Ecstatic Doggerel

The Gift That Keeps On Creeping

2011-12-31T10:53:00.009-05:00

I don't know how it became a holiday tradition to give friends an amaryllis bulb. Maybe it's something about the red flowers. Maybe it's the idea of having something that will bloom in the new year, or the fact that the flower vaguely resembles a seraphic trumpet when it blooms. The Wise Men could have brought the Christ child an amaryllis. I mean, seriously -- it would have been less creepy than myrrh, which was used for mummification and embalming. "Hey kid, welcome! You're going to die a horrible death some day, so we thought we'd bring you some supplies for that." Try bringing myrrh to a baby shower these days and see how that goes for you.

As far as amaryllis goes, I do know that when we got the traditional Christmas bulb gift a few years ago and I kept the pot in our bedroom, the thing gave me the freakin' creeps. For weeks it did nothing, and then all of a sudden, it came out. It seemed much more animal than vegetable, and because my side of the bed is near the sunniest window, it turned toward me as it grew. I would wake up in the morning and the thing would be looking at me in a way I did not much like.

Here's hoping that your 2012 blooms (literal and figurative) do not attack you while you sleep. Happy new year, all!

***

The Amaryllis

It was a gift; there seemed an obligation.
I followed the instructions on the box:
I palmed the hairy knob and buried it,
then waited for it to rise from the dead.

It seemed, at first, merely cheeky:

a thin green tongue stuck out at us.

But a day later, a snake emerged from the pot.
It rose straight up, a sinew with no bone;

it grew during the night, as though light
were irrelevant.

It turned its head
XXXXXto watch us sleep.
XXXXXXXXXIts tip grew thick
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXand split

into pursed pink lips that flushed
aroused red and parted at the corner.

Two clenched pinchers
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXflared open,
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXa lobster skewered on a baton.

Now it leans toward us in the dark, thrumming inches from my feet.

Each night it draws itself out of the soil

to creep on roots
to sway beside our bed.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXIts ragged mouths are eager to be friends.

Painting Up a Storm

2011-12-04T15:58:00.007-05:00

I've been overwhelmed with writing for work and therefore in more of a painting zone lately, though I'm working on some fiction projects. I find art can be a great escape from the verbal; the painting above is a gouache and ink rendering of fiddlehead ferns.

Check out some more of my work on Etsy.

The Thief We Can't Prepare For

2011-10-29T12:23:00.011-04:00

A friend and colleague died unexpectedly this week, a kind and funny woman who’d dedicated her life to helping animals (even those usually forgotten, like rats and possums and baby vultures).

It’s left a hole in our office that no one was prepared for. It’s also been a reminder of how such a thing brings out people’s kindness. I suspect many people are surrounded by more goodness than they realize, yet I do feel like my office is probably sweeter than most. Maybe it's due to the nature of the work.

I’ve been reading Jane Hirshfield’s latest book recently, Come, Thief, and it couldn’t have been more timely. Hirshfield’s one of my favorite living poets; her work has a calmness and a depth that leaves me feeling rejuvenated every time I read it. I am a person who has a very hard time slowing my mind down, something I notice daily but especially whenever I’ve tried to meditate; it just doesn’t happen. I try to make my mind a calm blank page, but a thousand little thoughts creep in at the edges. Reading Hirshfield—a practicing Zen Buddhist—is about as close as I can come to stilling the hamster wheel in my head. Even her voice is calm (to hear it, check out the lovely interview my friend Adam recently did with Hirshfield. It’s at the bottom of this page.)

The loss of our friend this week had me going back to Hirshfield’s The Lives of the Heart, which has so many beautiful small moments it’s difficult to tally them. They returned to me this week not only because the poems are full of mortality, but because they are also full of animals—horses, foxes, cats, birds. In thinking about my colleague—and her husband, a dear friend—many of them have risen in my head:

Walk slowly now, small soul, by the edge/ of the water. Choose carefully/ all you are going to lose, though any of it would do.
(“On the Beach”)

These lines acknowledge, simultaneously, the importance of choosing what will be central to your life, and the fact that all of it will be lost. A nihilist might look at the latter truth and say it makes the first meaningless, but not here: “choosing carefully” still matters, even though everything chosen will vanish.

In Hirshfield’s newer book, "Contentment," a poem about looking after a collection of satisfied hens—and one who’s not yet ready to return to the roost—struck me as an experience that Sue would have loved, tending as she often did to a menagerie of rescued creatures. But it’s this poem that really made me (to paraphrase William Stafford) think hard for us all.

Thank you for the comfort, Jane. And thank you, Sue, for all you did for people and other animals.

The Promise

Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.

Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.

In Memory

2011-09-11T13:44:00.005-04:00

SEPTEMBER

I. First Leaves

Outside was the whole world:
There were the first leaves, turning;
the coffee shop; the office parking lot, half full—
I was earlier than usual, and as I turned the car off,

the last chirrup of radio:
There is word a plane has collided—

Inside, the halls were formless,
the nameplates bore no letters.

We saw Pakistan for the first time:
the news kept cutting to a woman
ululating celebration.
We had never noticed her before;

we thought we were flying to San Francisco,

we had poppies in our hair,

we had warmed our lips with lattes,

we had names and shoes and outside
was autumn, the first leaves turning

in the trees: our dim acquaintance with fire.

II. Leonids

They were supposed to infuse the sky with light,
transfix our eyes with a radiance so vast
it might roar, like Christ come back as lion—

At three I left the city to see the sky
unstained by unbuilding,
past layers of dust, past tourists who’d come to stare.

In the park, cars had gathered; headlights
shone through exhaust, fog had fallen.

All around strangers moved through the dark,
craning our necks toward the sky
we hoped would come through,

give us something grand to hook our hopes to—

but when the meteors fell it was in silence,
their trails slight as scraping claws
of a hungry stray locked just beyond the door.

III. Lobby

The high window springs a leak of light
past the flags, across the marble floor,
washing the branded lobby,
spangling the eyes of the desk clerks,
the tender at the empty bar.

No one’s flying now.
The charred hull lies only a mile away;
the locals are drinking at home, their eyes
bound to their televisions.
Late afternoon, mid autumn, but the heat is stifling,

and there’s a bride coming in the sliding door.
Her dress is dirty at the hem,
her makeup creasing beneath
her eyes—still,
the staff around the lobby glance up,
then stare, when she appears.

Transfigured by the sunlight through the glass,
which, fixed in time, seems more fire than light,

she is, in the precision and toil of her finery,
so common even now,
that if the hotel staff lose their breath a moment

it is not beauty that pulls it from their lungs,
but this moment of the ordinary resuming,
the needle set back to the groove
where music stopped.

It is simply out of amazement
that people still
do this thing, this way—

the plans, the hoist of girders’ order and design,
the gravity and balance required to rivet

one life to another until two
share a single silhouette,
visible from afar on any clear, bright morning.

The World According to Martha

2011-09-07T21:00:00.012-04:00

Reading Russell McLendon's recent piece about the anniversary of the death of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, made me think about animal histories. I had been thinking about the way humans consider their past--issues of inheritance, family ties, legacies that are passed down through generations, and how those are both good and bad for people. How there are things our ancestors did that we're still on the hook for; things our ancestors suffered that still ripple out into our own lives. The way that people born to a place feel connected to it and will defend it, and how animals are (at least in theory) separated from that kind of thinking.

People have whole stories of how they belong in a place and how it belongs to them, a version of history that adds up to an explanation of how we came to be where we are, and often a story of why we control what we do.

When you visit the Alhambra in Granada, for example, or the cathedral in Seville, you're walking through spaces that have been Christian and Muslim and Christian and Muslim for centuries, based on the battles for control that went on there. The bell tower in the Seville cathedral, La Giralda, used to be a minaret. So much of the architecture is like that, a sort of structural palimpsest on which one thing was written and then written over and then written over again, but pieces of the original thing still show through.

While I was at the Alhambra years ago, I noticed not just the architecture, but the swallows who were flying in and out of one of the main courtyards, swooping for bugs, occasionally dipping into one of the fountains. It made me think about their ancestors: Had this swallow's family lived here for long? Did this line of birds go back centuries, so that their great-great-great-great grandfathers might have witnessed the fights between religious devotees, each trying to claim the land for their own vision?

And if animals were inclined to record their history in the same way we keep track of ours--the wars, the treaties, the grudges that are held and echo for centuries--what might they have to say about the primates who left the animal kingdom and became something else?

(I should note that I'm actually a dog lover, but that the parasitical nature of our favorite slobbering companions has always made me wonder how other animals perceive them--whether they're considered the Benedict Arnolds of the wild kingdom. And also that the thing I liked best about the process of writing this poem was discovering that a group of apes is called a "shrewdness"--probably the best herd term ever.)

THE HISTORY OF ANIMALS

The Plains Treaty settled the debate
between lions and gazelles:
who would pursue, who would fall and be torn.
Lemmings scuttled the tundra at regular intervals;
birds V-ed back and forth,

and one year a shrewdness of apes in the hills
went bald and began
to spend days on the ground,
knocking flint against flint and avoiding the rain.

But no one thought much of it:

the giraffe’s neck stretched to reach acacia,
the finch’s beak narrowed for nectar;
such changes were the way of things.

It was only when the Consul of Macaws
returned from the Carolinas
to report the apes there
sporting hats made from parakeets
that unease
descended on the delegations.

Then the peppered moth arrived
draped in black that matched the ash
caking the trees of Manchester. Absenteeism increased:
the blaauwboks, the quaggas, the dodos
stopped showing up for annual meetings,

and the delegation of passenger pigeons
that had once blacked out the sky with its arrivals

dwindled to a single bird named Martha
who confessed she thought it best
to spend her remaining days
safe within the Cincinnati Zoo.

A gator reported he’d seen an ivory-bill
swooping around his swamp in Georgia
but no one really believed it;

and by then the floor was too busy debating
what should be done about the dogs.

Most agreed they should no longer
be allowed a vote:

Tails in the air,
they’d felt the way the wind was blowing
and in the Great Canine Turning
they’d hired themselves out as mercenaries:

a low growl at midnight,
a head raised under an empty palm
bought them their protection.

Because even after the bears vanished,

and the plains wolf disappeared,

the squirrels and spiders and deer required monitoring;

not to mention the masked raccoons,
edged out of the woods,
tackling porch-lit trash cans,

pulling open lids to scour the little left:
the bags, the slimy cans, the bones.

What We Talk About

2011-08-21T11:05:00.017-04:00

The nameable sources for this draft: a rather unusual sonnet by Ernest Hilbert, the work of Rene Magritte (most specifically, "The Treachery of Images"), and one of my favorite Paul Simon songs.

Treachery

This is not love. This is a picture of love. This is a picture of love that you will not recognize as what you’ve spoken of when you use the word love. This is love with sunburn, its eyes pained, smelling of aloe. This is love that goes away on business, and returns unexpectedly with a plastic toy shaped like the Eiffel Tower, a pair of mouse ears, and a $10 chip from a riverboat casino. Where has it been? Do not ask it any questions. It is tired from traveling. It has been looking for itself, but will not tell you what it found. It will not tell you why it went away, why it came back, or if it really came back or instead sent an emissary, a perfect doppelganger with lasers for eyes. Perhaps it is merely biding its time. Perhaps it is assessing your weaknesses. When it refers to itself, you won’t know what it means. It will say its name, Love, as though it wished it were named something else. Something simple, like Eddie. You thought you knew what it looked like, but there are new lines around its lips. Its eyelids are trapdoors you might drop through. It goes out the door in shirts you don’t recognize. It speaks a language that sounds like yours, but when it says candle it means burner. When it says now it means maybe. When it says hold me, it means careful. Draw your ideas cautiously. What we say is there only by mutual treaty. The sky has come into the room and is thinking up new kinds of clouds. The man has an apple in front of his face, but he will never be able to bite it. Rene and Georgette are walking their dog, the one who died years ago. The collar moves on above the sidewalk, turning now and then to catch the smell of smoke.

We Parse, Therefore We Is

2011-07-03T18:53:00.026-04:00

It's an old joke: What does the dyslexic agnostic think about when he lies awake at night? The existence of dog.

Without getting overshare-y, over the past months, I've had some major sources of worry. I've occasionally found myself talking to myself, arguing with myself. Sometimes out loud. (Usually not in public, though at least once or twice I've caught a stranger's eye and thought, whoops, another person who thinks I'm shellacking the waxed egg.) When I am struggling with a difficult question or decision, I often become two debate teams. I let them argue with each other, and see which side I end up believing.

This is not the same as prayer. Prayer is different, and as an agnostic and lapsed Catholic, it's not my typical mode of problem solving. But a few times in the past few months, I have also caught myself uttering, quietly, phrases that could be taken for prayer. As in, Please, great entity I'm not at all sure I believe in and usually pay no attention to, help me out with this one.

What I'd like, at such moments, is for the clouds to part, and a large mouth to appear and deliver instructions in a clear voice, preferably Samuel L. Jackson's. Thus far, that has never occurred. I'd conclude that the lack of a clear response is due to my own failures to attend to God on a day-to-day basis, but from what I understand, even those who pay a great deal of attention to God get some confusing messages. (Perhaps God needs to work on his penmanship.)

Sometimes, though, I worry that answers come, but I miss them. For example, a while back, I was sitting quietly on a rock in Great Falls Park during a moment of crisis and pain, when the word please formed in my brain. And as it formed, the nook of gray rocks across the Potomac, the exact spot my eyes had fallen upon, seemed to shift and blur and a heron flew out of them, the same color as the stones, and passed over my head.

So what was that, exactly? An answer? Or did that heron just randomly remember its manicure appointment?

I can never make up my mind about these things. I'm never able to believe they're really signs, but I'm also never able to believe they're entirely coincidence, either. I suffer from a more agnostic version of the illness that afflicts the son in Nabokov's brilliant "Symbols and Signs" (which seems to me the point of the story: all humans both suffer and benefit from our tendency to interpret the world).

Thinking about this issue reminded me of an old poem I wrote about dogs and their fear of mailmen, which has long seemed to me a decent metaphor for humanity's problem with God. Specifically: We sometimes sense there's something out there. It sticks notes through our door slot, but we can't read them because, well, we can't read. And our attempts to read them lead to, well, theories about intelligent design and, sometimes, mass suicides. Sometimes doubt itself seems to me like the best product of the mind -- the capacity to hold a thought or opinion and all the while also hold the thought: I may be wrong.

Then again, of course, maybe some of us read divine messages correctly. In which case, can I snag a spare key to your bunker sometime before October?

***

This poem was eaten by the dog.

Daddy Issues

2011-06-19T22:44:00.011-04:00

Happy Father's Day from Sylvia Plath and Robert Hayden, two poets who apparently had very different experiences with their paternal role models.

Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" has long made me think of my own father. It's the work ethic depicted in the piece, the quiet attention to duty that you don't always, as a kid, recognize as love.

Plath's, while I recognize its lacerating genius and amazing sonics, these days mostly makes me giggle. Terrible, but true. It's the hyberbole ... and the fact that it seems like an early example of all the arguments that inspired Godwin's Law.

Here's a lovely one from Li-Young Lee, to tip the balance toward the good, graceful, non-Hitler dads everywhere.

Camera Set to "Fabulous"

2011-06-13T10:17:00.005-04:00

This isn't at all writing related, but the Capital Pride parade was so much fun and so full of lovely little moments that it seemed worth sharing some pictures.

Names Changed to Protect the Possibly Skeevy

2011-06-07T22:09:00.012-04:00

I was psyched to finally get a copy of the latest ALR. Once I was done ogling the cover, proofing my story, and inhaling some of the terrific work within (including a fascinating poetic sequence on Dante's Inferno by Mary Jo Bang), I faced one of the ongoing issues with publishing certain pieces: Who should be told that this thing has come into the world?

Specifically, when one has written a story that is so close to autobiography, who can one trust to appreciate the similarities, be amused by moments of recognition, and yet not hold a grudge about the aspects that are fictionalized (and those that aren't)?

This story, "The Umpire," depicts a kid who gets a crush on an umpire at her softball league and is completely obsessed with him until the moment it seems like he might return her fascination. She is 12. He is 33.

The story comes as close to portraying myself at age 12 as anything I've written. Awkward. Eager to please. Not immune to the occasional inappropriate crush, and yet still so much a child that I didn't even recognize such crushes for what they were. And it's set at a Little League--a venue rife with emotional tensions and politics kids are only barely aware of, but where I spent many frustrated and jubilant hours as a softball player, alternately hating myself for not being as good as I dreamed of being and feeling (very occasionally) smug about becoming better than I had been. When I was 12 years old, for example, I caught a line drive that, I'm afraid to say, may stand as the peak moment of my life. I'm still waiting to top it, twenty odd years later.

This story contains not only this fictionalized version of me, but a fictionalized version of my mother, my coach, my father, several amalgams of fellow girl softball players, and a middle school math teacher. And a much-creepified umpire, who in real life was nowhere near as troubling as I made him ... but who, even now, I occasionally wonder about. Where did he end up? What's he doing? And why did he want to talk about Freud's ideas on anal retention to a 12-year old?

Adolescence is full of mysteries that may never be solved. All I know is that I still, on occasion, buy a packet of Big League Chew and dream of being in the outfield, waiting for that perfect long fly. There's little that feels as good as catching one--except, perhaps, knowing you can show your mother a story that contains a fictionalized version of her and she will not freak out.

I'd be curious to hear how others deal with this. Are there stories/poems you won't publish in the name of protecting the innocent? Are there pieces you won't even write? What would have to happen for you to be free to write them?

Bin Laden is Dead, and I Don't Feel So Hot Myself

2011-05-10T13:55:00.025-04:00

As luck would have it, I got on a plane the day after bin Laden's death was announced. I was trying to decide whether anyone felt safer. Nothing seemed to have changed at the airport. The security line was just as long. The TSA agents were just as fond of fondling. I still couldn't bring the coffee I'd purchased only steps away into the secure area.

I'm not complaining; when it comes to debates over airport security, I'll take safety over the desire not to reveal my unpedicured toes to strangers. But no matter what's happened to al Quaeda's mastermind, figurehead, and Looney Toons in chief, it's clear that ambiguity and fear will remain a part of our lives for a long time to come.

***

This poem was fondled by the TSA.

You Can Go Home Again (But It'll Freak You Out)

2011-04-21T22:12:00.012-04:00

I went for a walk with my father tonight, in the town where I did some of my growing up. It sometimes seems like a place that will never change.

***

This draft was bulldozed to make room for a new subdivision.

This Radiated World

2011-04-08T15:57:00.055-04:00

The episode of This American Life last week was incredibly powerful. The theme--"See No Evil"--gave birth to stories of brothers trying to cope with the fact that one of them might have killed their mother, and of a gift store manager trying to figure out the source of his shop's shrinkage. But the most powerful stories came in Act II, which used the recent disaster at the Fukushima plant in Japan to launch into a discussion of the worst nuclear accident in history. The segment was comprised largely of translated passages read from a Russian book called Voices from Chernobyl. I dare you to listen without crying to the story of the new bride whose husband was sent in to deal with the disaster--in shirtsleeves and no protective gear.

I remember when Chernobyl happened. I was young and the TV reports were vague and terrifying. I can't help but think that most people who grew up during the Cold War must have some form of nuclear paranoia; off the top of my head, I can think of at least 20 poems I've written that have some element of nuke-related fear/fascination in them. When I was a kid and heard stories of the arms race, I conflated them with the space race, and used to envision a massive pile of rockets and space shuttles and nuclear missles circling the earth, a field of deadly rubble in constant orbit around the planet. And as to the use of nuclear power ... what is there to say? We're ruining the planet with oil and coal, but given the issues with nuclear waste, how can we treat nuclear energy as a true solution? In an unstable world where earthquakes and terrorism are realities, nuclear energy is a terrifying option, one requiring us to bury the consequences deep in the earth for future generations to deal with. It seems to me that one of the central metaphors of our time is radiation--the idea that something near us, something we created and have come to rely on to protect and empower us, to destroy our cancers and heat our homes, is simultaneously the source of an invisible poison. That poison is inseparable from power.

I've always been haunted by what Oppenheimer said about how people working at Los Alamos felt when the nuclear tests near Alamagordo, NM, were successful: We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Listening to NPR's ongoing reports on the disaster at Fukushima, I heard a story in which a reporter asked a local farmer whether he would leave the area due to all the pollution and fears of irradiated crops. He said that he would not. "This is our home," he said. "No matter what happens or how bad it gets, we have to live here." The same could be said of Earth.

***

This draft was irradiated.

Sometimes, More is More: A Fan Letter to Tony Hoagland

2011-03-23T00:00:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine recently shared some poems with an associate, a fellow poet and editor. The pieces came back with some praise, but also with critical notations marking up elements of description, along with general caveats warning against adjectives -- point after point where, the editor felt, the piece needed to lose some descriptive weight. Gone were certain colors, elements of dress, textures of objects.

I looked at the poem again, loving many of the very adjectives my friend had been smacked down for. And I wondered, not for the first time, when adjectives became the redheaded stepchildren of writing. (Of course, I should probably simply say "the children" of writing, as both "redheaded" and "step" are descriptive, and as all trained writers know, descriptions are lazy, and a waste of words.)

Ahem.

I realize I am taking on a literary sacred cow -- sorry, a cow. But really: Why do we hate adjectives? Should we blame it all on Ernest Hemingway?

He certainly did some damage, but he's hardly alone. Mark Twain ("When you catch an adjective, kill it"), Ezra Pound (“Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something"), George Orwell ("Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up ... against the lure of the decorative adjective") and even Stephen King ("The road to hell is paved with adjectives") have all taken their potshots.

OK: There are some reasons to be wary. Recently, I re-read Pat Conroy's bestselling The Prince of Tides -- a book that, when I was 16, I believed was the best novel I would ever read -- and was struck by how much adjectival fat it was dragging around. One of the first paragraphs:

I grew up slowly beside the tides and marshes of Colleton; my arms were tawny and strong from working long days on the shrimp boat in the blazing South Carolina heat...I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders. As a boy I was happy above the channels, navigating a small boat between the sandbars with their quiet nation of oysters exposed on the brown flats at the low watermark.

(That whizzing sound you hear is Hemingway spinning in his grave.)

While I still love Conroy's book, I think it could have lost about 50 pages of adjectives and schmaltz and been a stronger, tighter novel.

And yet ... "the sandbars with their quiet nation of oysters"? Lovely, vintage Conroy. Even that "quiet" matters, softening a description that might otherwise read like bivalve jingoism.

The notion that any problem in a herd of words can be solved by thinning--and that adjectives are the crippled baby gazelles in the pack--is so ingrained in the idea of serious writing these days that I have started to look for exceptions to the rule.

It's not to be contrarian. It just happens to matter to me that we live in a world where things are rough, blue, steamy, grease-smudged, blue, cheap, and occasionally pickled. And sometimes when you're writing about that world, more is more.

I recently finished reading Tony Hoagland's marvellous latest collection, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty. I can't remember the last time I was simultaneously so moved and so amused by a book. Oh, wait: yes I can. But in poetry, snortingly funny and heart-rending rarely go together.

And Hoagland is crazy for adjectives. Very frequently, he piles more than one adjective onto a single noun. Clouds are "creamy and massive." People wear "oddly sexy running shoes" and drink from "blue polyethylene water bottles." The sun, in one poem, "is a brassy blond novelist of immense accomplishment." And his adjectives work, layering onto each other and driving the humor, the tenderness, the wryly bemused and sensual and often heartbroken voice that make his poems so great at capturing the complicated, absurd, product-filled, media-and-money-saturated here and now of being -- dare I use this adjective? -- (a certain kind of) American.

As he puts it in the poem "Muchness": "Description,/which lingers,/and loves for no reason."

Given Hoagland's disgruntled affection for (or at least addiction to) the physicality of the places and people and things that make up the world, it's not surprising that the collection starts out an ars poetica called "Description," which addresses the limits of language, and yet might be a kind of rebuttal to that constant dictum to cut, cut, cut.

