Submit! Deadline: March 10, 2010.

Write 'Em!

Haiku Poem Contest


The TCU Purple Bike Program will be attaching sponsorship signs on the bikes and will also include a different haiku on each sign. The theme of the haiku must be related to bikes, the environment, or sustainability. The winners of the contest will have their haiku and name printed on a bike sponsorship sign. Submit by email one or more haikus to:

Keith Whitworth at k.whitworth@tcu.edu (PBP Program Coordinator)

Deadline: February 12, 2009 at 5:00 p.m.

A haiku contains three lines that do not rhyme. The syllables are traditionally broken up this way: Line One: Five Syllables - Line Two: Seven Syllables - Line Three: Five Syllables. Have fun with this and if you have any questions, please contact Dr. Whitworth by email or 817-257-5941.

Live Green, Ride Purple!

maybe he was on to something

JACK KEROUAC

BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE
LIST OF ESSENTIALS

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. Youre a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

As ever,
Jack [Kerouac]

Jack Kerouac "Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials" from a 1958 letter to Don Allen, in Heaven & Other Poems, copyright © 1958, 1977, 1983. Grey Fox Press.

http://www.poetspath.com/transmissions/messages/kerouac.html

the REAL dead poets society

http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_15996/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=EFebbaI0

Founder of Dead Poets Society visits bards' graves

DAVID SHARP
Published: October 31, 2009

CUNDY'S HARBOR, Maine (AP) - On the big screen, the leader of the Dead Poets Society at an all-boys prep school was an inspirational teacher played by Robin Williams.

In real life, it's a balding amateur poet who drives around in his "Poemobile," visiting and documenting the graves of dead poets and calling attention to their works.

Walter Skold, founder of the Dead Poets Society of America, just finished a three-month road trip in which he visited the graves of 150 poets in 23 states. Skold boasts that he set a literary land speed record of 1.66 gpd (graves per day) over the course of his 15,000-mile journey.

While his graveside poetry readings - and occasional cemetery sleepovers - evoke the macabre, Skold insists his intentions are honorable.

"It's not really a morbid project but rather a way to honor our literary forebearers and to historically resurrect their works," Skold said.

His reports, which sometimes include offbeat tombstone art, are posted online; he encourages others to get out and find the graves of dead poets and to post their video and photos online.

Skold, 49, of Freeport, founded Dead Poets Society of America a year ago, leaving his job as a public school technology teacher to pursue his passions of poetry and photography. For his trip, he bought a used cargo van with a rack for cameras and supplies, shelves for books and a desk that, in a pinch, doubles as a bed.

Over the course of his 90-day journey, Skold visited the gravesites of giants of the poetry world including Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as lesser-known poets like Dudley Randall, whose Broadside Press published many leading African-American writers.

He's making a film documentary called "Finding Frost: Digging Up America's Dead Poets." Next year, he hopes to scout out America's dead poets buried in Europe.

He was especially intrigued by poets who've been forgotten altogether. He calls them the "doubly dead" because they suffered a second death when their works were "slowly consigned to literary oblivion." Some of those include Madison Cawein, Eugene Fields, Virginia Boyle and Elizabeth Hollister Frost, he said.

Skold also discovered that the final resting places of many poets - dead or doubly dead - are unknown. In Maine alone, he found 29 poets whose final resting places are a mystery to the public.

"So many of these individual poets have such interesting stories and such interesting lives that I really feel it's a shame that they've been lost to our literary imagination or our literary history," he said. "I'm trying to bring back people's works and lives who have value and who have been forgotten for one reason or another."

The Library of Congress believes Skold's effort is the first such literary undertaking, said Peter Armenti, digital reference specialist whose focus is poetry.

Many of the poets' grave locations are well-documented, but only to scholars and poetry buffs, Armenti said. Skold's effort attempts to make the poets' information accessible to the general public, and in doing so generate some interest in America's poets.

"I just think it's a fascinating project," Armenti said. "I'm glad somebody's doing it."

Skold's project has the blessing of nine state poets laureate, each of whom was enlisted to participate in poetry readings during his road trip.

South Carolina's poet laureate joined Skold at Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston for a reading of a poem by Henry Timrod, whose work is believed to have inspired Bob Dylan.

"It's quirky and interesting in the best way," Marjory Wentworth said from South Carolina. "My hope, long-term, is that it's going to bring people to poetry who might not otherwise be interested. Anything that increases the audience for poetry is a good thing."

In Tennessee, poet laureate Margaret Vaughn said she respects Skold's ambitious goal. She, too, has been documenting poets' graves, as well as writing original poetry for each.

"I know what it takes. I've been doing it for 10 years. He's got the passion. That's what it takes to do this, passion," she said from her studio in Bell Buckle, Tenn.

On a recent afternoon, Skold was in Cundy's Harbor at the burial site of Robert P. Tristram Coffin, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1936. The Poemobile, named for Edgar Allan Poe, was parked across the street with the bumper sticker, "I brake for old graveyards."

Wearing a T-shirt from Poe's Tavern in South Carolina, where Poe spent a year in the Army, Skold quickly set a video camera on a tripod and then used a rake from a neighbor and a copy of Coffin's poem "An Old Man Raking Leaves" to create tombstone art on a brisk autumn day.

He likes to surprise with his tombstone art.

For example, he placed a scarlet "H'' on the tombstone of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who penned "The Scarlet Letter." At Longfellow's memorial, he set fire to a portrait of the poet's second wife to underscore her fiery death, which tormented the poet and inspired "The Cross of Snow."

Skold encourages others to take up his cause on All Saint's Day by going to graveyards, preferably during the day, to document poets' graves and read their poetry.

