Contact BSU Magazine BSU Home Beaver Athletics SUPPORT BSU Alumni Events Get Connected Giving Athletics News About Us Alum Rob Luke ’98 pens poems about his favorite BSU professors So You Want to be an English Teacher For Mark Christensen I was an outsider to the first university on the Mississippi River, rustic academia. Mark was my English Methods teacher. His classes seemed spontaneous, flashing like lightning bugs captured in a mason jar. Mark cultivated us hobos, of uneducated parents, hanging onto the caboose of literature, his a high-wire act as a trained professional, balance in the ballast of Norton anthologies wedged in his hip pockets. Mark believed in discussions in lieu of soliloquies. He unjammed the enjambment of our fear of free verse poetry. Each day, Mark presented opportunities to read, write, and discuss--previously buried in our parents’ yards of crabgrass and rusty swing sets. Mark’s skinny frame, draped in suits of a haberdashery unknown to our dependence on blue jeans, while he witnessed faith in pens and keyboards and salvation in his feedback edits. His credo was the teaching of English is the good work. I believed him; I still believe, made possible by his classrooms located between pine needles and a clear lakefront For some of my classmates, Paul Bunyan, wielding a rusty axe, the lumberjack of procrastination, and his sidekick, Babe the Blue Ox, the party animal, got in the way of becoming a teacher. On Mark’s office shelf, John Cheever’s short stories were lodged. Cheever hailed the Chekov of the suburbs. Those stories were dark, Mark confirmed, alluding where I came from—blood mixed with disingenuous drafts, a place of chewed knuckles and burned books, where I followed the Mississippi north into sanctuary. The Writing Process For Will Weaver My transit, from community college while working a trade full time to a university, a ticket punched by a bare knuckled brawler feared as God, was a journey of burs and brambles. My trial was bare feet on gravel, getting-through-guts gotten from my father’s demise, a labor of Hercules. In a snug office, burgeoning with books, I queried an author and a professor, one who had escaped the manual labor of farms, leaving behind dirt and dogma. His eyes sparked like my grandpa’s grinder, a honing device for sharpening blades that gutted fish and sliced loaves, enough for multitudes. The author smelled like fresh cut hay, like the grass my grandpa, an evolved townie, trimmed with a sickle along highway ditches. Grandpa’s failure of farming was a livelihood extinguished, stillbirth of expelled dead cells. The author kindly regarded me with benevolence and absolution. I, too shy, to ask outright, if he would teach me to develop anchorage by turning the soil with rough drafting, cultivate words likes rows of corn, and set posts to protect livestock, who grew like dynamic characters, with nurturing revision. I waiting for the author to tell me the secrets of keeping vermin out of the henhouse, granting me the omniscience to write my grandpa’s story as authoritatively as the book of Job, so I could visit his shaggy grave near the industrial park, knowing, even in death, words meant something. All Greek to Him Dr. Brian Donovan lived vicariously though Greek literature. Those gods of human foibles and bone saw tragedies: hacked guts, impaled spears, and dismembered heads, which Dr. Donovan wore on his imagination like a carnation compressed from a slow dance with a macabre sweetheart. Making sure his students never lost in translation, Dr, Donovan captained voyages to the Greek Isles, plotting the course of travel guides of literature. His lectures imbibed with love, Cupid’s arrow barbed into his enthusiastic lesson plans. Dr. Donovan’s love of the Greeks given to us from Hermes, a swift- footed messenger. And I know Helen of Troy neither succumbed to computer dating nor positing vain boasts on hollow social platforms. Greek literature, as Dr. Donovan taught, was a delectable wine, not a twelve pack of light beer. Dr, Donovan, our guide, led us to the peak of Mount Olympus, where we supped on ambrosia, almost as if we weren’t mortal. British Romanticism Students suspect Dr. Gurney sleeps in his ever-present suits while dreaming of British Romantic poems, which snap down in his valise. Despite dying far too young, Keats left behind a vault of resonance. Shelley’s atheism is holier than television religion. Lord Byron, club-footed, could keep poetic time like a metronome. Wordsworth prepared for unexpected spots in time armed with breath mints as sweet as daffodils. Coleridge’s endangered albatrosses, hanging like crucifixes from rear view mirrors. Dr. Gurney, with his Princeton mellifluous accent, maintained the British Romantic poets lived with rock star reputations. Too proud for reunion tours, broken Greek urns, poets slipped into the ever after of imagination, replaced by social media. Dr. Gurney is a conduit to beauty, which fades in society’s ire of road rage and domestic violence. The good doctor memorized poems by heart, a practice now gone from the high masses, like evaporated elixir. Surreal Helen Bonner, my English professor, you imported magic realism from warmer climates, unboxing Borges and Marquez, like vital solar power of literature. We were devoted eight a.m. students, gouging sleep out of our eyes while forsaking liquor in our livers. Helen, you promoted freethinking with your California cargo transported into frigid Minnesota. You shared the vodka of Dostoevsky with me. In a note, folded like my grandpa’s accordion, you encouraged me to keep writing. For every tree taken in one’s life, plant a new one. It takes a tree to write a Russian novel; It takes a village to write magic realism; and it takes empathy to read and write. Helen, you emerged from wildfires, taught in deep freezes, thawing students’ low self-esteems. I write because of you. The Female Voice Between classes, the sun warmed our backs, evidence of the reparations of Spring. I read the literature of the American way: the repression of women by men. I learned from Dr. Nancy Michael that equality could bloom even after harsh winters of shivering beneath coats, hats and gloves, teeth chattering in false smiles--and defiantly smoking outside, poisoning ruddy health, embers glowing like torches and ashes tapped like manifest destiny, a notion of white male power subjugating the female voice. Though women sang behind their social cells: Charlotte Perkins Gilman peeling the layers of The Yellow Wallpaper; Sarah Orne Jewett protecting the location of A White Heron. Dr. Michael also taught that sexual identity is not a sin, but autonomy in a free market. Spring is the budding, the sun reintroducing itself after an absence, like a steadfast friend who knows no prejudice. Dr. Michael taught me how to be a real man. Rob Luke is a 1998 graduate of Bemidji State University, with a B.S. in English Secondary Teaching. He taught English at BOLD High School in rural Minnesota from 1999 to 2006. He currently teaches English at Delano High School, in Minnesota, since 2006. He is a 2004 graduate of the M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His poems have appeared in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, the Tenth Muse, and forthcoming in the Windward Review. He lives on Lake Minnewashta, near the town of Excelsior, Minnesota, with his wife, Sara. 1500 Birchmont Drive NW #17 Bemidji, MN 56601-2699 Contact Us | Directions Email alumni@bemidjistate.edu foundation@bemidjistate.edu Phone Alumni Office: (877) BSU-ALUM (278-2586) Foundation: (218) 755-3989 Quick Links Giving Opportunities Alumni Stories Events Update Your Info Connect With Us: A member of the colleges and universities of Minnesota State, Bemidji State University is an affirmative action, equal opportunity educator and employer. Privacy Policy © 2021 BSU Alumni & Foundation. All Rights Reserved. | Site by Evolve Creative