Reckonings
Reflections of a Teacher-Poet
Thomas Zimmerman
This is a digital version of a chapbook that was assembled for
the Community College Humanities Associations 2013 National Conference, in Louisville, KY, October 24-26.
Copyright 2013 by Thomas Zimmerman
The author wishes to thank the publications in which the following
works first appeared, sometimes in different form:
The Apple Tree: Advice for Essay Writers and Teaching Shakespeare The Big Windows Review: Zimmerman and Poetry Carnival: Hunters Curio Poetry: Stars Adorn Our Ankles The Community College Humanist: A One-Sonnet Shakespeare Course
and Sonnet for Freshman Comp Leaves of Ink: Another Night My Wife Is Gone Michigan Writing Centers Association Newsletter: Sonnet for the
Writing Center Tutors Stone Path Review: Submersion
This book was produced on a Dell computer using Microsoft Publisher.
Fonts used are Century Schoolbook, Courier New, and Tahoma.
Photographs and book design by the author.
zetataurus press | ann arbor mi [email protected]
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Reckonings
Reflections of a Teacher-Poet
Thomas Zimmerman
Contents
Reckonings 4
Another Night My Wife Is Gone 5
Sonnet for Freshman Comp 6
Submersion 7
Teaching Shakespeare 8
Hunters 9
Advice for Essay Writers 10
Stars Adorn Our Ankles 11
A One-Sonnet Shakespeare Course 12
Zimmerman and Poetry 13
Sonnet for the Writing Center Tutors 14
Why Im Here 15
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Reckonings
Im navigating place and time and change. Im living on a pulpy edge, Ive got a paper cut, Ive joined a cult so strange that we believe that anything thats not ambiguous is false. The metaphors
are easy when you see that everythings connected. Rivers everywhere, and shores
on any margin, where a mermaid sings,
then morphs to Jesus spearing fish that fall
like maple leaves, like human hands that slap
a moving mirror. Shadows suckle all
us infants cradled in our mothers lap: in womb, in tomb, in school, in temple lit
with love, an elder enters, then we sit.
4
Another Night My Wife Is Gone
My teeth do float more loosely in my head
these days. Im tired, home from work, just dead awake, a beer in front of me. Thats good guitar I hear: a new, discordant disc
is on the stereo, but words, for mood,
are raging bores tonight. I feel no risk,
my journals out, I write what comes to blind me: Dots of mist are drying on my new blue coat, each one a dying world. My mind is all puffed up with fakes of things a few
cool poems by other men have said. I close
the new Selected Blah-Blah-Blah of So-
and-So, rethink my foredoomed plan to lose
myself in verse. The dog wants out. Lets go.
5
Sonnet for Freshman Comp
From brain to hand(s): thats how it starts. Just try a freewrite, brainstorm, cluster, outline, list.
Dont overthink it. Now think hard: on why and who and how and . . . anything youve missed. Select a topic. Narrow it. Now what
will be your point? To entertain? Inform?
Persuade? Youll need a thesis statement, but relax: youll tweak it later. Thats the norm. Now spin your yarn or build your case. Belief
is what your reader needs. Assemble stats
and details, anecdotes and facts. Be brief
in telling, more expansive showing. Thats the theory. Proofread. Spellcheck. Pare down. Add.
The goal is not write well; its not write bad.
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Submersion
A dish of potpourri beside the lamp
and light enough to see. The ink-pens had its squat, but youre not into this. So bad the art-impulse sometimes. Aesthetic cramp,
creative bends. You try to rise too fast.
You need to stay submerged awhile: a fish,
a stone, a fountain penny with a wish,
the rust that chews a chain to velvet, last
years brandied cherries. Read Neruda, Bly, or Rilke. Listen to the blues of Hurt
or Hooker. Surrogates and sources, dirt
and forking roots: to sleep so deep in high
and blackened waters, rich and strange, to let
the darkness fill you, empty in its net.
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Teaching Shakespeare
The sonnets are subversive, written to
A man. I like to start with that, or with
Wills will, or puns on genitals might do. I try to skip the old deer-poaching myth.
As comedy embraces tragedy,
So I assuage the students fear of verse: Relax. Remember Hamlets words: Let be. Then, like a pack of Calibans, they curse.
We plumb Midsummers dream of love, of life; Find truth in Twelfth Nights gender-bending maze. Macbeth, we think, is rite disguised as strife;
And Henry V debunks its glory days.