Visiting a graveyard at night can be a dicey proposition and requires special permission. Skold learned that lesson the hard way last Halloween when he was nearly arrested in Malden, Mass., where he and his son lit torches at the tomb of the Rev. Michael Wigglesworth, Puritan author of the "Day of Doom."

"Little did I know that there was a little woman who watches over the cemetery and she told the police that there were people performing satanic rituals," he said.

___

On the Net:

Dead Poets Society of America http://www.deadpoes.org/

Fiction Reading by Glen Pourciau on Oct. 20. Be there.

What: Fiction Reading by Glen Pourciau and TCU students.

Where: BLUU Ballroom C

When: Tuesday, October 20th @ 7:00.

Why: It’s the National Day of Writing. You like writing and may be a writer yourself.

Need an event to attend for expanding your literary horizon? Tuesday, Oct. 20--the National Day of Writing--is just around the corner, and do we have an event for you. Glen Pourciau is a young, local writer who’s already establishing a substantial reputation by publishing in some of the nation’s best journals, including the Paris Review, Antioch Review, Barcelona Review, Mississippi Review, New England Review, and Best of the Web 2009. He will be reading from his short story collection, INVITE, following four TCU students reading their own fiction prose and poetry.

Here is a link to an interview by BookFox with Pourciau from January of this year, if you are interested. http://www.thejohnfox.com/bookfox/2009/01/glen-pourciau-interview.html

Please join us for this fabulous reading adventure and stop by our table to pick up information about all the other fun things going on in the English department.

Submit!

TCUnderground on the National Day of Writing

Jason Bredle

The Idiot's Guide to Faking Your Own Death and Moving to Mexico

Every few seconds I check the Bible
to see what Jesus is saying about me. The answer
is always nothing. Sometimes

he's condemning me to eternal damnation,
but usually nothing. Tonight I am alone,
wearing my sex shorts, adrift amongst

the black suburban pools of eternal damnation.
No, I have not been in love. Yes,
I have been in love. I am speaking the language

in which no and yes mean the same, in which
apricot and goodbye mean the same.
I am remembering the kudzu of the awful season,

sitting with you beside the swamp for the last
time and neither of us knowing it was the last
time but yes the glass was hello and dragonfly.

Was it a blessing? They say so in this language.
Others say this language is dying, or already
dead. I speak it, nonetheless, while eating

apricots in the evening of eternal damnation
where you yell at the map and cut your wrist
and there is a darkness here that I have only shared

with my cat, like that guy in the movie who writes
graphic erotica and goes crazy. One says
pain near the black pool of everything,

my back is covered with wax. Every few
seconds I check the Bible to see what Jesus
is saying about me. The answer is always nothing,

aside from the time he lambasted the outfit I wore
to the People's Choice Awards. A green tuxedo.
Tonight, I am adrift in the suburb of the black sky,

I am speaking the language in which love
and apricot mean the same, in which pool
and death mean the same. I said goodbye

in a suburb like this, years ago. I said
goodbye in a suburb like this, years ago.
According to Hercules, if we make an angel

out of ourselves, that is what we are; if we make
a devil out of ourselves, that too is what
we are. See, this is what I am getting at.

It is the awful season and I am speaking
the language in which violence and God mean
the same, in which blood and dragonfly mean

the same. I am in the orchard of eternity
picking the goodbyes of damnation, I am licking
your dragonfly blood and speaking the language

in which pain means hello. A black pool,
a green sky. That is to say, each moment
without you is a vacant airport, each moment

without you is a glass apricot. Every few seconds
I check the Bible to see what Jesus is saying
about me. The answer is always nothing. Except

today, it's a bunch of weird stuff about how
I'm falling into a black pool in some suburb,
maybe Palatine or something, and just like that,

I've gone forever. I know! That's what I thought
too. This is the story, but in this language, this
is not the story. I am eating red ice,

harvesting a field of knives. I am speaking
the language in which heaven and earth mean
the same, in which sky and white mean the same.

O Lord, I made this dragonfly for you. Even
if you do not listen to it, just know, this
is how I have always felt about you. And I

am possessed. And I am a fatalist. Do you see
these bruises? Do you see these bruises?
They are a sad bouquet. They are a beautiful

scrapbook. I am floating. I am in love.
I am dead. On a perfect night, my back is covered
with wax. O Violence, but I did not want this hello.

O Lord, I made this dragonfly for you.
Even if You do not listen to it, just know, I made it
only for you.

TCUnderground twitter

if you follow us, we'll follow you.

http://twitter.com/eleven40seven

Rick Bass Reading

Friends--

Please join me for a stellar reading! And please pass this information on to students and friends. The reading is free!

Sept 22: Rick Bass, novelist/environmentalist

Reading at UTD at 7:30 pm in the Performance Hall

Rick Bass is the author of over twenty books. His first short story
collection, The Watch, set in Texas, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award, and
his 2002 collection, The Hermit’s Story, was a Los Angeles Times Best Book
of the Year. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and
the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short
Stories. He was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2007 for his short story
collection The Lives of Rocks. He was a finalist for the 2008 National Book
Critics Circle Award (autobiography) for Why I Came West (2008). His most
recent book, The Wild Marsh, about his life in rural Montana was published
earlier this year.

You can read an excerpt from it at:
http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200904-omag-rick-bass

Read more about the event at:
http://www.utdallas.edu/ah/events/detail.html?id=1220068171

Susan Briante, MFA, PhD
Assistant Professor
Aesthetic Studies
University of Texas at Dallas
800 W. Campbell Road--JO 31
Richardson, TX 75081-3021


http://www.ah.utdallas.edu/people/sbriante.html


http://ahsahtapress.boisestate.edu/books/briante/briante.htm