At the beginning of summer, I traveled to China: Beijing, Xi’an, and Shanghai. At the Summer Palace in Beijing, I watched this man calligraph with water, painting logograms onto the sidewalk. In the warm afternoon air, his words evaporated before our eyes.
Regardless of our comprehension of what the images represent, we were a rapt audience.
The creative writing students are blogging again this semester. And, we need you to help us expand our understanding of audience. Please follow these bloggers, like them, and tell your friends about Cosumnes River College’s diligent and creative writers.
- CRCMindImages.wordpress.com
- ThePlayList2018.wordpress.com
- LettersFromSacramento.wordpress.com
- GoSeeDoWrite.wordpress.com
- You Go to School to Learn
By Thomas Lux
You go to school to learn to
read and add, to someday
make some money. It—money—makes
sense: you need
a better tractor, an addition
to the gameroom, you prefer
to buy your beancurd by the barrel.
There’s no other way to get the goods
you need. Besides, it keeps people busy
working—for it.
It’s sensible and, therefore, you go
to school to learn (and the teacher,
having learned, gets paid to teach you) how
to get it. Fine. But:
you’re taught away from poetry
or, say, dancing (That’s nice, dear,
but there’s no dough in it). No poem
ever bought a hamburger, or not too many. It’s true,
and so, every morning—it’s still dark!—
you see them, the children, like angels
being marched off to execution,
or banks. Their bodies luminous
in headlights. Going to school.
Where do you go to learn? What are you really being taught?
