Articles by Kerry Wood on ArticleSnatch.com

Reflections on "Mirror" and "Metphors" by Sylvia Plath

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500

REFLECTIONS ON "MIRROR" AND "METAPHORS" Mirror by Sylvia Plath I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see, I swallow immediately Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful The eye of a little god, four-cornered. Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall . It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long I think it is a partr of my heart. But it flickers. Faces and darkness separate us over and over. Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, Searching my reaches for what she really is. Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. I am important to her. She comes and goes. Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish. **End Summary** Topics: poetry]]>]]> About the Author: ]]> Kerry Wood is a retired English teacher, textbook author, and award-winning poet. His memoir-- Past Imperfect, Present Progressive-- is a smorgasbord of reflections on his early life, education and profession contained in stories, poems, and correspondence. He begins with recollections of being consigned to a Catholic military boarding school at the tender age of four in 1942 and spending his academic years there until 1946 and the end of WWII. Writes one reviewer: "The hats Kerry Wood has worn are multifarious and variegated: Russian translator, secondary teacher of English in Turkey and California, world traveler, sports aficionado, editor of literature anthologies, amateur poet and essayist, stroke survivor, devoted husband and father. T

English Major Barbarisms

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Dear Sirs, Early on I decided that the career of an English teacher was the vocation for which I was best suited. I read and studied voraciously and tried hard to build my vocabulary In college I was overwhelmed with assigned reading and had to speed through books so fast that I couldn't really enjoy them. They got mixed up because of being read simultaneously. For instance, after a course called The Picturesque Novel, I read how Oliver Gulliver travels On the Road with friends named Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy, shouts Yahoo when he eats a huckleberrry, and recaptures a fugitive black man named Lord Jim, who's afraid of Virginia Woolf and is rooming with Roderick at Random House . The next year I read about a couple of brothers named Karamazov and their sister Carrie acting out The American Tragedy, the men contracting a disease called Moby-Dick. They all write pustulary scarlet letters to women named Pamela and Clarissa. A Frenchman named A. TranjÃ© falls asleep in his mother's coffin and dreams of being a catcher in the rye, protecting children from drunken overeaters named Gargantua and Pantagruel,. **End Summary** Topics: College]]>]]> About the Author: ]]> Kerry Wood is a retired English teacher, textbook author, and award-winning poet. His memoir-- Past Imperfect, Present Progressive-- is a smorgasbord of reflections on his early life, education and profession contained in stories, poems, and correspondence. He begins with recollections of being consigned to a Catholic military boarding school at the tender age of four in 1942 and spending his academic years there until 1946 and the end of WWII. Writes one reviewer: "The hats Kerry Wood has worn are multifarious and variegated: Russian translator, secondary teacher of English in Turkey and California, world traveler, sports aficionado, editor of literature anthologies, amateur poet and essayist, stroke survivor, devoted husband and father. T

Found Objects

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500

My wife and I met John and Rita about 30 years ago. John and I discovered that we both had been born on April 24, 1938. Friendship developed. We played bridge and tennis together and became the nucleus of a biking group that, I am ashamed to say, I tagged with the name The Awesomes: an acronym for Ageless Wonders Enjoying Sunshine, the Outdoors, Merriment, and Exercise. John was an indefatigable biker. (Indefatigable? I had to use that because if I said "tireless" it would sound like he was riding on the rims.) On warm weather rides, he always faded back to see how our wives were handling hills and heat, while I was seeking shade and a place to buy a cold drink. I refused to feel guilty because how much help can you give a struggling biker when you are struggling on your own bike? John, motivated by his desire to encourage the slower riders, ended up logging half again as much mileage as the rest of us. John got his golden handshake from Hewlett-Packard about the time I retired from teaching. Not content with leisure, he started a new career as a teacher of accounting. **End Summary** Topics: John Karlsten]]>]]> About the Author: ]]> Kerry Wood is a retired English teacher, textbook author, and award-winning poet. His memoir-- Past Imperfect, Present Progressive-- is a smorgasbord of reflections on his early life, education and profession contained in stories, poems, and correspondence. He begins with recollections of being consigned to a Catholic military boarding school at the tender age of four in 1942 and spending his academic years there until 1946 and the end of WWII. Writes one reviewer: "The hats Kerry Wood has worn are multifarious and variegated: Russian translator, secondary teacher of English in Turkey and California, world traveler, sports aficionado, editor of literature anthologies, amateur poet and essayist, stroke survivor, devoted husband and father. T

Tying One on with Emily

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0400

I can never be a wine connoisseur. My sense of smell is not keen, and a discriminating olfactory sense is a sine qua non for precise discernment and evaluation. Yes, I know when a wine is downright awful, but given a blind taste test comparing elegant vintage wines and their low-price counterparts, I'll choose the cheap stuff probably half the time. The same goes for my appreciation of pictorial art. I skipped the college course in art appreciation. I recognize the beauty of the classics and have my own unschooled preferences, but that's about it. When my wife thinks about foreign travel, she focuses on museums and art galleries. I think about wandering through exotic cities or quaint neighborhoods, trying new cuisines and quaffing brews with the locals. Sally can sit and revel in a single painting for the same amount of time it takes me to stroll the entire Louvre. Well...almost. I am led to this musing by contemplation of Emily Dickinson's "I taste a liquor never brewed," wherein the poet celebrates her enchantment with nature in a playful extended metaphor. **End Summary** Topics: Emily Dickinson]]>]]> About the Author: ]]> Kerry Michael Wood is a retired English teacher and textbook author currently devoting himself to free-lance writing. The article above can be found with slight changes in his memoir, "Past Imperfect, Present Progressive," a gallimaufry of reminiscensces by a vocal memmber of the Silent Generation. The memoir traces his childhood during the late Depression and World War II to adulthood and seniority, in stories and poems born of experiences as a four-year-old consigned to a military boarding school, an awkward adolescent, an undergrduate at Yale, and a career high-schoo lteacher. Enjoy moments of melancholy punctuating a lifetime of exuberant playfulness, in such unlikely areas as Shakespearean tragedy, English grammar, prosody, Scrabble, s

Diary of a Stroke

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0400

thursday i am home after three days and two nights in the hospital. my right arm is working at about 15 percent capacity after my suffering a stroke monday night. that explains the absence of capital letters. remember the lives and times of archy and mehitabel by don marquis? you will understand why i identify with the cockroach archy, who typed on marquis's newsroom typewriter at night by hopping from key to key but of course was unable to operate the shift key. thus no words were capitalized in archy's writings. i am typing with my left hand only and thus have archy's restriction to lower-case letters. since i'm working on a computer and not a typewriter, apostrophes are available to me, though they weren't to archy. a literary cockroach, c'est moi. Friday Progress! I can peck with the index finger of my right hand, so the shift key is within my command. Adopting the positive attitude that doctors, nurses and therapists have been prescribing, I now think of my little ischemic stroke as an incident of growth. My right leg and arm are suddenly about three inches longer than before. **End Summary** Topics: stroke]]>]]> About the Author: ]]> Kerry Wood is a retired English teacher, textbook author, and award-winning poet. His memoi-- Past Imperfect, Present Progressive-- is a smorgasbord of reflections on his early life, education and profession contained in stories, poems, and correspondence. He begins with recollections of being consigned to a Catholic military boarding school at the tender age of four in 1942 and spending his academic years there until 1946 and the end of WWII. Writes one reviewer: "The hats Kerry Wood has worn are multifarious and variegated: Russian translator, secondary teacher of English in Turkey and California, world traveler, sports aficionado, editor of literature anthologies, amateur poet and essayist, stroke survivor, devoted husband and father. Th