Thursday, July 11, 2013

Delpit with a Pencil


At SI.  Coffee cold.  Reading Lisa Delpit with a pencil.  Love the title.  No place to “like” it.  “No Kinda Sense” is speaking to me.  This essay ain’t ya mama’s academic essay.  It’s personal.  Pencil is moving.  Delpit “be all like, messin with her daughter’s talkin.”  Rather “I be rich” than “I am poor.”  Pencil scribbles in daybook.  So is this “bad writing”—or was that Foucault piece we were struggling to read really bad, but good if you like theory and stuff like that.  And is Delpit a hero, in the call-acceptance-trial-resolution kind of way, that her essay seems to follow (as my pencil slides across the words to make a found poem by reading Delpit in the middle and in the flow of words rather than sentences.)  So how to be here with a pencil, writing bad, reading words that pull and tug at the heart, words that have power over us, words that empower us, words that my pencil point won’t let flow, too poor to know better.  

3 comments:

  1. Nice job. The Delpit piece really spoke to me as well--as discussed in my blog.

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  2. How eloquent. My soul is filled with words, but all that you can hear is silence because I a numb and my body is truly exhausted. It reminds me of the same calmness that I feel after an encounter with the Holy Spirit. Have a wonderful evening.

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  3. I will probably bring the Delpit essay into the classroom because it really shows the nature of the essay and how there isn't some magical formula and that essay writing can use I and and be personal. That approach made the essay powerful.

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