Gonna fly

First off, right up front, please read Robert's meatier posts if you are hungry for thought-provoking discussions about poetry. Right now, I seem to be preoccupied with getting through the days, the weeks, the months, with having my life work out in some okay way.

I just wanted to put on record that my course, the poetry workshop I will be teaching for City College Continuing Education, is going to fly. No, I did not get the required number of people--unless a lot sign up tonight at Fort Mason--but Kirk Stoller, the guy in charge, is letting us go ahead anyway, although they will reduce what I will be paid. Since I'm not doing this for the money anyway (is anything involving poetry done for the money?), that's all right by me. I've put some time into preparing this class, I'd like to be able to put it on my CV, and mostly, I want the experience. I want to know, too, if this is a direction I want to go in or not. Some people, as my friend Idris says, have the teaching gene; some do not. I doubt I do. I'm far too nervous. But I want to find out.

I'm nervous, but I'm pretty sure I'll get through the three hours. I have an enormous leather tote filled with books--no, stuffed with books. I'm taking my laptop (and there's Internet access in the classroom). I've put together a 15-page handout. The students are supposed to bring copies of a poem they've written. If that (and the preliminaries) don't take us through the evening, we can just read poems from those books. If we read one poem from each of the books, we'll be there through the weekend!

I'm more nervous about the extra-curricular things. Getting there and (especially) getting back, because it involves night driving and I don't see well at night. But the tradeoff is that traffic isn't bad at that hour. All I need to do is put my car in the right lanes, basically.

I might write more about this later...

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Later. I survived. Not a huge turnout, but it's working. Hey, I talked myself into a corner a few times (Donald Duck like), but I don't feel too bad. I wasn't teaching CPR or anything. There's a fair amount of give, you know. Like Spandex. Oh yeah, I've had a glass of wine.

Driving to the class, I heard a urban parcours (sp.?) athlete talk about getting into a zone where there was a "warm hole in my head and I'm in there." I might have got that wrong, but it was so interesting that this guy probably had not idea of the metaphor he'd just created.

dkm