Jan. 31

PowerPoint Poetry

By David Galef

At U of All People, WAC, or Writing Across the Curriculum, has become big, and it’s no longer just for students writing in a chemistry class. Even faculty and administrators have joined the trend toward hybridization and crossovers. See the printout below, found in a board room after a splice of an academic administrators’ meeting with a poetry workshop.

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GAME PLAN

• Opening
• Imagery
• Other Parts
• Theme
• Conclusion

Opening

   □Introduction
       1. The sun glinting on the oak-hued seminar
       table at an angle of four o’clock
       2. Minutes from previous meeting
       3. The sobriety of our endeavors edges us forward

   □Address to Reader

       1. You, who so resemble us
       2. See report from 2007

   □Establish Issues
       1. The growing fiscal debt
       2. Greenbacks drifting into a bottomless pit

Imagery

   □List of Things

       1. The Chancellor’s Fund for Excellence,
       the new Dana Gioia Residential College
       2. Open maws, fevered hands reaching out

   □This Thing Is Like That Thing
       1. The debt is an untamed lawn
       2. The fund drive is like a mower that has
       come upon boulders hidden in the grass

   □Juxtapose Words with Cute Visuals
       1. Balance the budget;
       budget the balance (chiasmus)
       ➼ ♬ $ :-) ☜
       2. “Money is a kind of poetry”
       — Wallace Stevens
       moolah ≈, $, �, �

Other Parts

   □Such as Enjambment and Cut ✄ Faculty Raises ✍
   □Bulleted Lines
       •Impact
       •Decisiveness
       •Terse tercets

   □Miscellaneous
       1. Insert arresting metaphor here
       2. Pause for caesura and coffee break

Theme

   □The Importance of Art
       1. Humanities are the loss-leader
       of the academy
       2. “Poetry makes nothing happen.”
       3. A glint in a business major’s
       contact lens

   □Budget Shortfall
       1. There is never, no, never enough
       2. Imagine a plant that grows shorter instead of taller
       every year. What soil nourishes it?
       3. Impose hiring freeze

   □Cosmetic Measures, Like Brushing Pancake Makeup over a Burn
       1. Building for the Future,
       a four-step plan in quatrains
       (first draft)
       2. The smell of fresh paint from the newly renovated
       library lounge

Conclusion

   □Endings Are Always Hard
       1. Seated in silence, hands matched as if in prayer
       2. “In my end is my beginning”

   □Repeat Earlier Points
       1. Dana Gioia Residential College
       2. Chancellor’s Fund for Excellence
       3. The angle of the sun, now declining at five o’clock

   □Any Questions?

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