5 Things Meme

Via kouredios , who tagged me with this. If you comment about this, I've got to come up with five things about you that you will then elaborate on on your LJ.

Anyway, kouredios declared that the five things that she finds notable about me are:

1. poetry
2. grading
3. multicultural
4. Trollope
5. Maxwell

So:

1. Poetry. Yes, I write it. I write formal verse in a variety of formal genres. I started writing free verse when I was a teenager living in the Jamaican countryside. My father didn't approve of it. Until I won an award in the Jamaica Festival Literary competition in 1971. Then he complained that I didn't write short stories. I wrote a lot of poetry in the seventies and early eighties. Some of it got published. Then I stopped, for over two decades. When I started again, I was writing in formal modes and finding it a lot easier and more natural than writing in free mode. Why? I don't know.

The freedom that a simple, structured mode
provides, is not the one you might suppose
to let the verse move easily as prose
from mind to paper, or this odd abode
where thought and sense meet in a complex code
and we assume that what we might compose
is understood. The word is not the rose.
Laugh at the voice, but do not just reject
what has been said since all that has been meant
is honest feeling, compressed but still plain
in decent English rhyming for effect
there is no doubt. Just take the straight intent
in proper measure and count it pure gain.

2. Grading. Comes with the job. It's the part of teaching that, I suspect, most of us who teach really, truly hate. It's one thing to face bright young people in the classroom. It's another thing to realise that those bright young people have trouble getting nouns and verbs to agree. Sometimes they just don't go over what they write (or should that be 'right'?), in which case a man might be killed by a stray pullet. In other cases, they suddenly realise that an essay is due tomorrow, and rush to write the dratted thing. The rush to completion breeds monsters. There's no one as presidential as 'Barrock O'Bama'. Trust me. Or the young person who thinks that's the name of the president of the United States.

3. Multicultural. Eu non sei si anda ou si corre. ¿Pero porqué me calificas cómo multicultural? Is why yu put mi inna disya category. I'm just thoroughly uncertain.

4. Trollope. Now why are you calling me a trollop, young lady? I'll have you know I'm a very proper person. I'll have nothing to do with trollops. Nor, with Trollope, except as a professional matter, not after spending time with The West Indies and the Spanish Main. The funny thing is that most of the section on Trollope got excised from that piece for reasons of length; the version that will be published this year will be about Carlyle, Froude, and Thomas. Trollope and Kingsley will be mentioned but not discussed at length. Which is a pity, since both Trollope and Kingsley deserve attention as contributors to the Victorian debate on how the British West Indies should be governed.

5. Maxwell. Yes, John Maxwell sends me copies of his newspaper column for dissemination online (after it appears in the Jamaica Observer). I've known him for thirty-two years now. He's an extraordinary person. He taught my older son to suck on limes when he was ten months old, and he was still doing it as a teenager. My younger son has 'Maxwell' as one of his middle names, which says something about the respect that his mother and I feel for John.