<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><blockquote type="cite"><div>I strongly recommend you all come to this if possible. I went to Renato's reading yesterday, and he's terrific.<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div>Robin</div><div><br></div><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div><br>--------------------<br>Subject: <b>Last chance to hear Renato Rosaldo: "How Poetry Chose Me" @ CHASS INTS 1109 @ UC Riverside!<br></b><br>Come hear more about Renato Rosaldo's process as a poet:<br><br>A little taste from "How I Write":<br>(<a href="http://www.facebook.com/l/ae318;www.stanford.edu/group/howiwrite/Transcripts/Rosaldo_transcript.html for the entire interview">http://www.facebook.com/l/ae318;www.stanford.edu/group/howiwrite/Transcripts/Rosaldo_transcript.html for the entire interview</a>)<br><br>"What happened was September 26, 1996 I suffered a stroke, and within—I’d like to think within a week, but it must have been a little bit longer than that—within a short time, a couple of weeks, poems started coming to me and I was sitting there and these lines would start coming to me. I didn’t know exactly what they were and so what I started doing was I started writing them down because I thought I should do that. And I started doing paintings with every poem that would come to me and I was just loving these things that would come to me, I was cherishing them. And I was hearing from people that not only would I have to do physical therapy, I’d have to do cognitive therapy, and I thought, “Well, a poem, that’s something I’ve never done before.” I had never written poetry before. I’d written a lot of prose with a lot of attention to writing, so I thought of myself as a writer and a teacher, rarely as an administrator, a writer and a teacher. It had occurred to me to try to write a novel or a short story, but I’d never done it because it was too much like writing ethnography, the creative nonfiction I was writing, or whatever you call it. On my 40 th birthday I started painting and drawing. And I remember my first class where they showed us a grapefruit and I drew a circle. But I had loved to draw when I was a kid and so I would just get completely absorbed in this. And so I worked at that for quite some time—since I was 40.<br><br>But the last thing I expected to do was for poems to start coming to me. It was not out of my slate of ambitions, it was just something that happened to me. I don’t think I sort of said set out to always want to write that artificial stuff nobody could understand. I never thought that. So, as I began healing my fantasy was that I would write a book of poems called “Healing Songs.” Because I saw the poetry as healing, deeply healing for me, and it was just brightening my day. Even now I think I’ve become addicted to writing poetry. And what I’ve found is I can’t stop, and when I don't write, my day is grayer. I wouldn’t say the old functionalists in anthropology said, “If you don’t do it, the whole machine will break down”: the world just gets grayer, it just gets grayer."<br>--------------------<br><br>To reply to this message, follow the link below:<br><a href="http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox%2Freadmessage.php&t=1145398750938&mid=153b1e9G2be977adG2f75409G0">http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox%2Freadmessage.php&t=1145398750938&mid=153b1e9G2be977adG2f75409G0</a><br><br></div></blockquote></div><br></body></html>