poem of the week

i am going to make an attempt to blog more consistently...i think i'll start posting the "poem of the week" again...low pressure for me but all in all i think that it helps me work things out...especially in regard to teaching

i also took some great pictures of a botero sculpture while i was in st. louis visiting my significant other that i want to put up...it's a great piece of artwork. i want to work on some potential articles regarding botero's work...scholarly articles are few and far between which is odd because to me his artwork is intellectually rich and provocative.

i really like this atwood poem...i think that i am going to bring it in to my advanced exposition class as a tool to get them thinking about sign systems and (the arbitrariness of) language






You Begin
by Margaret Atwood



You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.