Two students skip your evening
graduate seminar to go to a movie.
How do you know? You see their happy
faces on social media, bathed in the glow
of a streetlight or the marquee; or maybe
it’s the shine of highlighter. You’re curious:
what did they see that was more captivating
than Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space,
first published in 1957, in which he talks
about the world as a house, the world as nest,
the metaphysic of corners, the dialectic
illustrated by a snail half in and out
of its shell? Sight says too many things
at the same time. Being does not see itself.
Perhaps it listens to itself. With so many inviting
surfaces in the world, it’s possible the grey
space of the classroom— with its standard-
issue blinds and chair-desks, its whiteboard
and motorized pull-down screens— just isn’t
nest-like enough. From the depths of a plush-
covered chair in the darkened theatre, or at home
in fleece pajamas and cozy bunny slippers, it’s
easy to contemplate the world as a place
that exists because we can dream it. But isn’t
it hard to tell sometimes between the dream
that’s dream and the dream that’s plain
existence, dressed in desire or fear? Remember
the pale monster in the underworld that the child
awakens because she takes two pieces of fruit
from his buffet table? He gropes for his eyes
and pops them back into their sockets in the palms
of his hands. He would have eaten her whole, left
only hair and bones and a pile of her clothes
on the floor, if she hadn’t remembered
to draw with a piece of chalk a door—
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for her manuscript Maps for Migrants and Ghosts, forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press in fall 2020. She is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.
are your students getting nervous yet??
Ha :)