Backgrounding Stream
I live a bifurcated life. Oh, hell, actually I live many lives. Or, I live in many lives. Or, I can't be sure about being sure about any damned life.
Early on, I started to write. What it was, I couldn't say. I could say... I can say... what it was was what it was, and it inhabited me, and so I went with it. And, a bit later, I--and others--called it poetry.
At the same time, or course, of course, I was attempting to imagine myself for the long run. I was trying to figure out how and what to monetize. (I hadn't thought about that word until I found it on one of the tabs above this blog entry editor. Still, that's what I was trying to do. Or, I was trying to figure out what I could stand to do for a long while that would pay me to do what I wanted to do. Or, I was trying to figure out what I did NOT want to do or could NOT do. More about that later, perhaps.)
Anyway, long story short not really, I ended up getting a doctorate in poetry (invention of the modern diploma mill and the desire of others like me sort of to try and make a living with their minds but not as fact merchants or engineers or racketeers--rather as associative souls). However (and, yes, I was taught by someone I thought was way smart at the time that no one owing to how it went in Latin should in English begin a sentence with "however"--reserving that for the clause that appears after a semicolon--hence, in part, my fascination with punctuation in general and with the semicolon in particular).
That poetry thing didn't work out. Well, actually, it worked out just fine in a roundabout way, but back then anyway I was one at times interesting but most of the time just another poet type; so (semicolon love), I decided to add a layer or create a parallel track for my own self--to help monetize my life, don't you know. And, so, I pushed myself on an ex nun who happened to have traded Jesus for the study of rhetoric, and ended up doing post doctoral work in how to write the non poetry stuff and how to write about those writing and delivering just about anything. Definitions: rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric: and on (ad nauseam). And, it turned out, I could play that game a bit. And, anyway, the marketplace was hungry for anyone with official and verifiable backgrounds in the reemergent field of rhetoric and composition. I could monetize! And, I did.
All of which resulted in me having had one leg (if two are all you get) in the poetry world and one in the rhetoric/composition world (which morphed or massaged its way, too, into the business and technical communication world). Two legs, two worlds. How different. How, now, converging upon each other, though.
The Poet Noosed by the Academic (or, how THEIR rules blessed and killed me)
For at least the past 25 years, I've been helping students find their way toward correctness. Hey, it was/is a living. Learn the genre. Teach others where they fail the genre. Find a template. Love a template. Bang the template loudly. Pretend for long enough that there is a narrow bandwidth, and you can prosper there. Small territory of the mind.
Now, however, I find that limitation, well, limiting. And, so, I've decided on visiting convergence town in the form of a Writing for New Media class. Hell, it turns out, that my first wife (calculated in terms of time spent, depth of snuggling, plans for the future) is the net. Ooops. You know what I mean. So, if I'm out there in the www ether for 80, 10, 12 hours a day, why wouldn't I be good at guiding (posing the questions) a class in the matter of writing for new media. So, I begin. After all, I am a living incarnation of mixed diction, anyway.
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You have a wife an appealing babe adjusting to the face of corporeal treachery still no one’s afterthought two children: one rasping at those outskirts that fail now to fascinate or lure & another whose penance (when generous you call it succor) is common distance: a furlong for every indigestible antipathy & a mutt-Dalmatian who trotted recently into the dangling biscuit of your kindness & kinged you by utter mistake There is a job: yada yada: trespasses tortured diplomacies all the piddliness and rigmarole you’d expect from insufficient recompense but there are laurel saplings too: strivers oily green & sun-fuddled & quirky hedges that demand your focus or deliberation or depth of faith or some such amalgamated pretense multiplying as they do at some encroaching edge
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