Thank you to Tris Hussey who is going to help my old friend Jerry re: the process of hooking his Honors class up with what they need to blog. Tris wants me to donate the $10 to my library instead of giving him the amazon gift certificate. He's a gooood egg.
I have also forwarded on all the links you left in comments for the class's learning pleasure. PLEASE feel free to leave more links, wit, and wisdom on edublogging and the like. Lemur, your call was essentially essential as well. And. You. Know. What. I. Mean.
I thought I should toss a word in about who Jerry is, especially since some, okay quite a few, of you have inquired in the past where how i got that poetress thing down so good. The wounds were there for the opening, let's say. Mr. McCarthy was my modern poetry teacher while I was a college junior and senior at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, 1982-84. I would like to tell you that he made loss less scary for me, but I think the opposite is true. In the end, the mashup of voice+terror was a good thing for me, because there was no way out but through.
Most of Jerry's poetry and fiction lives in Real. Paper. Books. But I did hunt around for some stuff onlilne:
SPRING EQUINOX 2005 (or The New War Dead)
The End of the World, Etc.
On a Line by Li Po
essay: The Caged Bird
And, more:
Gerald McCarthy as born in Endicott, New York of an Italian mother and Irish father. When he was seventeen, he enlisted in the Marines and was sent to Vietnam. He unloaded cargo from ships for two months at FLSG-Bravo with the 1st Marines and then was transferred to the 1st Combat Engineer Battalion in Chu Lai and then Danang. After his return from Vietnam, he deserted and spent time in military prison. Upon his discharge he worked as a stonecutter, concrete finisher and shoe factory worker before attending The Writers Workshop at The University of Iowa. He is the author of War Story (The Crossing Press) and Shoetown (Cloverdale Library). A recipient of awards from the National Writers Union and The New York State Council on the Arts; his poetry, fiction and criticism have appeared in New Letters, TriQuarterly, America, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ohio Review, Rattle, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, Nimrod, Carrying the Darkness, From Both Sides Now, A New Geography of Poets, Unaccustomed Mercy: Soldier Poets of The Vietnam War, Asheville Poetry Review and other magazines & anthologies. Active in Vets for Peace and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he has twice been a visiting artist at The American Academy in Rome and has taught workshops in schools, colleges, migrant labor camps, and Attica Prison. Currently Professor of English at St. Thomas Aquinas College, he lives with his wife Michele and their three sons in Nyack, New York.
Tags: Gerald McCarthy, Shoetown, War Story, Poetry, Blogging, Edublogging, Friend = Powered by Qumana