There is some sense to the urge to make a noun nothing but itself--but what if its core essence has to do with being "blue polyethylene"?

The last lines of Hoagland's "Description," below:

In all of this a place must be

reserved for human suffering:

the sick and unloved, the chemically confused;

the ones who believe desperately in insight;

the ones addicted to change.

How our thoughts clawed and pummeled the walls.

How we tried but could not find our way out.

In the wake of our effort, how we rested.

How description was the sign of our acceptance.

The Hunt in Childhood

2011-03-13T23:00:00.003-04:00

I was walking into the local library on a warm summer evening a few years back, when the door burst open, and a little boy and a girl ran out into the lawn, carrying paper shadow puppets they had just made (I could see the rest of the kids inside, the teacher picking up the scraps of paper and sponging paste off the desks). The little girl was chasing the boy; they were clearly exhilarated, laughing and flushed and enjoying the game.

Watching them, I remembered chase games from my own childhood, how much I loved them--the physicality, the sense of quest, the occasional sense of terror when you were about to be caught. (Margaret Atwood captured this beautifully in the last lines of her poem "Game After Supper": From the shadows around/the corner of the house/a tall man is coming to find us.//He will be an uncle/if we are lucky.)

The terror--that was always an interesting element. For these were just other children I was playing with, and yet sometimes in that split second before one of them would tag me--or, in rougher versions, grab hold of a sleeve and hang on till it stretched or tore, perhaps sling me to the ground, perhaps tickle or punch me--the terror of that contact was real and visceral. It seemed life might hang in the balance, that being caught could mean actual violence would befall me, that I was in real danger.

Watching those kids, I was struck by the idea that they were happily and innocently enacting a ritual--one that could go on for the rest of their lives, but never again so visibly.

***

This poem was hacked up with safety scissors.

Larkin, Love, and Schadenfreude

2011-01-30T21:41:00.014-05:00

So/To pile them back, to cry/Was hard, without lamely admitting how/It had not done so then, and could not now.

I've thought about this Larkin poem a bit lately, as friends and loved ones struggle in relationships. The first time I heard it, those last lines went through me. They felt like a slap in the face.

I was a freshman in college, more romantic and idealistic and judgmental than I realized, convinced that reason and love could save the world--though even then, I would never have been so Pollyanna as to articulate this belief. I was taking a lit survey class called "Love in the Ruins," my election of which now makes me think of this classic moment.

So, OK, maybe I was asking for it, taking a class that should have been titled "Why Love Sucks, or Will Eventually Begin to Suck No Matter What You Do, Because the World Sucks and the World is, Unfortunately, Where We Stupidly Love Each Other." (Texts, for the curious, included Graham Swift's Waterland, Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, the Walker Percy novel the class was named for, and a collage of other gems virtually guaranteed to have romantics reaching for the Prozac and/or hemlock.)

But I digress. The first day of class, the professor entered without much ceremony and read the poem below out loud, breaking my heart and turning me into a lifelong Larkin fan.

Love Songs in Age

She kept her songs, they took so little space,
XXThe covers pleased her:
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,
XXAnd coloured, by her daughter --
So they had waited, till, in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood

Relearning how each frank submissive chord
XXHad ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein
XXThat hidden freshness sung,
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,

The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
XXBroke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
XXTo pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.

For me, no one captures poetry's frequent paradox of pleasure in pain like Larkin.

This sounds vaguely masochistic, but I think it may be closer to schadenfreude -- an emotion I usually think of as a negative, gleeful "Yay, someone is suffering!" sort of thing.

Not so here. There's no gleeful, Dr. Evil-esque chortling over someone's anguish. But poetry regularly asks the reader to take pleasure in the description of someone else's pain.
I'm talking about how occasionally a poem is so beautiful, so truthful, that it is painful--or how it may depict something painful in a way so clear-eyed, unsentimental, and elegant that it is beautiful.

It is, I think, what Bruce Weigl is talking about in the last lines of his brutal poem "The Impossible": Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.

It is a kind of empathy, a moment when you recognize your own thoughts in the words of a stranger ... which is where the pleasure comes from. Because even if the identification is painful, identification always carries a kind of pleasure, a recognition, a sense of feeling less alone.

Encountering such a poem can feel as though a stranger somewhere in time has somehow located a small, wounded piece of your heart, and had the courtesy to return it to you.

Love: "still promising to solve, and satisfy, and set unchangeably in order." Likely it will do none of these things, Larkin seems to say here--and yet because I recognize things I have thought here, I find this heartbreaker strangely, oddly comforting.

Fire and Ice: Frost-il Fuel

2011-01-15T16:22:00.024-05:00

A tongue-in-cheek response to Robert Frost's famous, also tongue-in-cheek eschatalogical poem "Fire and Ice," inspired by more depressing news about climate change.

In his original (below), Frost implies it will be either fire or ice (or their corollary human flaws, desire and hate) that will end the world. But looking at the environmental debate and our failure to make change quickly enough to save our own skins, laziness and greed seem just as trenchant.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

... Or Something Else

Why must it be an either/or?
Forces exist
Beyond the flames or flakes of Frost.
The world might end in flood, or dust.
But if I had to top the list
Of what could leave as deadened husk
This blue world’s lovely skin of green,
I’d go, like Gore,
With gasoline.

Loren Graham Out Loud

2011-01-10T19:00:00.000-05:00

Yeah, yeah: I blogged about Loren Graham's fantastic book The Ring Scar already ... but just saw this online and wanted to pass it along.

Always such a pleasure to hear him read.

Poem for the New Year

2010-12-31T19:19:00.008-05:00

Thinking, as I suppose many do around this time, about change and rebirth.

And was listening earlier to Leonard Cohen's lovely "Joan of Arc," specifically this line, when the warrior-saint is on the pyre: "Myself, you know I long for love and light/But must it come so cruel, and must it be so very bright?"

(Also, is it just me or is Cohen the missing lovechild link between Leonard Nimoy and Peter Coyote?)

Happy New Year to all.

Poem for the New Year

Forget the cults, the eschatology of horsemen:
the panting, the boils, the locusts. It’s usually less dramatic:
a quiet moment in the driveway when something
shifts in your chest; the late night unexpected call.
Always small worlds are coming to their conclusions:
screws surrender to rust, bread to the mold’s greed,
nestlings to the dizzying lures of earth. Every day
brings a case of misjudged medians, the traffic
choked to one lane, flares marking the steel mangle
you’re meant to look away from but can’t, with your
love for the swerve, for the smash, for the black screen
and the sound of fluttering celluloid. For Big Bangs,
little deaths, shipwrecks, shootings, bridge collapses;
for singing fat ladies, copper-mine canaries that drop
and draw the TV trucks, inspire the harrowing rescue.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell a house fire from a block party;
we’d break out the beers if the wives wouldn’t scold.
Even the great sequoias arrive on the wings of endings:
flames swallow cones, force them fertile, reduce
smothering scrub to embers so that seedlings—
trees that will grow to tickle the stomach of the sky—
can find a foothold in the rich ash
of what once occupied the world.
So cock the safety. Shred the diary.
Cry the long, self-pitying-jackass cry. Throw the drink
in his face and walk out grinning, and gun the engine
when you peel away. Or if these are too much
for the simple chime of midnight, at least admit
you sometimes consider the possibilities of what
comes next: the cold smell of ocean, the gulls,
the unfamiliar markets with their strange, knobbly fruits,
the wind moving through you as though it understands
the scores of lives you must lead with this one body.

New work on Linebreak this week ...

2010-12-22T09:59:00.004-05:00

This one's based on one of my trauma nurse sister's tales of her working life. Until she told me, I had no idea that leeches were still used in modern medicine.

Happy holidays!

And the (Often Futile) Pursuit of Happiness

2010-12-09T23:59:00.007-05:00

Where did this not-so-cheerful little draft come from?

I think I can track it:

- A longstanding fascination—usually charmed, sometimes alarmed—with the fact that “the pursuit of happiness” is a right guaranteed in our founding document.

- This book review, in which the following appeared: The title, of course, comes from the famous passage in the Declaration of Independence, which, Kalman tells us, would have read “life, liberty and the pursuit of property” had Thomas Jefferson not decided to change it. Was anyone ever more elated over an edit? “Hallelujah,” she writes. “All I can say is hallelujah.”

- A friend’s riffing on that idea, saying he’d “never seen real estate scamper away,” so he’d go with the more nimble “happiness.”

- Tony Hoagland’s poem “At the Galleria,” which he reads at 56:18 here. In the last lines, he makes a connection I feel all the time: that there is something American about loneliness, or something lonely about Americanness, or just some particular kind of American loneliness that we have yet to fully identify.

I’ve been wanting to write about the pursuit of happiness for years, but imagining it as quarry, as something fleet-of-foot and nimble, helped me start putting this on paper.

Pursuit

You thought
it was just over the hill,
near the green light,
farther west, higher up.
You hired a realtor,
built a deck, annexed Hawaii.
You called your mother, ate organic, rolled the dice
beneath Las Vegas’s smug thumbs-upping cowboy.
You wore hiking boots, jogging shoes.
You took an advance degree
in pursuit. You did your cardio;
you arched, you basket-wove, you ducked and covered;
you earned a merit badge declaring you prepared,

but what was its habitat? Where
might it graze? You lurked in menswear,
trying on silky scraps of boxer,
admiring the curve of your abs.
You got paid. You shopped
for better faces.
For a while you hunted it
in the lowlit bodies of others,
had moments when you thought you heard
its heavy breathing in the room,
but then: the little death, the slowing heart,
the knowledge that the breath
had been your own—

and how you withdrew then—
disappointed in what
you’d mistaken for your quarry:

how human it was,
its sad aging concealer-crusted face,
its embarrassing magazine subscriptions,
its fetishistic attachment to its cat—how you

took yourself back piece by piece in the morning,
your sock-feet sneaking over the linoleum, quietly closing
the heavy door. Out on the street, the dump truck
heaving its scatter over your toes, it came to you:

children. The purported joy,
the sudden loss of self,
that sad-sack shadow you’d been trying for years
to satisfy or unstitch.

So you had them.
Gave them saddle shoes, guilt trips, orthodontics;
passed on what you hoped they’d take for wisdom.

But after a while they left
(your sad aging sunk-mouthed face,
your embarrassing crosswords) and now

it is just you again, watching the sun
slide over the north end of the yard
until the whole swimming pool
slaps in the shadows of the hickory,
and you are cold,
and you’ve lost twenty years.

There’s no time left. You go out
to the shed, sharpen your knives.
You run your arthritic hands
over the sweet smooth yew of the bow.
You get in your car and drive toward
the golden west, the copse of trees
that still stands near the edge of your town,
hearing all the while the voice
of your scoutmaster:

a clean shot is best. Get it
in the head or heart.
Learn to handle the viscera
spilling slippery over your hands.
You bivouac and settle in to wait,

but there in the blind as the chill
digs in its heels and the sun
fondles the edges of the pines, you realize

you still do not know
its shape,
its scat,
its tracks

or if those wild snufflings
coming fast now through the underbrush
belong to it,
or something else entirely.

Listening to Poetry

2010-12-05T19:55:00.012-05:00

The experience of listening to an author read a poem immensely different from reading one on a page. There is some poetry that first came truly alive for me because I heard it read by the poet. Charles Wright's work is one example. Some years ago, I heard him read "Clear Night," and it changed his work for me; I can hear his voice when I read him on the page, and it made him far more accessible for me.

A good reading always reminds me that poetry is meant to be spoken, and it's one of the few public spaces where you can hear an entire audience share a small, inspired, satisfied exhale--that sound you hear again and again at the end of effectively read poems. (If I had time, I would go around and record that sound at readings and turn it into an audio collage. It's a sound you hear nowhere else.)

There are also cases, I think, where poets' readings--due to nervous public speaking habits such as speed-reading or a pompous, bombastic manner--can threaten access to their work. The few times I've done public readings, speed-reading due to sheer terror was something I had to fight through. And I've had this distancing happen with at least one of my own favorite writers; when I first heard her read in person, her peculiar manner and cadence was so difficult for me to get past that I resolved never to see her read again. (A note to poets: For god's sake, practice before you read your work publically. Don't become the literary equivalent of these guys, butchering brilliant material.)

But I digress; generally, hearing a writer read their own material is almost always a good, enriching experience. I would not want to pick between the experience of a poem on the page and that of a poem out loud, but the latter has become increasingly precious to me due to its rarity in my life. I read poetry all the time, but don't go to readings as often as I'd like.

I'm posting these because I only recently became aware of their availability: I think Nick Flynn (author of the hilariously named memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and, more recently, a memoir that delves into the subject of torture) wrote one of the most amazing poems of the past decade with "fire." It's terrific on the page but stunning out loud. You can listen to it at the audio link here.

And this whole reading is worth the time, but at 56:18, the amazing Tony Hoagland introduces and reads an amazing, moving poem about shopping--a rare thing indeed.

Coquinas and Childhood

2010-11-27T15:58:00.020-05:00

I was digging through old pictures recently to find some of the best baby and kid shots of my sister, part of a little photo montage for her birthday. One of the shots I found was the one above, which reminded me of lines from one of my favorite Donald Justice poems:

There is a gold light in certain old paintings
That represents a diffusion of sunlight.
It is like happiness, when we are happy.

I always loved this photo -- partly because it was taken in one of our favorite places: Gulf Shores, Alabama, back in the early '80s when there were far fewer giant monolithic condos lining the beach and more vast strips of sea oats dotted with little beach houses. There was no oil in the water, our grandparents were still alive, the waves were gentle and glorious, and all we did for a week (and sometimes two) was swim and eat shrimp and read books and play cards and build sandcastles and dig for coquinas (shown here in their "angel wings" stage) and try to avoid sunburn.

But I also love this picture for its specifics: the light of nearly sunset; my father, who grew up coming to these beaches, about to throw me into the surf; the storm clouds retreating and the just-barely-there rainbow arcing through the left corner; and my little sister standing watching it all ... her stance suggesting excitement and fear and the thrill of waiting to get tossed into the sea. Seeing it again suggested certain connections between shell-collecting, the lines between innocence and experience, and the fears a father might have for his children.

***

This poem dug back into the sand.

Woot! Terrance! Terrance!

2010-11-21T10:16:00.015-05:00

Really pleased to see Terrance Hayes win the National Book Award for poetry this past week. I was blown away by Wind in a Box and just finished Lighthead last night ... amazing, trenchant, beautiful stuff. Hayes is an astonishingly adept synthesizer (of the non-Casio variety) of the personal, the pop, and the brutal past of the American project.

For those who don't know his work, find it, ASAP. Listen to it. Or, better than getting the milk for free, go buy Lighthead and treat yourself to his poem "The Avocado" and the rest of the brilliance therein. Or snag Wind in a Box, and marvel at the incredible wit, insight, and form-busting of his "letter" to Michael Jackson.

(I heard him read this amazing, funny poem at the Folger back in 2008 for the State of the Union: 50 Political Poems reading. I got into the city early enough that I spotted him wandering down Pennsylvania Ave. before the reading and briefly stalked him down the block, ogling from a distance to see what geniuses do when they're not geniusing. This one went into a book store and a convenience store (where he bought some water--I can only assume it was this brand). If he ever got creeped out by the adoring white girl loitering creepily behind trees and crouching behind newspaper boxes, he had the decency not to call her out on it.)

Defending Dandelions (Can Older Poems be Saved? Or Should They All be Razed to the Ground?)

2010-11-08T22:55:00.019-05:00

Revisiting old poems is something I try not to do very often. It creates a number of problems for me: I notice the immaturity/ triteness/ pretentiousness/ strained qualities of the earlier work, which affects my confidence; and even though I perceive the crappiness, I then find myself stuck in the voice/mode of the earlier work for weeks afterward.

It’s the anxiety of influence, except the influence is of your own younger, stupider self.

Or, sometimes—and worse—the influence of a younger self who was briefly in the poetic zone, and whose momentary energy/vision your current self cannot seem to recapture. It’s a depressing moment to catch yourself trying and failing to write like yourself, especially when the self you’re trying to write like was already mostly trying to write like Philip Larkin.

My few attempts to rescue early poems from their flaws have been largely ineffectual. In my experience, while stories can be retrofitted, most poems cannot. I’m curious whether others have this sense too, or whether you’ve been able to save and use some old trifle—even if it was only a line, an image, an idea?

The first poems I remember writing came in 5th grade, when I wrote one poem about a fox attempting and failing to raid a local farm—“My family must go another night/without a plump and juicy hen/But farmer, tomorrow night beware!/The fox lurks again!”—and another that was my attempt to defend dandelions from what I saw as an unfair hatred by lawn-obsessed suburbanites—“Though some folks call you ‘pesky weed’/Your color never does recede. Dandelion, this poem is true/You're my flower; I love you.”

(I can't believe I'm copping to having written those lines. I can forgive myself for them only by repeating over and over: I was 11. I was 11. I was 11.)

A defense of dandelions, though, is an idea I reconsidered a few months back and decided it had some sort of merit. The problem with the 5th grade version of the idea (excuse me: one of the many problems with the 5th grade version) is that my 11-year-old self was truly, passionately, literally devoted to dandelion defense, rather than realizing that suburbanites hatred for dandelions might be extrapolated into something else—specifically, the understandable-yet-sad devaluation of lovely, everyday things in favor of the rare, the forbidden, and the new.

***

This poem seeded and floated away.

Rainer Marie Jerkweed: A Cautionary Tale?

2010-10-30T10:50:00.013-04:00

One of the greatest struggles I have is finding the balance between having a writing life and just living a human one. Discipline is a necessary tool in the writer’s shed—and yet so many times I have come home, determined to write, only to find nothing was happening, and that I had skipped something enjoyable in the futile hope I might spend the evening deep in the current. If you write, you know what I mean: when you are in the zone, it is one of the best possible feelings. When the work is going well, it’s worth trading for.

But the other side of that—skipping pleasurable, important, joyful moments of existence to write, only to find the writing simply will not come—is almost as painful and frustrating as the other is blissful. Then I’m stuck at home, uninspired, and doubly annoyed to be stuck there while somewhere not far away, friends are drinking good beer, saying droll and affectionate things, and bonding in ways that might actually inspire future writing.

Being a hermit has its advantages; god knows you have to set some boundaries. But sequestering yourself for your art—if your art hopes to be human—seems potentially misguided. Yes, I know the Belle of Amherst hid away in her room, feeding her genius and communing only with friendly mice and Jesus (it’s hyperbole, Dickinson scholars; don’t send angry letters). But were she around today she would likely have succumbed to social pressures. She would be Tweeting and Facebooking (“Emily Dickinson is nobody. Who are you?”) and perhaps desperate, as I occasionally feel, for silence.

Finding balance—has anyone nailed this one? Just recently, I almost skipped a reunion of old friends from high school for the sake of going home and writing. Instead, I went, and not only caught up with dear erstwhile companions, but met new ones. Good ones. And if I had just gone home, instead? I would likely have been frustrated and ended up sitting on the couch, staring through a Law & Order episode and brooding.

One of the best stories I’ve ever heard on this conflict—it may be apocryphal, but is referenced in at least two biographies—was about the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who reportedly skipped his own daughter’s wedding because he thought a poem might come, and that the wedding might break his concentration.

The first thing I thought when I heard this tale was “What a dick.”

And the second thing was, “You know where your precious poem was, dude? It was at your daughter’s wedding.”

But who am I to think Rainer Maria Rilke was doing anything wrong? Maybe he was skipping a wedding when he wrote "An Archaic Torso of Apollo."

This poem is for Deb, Warren, Jordan, Justin, and Ben. Also for Angela, who is also—like so many of us—struggling to find the space for a writing life that does not eclipse actual living.

***

This draft flew away.

Cezanne in the Gardens

2010-10-22T00:53:00.015-04:00

** This draft died of a fever. **

Poetry for the Sadder (Wiser?) 50 Percent: Loren Graham's The Ring Scar

2010-10-12T18:51:00.015-04:00

Anyone who has been through a divorce knows certain truths: Looking back on the time before the decision was made, you can identify a moment when you knew there was no turning back from that precipice. And yet the moments that led to that single awful point in time are too many to count. You also know the way certain objects—or dates, or songs, or foods—will never again be experienced without their accompanying baggage. To this day, for example, I cannot hear Led Zeppelin’s "Bron Y Aur Stomp" without thinking—with fondness, more than six years out of the marriage—of my ex, an intense and talented musician who used to spend hours sprawled on the floor of our apartment perfecting the finger-work on the guitar part.

For a while after we split, I often joked that my newly acquired affection for Zeppelin was the one positive thing to come out of our marriage. As time has passed, I’ve been able to identify others, most especially a changed perspective on relationships, one that perspective will not allow me to call wisdom. If any wisdom came out of the whole chaotic experience, it is only the knowledge that my current ideas will change; five more years could bring something entirely new. Back then, my ideas about love and commitment—and how much work could go into a relationship before it became nothing but—seemed entirely fixed and immutable. I knew what I knew.

I met my first husband in graduate school in late 1998. He was a student in the same writing program I was in, the same writing program that had had the good sense, the year before, to bring in Loren Graham as a visiting writer and lecturer.

Graham had one book of poetry out at the time. I hadn’t read it. I took his creative writing class because he was one of the few teachers in the English department I hadn’t yet worked with. It seemed like the thing to do.

He proved to be an excellent teacher, and in my spare time (back in those sublime grad school days when I often read five or six books a week) I went on to read the astonishing Mose, which taught me more about the potential of form than any book of poetry I’d read before. The book is a series of letters from a convict in a Texas prison to the woman he loves; it has the imagery, sonics, and precision of the best poetry and the momentum and narrative arc of a thriller.

We also became friends, and it was through that friendship that I became aware of his current project: he was writing a series of poems that he often referred to as “the divorce sonnets.” He read a few of them at the annual Writer’s Harvest event, and it was clear that he was onto something enormously powerful. Over time, the project—now published as The Ring Scar—evolved from a one-sided conversation into a back-and-forth, the husband’s words in sonnets, the wife’s in free verse, each revealing their thoughts and doubts in an imagined conversation that, I often thought as I read them, might have saved the marriage if they had only been capable of having it directly.

The poems cross paths; the speakers are often in agreement, but seldom at the same time and place; they can describe their estrangement, their failure to connect, without being able to fix it. Even the forms reflect a failure to connect, a fundamental difference and the attraction of it. It is an astonishing sequence of poems and I am so pleased to see that it is finally in print.

Anyone who has ever struggled with a long-term romantic relationship will recognize pieces of their own experience here, in ideas and in images—a stray hair wound around a button, a cold motor turning over in the driveway, an escaped pet bird, or the central image of the book: the ring scar itself.

It’s a circle one can step out of but never fully escape (even when you're lucky enough to move on to happier, healthier things). And this book makes that seem only right.

(And what a metaphor on the cover: perfect little houses with no doors.)

I'm posting the title poem, but you shouldn't deprive yourself of reading the rest.

The Ring Scar

By Loren Graham

It should have disappeared by now, this faint
line of pale skin where my ring used to ride,
but it persists. It faded overnight
from my palm, but on the back of my hand,
part of me most familiar, it has remained
for months: indented, obvious, a fine
shadow, a delicate burn never quite
healed. Nothing will erase that little brand:
I’ve stretched it, flexed it, held it in the sun,
but it will not be exorcised. It hangs
on like an old unwelcome ghost, a crank
spirit biding its time, making mortals wait
until the day when, for reasons unknown,
it leaves off haunting and suddenly is gone.

Goodnight, Sweet Pooch

2010-06-10T12:57:00.071-04:00

Yesterday, we had to put our dog Coltrane to sleep. He was a sweet, mellow beagle-mix who slept between us in bed every night. My husband and I had a voice for him--we'd often use it to order each other around on the dog's behalf: Open the fridge. Give me a walkie.

