Michael Martone

@SusanSNeville Billowing.

@jacksonbliss @NotreDame I still have quite a backlog. I need to get a smart phone. Alas, my phone's so dumb. I hope that water was magical!

Scattered, yes, randomly by the pond. One or two or more phones strike up a ribbit. Ribbit. Ribbit. The phones transmit a workshop of frogs.

One last thing I ask once they've shared their texts. I ask they turn their phones to vibrate, set at eleven, while we contemplate the pond.

They read the missives. Their recipients. Think of the someone, somewhere whose phone alerts just now, like that, unwraps a knotted nothing.

No matter where they send, I am amazed. I am amazed. I tell that that, I am. You wrote something like that, and there it is there like that.

And now they read their work, but tell me where the message went. "To my brother in Oregon." "Oregon!" I shout, reminding them to be amazed.

There's a murmuration of whooshes as their texts launch. The texts infiltrate the electromagnet porridge, a kind of slurp, a splash, a hush.

They consider such compositions "random." This is all very random. Yes, exactly. We're looking for the meaningful composition of the random.

I ask them to turn the volume up. I want to hear the whoosh the machine makes as the message goes. We've talked about Hermes. Here's Hermes.

Leap a leap, I say to them, and they heave to. They are coiled on the bank like students about to strike. Their thumbs skate like waterbugs.

In short, text, but text differently. Think of it as a gift. A sudden emergence in that someone's phone, a startled passenger on a lily pad.

"Make nothing happen." It's a double-take the writer takes. The ply, play. The slipperiness of language, its amphibian nature. Its bothness.

Watching the pond's ripples dissipate, I ask the writers to imagine someone somewhere, bored, distracted. Now, now text something, nothing.

The university advertises itself: Alabama touching lives. The visual? A student's face lights up, enlightenment radiates outward into space.

The pond once was the college pool. A hidden pump agitates the surface in ripples. A frog does jump, disrupting the disruption's disruption.

They're shy. Why is this one of the most famous poems in the world? We talk about the sudden turn. The way sight is swallowed up by a sound.

There's an old pond nearby. I have the students search for Basho's haiku. old pond / frog jump into / watersound floats up on their screens.

The campus is filled with faux classical temples capped with ever order of capital, cupola, and metope, But here, this modest culvert means.

This building has bona fides. This particular hut is historic. It's the last of a slew thrown up post-war to house the returning GI Billers.