About the Poems - CAK
About the Poems
by Cynthia Arrieu-King "Regimen of Bouncing Back" This poem is about the fact that you will never feel better unless you face facts and walk through the emotional pile of poo you've been avoiding. "Advanced Winter" Some winters, people say the darndest things in the hallway, in feminist rhetorics class, on the radio, out of the corner of the mouth and each scrap of language seems to point to the same thing: in this case, the highly developed schadenfreude of humans right around the first week of February. "Welcome to Your Wish List, Tomohiko Nakao" Don't you like knowing what others secretly wish for? I do. "Cost" A poem dedicated to my friend Betsy Wheeler. She once saw a boat printed with sailboats in a window, very high price tag. I have a boyfriend whom I thought was a dwarf before I actually met him. Yet she and I pressed on, knowing what we wanted. "Bird Studies Human Studies Bird" I was reading James Paul Gee's, What Video Games Have to Teach us About Literacy and Learning. The book yields rich pedagogical lessons from a comparison between the landscapes of multi-player video games and composition classrooms. I was reading along merrily one night, when suddenly, Gee started analyzing the social matrix of birds, dodos, and the sentence "If, in either case, dodo or ivory-billed woodpecker, Mary Smith persists, what happens?" got stuck in my craw.