Over the years, we had developed a projected personality for Coltrane that altered between morose, snooty, greedy, Al Capone-esque, and deeply philosophical. Sometimes my husband and I would speak to each other in his voice for hours. Coltrane had no idea what we were talking about, but he knew when we were using "his" voice and would look up from the floor and beat his tail against it, waiting for us to stop projecting the fictional Coltrane and pet the real one.

There's an oft-circulated story about "the Rainbow Bridge" that's designed to comfort people who've lost a pet. It's a lovely, sentimental piece of nondenominational religious feeling that depicts a world where bereaved pet owners are reunited with their animals. I honor it for providing a framework where animals can go to heaven, since many religions won't even grant that they have souls (my feeling is that if I have a soul, then Coltrane did). But it always seems so cartoonish and inadequate. After the vet put Coltrane to sleep, a little old lady came in and made a play-dough pawprint mold from his foot and talked to us about the Rainbow Bridge. She was very well-meaning, but after several minutes of patter about how Coltrane had "just gotten his angel wings," I was ready to push her out the door.

For years I've been amused imagining Coltrane's reaction to the Rainbow Bridge: He would not want to go anywhere near it. He would check to make sure if there were any abandoned plastic bags (terrifying!) on it. He would sniff it in hopes of finding some dirty underwear or a nice week-old chicken bone. In Coltrane's real heaven, I imagine, sausages would grow out of the earth and the trees would all have low-hanging branches good for scratching your butt on. But even that image is my own projection. I do think that if Coltrane has a heaven, the Rainbow Bridge is about as good an approximation of it as the harps and angels image is for mine.

Bonnie Raitt's song "I Don't Want Anything to Change" comes close to the mood around our house now, where snowdrifts of white fur are still piled up in every corner. He was, we liked to say, a serious dog for serious times, and we will miss him for years. (We'll probably be finding his hair for even longer.)

There are no adequate words to get at how awful it is to deliberately end the life of a dog you love so much. I'm posting the only poem I've ever read that, for me, comes close to the truth of it. It's stripped down, plain--perhaps the only way such a thing can be talked about.

May

I wanted to stay with my dog
when they did her in
I told the young veterinarian
who wasn't surprised.
Shivering on the chrome table,

she did not raise her eyes to me when I came in.

Something was resolved in her.

Some darkness exchanged for the pain.

There were a few more words

about the size of the tumor and her age,

and how we wanted to stop her suffering,

or our own, or stop all suffering

from happening before us

and then the nurse shaved May's skinny leg

with those black clippers;

she passed the needle to the doctor

and for once I knew what to do

and held her head against mine.

I cleaved to that smell

and lied into her ear

that it would be all right.

The veterinarian, whom I'd fought

about when to do this thing

said through tears

that it would only take a few minutes

as if that were not a long time

but there was no cry or growl,

only the weight of her in my arms,

and then on the world.

from What Saves Us, by Bruce Weigl

Lebensraum, Cleave, and Strout

2010-03-28T14:01:00.006-04:00

Ah, my poor little neglected blog. It's been so long, and this will be but a short visit to make you feel briefly cared for.

Over the past few months, Work has become my little kommandant, demanding more and more lebensraum in order to stretch out and stuff its face with the schnitzel that is my life. I’m hoping that soon the allied forces will land at Normandy and starting beating Work back into the space it belongs in.

It’s best that I abandon this metaphor before it becomes even more ridiculous.

So much research, so much interviewing, so much writing. I read more than any sane human should about the congenital disorders that are hurting purebred dogs. I went on a trip to Mississippi to cover a major seizure in preparation for a story on animal hoarding. I’m starting work on a feature on shelter animals working with combat veterans with PTSD.

All of these experiences have been interesting and rewarding (the genetic disease story became an obsession; for a few months, I couldn’t see a purebred dog without wondering what was wrong with it). But between them and the rest of the pile of work on my desk, I’ve had no brain matter left for fiction and poetry.

I have managed to get a little reading done, though, and so just wanted to give a little shout out to a couple of books: Little Bee, which is very moving and very funny in spite of some credibility-straining inner monologues (it wasn’t the precise English of Little Bee that bothered me, but her insight into the ironies of English culture—some of these seemed work better as a novel device than as the real voice of a Nigerian 16-year-old). I'm curious about the decision to change the title for the American market. The Other Hand seemed to me a much more intriguing title.

I also read another of Elizabeth’s Strout’s books—Abide with Me—almost as soon as I’d finished Amy and Isabelle. I think Strout is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers; she takes small-town settings and characters and psychologically unpacks them in a way that is so true and so unsettling. Check out her great interview with Michel Martin from 2009. I’m looking forward to reading Olive Kittredge, once I can force out the Work invaders and reclaim a bigger piece of my own mental territory.

Lev Grossman's "The Magicians": You Can't Go Home Again

2010-02-07T22:57:00.021-05:00

My three late-childhood reading obsessions can be summarized easily: The Chronicles of Narnia; its less-famous cousin, The Chronicles of Prydain; and Tom Sawyer. And then when I was 12 or 13, I read Stephen King's The Eyes of the Dragon, which thoroughly obsessed me for months.

Though I never got into the Middle Earth saga, all the books I really loved (OK, maybe with the exception of Tom Sawyer) suggested I was going to end up as Renaissance Faire geek, summoning the moon, experimenting with Wicca, tattooing myself with unicorns, and listening to a lot of Loreena McKennitt.

I kind of wanted to end up that way. I kept trying to get into it; in high school, several of my dear friends loved the scene. But my parents were vaguely suspicious about the air of paganism and truancy that surrounded the whole culture, and the one Renaissance Faire I ever went to--not until college--spoiled the whole deal. Beyond the jousting and the wax hand-dipping, there was one exhibit behind a little hut, marked with signs that said, "Come see the littlest Unicorn!"

I was 19 by this point, there with my boyfriend over summer break. We were doing our best to get into the spirit of things, and the sign noted that the extra charge to meet the numinous beast would be donated to the March of Dimes. So we each paid the extra $2 to go behind the hut. We followed an incredibly excited pair of 8-year-old girls who were squealing to each other about the amazingness of what we were all about to see.

Behind the hut, in a small clearing scattered with hay and droppings that looked like buckshot, was a red-eyed teenaged boy in a slouchy velvet hat and leggings. The smell of marijuana around him was so strong it was almost visible, like the clouds of dust that follow Pigpen in the Peanuts cartoons. He was holding a rope attached to the halter of ... a small white goat with no horns.

Now, I can't say exactly what I expected to see. I knew it would not be a unicorn. I kinda thought it would be a pony with some sort of horn strapped to its head. I expected that they would have made SOME sort of effort, at least, to wow us just a little bit. I watched as the two little girls ahead of us frowned and looked at each other. And then one of them said to Cheech Greensleeves, "That's not a unicorn."

I waited for Cheech to spin some excellent fairy dust about how it had lost its horn through a curse, or how it was so young its horn hadn't sprouted yet.

But Cheech (who, let's be honest, had a lousy job and did not belong in any arm of the hospitality industry) leaned down and said to the girl, "That's right. It's a goat. And do you know WHY it's not a unicorn?"

The girls shook their heads.

"It's not a unicorn because children like you don't believe in unicorns anymore."

I give the kids a lot of credit for not a) bursting into tears (which likely would have been my approach at their age), or b) punching him right in his THC-laced nuts, which is what I thought he deserved. They just looked at him and looked at each other and looked disappointed, and then left.

My boyfriend and I did the same, and immediately began discussing whether we should ask for our money back. In principle, we felt we should. I don't think we did, though. Perhaps we were hoping that the $4 we'd given the March of Dimes would prevent more tragedies like Cheech. In any case, that was my first and last Renaissance Faire. And while I actually did like the wax hand-dipping and kept the resulting Mickey Mouse-ish wax glove for several years, nothing at the Faire came anywhere close to providing the kind of pleasure I'd gotten reading the Narnia or Prydain books, or from fantasizing that I lived in a place where it was possible to ditch school and go drift down a river on a home-made raft.

Honestly, while I've loved reading as long as I can remember, post-junior high, it's been rare that I've found a book that I loved as obsessively and devotedly as I loved those. Sure, I've read great books, I've found books that made me think and laugh and cry, I've found books that blew my mind with their ideas (Swift's Waterland, Quinn's Ishmael, Fowles' Daniel Martin all leap to mind). But books I wanted to chuck it all and LIVE in? Very rare.

And of course, once you actually study them, the Narnia books--like all books subject to academic exegesis--are tainted. If you read them again, you spot the sexism and the xenophobia and the religious fundamentalism, and it makes the whole thing just a little bit harder to get lost in.

But of course, where can you live then? Reality is such a pain in the ass, so lacking in winged horses and warddrobes that give way to winter forests. I can tell you what's in my warddrobe: Clothes. A mess of clothes, some of them I need to wash soon in order to look presentable for my job--a good job, all in all, but one where I work in a cubicle a good part of the time and rarely have to escape from Tashbaan in the middle of the night riding a talking horse.

All of this is a long way to get around to asking: Have there been any books you really wanted to live in since you turned 18? And if not, why not? It can't be that the books aren't as good. Qualitatively, the books are almost certainly better. At least some of them.

And a long way to get to my plug, which is this: If you are an adult who grew up on the Narnia books, if you like the Harry Potter books now, you should read Lev Grossman's The Magicians. I've been snowed in for the past few days and I read it basically overnight. It deserves the praise it's getting, and will make you remember the feeling of wanting to live in a book. (Not that you'll want to live in his. You won't.)

Read it, please, then come back and tell me a) why, once you pass puberty, so few books inspire the longing to live in them? And b) whether you think Grossman's ending is happy or sad. Because I can't make up my mind, and it's bothersome in the best kind of way.

A Novel About Poetry

2010-01-18T21:56:00.007-05:00

That's what I'm reading now, having finished Jane Hamilton's book Disobedience, which is about a teenaged boy who stumbles upon an e-mail from his mother that reveals she's having an affair. Terrific on multiple counts: the family dynamics, the affair dynamics, the teenage petulance and rage and confusion. Funny and well worth reading, though technology has already caught up to Hamilton's opening:

Reading someone else's email is a quiet, clean enterprise. ... There is no sound but the melody of the dial-up, the purity of the following Gregorian tones, and the sweet nihilistic measure of static.

How long has it been since you heard that sequence of sounds? So odd to think that dial-up's a technology that most people won't even remember in a few years.

Now I'm starting into Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist, which is about a minor poet whose personal life is in shambles and who's trying to write the introduction to a new poetry anthology. Even though I love poetry, a novel with such a plot would normally make me run very far, very fast. Probably toward a movie with lots of explosions.

But Baker is a very interesting writer. Along with a book about his obsession with John Updike (U and I), he has written a couple of fairly dirty books (Vox and The Fermata). Vox, which is the transcript of a long phone conversation between two people who've dialed into a chat line, is a really smart book that will make you think about the depersonalization of sex, the eroticism of anonymity, the old Shirley Maclaine quote about the brain being the most important sex organ. It will make you think about all of these things, once you're done with the lotion.

The main quality of Baker as a writer, though, is interestingness; he is seemingly incapable of not being interesting, and usually this is one of my favorite things in his books: He'll take some ordinary object, like a toenail clipper or something of the sort, and mine it for all its odd history and personal meanings and place in modern life, and usually this minutia is so fascinating that it doesn't bother you at all that, very occasionally, it grows a little chilly. (He talked about his fixations a bit in an interview with Salon a while ago.)

Anyway, my point is that Baker is one of the few writers who could write a book about a guy trying to write the introduction to a poetry anthology and actually make me want to read it. And sure enough, on page 9, the narrator provides advice I thought worth sharing.

And never think, Oh heck, I'll write that whole poem later. Never think, First I'll write this poem about my old orange life jacket, so that I'll be more ready to confront the haunting, daunting reality of this poem here about the treehouse that was rejected by its tree. No. If you do, the bigger theme will rebel and go sour on you. It'll hang there like a forgotten chili pepper on the stem. Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under someone else's name, you'll hate yourself.

This strikes me as about 90 percent true, which is enough true that I think it should be Xeroxed and handed out to creative writing students. And then there's that 10 percent that says sometimes you are just not ready, and you have to let that poem percolate or it's going to come out weak and grainy.

I've had this happen with poems that I let sit in my brain for over a year before writing--but then, I've also had the other thing happen, where I didn't write it and it flew off to visit someone else. What about you? Are there ways you've learned to lasso the thing and get it tied it down before you're ready to ride it?

(I count at least three metaphors in the above couple of grafs--coffee, birds, broncos--that make me think I just need to go back to reading for the evening.)

Kudzu, Kannibals, and Kosher Sushi

2010-01-07T22:00:00.000-05:00

And now for recent reading highlights ...

Best book that never quite seemed to develop a plot: Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. Really, what happens in this book? A lonely dude mooses around New York missing his estranged wife, dealing with his natural dreaminess (Frank Bascombe, meet your Dutch-boy soul mate), and interacting with a vast multicultural stream of characters. But who needs a plot when you have New York City, disquisitions on how to produce kosher sushi, and a quest to turn cricket into a national sport?

Best book that will make you want to shoot yourself, in between bouts of wondering whether human flesh really tastes like chicken: Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

(I dragged my husband to the movie during the holidays, too. Sorry, honey. It wasn't exactly festive. But I generally agree with Kafka's idea that we should read "only the kind of books that wound and stab us ... books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves ... book must be the axe to the frozen sea inside us." To which I've long been sure Kafka meant to add, "Oh, and books that make us laugh till a little bit of pee comes out.")

Which brings me to:

Best book I read, flat out: Beth Ann Fennelly's collection Unmentionables. It's funny, naughty in parts, imbued with a nice southerny tongue-in-cheek-iness that I liked a lot. But for all the southern bits (the kudzu poems are terrific, and you can see a cool video art version of them here), my favorite part is the sequence on Berthe Morisot.

Other bits of note: Katie Roiphe's fascinating essay on sex and the American male novelist in the last New York Times Book Review. A friend of mine pointed out that, in An American Dream, Mailer throws a woman out the window after raping her, and that therefore she couldn't find it in herself to work up much nostalgia for this older generation of scribblers. My first instinct was to agree, but then it occurred to me that it wasn't Mailer but Stephen Rojack who threw someone out a window, so given the novelist's common role of cultural critic, it seems a less clear feminist cause to me (though Mailer's own taste for the human ear is well-documented). In any case, the essay's definitely worth a read. Did you read it? What did you think?

Now starting into Ron Slate's The Great Wave and Jane Hamilton's Disobedience. See you on the other side.

Of Yaks and Modern Poetry

2010-01-01T14:21:00.002-05:00

The Washington Post released its list of the best books of 2009 a few weekends back.

Memoir! Fiction! Arts and Letters! Business and Economics! Separate lists of American history and world history! Biography! Politics! Science! Sports!

And not a poetry book in sight. Not one.

The Post has apparently decided that poetry is a dead medium. Maybe it takes one to know one?

(I'm sorry. That was harsh. I know some very dear people who work at WP. And it has occurred to me lately that there are similarities between the ongoing gutting of journalism and the neglect/disappearance of poetry. Good poetry and good journalism are both things many people will not miss until they've disappeared completely, when the difference between the two arts and what's left in their place--Hallmark card doggerel and blogs loaded with truthiness--becomes starkly clear. Poets have never been able to make a living off their craft, yet poetry has survived, even if it's been marginalized. Journalists--who once could turn their skills into a decent living--are increasingly in the dinghy poets have drifted in all along.)

The New York Times, at least, included two poetry books on its 100 Notables list, those by Amy Gerstler and Louise Gluck. It's paltry, sure, but it's something--and the Times also included a lot of terrific short fiction collections, which frequently suffer similar neglect.

I'm sad to see my hometown paper ignoring poetry. I know they have their little poetry ghetto every week (which has recently changed form, allowing a poet to discuss one of his or her own works). I like Poet's Choice, but whenever I used to read the columns, my enjoyment was tinged with the sense of being treated to an explication of an obscure and mysterious art from a strange and distant land. As though the poem under review were a Himalayan basket designed for an obscure god to lay an egg in, or a Peruvian bowl made out of alpaca hoof.

It was this thought, along with a general musing about the insular nature of modern poetry, that inspired this poem a while back.

Happy new year to all!

***

THIS POEM FELL OFF A CLIFF. Mooooooooo.

New ones up on Etsy ...

2009-12-05T15:56:00.011-05:00

I was at a craft show yesterday and several folks asked me about LSD when they saw this painting.

I just like colors, OK?!?

Check it out along with a couple of others here!

Cervantes Prize to Pacheco

2009-11-30T19:45:00.006-05:00

I don't know much of the work of Mexican poet and fiction writer Jose Emilio Pacheco, who won the Cervantes Prize this morning.

I do know the prize is kind of a big deal, the top for literature in Spanish, with previous winners including people like Borges and Octavio Paz.

And I was lucky enough to skim through a copy of Pacheco's Selected Poems years ago, where I encountered what remains one of the clearest and most lovely statements on patriotism I've ever read. The tone, the way it vaults over grand statements about destiny or democracy to capture the concrete, physical things you can really love, the things that bind you to a place.

If there's any big statement at all, it's the title, which (I think) can be read as a neat little smack to those who would say grander things--those who would be immediately offended by Pacheco's opening statement, and might read no further.

High Treason

I do not love my country. Its abstract splendor
is beyond my grasp.
But (although it sounds bad) I would give my life
for ten places in it, for certain people,
seaports, pinewoods, fortresses,
a run-down city, gray, grotesque,
various figures from its history
mountains
(and three or four rivers).

Alta traición

No amo mi Patria. Su fulgor abstracto
es inasible.
Pero (aunque suene mal) daría la vida
por diez lugares suyos, cierta gente,
puertos, bosques de pinos, fortalezas,
una ciudad deshecha, gris, monstruosa,
varias figuras de su historia,
montañas
(y tres o cuatro ríos).

Finished Thanksgiving Day ...

2009-11-28T12:12:00.002-05:00

Now up on Etsy.

Living with a Writer: A Gratitude

2009-11-24T10:44:00.047-05:00

Living with a writer (or an artist of any type, I suspect) is a recipe for irritation.

Few weeks go by when I don't think to myself at some point, I am a pain in the ass.

When I am not working, or when my writing isn't going well, I can be grouchy or emotionally needy.

When the work is going well, I am distracted. I may well forget to feed the dog, or myself, or to put on underwear, or lock the front door, or ask my husband how his day was, because I am thinking about exactly how to phrase a piece of dialogue or where to break a line or what color of paint I need.

This is a no-win situation for my husband, who frequently gets to choose from a delicious, two-option buffet: gaga, overly sensitive emotionalism, or "What did you say, honey?"

Luckily, he is also a writer, so he is also (by the rules established above) a pain in the ass.

Learning to tolerate and accept the quirks of sharing space with another writerly brain is key to our happy relationship.

I would not trade my husband for all the world. We can talk about the craft, we can do first reads on each other's work, we can share good and bad nuggets from our scads of reading material, we can say honestly (but gently) when something isn't working. We understand the annoyance of working for days on a piece, only to submit it and have it rejected, or damned with faint praise, or picked apart by blog commenters who respond to a piece that took hours of interviews and research by pointing out that you made a typo and forgot to include the "l" in "public." Ha ha! Good times.

We can also--every now and then--sit around with our dog and watch bad movies, drink beer, listen to music, chill out with friends, and talk about everything but writing. Those are good times: when we stop, for a moment, being neurotic, narrative-driven freaks and exist as human beings--human beings who have no need or obligation to commit anything to a page, no obligation to do anything but enjoy each other's company and feel happy that we get to go through the world with another person who has to love and tolerate our pain-in-the-assness, because we love and tolerate theirs.

I give thanks for this almost daily, while remembering that not everyone is so lucky. The newsletter of the Kenyon Review this week highlighted an old gem by Roger Rosenblatt, (who wrote the terrific novel Beet--certainly the funniest academic satire since Russo's Straight Man). The story first appeared in the Kenyon Review in Fall 2007.

I don't live with this guy, but I have met or observed him many times at readings. And I have met his long-suffering wife. Oh boy, did this story make me laugh--with amusement, recognition, and appreciation for my own writer-spouse, whose egotistical writer B.S. is minimal and whose patience for my occasional dark moods and "Clean the kitchen? We have a kitchen?" absentmindedness is great.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

The Writer's Wife

Look at him, my active man. Sometimes he sits and turns to the left. Sometimes, to the right. I wouldn't think of disturbing him. He is dreaming his writer's dreams, and his dreams are inviolable. I have the privilege of serving him, and of watching him.

Did you say something, dear? Nothing yet? Still dreaming? Well, while you're at it, I'd better get to my chores. No, don't get up. I can handle it: Fix the engine on the Prius; recondition the Steinway; point up the bricks on the west wall; build a bathroom in the basement, from scratch.
Busy, busy is the writer's wife.

And please, don't even think of lowering yourself to the details of bill paying, dry cleaning, shopping, cooking, dishwashing, trash toting. May I get the door for you? May I get two?

Am I complaining about my lot? Never, sweetheart. The intellectual challenges alone make it worthwhile. How many ways can I invent to assure you that you're not losing your touch? Our topics of conversation: Your obligation to your gift. My obligation to your obligation. Were you born before your time, or after your time, or just in time? I forget.

Then there's our social life. The dinner parties, where everyone speaks in quotations. The book parties, where everyone says, “There he is.” Or variously: “There she is!”

Do I want to go to Elaine's? Are you kidding? I want to live there!

And don't worry. I've laid out your uniform. Dark suit, dark shirt, dark tie. Your special look.

Do you think you might speak to me this month? It was so nice last month, or was it the month before that, when you asked me how I was. For a moment there, I thought you'd asked who I was. That's just a little joke. Nothing to upset yourself about. But what am I saying? Why would you be upset? Why would you -- sitting there in your dreamscape -- why would you even look up?

My folks, having met you but once, suggested I marry an actuary or a mortgage broker. Or a wife beater. Hell, what do parents know about the life of the mind -- yours. The precious moments we share --

Such as the times you ask me to read something you've written, and if I say “I love it!” you say I'm blowing you off, and if I appear disappointed or confused, you go into a clinical depression, and if I say, “Then, please don't ask me, if you don't want my opinion,” you go into a clinical depression.

Oh, dear. Did I say, “That was the best thing you ever wrote”? Of course, what I meant to say was, “Everything you write is a masterpiece. And this latest masterpiece just proves it.” That's what I meant to say. You're right. I must learn to say what I mean. Forgive me?

But soon we make up, and you'll say, “Let's go to so-and-so's poetry reading.” And I'll say, “Oh, darling! Let's! Just give me a minute to freshen up and hang myself from the hall chandelier” -- which, by the way, I repaired last week.

Memories? Say, rather, treasures! The day your agent returned your call. The day your editor returned your call. The day you found your name in the papers. In the phone book. Remember the time we saw your first novel on sale in the Strand for one dollar? How we laughed! The night you awoke with an inspiration for a story, and in the morning it sounded so silly?

Remember when I tried to write something myself, and you said it was “interesting”?

You know? I used to like books.

Ah. You've turned to the left again. I'm pooped, just watching you. Watching you in your dreams. I dream, too. Here's mine:

Lord, please let him find a younger woman.

King Praises Sklenicka, Who Trashes Lish, Who Muddied Carver, Who Wanted a Drink, Which King Also Wanted

2009-11-22T11:46:00.011-05:00

Alcoholics build defenses like the Dutch build dikes. I spent the first twelve years or so of my married life assuring myself that I "just liked to drink." I also employed the world-famous Hemingway Defense. Although never clearly articulated (it would not be manly to do so), the Hemingway Defense goes something like this: as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don't give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on, I can handle it. A real man always can.

--from Stephen King's On Writing

Stephen King was one of my first writing heroes; at 13, I hid a copy of The Shining under my pillow because I knew my parents would confiscate it if they found it.

