A poem for spring

Winter wrapped her last breath
about a yell and up-
rooted the neighbor's tree

Now resting on his broken arms
among the wet grass blades
and shattered sidewalk tablets

Brittle and frail as the bones
of human hands snapped
by those agents

Who likewise clean the automobiles
parked along a street
made newly mad by spring.

Break and Repair.

Spring break, if we care label this last blast of wintery goodness either "spring" or a "break," arrived on Monday. The Woodland Joint Unified school district shutters its campuses for a full two weeks this year, and it's no stretch to say that I'm their most fortunate employee.

For the first time in three years, my professional and educational reprieves overlap. This stroke of luck affords me one week of unobstructed time to catch up, look ahead, and compose. True, two evening classes remain the only scheduled items for second week of the vacation, but the emptiness of the first has been both calming and inspiring. And while I've thus far put multiple pans in the fire, each task has surpassed my expectations.

Foremost in this list of tasks has been the drafting of my MA thesis. I'm some fifty pages in, adding roughly 18 from my own pilot study and another 12 pages of freshly written words in the past three days. And though it will undergo periodic stages of dramatic revision, I'm energized by the progress. Apparently, until now, I refused to recognize the looming reality that I'd actually find a way to compile something before the submission deadline. So I'm giddy. My spirits are bolstered by the reality that I may actually put a bow on this phase of my life.

A close second on my list of tasks is physical recovery. After putting up decent numbers in the Shamrock'n Half Marathon on March 13, I've scaled back the miles and speed work in order to let the sorer regions of my body return to their normal forms. From late February to early March, I was running an average of 40 miles per week. Following the race, I dropped down to 10--not exclusively for want of a break, but because of persistent pain in my right glute, hip, and left calf. This week, my totals will again reach the low 30s, just in time to gear up for a few races in April and May.

The absence of speed work and the influx of rain has resulted in a number of milder runs on the levy. This is also due to the effect winter weather has on the dirt track in Land Park. As a result of this change in training location, I've been able to arrive at a few noteworthy points.

First, with the increased water releases upstream, I'm impressed by the extremely high levels of the Sacramento River. It has been a trip to see so much water rushing by, and also to witness how it transforms both the shoreline and access to the American River Parkway. It's worth mentioning that, in nicer weather, it's tough to get any reaction from other users of the trail. During these last few storms, however, there's a shared acknowledgement between the few stubborn runners and parks department employees I pass. We don't necessarily make eye contact, but we wave our glove-covered hands at each other.

I've also concluded that I'm comfortable calling myself a runner. I've always liked to run, but I think I'm ready to let the title consume me. So here it is: I'm a runner. And you'd think the training miles, the marathon, or the races themselves would be the catalyst for this change, but they're not. And while it's related, the shift doesn't totally reflect my membership with Sacramento's Fleet Feet Racing Team.

No, this new awareness comes from an unlikely place deep in the recesses of my memory when, as a teenager in high school, I liked snowboarding. At the time, and still now, I never really considered myself a snowboarder. I didn't buy season passes consistently, I didn't ride with the school's elite snowboard team, and I didn't seek employment opportunities at the local board shops or ski resorts. I also avoided, unlike many of my friends, competing in local events, or pushing myself to reach higher, faster, and riskier levels. I thought actual snowboarders were sponsored riders. I saw them in films, in magazines, and in competitions around the region. I knew a few people on campus with some corporate deals, and I knew I wasn't one of them.

The closest I got to tasting this sponsoring was a free t-shirt and a roll of stickers we received from a company called Mission Six. They only sent the swag because my buddy Colin and I hung out with some of their riders at an event and then wrote the company a letter to inquire about the product.

Early this week I picked up a new pair of discounted Asics running shoes from Fleet Feet. I came home and emptied the dryer. I folded my Asics shorts and hung my Asics Fleet Feet warm-up suit and my orange FOO racing singlet on their designated hangers in the closet. I deleted some emails--one about volunteering at racing events that conflicted with my schedule--and another about the availability of team arm warmers and socks, before it struck me. I am a runner. Unfortunately, though, this conclusion was born not from the seeds of my desire or the results of my actions, but from the status and materialism associated with the sport.

And so, while my mind shifts to account for this new definition of myself, I'm a bit ashamed of the way it all went down.

The Song that doesn't End.

I tinker with words constantly. I concoct silly puns, contradictions, oxymorons, and homonym plays--usually while running or driving--and record them with no real intention of using them. The results might emerge in a Facebook update or an occasional blog post, but the products mostly just sit on the pages of a journal in my book bag.

When I was an undergraduate, these pedantic little word games got me through long classes and literature seminars. I would string sentences or phrases together and think, That would be a cool band name. Or an album title, even. The writing picked up when I lived at home while completing my credential. I had more time then, so the work grew into larger bodies that actually had some miles. I paired my scribbling with a beginner guitar my brother loaned me, strummed the eight or so chords that Justin showed me, and started building "songs."

I kept my cards close, then. I didn't even play the stuff for my on again/off again college girlfriend (partly because I hated the sound, partly because the songs were not-so-subtly coded angst). I ponied up for cheap recording software and a new guitar. I sent files to Jamie and Justin, and eventually posted some work on Myspace. I made booklets and track listings for little "albums" in the living room with a coffee mug of wine. I painted the covers, drew on the discs, and gave them to my mom and stepmom.

Then and now, I know the work was completely self-serving. I often explained it as such, and excused myself from sharing because I didn't want to expose what I considered my own self-involvement. I didn't want to admit to the fact that, even if the outcome didn't make sonic or intellectual sense, it made me feel good. It helped me make sense of my departure from life on the central coast, a friendless, post-graduate slump, and life back in Placerville. It was lyrical, musical diary, really. It was my Post Secret--but with Myspace, there was a dash identity, and the thrill of imaginary audience.

I never performed my music for an actual audience, though. I played some songs over a cuppa wine on a number of occasions, usually at the request of Brittany and Sol. In the last couple of years, I've been pretty dormant, musically speaking, and don't mind much. I'm losing anything I ever had, to be honest. Whatever skills I developed evaporated; now, I find it hard to play more than three or four covers without cramping in the wrist and wincing at the pain in my fingers.

I still love words, but I use what I create differently these days, if at all. The Myspace page remains largely untended. From time to time it gets a visitor (and from time to time it's me, I confess). Once, last year, my brother in-law called me by my musical pseudonym. I got embarrassed.

This week, a wonderful student named Ivan stopped me as I returned some graded work. He said, "Mr. Petty, I heard a cool song this weekend." My gut flared a bit, but I suppressed it with doubt.

"Oh really, Ivan? That's cool." I saw the bait and swam away, turning to continue dispersing papers.

"Yeah. It's called, 'Stalkings.'" It's one of my tracks about someone who is obsessed with a girlfriend and suspects her of cheating. The speaker is hopelessly dependent, and stalks about town to find proof of his suspicions. That's stalkings, not stockings.

Like I said, word play.

So, the cat has destroyed the bag. Ivan looked guiltless. "Kelsey showed me," he said.

Ivan submitted his essay Tuesday. His properly formatted MLA heading read,

Ivan P--------
Mr. Petty / Kid Grin
Senior Lit. and Comp.
15 February 2011

Turns out, a lot of students know about this side of me, and no one really cares for an explanation despite my internal compulsion to offer one. It is what it is: a kid trying to make sense of his world on his terms. He's still connected to society (albeit virtually), but he's chugging along at his own speed.

I guess I can see why a 17 year-old would appreciate that in a teacher.

My critical eye is closed, for now.

The two previous blogs were fairly ambitious. I engaged in some tertiary texts and made an argument or two--albeit creatively. I would likely classify those entries, if the necessity presented itself, as critical responses.

Enough of that, though.

While it has taken away the time and desire to build up the family blog in general, the writing I'm being asked to do in graduate classes is purely criticism. It is all argument, all the time. Thus far this semester, it has consisted of weekly prompt addresses (roughly three pages, on average), a response paper (nearly four), and the continual building of an MA thesis (stalling around page eight, currently).

Always, I am arguing.

Aside from the data spawning my thesis, my arguing is focused on the work of two distinctly prolific writers: Shakespeare and William Carlos Williams. Since enough has been said on the former--and since I'm slogging my way through an undergrad course to fulfill a requirement, let me address a few things about Mr. Williams.

The man is a machine (he often writes of cars and loved his typewriter, ironically). He wrote in all genres and forms throughout the span of his life, and did so while tending to and entertaining a family. Oh, and did I mention he was a full-time practicing pediatrician? He admits, in his quite funny and digestible autobiography, he'd typically come home late after work, head full of notes and thoughts, then bang out eight or ten pages before bed. It's somewhat frustrating to read of his nonchalance with this habit, actually.

If you're not familiar with Williams, as I wasn't upon registering for the course, you'll enjoy knowing he hung with a talented crowd. He did not leave with the other expats during the first War, though he visited them. He spent considerable time with Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, E.E. Cummings, Gertrude Stein, and many others. He hated the fact that T.S. Eliot gave the poem "back to the academics," and considered his famous The Waste Land "[T]he great catastrophe to our letters."

If you do know Williams, hopefully you know more than the one about the wheel barrow, the one about the plums, or the one about the fire engine. If not, seek context. I beg you.

I enjoy where I find my head after reading his work, regardless of genre. There's play, humor, and ambition in the autobiography. The poetry and prose in his early books is a departure from the familiar. It's imaginative; his unabashed veracity, inspiring.

It's enough to be critical for the class. But here--here, there can be fun. Here's some of what I'm making from these thoughts.

River there placid,
friend to winter on
calm, clear, brisk
days of February--
Me here
on this levy
in jog, between
your stillness
and the workers flooding
the freeway, whose
rumble and
roll and
rhythm
have replaced you.

----

she has folded the magazine pages
back upon themselves to better
facilitate her reading--
the glossy stack curls from the
spine and creates
from this angle
the shape of a heart.
and the pages tell
the story of a
war.

----

in seeking the
poetics of the run i see
instead webs
fled by spiders
desiring simpler means
of survival. bound up
in rhythm too
s t e a d y
for word,
i submit

to be lost in breathing.

----

drowning steady hums
from fixtures in my kitchen
the teapot whistles

Seeking the space to critique structuralism, I succumb to its pitfalls.

I agree, to a reasonable extent anyway, with the notion of rules and structures, at least as far as societal function and cultural facility are concerned. I do not prescribe to the notion that we're inherently good beings that, when left to our own devices, will consistently act in the best interest of what's dubiously dubbed "the common good" or "a brotherhood of man" [overt patriarchal language maintained intentionally]. I generally believe human beings habitually conceive of and impose structures to, essentially, grease the wheels of the masses. We regularly agree to stop at red lights, pay our taxes on time, and abstain from public flatulence because it works. We subscribe, unflinchingly often, that these kinds of rules exist for everyone's best interest.

Now, there are times when I knowingly disregard the pull of the structural tide. For example, rather than teach the "rules" of writing (read "grammar"), I advocate reading. My rationale is simple. I've seen too many students recite--in prompted chorus--that Sentences must have a subject and a verb and convey a complete thought, only to watch them grip their pencils and write a sentence like Except for when he learns Victor is his creator. Therefore, I direct them to books because I want their brains to get so used to the rules of language that I don't have to ask for choral responses. Rote memorization of these rules, in my and many researchers' eyes, never produced good writing. Really, I'm sneakily advocating from a kind of subliminal approach to structuralism, one that still teaches, but keeps me from overtly doling out oppressive language rules from my podium on Mount Pious (a term often used by this guy to criticize holier-than-thous atop soapboxes).

I'm belaboring the point of this post, which is actually both meaningful and perplexing.

I've had a frustrating week at the keyboard. Since last Sunday, after I went on my usual romp around my favorite pages on the interwebs, I've been hacking away with a huge monkey on my back. The weight has plagued me through typing simple emails, quick literary response papers, and even delayed the otherwise attractive immediacy of my Facebook postings. Thanks to Farhad Manjoo's article decrying the widespread acceptance of two spaces after terminal punctuation of a sentence, I've been afraid the grammar police will bust through my door any minute. "Can I let you in on a secret?" Manjoo begins from his powerful chair of knowledge. "Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong."

Hold the phone. Not that it's impossible to fathom, but he's essentially accusing my middle school computer class, high school keyboarding instructor, undergraduate technology lab professor, and instructions from a digitized Mavis Beacon as being misinformed. Can this be?

If personified, Manjoo's article would don black sunglasses, cross its arms, and gesture authoritatively toward a badge. It reeks of know-it-all. While he has his reasons--even noting that the Modern Language Association clarifies this rule in its yearly publication of humanities typographical norms--it's an abrasive read. And while I must concede his point, I desperately wish that I, like the rest of us habitually double tapping the spacebar after every finished thought, could have been let in on the development. Not for our own benefit, but to make Manjoo hate us less. His offense is, well, actually offensive. He bemoans our ignorance, upset by the fact that "people who use two spaces are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste."

Geez, man. We had no idea.

So, this week I've been working on cutting that second, quick thumb slap at the end of my sentences. I started a couple of paragraphs ago, in case you wanted to know. And it's not easy; my endless revision a la deletion has forced me to realize how ingrained typing is in my day to day operations. It makes me want to go outside, really. Or write a letter. Or avoid Slate.com for awhile.

Realistically, the article strengthened my resolve as a teacher. While I have conceded to try and adopt this single-space structure, I remain adamant in my stance that there's a lot of damage posed by this kind of tone with these kinds of rules. In my eyes, they don't inform so much as belittle. Disenfranchising is something I strive to avoid in my adult life since, in retrospect, I spent far too much time mastering the art of ostracizing others as a teenager.

So now, in my professional life, the pages I read will still look relatively normal even if the writer uses two spaces. And Manjoo? He will still hate the world.

Why I Love the Romantics (or, Why I Hate the Romantics)

Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of prophecy! O wind,
If Winter comes, can spring be far behind?

And it's now, fair reader, that I venture into waters heretofore uncharted. I admit I may lose you with this next sentence alone, but it's true: I've been snookered by the beauty of "Ode to the West Wind," by Percy Bysshe Shelley's terza rima, by his five sonnet ode to the Zephyrian gusts, and by his burning desire to, well, get blown.

You blacked out until blown, right? I can't say I blame you.

Before this week, I preferred not to tango with Romantic poetry. I happily ignored all things Wordsworth and Coleridge and Blake as soon as I, then a senior in high school, closed the massive anthology and opened Huxley's Brave New World. It's fitting, really. That "brave new world" I sought wasn't to be found in gushing naivete of a Romantic mysticism; the world I wanted was hurdling through the future, spinning off into distopian catastrophes, and stoking the fires of prophetic failures in a false social "order."

But today, I capped off a week of Romantic poems with my seniors through an examination of Shelley's ode. After four days, I finally got them to focus on how the aforementioned poets regarded nature and their relationships with it. I washed the poetic intricacies with suds of superficiality. I accepted the dumbed-down responses. I broke them of the wont to label these poets hippies, escapists, or just plain loony. They finally recognized my urgings, eventually reciting for me--in sloppy handwriting all--how speakers "want to be in harmony with nature," how the rationalism sent them "on journeys to make nature mysterious again," and how social order in the cities "made monsters of good people."

Then, I casually sent them back into the ugly world they inhabit, oblivious to an existence without artificial sounds, artificial light, and empty hands. Before one group of students left, I reflected on an assignment I used to mandate. For homework, I told them, I used to ask my students to seek out a location in a natural setting. There could be no traffic, I recalled, no music, and no cell phones. When students arrived, I just asked that they sit for 30 minutes. After that time passed, I only requested they write about their reaction to the previous chunk of time. I didn't assign this today, mind you, just invoked it as a hollow threat.

The gasps were overwhelming. The horror of disconnection, even for thirty minutes, seemed unfathomable to many of them. It forced me to wonder, If being a Romantic is no longer attainable for anyone who claims to have a soul, is merely understanding the Romantics, the circumstances that drove them to create, and the awareness of their appeal, also impossible?

When I got in my car and left, I received a partial answer:

"The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind./ The answer is blowing in the wind."

Race for Daylight.

Stephanie admitted possessing an unimaginable optimism at the prospect of running with the sun out. Such are the wants at the Zook/Petty house.

Before today, all we had to show was a whole lot of wanting. Since the marathon and the much-needed rest period that followed, we've been slowly getting back into a routine. I've joined the Fleet Feet racing team this year, and Stephanie has mapped out a semi-independent racing schedule of her own.  Preparing for racing and distance events again, for us at least, involves training in the dark. When given the chance to run friendlier times, we've been subjected to weekend runs marred by clouds, fog, and rain.

Initially, the weather didn't faze us. No longer training, we shared our excitement about not having to hit particular distances, not needing to complete tempo runs or adjust for pacing, and not even wear a watch if we felt so inclined (only I can cop to this, however). But with the increase in speed work, workouts involving splits and tempos, and overall mileage, we've struggled to absorb the added work alongside the relentless winter weather. Since Christmas, for example, I've felt compelled to add sleeves, gloves, and a hat to my ever-growing collection of gear. It helps the training, but the process of bundling up can force me to question the value of the time spent in the elements.

Today, despite the fact that fog swarmed the area around 9:45, we enjoyed an easy run on a parkway bathed in morning sunlight. We started from my new favorite location, the Bella Bru at Fair Oaks and Arden, and jogged to the trail entrance at William Pond. Steam rose from the river, cobwebs and tall grass glistened in splotchy orange shimmers, and my hands and head felt a necessary freedom outside their cold-weather protection.

The pace was smooth; I set out with other team members, conversing throughout at a pace around 8:15 per mile, while Stephanie held back and operated at a speed more conducive to her current workout schedule. I finished my 10 and returned to Bella Bru for a cup of coffee, paper marking, and a bran muffin. Stephanie returned not long after, having finished 12 miles of her own. We enjoyed a leisurely breakfast together amid a throng of gym goers, cyclists, and runners, and decided we'd definitely been missing out on the post-training culture that this part of east Sacramento has to offer.

It was a great way to spend a morning. By the time we left, the sun, much like our plans for exertion, had called it a day.