Michael Agar
Ethknoworks LLC
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I still like the earlier poem and leave it below this one. But "The Country" made me laugh, because since we turned our little plot of desert into a truck stop for every animal around, sometimes there's too many mice and I have to get rid of them. Since the house is run by a vegetarian dictator they have to be caught and released in the north forty rather than killed. My theory is that they just consider this a minor inconvenience and wander back to the house. Besides, the poem for some reasons reminds me of writing a book.
The Country
by Billy Collins I wondered about you when you told me never to leave a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches lying around the house because the mice might get into them and start a fire. But your face was absolutely straight when you twisted the lid down on the round tin where the matches, you said, are always stowed. Who could sleep that night? Who could whisk away the thought of the one unlikely mouse padding along a cold water pipe behind the floral wallpaper gripping a single wooden match between the needles of his teeth? Who could not see him rounding a corner, the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam, the sudden flare, and the creature for one bright, shining moment suddenly thrust ahead of his time— now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid illuminating some ancient night. Who could fail to notice, lit up in the blazing insulation, the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants of what once was your house in the country? Here's another poem by Wendell Berry that made me laugh about delusions of "objectivity."
The Vacation Once there was a man who filmed his vacation. He went flying down the river in his boat with his video camera to his eye, making a moving picture of the moving river upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly toward the end of his vacation. He showed his vacation to his camera, which pictured it, preserving it forever: the river, the trees, the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat behind which he stood with his camera preserving his vacation even as he was having it so that after he had had it he would still have it. It would be there. With a flick of a switch, there it would be. But he would not be in it. He would never be in it. American Life in Poetry: Column 162 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006 Though at the time it may not occur to us to call it "mentoring," there's likely to be a good deal of that sort of thing going on, wanted or unwanted, whenever a young person works for someone older. Richard Hoffman of Massachusetts does a good job of portraying one of those teaching moments in this poem. Summer Job "The trouble with intellectuals," Manny, my boss, once told me, "is that they don't know nothing till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that," he said, "he gets to middle age--and by the way, he gets there late; he's trying to be a boy until he's forty, forty-five, and then you give him five more years until that craziness peters out, and now he's almost fifty--a guy like that at last explains to himself that life is made of time, that time is what it's all about. Aha! he says. And then he either blows his brains out, gets religion, or settles down to some major-league depression. Make yourself useful. Hand me that three-eights torque wrench--no, you moron, the other one." American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2006 by Richard Hoffman, and reprinted from his most recent book of poetry, "Gold Star Road," Barrow Street Press, 2007, by permission of the poet. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. |
BiographyMichael Agar received his undergraduate degree from Stanford and his Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology from the Language-Behavior Research Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. An honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellow, NIH Career Award recipient, and former Fulbright Senior Specialist, he is professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park, with adjunct appointments in Speech Communication and Comparative Literature, as well as an associate at Antropocaos at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. He was recently appointed Distinguished Scholar at the International Institute of Qualitative Methods at the University of Alberta and Research Professor in Biology at the University of New Mexico. He works independently as Ethknoworks LLC in northern New Mexico with the title of "Chief Paradigm Mechanic." Ethknoworks centers on research, writing and consultation around issues in ethnography, language, complexity theory, and the organization from both theoretical and practical points of view. Kurt Lewin provides the motto: There is nothing as practical as a good theory. He has also worked with the Redfish Group in Santa Fe (www.redfish.com), particularly around the application of a blend of ethnography and computer visualization called "OrgViz," short for "making the organization visible. His past appointments include research positions with public health agencies in Kentucky and New York as well as university positions at the Universities of Hawaii, Houston, and California in the U.S., and visits with the Universities of Mysore in India, Surrey in the U.K., and Vienna and the Johannes Kepler University in Austria. Publications include articles in journals from the fields of anthropology, linguistics, folklore and oral history, sociology, organization research, psychology, psychiatry, public policy, artificial intelligence, complexity, intercultural communication, and the substance use and transportation fields. He has also written for general magazines like Smithsonian and done op-ed pieces for various newspapers. His books include Ripping and Running, The Professional Stranger, Angel Dust, Speaking of Ethnography, Independents Declared, and Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation. A recent book, a policy critique based on his decades in the drug field, is Dope Double Agent: The Naked Emperor on Drugs. At present he is completing a book called The Lively Science, an accessible description of the historical roots and modern logic of a style of human social research closer to intentionality and lived experience of the human subjects who are the point of it all. Copies of the first chapter of the latter two books are downloadable on his web page. In 2006 he finished work as principal investigator on a seven year NIH project to explain illicit drug epidemics. He also conducts introductory and advanced workshops on qualitative research and complexity theory and consults on the use of those methods in diverse project applications. For several years the use of complexity theory to reformulate social service organizations occupied his time and interest. Projects now underway include water policy in New Mexico, artificial intelligence applications to intercultural communication, and agent based modeling of clinical practice. He hopes to develop applications for ESL in the near future. He is a member of several editorial boards and has served on numerous research advisory committees. In 2004 he was presented with the Leadership Award in Qualitative Inquiry by the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology. |
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