Raymond Carver came later, and I never felt any need to hide his books. Quite the contrary: By that time, I was in college, and carrying around a copy of Carver was de rigeur, a sort of secret writer's handshake that let other babywriters know you were one of the pack. I was never a huge Carver devotee, but I still remember the first time I read "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." I thought about the story for days afterward, and it still comes back to me any time I think seriously about marriage; the old couple that Mel describes haunt me. Are they true; are they possible? Or are they just an image of perfected love to taunt the rest of us?

And I still remember the experience of reading King's It, which remains the only book I've ever had to stop reading because it scared me so much. (I put it away for four months--I even put other books on top of it, subsconsciously trying to make sure the cover stayed closed--before I could get back to it again.)

They are different kind of shocks, of course, producing different kinds of tremors. But put King and Carver together, and hey, I'm there.

If you're interested in either writer, check out the New York Times' lead review today, in which King reviews a new Carver biography and a collection of his stories. It's full of fascinating, occasionally horrifying info about Carver, but also about the egomaniacal editor Gordon Lish, who seems to have shaped our idea of "a Raymond Carver story" and the Raymond Carver approach to writing, maybe more than Carver himself.

The discussion of Carver's short story A Small, Good Thing, which was completely transformed by Lish, interested me not only because the editor changed it into a much darker story, but because I realized that the version of it that ended up in Short Cuts, Robert Altman's film of interwoven Carver stories, is the version that Carver originally wrote. Yet another element of awesomeness in that discomfiting film, along with Julianne Moore's pants-free rant. (Bless Altman for using it, and don't blame him too much for Andie MacDowell, who is so cheesy in the cathartic scene of that story that she makes my teeth itch.)

For me, the review is fascinating in what it suggests about King as much as what the reviewed biography reveals about Carver. His take on Carver's alcoholism and his sympathy for the writer's first wife seems to come from a deeper personal space. Carver sounds hard to like, but at the end of the review, I liked King even more.

More Asparagus, Less Detroit

2009-11-17T22:00:00.001-05:00

I've been thinking about the different processes involved in poetry and painting. Specifically, about the planning of each.

With poems, I often come up with one line (or rather, one line comes to me) and write toward that line or idea. There is a destination, and the terrain comes clear as I track toward it.

Sometimes, this can be a problem, since the single line can be like Detroit: You see its skyline off in the distance and it seems interesting, but once you get there, you're like, "Oh. This is not where I want to be."

Then you have to backtrack and realize that you really wanted to go to this little roadside fruit stand near Lake Michigan. Or you realize that the whole trip was wasted and you're stuck in Detroit, looking at shut-down auto factories.

With paintings--or at least the kind I'm doing right now--there is very little planning. I take a canvas or sheet of paper, I mark the center of my circle, I decide on the first color I want to use. Almost everything after that seems to happen without thinking. My mind goes to a completely different space; it is almost glandular. Yesterday, for example, I was looking at a square of warm gray paper. For a moment, there was nothing, and then several hours later, there were crescents in a bright shade of magenta and swirls of white.

And then with the one pictured here, suddenly there were asparagus tips. I didn't even realize they were there until the whole thing was done.

I would really like it if more poems came to me like that. Once or twice, it has happened, but lately, I can feel myself trying to write, and when that happens ... Hello Detroit, I'll be here all week!

What comes to you when you write? Can you plan your poems? Does it work?

Flowerwheels and mandalas ...

2009-11-14T13:33:00.004-05:00

As Guy Clark once sang, "There ain't no money in poetry/That's what sets the poet free."

Yeah, but the poet occasionally gets writer's block, and the poet also has veterinary bills to pay because the poet has a dog who likes to eat anything--ancient burritos, chicken bones, underwear--he can sniff out on his daily walk.

Consequently, this scribbler has gone back to doodling. There ain't much money in art, either, but it looks prettier when you hang it on a wall (or a tree).

Once upon a time, I sold a painting or two, and am now trying to get back to it via Etsy. I just put up my first listing and will be adding more in the weeks ahead, so in case you're looking for good Christmas presents for those who enjoy acid trips, check me out at CarrieTheRed.etsy.com.

I Should be Writing ...

2009-11-07T21:31:00.011-05:00

But lately I've been painting instead, trying to get over a terribly long stretch of writer's block.

I use so much of my verbal energy at work that painting feels like a great relief, a respite from too many words.

I can't tell if it's helping with the writer's block or not, but it does give me something to occupy myself while the hubby is watching Nebraska football.

My Brush With Svetlana

2009-11-01T15:19:00.006-05:00

I rarely answer my cell phone if I don't recognize the number on the display.

But at work a few weeks back, I was waiting for a call from a customer service person, so I violated my own rule when my ringtone sounded.

Me: "Hello?"

Female voice, vaguely Eastern European accent: "Hello, I am talking to reach M.C. Allan?"

Me (immediately on guard. I write fiction and poetry under that name; no one actually calls me that): "Yes?"

Female voice (becoming--is it my imagination--slightly more seductive?): M.C., I am calling because we have read your book, and we would like to help you getting more people to reading it!

Me (racking my brain to try to remember if I've somehow published a book without being aware of it): Um ... I'm sorry ... what book?

Female voice: Your book! We love it, and we want to get it in front of millions of customers!

Me (Wow! Millions of customers! Except ... wait, that's right, I don't have a book): Um ... I'm not sure what book you're referring to.

Female voice: We have read your book, the Delaware Poetry Review, and we want to help bringing your book in front of millions of customers!

Me: Um ... that's not actually my book? That's an online poetry journal.

Female voice: We have read your poetry journal, and we want to help you to getting your book read by millions of customers!

Me: I think there's been some misunderstanding. It's not my journal. It's an online journal that just published some of my poems a while back.

Female voice: Yes! And we want to promote your work. We can reach many many customers and let them know about your journal. Our fees are very small.

(By this time, I must mention, the voice had begun to get a trifle irritated with me. I can only assume that, from her perspective, I was some idiot American whose book, the Delaware Poetry Review, was just waiting for a little marketing push in order to climb the New York Times bestseller list, and here I was, ungratefully hassling her about details.

Meanwhile, in my head, I had a clear picture of a skinny, frosted blonde with long acrylic nails and fur-topped stockings--a little like Ilsa, only no jodhpurs. I had already decided, actually, that her name was "Svetlana" and that she must been making marketing calls out of some tiny basement in Moscow, and that this was her second career--her first foray into true Western capitalism--the first one having been 15 years on the street in the employ of a vicious pimp and petrol smuggler named Ivan.)

Me: I'm not sure you understand ... the Delaware Poetry Journal is not something for sale. Anyone can go and read those poems online for free? I don't think I can really do much with your marketing service. I'm sorry.

Svetlana: But we can getting your poems in front of millions of customers!

(Note: Not once did Svetlana reference "readers." They were always "customers," drooling, money-spending sheep waiting to be fleeced, waiting with baited breath not only for the latest wrinkle reducer, car shammy, dish detergent, erection enchancer, cholesterol medicine, but for my poem about wild dogs on the beach in Karachi, Pakistan.)

Me: Thank you, I appreciate it, but I really have to get back to work.

Svetlana: Do you not think that your journal is good to read?

Me: I just think there is a misunderstanding, and I'm in the middle of editing a--

Svetlana: Fine! So sorry to have bothered you.

(At this point, she hung up in a huff.)

Fellow laborers in this discouraging slog of rejection slips, writer's block, and obscurity: Have any of you heard from Svetlana--or someone of her ilk? How did you handle her?

Are you, even now, slurping down spoonfuls of caviar and enjoying your time on the bestseller list in Kiev? Has someone in the former Soviet bloc discovered that poetry is actually a marketable commodity?

Readings in the Rain

2009-09-27T11:36:00.016-04:00

Yesterday I trudged through the mist on the National Mall to go to several readings at the National Book Festival. I hadn't been before--in fact, I'd avoided it on the suspicion that it would be a zoo. Which it was. Hordes of people toting their purple bags, looking at layout maps, moving from one pavilion to the next. It was certainly enough to make me feel happily skeptical about all the death knells that have been ringing for the publishing industry, but on some level the whole idea is odd: Bringing thousands of people together to celebrate publicly the intensely private experience of reading.

But readings are always different than reading; that is part of their charm.

The difficult thing is watching people cram themselves under the enormous tent set up to hold James Patterson--there were folks standing outside the tent in the rain, bonking against each other like so many gumballs--when, 50 feet away, Jane Hirshfield is reading and there are empty seats.

I don't have anything against Patterson. I've read and (kind of) enjoyed several of his books. I'm sure he's probably a nice guy and it's great that he's trying to turn kids into readers. But so many people gathered for his wisdom? It's not, surely, because he's the voice of our generation ... so the crowd read, to me, like they were there to get a sniff of his millions and the celebrity that's accompanied them. Sheesh, Patterson's got a team of people writing his books now, and that whole notion seems odd to me. It reminds me a bit of some of the celebrity chefs who haven't set foot in a kitchen in years. Maybe I'm too naive about writing, still too wedded to that obsolete notion that authors are instrumental to their own work. Maybe only some authors are instrumental to their own work.

All I know is that I have a hard time imagining Jane Hirshfield waking up, doing her morning Zen meditations, and then handing off her pen to a lackey and saying, "Hey, do me one like 'Each Moment a White Bull,' only with more explosions."

Hirshfield read that lovely poem, along with some of my other favorites. I've written before about how much I love "The Envoy," and hearing her read it was a real pleasure.

I also got to hear Patricia Smith, which was the reason I came down. I loved her book about Hurricane Katrina, Blood Dazzler, and had heard that she was an amazing reader. This was proved yesterday. There are some poets that I think you can fully appreciate based on the writing on the page alone. Smith's work is great on paper, but it takes on a rawer and more vibrant quality when you hear it in her voice; she brings a power and heart and wit to her performance that the page doesn't capture.

Between Hirshfield and Smith, Ana Menendez read. I haven't read any of her books yet, though In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd is one of my favorite titles of the past ten years. Menendez read from her most recent novel, The Last War, but it was her off-script musings that I found most insightful. My favorite tidbits below.

"There is a kind of magic in writing. In my writing classes, I always have my students tell a story orally and then write the same story. They always discover something new about it when they write it down."

On the trend of ethnic fiction: "At it's best, it's beautiful and illuminating; at it's worst, it's just a way of exoticizing a culture and playing cultural anthropologist for the white people."

On the time she spent in India: "They would at first think I was Indian, and then when I opened my mouth, they would just think, 'Westerner.'" [As opposed to the States, where people always first see her as Cuban-American]. "One of the beauties of travel is that you see how fungible identity is."

Swindle. Cool.

2009-09-22T12:32:00.002-04:00

Digging this cool crawler from the good folks at Linebreak.

What I Read on My Summer Vacation

2009-09-14T15:39:00.010-04:00

In August, I went to Mexico for two weeks, where my husband and I climbed the tallest pyramid in the Yucatan, ate at various street vendors without incurring digestive distress, snorkeled the Great Maya Reef, and drank far too many lagers with lime. (Normally, I am a Dogfish Head loyalist, and mostly loyal to their brews of 7% alcohol or better. After those heady, nutty, malty, hoppy brews, Mexican lagers really just don’t cut it … but if we’d had access to Dogfish beers in Mexico, it’s entirely possible we’d never have left.) Above is me, wandering the streets of Izamal, a really strange little town where all the buildings are painted gold. I felt like I was walking through a de Chirico painting--specifically, this one.

The first few days of the trip didn’t allow much time for reading (too busy snorkeling and trying to get into relaxed zone after mad cram to finish up work), but by day three I’d started into Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. I don’t know how I managed to miss this book until now, as its blurbings were effusive and compared it to great poli-sci-fi like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. It is a fascinating read, depicting a post-nuclear war world in which all scientific materials have been destroyed by people convinced that science was responsible for “the Flame Deluge.” Only fragments remain, and these are preserved by Catholic monks laboring in the desert to illuminate manuscripts that may be no more important than someone’s shopping list, but may be the blueprints for nuclear reactors. They are preserving materials they don’t really comprehend and have worked the material into an evolving "Catholic" literature. It’s funny, scary, and totally bizarre. I had heard of the book before, but never read it. I’m convinced that the only reason it doesn’t get more attention now is because the threat of nuclear oblivion that was the chief cultural fear during the Cold War (the book was published in 1960) now seems charmingly simple; the world is no longer split into two behemoths bent on destroying each other, but into a thousand factions that want to do the same. Between our changed thinking on nuclear stand-off and the scandals that have hit the Catholic Church, it’s hard to read the book in a 1960s mindset—but it’s still a great read.

Once I was done with Canticle, between sunburns and reef visits, I perused the lending library at the little beach house where we stayed in Mexico. It was like every beach house lending library, in that it was composed of bad thrillers and pirate-themed bodice rippers in which terms like “velvety orbs” and “downy mound” stand in for body parts. It is fun to do dramatic, out-loud readings of these books (especially if you add piratical “Arrrs” to the euphemism-laden love scenes), but they are not good reading. Not even good beach reading.

Granted, I think Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides is great beach reading, so maybe my tastes run darker than most.

I actually got so desperate for reading material that I perused a few of the books at the beach house (Jeffrey Deaver’s The Sleeping Doll and Harlan Coben’s Gone for Good). The Deaver book was not my thing: all plot, zero characterization and subtlety; I could actually see the credits for the bad TV movie playing as the first scene went along. Harlan Coben, on the other hand, is a good writer; the book was funny, had a good voice; lots of thriller-standard plot twists but some real emotion humming underneath the surface. (Then, later, I read Coben’s Tell No One and was amused to discover the movie adaptation was way better than the book—more tender, more believable. The movie leaves out the book’s final plot twist and is much the better for it.)

I left my own copy of E.L. Doctorov’s Loon Lake at the beach house. Partially to improve the offerings there, but really because I had stuck with it for 200 pages and kept thinking it was brilliant and then annoying and then brilliant and then annoying and finally the annoyance won out and I stopped reading it. Normally I like Doctorov and like experiments with form, but in this case, the moves between the narrative and the modern poetry kept losing me. Perhaps my brain had been turned to goo by the sun. Maybe the next beach bum will have more luck.

Speaking of experiments in form, I discovered Anne Carson. Whoo boy. A few pages into her book, Autobiography of Red and I am cursing myself for not having found her earlier. Talk about exciting experiments with form.

I owe at least four people comments on their manuscripts and/or poems. I am sorry; I swear, I will read them. I’m hoping they’ll jog me loose from this writer’s freeze I’m in … got diverted from the novel by vacation, and am trying to dig back in now … mostly via painting, which is often a great way for me to refocus creatively.

That’s all the news that’s fit to blog. Will poke my head up again when there’s something worthy on the radar.

Who are You, and Why are You Thinking About Ballerinas?

2009-07-02T14:29:00.036-04:00

A few weekends back, I burned through Tana French's first book, In the Woods. It's true that you should not judge a book by its cover, but you can sure as hell sell it. I'd planned to read it ever since I saw the cover image, which successfully conveys both a woodsy branchiness and the organic, creepy look of blood vessels.

The first book won several awards and got deservedly praised every which way, but it had--to my mind--one substantial flaw. The first person narrative occasionally veers to places that seem unbelievable for the character in question. He's Rob Ryan, a youngish homicide detective in Ireland, never finished college, obsessed with his job, troubled by a forgotten childhood trauma that may or may not be connected to his latest case. All well and good, and for the most part, French carries the voice off pretty well.

But every now and then, Ryan let slip a line or a thought that had me turning to the back jacket of the book to look French in the face. He compares the preparation for a murder investigation to the chaos that happens backstage as ballerinas wait for the curtain. He names the French musical piece that young ballet dancers are warming up to. All in all, for someone readers have been given no reason to think of as a ballet aficionado, he seems to know an awful lot about the world of toe shoes and nutcrackers.

While these moments were enough to make me stop reading and address a general, "WTF?" to the empty room, they were minor problems in an otherwise terrific book, and almost as soon as I finished the last page, I picked up French's second book, The Likeness. And there the voice problems ceased: In the second book, the narrative voice is no longer Ryan's, but his former partner's, a young female detective. In The Likeness, the plot is just as taut and the first-person voice comes off without a hitch.

The difference between the two books made me think about the trapdoors in that old writing class dictum: write what you know. I've always thought that it should be followed by a number of caveats, one of them being: unless the character you're creating doesn't have a clue about what you know, in which case, write what HE knows. French's bio says she trained as an actor; my guess is she may have encountered a bit of ballet over the years, but letting it drift into the consciousness of her male detective protagonist--without at least a throwaway line to explain how it might have got there--seemed a misstep.

It also made me think about the difficulty of believably inhabiting a demographic that's not yours--something I'm struggling with right now as I work on a story set in 1960s Mississippi in which the two central characters are a middle-aged black woman and an 8-year-old white boy. I figure, demographically, I've got a little connection to each of them, but I also keep thinking I have to know more, more, more about their lives and their worlds. I keep reading more about the civil rights movement, about life on the Gulf Coast, about what people wore and ate and where they worked and how they lived. Sometimes I feel like I'm going to drown in research and never actually write this story.

It reminds me of the writerly equivalent of that old apocryphal anecdote about Dustin Hoffman: Supposedly, while on the set of Marathan Man, method actor Hoffman, playing an exhausted college student on the run from Nazi war criminals, was staying up late and exercising himself sick to get himself looking and feeling the part. His co-star, Laurence Olivier, saw this miserable wreck dragging itself onto the set each day and expressed concern; when Hoffman explained what he was doing, Olivier said acidly, "Try acting, dear boy; it's so much easier." (If you want to get a sense of how Hoffman took this advice, this photo pretty much says it all.)

I think the opposite is true. Sometimes I know I'm researching just to avoid putting pen to paper. I plan to post this photo above my desk as encouragement.

And Like a Thunderbolt He Falls

2009-06-09T19:00:00.007-04:00

I found this article oddly fascinating, and the incident it refers to would make a great poem. Some extracts for the time-constrained:

Of all the moments that might leave an impression on the minds of budding young poets at the Springs School, the day that a hawk killed a blue jay and ate it in the courtyard at the school seems to resonate above all others ...

The subject matter of the poems runs the gamut ... but nothing inspired fifth grade students more than the bitter cruelty of nature outside their window on the day the hawk killed the blue jay.

“These poems all come from classes that had a perfect view on the courtyard,” said Ms. O’Conner.

"A bird of prey/silently snacking/on a blue bird/savoring every bite/its talons/engraved/ in its mid afternoon/snack,” wrote fifth-grader Katherine Espinoza.

“The hawk rips the feathers off/the bird/the tail of the blue jay/goes up/stomped by the hawk/it’s a cat and mouse rampage,” wrote fifth-grader Chris Tapia.

A moment in childhood when, for one reason or another, the attention of many children is directed at one particular event. That so many of them chose to write about it is really interesting. Is it the early development of the classic dictum, "If it bleeds, it leads"? A lack of other source material that feels suitably "dramatic" to kids tasked with writing poems? An instinctive understanding that death is interesting?

Whatever, "its talons/engraved/in its mid afternoon/snack" is a great line. Watch out for that kid.

One for the Ages

2009-05-19T13:23:00.035-04:00

Sorry for the long hiatus. I'm not dead yet.

But this blog is likely to remain dark for a bit. My job is sucking a huge amount of my writing energy, and I'm trying to focus what little juice remains on a bigger project.

I will be popping up now and then when the news is worthwhile or the Muse comes knocking.

***

In the meantime, though, before I go back to radio silence for a while, I feel compelled to give a shout-out for a book I have recently been re-reading. For the sake of full disclosure: The author, Andrew Kozelka, is a friend of mine. We went to grad school at Hollins together, though I think we shared only one class, a theory seminar on short fiction. And while most of us young grad students were spending our nights hanging around, drinking, bantering wittily, hoping to show enough intellectual ankle to get us intellectually laid, this guy was burning the midnight oil in his little apartment in downtown Roanoke, churning out two novels and many of the first poems in the book below.

Every time I pick up The Ages, I am struck by a complex roster of emotions: The first is a rueful sense of irritation with the state of poetry publication in this day and age. Here is a book, dear readers, which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in 2005. A finalist, but it did not win, and then when Kozelka got tired of the ongoing slings and arrows of the contest submission system, he finally did that horrible, shiver-inducing thing which can draw hushed gasps of disgust even from those who know the meaning of the slang term "Dirty Sanchez": He self-published it.

While the innocent among you are googling the term (I tell you now, you'll be happier if you don't), I ask the rest: Has Kozelka, by dropping into the self-publishing well, dipped himself in tar which can never be peeled away?

Maybe he could have gone on playing the game. Maybe he should have. Every time I pick up the book, I argue with myself about it, the angel on one shoulder soothing, It's out there, the devil on the other seething, No one will read it.

Oh, but that's just the first emotion. The second one comes on as I start reading: envy. Deep, lustful envy of these poems. The kind I very rarely experience, that Why the hell aren't I smart enough to write this? sort of feeling. Then, as I read further, the envy vanishes and turns into excitement. Excitement at their ambition, their leaps of imagination, their historical scope, their black humor, their multiplicity of form, their willingness to scavenge through the darkness and bring up gold and icons and drowned slaves and dead czars and heroes who are known as heroes because they killed many, many people.

I realize I am waxing all slobbery here, but I cannot help it: the cumulative power of these poems taken together is hard to overstate. Every time I read them, they make me want to write more, and read more, and simultaneously they make me want to throw every book in the room onto a pyre and light it and go be a throat-slitting pirate somewhere. Really. It is that good.

I'm going to just shut up now and drop a couple of my favorites below. Kozelka's dirty, filthy, self-published book of brilliance is available through Amazon. Buy it, and have a little source of dark light to put on your shelf.

***

The Age of Fable

From the village below the castle

The serfs can see the knights

Cavorting with pale ladies;

They can smell the delicate muttons,

They can feel the blatant unfairness

And what the priest tells them

Doesn't really help.

As for the Revolution

It's at least five hundred years away,

And so they make up stories.

In one, they're strong with rage.

An axe is in their hand. They go

Up to the castle and rape and kill

Everything that breathes.

Then they sit down at the great table

And stuff themselves.

They lay a tax upon the village.

The prettiest boys and girls

Are brought to their bed.

They sleep in. They kill off

Anyone who seems ambitious.

All the serfs in the village know this story,

Though not one has ever told it.

***

The Vision of St. Francis

in the Year of the Plague

Some children undertook

Another crusade

To stop a war their parents had made

But along the way they grew up, had children

Of their own,

And had to protect them with arrow and stone

And had to settle and build a fort

Where soon their children were asking the same sort

Of questions they used to:

Why the need for the wall?

Why even have enemies at all?

Why do we work? Why elect a prince?

It just doesn't make sense.

And so they went off on another crusade

To stop the war their parents had made.

But they didn't want it to be like before

And just end up fighting the same old war

And so when they saw the marauders approach

The children didn't go into a protective crouch

But instead ran out to the desert holding hands

And took to kissing in the sands.

Soon it had gotten dark out and the children couldn't see.

All of this was told to me

By my fever.

***

Teaching Japanese Children English

Not Far From the Hiroshima Peace Park

We the guilty form a wall around innocence,

Killing and being killed where we stand or attack

And there is nothing else between love and the dark,

No wall not of our making, no free-taken home,

And no consolation for the myriad displaced

But to pass briefly through pitiful gardens.

My Lizard Brain is Amish

2009-04-13T22:43:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine pointed out that Vegas is the best place on earth to surrender to your lizard brain. Thus my conclusion above, reached after only a few hours of wandering from Bally's to Paris to the Bellagio to Caesar's Palace. Brain ... can't ... handle ... any ... more ... neon ... lights ... must ... milk ... cow ... and ... raise ... barn ...

