Lucius Cornelius Prissywig

Doing a unit on poetry in Comp II, and tomorrow we'll cover allusion and parody. I have some good examples of parody written by former students, e.g. "After great meals, a gassy feeling comes --", and I found something called the Poet Name Generator while looking for other parodies on the Internet. The Poet Name Generator seems to adhere to cultural assumptions about the abstruseness and effeteness of poets and poetry, but it is amusing nonetheless. My poet name is Forsythia Picklesouse. Lucius Cornelius Prissywig is my brother. Find your own poet name here.

In other news, had interesting discussions about Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" with both Comp II sections yesterday. Sexual imagery made UC Davis students uncomfortable; my spring ENL 3 class wouldn't touch the lines "How do they come to the / come to the come to the God /come to the /still waters, and not love / the one who came there with them" in Sharon Olds' "Sex Without Love." So I acted it out to break the ice. While my advisor was observing the class. I'm teaching a lot of the same texts in Oklahoma, and I wondered how students here would take them.

Things were a little weird at first, but everyone seems on board now. When I asked about the word "vegetable" in Marvell's lines "My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow," one student yelled "Boner!" Personally, "vegetable love" has always made me think of kudzu, but I guess boners work too.