Poet’s. Corner

Drop off Your Poetry and We’ll put it in.

De-constructing the Ivory Tower in terms of Pooh - (a history student’s perspective) - by Jo

a smailish gatherer walks down the hall

ambidextrous thoughts slithering across synapses. Liquid unheard, excepting herself.

wondering about meaning and freedom. Also about dinner

she finds empty chairs in a full class

(self-professed poets of an 8 to 4 variety) presumptuously more “knowledgeable than the prof” the ache to return to tedium. Television Medium.

meanwhile, professors unabashedly offer the innards. Private causes. like toll booths to intellectual highways...they general- ly go unnoticed.

Mediocrity. That vice. Grips the undergraduate skull. cinching medulla oblongata. Starving brain cells.

homeless thoughts rattle ‘round. A collective unconscious emerges.

who are the toll collectors? these mysterious professor? Frantically battling Mediocrity... gypsy vagrant salespeople? selling ideologies?

enter Pooh. an enormously Ironic Bow-Tie stoutly jovial. Feigning amusing digressions Spouting fables a la Louis LAmour.

a kind-hearted Pooh. Wise with the honey

down the hall. Left. Right. Left. the gatherer continues.

Owl waits. sitting sarcastically on bared claws.

prepared to slash Bede’s medieval methods, expose Mar’s folly.

sparring cautiously with Foucault...attempting quick short jabs...circling round Nietzche’s melancholia. prodding gently. dueling with his fellows, Owl jars giants to life. Greeks philosophize, Romans plot and French men nationalize. humanity falls from the text. Owl poises. Awaiting a historical strike, and a seat among his peers.

the gatherer wanders back to the Hall. Into the bright world. Surprised at the light. stepping directly into Piglet.

deep within Shakespearean throes, Piglet scuttles nervously about. brow furrowed. uneasy with Ondanje’s deserval of the Gillman. Dead metaphors. Opheliacs. busily anxious.

she rejoices in discovery. fluttering approval. fretting missed opportunities. longing to discuss alternative words for ocean. fearful of Mediocrity. Student apathy.

She bumbles away on her won private whale-road. sighing.

Furthering her journey. The gatherer exits again to the Hall. Closing in on Christopher Robin’s house. Ruddy cheeks glowing, eyes exuberant. He spins tales of Mounties and Niagara. Laurier’s prediction. becomes folklore.

Ontario is dissected as easily as donuts. Christopher laughingly finds kinship is a vast imagined community. History in short pants.

The gatherer exits. Not for the last time. Each turn may reveal a new professor. peddling ware, selling doctrines. Revealing contradiction and Organizing coincidence. coaxing unwilling gatherers towards uncertain understandings. Vagrants. Every one. In the Halls of the Hundred Acre Wood.

A Choice

In one hand you hold the universe,

All its power, prestige and glory.

In the other you hold a single rose,

subtle, elegant and pure,

And yet complex in its own simplicity.

You may choose but one, so which will it be?

In one hand you hold the universe.

In the other, a single rose.

- G. S. Whyte

Word of

the Week

Conflagration:

a) a destructive fire b) a diversionary tactic used by pro- fessors who don’t know the answers to student’s ques- tions

c) the arrangement of parts ina machine

d) a euphemistic term used for alcohol

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