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Come on in! The Morris Recreation center is fine.

The staff of the Jerry D. Morris Recreation Center welcomed students back to classes with a grand opening celebration, including a free swim, Aug. 28. See more about the luau-style fun on page 6.

A&M-C decides against tuition hike for January

Tuition increased $5 per semester hour this fall at A&M-Commerce, but unlike several other colleges and universities in the state, the University will not raise tuition rates again in January.
The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents met in Commerce July 24-25, when they approved requests by several A&M System universities to increase tuition effective in January.
A&M-Commerce did not request such an increase.
Reduced state appropriations and the recent deregulation of tuition are resulting in a number of institutions raising their tuition.
President Keith McFarland said, “I realize deregulation gives us the authority to drastically increase tuition, but we will not do so because it would deny opportunity to a number of our students.”
A majority of A&M-Commerce students have to work while going to school, he said, and University administrators do not intend to jeopardize these students’ plans to earn college diplomas with big increases in tuition and fees.

No rhyme, no reason, no problem for this Lone

There are a few things you’ll want to know
about Cleatus Rattan. He loves his family. Once upon a time
he was a real cowboy. He still is a real rancher.
He was a United States Marine. He still loves the Corps.
He signs everything, even the shortest of e-mails, “Love, Cleatus.”
He’s earned five degrees, one of them—a doctorate, here in 1985.
He also is the 2004 Poet Laureate for the great state of Texas.

In a recent interview with the Dallas Observer, Cleatus said the follow- ing about having earned five degrees: “I don’t consider myself well educated, but I am frequently educated.”
He teaches at a junior college in Cisco, Texas, which is about twice as far southwest of Fort Worth as Commerce is northeast. One day, after hearing about a class here where he could learn timing and plot in the novel, he decided to traverse that great distance on a weekly basis. Eventually he took a yearlong leave from his work in Cisco to stay in Commerce and earn his doctorate. “I loved Commerce and ET immediately,” he said.
Though he often answers questions about his poetry with an honest “I don’t know,” it’s clear his creativity doesn’t suffer from the lack of conscious understanding. Cleatus himself seems to revel in the mystery, yet he’s obliging enough that even a casual e-mail Q&A is able to reveal a little more about this Alumnus Laureate.

You’ve said you started writing poetry after attending a reading by Jack Myers, who happens to be Texas’ current Poet Laureate. What exactly happened at that reading of his to cause you to try your hand at poetry?
          I’m not sure what happened, but it was something mysterious. Poetry is a mystery. Many books on poetics are written each year, and all of them are attempts to answer the question of the magic. Most of us who write and read such books do so to help answer the question of this mystery, but I am not sure what happened, except that I came away from the reading by Jack wanting to try to do that. I already had an MA in English, and I thought I knew something about the subject, but I had much more to learn. I think that now I try to write poetry, sometimes do, sometimes don’t succeed, in order to have a moment of order in an otherwise chaotic universe. I get to play God and create my own little island of sense, which I can sometimes transmit. And the bonus, of course, is that I fend off my own anxieties and depressions that I am often subjected to.

A cowboy poet. Now that’s a well-accepted romantic combination. What’s the common denominator in a United States Marine and a Poet Laureate?
          I have little idea about the Marine Corps either. I only know that I loved the Marine Corps. If I had two lives, I would have lived the second one in the Corps. Something about the life had a strong pull on me. One’s daily reminder that he is proud of physical accomplishments has something to do with life in the Corps, and the order helped me to fight off the daemons of anxiety and depression that poets are given to. You know that poets have what seems to be an occupational hazard of suicide, but it’s not the poetry. As I am recently given to understand by my Ph.D. in clinical psychology son, the area of the brain that is creative is also the same area that is given—a strange and questionable word—given, to anxiety.

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