Danny from 2017: As the culminating assignment for Descents into the Underworld, a seminar exploring depictions of the underworld and afterlife across cultures and literature, I had the option to write a short story rather than a research report, so long as I faithfully incorporated as many elements of the course material as possible.

So, I did that!  As my completed, non-poetic works go, this is both rare in general and something I’m still proud of at the time of this writing.

Danny from 2017: The Electric Smock Cycle (of two poems, alas) was born as a dare on the late-night Ontario Northlander train from Toronto to North Bay.  I found myself sitting across from another Nipissing student, and while comparing programs, he learned that I was struggling with a poetry assignment that I hoped to complete during the journey.  He immediately suggested I write about a smock that kills people.

“Like, the kind of smock you wear?”

“Yeah!”

How does a smock kill people?  Lethal static electric discharge, it turns out.

I loved this monstrous thing, and expanded the exercise into my final assignment for Creative Writing: Poetry.  My ultimate goal was to write additional components of the cycle as parodies of established genres – the long poem that follows the shorter exercise in this document was inspired by the pastoral, “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love” by Christopher Marlowe – I foundered after a few lines of something hideous inspired by “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in which a Small Moose Named Harold (the protagonist of my high school epic) would do mortal battle with and vanquish the grisly garment.

As yet, the Smock remains at large.

Danny from 2017: This poem was written as an exercise after studying Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” Our goal was to mimic the gradual revelation of an untrustworthy narrator, and my roommate suggested the image of a deranged scientist lecturing a room of corpses who had died by his hand.  While writing this – particularly after transposing it into a school setting – I wondered vaguely if the subject matter would injure my aspirations of classroom teaching.

So far, so good, but I’m not famous yet…

Danny from 2017: I came to Poe’s “The Raven” much later than most folks working on an English degree, but when I did, I was freshly full of poetic device lore, thanks to the metrical focus of John Kooistra’s poetry class, and of a scatological inclination thanks to recent coverage of Jonathan Swift in my English Literature course.2(Convolving a poor dietary decision the week before, as has been widely guessed by my adoring fans and concerned friends…)  The effect, in that frame of mind, was almost tangibly inspiring – it made me breathe deeper, it flooded my mind with fragments of experimental verse, and by the time I had walked home that afternoon, Edgar’s Evasive Evacuation’s first two couplets had essentially coalesced.  Over the following week, I was obsessed and productive as I had never been until that point; the poem below was the product.

Danny from 2017: As part of my Creative Writing: Prose course, this assignment was to write the world from a non-human point of view, particularly as seen from a mundane object.  I think the endless, iambic sentence was meant to represent the unblinking stare of my chosen perspective, and scans like a poem rather than the assigned prose form.

Reading this out loud is very difficult.