Holy Sonnet 1

Batter-up to my heart, triple-threat God
you who can hit harder than a slugger
on ‘roids staring down a pitcher who’s got
nothing left in his arm, a hanging curve
looped right over the plate, square up and smash
that tater so that I drop into the
glove of a kid halfway up the bleachers,
the last note of the national anthem still
ringing in his ears. From that, dented and
scuffed, let my heart rest for many years on
a mantle next to other forgotten stuff,
photos and knickknacks and coins, until
you pick me up and put me back in play,
a small white dot in all that green and blue

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Kalamazoo 2016 Redux

Where were the swans this year?

Where were the swans this year?

I just returned from my seventh International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, MI. As always, I had a great time, emerging both exhausted from the whirlwind of activity and socializing, and exhilarated from the stimulating and provocative discussions. This Kalamazoo felt different, however, and not only because it was my first time attending as a full-time professor, with the support that entails; and I write this now in an attempt to untangle the threads of that difference, which seem both personal and general.

First, instead of making the usual trek from Buffalo — which had always been a sort of celebration at the end of spring semester, arriving to family and friends in Detroit with perhaps a few papers to grade and my own presentation to put the finishing touches on — I flew all the way from Kuwait. This had seemed like a good idea way back in the fall. I could, as always, rent a car and visit my sister and friends in the Detroit area, drive to the conference, and make a sort of vacation out of the trip. However, in reality, the trip proved a logistical challenge, if not a nightmare: with AUK’s semester not yet finished, my time was even more curtailed than usual. I stepped onto the plane in Kuwait with a raft of essay drafts to respond to, as well as a senior thesis to shepherd through the late stages — not to mention a nasty head cold.

In truth, it was a bad time to be away, and most surprisingly, I didn’t want to be away. I had grown to love my Poetry and Poetics students, and I felt keenly the loss of two of the last three class dates before semester’s end. I had also been working closely with my senior thesis student, the two of us intensely discussing Dante’s encounter with Muhammed in the Inferno, on which she would be presenting her research at semester’s end. Leaving now, with the presentation just a couple weeks away, felt like a sort of abandonment, though I promised to be responsive via email if she needed any help. Being sick made everything that much worse, as I downed cold medicine to get me through the days and largely avoided the usual rounds of open bars and late-night reveling in an effort to preserve my strength.

Even upon arrival, things felt different. As I made the familiar drive off I-94, through Kalamazoo to the WMU campus and thence to registration, I was immediately struck by the incongruous new modernist dining hall being grafted onto the boxlike structure of Valley I, while the pond, always a nice place to relax and reflect between sessions, had been fenced in, the familiar family of swans banished. And it was cold. The weather is always a surprise in Michigan; I’d grown up there, of course, and over the years at Kalamazoo I’ve experienced rainy weather, chilly weather, sweltering weather — this year it was frost and snow. Thus, combined with my cold, my usual morning runs through downtown and campus were replaced by attempts to sleep in, followed by hustling to the warmth of my rental car and morning panels.

The panels I attended were varied and wonderful — none of the papers I heard were half-baked, and many were dazzlingly complete and provocative, even at less formal roundtable sessions. These included a session on “Animal Languages” with great stuff from Robert Stanton on “Old English Animal Voice Catalogs” and Michael Warren on bird sounds in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen‘s MEMSI session on “Play”; Gabrielle MW Bychowski and others on “Hermaphrodites in the Middle Ages”; and the mindblowingly entertaining “Dead Language Karaoke” with examples from Old English, Latin, Arabic, Icelandic, Middle English, and Middle Scots. Then there were the sessions I’d helped organize — eth press‘s panel on Jack Spicer‘s The Holy Grail, in which we listened to recordings of Spicer reading the poem interspersed with a discussion from the perspective of several medievalist-Arthurian scholars; and, with Will Rhodes, a roundtable on pastoral verse titled “Against Progress,” in which I spoke about the pastoral elements of Virgil’s Aeneid while others discussed the poetry of Edmund Spenser and Samuel Daniel. Though this latter was scheduled for the dreaded 10.30am Sunday morning slot, and thus sparsely attended, the audience asked excellent questions and we had a wonderful discussion about the complexities of pastoral poetry, a seemingly appropriate end to this Kalamazoo with snow swirling outside.

