William Stobb

After reading a lot of sensible poems, you know the ones where people are making meaning out of little descriptions of personal experiences, my head feels full and busy looking out at the picnic table under the canopy the old lilac makes in my yard. My . It’s cloudy today but I notice the sun’s shone through the picnic table’s clear Plexiglas and is burning the grass underneath. Note to self: move the table. Move the table move the table, like kicking dirty laundry around.   Weirdly, I think these are examples of my brain working better , and that idea makes me want to put on some awful radio or trivial music (Marc remembered that Level 42 song “Something About You,” and now we’re both singing it everywhere we go) just to dull this enervation a bit. But I don’t. I like quiet and I keep it quiet, though it’s not really quiet—the dryer’s running, and the fridge, and the furnace fan—not the air, just the fan, which makes me think of the overlook above the bluff where people go t...

I remember in '06 and '07, the years after Hurricane Katrina, my sections of first-year college writing were full of young people who had traveled to New Orleans to work in the re-building efforts. Because of their engaged citizenship, my classroom became a site of real public exchange about real human values--individuals' stories, topics of social justice, global warming, civil engineering, American values, jazz, cajun food. At some point it dawned on me that I'm just one teacher at one school in Wisconsin; that same conversation must've been happening in Composition classes all over the United States, and the products of those conversations--essays of all sorts, posters, PowerPoint presentations, and just... moments of insight and exchange--were probably some of the best, most earnest and hopeful public exchanges happening anywhere . They weren't published in the Times , and they weren't anthologized, and in fact I've never seen it publicly acknowledge...