We learn, as well, that couplets close an act
Or click a sonnet shut with measured tact.
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Hunters
Orion poised above the roof; the moon
a scythe, a pendulum; my breath a wife
engendering pale wraiths that die too soon
for me to ask about that other life. . . .
The night is strange, and so am I: I read
too much, or not enough. Dear Percys here with me, as black as I am white; hes peed and had a treat, still innocent of where
we end: like me. His snuffling in the brush,
his belly-consciousness: mere metaphors
for my more abstract quests. His headlong rush
at rabbit, squirrel, mouse: how he adores
the kill; or is it merely sustenance?
Like finding God unarmed, asleep, by chance.
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Advice for Essay Writers
Its best to have a thesis statement if youre writing for a grade. Make items in a series parallel. Dont split infin- itives. Your nouns should be concrete, specif-
ic. Watch your fragments, slang, and dashes. Learn
to love the Oxford comma. Know your aud-
ience. Prefer the classic to the mod.
Dont break words off at ends of lines. Dont burn your notes and drafts. Revise. Intuit. Be
concise. Break any rule provided you
have thought it through. Remember to/too/two.
Be clear about your ambiguity.
Be careful with imperatives. Take time.
Dont plagiarize. Dont be a slave to rhyme.
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Stars Adorn Our Ankles
Magnetic is the dark abyss, and strong
the wind on northern plains, the land so flat,
the sky so big that, nights, the stars adorn
our ankles. Veils of topsoil, reads a poem I wrote in North Dakota, dancing black and naked for the plaid-backed farmers. You were lying on that hotel bed, in shock
on our arrival, TV chained against
the ceiling, stars around its ankles. Blue
as atlas interstates, crabbed veins adorn
my ankles now, and so much laid out flat
behind, beside, in front, inside of me:
my mother grown into a hoop I keep
on jumping through, my fathers eyes the earth so torn it blurs the far horizon line.
11
A One-Sonnet Shakespeare Course
The Sonnets are subversive: four-fifths praise
a young man for his beauty, mourn the curse
of both men being male. Midsummer plays
with love as fleeting dream; the woods reverse
the states proprieties. And Henry V is our Afghanistan: at what cost war?
In Hamlet, theres to be or not to be avenging angel, scholar, whining bore,
or saint. Twelfth Night bends genders, mocks the minds
of narcissists in love with mouthing love.
Macbeth shrieks Thou shall not kill! while it binds the fates of man and wife to powers of
infernal force. The Tempest presses hard:
Forgive your foes? Is Prospero the Bard?
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Zimmerman and Poetry
I google Zimmerman and poetry
when I feel low. The point? A poet is
a junkyard dog; the published poem, a bone.
Most readers give you twenty seconds. Then
youd better give them something back, or else youll end up teaching, never to atone.
I drink an ale called Anger. Two-thirds gone.
Whats next? That cheap Shiraz that vibrates by the stereo? Ill workshop now. Alone.
Next time you want to die, remember just
how good you feel right now. This jagged verse
has snagged a drifting petal, scratched a stone.
So whats a poem? A rhythm, and a tone. So whats this flesh I lug around? A loan.
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Sonnet for the Writing Center Tutors
The sentence fragment, comma splice, and run-
on sentence; passive voice, omitted word,
and dangling modifier; overdone
expressions, wordiness, verb tenses blurred;
the thesis unsupported, paragraphs
in disarray, citations misaligned. . . .
With all these common errors, its the staffs good will and generosity of mind
that guide the student writersad, afraid, or mad as hellto greater clarity, to self-awareness, pride in things well made,
the thought that beautys not a rarity. . . . Lets call it mission, love, a calling; ranks of writers helping writers. Lets give thanks.
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Why Im Here
Reducing suffering remains the goal
I seek, the thing that keeps me here. The work
itself is sometimes work: to play the role
of parent, sibling, psychic, shrink, or jerk
can take its toll; but most daysdare I say it?Im euphoric. Love redeems us all; and here the love I give, receive each day
renews me, makes me whole. Right now, the tall
and silent evergreens are white with snow;
on other days, the tulips blaze with red
and pink and gold. These lovely changes show
me alls in flux, remind me not to dread the thought of death but think of all thats grown, thats thrivedand one such life has been my own.
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Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and
edits two literary magazines at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann
Arbor, MI. His chapbook In Stereo: Thirteen Sonnets and Some Fire Music
was published by the Camel Saloon Books on Blog in 2012.
zetataurus press | ann arbor mi