A Note to Image Shoppers (and others)

I searched online and found an image like the one on the left. It was over a caption that read, “By the way, here’s that Indian Head Test Pattern you’re looking for (but please, see the rest of my site first).” As my blog has also become an image [...]

Haiku Sonnet: Teaching a Lovesong

 *
I’ve said to myself:
Listen, if you tear teaching
“Prufrock,” maybe you
should dare, maybe they
should hear you stop counting lines
to say how Prufrock
feels.  How does he feel?
Scuttling claws won’t fit through sleeves,
And those mermaids, they
are someone else’s
fetish.  I wait for the bell
sending them elsewhere.
Birds collect outside windows.
Every one looks in.
*T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred [...]

Only Connect

Occasionally students ask, “What’s your favorite book?” They might ask without meaning it—desperately hoping for digression—so I respond without elaboration. It’s an answer I’m too lazy to revise, like my favorite color…purple.
Like most avid readers, my favorite shifts periodically, and, if I’m on a lucky streak, I say it’s the [...]

Haiku Sonnet: Echo

They say some echoes
never stop. Sound penetrates
to atoms and rings
interminably.
Or until another gong—
or temple bell—stirs
the flowers again.
Outside, wrinkled continents
of snow slip from slate
roofs. Each sloppy crash
echoes around the courtyard
and the sound never
melts. It is no day to stand
in the open sky.

Swinging the Bat

I’m not one for baseball analogies, but here’s one—lately I’ve been fouling everything off.
I’m standing in the batter’s box and taking pitch after pitch—sometimes it seems more than one hurler is standing on the mound—and I’m two strikes down, still hoping to connect or at least catch a thread of the ball [...]

Find: Picnicface

Here are some parodies. Okay, Picnicface is hardly highbrow, but this college age-ish comedy group is irreverent and funny. Especially adept at the frenetic pace of late night TV ads, they go to preposterous extremes in the promotion of their “products.” I know it’s probably a bad sign I find [...]

Haiku Sonnet: What Won’t Stick

Today’s snow wanders,
ash that won’t wait for plowing
or melting into
shapes like waves. It is
already spent, exhaustion
its only motive.
And I can’t describe
why—because I’m falling too.
In my Eskimo,
every word means “snow.”
The same flake a million times,
one page torn into
dust. I’m out standing in it,
getting it all down.

Habitually Yours, Joe Felso

Before now, I’ve never been a habitual writer. Most of my life, I envied writers who pulled weathered journals from satchels and leafed through crowded pages to find clean space. They add a page in place of bowing toward Mecca or kneeling at another station of the cross.
Now that I’m [...]

Haiku Sonnet: First Winter

Overnight snow threw
white sheets over dying grass
and lacquered roads black.
Between moonlight and
street lamps, the petals of your
shadows spread on snow,
blue and round. You spun,
laughing blooming breath at flakes
slowing to nothing.
My footprints opened
dark spots as the lawn emerged,
earth beneath white, while
under you, a circle spread,
the hem of your gown.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: An Exegesis

I wrote this parody paper some years ago and, with the season upon us, it seems a good time for it to return…
Toward the end of his life, just before that ugly cheek tweeking incident in New Orleans, noted literary critic, Michel Fausault* established the standard by which all “Rudolph the [...]