Eric Xu publishes a poem, Christine dances at Annenberg, and we celebrate the moments

There are three beautiful people in this photograph and one very lucky one. The three? A scientist/poet. A scientist/dancer. A scientist/artist. Phenomenal writers, all.

(Scientist, for me, is anyone brave enough to take any course that leads toward a degree in engineering or the medical arts.)

These are some of my last-semester students (Angela, sadly, arrived too late for this photograph), which is to say, these are members of my family. Eric, over there on the left, just had a magnificent poem published in Apiary, and he has sent it to me, and I have read it, and I am not in any way surprised by its quality, nor by its heart, nor by its collectively powerful imagery. Not surprised, for I know Eric. I know the strength of his character and the reach of his art.

If you click on the link here, you will find his poem, which was written during his class with Professor Greg Djanikian. Greg's office sits above my classroom at Penn. On very good days, I have a chance to talk with him. It's because of Greg that I came to Penn to teach memoir as an adjunct. Because of him that I was allowed to teach a second class after conducting a first and sometimes (because of its small size) wobbly class.

Because of him that I have people like Eric in my life.

And also Christine, who is performing this evening and tomorrow evening in a show that she herself choreographed. Curtains are up at 7 PM at the Annenberg Prince Theater. I'd give anything to be there, but I cannot. Please go in my stead. Give her your love and your awe, for Christine inspires awe; she is endowed with specialness.

And also Chang, our remarkable artist, our no-way-is-English-her-second-language writer, our kind soul and purveyor of hot chocolate, our wise one. If you go up and down the campus at Penn you may find her writing, you may find her drawing, you may find her solving Organic Chemistry problems. She does it all. She does it with love.

And also Angela, who taught us all so much about love and forgiveness, who made us cry, who wrote the heck out of every single sentence. Someday I will have a picture of her, too, but in the meantime, look for beauty.

I am, as I said, the lucky one.

And I'll be back on the campus Monday night, at 7 PM, for a Live at the Kelly Writers House taping, joining Andrew Panebianco, Katie Samson, and Raphael Xavier for a WXPN event with Michaela Majoun. We'll be there on behalf of the 12th Annual  First Person Arts Festival, which is launching in a matter of days now. Toni Morrison will be in town for that festival. Rita Dove. Ana Castillo. Sonia Sanchez. Others. I'll be joining Dani Shapiro on the stage and also teaching a memoir workshop focusing on food and kitchen spices, and so we'll be at Penn on Monday, talking about all this with WXPN.

Where would I be without my alma mater?

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Poet at the Dance

Leave it to Jane Satterfield, the poet, memoirist, and teacher, to instruct me, again, in what I did not know but should have. We met at Bread Loaf, Jane and I. I've been learning from her ever since.

So that yesterday it was an email that contained, among other gifts, a link to this 2003 Robert McDowell interview with Rita Dove. The title? "Poet at the Dance: Rita Dove in Conversation." I probably don't need to say more.

Except that I will. I will quote from this terrific interview, and I will say, for myself, this: Last week, and the week before, something happened at the studio, a letting go (again, more) that enabled me, for the briefest moment, to skim the floor the way Dove describes such skimming. To trust so completely the dancers who kindly danced with me that I could also trust myself. I'd ruin things, of course. I'd break the spell. But for an instant I grasped what it must be to have the knowing of dance in one's bones. I grasped it. I wanted more.

From Rita Dove:

Poetry is a kind of dance already. Technically, there's the play of contemporary speech against the bass-line of the iambic, but there's also the expression of desire that is continually restrained by the limits of the page, the breath, the very architecture of the language--just as dance is limited by the capabilities of our physical bodies as well as by gravity. A dancer toils in order to skim the surface of the floor, she develops muscles most of us don't even know we have; but the goal is to appear weightless. A poet struggles to render into words that which is unsayable--the ineffable, that which is deeper than language--in the hopes that whatever words make the final cut will, in turn, strike the reader speechless.

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