Full Cover with Blurbs
So, I've posted the front cover, but I wanted to show you what an awesome job Amy Freels, the designer at Akron did with the cover. I had no idea Andie deRoux's image would wrap around the whole book, and when I opened the image I was quite happy.
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Blurbs are funny things. I'm not comfortable asking people who I don't know, so I basically asked my friends to blurb the book.
Thanks Aimee and Jon.
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Our dog, Jake, who turns 14 this year, is suffering the effects of what looks to be hip dysplasia. On top of that, he's got cataracts and is hard of hearing. Poor guy.
The good thing about his hip dysplasia is that we don't have to walk him in the winter rain, so I guess there are hidden bonuses.
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Taught my first week of classes. I'm trying to add more audio/visual stuff to my presentations but I'm finding that just the setup is taking up more time than I want. I'm also trying to minimize the amount of photocopying my students are doing for workshop. We'll see how it goes. If it doesn't work, I'll revert back to my old photocopying ways.
We talked about T.S. Eliot in my long poem class, just because it's a good starting point in discussions about the long poem--the movement away from an exterior/physical hero/heroine to a hero/heroine? whose conflict is mostly internal. From Eliot, Berryman.
The real challenge is the workshop--how to produce valid/active feedback for individualized long projects. My feeling--I'll need to provide rubrics and other models, for the initial stages. Not thrilled about this, but we'll see.
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And already I've got my book order forms for next quarter. Again I'm teaching ENG 453, which I always teach as a prosody/forms class. I'm teaching ENG 460 again, only this time I don't think I'll teach it as a prose poem class. I think I might teach it as an ekphrastic writing course, depending on who else is teaching ENG 460. Got any ekphrastic texts you can suggest? They can be essay, poetry or fiction, since ENG 460 is a multigenre course.
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I'm at a strange emotional point. A point between books. The impetus to be creative is at a low point, though I also feel I have the urgency to be creative. This is a normal state, I'm certain, but it's still disconcerting.
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Current Spin: