new posts in all blogs
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: Gregory Djanikian, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 6 of 6
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: Gregory Djanikian in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
I felt blessed when
Pennsylvania Gazette editor John Prendergast invited me to write a 3,000 word story about Greg Djanikian, who trusted me to teach at Penn, who talks with me many spring-semester Tuesdays when I arrive early to teach, who inspired a key character in my forthcoming Florence novel
One Thing Stolen, and who writes some of the most gorgeous poetry anywhere. I wrote of his most recent book,
Dear Gravity, here.
To write this story I spent an afternoon in Greg's beautiful home (filled with the artistry of his wife), interviewed Stephen Dunn, Julia Alvarez, Al Filreis, and others, and returned to a dear student, Eric Xu, who brought valuable insights to the Greg's beloved teaching.
The story can be found
here.
I had all sorts of prospects for my class at Penn yesterday. Just two classes to go, and I had a plan in place, some thoughts about teaching the art of putting another's gestures, postures, cheekbones, eyes on the page. I had things to read, photographs to study, Annie Dillard, Anton Chekhov, Francine Prose, and Cynthia Kaplan in my back pocket. But before we would get to that, we would hear from the students themselves, who had been interviewing each other and writing "practice" profiles.
Except. These were no practice profiles. These were fully developed, deeply moving, vastly important
gifts crafted scrupulously for one another. It became important to simply dwell with these pieces, to slow things down, to take note of all the progress my students have made this semester, to honor the insights and the care embedded in their most recent work. There were students who had entered my classroom in winter proclaiming that they couldn't write; how wrong they were. There have been those who have worried about getting things wrong; time and again they got so much right. There were those who cautioned that they might not come to every class, and would probably be late with the assignments. Okay, so. There was only one of those, and he lied. He came. He wrote. Not just extremely well, but also (he amazed us) on time (give or take three minutes).
Soon I'll be able to share one of my student's works, for it will be published in an esteemed magazine. Someday I'll be able to tell you about the others—their gains, their triumphs, their stories.
But for now, in the midst of what has become the busiest season in my life, I want to take a minute and thank my institution, the University of Pennsylvania, for giving me the chance, again, to fall in love (thank you, Greg Djanikian, and thank you, Al Filreis). This is a great privilege, spending time with these students, watching them grow. And it is a great privilege to work at my alma mater. The final project my students will produce is a profile of an individual who inspires. Many of my students have chosen a university professor, and in reading through the profile proposals this morning, I am awed by the many professors I've never met who are radically changing student lives.
If you walk through life looking for the good, you find students like my students. You find an institution like my own.
"You stand among giants," I could often be heard telling my students this semester, and there wasn't a speck of exaggeration in the claim. For I had a class—oh, I had a class—and they taught me and one another.
It is perhaps fitting, then, that this past Tuesday,
Peregrine, the Creative Writing Program magazine of the University of Pennsylvania, began to make its way into mailboxes and classrooms. It's the fourth issue of this beautiful publication, and all credit goes to the great poet, teacher, and CWP director Gregory Djanikian, who quietly sifts and mingles the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry of faculty, students, and alumni to bring this book to life.
I am so honored to be included in this magazine, and I am so touched to find myself here among the likes of C.K. Williams and Charles Bernstein, Alicia Oltuski and Rick Nichols, and my dear friends Karen Rile, Alice Elliott Dark, and Kate Northrop. I've set this afternoon aside to read. It will be time extremely well spent.
This is the season during which the work days never end, and the skies darken for long stretches, and the rains come, and the tree limbs scratch their chaos into the tired stucco walls of this house.
This is that season, again.
But last night, through what was cold and what was dark, I made my way by train and collapsed umbrella to the University of Pennsylvania campus, which Al Filreis and Greg Djanikian have turned into a second home for me. I traveled there to hear
New Yorker editor David Remnick speak of journalism—then and now. I traveled to sit with my dear student Kim, and to hear of her life, how it unfolding. I traveled for the chance to chat with the great fiction writer and teacher, Max Apple. I traveled to sit among students intent on learning all they can—there, here, now—and among teachers and working writer/editors (Dick Pohlman, Avery Rome, more) who are generous with their own stories.
A gift, all of it.
I arrived at the Penn campus early yesterday, first to have tea with Gregory Djanikian, a poet, a mentor, and the director of the creative writing staff. We talked of students and what might be yielded to them, talked of what remains, or should. We walked, then, to the eastern wedge of the campus, where Greg has a standing Monday squash game, and where I, by virtue of proximity to a once-familiar structure, remembered my own days on the varsity team.
I said goodbye to Greg, then met Jay Kirk on the library steps. I had an elephant's eye for him—glass, a taxidermist's tool, an object found at Paxton Gate during a San Francisco trip. Up Locust Walk, then, Jay and I went, talking of books, rehearsing history, recalling the days, mine, when again and again my work was rejected for its lack of commercial viability. We talked about English 145, and about Jay's narrative nonfiction, and about what I hoped he might relate to the students of my class.
After lunch, Jay was there, in Room 209, engaging these young writers, as I knew he would, with stories about funeral home directors and brothels, a lesbian retirement community, Rwanda's post-genocide tourism business. In structure lies meaning, Jay told the class. Scene making is story making. Write your authentic self—your fears, your not knowing, your questions—directly onto the page.
They do. They have. For we critiqued the students' memoirs then—powerful, personal stories that demanded respect and received it. Talent matters in writing workshops, of course it does, but so do intellectual integrity and kindness. My students bring all three to class. They move me to tears. I can't help it.
When you live in Iowa, you're never 100% sure how a town's name will be pronounced. I was shocked to discover that Madrid, Iowa was pronounced MA (as in cat)-drid. Or Nevada? Just a few states over there's a Nevada. A good model. But here in Iowa, Nevada is pronounced with a long a--ni-VAY-da.
So why had I never thought about Des Moines's pronunciation? Obviously we don't use correct French pronunciation when saying Des Moines. But its odd pronunciation never crossed my mind until I read the wonderful "In the Elementary School Choir" by Gregory Djanikian at Poetry Foundation.org. Here's the relevant stanza:
It was a problem which had dogged me
For a few years, this confusion of places,
And when in 5th grade geography I had pronounced
“Des Moines” as though it were a village in France,
Mr. Kephart led me to the map on the front wall,
And so I’d know where I was,
Pressed my forehead squarely against Iowa.
Des Moines, he’d said. Rhymes with coins.
Beautiful!
Do read the whole poem here.
-------------------------------
The Well-Read Child is on the roundup!-----------------------------
There are still three hosting spots open in October! Let me know if you're interested....
By: Beth Kephart ,
on 8/21/2014
I arrived at the Penn campus early yesterday, first to have tea with Gregory Djanikian, a poet, a mentor, and the director of the creative writing staff. We talked of students and what might be yielded to them, talked of what remains, or should. We walked, then, to the eastern wedge of the campus, where Greg has a standing Monday squash game, and where I, by virtue of proximity to a once-familiar structure, remembered my own days on the varsity team.
By: Kelly Herold,
on 8/1/2008
Yes, looking for good is always the best choice.
And then I want to say, "Who would ever miss one of your classes - or arrive late?"
Answer: No one. Ever.
It is indeed life's greatest privilege. Meeting people. Getting to know them. Walking for a bit at their sides.