We rotate cities for our annual conference, and Vegas definitely pulled in the crowds this year. (It struck me that hosting an animal welfare conference in Las Vegas is a little ironic. Here we are pushing a movement that works to encourage people not to give in to their base instincts—suggesting that there are ideas that trump the pleasure principle, radical ideas like, "Maybe you shouldn't beat your dog, even if it makes you feel good," and "Perhaps you could eat something other than veal, even though it's tasty"—and this year we held it in a city that whose modus operandi is to encourage people to indulge every instinct they've got.)

Here's the most depressing thing I saw in Vegas, familiar to anyone who's been there: On the strip at regular intervals, there are lines of Hispanic adults, mostly men but a few women, none of whom seem to speak more than a few words of English. They stand on the sidewalk, all wearing bright t-shirts that say "HOT GIRLS STRAIGHT TO YOUR DOOR IN 30 MINUTES!!" They're all holding stacks of small cards, and as the tourists pass, they slap the decks against their hands, making a snapping sound to get the attention of passersby. The cards, which they'll hand over in piles to anyone who holds out a hand, are all of oiled naked girls, most of whom will come see you for $35 (Vegas regulars: Is that recession-pricing, or is that standard?). You can get two for $99, though the cards don't specify what these girls will do for those prices. Maybe they'll iron your shorts.

Can we make an Exploitation Flow Chart here? The prostitutes are exploiting the immigrants, the johns are exploiting the prostitutes, the city is exploiting the johns ... I feel a chorus of "Proud to be an American" coming on!

On our way back from a show at the MGM Grand, a friend and I saw a woman who must have been 70 passing out these cards. She was about four feet tall and had more than a few missing teeth, and the kind of wizened, ancient face you usually see in photos accompanying National Geographic articles about lost Amazon tribes. This is the global economy: Instead of selling baskets to Ten Thousand Villages, Grandma's helping sling bargain sex to tourists in tracksuits.

Vegas is like a big red glowing clown nose stuck onto an ancient, craggy, dignified face. From the top of the hotel and from the plane on the way out of the city, I could see the desert surrounding the city—empty, arid, weirdly beautiful. I wanted to be there instead.

Triptych: Portraits of Doubt

2009-03-30T21:00:00.001-04:00

My sister and I grew up Catholic, and when we were kids, my mom would frequently suggest we give up something for Lent. My suggestion that we give up homework never seemed to be appreciated.

Like most kids anticipating Easter, I looked forward primarily to searching our yard for plastic eggs and consuming puke-inducing amounts of chocolate. But the religious significance of the day was not lost on me. I grew up going to Sunday school and Mass and reading illustrated Bible stories that alternately fascinated and terrified me (there was an image of Absalom, his hair caught in a tree, that I still remember being upset by). Back then, both Easter and Christmas induced a sense of wonder, of unmooredness and mystery, that I no longer experience. I miss it, especially at Christmas.

Was I a believer then? I probably would have professed to be, into my early teens. But at some point, doubt entered the picture. When I went to Mass and it came to the time to recite the Nicene Creed, I started to be silent for the parts that I didn't believe anymore. I would mouth the words and hope my parents didn't notice. The part about "one baptism for the forgiveness of sins" was the first to go, because it struck me early how unfair it was that unbaptized kids in distant heathen lands who'd never even been exposed to Christianity would go to hell. It didn't seem like the kind of thing God—at least snuggly, post-therapy, New Testament God—would endorse. Gradually other pieces of it dropped too. These days, my performance of the Nicene Creed would probably resemble a Milli Vanilli concert.

My mother blames herself for this. My sister and I spent most of our formative years at good secular schools overseas and here in the U.S. It wasn't until we moved to Australia that we were chucked into a Catholic school, not due to any misbehavior, but simply because St. Clare's was the best educational option in Canberra. My mom sometimes mutters self-criticisms about how she should have put us into Catholic school earlier, because then we'd still be practicing. I think she's nuts: Nothing did more to tip out my dregs of religious piety than Catholic school. The first first day, I left class to go pee, and in the bathroom, a pack of feral adolescent girls were leaping around, shouting at a crying fifth girl and pelting her with feminine hygiene products. Imagine the shower scene in Carrie meets Lord of the Flies. I'm not saying that it was enough to make me question the existence of a benevolent God, but it was certainly enough to make me question the value of Catholic school in shaping good little Catholics.

Along with the picture of Absalom (lesson: When riding a hysterical mule away from service in your father's army, always put your hair in a sensible bun), a scene I remember seeing many times is that of "doubting" Thomas checking out Jesus after the Resurrection—the Caravaggio above is probably the best known. I always thought this was one of the weirdest stories in the Bible: Thomas says he won't believe Jesus has risen unless he checks out his wounds for himself, and when Jesus comes back, he makes him do it. Imagine having belief forced on you in that way! It's almost like fraternity hazing: Oh yeah? Well, here: stick your finger in this, pal, and tell me what you don't believe.

The poem below consists of portraits of Thomas and two other central figures of the crucifixion story, each grappling with what they did and why they did it; it appeared in Tar River Poetry last spring. The most interesting thing I learned while researching to write it was that the "good thief" crucified next to Christ had a name.

TRIPTYCH

I. Pilate

What did he want—me to declare him innocent,
set him free to pull lepers out of hats?
I am not comfortable with the insinuation of miracles.
Torchlight laddering up a woman’s back,
the bruised figs brought to me by servants,
the sea-scent of olives and sweat—
already more than I expected.
Too much, perhaps—but worth protecting
against riff-raff sorcerers and all they might imply.
I washed my hands not to show my innocence.
The cloth and water were all I could be sure of.
My hands that night smelled not of blood, but lemons.

II. Dismas

The good thief, they called me, leaving out
excellent tax cheat, superior adulterer.
I’d spent time in the company of whores—
in this, our strung-up party of three, I was not alone:
I’d seen him before, threadbare and muddy;
long before he hung bloody beside me,
there were always women around, enraptured,
their dusty hair unbound, poor locals
drawn by those purpled eyes, that green garden
he claimed to have the keys to. My buddy
smarted off. But I was a good gambler
as well—I did not show my tell. I said:
Remember me when. Pain had blurred
my mind, breath and sweat were peeling
away from me in veils, I saw my death
elbowing through the seething crowd,
not a one of them was there to grieve it.
You’d do the same: Say the grace.
Kiss the kingdom. Hope to wake up and believe it.

III. Thomas

Unless I see the wounds, I said. Unless I stick
my fingers in his hands. Around us in the room
the faces of our friends
hung slack as sails on a windless day.
Fresh from the tomb, he parted his robe,
drew my hand to his side,
then parted flesh rough cloth had uncovered,
to open in his battered side a small door
my hand slipped through. There were the ribs:
spines of books I could not read;
beneath, the fat hot ropes of his intestines.
I had not known the stuff that made a man:
here was the form of my friend who’d sat by fires
with me, eaten, laughed—died? Yet, not him
at all: I pulled my hand out, terrified,
tried to hide my blush, my fingers still sticky
with that other, inner world. I think he blushed
as well—though for himself inside that flesh
or me inside my doubt, I couldn’t tell.

Henri Cole: "Oil & Steel" & Subtlety

2009-03-15T21:20:00.016-04:00

Henri Cole's 2008 book Blackbird and Wolf has won numerous awards now, and highlighting a poem from the book seems a little like telling people about how computers will soon be changing society. But every time I read this poem I'm struck by it, especially because Cole said i n an interview that, aside from free verse, there's nothing particularly American about American poetry. To me, "Oil & Steel" seems very American, though I can't quite say why ... something about the seriocomic tone of the line about the schnauzers and the way the capitalization of "Modern Fiction" implies a slight sneer, as though the father's contempt for the idea has been at least partially passed to his son.

Oil & Steel

My father lived in a dirty dish mausoleum,
watching a portable black-and-white television,
reading the Encyclopedia Britannica,
which he preferred to Modern Fiction.
One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease,
except the one that guarded his corpse
found holding a tumbler of Bushmills.
"Dead is dead," he would say, an anti-preacher.
I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet
and some motor oil—my inheritance.
Once, I saw him weep in a courtroom—
neglected, needing nursing—this man who never showed
me much affection but gave me a knack
for solitude, which has been mostly useful.

***

I love how concise this poem is, how much it tells about the relationship in so few words. I love the way the peculiar alliteration (it comes nowhere else in the poem, and so is startling when it appears) of "neglected, needing nursing" manages to deflate the anguished image of the weeping father and keep the poem from swerving into sentiment.

I love the multiple schnauzers (how many? We never find out), and how they help flesh out the image of the home this man lives in and of his consistency of habit.

I love how the simple, direct voice and absence of rhyme disguises the fact that the poem is essentially a sonnet, complete with the classic turn, in the 9th line, toward resolution of a presented problem. And dark as the memory is, the narrator's recollection of seeing his father weeping and neglected is part of his own resolution, and what seems to allow him to give the man some small (if partly ironic) credit.

More than anything, though, I love the word "mostly" in the final line. Whole worlds of regret and anguish and a wry, pained acknowledgment of inherited graces (and wounds) lie in that one little "mostly."

A Little More on Orr

2009-03-01T11:31:00.012-05:00

Generally speaking, though, the style we have in mind tends to be grand, sober, sweeping — unapologetically authoritative and often overtly rhetorical. It’s less likely to involve words like “canary” and “sniffle” and “widget” and more likely to involve words like “nation” and “soul” and “language.”

-- David Orr, "The Great(ness) Game," The New York Times Book Review, Feb. 22 2009

As soon as I read the part above, I thought, a) So the poems we think of as great are more likely to contain sweeping abstractions rather than concrete images? Whatev, and b) Someone must write that sestina.

I tried. It didn't quite want to be a sestina, though. Still, what the hell—it's a draft. I stole a line from Engman's "Another Word for Blue" in the 4th stanza.

Orr Not

There is a canary singing at the head of this poem.
It’s a minor app, a blaring yellow widget to catch
your eye, let language work its wiles on the soul, or brain,
or whatever we can call the locus in the meat
that feels, now that the idea of souls, of gods, of nations
are dying, or at least suffering severe sniffles.

This poem planned to be a sestina, but its soul
resisted. It suspects that greatness—at least in language—
lies now in prose, or in pieces. It has heard the canaries
singing in the coal mines, proclaiming the nation
immune to meter and rhyme, obsessed with widgets,
cell phones, reality TV—trends that make MFAs sniffle

as their wrists go carpal from repeating those six
words over and over. Sestinas? Villanelles? What
greatness of soul is possible, making language macramé
in a world of hi-res pixels? You want some sniffling words
to be universal in a nation made of one-way streets,
trains gang-tagged silver and canary yellow, widgets

that work on one brand of PDA and make
the other sniffle, freeze, crash? “Greatness”? What
does it even mean? It’s a mutant canary dyed pink,
singing in a baroquely shit-caked cage. There’s a place a block
from here where they never heard of free verse. A place?
Try every bar across the nation. And the girl at the till

at the hot dog stand at Whitman’s rest stop on the Turnpike
thinks he's a chocolate maker. Where is she in “Greatness”?
It’s a widget that will be outdated by next week; she’ll still
be grilling franks. Time doesn’t move the way it did for Frost.
I trust "canary" more than I trust "nation." What soul left
is broken into pieces. Greatness needs a hardwood floor to settle,

and this nation’s potholes and steel plates shift.
Give me your tired of language, your poor snifflers
off the boat, the manuscripts and machetes in their gym bags
the widgets of dreaming. Give me your Twittering canaries,
their ADD effusions on the blogs. Pile it up; sweat it in a pan.
See what comes out. That laurel crown crumbled years ago.

Orr on Greatness: Who Is, Who Ain't, Why We Should Care

2009-02-28T21:08:00.000-05:00

God bless the New York Times for continuing to struggle with poetry and to allow its reviewers and critics to take it on in a serious way. I love the Post for having poetry in every issue of Book World--at least until they killed the print edition of Book World--but the Poet's Choice column always seems a little like a poetry ghetto, what one might do with a dead (or dying) art: Serve up little samples, then have an expert explain why people should eat them.

The Times keeps reviewing poetry books as though they matter and as though people care. Granted, the Book Review includes poetry less frequently than I'd like, but it's there on a semi-regular basis, maybe once a month, and it's talked about seriously. And the paper also has David Orr weighing in with an ongoing commentary about poetry. He's a schnarky sonofabitch. I'm often irritated after reading his pieces. But that's OK with me. Sunday mornings can get too bland.

Last week Orr had some typically provocative things to say about the state of the art. The whole column is worth reading, but he starts off with this:

What will we do when Ashbery and his generation are gone? Because for the first time since the early 19th century, American poetry may be about to run out of greatness.

What I love about Orr is that his essays almost immediately make you start arguing in your head. I immediately thought, "What? What is he talking about? There are plenty of great poets working today! And what about those we don't even know about yet? I can think of at least three poets I know personally who might qualify -- either right now or as the years pass. And I don't know that many people."

Orr gets more interesting.

The problem is that over the course of the 20th century, greatness has turned out to be an increasingly blurry business. In part, that’s a reflection of the standard narrative of postmodernism, according to which all uppercase ideals — Truth, Beauty, Justice — must come in for questioning. But the difficulty with poetic greatness has to do with more than the talking points of the contemporary culture wars. Greatness is — and indeed, has always been — a tangle of occasionally incompatible concepts, most of which depend upon placing the burden of “greatness” on different parts of the artistic process. Does being “great” simply mean writing poems that are “great”? If so, how many? Or does “greatness” mean having a sufficiently “great” project? If you have such a project, can you be “great” while writing poems that are only “good” (and maybe even a little “boring”)? Is being a “great” poet the same as being a “major” poet? Are “great” poets necessarily “serious” poets? These are all good questions to which nobody has had very convincing answers.

He goes on to Donald Hall's famous essay, "Poetry and Ambition," in which Hall accused American poets of lacking the aspiration to write great poems. "Contemporary American poetry," Hall wrote, "is afflicted by modesty of ambition—a modesty, alas, genuine ... if sometimes accompanied by vast pretense." No reason, Hall argued, to spend your life writing poems unless your goal was to write great ones.

When we talk about "greatness," Orr writes, "the style we have in mind tends to be grand, sober, sweeping -- unapologetically authoritative and often overtly rhetorical ... Greatness implies scale, and a great poet is a big sensibility writing about big things in a big way."

So does every single one have to be great? Does every poem have to have soaring ambition? Is a poem about a teacup inherently less great than a poem about a big "concept"? Doesn't that PoMo thing that Orr brought up call into question not only the nature of ambition, but the viability of Great Subjects?

Any ideas for contenders for the Ashbery Slot? Ideas about what, now, qualifies someone as A Great Poet? What makes a Great Poem? Some of my favorite poets (Jane Hirshfield, for example), those who I regard as having great technical skill and emotional impact, work on a "small" scale, taking on limited spheres that are often no wider than the few out a kitchen window or the way a single thought moves and grows in the mind. Does that mean the poet is not great, or that the poems aren't? Or is that smaller scale the only trustworthy realm when thinking in absolutes seems to have such terrifying effects?

P.S. I like Orr's writing. It's challenging and interesting. But sometimes it seems loaded with so much provocation and tongue-in-cheekiness that I'm not sure how much I've just been drawn in by a nicely written bit of sophistry ... I don't know, after reading the piece, whether Orr believes a word of what he wrote. The one sentence where I thought I could see the real man:

When we lose sight of greatness, we cease being hard on ourselves and on one another; we begin to think of real criticism as being "mean" rather than as evidence of poetry's health.

That, to me, sounded like a man who's taken a lot of crap over his own "meanness." And as much as I wouldn't have wanted to be the subject of some of his reviews, I agree with him.

Elling Does Roethke Better Than Roethke Does Roethke

2009-02-15T10:39:00.031-05:00

Popular song lyrics read without music are most often cringe-worthy. (For an evening's entertainment, though, you could do worse than gather a few friends and some beers and have the group perform poetic readings of the collected lyrics of AC/DC. Really. Imagine an earnest poetry-reading-voice intoning, "She was a fast machine/ She kept her motor clean ...")

Much as I love Dylan and partially agree with the argument that he's a poet at heart, when I read "Desolation Row" transcribed as a poem in David Lehman's Oxford Book of American Poetry, it set my teeth on edge. If Dylan's a poet, he's one who should only be heard; on the page, his songs read to me as irritating doggerel: an obsfucating, unfunny Ogden Nash. It's may be the end rhymes or the fact that Dylan's voice and delivery can't help but crop up in my head while I'm reading, but something is utterly lost in translation. When separated from their sonic back-up, most pop lyrics reveal themselves as pap. There are a few exceptions, of course; many of Tom Waits' songs—especially stranger pieces like "9th and Hennepin" and "What's He Building in There?"—hold up, but Waits is a writer's musician. (If Lehman's criteria for selection were pure on-the-page success of a work, Waits should've trumped Dylan for inclusion the anthology.)

There's a long tradition of changing great poems into songs, with greater but still mixed success. Loreena McKennitt has done some great work here, recording versions of Noyes' "The Highwayman" and Tennyson's "The Lady of Shallot"—but due to her sound and the age of the poems, they seem like artifacts. Lovely ones, but still. A 1997 collection called Now & In Time to Be had Irish musicians setting Yeats to music. The disc is hard to come by now, but Van Morrison's take on "Before the World Was Made" and the Waterboys "Stolen Child" were well worth listening to.

Recently, though, I heard a musical version of a well-known poem that took my breath away.

Theodore Roethke's "The Waking," which with Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle" and Bishop's "One Art" fills out the trifecta of most famous villanelles, is good enough on the page. But the recordings I've heard of Roethke reading the poem have always turned me off; his portentous delivery makes the poem into something overly ominous. While an awareness of death is central to the poem, his readings of it always seem a little stern, failing to capture its essential liveliness and the sweetness in it.

The poem took on a new life and beauty for me a while ago when I saw jazz vocalist Kurt Elling perform it. As soon as he uttered the first words, I was transfixed. It's an astonishly beautiful rendition, and Elling has real power in performance—a sort that seems to come from a sheer love of what he's doing.

My recommendation: Go to iTunes, put down your 99 cents, and download track #8 on his CD Nightmoves (try not to think of Bob Seger). Pour yourself a cup of something slow-sippable, and play that sucker, loud.

Or you can listen to the YouTube version, below. Let me know what you think—and if you have any favorite poems that have been turned into songs, I'd love to hear them.

In the Can with Donald Justice

2009-02-09T12:33:00.022-05:00

News from the BBC today of a competition in the U.K. to find poetry to be displayed in the public toilets of Shetland. The competition is to be called "Bards of the Bog."

A local librarian said, "It should brighten up folk's day, and maybe they'll be inspired to pop into the library and borrow more poetry."

Hopefully after they wash their hands ...

Toilets are perhaps the last place in the world where poetry may find a captive audience (though I wouldn't put it past people to be on their Blackberries while on the loo). Still, I wonder if any contemporary poet can top the classic stall verse that begins, "Here I sit/broken-hearted." Perhaps it could be expanded from a quatrain into a full sonnet.

Or they could just turn to Donald Justice's New and Selected for a poem that adds a painfully existential angle to a simple trip to take a leak.

Unflushed Urinals

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX lines written in an Omaha bus station

Seeing them, I recognize the contempt
Some men have for themselves.

This man, for instance, zipping quickly up, head turned,
Like a bystander innocent of his own piss.

And here comes one to repair himself at the mirror,
Patting down damp, sparse hairs, suspiciously still black,
Poor bantam cock of a man, jaunty at one a.m., perfumed,
xxxxxxundiscourageable ...

O the saintly forbearance of these mirrors!
The acceptingness of the washbowls, in which we absolve ourselves!

Rabbit, Rest

2009-01-27T16:12:00.005-05:00

Wow. John Updike died today.

This little segment of Rabbit, Run, where Rabbit is sheltering up the stairs from a little mechanic shop, stunned me when I read it.

(In fact, that whole book stunned me. And he was not yet 30 when he published it.)

The clangor of the body shop comes up softly. Its noise comforts him, tells him he is hidden and safe, that while he hides men are busy nailing the world down, and toward the disembodied sounds his heart makes in darkness a motion of love.

Colbert takes on first poet since Billy Collins to have an audience greater than 10

2009-01-25T11:38:00.002-05:00

Poor Stephen. No mermaids for you.

New work up at Linebreak this week ...

2009-01-22T11:21:00.012-05:00

The guy who reads the poem in the audio version does it WAY better than I could. Thanks to the Linebreak editors for treating their poems so well.

(And I hate to link to commercials, but if you want to watch the way Rube would have made a car, this is fun.)

In the best news I've had all week, I just found out that the Inquisition has risen from the ashes. For those unfortunate readers who were not students at Mclean High School in the late 80s-early 90s, this news will likely not fill your soul with joy. For those who were, though, I don't need to remind you of Allan Piper's little newsletter that took on national news and politics with more wit and insight than any high schooler really had the right to possess. I still remember by heart one of the paper's rare sallies into rhyme, around the time of the first Gulf War:

Little Hussein went out of his brain
And killed all the Kurds in his way.
Then Little Bush kicked Hussein in the tush,
but let him kill Kurds, anyway.

The Inquisition lives!

The Cabernet of Asthma Medication

2009-01-18T10:58:00.052-05:00

So it’s less than 24 hours till we get a guy who reads modern poetry in the White House, and I could write about past inauguration poems or the flap over Obama’s choice, but instead, I find myself wanting to write about my drinking problem.

The subject came up for me after I re-read a poem in Tony Hoagland’s 2003 collection, What Narcissism Means to Me. Funny title, often hilarious book, and the poem “When Dean Young Talks About Wine” (below) is classic Hoagland. It’s very funny—blatantly, over-the-top funny; at times I can imagine Hoagland doing stand-up—but also moving and intelligent in ways that creep up on you. His poems have a way of making direct statements that wouldn’t be as successful in work that didn’t have this comic sensibility; if you can make people laugh, they will follow you anywhere.

My drinking problem is not that I drink too much—though I do love the Dogfish Head Brewery only a few blocks from work. My drinking problem is different: I'm married to a lovely man who writes about food for a living, which means that we're occasionally at press dinners where people say things like, "I don't think the holy basil successfully elevates the buttery tones of the fish" and "The miso provides a perfect counterpoint to the acid" and "This chef needs to learn that salt is his friend, not some embarassing redneck cousin he needs to hide in the basement." And while I do, at these events, occasionally harbor thoughts like, There are people starving in Darfur—hell, there are people starving two BLOCKS from here—and we're bitching about the lack of elevating qualities in the holy basil?, I understand what they're talking about. I love food. I think cooking is a true art, and 95 percent of the time when someone says something that would sound incredibly pretentious to non-foodies, I totally get what they mean. (Really, probably 20 percent of the time, the person saying something like that is me, and I'm completely sincere about it.)

Where I get lost is with wine. Good food and good wine usually go together, and people who know a lot about food often know a lot about wine as well. But while I can hold my own in banter about the flavors of a dish, I am a complete baboon when it comes to wine—an oenofool. Even now my approach when the subject comes up is to shut my mouth and try not to say anything that might embarrass my husband (or my friend Angela, who's been known to be able to tell an Oregon from a Washington pinot at one sip. This may be no big deal among wine people, but it impressed the hell out of me). It's taken me years to even begin to be able to tell a Cab from a Pinot, and I would probably still make plenty of mistakes if blind-tested. I could almost certainly discern a red from a white, but I might try to peek to be sure.

It's not that I don't like it—I'm very fond of many wines, but to quote Dave Barry, "my policy with wine is very similar to my policy with beer, which is pretty much drink it and look around for more." Terroir, tannins, vintage, crus—the effects of all these things continue to mystify me. Part of this is certainly due to how my sister and I grew up: Our parents liked a glass of wine with dinner, but we never saw a bottle more expensive or unusual than a Kendall-Jackson Chard or a Gallo—not ever. Sensible, down-to-earth people, my folks, who still drink rotgut gin in their G & Ts, even though they could afford something better. My folks' version of talking about wine would have been some high-falutin' banter like, "Nice wine." "Yep, it was on special at Giant."

