Did Mark Doty, Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, and Linda Pastan make that list? I've been skippy girl, but those are a few of my favorite contemporary poets.

Jesse really was too cool for school.

I once got an A on a paper I finished in longhand during class. There was no reason for me to respect my classes. Even worse, IIRC, that paper was for AP English.

I've been skippy girl, but those are a few of my favorite contemporary poets.

I pimped Sharon Olds.

I once got an A on a paper I finished in longhand during class. There was no reason for me to respect my classes. Even worse, IIRC, that paper was for AP English.

Heh. My senior year of high school, AP English, I handed in my final paper of the year the day before graduation. The grades had been due some time before that, and my teacher had called me in to tell me that he'd give me an A in the class if I promised to hand in an A paper before I graduated. So I did. (I believe the paper was on Louise Erdrich, who is one of *my* favorite contemporary poets.)

I once totally forgot about an essay that was due. I wrote it during study hall the period before it was due, and then when we got them back, I got an A- and the teacher read mine to the class as an example of how we should have approached this topic. (The question was, "Were the Dark Ages really dark?" My answer was basically, "Well, a little bit, but not really.")

I once got an A on a paper I finished in longhand during class. There was no reason for me to respect my classes. Even worse, IIRC, that paper was for AP English.

FWIW, there sometimes just isn't a connection between the amount of time a student spent on a paper and how good it is.

I've had kids turn in crap papers that I know they slaved over (because they just aren't astute readers or just aren't yet great writers--any number of reasons), and I've had students who wrote it last minute ace it. Like anything, some people just have that skill, like a musician who doesn't practice but is amazing anyway. The practice always helps, but they're always going to be better than some other poor slob who practices every single night and will never be as good.

It's not fair, but there you go. This may be apropos of nothing, but I felt the need to chime in. I think mainly my frustration here is stemming from the fact I was accused this year by a student of "playing favorites" when the truth likely lay in the fact some of his classmates just didn't have to work as hard as he did.

t /English teacher

I don't recommend this method, but I got an A on a paper my junior year of college that I wrote on my roommate's word processor (hey, it was 1991, and not everyone had a computer in their dorm room) on Halloween night. I typed it one-handed, because I had a can of beer in the other hand. My roommates were running in and out of the suite of rooms we shared, getting ready for various parties, and I was swearing at them in between typing and drinking, because they got to go out and I didn't, since I had procrastinated on that paper, which was my MO in college.

I decided at one point that I was living the cliche of drinking while writing a paper, but I needed a cigarette to complete the cliche. So I crawled out onto the "balcony" we shared with another suite (it wasn't so much a balcony as it was the roof of the front entrance to the dorm, which our windows overlooked; we were expressly forbidden to go out there, which meant we spent every free moment in good weather out there) to knock on their window and bum a ciggie. So I smoked (very very very badly, I might add), drank, and wrote that paper.

I really don't deserve my college degree.

My fun paper story is the four-page paper I wrote on Richard III the night (as in, I pulled an all-nighter) before it was due. The next week, my professor turned to me at lunch and said, "You wrote a good paper....You should get the fuck out of biochemistry."

Another good one is the paper I wrote on Nevermind the day it was due. I think I started right after lunch and finished an hour before the 5:00 deadline. Not only did I get a good grade, but the professor quoted it before handing the papers back.

So, JZ hit up her Mom's bookshelf and found the book which produced the City of Invention metaphor with the Castle of Shakespeare etc.

And it very nicely addresses many of the issues we've discussed here - and even nicer, it does not take an extreme stance on it. Anyway, I'm compelled to type up some choice extracts from Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen by Fay Weldon:

I suffer myself from the common nervous dread of literature. When I go on holiday, I read first the thrillers, then the sci-fi, then the instructional books, then War and Peace, or whatever book it is I know I ought to read, ought to have read, half want to read and only when reading want to fully. Of course one dreads it: of course it is overhwelming; one both anticipates and fears the kind of swooning, almost erotic pleasue that a good passage in a good book gives...

Perhaps they will explain it to you better, at your English Literature course. I hope so. I rather doubt it. In such places (or so it seems to me), those in charge are taking something they cannot quite understand but have an intimation is remarkable, and breaking it down into its component parts in an attempt to discover its true nature. As well take a fly to bits and hope that the bits will explain the creature. You will know more but understand less. I do not wish (much) to insult Departments of English Literature, nor to suggest for one moment that you would be better out of their care than in it: I am just saying be careful. And I speak as one studied by Literature Departments...

You must read Alice, before it's too late. You must fill your mind with the invented images of the past: the more the better. Literary images of Beowulf, and The Wife of Bath,and Falstaff and sweet Amaryllis in the Shade, and Elizabeth Bennet, and the Girl in the Green Hat - and Rabbit Hazel of Watership Down, if you must. These images, apart from anything else, will help you put the two and twos of life together, and the more images your mind retains, the more wonderful will be the star-studded canopy of experience beaneath which you, poor primitive creature that you are, will shelter: the nearer you will creep to the great blazing beacon of the Idea which animates us all. No? too rich and embarassing an image?...

Hey, I have a signed Mark Doty poem on my wall. Don't know why I didn't include him on the list.

Ararat

Wrapped in gold foil, in the search
and shouting of Easter Sunday,
it was the ball of the princess,
it was Pharoah's body
sleeping in its golden case.
At the foot of the picket fence,
in grass lank with the morning rain,
it was a Sunday school prize,
silver for second, gold
for the triumphant little dome
of Ararat, and my sister
took me by the hand and led me
out onto the wide, wet lawn
and showed me to bend into the thick nests
of grass, into the darkest green.
Later I had to give it back,
in exchange for a prize,
though I would rather have kept the egg.
What might have coiled inside it?
Crocuses tight on their clock-springs,
a bird who'd sing himself into an angel
in the highest reaches of the garden,
the morning's flaming arrow?
Any small thing can save you.
Because the golden egg gleamed
in my basket once, though my childhood
became an immense sheet of darkening water
I was Noah, and I was his ark,
and there were two of every animal inside me.

-Mark Doty

The poem is on handpressed paper in Granjon type. There's an illustration from the Frankfort Laeyon Biblia of 1569 of the animals approaching the ark. The upper corner is flecked with blood from my dog's nose (dating to before I framed the poem) where she cut it on an expedition to the woods.