Informant38

{Women for whom my love has never ceased to live and as it lives grow and as it grows become more than its beginning as the need of a man
becoming the rightful presence of a woman in the dirt of the earth and a man in the dirt of the earth this is the woman who brought us the ears the ears the ears that made that sound those sounds the ears made still making those sounds the ears she brought I stole that sound like a glad thief and made it into a spider made into dental plaque gave it to whores in Guatemala who gave it to subversive boys who hid it in the bright corners of the day hid it in a helicopter flying low over that same spider and the spider was at that moment walking over a tolmec statuette inches under the surface and it dropped the block of dental plaque dropped and crushed him and a little of his blood dripped down through the soil onto that clay figure and he had walked all the way from a country school in Petaluma and now this:}


Teaching Statement

Carolyn Forch�

I didn't know quite what to do, so I announced to the class that I simply couldn't teach in a segregated classroom, and proposed that I leave for ten minutes while they discussed possible solutions. When I returned to class, the no-man's land was a bit more populated, and the class was involved in a rather heated discussion about whose fault the segregation had been. I assigned them to write a narrative about their childhoods in their own words and in their own hand, assuring them that I wouldn't assign grades to these papers. The next day, I asked them to read their papers aloud. They weren't called upon, and so we endured many long silences between volunteers. The narratives were poorly written, but they were compelling and interesting and provoked an unexpected reaction of shock among these students at the similarities between the childhoods of the African-American and white rural poor. Affected by each other's stories, they slowly allied themselves. I confessed to them that their teacher was a rank beginner, but that I cared about their success, and in exchange for their assistance in "training" me, I would certainly dedicate myself to helping them stay in school.