For years when I heard people talk about tasting steel or blackberries or old saddle leather in their wine, I thought they were either crazy or making it up to sound sophisticated. Or actually sophisticated in ways that must make me a total rube. Recently I was reading Marion Winik's lovely new collection, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, and was gratified to find an anecdote where someone swishes their wine and tells the others tasting it, "Grapes. I'm getting ... grapes." It was a wonderful line, but my sense was he said it to be funny. I would have said it in earnest.

About five years ago, though, I had a breakthrough: I'd stopped at a wine bar to wait for my husband one evening, and ordered a glass of something. It should help indicate what a complete wine idiot I am that I have no idea what the something was, though I do recall it was a Red Something. I lifted it to my face to sip and was almost wacked in the face with an incredibly powerful waft of pure butterscotch. The wine reeked of it.

I'd never experienced anything like it. I won't say it was spiritual, exactly, but it was close: I'd experienced something that had always been invisible, that I'd always believed fictional or at least beyond my capacity to experience. I would never have expected to have my own personal little oeno-Lourdes at a strip mall in Gaithersburg, but there you have it. It was everyone else's illusion until it became mine, too, and I suddenly understood it was real.

That said, the most I would have ventured about that wine was what I said above: It reeked of butterscotch. The oenophile in Hoagland's poem talks about wine on a whole other level—an expertise that seems, by the end of the poem, to be about dodging more painful subjects.

***

When Dean Young Talks About Wine

The worm thrashes when it enters the tequila.
The grape cries out in the wine vat crusher.

But when Dean Young talks about wine, his voice is strangely calm.
Yet it seems that wine is rarely mentioned.

He says, Great first chapter but no plot.
He says, Long runway, short flight.
He says, This one never had a secret.
He says, You can’t wear stripes with that.

He squints as if recalling his childhood in France.
He purses his lips and shakes his head at the glass.

Eighty-four was a naughty year, he says,
and for a second I worry that California has turned him
into a sushi-eater in a cravat.

Then he says,
XXXXXXXXThis one makes clear the difference
between a thoughtless remark
and an unwarranted intrusion.

Then he says, In this one the pacific last light of afternoon
Stains the wings of the seagull pink
XXXXXXXXat the very edge of the postcard.

But where is the Cabernet of rent checks and asthma medication?
Where is the Burgundy of orthopedic shoes?
Where is the Chablis of skinned knees and jelly sandwiches?
with the aftertaste of cruel Little League coaches?
and the undertone of rusty stationwagon?
His mouth is purple as if from his own ventricle
he had drunk.
He sways like a fishing rod.

When a beast is hurt it roars in incomprehension.
When a bird is hurt it huddles in its nest.

But when a man is hurt,
XXXXXXXXhe makes himself an expert.
Then he stands there with a glass in his hand
staring into nothing
XXXXXXXXXXas if he was forming an opinion.

The Holiday Stupid

2008-12-28T11:00:00.011-05:00

So here I am, entering the back half of nearly two weeks to myself, with more than 60 hours of vacation time that I had to use or lose by the 31st ... and I have had no urge to write. None whatsoever.

The Holiday Stupor (which really means "stupid") descended, clogging my brain with obscene amounts of food and work-stress and several visits to The Mall. I blame the mall for the current case of writer's block. Not because I really feel that those few trips truly caused my brain-freeze, but because I prefer to blame malls for everything. My younger sister earned my eternal admiration this year by fulfilling an ambition I have stated for five years but have not yet achieved: she accomplished every bit of her Christmas shopping online, thus avoiding completely the insane crush into too few parking spaces, the plowing through mass-produced merchandise that's been pawed over by hundreds of people, the perfume snipers in the department stores, the aggressive kiosk sellers in the halls with their assortment of The Extremely Random (warm, lavender-scented paraffin wax to dip your feet in? Toasters that only toast hot dog buns and simultaneously steam a weenie? Really?)

I'm trying to rejuvenate with lots of reading. I can't remember the last time when I read three novels in a week, but I'll manage it this time. Already finished Roger Rosenblatt's Beet (hilarious; probably the best academic satire I've read since Russo's Straight Man) and Margot Livesey's The House on Fortune Street, which I found very moving and tried to learn from structurally.

I also read Billy Collins' latest book straight through this morning. I don't mind Billy Collins; I know there's a whole school of Collins-haters out there. I've never fully understood the vitriol about him. But I do have to admit to feeling that once you've read one good Billy Collins poem, you've read them all. He varies his subjects a bit, but his technique and mannerisms seem to stay so much the same that it's like eating a savory-yet-predictable dish over and over. I found nothing in the new collection to correct that opinion. (If you missed David Orr's review of Collins' last book, The Trouble with Poetry, go read it now. It's not only a clever review but an impressive piece of ventriloquism; I thought that it was fair to Collins in reporting his strengths and weaknesses as a poet, but the accuracy with which Orr managed to get the Collins voice seemed the most stinging aspect of the review. Reading it is a bit like watching someone stand behind a gifted magician and do the exact same routine, but very slowly so that you can see the moment when the rabbit's pulled from his back pocket.)

Anyway, I'm hoping to get the brain back in gear soon. It's incredibly frustrating to have a period of time for writing and no urge/inspiration to do it.

In the meantime, Beltway's new issue is out, a fascinating collection of poems on the theme of museums. I'm honored to have a piece in it.

Happy new year to all and if you've been similarly afflicted by the season, may your own holiday stupid soon pass over.

Robert Bly No Habla Español

2008-12-06T11:19:00.016-05:00

Below, a guest blogger on his frustration over Robert Bly's translations of Antonio Machado.

***

soberbios: pride, arrogance, haughtiness
bendita ilusion: blessed illusion
ciencia: knowledge, learning

Robert Bly: worst translator ever? I can’t make that claim since I haven’t read every translation in every language. But I wonder if any other readers out there have encountered translations as exploitive and distorted as Robert Bly’s?

In his translation of Machado, the Spanish poet of the early 20th century, check out these lines (even if you don’t know Spanish):

Machado
En todas partes he visto
caravanes de tristeza,
SOBERBIOS y melancholicos.

Bly
Everywhere I’ve gone I’ve seen
excursions of sadness
ANGRY and melancholy ...

Ignoring the clumsiness of "excursions" instead of "caravans of sadness," why does Bly use "angry" instead of "pride" or "arrogance"?

Machado
Anoche cuando dormia
sone, BENDITA ILUSION!

Bly
Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — MARVELOUS ERROR! —

"Marvelous error" instead of "blessed illusion"?

Machado
corazon maduro
de sombra y de CIENCIA.

Bly
a heart made mature
by darkness and ART.

Obviously, the primary meaning of "ciencia" is "science." A secondary meaning is "knowledge." I could even see translating it as "wisdom." But "art"? Clearly, Bly is exploiting Machado for his own purposes. Unfortunately, he is one of the most prolific translators of Spanish-language poetry. Before I could read much Spanish, a teacher warned me off Bly and told me Alistair Reid was the much more reliable and artful translator.

- Mouse (Raton)

***

My thoughts: I don't envy anyone who takes on the work of trying to preserve the nuances, inflections, and even the sonic qualities of poetry in another language. Even with the best of intentions, the result will always be its own new creature; a translator can't help but leave a fingerprint, and some things are truly untranslatable. And given Bly's prolific work as a translator—he's translated vast reams of poetry not only in Spanish, but in many other languages as well—we likely have him to thank for exposing many English-speaking readers to works they never would have otherwise encountered.

That said, go back to "many other languages" note: Bly's taken on poetry in Spanish, French, Norwegian, Persian, Urdu, German, and Swedish. Does he speak all of these languages with anything resembling fluency? I know many translators work with assistants who are more fluent than they are (Robert Hass actually worked directly with Czeslaw Milosz, a hell of an aid in translating his own work). Maybe Bly had a good native-speaking guide for all of these. But where's the line between translation and creation? Should we celebrate the fact that we can read these authors, or that we can read a Bly-toned version of these authors?

The results of his work on the Machado poems cited above remind me of stories about changelings, those substitute babies in folklore. Brought by fairies to replace a stolen child, they bear a resemblance to the original, but something is creepily off.

Thoughts on this tricky art? Ever tried it? Ever been frustrated by a tainted translation, or are you more grateful that any version of these writers is accessible?

Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" — Never Let the Facts Get in the Way of a Good Poem?

2008-11-29T12:11:00.053-05:00

Saint Mark Freeing a Christian Slave
Tintoretto

The Spoliation
El Greco

John the Baptist
Caravaggio

The Third of May
Goya

The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus
Rubens

About suffering, they were frequently wrong,
The Old Masters: if they understood
Its human position, how it takes place

While someone is eating, opening a window, or just walking along,

That understanding is rarely in evidence

In their paintings, which more typically depict

The agonies of martyrdom, the brutalities of the state

As the central focus of the work—as though

Outside of the radiant anguish,

Little else exists or is worthy of attention.

And not simply for the viewer, we posterity whose eyes

Are directed via light effects and shadow

Toward the tear-stained face of Mary or

The tortured veins on the throat of a slave, but

For the other inhabitants of the painting, who usually

Are turned toward the central scene of pain, and not—

Like the ploughman, the expensive delicate ship

In Brueghel's atypical "Icarus"—gesturing away.

The central argument of Auden's poem seems to be

About human suffering itself, which inarguably does

Happen while others are not paying attention.

It is undebatably true we are all cocooned

Within the opaque veils that comprise

Our own fields of concern; that we fail

Again and again to attend to the suffering of others,

And that this has elements of both tragedy

(Our blindness, our inefficacy in the face of horror)

And solace: that all of this shall pass. But this much loved

(By me as well) poem argues its case

With evidence circumstantial at best, using

A painting that in no way typifies

The Old Masters approach to suffering. In their work,

One could more rightly argue

That suffering is the center of the world, and that every eye

Moves toward it as a needle points to north

To be, by its dark light, inexorably changed.

How did Auden pull this off? Is there any chance that his great poem should be read not as a statement on the nature of suffering, but about the critic's ability to force misinterpretation by misdirecting the viewer's gaze (and perhaps the poet's ability to do the same?) I'm just spitballing here ... because I don't think this poem would have survived this long if it were read as a statement about how criticism/interpretation is a tricky process in which "experts" misguide us.

Poetry often seems to be what sounds like truth—the Muses said as much to Hesiod. Yet I am not entirely comfortable with "truths" that try to claim our minds without the needed facts, which gesture toward the thinking behind edifices such as Kentucky's Creation Museum.

I have started to collect these factual issues in other poems I like: In B. H. Fairchild's "Weather Report," for instance, how everything builds nicely into his thesis: a wry acknowledgment that both grand scale injustice and quotidian dolor are perpetual—a fairly convincing argument, largely supported by his facts (and ours). Yet, stanza four is this nice little mousetrap:

Eichmann lies in bed and reads a novel;

A Holocaust survivor sets himself on fire.

The thief's in church, the priest is in the brothel;

the sky is clear, the weatherman's a liar.

Sounds great, but this is from his 2003 collection, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, and unless Fairchild wrote this particular poem back in '62, Eichmann had been dead—captured in Buenos Aires, taken to Israel, tried, and hanged—for 40 years. You can argue that the poem is outside of time in some way; that it speaks a truth beyond the factual about victims and victimizers, that it captures certain eternal realities without capturing temporal facts. But for some reason, I feel that it matters that no, Eichmann is not lying in bed and reading a novel; he is not lying anywhere because his ashes were scattered in international waters so no one could visit his grave or memorialize him. Whatever you think about state-sanctioned execution, Eichmann's fate certainly bespeaks a kind of moral justice that the poem seems to argue is absent from the world.

A good poem, even if it's not making any kind of philosophical argument as these two are, must be persuasive about its vision. And yet, I think both Auden and Fairchild's poems do persuade, even without having all the facts in order. So where is the border between fact and truth? Would these poems be improved by use of facts more supportive of their arguments, even if the names were more obscure? (There are certainly some Nazi war criminals who escaped the noose, but few would have the resonance of Eichmann.) Is all that separates great poetry from great propaganda a poet's good intentions?

My Little Sister is 30 and I Have One Foot in the Grave

2008-11-18T10:50:00.033-05:00

Spent the weekend in NYC with beloved sister, celebrating her momentous arrival on the planet, which occurred 30 years ago yesterday. We saw two plays, walked hundreds of blocks, hit two great museums (the Met and the MoMA), wandered through Chinatown and Little Italy, and had two less-than-great meals. As usual, I got back completely exhausted but sorry to leave.

Question: How many "chocolate bars" can one city support, especially in a recession? Everywhere we walked, it seemed, we passed some little exclusive chocolate shop with a menu of gold-leaf truffles and $8 hot cocoas and chocolate with bacon in it. I couldn't help but wonder what will happen to these places over the next few years, as our need for the chocolate endorphins rises and our ability to pay for anything more than a square of Hershey bar sinks.

Moment with the most "poetry": Eavesdropping on a class of public school 2nd graders at the MoMA as their tour guide sat them down in front of the cluster of Brancusis shown above and had the kids talk about what they saw in them. The kids were amazing: alternately squirmy, entranced, and disgusted by the naked breasts on a Klimt in the room. I couldn't wait to write about them. The kids, not the breasts.

Best New York moment: Eating a bagel in a small diner near the museum and watching our Indian waitress enchange flirtatious banter with the Ukrainian line cook and the Latin American manager. Oddest NY moment: Walking south on Madison Avenue just after the Met closed on Saturday, freezing our asses off in the dark, and crossing an intersection only to realize that the entire area was clogged with cop cars, marked and unmarked, and that every nearby doorway had an officer in SWAT gear lurking in it.

These contest results went live this weekend while I was away ... a nice surprise. The $2000 first prize would have been nicer, but $100 will help me pay for the time in New York!

New work in Blackbird today ...

2008-11-14T12:13:00.018-05:00

Check it out here.

I was happy to get work accepted, but I'm happier still seeing the company ... The issue is a veritable roll call of Hollinsites, with fiction by Lee Smith (Hollins class of '67), a memoir by Constance Adler (who was in my '99 M.A. program and who I haven't seen in years! So happy to see she's still writing!) and poetry by Jeanne Larsen (Hollins class of '72, and one of my favorite professors ever ... not just a wonderful poet and novelist, but one of the world's genuinely kind and generous people). It's enough to bring out my school spirit.

Also: Bruce Weigl. No Hollins connection I know of, though the Hollins Critic included a good essay about his work way back in '94. But Weigl is one of the poets I discovered in grad school, and much of his work just stuns me. Go find and read "What Saves Us" and see what you think.

And Angela, thanks for the picture!

Obama Needs to Watch His Line Breaks

2008-11-07T16:43:00.004-05:00

I mean, breaking on "the" in the 9th line is a little weak.

Otherwise, really, this ain't bad for a collegiate poem, even if it does sound like Obama might have been tripping—or feeling negative about a recent spelunking experience—when he wrote it.

(Underground apes eating figs?)

Underground

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.

Another, perhaps more personally revealing, poem by the President-elect here.

Our new president wrote poetry! It's a good thing this didn't come out before the election. it could have scared off middle America—even though Lincoln himself was known to scribble an iamb or two.

Still giddy ...

Woohoo!!!!

2008-11-05T10:26:00.002-05:00

For the first time in 8 years, I'm finding myself shedding tears of joy over the news, rather than ones of disgust or impotent rage.

I'm sure emotional equilibrium will return in a few days.

VOTE!

2008-11-04T10:19:00.002-05:00

Well, let me amend that: If you've read a paper or follow the news or are reasonably informed, vote. Otherwise, just pretend this is a regular old day. Go to work. Watch your stock portfolios plummet. See who's died in Iraq today.

I don't care if people vote for McCain -- I just hope they don't vote due to Barack's middle name. Anyone's who's harbored the thought that he might be Muslim (and that might be bad), who thinks he's a commie, who thinks he's related to Saddam, please, just stay home and leave this to people who are voting on policy issues.

Washington City Paper staff are following the nitty gritty of the local polling stations via Twitter here. Lines around the blocks. People jubilant. Several unicorns spotted.

In the Immortal Words of Joey Tempest ...

2008-11-02T18:25:00.023-05:00

It's the final countdown.

But in the meantime, this weekend my friend Lou created—using saws, kerosene, and several enormous pumpkins—a scene in his front yard that must have thrilled every kid in the neighborhood, and probably many adults as well (the ones who weren’t freaked out by the potential for neighborhood-wide conflagration).

Am I overstating things to say this diorama of carnage is a quintessential American art installation? It’s over-the-top, absurd, funny. It simultaneously represents and parodies our obsession with violence and spectacle. It honors the value of work—this took hours and hours to create. And most of all, it values the audience: Why spend the time to do this thing at all, if not to create a reaction of horror, amusement, and, dare I say, delight?

Maybe I’m overstating things. Still: awesome.

On to Americana of a larger scale: This weekend, the book review sections of both the Washington Post and the New York Times carried articles about presidential reading habits. (They also both carried reviews of a novel called The Flying Troutmans, and in an all-too-common scenario, the Post’s critic loved it—“Toews has created such an engaging cast for this 2,000-mile trek that you'll never be tempted to ask, ‘Are we there yet?’—and the Times critic panned it—“a journey of a few thousand miles that ends up seeming like several million. I blame the disagreeable company and the vapid conversation.” But I digress.)

The Post piece is a review of a recent book by Fred Kaplan on the literary works that shaped Lincoln, Jon Meacham’s a general round-up of reading executive habits that comes around to focus on McCain’s for Hemingway’s hero in For Whom the Bell Tolls and the fact that both candidates share a tragic sensibility; Meacham covered much the same ground in two NPR pieces this week, though the NPR pieces delved more deeply into the Obama and McCain autobiographies.

Both articles are worth a read, but the few extracts Jonathan Yardley quoted from the Lincoln book seemed particularly germane at this moment. First, Lincoln himself, writing in 1855:

“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ' all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except Negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equals, except Negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.”

Then Kaplan himself, writing about Lincoln’s preparation through books:

"If intellectual readiness is everything, he was ready, as he well knew when he said goodbye to his Springfield world, having prepared himself over a lifetime to become a well-read master of the human narrative. If that narrative was to have its tragic dimension in Lincoln's failure, despite his talents, to prevent the South's secession, shorten the inevitable war, or alleviate Northern racism, it was to be an object lesson in the limitations of language rather than a failure in preparation. At the same time, the unfortunate givens of the narrative provided the context for his two greatest achievements, the Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural address, in which he did what great writers do: create useful texts from which readers can derive inspiration, literary pleasure, and universalizing direction."

Nice. In my moments of fear that the polls are wrong or that the Karl Rovian plotters are about to launch some massive smear campaign (“Obama Found Sharing Cup of Borscht in Gay Love Nest With Reverend Wright”) in these last hours, I console myself with this: Even if Obama doesn’t win, isn’t it nice that, either way, we’ll again have a president who reads?

I don’t know why, exactly, but this Donald Justice piece from his 2004 Collected Poems struck me as relevant, right now. It’s the last stanza in particular that seems, to me, to sum up this moment of great hope.

“There is a gold light in certain old paintings”

There is a gold light in certain old paintings

That represents a diffusion of sunlight.

It is like happiness, when we are happy.
It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at once, this light,
++++And the poor soldiers sprawled at the foot of the cross

++++Share in its charity equally with the cross.

Orpheus hesitated beside the black river.

With so much to look forward to he looked back.

We think he sang then, but the song is lost.

At least he had seen once more the beloved back.

++++I say the song went this way: O prolong

++++Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.

The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work.

One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.
The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar.

Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good.

++++And all that we suffered through having existed

++++Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.

Happy Halloween!

2008-10-31T14:19:00.008-04:00

Nice little montage of poets' graves by the Academy today.

(Of course, some of us prefer to go au naturel.)

Here's a little tribute to one of nature's creepiest.

Vulture

My name is Charon.
I am the ferryman
across this black river
to the land of the dead.

My name is Charon.
Someone must dine
on the flesh of the gone.
Their lives flow in my bald brain
after they are nothing but bones.

You can’t take it with you,
but I can. Many complain
about my breath,
but I don’t get mints.
I stay alive by eating death.

My name is Charon.
My beak is the oar,
my stomach the boat.
Please leave your bags at the gate.
The only luggage I take is carrion.

Maybe We'll Have Dust Tupperware, Instead

2008-10-25T19:59:00.009-04:00

While driving into D.C. today to check out some of the new exhibits at the American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery (which, most excellently for a rainy pisser of a day, are located in the same building in Penn Quarter), I heard an excellent Freudian slip on NPR. Discussing the collapse of Wall Street and the coming D.C.-based economic summit to discuss it, the reporter noted that "the crisis will be held in Washington."

Indeed it will.

And in (gulp) barely more than a week, we'll know who's going to be holding it. Whether it's Obama/Biden or The Exoskeleton Formerly Known as John McCain and the Gleeful Moose-Killer, they're going to have a hell of a job ahead of them.

Last week Forbes reported that seniors are selling off previously purchased cemetery space in order to nab a little cash. Forget that sweet little space in Forest Lawn; sell it now to pay for your medications. When you die, just have your next of kin stick you in a Hefty bag and drop you in the nearest 7/11 dumpster.

Every time I hear news about the economy, visions of Cormac McCarthy's The Road dance in my head. For those unfamiliar with the plot of McCarthy's Pulitzer winner, here's an extract from Wikipedia's summary:

Civilization has been destroyed, and most species have become extinct. What happened outside of North America is left unexplained. Humanity consists largely of bands of cannibals, their captives, and refugees who scavenge for canned food. Ash covers the surface of the earth; in the atmosphere, it obscures the sun and moon, and the two travelers breathe through improvised masks.

Good times!

I'm not sure I could say that visiting the gallery cheered me, exactly, but the American Art Gallery contains some amazing works created during the Great Depression, some under the auspices of the WPA. There's a stunning mural by Thomas Hart Benton, and Alexander Hogue's Dust Bowl (above) could have served as the cover for McCarthy's novel. Hopefully we won't be seeing similar images on the cover of U.S. News and World Report any time soon.

Get tips on surviving the apocalypse to come here. Enjoy them while you can; it's hard to access hilarious online videos from the back of a boxcar.

Instant Memorials and the Problem of Fodder

2008-10-19T17:08:00.016-04:00

Get ready: It's nearly Halloween, and as soon as that night of rotten eggs and toilet papering is over, the real scare begins: marketing for the holidays kicks into full gear, with retailers eager to encourage us to buy, buy, buy in the name of Jesus. Your family will be inflicted upon you. You will be inflicted on them. Out will come cameras for endless shots of decorating, pie-making, present-wrapping, and Uncle Steve passed out in the eggnog.

I make joke, of course. I don't even have an Uncle Steve (though if I did, I'd want him to be like this guy.)

But the approach of the holidays has had me thinking about a lost ritual: the development of family photographs. Once upon a time, you had to wait weeks to see the pictures you took on vacation or during family visits. You mailed them off and got them weeks later; viewing them felt like you were looking over a historical event. Then, I think while I was in elementary school, came the advent of the express photo shop, where you could get your pictures in an hour or so.

Now, there's no delay at all. I can't remember the last time someone handed me a stack of photographs. Instead, it's all digital: you click, and instantly you can see the results. What's more, you DO see the results; I can think of many recent occasions when as soon as photos had been taken, the camera was passed around so that everyone could see the images. I looked at the pictures, some of which included me, and like everyone else I giggled and groaned—and felt somehow nostalgic for a moment that had occurred only seconds before.

What is that? Does looking at images of yourself enjoying a moment remove you from the moment you're enjoying? Never before have events taken so little time to be memorialized— which is a different process than remembering, and sometimes an oppositional one.

