Local Fool

To colleagues in AmLit, Transcendental
Romanticism, Dialogue & Dialectic as well
as Across the Curriculum:

Noggin Notions provoked by class
room management sitting in Jensen
ideas flying like sparrows & crows;
weeds groaning rampage thru cracks
like barnyard grass, bigfoot morning
glory, ladythumb smartweed, field
bindweed, marestail, prickly lettuce,
shattercan, quackgrass, jimson weed
& honey vine; you know: all the liberal
art once the black plastic has been
pealed off the strawberry patch.

My lecture on Emerson.

Obey

What he's saying.
Preaching. Oyez!
Oyez: Hear ye!
Hear ye!

Listen..
Not: do-what-I-say-or-else;
Just listen is all..

When Barbara McClintock
(geneticist studying corn)
was asked her secret as a
noble prize winning
scientist, she said:

I lean over and listen
to the corn shoots.

Ha! I say,
patronizingly.
Sure you do.

Famous Novelist, asked
how she writes her novels
says, I listen to what my
characters tell me.

Cute.
Come on.
Really: tell us.

I went to a poetry reading &
a lady asked where do you get
your ideas for poems from and
he said,

Ideas fly like birds & flap by
all you good citizens to come
roost in my skull house—
welcome and knowing
it: room in the inn
so to speak.

Listen if you got ears to hear..
We can argue, or what's
a college for?

Liberal Art

What motivates me to pay
attention and neglect all else,
such a deficiency and crime
against the whole, my cost-
benefit analysis?

Survival in changing times?
Citizenship? Food & shelter?

“sanity”

Cleanliness next to godliness.
Sanitation or Sanitarium: choose.

Unsane? Dirty business & some
one’s got to do it.

“Passion” “Patience” & “Patient”
are kin—all in the pati family.
"to feel." Pathetic. Pathologic.

The Stimulus Bill.

For those working it out: is it about
taking care of business: trash removal,
doing the dishes, pork & shovel- ready
projects? Making the world a better place?

OR negotiating their relationships
& infrastructural concerns:

see me
hear me
touch me
feed me?

I'm asking. We could argue.