The "Against Progress" pastoral roundtable crew: Nicholas Hoffman, Megan Cook, Will Rhodes, David Hadbawnik, Melissa J. Rack

The “Against Progress” pastoral roundtable crew: Nicholas Hoffman, Megan Cook, Will Rhodes, David Hadbawnik, Melissa J. Rack

Change, and some hint of trouble, seemed to be in the air at this congress. One congress-goer posted a short piece on the lack of senior academics at Kalamazoo, while Shyama Rajendran wrote about “The Work We Still Have to Do” in terms of inclusiveness and power dynamics in medieval studies, and Gabrielle MW Boychowski posted on the controversy that erupted from the “Pseudo Society” session after several speakers used transgender slurs in attempts at humor, resulting in some people walking out of the session and the organizers issuing an apology and promise to fully vet all papers in the future. “#FemFog” shirts, referencing the Allen J. Frantzen misogyny incident from last January, were much in evidence, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen even wrote a piece calling into question that most sacred of conference activities, the imbibing of alcohol.

Fighting off my cold, I drank much less than at previous congresses — I believe I managed one beer at the BABEL party at Bell’s Brewpub Friday night, and a beer and a couple of watered-down scotch-and-sodas at the Saturday night dance, and because of that I enjoyed feeling more awake and alert as the conference wore on. It wasn’t until the dance that I finally felt well enough to cut loose, and I found myself dancing with some old and new friends for several hours to the mostly ’90s playlist pumping into the ballroom, having real fun for the first time since my arrival, sweating and laughing, staying until the bitter end and even hanging out afterwards in the Valley dorms, eating popcorn and laughing some more with a handful of folks. Some of the conversation inevitably turned to job stuff, and I was keenly aware of those who had barely made it — or had not made it — to Kalamazoo. Someone tweeted afterwards about having to explain the lack of affiliation on a conference badge, which felt like “not having a last name,” and indeed, subtle and perhaps unintentional hierarchies were often in play. “Where are you now?” sounds like an existential question, but in practice it’s inevitably tinted with issues of status as much as genuine curiosity — not “being somewhere” is akin to a kind of academic death, or at least state of Limbo.

In some sense, this held true for me as well. The “American University of Kuwait” printed below the name on my badge prompted questions that went beyond the usual “How are you liking it at University X?” and sometimes a simple statement of incredulity: “I can’t believe you came this far for a conference!” I answered such queries in the good-natured spirit with which I hope (and trust) they were asked, genuinely eager to talk about some of my amazing students and colleagues, as well as the strangeness and wonder of living in the Middle East. In truth, of course, it is difficult for me to make it to conferences in the U.S., especially during the school year, and despite the support I receive my North American conferencing will be limited in the future. And there are some tough challenges — I was reminded of some of the issues we’ve faced while communicating with my wife Tina about a leaky bathroom back home, and stepping into the Exhibit Hall to look at the riches of the book fair was an exercise in frustration as I thought about our limited university library and the tiny collection of books I was able to bring.

Every Kalamazoo is different. It’s my favorite conference because, creature of habit that I am, I love the routine of knowing it’s there every spring, knowing my way around campus and (sort of) around the city, seeing familiar faces and catching up, submitting to the relentless rhythm of the sessions and socializing — most of all, feeling the fellowship of others who are so passionate and smart about all things medieval. Kalamazoo was the first conference I felt welcome at, and it helped make me feel certain about the academic and, I guess you could say, life path I eventually chose. Despite the changes in Kalamazoo and me, I hope to continue that fellowship well into the future.

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Andrew Marvell Palimpsest (“The Grower’s Song”)

Used to be I had the world by the tail–
The lush buds fresh and sticky,
Green and kind behind the house
All of it, with me, a giant selfie
Till this babe Julie came and she
What I do to the pot, does to my head and me.

Like, for real–but somehow even while
That happened the buds grew bigger
And toking ’em, you got an even better
Buzz than before, no doubt–
Since Julie hit the scene and she
What I do to the pot, does to my head and me.

Ungrateful custies — how could you
Quit buying your dank from my stash?
And hang out smoking strange bongs
While I sit here, short on cash?
Cuz Julie came around and she
What I do to the pot, does to my head and me.

