Archive for March, 2009

things I know

March 9th, 2009

last Tuesday, the 4th and 5th grade teacher asked me which kids of hers I wanted to take for martial arts class. they were already engaged in an activity and so I told her to ask them to raise their hands if they wanted to come and only take those students. I figured at most half and more likely 4 or 5 students would want to come down; the rest would continue doing arts and crafts. see, I am very strict with them. I have made a few of them cry before. I don’t take any guff and I get on their case for the smallest things.

everyone raised their hand. everyone took martial arts class that afternoon.


I received these 2 notes last Thursday. I was prepping my class 1 last time for their tournament and 2 girls acted out. it was fairly minor infractions — talking while I was instructing and talking after I said “the next person who talks gets sent out.” they’re 2 of my best students but they broke the rule and I needed to be firm and set an example. so I sent them out. 15 minutes later, they come back with these.

whatever else that I am, a good person, a good poet, a good friend, whatever, I know at least this much:
I am a strict teacher. I am a stern teacher. I make students cry, whether they’re 10 or 20 years old. I also make students learn. They look up to me. I teach them more than just punches and kicks; they learn respect, self control, discipline, art, and love.

I am a good and effective teacher.

sometimes it helps just restating the obvious.

Doc Brown, my mentor, had this poem that ended with “no one gets out of here without an education.”

yeah.

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questions and answers

March 9th, 2009

how much does your occupation dictate the kind of person you are and the kind of life you live?
in Spanish, they use the verb estar to describe temporary states of being, such as location (estoy en la calle) and feelings (estoy triste). in Spanish, they use the verb ser for permanent things, such as race (soy Chino) and, indeed, occupation (soy maestro).
the US department of Labor code for poet is 131067042.

what does it mean to be a poet?
Emerson said we are transparent eyeballs. it’s not enough to just be a disembodied eyeball, a mere observer of the world without any ability or faculty to alter it, but we must also be transparent; unaffected and unnoticed by the world.
Elizabeth Bishop said, I believe, that poets are walking open wounds. we are things not meant to be touched. we are reminders of things that happened before but not enablers of anything future.
I discovered the best answer to give whenever a student asks what poets are or whenever a supervisor is trying to explain to someone why they hired me and what I teach is that poets are storytellers. what I don’t tell them is there’s a distinction between storytellers and storymakers.
M.H. Abrams generalized literature into 2 seemingly opposite categories — the mirror and the lamp. the writer as mirror doesn’t alter or affect what he sees. the writer as lamp, the Romanticists, can cast anything under a certain light and lead the reader’s perception in any direction.
Heisenberg said that as much as observing an event fundamentally alters that event. there is no distinction between mirrors and lamps or sayers and doers; we change the world by simply being in it.
it says in the Mishna Sanhedrin that the universe was created for us. sometimes, I want it to say that the universe was created for me.

how much agency do words have?
seemingly unlimited. if words were powerless themselves, we would have no lawyers, debaters, speech writers, propagandists, activists, reverends, role models, teachers, counselors, politicians, journalists, biographers, historians, or grandmothers.

how much agency should a poet take within his work?
I don’t know.

how much agency should a poet take in his personal life?
I don’t know.

is the poet and the person 2 different things?
I don’t know.

what do you know?
I have way too many questions.

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I

March 5th, 2009

I have just been recently and starkly reminded of what I really am, what my goals are, what makes me happy, etc. it’s refreshing in a sense. at the core, I am a poet, even if my writing would lead you to believe otherwise. the only thing that makes me happy, the only thing that helps me in times of crisis, the only thing that makes me feel truly useful is writing, reading, and performing poetry. it’s such a solitary act — even group poems, at least the kind I have novicely participated in, are individual poems welded together. still, by some ironic twist, poetry makes me feel less alone, steels me against the encroaching feelings of oblivion.

I don’t exactly know why though. is poetry a natural gift for me? professors once attested to as much. is it something I’ve worked for, which is why it is so familiar and comforting? or, and this is the scariest part, do I write only out of habit? if I were, say, shooting photographs for the last 7 years, would photography be just as soothing?

I like to be idealistic, to be romantic. I want, so hard, to think that poetry was fated. see, poets are walking open wounds, transparent eyeballs, mirrors up to the world — they are story tellers, not story livers or story makers. I’m willing to accept this passivity if I knew it were scripted or meant to be. if not, I would be very sad to learn that I, not anyone else, had painted, or written, as it were, myself into a corner.

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