Se Hace Camino Al Andar

Via Poets.org

Example and Admonition
by Dick Barnes

My father’s admonition: when given
a choice, choose the path that
leads uphill, always,

so up we went, but all led down soon after:
our destination Deep Creek, where water had gathered
by taking every downhill opportunity.

We thought of that when the higher path turned down,
but no one mentioned it then, nor ever, in fact, til now.
Two lessons: and though sometimes I feel clever,

and have read the Chou I book all about that water,
I’ve not forsaken either one. If there be something in a man
that flows uphill, he has to go with it

whatever sweat or humiliation may attend his going.
Done patiently, this is called “matching heaven with heaven.”
Otherwise, just strife.

Link: NYC Dept. of Ed.EmpowermentSchools.

I need to read more about this but I’m just posting this, FYI. Read and leave comments. (It’s a PDF)

Update:
I did a little googling, hoping to find an analysis of the Autonomy Zone, which I didn’t but here are some links I followed:

Edwize

InsideSchools

The Economist

My initials thoughts on the whole thing:
Autonomy works best when it is exercised by people with the skill and ability to handle such a responsibility. I like my principal, as a person but as a leader…not so much. Right now, this is a pilot program and the applicants are self-selected. What happens when it rolls out to all the NYC schools? There’s a big difference between principals who would choose to take on this responsibility and principals who do it because its “the new thing” handed down from the DOE brass.

Anything else?

From Doug, a great post about what makes a teacher effective, or what makes for effective teaching, based on a study from Australian researchers. Of particular interest is the section on expert teachers. I see some of these qualities in myself, and other qualities I know I am still working on…but there’s a glimmer of them.

Link: Drums Along the Hudson: A Native American Festival & Shad Fest – New York City Department of Parks & Recreation
.

The NYCWP City Island walkabout was cancelled, which frees me up to hit the Drums Along the Hudson event at Inwood Hill Park. See you there?

Via Poets.org

The Culture of Glass
by Thylias Moss

Thanksgiving 2004: I’m thankful for

Columbo’s eye, Peter Falk’s indivisible
from the other’s vitreous dupe that he can pocket,
rub into, off of, and shine the crystal eyeball after
it subs in a game of table pool. Oh yeah!

The future of fortunes is manufactured revelation
of a snow globe: when the right someone gets his hands
on such a world, that world is shaken to pieces, the glass

is tapped in the aquarium, semitransparent arowanas remain
inexplicable, a tapper’s desire breaks out: oh to become glass,
to slide the foot into a transparent baby slipper arowana
and dance with a prince whose glass toenails
shatter when he runs after glass-footed beauties

born that way, skin so thin it hides nothing
without actually being clear, sneak peak
at the friable optic nerve, the components

separated only by glass
through which all seen becomes transparent, criminal
activity obvious, the put-on of opaque alibis
exposing a fear of crime’s transparency:

finger prints on the latex interior of the gloves,
imprint of a face on the wrong side of the mask:

at some level, a matter of seeing eye dog versus unseeing
eye dog, culture of breed, hole-in-the-wall expectations, cash
transactions, motel by the half-hour versus extended stay
opulence just to sleep there for real

with seeing eye dog sleeping on a braided rug half-under
the bed of a blind girl, the girlishness not an issue,
the dog not meant to be her guide into decisions, just
crossings to which she becomes committed independently,

regarding the cool dark of evening, the lapse
of the feel of light as day’s form of breathing,
getting illumination off its wide chest
until able to face again the responsibility of light
that even this girl must accept behind glasses:
day is hers too, given by an internal clock
that wants all the bright hours, odor of rising,
flowers opening with the bakeries, stunning
synchronizations, a pas de deux, she steps, dog steps
into the crosswalk at the same time as a man heading
toward them with coffee, led also but by the Arabica, hookah
descent, descant now to the caffeine
that doesn’t adhere to the glass mug: it is all for him,
her too if they merge at first sight: the world of coffee,
the culture of glass

bottom boats, success:
liquid assets: if solidity is the basic state

that matters, it’s obvious what happens:

The dog retires, seeing what canines see
for himself, fleas cross
his coat without help other than his receiving
no special treatment,
tied in a twenty-foot yard frequented most
by sunflowers, each seed
like the eye of an insect. An alley of a yard

that from time to time becomes a crime scene
in the blink of an eye

the glass one melts last.

Via Poets.org

Just Listen
by Peter Johnson

I sit by the window and watch a great mythological bird go down in flames. In fact, it’s a kite the neighborhood troublemaker has set on fire. Twenty-one and still living at home, deciding when to cut through a screen and chop us into little pieces. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly,” his mother would say, as they packed our parts into black antiseptic body bags. I explain this possibility to the garbage men. I’m trying to make friends with them, unable to understand why they leave our empty cans in the middle of the driveway, then laugh as they walk away. One says, “Another name for moving air is wind, and shade is just a very large shadow”—perhaps a nice way to make me feel less eclipsed. It’s not working, it’s not working. I’m scared for children yet to be abducted, scared fo! r the pregnant woman raped at knife point on the New Jersey Turnpike, scared for what violence does to one’s life, how it squats inside the hollow heart like a dead cricket. My son and his friends found a dead cricket, coffined it in a plastic Easter egg and buried it in the backyard. It was a kind of time capsule, they explained—a surprise for some future boy archeologist, someone much happier than us, who will live during a time when trees don’t look so depressed, and birds and dogs don’t chatter and growl like the chorus in an undiscovered Greek tragedy.

Tomorrow, I’m taking some of my students to the Bryant Park Reading Room for Poem in Your Pocket Day. Poets.org will be giving out free poetry books and posters. Thankfully, the weather will be nice (the Reading Room is an open-air library!).

More information about the Reading Room here.

Via Poets.org

First Things to Hand
by Robert Pinsky

In the skull kept on the desk.
In the spider-pod in the dust.

Or nowhere. In milkmaids, in loaves,
Or nowhere. And if Socrates leaves

His house in the morning,
When he returns in the evening

He will find Socrates waiting
On the doorstep. Buddha the stick

You use to clear the path,
And Buddha the dog-doo you flick

Away with it, nowhere or in each
Several thing you touch:

The dollar bill, the button
That works the television.

Even in the joke, the three
Words American men say

After making love. Where’s
The remote? In the tears

In things, proximate, intimate.
In the wired stem with root

And leaf nowhere of this lamp:
Brass base, aura of illumination,

Enlightenment, shade of grief.
Odor of the lamp, brazen.

The mind waiting in the mind
As in the first thing to hand.

Link: Why New York’s Reading Wars Are So Contentious — New York Magazine.

Via Poets.org

Fears
by Felipe Benitez Reyes

By Gonzalo De Lerma

The sensation of being the only guest
in a grand hotel on the outskirts of the city
—and hearing the somnambulistic
elevator and a scream—
or being in an empty theater
or in a lonely plaza
of a lonely unknown city
weighed down with suitcases and no money
surrounded by escaped doves
from the studio of the worst taxidermist
that ridiculous melancholy of one who feels ignored
at the parties of younger people
whom he calls late at night
from a bar with the lights already turned off
and talks to himself about the comforts
of being an academic ghost
of an orchestra conductor

I fear, in the end, that I’ve kissed
The lips of a mistaken goddess