The effect of digital cameras reminds me of the poetic process, if such it can be called: When something interesting occurs or some emotional moment transpires in my life or I witness/ eavesdrop on a conversation, I often think within seconds, "This will make a good poem" or "I'm going to put that in a short story." How many pieces of my life have I missed thinking about how to convey them in words?

Do you do this? Is it healthy—or is health beside the point? Maybe once you start writing, you can't help vampiring big chunks of your existence. Maybe you should only worry once you actually start avoiding life in order to write; supposedly, Rainer Maria Rilke skipped his daughter's wedding because he was thought a poem might come. (If I'd been his kid, I would have been pretty pissed about this. "Hey Dad. I hear you were waiting for a poem. You know where your poem was? At our wedding with everyone else, you prick.")

Anyway, I've been reading Brenda Shaughnessy's Human Dark With Sugar this week. Lots of really striking lines and startling turns of phrase in the book, but the one below struck me as pretty damn funny. I laughed out loud, in fact. (And then started thinking, "This would make a good blog entry.")

A Poet's Poem

If it takes me all day,

I will get the word freshened out of this poem.

I put it in the first line, then moved it to the second,

and now it won't come out.

It's stuck. I'm so frustrated,

so I went out to my little porch all covered in snow.

and watched the icicles drip, as I smoked

a cigarette.

Finally I reached up and broke a big, clear spike

off the roof with my bare hand.

And used it to write a word in the snow.

I wrote the word snow.

I can't stand myself.

A Dish Best Served with a $5.99 Sticker

2008-10-12T00:00:00.003-04:00

While I was in grad school, an editor from a major publishing house came to visit our writing program. His visit was greeted with much excitement by those of us scribbling away at novels and short story collections; we were invited to submit a sample of work that he would read before meeting with each of us.

While we feigned nonchalance, I'm sure each of us secretly hoped to be Discovered by this editor, a writer in his own right whose first novel had been highly praised by critics and whose career seemed poised to scale the heights. Knowing he was unlikely to read everything I sent, I struggled to decide which story to place first in my batch. I chose an atypical piece: it was more frothy and “chick-lit”ish than what I generally wrote—but it had moved a few readers to tears, and had scenes I’d continued to find funny months after writing them.

When we met, it was immediately clear that I had chosen the wrong story. “How old are you?” he asked. I admitted that I was 23. “Good,” he said. “This first story is obviously the work of a very young writer. If you had been older, I would have tried to discourage you from continuing. But you obviously have some years to grow.”

Bummer. But while I felt a bit patronized (and cursed myself for putting that story first), I figured, hey—could’ve been worse.

It wasn’t until a friend told me about his own meeting that I was truly put off. My friend was working on a novel about sharecroppers; it was taut and lean and beautifully written, with real depth and scope and a strange, cut-down prose that served the story well. When he met with the editor, the man praised the writing but told him it was derivative, had already been done by Faulkner, and would never sell.

“If you want to see a Southern novel that doesn’t repeat what’s already been done before, one that’s truly original,” he said without irony, “read my book.”

Ick!

Soon after grad school, my story, “The Colonization of Helena Capezi,” ended up in Iron Horse Literary Review. I was ecstatic (more so than usual, even) for it to find a home, and later to get calls from an editor and an agent wanting to read more work.

But that visiting editor was right: The damn thing practically has ringlets.

Nonetheless, since then, I’ve seen his first and second novels stacked in the bargain section of at least a dozen bookstores. I’m not gloating—I was 23, after all, and with the perspective of years, I think he was generous. But every time I see his books, I think about him telling my friend to read his own novel as an example (the only example—no suggestions to read Barry Hannah, Tim Gautreaux, Lee Smith, James Lee Burke, Dorothy Allison) of how to do Southern fiction right. And I think about Clive James’ most hilarious poem, which David Orr quoted in a review of James' new selected poems a few Sundays back.

Blessed are those humble in success, for they shall never remind anyone of this poem.

The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered

By Clive James

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book—
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots—
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun."

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error—
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

The Bits of Stuff That Let Art Happen

2008-10-05T23:00:00.003-04:00

A while ago, I wanted to write a poem about someone working in a pen factory, putting the tiny little caps onto pens that would be used to sign contracts, endorse checks, and write poems.

Behind any kind of art that now exists—even one as insubstantial as poetry often seems—there is a pile of materials that must exist in order for the art to be made. Someone must mix the colors for paints, creating the precise balance of pigment and chemical that makes a paint burnt umber rather than sienna or rust. Someone must run the machines that press out keys for the keyboards upon which novels and poems are written. Someone must mine the kaolin that's refined into porcelain clay. Yet how many of the people who produce the materials that allow art to exist have the money to possess the final “product”—or the free time to appreciate it?

The gap between those producing the raw materials and those creating the final artworks has long interested me. It’s more elaborate, too, than just producer/artist—for a shade of paint, there’s a mine where the pigment is obtained, then the pigment is refined, then the paint is created and sold. How wide is the economic and cultural gap between the laborer who pulled the ore from the earth and the artist who uses it as one shade on a canvas?

Most people in my zip code can afford to buy a book of poetry, but some the next zip code over would find even that purchase difficult to squeeze into a budget. I'm lucky enough to be able to buy a book now and then, but most visual art is beyond reach. Choosing to buy a painting I love would mean not paying our gas bill, and so I prioritize. But the fact of that choice is a sad one.

Tolstoy said something like, “To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men is the same as saying some kind of food is very good but that most people can’t eat it.” I think about both sides of that idea frequently; my husband works as a food writer, and we sometimes find ourselves noshing delicious things during press events at restaurants we can’t afford or would have to save months to eat at.

I never got around to writing the pen poem, but this weekend my husband mentioned a job he had after high school that captured another iteration of the exact image I’d been considering: he worked in a plant that made pads for saxophones, stamping out tiny bits of felt all day.

What a tedious, mind-numbing, menial job—without which no one would have ever known the names of John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Lester Young …

** This draft passed out hearing Kenny G. **

Poetry and Politics: Strange Bedfellows?

2008-10-01T16:32:00.005-04:00

Great event at the Folger Shakespeare Library this past Monday: Terrance Hayes, Nick Flynn, Eileen Myles, and Edwin Torres reading in support of a new collection, State of the Union: 50 Political Poems.

I’d heard Flynn read part of his poem “Fire” on the Academy of American Poets Poetcast a while ago and found it stunning (little did I know that the podcast contained only about half of the whole poem; apparently the Academy didn’t want listeners to hear the c-bomb dropped in its hallowed recordings. Flynn apparently didn’t know this either; when I asked him about it Monday he said he hadn’t heard the Poetcast of his piece and didn’t know that it had run censored). The whole of it appeared in Tin House’s issue on the subject of evil a while back; it’s an amazing piece of work that's utterly chilling and humanizing of both captives and captors at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.

I was curious to hear Flynn read, but the main reason I went was to see Terrance Hayes, who is writing some of the most exciting American poetry out there right now. Hayes draws on history and the language of both sermon and myth to explore the ways in which we’re both in thrall to the past and desperate to move beyond it. His collection Wind in a Box is rich, strange, and really funny, and the work he read Monday made me wish his new collection were coming out today. Some writers are not good readers of their own work (it’s always painful to go to a reading of work you love to find that the writer’s shyness or dry/forced delivery comes close to ruining the poems), but Hayes is a natural performer and was a pleasure to hear.

After the individual readings, one of the editors of the new anthology, Matthew Zapruder, led a panel discussion of the writers about the nature of political poetry—a combination that many regard with suspicion or downright dislike. Zapruder asked the poets why, and why a “political poet” is seen as such an odd creature in the U.S.

The poets kicked it around for a while, and fear of didacticism seemed to be the number one reason—creating a poetry that’s the political equivalent of the sentimental verse found on Hallmark cards. I can think of a few poets whose works has veered into that zone at times.

At some point Zapruder started to say how the issue is seen differently by poets in other countries, and Flynn interjected “That’s because they’d be put in jail.” A valid point. But I think what Zapruder was leading to is the point that in other countries, politics is seen as so central to a person’s being and such a major component of life that there’s not the disdain for it we often see in the U.S. A “political poet” in South America or Europe is any poet at all; labeling one as such would be a bit like the name of the old Department of Redundancy Department.

Part of the issue to me seems to be that poets and politicians mutually look down on each other; each group thinks it’s dealing with the more important matter. To some poets, the stuff of politics often seems too fleeting to muddy the hands with, and to politicians, much poetry seems incomprehensible or at least detached from real, contemporary concerns. There are so many celebrities now who dabble in politics; political dilettantism is rampant among artists. And there are plenty of political poems that, when you get to their core, seem satisfied with simple messages: war and sexism and racism are bad bad things.

If the job of the artist is to deepen the mystery, can a poem that makes an effective political argument really succeed as a poem? Thoughts?

And a couple of interesting thoughts on the matter here and here.

Unspeakable Speeches

2008-09-22T19:06:00.007-04:00

Poet Sam Rasnake posted Francis Bacon’s painting Head VI on his blog the other day, and accompanied the painting with a quote from Bacon: “If you can talk about it, why paint it?”

Great question. In some ways, I think it's a perfect question for poetry, as well—though an odd one, given that poetry trades in words; to transfer Bacon’s thought to our medium would be to say, If you can speak of it, why write it? Which seems only a small step from saying, If you can speak of it, why speak of it? and from there, one might descend down a long slippery slope of verbal insanity, at the bottom of which one would find Yogi Berra, explaining how he’d give his right arm to be ambidextrous.

For all the wackery in that line, though, to say that poems are unspeakable speeches seems very close to the truth—and not “the unspeakable” meaning solely "awesome" or "horrifying" (as many of Bacon's paintings are), but the things that simply cannot be conveyed in conversation or in narrative prose; what can be expressed that way is not poetry. And in fact, I find that the more I struggle to “say something” in a poem, the less happy I am with the outcome. When I try to say something, it often results in a highly crafted, overthought piece that doesn’t succeed at all in creating the feeling I get when I read a really stunning poem—namely, of having been momentarily removed from my body by a strange confluence of image, sonics, feeling, and idea.

Like so many poems, Bacon’s unsettling canvases are describable when it comes to method—you could talk about the thickness of the white and the purple here, the vertical dry brushiness of the black obliterating the figure’s eyes—but as with a poem, the painting’s final impact cannot be described or summed up the way an article or even a novel might. Many times that’s because poetry, or at least the initial impulse toward poetry, comes from somewhere else, a place even the supposed creator of the poem usually can’t explain. At least I can’t. Writing-wise, there’s little I dread more than having someone ask where I got the idea for a poem. (I’ve noticed other poets never ask this question.)

Jane Hirshfield’s “The Envoy,” from her book Given Sugar, Given Salt, captures this unconscious aspect of writing better than any other work I know; in fact, Hirshfield’s study of Buddhism seems to have led her to become an astute and precise observer of her own mind at work throughout much of her poetry.

What I want when I write a poem is to be able to access the “belled herds.” But they do not come when I call, I cannot look directly at them, and they often dissolve when I try to speak them into being, leaving in my mind a pungent bovine smell that will not turn up on the page. When it does turn up, I feel justified in cracking a beer and calling it a night. But most of the time my brews are unearned, opened because the magic isn’t happening rather than to celebrate its visit.

The Envoy

One day in that room, a small rat.
Two days later, a snake.

Who, seeing me enter,
whipped the long stripe of his
body under the bed,
then curled like a docile house-pet.

I don’t know how either came or left.
Later, the flashlight found nothing.

For a year I watched
as something—terror? happiness? grief?—
entered and then left my body.

Not knowing how it came in,
Not knowing how it went out.

It hung where words could not reach it.
It slept where light could not go.
Its scent was neither snake nor rat,
neither sensualist nor ascetic.

There are openings in our lives
of which we know nothing.

Through them
the belled herds travel at will,
long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

Temporary American Poetry?

2008-09-07T13:40:00.004-04:00

We read different poets for different reasons. There are some I turn to (they tend to be old guys like Justice, Larkin, Auden) when I want a sense of solid ground, of comfort in high winds and waves. There are others I read when I have poetry block; for some reason, I can write fiction almost any time, but I have to be in a certain mental space to write anything resembling a decent poem. Reading Jorie Graham or August Kleinzahler often helps break me out of a prosaic tone that regularly threatens to creep in; the drive toward narrative is a tick on my belly every time I try to write a good lyric poem.

I read Campbe ll McGrath for pleasure, but also as part of an ongoing argument with myself about what cultural stuff belongs in poems. For some reason, poems that are filled with modern implements—the things we’re surrounded by right now—often turn me off. A poem that mentions Britney Spears, text-messaging, or Seinfeld may intrigue or amuse me, but I have yet to find such a piece that makes me want to go back and re-read it. All of these things are themselves, but in poems they’re often metaphors as well, and how long can they last as metaphors for anything but transience itself?

In college I had a used textbook called Contemporary American Poetry in which, on the title page, some wit had crossed out the first three letters of Contemporary. When I read poems that have such modern cultural minutia in them, that’s how they often feel to me: temporary. While we were in grad school, my then-boyfriend wrote me a gorgeous poem—delicate, restrained, yet passionate—but it mentioned the playing of a CD, and that word almost ruined it for me (he was kind enough later to change it to “album,” which helped—and now, sure enough, CDs are almost a dead reference point.)

I want to get the references in what I read. I know he’s a favorite of many, but John Ashbery’s a poet I’ve never been particularly fond of; many of his poems bar me right from the start with allusions to art or films I’ve never seen and have no charge or investment in. Yet Campbell McGrath uses the same baggage; his poems overflow with names and places and stuff. His book Pax Atomica, for example, contains a long poem called “Guns N’ Roses.” Yes, it’s about the band (or at least uses the band as a central image) and I really like it. It’s probably because recognize McGrath’s cultural baggage and have lived in it, where Ashbery’s seems like another planet.

I want to read (and write) something lasting, and it’s often hard to tell how much of right now will last. Yet what seems classic to us now was once tentative: Auden’s “September 1, 1939” is full of contemporary references. But it has lasted and is quoted regularly, in spite of the fact that few contemporary readers know “what occurred at Linz,” what Nijinsky wrote about Diaghilev, or even who Nijinsky or Diaghilev were. And on some level, I think my desire not to see cell phones or iPods or Donald Rumsfeld in poems is a ridiculous and maybe even harmful bias. Poets are regularly bemoaning how few people read poetry, but how many poets write poems that live in the world most people live in? Many poems I read seem a million miles from contemporary concerns and cultural touchstones. How can you tell trivia from culture, especially when much culture is trivia and there’s less and less of a difference between high art and pop? The line becomes more porous by the day; it’s almost become an irrelevant fiction.

Besides, who says something has to last forever to be good? Why do I have a bias insisting art has to be like Michaelangelo’s David—still standing centuries from now? Not only is it a standard most art will fail to reach, it fails to acknowledge that something ephemeral can have it’s own particular merit and bring, in the moment it’s viewed or read, all the pleasures of more lasting art. Given that everything is fragmented now, why try to build cathedrals? No one goes to cathedrals anymore. People go to the movies, the drive-thru, the grocery store. People go to Subway.

And on that note, here’s one of my favorites from McGrath’s Pax Atomica: funny, gross, utterly now (and on some level, I think, about the tension between high and low culture). You have to love a poem that includes both sandwiches and Wittgenstein. And while the sandwich chain may go out of business at some point (potential headline: “Subway Announces It Will Close 300 Stores; Jared Swells to 300 Pounds”), I would wager more Americans have interacted with Subway this year than they have with Wittgenstein. What’s lasting? And to whom?

Woe

Consider the human capacity for suffering,
our insatiable appetite for woe.
I do not say this lightly
but the sandwiches at Subway
suck. Foaming lettuce,
mayo like rancid bear grease,
meat the color of a dead dog’s tongue.
Yet they are consumed
by the millions
and by the tens of millions.
So much for the food. The rest
I must pass over in silence.

Beached Wails

2008-09-01T09:40:00.010-04:00

Living overseas, my family fervently looked forward to returning stateside. Postings with the Foreign Service were of varying lengths, and if you were sent somewhere for more than three years, your family got “home leave” midway through—a trip back to the U.S., courtesy of Uncle Sam. Our trips back were most often to the South, specifically to Pascagoula, Mississippi, where my father’s parents lived. We would spend a few days in Pascagoula before hitting the road for the Alabama beach, usually driving in separate cars, my parents’ little rental and my grandparents boatlike Crown Victoria. It had leather seats—I still remember their smell—and power windows, which seemed incredibly decadent and luxurious to my sister and me.

Even when my mother and father were growing up in the South, their families were summering in Gulf Shores, Alabama, the Redneck Riviera. They’ve joked for years that Mom likely kicked sand in Dad’s face when they were children, with no idea of what lay ahead years in their futures.

We went back to Gulf Shores over and over throughout my childhood, sometimes just the six of us, other times joined by my father’s brothers and their families. My father and mother can remember when getting from the west to the east to see Fort Morgan required a short trip by ferry. There were hardly any buildings along the shoreline at all.

When my sister and I first started going, the beach was scattered beach houses, far off the main shore road in the dunes, each an isolated little retreat at the end of paths made of bleached and broken shells. We’d rent a small, stilted house from friends of my grandparents, and for a week we’d live barefoot on sand-scattered linoleum, windows open to the sound of the waves at night, small rotary fans cooling the rooms. We’d swim in the mornings and late afternoons, spending the long hours through the blazing heat of the day reading or working jigsaw puzzles or chasing the scores of lizards that lived in the sea grass beneath the house. We ate sandwiches and tomatoes bought roadside and cartons of boiled shrimp. Going out was a major occasion; we had to drive half an hour to reach our favorite restaurant, a little diner called Hazel’s Nook. We got stung by jellyfish, we stepped on sandspurs, we got sunburned and mosquito-bitten and once, running over the weather deck, I got a splinter the size of a sequoia that required a trip to the tiny clinic in Foley. At night we chased sand crabs and watched hundreds of stingrays haunt the floodlit water beneath the pier. We listened to my grandparents bitch at each other as they played gin and taught us to play hearts. It was about as close to heaven as anything I’ve experienced, and it’s always that little beach house that I think of when I hear the word home.

Over time, of course, most of the beach at Gulf Shores has fallen victim to the same fate as every beach town in America: condos, enormous reefs of condos as far as the eye can see, all varying pastel shades, with names like Summer Sanctuary and Seafoam Estates. And now that my grandparents have both died, there’s no longer a strong force pulling the family south for the summer. Virginia Beach—much closer to home—has become the new family rendezvous.

But the sand seems dirty, the beach crowded, the water murky and rough, and the weather this past week was the pits (the picture here was taken by my sister on the one pleasant day, and there was so much seaweed in the water it felt like swimming through a bathtub hair-clog). The beach certainly doesn’t hold up to our nostalgia about the Gulf, where the sand was whiter, the water calmer, and all of us younger. I wish that the family could go back there and experience that slow summer torpor, which these days seems as far away as the Gulf does—even at the beach this past week, I checked my work email several times a day. I never reached a state of relaxation; sometimes my stomach felt knotted with the same worries. I would love to be able to go back to the Gulf and kick that white sugar sand at my husband, but I suspect it would seem like a forced gesture.

I did go back to my grandparents’ old house in Pascagoula after Katrina hit. The beach road a block from their house had disappeared into the ocean. I had to find my way through a city with no signs, in which every yard was full of debris and all that was left of most houses was concrete slab foundations. My grandparents’ house was still standing, but barely. The yard was full of rubble, the lawn was dead and salty, and dazed-looking strangers were wandering through the battered, junk-filled streets. Most times and feelings and places we can’t recreate.

With Gustav bearing down on the Gulf Coast now, I’m hoping that Mother Nature has the same limitations.

***

This draft choked on seaweed and a bottlecap.

Poets Beware ...

2008-08-25T17:01:00.003-04:00

As if the terse rejection slips, the disinterest of 95 percent of the population, the payment in contributor's copies, and the nights of soul-searching and utter certainty that you have no talent weren't enough, then there are stories like this one.

Butterfly, Squirrel, Beagle, Moose

2008-08-24T17:44:00.007-04:00

The Washington Post Magazine today contains a lovely article by Dan Southerland detailing his relationship with a red admiral butterfly who alighted on his collar one July afternoon in the District last year.

The butterfly proceeded to hang out there for hours as Southerland stepped into a photo-shop to capture the moment, went to lunch at Smith & Wollensky, and finally took a cab home. Upon arriving chez Southerland, instead of departing, the butterfly stayed in the area, coming back to the garden and visiting Southerland and his family many times over the next month.

Southerland does a wonderful job conveying the joy of the whole experience, which gradually drew in family and neighbors and colleagues. He talks to a Smithsonian entomologist about butterfly behavior and what the little fellow might have been up to. The expert’s theory: The animal was likely attracted to Southerland’s sweat and may have been using him as a perch to scope out sexy female butterflies.

But much of what Southerland experienced with this little bug, the lepidopterist concluded, was highly unusual behavior for a butterfly. A mystery, in other words, and thank God for that.

The strange dance that developed between Southerland and his butterfly is one of my longstanding obsessions—not butterflies, particularly, but animals in general; how we relate to them, and they to us; what we share and do not share with the creatures who co-inhabit this world.

As a kid, I obsessively read the National Wildlife Federation's magazine “Ranger Rick,” spent many hours overturning rocks in the backyard to watch the ants do their marching thing, and used to wander miles down the tiny creek that flowed under our backyard trying to catch minnows and salamanders. I fantasized about wild birds coming down to land on my outstretched finger. I hatched many a Rube Goldberg-esque plan for catching one of the neighborhood squirrels, imagining that once we spent a few hours together, the squirrel and I would develop a friendship that would be fulfilling, passionate, and deliciously misunderstood by the philistines and grown-ups who could not comprehend the depth of our bond. I was a lonely kid, and wanted an intimacy most wild animals are well-served by avoiding; a relationship with a wild creature who “chose” me might mark me as special in a way that few people seemed to recognize.

I’d like to think that the ego-needs have gone out of my interest in animals at this point. I certainly no longer set up makeshift traps involving a box, a stick, and a bowl of peanut butter (which, by the way, no squirrel was ever dumb enough to fall for), and my work at The HSUS has taught me plenty of less sociopathic approaches to wildlife.

But the obsession with animals—what they do, what they might be thinking and feeling—has stayed with me. Even now, I can watch Coltrane, our beagle, for hours. My husband and I have invented a voice for him, and he “speaks” to us on a regular basis. His personality as we’ve constructed it is alternately sweet, smug, petulant, and greedy. There are grains of truth in this invented persona, but really, Coltrane is a mystery: a small, warm, breathing being who shares our home and our bed. We know so little about his inner mental life (we sometimes joke that it looks like a flat line on a heart monitor, jagging upward at moments when food is mentioned), yet we love him devotedly. And my belief in scientific principles and knowledge of the often-parasitic nature of the dog/human relationship are not quite enough to convince me that when he gazes up at us or licks our faces, that behavior is entirely driven by a desire to be fed. On some incomprehensible level, I believe, this animal loves us.

Maybe we’re romanticizing him; our belief in his affections may be a parasitism of our own, and some of what we love may be in the same vein as my childhood wish to be selected and loved by a wild creature that should know better. But I’m OK with that. There are fewer and fewer mysteries in the world, it seems, and the minds and hearts of animals are one.

I know few poets who write about animals with as much perception and stripped-down honesty as Robert Wrigley. His acutely observed poems about the wild are often brutal and completely without romanticism, and he gets into the heart of the way we look at animals and the ways we often fail to see them accurately. It’s hard for me to pick a single favorite, but here’s one; the poem below is from Wrigley’s Lives of the Animals.

The Afterlife of Moose
for Stephen Dunn

As the moose is obsessed, relentlessly
and with little or no variation, with food,
safety, and procreation, I am myself
obsessed of late with God, though by God
even I am uncertain What or Who I mean:
the word or the Word in the mouths
of those who use the word as a bludgeon;
the fabulous order of all disorderly things
or the perfect chaos that lives in straight lines;
all the succulent preliminary wines and kisses
or the thrust and plunge and plosive release.

