Half Starts and Trail Offs

Empty bottles and rush hour traffic: Kopelke and Matanle

Apr 20

MeredithPoetry, Reading, Writing 1 Comment

I have been fortunate in my time at the University of Baltimore to have some wonderful teachers who helped guide me in shaping my writing and developing my voice. One of the greatest things about this program is that it encourages its students to play-work, or plork, as we like to call it, and try new things to stretch our imaginations and our writing so that we can grow in our craft. And that same willingness to experiment and explore is evident in the faculty. Today I want to share the writing of Kendra Kopelke and Steve Matanle with you.

Kendra Kopelke

Kendra is a poet willing to tackle any subject, and I have seen her poems range from reflections on life-changing surgeries to explorations of the paintings of Edward Hopper. As a teacher she has an uncanny ability to give her students what they need. I know that in this last semester she has been invaluable to my efforts with my thesis, by turns encouraging, listening, and cheering me on. And when I read her poetry, I can see her, the Kendra-ness, come through. She has a clarity of language that I envy, a way of saying what needs to be said but in a beautiful way that pushes you to read on. Here’s an excerpt from one of her poems. Read it (and a couple others) in its entirety here.

I am one week post-op and sitting beside
a window that plays nothing but steamy
rush hour traffic, a sky hovering like a foul odor,
and for starters I count thirteen black
electric wires crisscrossing the street, a portrait
of the intensity and congestion that dogs old Baltimore.

~from “Pissaro’s Pontoise Post-Op”

Steve Matanle

Steve is a quiet, unassuming man who challenges his students, pushing them to take their writing further than they might think possible. He was the first teacher who asked me and my classmates the question, “Should we revise our poetry?” He wasn’t urging us to think one way or another, just inviting us to actually think about this thing we’ve always been told to do; to consider what it means and make the decision for ourselves. And his writing has a raw, honest quality about it that leaves the reader feeling like they’ve been there, standing next to the speaker. I love its plain-spoken elegance, the way a trip to the laundromat or the tiny bell above a shop door become things of beauty. I particularly enjoy this poem, which you can read in its entirety here.

. . . Our life sounded like someone
blowing into an empty bottle, although once in a while
it sounded like music, hollow ballads of love and estrangement.
Sometimes we would go to the Laundromat at night
and dump our clothes in a couple of washing machines, then go
down the street to a bar and forget about them, returning later to find
the damp tangled clothes piled on a folding table.

~from “Just This”

I’ll end with a question for my readers. We’ve all had teachers who have changed how we think or how we do things (and I’m not just talking about writing here). Which teachers stick out in your memory, and what did they do or say to make you change your way of doing things?