Final Project note for The Book as Art

Well, friends,

the time has come to open up a space for sharing our projects. I have now done that in the class’s Courseweb page.

I’m sorry that this pandemic cut us off from one another so abruptly, but I am trying to remember creative people who often feel more of other people’s suffering and worry an awful lot about the state of the world ALSO are the dreamers who figure out ways to live through and with anxiety. I’ve heard from some of you about your time in isolation, and I hope the rest of you are safe, sheltered, and caring for yourself the best you can. I hope the forum and sharing projects with one another will reinforce some of the solidarity and community we had in the actual classroom.

As always, feel free to reach out to me if you have a question or just need to talk/vent/invent.

SO: Please post photos of your whole project or a movie, if that’s possible. You can upload your work from today until the 22nd, which is about when I’ll have to start getting grades in.

NOTE: When you submit, remember that I need to be able to see the whole text as well as the images. Feel free to post close-up images of any special features you’d like me to notice. Feel free to add a note telling us what the process was like, what materials you used, any issues you faced.

If you don’t want to post (or can’t) send it to me at oaks@pitt.edu. I know that some of you ended up working on very sensitive matter, so there’s no shame if you prefer to keep that between you and me.

If we had been in the classroom, I would have bought enough pizza for everyone. Lord, I miss that ritual now. If you can, reward yourself and your hard, engaging work this term with something. Maybe it’s a pizza but it could also be something like playing a favorite song and letting yourself dance for 3 minutes. It could be just sitting and breathing in. We made it to the end.

I’m not sure what the future will hold. I know that summer classes will all be online. No one’s sure about the fall. Much will depend upon scientists and doctors and folks working to treat and find a cure/test/something. Remember that someone has to write and record the history too, and that doesn’t have to be recorded merely by Historians. Writers and artists do this work too. This class has given you a few skills, I hope, and maybe some ways to work with your hands and whatever materials are around you, and to think of ways to connect images and words in some new ways. It’s a beginning. Folks on Youtube can be great teachers of skills. There are online resources everywhere it seems. There’s instagram and wordpress and soundcloud and a whole host of platforms where your work might be needed. If you write what you need to write, there’s bound to be other folks out there who will be grateful to hear it.

It’s been a pleasure to have gotten to spend time with all of you in class. You’ve been a great group to test this slightly-experimental class out on. I’m convinced that this class does have a role to play in the curriculum, and I’ll certainly offer it again, maybe in a year.

Thank you to Jacob for being an enthusiastic and encouraging teaching assistant, always willing to help me lug all that stuff downstairs, and for his passionate interest in the work of getting images and words to talk to one another.

Thank you for all your inventive, smart, funny, and joyous work. I hope you continue it wherever you are and in whatever ways you can.

Jeff

Notes to the poets: week of April 6th

Hi all,

 

I’m checking in on a Thursday, which makes me late a bit. This has been an odd week of irritations and realizations as we’ve been readjusting to living in a one bedroom apartment with a dog. My husband in March took up smoking again because he was so anxious, and then in April he’s decided to give it up again. It’s been very hard for him to process all the anxiety everywhere. For my part, I was drinking whole pots of black tea and then wondering why I felt so crazy every morning as I was talking to colleagues on Teams, then trying to send out emails to a number of folks, then comment on student poems on Courseweb, and and and I always felt like I wasn’t doing something else I should be doing—keeping a visual journal for my The Book as Art class, working on a manuscript I told myself I’d get to now, or reading anything at all. Yesterday, thinking we were giving ourselves a treat and being good citizens, we ordered a big meal of pizza and steak and cheese grinders from a local restaurant (with a slice of chocolate cake for me!) and it took two hours to reach us.  We of course ate it but it was not exactly a treat by then; it was another sign that we were in a world that the old expectations wouldn’t necessarily work in anymore.

 

So, I’m taking a big breath today, and getting back to what needs to be done. My plan is to comment on two or three poems you’re posting on Courseweb per day.  I have a couple of big pieces from a couple of you and I’m hoping to send you some audio notes on because I realized that typing out all my comments would be completely exhausting.

 

I also wanted to call your attention to the poems I’ve been posting every day on Courseweb as my attempt to keep practicing the art even in the midst of the anxiety of the moment, and to give you a view into how I’m trying to respond to the world as it shifts and changes. My plan is very simple: to write at least 10 to 15 ten syllable lines every day. Some days have been quite a lot more. They’re not all perfectly good. Some will sound silly to me when I look back at them at the end of the month, which is when I’m reading them and not before.  So, no need to comment on them!  I’m just putting things down first as clearly as I can and without lying if I can. I’m not worrying about being smart or funny or beautiful or literary.

 

For those of you who have not posted on courseweb, you are still required to give ME poems. You don’t have to post them on CW but you will need to get me something.

 

Or you can write and let me know that you’ll be fine with the B I’ll give you at the end of the term for the work you’d done thus far (and which I’m fine with giving you, by the way, because I know this hasn’t been easy for some of you and because you can easily petition to have that grade turned into a Pass if a B is going to spoil things for your GPA).