Writing Family

Many thanks for the kindness of Anne, Faye, and others whose steadying words are helping me think and feel my way through the strange crux of my grandfather's passing.

The late, great Lucille Clifton left us this:

why some people be mad at me sometimes

they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine

For bracing, unflinching honesty about the self and others, check out Natasha Trethewey's two new father poems in the latest issue of New England Review.  From "Elegy," addressed to her father, about fly-fishing together:

     I can tell you now

that I tried to take it all in, record it
     for an elegy I'd write--one day--

when the time came.  Your daughter,
     I was that ruthless.  What does it matter

if I tell you I learned to be?

And from "Knowledge" (which, unfortunately, isn't available online), from an 1864 drawing of four Victorian men dissecting and studying a naked female corpse:

. . . how easily
     the anatomist's blade opens a place in me,

like a curtain drawn upon a room in which
     each learned man is my father

and I hear, again, his words--I study
     my crossbreed child--

I love the way both poems go to the mat, and I love the way they jostle together an uneasy mix of feelings with such clarity and precision.

Today I meet with the four grad students who've chosen to do teaching internships with me.  They're great women (is it a coincidence that they're all women?), but I have to say it's pretty weird being observed, class after class after class.  We meet regularly to discuss pedagogy and professional issues.  They keep journals; I read them.  They notice everything.  I've never done this before, and it's a little unnerving.  I hope it all turns out to be useful to them.