Where Have You Been?

I haven't updated my blog in a while. And now I am back again. So, where have you been, Peter-o?

For the past few years, I was a busy, busy boy working full-time, followed by a somewhat lazy-boy.

From 2008-2011, I worked as a tutor and then a teacher's assistant at John Muir Charter School, on the site of San Jose Job Corps Center (SJJC). It was a great job! I worked mostly teaching Algebra I, and preparing the students to pass the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE). I also worked with the staff of the Nevada County Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA) to ensure that the necessary subset of our students had their Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) or Section 504 plans up-to-date and reviewed, ensuring they qualified for the new exemption to the CAHSEE under California law. It was the kind of work that made a profound difference in the lives of many at-risk young men and women.
 
However, in June 2011, I was let go due to a decision made by Muir to ensure all their teachers at the site had K-12 Single Subject Secondary Education credentials. Since my credential is in Adult Education (not K-12), it meant the end of the line for me. Now, almost a year later, I look back at it as a wonderful experience that I dearly miss. I hope that everyone at the Muir site, indeed, the whole the Job Corps Center are doing great this year! I miss all the teachers and students there.

Since then, I have been doing personal tutoring. I had a wonderful opportunity over the summer to act as a docent and English tutor for a visiting foreign exchange student from France. More recently, I have been doing tutoring in AP US History, English, and Geometry for Los Gatos high school students through TeamUp! Tutors. And I've also snuck in some private consulting for a creative principal in the movie/animation industry.

For those familiar with my work and efforts of recent years, most of those initiatives are on hold: Flowers in the Cracks, the Global Understanding Institute, and many other wonderful ideas just tailed away into silence, or were shelved due to circumstances. I reserve the right to revive them at any time, but for now, they are sleeping dreams. There are other ideas I have percolating, but it is not yet time to mention them.

But one thing I can talk about is my new web site: petercorless.com. I've just begun to flesh it out. With the recent changes in policy now allowing Californians to again be part of the program, I've rejoined as an Amazon.com affiliate. So I started putting links back to the old Green Knight Publishing products. Expect that to flesh out over time. And also expect to see more links from me under an Arthuriana topic, and eventually a section for history, etc.

Happy Birthday Jackson

Hey, Jackson Pollock.
Why did you break the rules
Making painters’ tarpaulins
The ideal of modern fine art?

Now it was impossible
To draw a good foot
For Mrs. Darvin
And be taken seriously.

Ah well, thanks too, you know.
For showing that the raw energy
Of creative expression
Is what people value most.

Like atomic explosions
Genetic recombination of photons
Even before Watson & Crick
Spoke the laws of biochemistry.

Somewhere in the recesses
Of my Colliers apartment
Is my own Art Students League medal
As meaningful to me as the Nobel prize.

During Odysseus’ voyage, the WPA
Gave you each day your daily bread
While each night you drank it away
Into the oblivion of Depression

Rising up on the engines of Jung
Borne aloft by an angel camouflaged
With nose art of mad dribbling paint
Guernica cried out, and then the world

That was when you threw book at the floor
“God damn it, that guy missed nothing!”
Yet life was not escaping you either
Except through methyl and methylene fumes

Probably sufficient to make first dance forgettable
But a knock on the door
Re-introduced you to romance of the sort
That only from death do-you-finally-part

Blitzkriegs shattered Europe and Asia
Yet all the while you two remained a neutral power
Until the fateful explosion of Oppenheimer
Ended the war, even on Long Island.

There in October, the Bessarabian and you
Began a resistance and revolution of your own
Three years after the wartime exhibit
Had made you and Lee Bohemian comrades-in-arts

Get rid of the labels
Get rid of the titles
Get rid of the intentions
Just look and let the image emerge

Get rid of the demons
Get rid of the bottles
Get rid of the cigarettes
That’s where we aesthetically diverge

Hey, Jackson Pollack
You had it all before you
At the age of forty-four
When you got into the Olds

Ruth’s Zowie and Metzger
Didn’t know what hit them
Neither did you
When your own painting stopped

Spattering yourself on time’s tragic canvas
Discovering incidental causality of a tree by the road
Departed at forty four by eight-eleven fifty six
Leaving shocked Lee in the proverbial lurch

Now I’m forty four and reflecting on you
Raising an ice tea in a toast of your life
Hoping there’s peace in the place where you’ve gone
Pondering abstractions of form on this Earth.

The light is remarkable outside the clear glass
Sitting amongst beauty and café conversation
A tree black and brown in the corner of view
Reminds me of organic chaos with a pattern implicit.

Horus’ eye gazes blinding eternal
From the hat off my head on my bag on the table
You broke the priest’s hieroglyphs
And paid the price of heresy.

Hey, Jackson Pollock
Thanks for the alchemical madness
That shattered expectations
And made people finally think

For themselves.