There's a lot of noise out there.

One of my D'Youville classes is WONDERFUL. Read that in the handwriting with which Viv Eliot wrote "WONDERFUL" on the section of The Wasteland that used her words. Day two and they were more than on the ball -- we read a Richard Wilbur poem called "Junk," highly anthologized, which uses Anglo-Saxon strong-stress alliterative meter to talk about the life and afterlife of trash, and since it does so in an ancient and largely discarded form, says things about the life and afterlife of poetry too. It's fun, or at least I think it is. Anyway, the 10 a.m. section had plenty to say about the poem from go, and when I told them about the form it used, they immediately picked up the connection and ran with it. They also got a particular critique Wilbur is making of throwaway language (I gave the example of Hallmark cards as the kind of "poetry" most people know in the US) and those who get paid to produce it, and they got it without any prodding at all. The 8 a.m. section, curiously, had a much harder time with that piece and the other one I had for us today, Archibald MacLeish's beautiful "Ars Poetica," with a couple outright misreadings. One student thought "Junk" was about "a working stiff," and I'm not at all sure how he got that because there are barely people in that poem at all. Every class has its dynamic, and I think I'm going to have to find some other ways to teach the earlier section than relying on my usual methods of asking questions and moving the class along based on their answers. It is pulling teeth, and pulling them with pliers made of noodles, to get them to say anything at all, and then, at least so far, what the ones who talk say is a little screwy. Maybe others will warm up and start talking, though -- hope so.

I haven't looked at the students' majors but I wonder if that early section isn't heavy with hotel/restaurant management and finance and pharmacy and generally responsible, unimaginative careers. The other one has at least two students who've clearly had a lot of English and specifically poetry, and about four more who, however much they've had or not, they're picking the poems up really well -- the two I'm noticing most are the only ones I saw writing down the names of books I mentioned on the first day as not required, but cheap and useful if you're an English major or minor. Wish I could transplant some of the students from each section into the other. . . but alas.

I am inordinately happy about the course I've put together, and however the semester itself goes, I think I have a bang-up writing-about-literature syllabus to send out for jobs now. My little homework prompts are all sorted out, my first three essay assignments are written (the fourth will be a research essay and I need to check around to find out things like how many sources I should be requiring), the terms and concepts I'm covering are noted in my copy of the schedule, and it's probably the best class I've ever built. On paper, anyway. Anything can implode, but this one, I'm pretty sure it has the pieces together in the first place.

On my home-sometimes-not-so-sweet-home front, I think I might be about to become one of the bitchiest people in the history of my block. There's this younger couple who moved into the apartment beneath me a few months ago, and they have the single barkiest dog I've ever encountered. My god. It's a terrier mix and boy, it got all the terrier genes for incessant and inane barking. It went for five hours this afternoon without letting up, from one to six, and this isn't unusual. It seems to start up every afternoon around one or two and to go until its people come home, which sometimes is at three or so but sometimes. . . is significantly later. Sometimes they'll have people over, too, and be playing beer pong til three in the morning, which is a problem for me by itself but then of course their dogs are wound up too (they have two, but the non-terrier isn't as bad). Anyway, I've talked to them and left them notes, and I think the next thing I do may actually be to call the police and see if they write tickets for breaking noise ordinance around here. Five hours! I'm trying to write a dissertation and an unattended dog is barking basically into my windows for five hours straight. I don't really want to be the nasty old English teacher who calls the cops on people's barking dogs -- but I don't want to be the girl who never finishes her dissertation either. My concentration is fragile enough as it is.