And tho we once were buds (get it?)
I’ll have my revenge — I’ll pack
Us all in a great big bowl
And light it up, smoke the whole
Damn thing — Julie’s in the house and she
What I do to the pot, does to my head and me.

And so, my plants, who’ve been
More like me than myself, I’ll go
Up in a giant puff of smoke,
Forgotten like a stale old joke,
Since Julie’s here, and she
What I do the pot, does to my head and me.

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H.D. Palimpsest (These Walls Don’t Fall)

On April 6, 2016, an Iraqi college student flying from L.A. to Oakland was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight after another passenger heard him speaking in Arabic on his cell phone.

An ‘inshallah’ here and there,
some threats sent (and retweeted)
through your (and my) feed:

terror of Muslims — no offense–
causing the wheels to halt, the passengers
to disembark from the plane

in hijabs, thawbs, prayerbeads
clicking, the prophecy scrawled
on a paper napkin:

there, as here, bombs resound
in the market, temple, mosque; then
as now, an ambiguous sin:

sudden death from below or
falling from the sky, here,
there, puffs of sand

mark an absence, an open room
where a wall was, or
a stump for a hand:

so in the devastation
a drone strikes, collateral damage haunts us
in the gloom:

unaware, the satellites zoom
in on the craft, ‘Reaper’
or ‘Predator’ we know not:

we type furiously on our devices;
fighting, arguing
in comment streams — we’ve got

too much to say, we post to our walls
where ‘likes’ proliferate,
hieroglyphs of modern affect;

Iraq has nothing to teach us,
we see ourselves in a funhouse mirror,
slow faces melting in hate,

letting the pressure build until
bile bursts from our fingers
(what people will say online!):

inside, mediated pathos,
outside, the whirl of a virtual floor
throws off our footing

and we scroll down, drunk,
searching for a door
that is not there:

the body was made for
no such long sitting without moving,
yet the eyeballs cling to the screen:

the ass? it has grown numb,
the heart sinks down, dead weight,
joints, muscles atrophied, skin gone sallow,

yet the dream holds:
we share the meme: we wonder
who made it? what for?

*

This poem originally appeared in Dispatches From the Poetry Wars.

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Shakespeare Palimpsest

Full fathom five thy old bard lies
Let’s raise a pint and ‘cheer’;
He liked to hang out with the guys
And drink his fill of beer.
He left us with a few good jokes,
Some truths about the common folks,
We celebrate him with a post:
Retweet!
Look! Now I see him–farewell, ghost.

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Pound Palimpsest

And then went down to the ship. Then
became Men’s Rights Activists,
set queer keel to breakers,
then played the $1.5 billion powerball
27 times and lost, sat down
in a daze of tickets feeling numb-
ers falling around us, then got confused
about apostrophes, divots in green
earth filling with blood, then established
domains like “Circe.com” and “Odysseus.org”
fighting for words among cybersquatters, then
voted for Donald Trump, quoting erroneously
from the Constitution, “a man of no fortune…”
“And I stepped back” “ill-starred”
“Lie quiet Divus,” “I mean”…

So that:

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John Donne Palimpsest

As virtuous men pass mildly away
And click ‘delete’ on their life’s file,
Messaging their FB friends to say
I’m checking out, but with a smile:

Let’s not freak out and make a scene
Cuz if we do, we’ll lose all cred;
Stop blubbering like a silly teen
Who’s just been told her puppy’s dead.

Like when someone pulls a fire alarm—
A dickish move, though no one died;
But a real fire does way more harm
Than making people wait outside.

We’re better than those fools who just
Want to get laid and can’t deal
With being apart, because lust
Is the only thing they really feel.

I feel you, baby; we’re secure
Enough in our love that absence
Makes the heart grow fonder, more sure
Of each other despite the distance.

So, by that logic, even though
I have to ghost, it’s like I’m here;
In fact, the farther away I go
It’s like, the closer I draw near.

Your kiss is like a tweet gone viral
That gets retweeted endlessly
Trending #love; it spirals
Around the world, and back to me.

And even though – stay with me, now—
That tweet (your kiss) is everywhere,
I’ll give it the emoji ‘Wow!’
And that, my dear, I’ll never share.

You are to me a perfect piece
Of code that nobody can hack;
Your algorithms give release
To me, but keep me looping back.

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