Title comes from this song :

Came up on the ol’ mp3 list today, and got stuck in my head. Dunno why. Guess I have some sorrow and grief to express. It’s one of my favorite sad songs. There’s such gentleness and depth of pain in Gordie’s lyrics and vocals. And I like the image of the boy’s soul sailing onto Fiddler’s Green forever.

He never knew a soul, and there’s no place that he’s really been…. but he won’t travel all alone. No, not in Fiddler’s Green.

Sounds a lot better than having him suspended forever in Limbo, anyhow. Goddamned Catholics.

Linguistics class continues to kick my ass. The stuff we are learning now is pretty hard, a lot harder than I thought it was when I did the homework for this class. Homework that is definitely not coming back with a passing grade. I thought I understood it but when we reviewed it in class….. nope.

Dunno about the test I did today either. I might pass, I might not.

Man, every time I think I have that class figured out, it knocks the legs out from under me. Right now, it is all about survival. I just want to make it through the class and maybe pass. And leave with the knowledge that linguistics is not for me, and neither is it the sort of thing one should take out of casual interest either.

I blame the one other Linguistics class I took back in UPEI, during College Part I : The I Didn’t Know There Would Be Two Parts edition. It was a softball course on the history of the English language, and as such, it certainly made linguistics seem friendly and easy. Arguably, if that had been my experience in College Part II, I would probably take at least one more linguistics class.

As is, no fucking way.

Creative Writing was okay. I actually did my homework for once…. and that ended up not mattering at all because she never called for it. Fuck. She’s way too disorganized, and way too prone to going off on tangents and telling us stories and generally veering away from what she is supposed to be teaching us. That kind of inability to be at least a little linear makes it very hard to follow her. I should not be put in a position where I have to work as hard as I do just to figure out what the hell she is saying.

Sometimes her speech just falls in on itself, like a black hole forming from the sheer mass of un-referenced pronouns and ill defined references and bewilderingly complex yet tenuous sentence structure. I honestly feel like she has no idea WTF she is doing most of the time. It’s hard to believe she has spent her life traveling and teaching without getting any better at it.

In fact, I am beginning to feel like she just might be, alas, full of shit. Like, totally full. No room for more.

All her tales of traveling all over the world to various places and teaching all the poor little children are beginning to wear thin. I want to believe her, but it’s hard to imagine someone with quite so amazing a life. It is beginning to sound more like something someone who is trying to impress people would invent. Either that, or the bar is very, very low for these globe-spanning aid jobs.

I suppose it might be.

Today was especially frustrating. At one point, she said “Go out into this beautiful day and take pictures with your phones then write a poem about one of those images! Oh, and I am breaking you up into groups and it has to be a group poem!”

Are you fucking kidding? Fortunately, she also let us stay in and work on our own, which I totally did. Woman, if I was the sort of person who wanted to go out and explore nature, I would not be a writer in the first place. I like writing because I can do it sitting down, indoors, and alone. A group tra-la-la outdoors is the exact opposite of writing as far as I am concerned.

Oh, and did I mention that she left too? She said “I’ll be down by Tim’s if you need my help!”. Translation : I am going to take a 40 minute coffee break in the middle of the class I am supposed to be teaching. Despite assuring us that she was as eager to go outside on this admittedly gorgeous day as she wanted to be.

I ended up writing two poems and starting a third. The second one was free verse and didn’t have much meat on its bones because I was more or less just stringing thoughts together. I wasn’t inspired or anything. And the third would have just been some crap about childbirth and blood and whatever.

The first one, though, was halfway decent. If I wasn’t so lazy, I would type it in. It was somewhat defiantly a traditional poem with rhyme and meter and scansion and such, all the stuff that supposedly is anathema to modern poetry buffs. Well I don’t give a shit. I don’t consider myself a poet at all so I will write whatever the hell I want, in whatever format I choose, and the world of modern poetry can choke on their overused enter keys for all I care.

Maybe that makes me even more of a poet than if I had towed the line. I dunno.

And then when she gave me notes on the poem, they were either incomprehensible or insipid or both. I should use absurd punctuation just to make it more “visually interesting”? Um, I don’t think so. I write for the ear and that’s it. It has the punctuation it has because of that. All my poems are speeches.

See why I an looking for a better creative writing school? Nicola Harwood was at least competent.

Needless to say, if I get an email asking me to comment on my Creative Writing class, they are gonna get an earful. Or iPodful. Whatever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.