: a new, discordant disc

is on the stereo, but words, for mood,

are raging bores tonight. I feel no risk,

my journals out, I write what comes to blind me: Dots of mist are drying on my new blue coat, each one a dying world. My mind is all puffed up with fakes of things a few

cool poems by other men have said. I close

the new Selected Blah-Blah-Blah of So-

and-So, rethink my foredoomed plan to lose

myself in verse. The dog wants out. Lets go.

5

Sonnet for Freshman Comp

From brain to hand(s): thats how it starts. Just try a freewrite, brainstorm, cluster, outline, list.

Dont overthink it. Now think hard: on why and who and how and . . . anything youve missed. Select a topic. Narrow it. Now what

will be your point? To entertain? Inform?

Persuade? Youll need a thesis statement, but relax: youll tweak it later. Thats the norm. Now spin your yarn or build your case. Belief

is what your reader needs. Assemble stats

and details, anecdotes and facts. Be brief

in telling, more expansive showing. Thats the theory. Proofread. Spellcheck. Pare down. Add.

The goal is not write well; its not write bad.

6

Submersion

A dish of potpourri beside the lamp

and light enough to see. The ink-pens had its squat, but youre not into this. So bad the art-impulse sometimes. Aesthetic cramp,

creative bends. You try to rise too fast.

You need to stay submerged awhile: a fish,

a stone, a fountain penny with a wish,

the rust that chews a chain to velvet, last

years brandied cherries. Read Neruda, Bly, or Rilke. Listen to the blues of Hurt

or Hooker. Surrogates and sources, dirt

and forking roots: to sleep so deep in high

and blackened waters, rich and strange, to let

the darkness fill you, empty in its net.

7

Teaching Shakespeare

The sonnets are subversive, written to

A man. I like to start with that, or with

Wills will, or puns on genitals might do. I try to skip the old deer-poaching myth.

As comedy embraces tragedy,

So I assuage the students fear of verse: Relax. Remember Hamlets words: Let be. Then, like a pack of Calibans, they curse.

We plumb Midsummers dream of love, of life; Find truth in Twelfth Nights gender-bending maze. Macbeth, we think, is rite disguised as strife;

And Henry V debunks its glory days.

We learn, as well, that couplets close an act

Or click a sonnet shut with measured tact.

8

Hunters

Orion poised above the roof; the moon

a scythe, a pendulum; my breath a wife

engendering pale wraiths that die too soon

for me to ask about that other life. . . .

The night is strange, and so am I: I read

too much, or not enough. Dear Percys here with me, as black as I am white; hes peed and had a treat, still innocent of where

we end: like me. His snuffling in the brush,

his belly-consciousness: mere metaphors

for my more abstract quests. His headlong rush

at rabbit, squirrel, mouse: how he adores

the kill; or is it merely sustenance?

Like finding God unarmed, asleep, by chance.

9

Advice for Essay Writers

Its best to have a thesis statement if youre writing for a grade. Make items in a series parallel. Dont split infin- itives. Your nouns should be concrete, specif-

ic. Watch your fragments, slang, and dashes. Learn

to love the Oxford comma. Know your aud-

ience. Prefer the classic to the mod.

Dont break words off at ends of lines. Dont burn your notes and drafts. Revise. Intuit. Be

concise. Break any rule provided you

have thought it through. Remember to/too/two.

Be clear about your ambiguity.

Be careful with imperatives. Take time.

Dont plagiarize. Dont be a slave to rhyme.

10

Stars Adorn Our Ankles

Magnetic is the dark abyss, and strong

the wind on northern plains, the land so flat,

the sky so big that, nights, the stars adorn

our ankles. Veils of topsoil, reads a poem I wrote in North Dakota, dancing black and naked for the plaid-backed farmers. You were lying on that hotel bed, in shock

on our arrival, TV chained against

the ceiling, stars around its ankles. Blue

as atlas interstates, crabbed veins adorn

my ankles now, and so much laid out flat

behind, beside, in front, inside of me:

my mother grown into a hoop I keep

on jumping through, my fathers eyes the earth so torn it blurs the far horizon line.

11

A One-Sonnet Shakespeare Course

The Sonnets are subversive: four-fifths praise

a young man for his beauty, mourn the curse

of both men being male. Midsummer plays

with love as fleeting dream; the woods reverse

the states proprieties. And Henry V is our Afghanistan: at what cost war?

In Hamlet, theres to be or not to be avenging angel, scholar, whining bore,

or saint. Twelfth Night bends genders, mocks the minds

of narcissists in love with mouthing love.

Macbeth shrieks Thou shall not kill! while it binds the fates of man and wife to powers of

infernal force. The Tempest presses hard:

Forgive your foes? Is Prospero the Bard?

12

Zimmerman and Poetry

I google Zimmerman and poetry

when I feel low. The point? A poet is

a junkyard dog; the published poem, a bone.

Most readers give you twenty seconds. Then

youd better give them something back, or else youll end up teaching, never to atone.

I drink an ale called Anger. Two-thirds gone.

Whats next? That cheap Shiraz that vibrates by the stereo? Ill workshop now. Alone.

Next time you want to die, remember just

how good you feel right now. This jagged verse

has snagged a drifting petal, scratched a stone.

So whats a poem? A rhythm, and a tone. So whats this flesh I lug around? A loan.

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Sonnet for the Writing Center Tutors

The sentence fragment, comma splice, and run-

on sentence; passive voice, omitted word,

and dangling modifier; overdone

expressions, wordiness, verb tenses blurred;

the thesis unsupported, paragraphs

in disarray, citations misaligned. . . .

With all these common errors, its the staffs good will and generosity of mind

that guide the student writersad, afraid, or mad as hellto greater clarity, to self-awareness, pride in things well made,

the thought that beautys not a rarity. . . . Lets call it mission, love, a calling; ranks of writers helping writers. Lets give thanks.

14

Why Im Here

Reducing suffering remains the goal

I seek, the thing that keeps me here. The work

itself is sometimes work: to play the role

of parent, sibling, psychic, shrink, or jerk

can take its toll; but most daysdare I say it?Im euphoric. Love redeems us all; and here the love I give, receive each day

renews me, makes me whole. Right now, the tall

and silent evergreens are white with snow;

on other days, the tulips blaze with red

and pink and gold. These lovely changes show

me alls in flux, remind me not to dread the thought of death but think of all thats grown, thats thrivedand one such life has been my own.

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Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and

edits two literary magazines at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann

Arbor, MI. His chapbook In Stereo: Thirteen Sonnets and Some Fire Music

was published by the Camel Saloon Books on Blog in 2012.

zetataurus press | ann arbor mi