My class was small--four women--which was also a change. With the usual ten or twelve participants, I have to be a timekeeping martinet during discussions. But this weekend, we had plenty of space to go off on tangents; and tangents, as any loafing poet knows, are frequently more revelatory than plans.
Of course, nothing is perfect. I had a brief, 10-minute reading on Friday evening, and, afterward I was sure it was awful, that I should have chosen some funnier excerpt from Tracing Paradise, that I should have read more poetry and less prose, that I shouldn't have been so uppity and intellectual. I lay in my bed regretting everything and thinking that I should never have bothered to climb out from under my rock and take this job. Yet the next morning people kept telling me how much they liked what I'd read. So I ask you: when do people ever get smarter about themselves? Or do we always stay just as dumb as ever?
3 comments:
Personally. I often walk around berating myself for stupidities, though others keep telling me that whatever I did was just fine, if not great. Must be the nature of people who want to do well and want others to do well too.
"OMG! Shut up, you both rock!" -- junior girl to her friends after they read their short reaction assignments and then self-harshed last week.
"OMG! Shut up, you both rock!" -- Kate to Dawn and Ruth, today, with as much love.
And tangents rock, too.
XXX to you, too, Kate. And by the way, I put a link to your blog on the Frost Place Facebook page. I wanted everyone to read what you have to say.
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