I’ve been watching this particular bull
for a good while now, as he feeds
on the rich new shoots and shrub
by shrub moves slowly through the forest.
He knows I’m here. He eyes me
now and then. This morning I am in his mind
as God never is, and what I wish I knew
is whether or not I envy him that constant absence,
or whether doubt might not be
the source of all love,
all the shimmer of truth, the flavors of beauty.
Only a fool would see the moose’s life
as easier or less than his own.
As for the afterlife, I’ll take his chances.

Blurbings and Bitchslappings in the Book Review

2008-08-19T09:52:00.009-04:00

Usually the hubby and I spend Sunday morning working our way through the weekend editions of the Washington Post and the New York Times. It’s all grotesquely domestic—coffee, spooning, occasional sharing of good bits from the pages we’re reading, occasional shared explosions of snot-flying, wheezing, heaving allergies caused by the massive hair expulsions of our beagle, Coltrane.

This weekend, though, we were away celebrating Tim’s birthday and so didn’t get to our usual ritual. We spent Sunday morning waking up pleasantly below the deck of the Schooner Woodwind, a sailboat that does tours out of Annapolis and serves, on Saturday evenings, as a “boat and breakfast” for those who want a whisper of piracy and wave-rocked relaxation without the tedious traditional accompaniments of scurvy and Dramamine. We had to get up early for breakfast, so we missed our usual newsprint canoodle. Besides, the stateroom was the size of a large shoebox. If we’d tried to fit the two massive Sunday editions into the sleep-drawer with us, one of us would have ended up in the water, dodging ducklings and the occasional drifting raft of beer barf.

To make an already tedious story short, I missed two worthwhile pieces about writing in the Times’ Book Review—one, Rachel Donadio’s funny piece about the inside business of blurbing, and two, Walter Kirn’s excoriation of James Wood’s new book, How Fiction Works. The two pieces are a matched set bookending the section: the politics of “to blurb or not to blurb” and a review that can only be described as “The Anti-Blurb.”

I’ve always thought that a review in the Times could only be good for a book’s sales, even if the review was mostly negative. Having witnessed plenty of rubbernecking on the actual highway, I can’t help but think some readers will get on the virtual one and buy the book just to see the smoke and the blood and judge for themselves how bad it is. Kirn’s takedown of the book is so vicious and personal (and funny) it made me cringe—and wonder if Wood had once seduced his wife or killed his dog.

Remember the dust-up over Heidi Julavits' piece on nasty criticism? In her piece for The Believer in 2003, Julavits wrote:

... I don’t know what many critics believe when it comes to literature; at worst, I fear that book reviews are just an opportunity for a critic to strive for humor, and to appear funny and smart and a little bit bitchy, without attempting to espouse any higher ideals—or even to try to understand, on a very localized level, what a certain book is trying to do, even if it does it badly. This is wit for wit’s sake—or, hostility for hostility’s sake. ... I call it Snark, and it has crept with alarming speed into the reviewing community ...

Kirn's piece reminded me of the tussle over the Julavits piece. But I wondered whether this a different breed of nasty? If so, why? Is it because it’s a critic taking down a critique—what sounds, from the sample grabs in the review, like a particularly pompous critique? Kirn reaches, in the final crescendo of his essay, the classic rhythms of a preacher's rant:

“How Fiction Works” is a definitive title, promising much and presuming even more: that anyone, in the age of made-up memoirs and so-called novels whose protagonists share their authors’ biographies and names, still knows what fiction is; that those who do know agree that it resembles a machine or a device, not a mess, a mystery or a miracle; and that once we know how fiction works, we’ll still care about it as an art form rather than merely admire it as an exercise. But there is one question this volume answers conclusively: Why Readers Nap.

Mee-owch!

I think Kirn nails it in that last graf: can anyone, anymore, say what fiction is, much less how it works? But while I’m grateful to him for the caveat (I’ve been considering reading Wood’s book), if I were at a cocktail party with the two writers, I’m not sure which I’d be more eager to avoid. Bumpy night, indeed. Hope Kirn has his next set of blurbers lined up solidly—and that none of them drink beers with Wood.

More on Larkin

2008-08-18T08:13:00.006-04:00

Mary Karr, the Washington Post's "Poet's Choice" columnist, wrote about Larkin in this weekend's book section.

How'd he describe himself at Oxford? As a balding salmon. Ultra-conservative in politics and art, he praised Margaret Thatcher and mocked experimenters like Picasso. For Larkin (a college librarian), poetry was "an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are."

Definitely an odd duck on the poetry scene--or at least not the way most people imagine poets to be. Read more of her write-up and some Larkin tidbits here.

Tim Gautreaux: Bayou Poetry

2008-08-14T17:17:00.008-04:00

An evil-smelling mocha puddle

Fly-haunted mules

Suits that fit like a hound’s skin

Guitar music that sounded like raindrops striking a trash pile of tin cans

Sun-gilded porch boards

The blind horse stood steaming like a hot rock

If all thrillers read like Tim Gautreaux’s The Clearing, I’d spend more time with them. The book reads like a rocket (or maybe a nutria on crack, to stick with a bayou image), and you can smell the swamp-rot coming off the pages.

This is a guy who knows his terrain, and the terrain’s been much the same throughout his novels and short stories: backwater Louisiana. I just finished reading the novel, Gautreaux’s second, and the book reminds me that there’s often a fine line between poetry and prose. But more, it brings back a thought I’ve had so many times: that having a native ground is vital to fiction writers, even if they aren’t really native to the place.

Having grown up as a foreign service brat, there’s no place on earth that I know so well as Gautreaux knows Louisiana. I never felt I got to know a place so well I could picture every inch of it, capture the dialect, delineate lines and hollows and alleys only natives know. I have little pieces of a hundred places, a patchwork of turf I’ll never revisit.

Such fragments are fine (maybe even an asset!) for writing poetry, but when I set out to work on a piece of fiction, I sometimes feel a little crippled about how to provide that sense of real habitation. I’m beginning to know D.C. pretty well, but it’s taken on-and-off visits and stays over a lifetime for that to happen, and when I read a book that depicts a place so intimately, I get a pang—not envy of the writing, but of the sense of being at home somewhere, even if the somewhere haunts you.

My favorite books for sense of place: Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides. Okay, yes, I know it’s overly flowery and sentimental, but when I read that book at sixteen, I never wanted to shut it. I went back and read whole sections of it as I was going, just to keep it from ending. His images of the South Carolina lowcountry are baroque and sun-struck and stunning. Graham Swift’s Waterland. Jeffrey Eugenides The Virgin Suicides, pitch perfect on the emotional and actual topography of the suburbs. Most recently I’ve been digging John Burdette’s strange, kinky detective series set in Bangkok—rollercoaster plots and a great anchoring main character, but really, I’m reading them for the sense of having been dropped for hours at a time into seamy, steamy, ancient Thailand.

When it comes to fiction, plot and character are essential—but sometimes I can be satisfied just to find a place to hole up in.

What are your favorite literary geographies—poetry or prose?

Happy Birthday, You Miserable Old Coot

2008-08-09T11:23:00.031-04:00

Had he lived, today would be Philip Larkin's 86th birthday.

He died of cancer in 1985, accomplishing the fate he'd been gesturing toward throughout his entire body of work. It's the same fate that awaits all of us, but in Larkin's poetry, death is a constant companion -- a vicious pet dog he feeds and grooms, all the while knowing that it will one day eat him.

In his marvelous Lives of the Poets, Michael Schmidt wrote of Larkin, "When he is being savage about the poor, the old, the uncultured, we can be sure that by the end of the poem they will have been understood and celebrated, the savagery having been redirected at himself, his attitude, his circumstances." The cynicism and morbid tone that wash through his works are never patronizing; Larkin is in this thing with us.

My first encounter with Larkin was like that of many, I suspect: A boyfriend quoted "This Be the Verse" to me when I was in high school. I now know it by heart, but its pleasures are more suited to recitation in bars. After years of reading Larkin, I've come to see the best example I know of a phenomenon common to great art, what you might call ecstatic masochism. His endings are so perfect they make you shiver with anguish. They snap shut like bear traps, delighting you even as they describe something deeply sad or painful. They force you to enjoy your own suffering; it seems so exactly right.

In "An Arundel Tomb," Larkin describes the tomb of a lordly couple. A sculptor has carved an image of them in the stone, and the image depicts the earl wearing one armored glove. In that armored hand, he holds the other glove, while his bare hand holds that of his wife. Time has passed, the writing on the tomb has faded, but this image of the couple holding hands remains; those visiting now remember that gesture. I've heard the last line of this poem -- "What will survive of us is love" -- quoted in eulogies to comfort the grieving.

It reminds me of '87, when love-addled high school Romeos were calling radio stations to dedicate R.E.M.'s "The One I Love" to their girlfriends. Transfixed by the pounding drums and the title, they managed to miss the line where Stipe describes his love object as "a simple prop to occupy my time."

In the full context of stanza, the line is not a comfort:

Time has transfigured them into

Untruth. The stone fidelity

They hardly meant has come to be

Their final blazon, and to prove

Our almost-instinct almost true:

What will survive of us is love.

What's fascinating to me (and I think Larkin may have been clever enough to plan on this): The strong declaration and meter of that closing line drives it into memory. Because of that, the way this poem is often recalled and quoted echoes the phenomenon described in it: Just as visitors to the Arundel cemetery remember not the facts of the lives of the earl and countess, but the way they're holding hands, readers don't recall how the whole of the poem builds to undercut and negate that last line. Over time, this poem has become the Arundel tomb.

We don't like to think ourselves as lonely, bitchy, selfish creatures headed for the dirt. Bless Larkin for reminding us -- in a way that somehow always seems comforting.

Tattoo You: Lines to Be Buried In

2008-08-08T08:53:00.000-04:00

Talk about commitment to a line.

This proverb from William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" -- and other excellent poetry tattoos -- can be found here.

For a long time while I was in college, I seriously considered getting the last line of "Fern Hill" tattooed around my ankle. I could see a flowing script (something like Cezanne, only looser) circling the bones: Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea. Coooooool.

But I kept thinking about Johnny Depp, and his painful laser copyediting of his "Winona Forever" tattoo, which now reads "Wino Forever." More, I thought of one of my best friends, who in college deliberated for weeks over a tattoo before choosing a lovely, meaningful symbol -- the alchemic sign for "essence" -- only to have someone tell her (once it was inked permanently onto her back) that it looked like a swastika.

Moreover, it seemed to me that the Thomas line might be great around my ankle at 22, but by the time I was 65 might seem a little grim -- a daily reminder not to sing, but that death was growing closer by the day and that I would meet it would a sagging, stretchy-tattooed ankle.

Thus far, I remain uninked. But now and then I still think about getting one.

What line would you want to be buried with, if you were in the market for a tattoo? Keep in mind: whatever you pick, that's what Charon's going to read when you ask to cross the river. (Probably best to avoid ethnic jokes.)

While I think Peter Trachtenberg's book Seven Tattoos is an incredible piece of work (one I'd highly recommend -- even if you're not going under the needle -- for the way it examines the intersection of ritual, grief, and desire), it's not my favorite piece of tattoo writing. That's still Robert Hayden's masterful poem, below. Is it about a circus freak? Yes. Self-creation? Yes. Otherness and solitude? Yes. Being black in a racist, blancocentric America? Yes. Trying to fix your flaws in order to be loved? Yes.

It's so many things at once. I think it's a masterful use of line, too: the thinness of the poem, the way it winds downwards, the short lines, suggest to me the way ink might move over skin -- hesitantly, jerkily, as though every movement hurts.

The Tattooed Man

I gaze at you,
longing longing,
as from a gilt
and scarlet cage;
silent, speak
your name, cry--
Love me.
To touch you, once
to hold you close--
My jungle arms,
their prized chimeras,
appall. You fear
the birds-of-paradise
perched on my thighs.

Oh to break through,
to free myself--
lifer in The Hole--
from servitude
I willed. Or was
it evil circumstance
that drove me to seek
in strangeness strange
abiding-place?
Born alien,
homeless everywhere,
did I, then, choose
bizarrity,
having no other choice?

Hundreds have paid
to gawk at me--
grotesque outside whose
unnaturalness
assures them they
are natural, they indeed
belong.
But you but you,
for whom I would
endure caustic acids,
keenest knives--
you look at me with pain,
avert your face,
love's own,
ineffable and pure
and not for gargoyle
kisses such as mine.

Da Vinci's Last Supper--
a masterpiece
in jewel colors
on my breast
(I clenched my teeth in pain;
all art is pain
suffered and outlives);
gryphons, naked Adam
embracing naked Eve,
a gaeity of imps
in cinnabar;
the Black Widow
peering from the web
she spun, belly to groin--
These that were my pride
repel the union of
your flesh with mine.

I yearn I yearn.
And if I dared
the agonies
of metamorphosis,
would I not find
you altered then?
I do not want
you other than you are.
And I--I cannot
(will not?) change.
It is too late
for any change
but death.
I am I.

Traveling Home from Work I Saw a Jerk

2008-08-03T20:57:00.000-04:00

Really funny piece in the Times magazine Sunday on people’s bad behavior on the roads—specifically about a phenomenon my husband and I have enjoyed many good, bonding, soul-mate-level rants about. While Gorney is describing a scene particular to a road in California, anyone Washington commuter whose daily grind involves heading south down the 270 spur in the evenings will recognize the behavior she describes. Just before the spot where the spur hits the Beltway east toward I-95, the far left lane exits onto 355 south. Every day, hundreds of patient souls line up in the bottleneck into the loop, and every day, scores of other shoot by these waiting cars in pretense of exiting at the Bethesda offshoot—only to zip over at the last possible second and jam their way into the line onto 495.

Every time I see this, my inner fifth grader wants to yell "Cutters!" Maybe these people skipped elementary school. Maybe they were spoiled as children. Whatever it is, something tells them it’s fine to skip past all those decent souls waiting patiently in line (OK—maybe they’re not all decent souls. Maybe there’s a child molester or a virulent homophobe or a white supremacist in one of those cars, but when you’re stuck in traffic, all you want from your fellow commuters is courtesy; your grander moral judgments can wait till you’re home in time for dinner).

Gormey amusingly depicts our mixed reactions to this driving behavior as a battle between two opposing forces in the American soul: We like to believe we are simultaneously a) a nation of equals and fair play, but also of b) rugged individualism. So how to cope with those rugged (read: smug, self-important, at best oblivious) individuals who assert their individualism via what N.P.H. would certainly call “a dick move”? Cope with it, that is, without being tempted to go for that other classic symbol of the rugged American soul—namely, c) the .44 Magnum?

Most of these people would not cut in line at a movie theater or other open-air queue where they can actually be identified and called out. But behaving badly in a car, where fellow drivers can catch at most a passing glimpse of their faces, seems to cause them no shame. Or does it? Maybe these people wake in the night and feel wretchedly guilty. Maybe they confess it to their priests.

Parishioner: Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. Last week, coming home to Chevy Chase, I pretended I was going to get off at Bethesda and instead cut back in to the line onto the Beltway. I haven’t been able to sleep since.
Priest: I cast you out, hell spawn, and may all the angels in heaven spit on your minivan.

I’m working on several poems about being stuck in traffic right now—more about all the odd places my mind goes to while stuck in it—but when I started poking around in my various anthologies and online sources, I found that traffic seems to be an underwritten theme in contemporary American poetry. Given what a large feature of our lives it’s become, it seems like it would have more of a presence. Anyone have any good ones? I’d love to read them.

In the absence of a good traffic jam poem, here’s a driving classic instead—one about ethics, at that, and one of the first poems I ever loved, on that “God-DAMN, that is a great poem” sort of level. The great William Stafford, below (and remember, folks, wherever your commute takes you, watch out for deer. They were here first—even before the folks waiting patiently to merge—and as bad as the real estate market's gotten for us, it's a hell of a lot worse for them).

TRAVELING THROUGH THE DARK

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

1921: T. S. Eliot Discards An Early Draft

2008-08-01T10:34:00.000-04:00

August is the humidest month, breeding
Muffin tops and dewy sweat on the fuzz
Of upper lips

I don't think very much of September either
No bank holidays until Christmas and the traffic
Is simply beastly

Ever imagine what a poem would have looked like if written in another place or time--or by another person?

In a recent piece in the NYT Book Review, David Orr wrote that if Seamus Heaney’s oeuvre were revealed to have been written by a Portuguese guy living in Toronto, it would entirely disrupt our sense of his poetry.

I'd love to see some new opening stanzas: Sylvia Plath's version of "Daddy" after they've gone to family therapy. e.e. cummings' version of Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." Langston Hughes writes about dreams deferred, but during this election year.

Or, if you really want a challenge, a poem of Seamus Heaney's as written by a Portuguese guy living in Toronto.

Poetry Anthologies: Man oh Man ...

2008-07-31T08:52:00.001-04:00

In response to a comment left earlier today ... a great one, at that:

... if i may digress, i’d like to mention a delightful anthology of international poetry assembled by the polish/lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz. it is a wonderfully idiosyncratic collection and i was drawn to it because it contained so many poets i’ve never heard of: Jaan Kaplinski, Li-Young Lee, Oscar Milosz (a distant relative), 'Yoruba Tribe' ... any suggestions of other anthologies?

This post reminded me of all the creative, funny advertisements that I find myself thinking about days later ... without being able to remember what the heck the advertisement was shilling! (That talking baby with the clown still amuses me, but I always have to look up the video to remember the product.)

But this must be the book the anonymous poster was referring to. Yes, Anon? Thanks for the recommendation; I'll have to check it out soon.

I love poetry anthologies. They're like eating tapas: Grab the proscuitto-wrapped melon, seize the beet chip with goat cheese, skip the fried sardine balls. (Unless you like sardine balls, in which case, well, good luck with that and please don't breathe on me.) I've discovered so many poets through good anthologies -- John Engman being one of those -- and just love the sense of meandering exploration they provide.

A couple recent faves, several of which are in the giant book pile beside my bed:

The Oxford Book of American Poetry (David Lehman, editor) - complete with controversial inclusions such Bob Dylan. (No Jewel yet. Maybe next edition.)

The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales (Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson, editors) - Started reading this one while working on a series of poems reworking the Red Riding Hood story. It's full of gems.

Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times (Neil Astley, editor)

Finally, I bought this one a few months back and really dig a lot of the poems in it. About the male experience, yes, but some poems by female writers too.

But it's such a terrible title, one that immediately made me snort. There is something about the word "Man" -- that flat "ah" sound, the connotation of pulsing testosterone? -- that makes it hilarious when you put it in front of another noun.

(Try it: Man-teeth. Man-pants. Man-cake.)

It just does not communicate the soulfulness and gravitas that this collection has in spades.

Other great anthologies? Weigh in!

New York Envy Pt. II

2008-07-28T14:45:00.000-04:00

Working on a draft ... in lieu of moving to the city immediately, which doesn't seem to be in the cards right now, and is likely better as a fantasy anyway ...

***

* This draft fell into an NYC manhole and was immediately eaten by alligators.

Dylan Thomas Rolls Over Drunkenly in His Grave

2008-07-26T10:47:00.000-04:00

O curse you, Internetz. How many poems and stories have you stolen by providing such interesting toys?

I spent a good half hour playing with this Wordle thing a few days back. This is, of course, because I do not actually enjoy writing and like to distract myself from distraction with distractions. A half truth: There are moments when I'm "in the stream" when writing feels close to ecstasy, a rapture-of-Saint-Theresa-the-cosmos-is-flowing-through-me-and-I-am-but-its-humble-vessel sort of feeling -- but a vast majority of the time it is work, work, work. More mind-numbingly pleasant to screw around online.

(Aside: How much of blogging and Internet-surfing is people trying to avoid their vocations? Discuss.)

Wordle takes whatever text you give it and creates word collages in which the more frequently appearing words are largest. (This would be fun and horrifying to do with some of Bush's speeches. I'm expect EVILDOERS, FREEDOM, and POOTIE-POOT would make a big show.)

I plugged in a couple of my own poems and found that the word "one" is a biggie for me. Wordle has flagged some ongoing quest for communion and unity I didn't even know I was on about! I'm thinking this could be a way quicker method of therapy: After an hour on the couch, your shrink plugs everything you've said into Wordle and finds that the word FATHER is huge in your collage and tells you to go make your peace with him.

Also, for lazy college students assigned to poetry analysis. So much more accessible!

"So, John, what do you think Thomas is talking about in this poem?"

"He's talking about, um, greenness, the state of being, you know, green, and young, and about living on a farm and how like, living out with nature and apples almost feels like being high. Also, about time and stuff."

Everyone in New York is Having More Interesting Conversations Than You Are, Unless You Too Live in New York

2008-07-22T22:39:00.000-04:00

Is it just me suffering from this delusion? Do people of other occupations wake up with the sneaking suspicion that every day they did not live in New York City is a day they’ve somehow wasted? Do garbage collectors in Peoria aspire to collect garbage in New York? Or is it just writers who worry they’re missing out?

I’ve lived in 5 foreign countries and traveled to a score of others, yet every time I go to New York I feel like a country rube fresh from the pig waller. I’m constantly gawking up at the mountainous glittering heights of the buildings. My hair is not expensive/punk enough. I’m overdressed or underdressed. (This time it was underdressed; every woman in the Lower East Side this summer appears to be wearing an empire-waisted dress that goes to the ankles.) In most places, this sense would make me feel self-conscious, but New York gives me so much to look at that I stop thinking about myself for hours on end, a relief no pastoral landscape can provide.

Much as I loved Colson Whitehead’s rant about the fetishizing of Brooklyn writers in the Times a while back, I have no borough fixation. It’s the whole of the city. I can think of no other place on earth that is simultaneously beautiful, hideous, and completely exhilarating. I don’t know how the natives do it: living in a constant state of astonishment seems like it would become exhausting after a while, so maybe the people who live there tune out a little bit, just to protect their own psyches.

We went up this weekend to see our dear friends and to meet my husband’s sister and her husband at the soon-to-be-history Yankee Stadium. That was good, but not as good as watching their kid run through the spray of a fire hydrant in the Bronx, and not as good as buying bagels from a Polish émigré in a tiny baker’s hole off Houston, and not as good as seeing a bored girl in a silver-sequined bikini taking a smoke break outside a burlesque club at midnight. And nowhere near as good as hearing a group of young, hipster New Yorkers on the 4 express train have an incredibly boring conversation about the hot weather—which made me feel—weirdly—not smug, but gratified: They live in the coolest city on earth, and they’re still human enough to have that boring conversation about the weather, the one you have with people you like but have run out of things to say to.

All in all, my favorite moment in New York this time was sitting quietly on a rock in Central Park with my husband, watching a pair of turtles chasing each other through the pond and watching an enormous koi—the rouge color of the sun on a hot summer evening—drift beneath the green water, so slowly it was almost still. From where we sat, the horns from traffic and the shouts of the guys selling bottled water near the horse carriages seemed very far away, and I wondered: What can that fish hear, under there? Can it feel the engines and the subways and the generators thrumming under the water? Do its gills shiver with the city’s wounded thunder?

I could end this with any number of amazing NYC poems, but one of my favorite poems about the city (I’m being presumptuous here, I guess, but with some reason) is by a buddy of mine, Andrew Kozelka, who was living in New York on 9/11 and wrote one of the best damn books of poetry I’ve ever read. It’s called The Ages, and this poem arrives toward the end of them. There may be echoes of Auden’s “September 1st, 1939” in those last lines. In my book, that’s no bad thing.

The Smoker

He’s just seen the end of peace
Tilting overhead:
And now the whole city
Looks up in horror
And everyone screams, runs about—
Except for him. He sits down
And smokes a last cigarette,
Makes a small prayer:
Among the beasts
Who inherit our silence,
Let there be one or two
Who are calm when the light comes.