Sailors of the Secret Ark

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade is recruiting anti-Nazi compatriots for a spy network to feed information to the English after the Germans invaded France. One of Fourcade’s lieutenants encourages a prospect by “describ[ing] her in glowing terms, saying she had ‘the memory of an elephant, the cleverness of a fox, the guile of a serpent, the perseverance of a mole, and the fierceness of a panther.’”

That’s quite a package. Perhaps it influenced Fourcade’s decision to assign animal code names to everyone in The Alliance. Or it was the other way around? 

In any case another name was given to the spy network when the Germans captured and interrogated one of its members. The prisoner does not or is unable to reveal the real names of the leaders, only offering up “Aigle (Eagle) and Herisson (Hedgehog).” (Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was Hedgehog. A man was Eagle. That may seem sexist, but Fourcade had starry eyes for Eagle, I think.) How many more animal names did they get out of their prisoners before “the Germans began referring to the group as Noah’s Ark”?

Noah’s Ark — an ironic appellation? The animals on the ark were being saved from a disaster overtaking the entire world. If there were a Noah in this metaphor he wasn’t Adolph Hitler.

source:

Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: the daring young woman who led France’s largest spy network against Hitler

by Lynne Olson

2019. Random House, New York

Let’s not be poetry victims

Meter and rhyme isn’t much in fashion and hasn’t been for decades. But there are still people who don’t consider a poem a poem unless it presents in rhyme and meter. As a kid I felt — victimized is too strong a word — I felt pressure from people like that. I never experienced much pleasure reading rhyming verse growing up. Sure, there was the occasional poem or song lyric that got in my head in a good way. “Jack jumped over the candlestick …” I did force rhyme and meter under the gun of class assignments. It felt like math, all that counting counting counting. I didn’t always hate the result. But it did not read as fun. 

I was much more interested in fiction. You could do anything in fiction. Imagination could run wild. I wanted to get school credit for that! Naturally, including freedom in the school curriculum was frowned upon. But in high school an after school poetry class got offered, I guess as an experiment to see if students would show up. The teachers were poets; their main text was Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams. And what it taught was freedom — poetry was a mind set loose. Even meaning could shake off its chains. I loved it. I wrote tons. Was any of it metered verse? 

Once I got hooked on writing poetry I read all over. Most of it was free verse, but one can’t help reading poetry in received forms at least sometimes. I’m a fan of Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger,” and have lines from it memorized. “Tyger, tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night.” But metered verse can be painful — exhausted rhymes, contorted syntax, the mind-numbing barking at the fence.  

I’m not the only one who felt victimized by the way poetry was taught. “[I]n seventh grade, my English teacher in the public high school was a poet,” Annie Finch says, “and he saw that I was pretty serious about writing poetry and he said, ‘Real poets write free verse.’” Finch wanted to be a real poet, so she ditched rhyme and meter, except for that one versification course in college where the prof passed around Finch’s student poems as exemplary. That wasn’t enough to override the judgment of the seventh grade teacher, apparently, for Finch “hid all those [metered poems] in a drawer and continued to write free verse.”

I have to pause here. What is a “real poet”? 

So I’m reading along in this “conversation” with the well-published poet irritated at the way she cloaks herself in victimhood and how she is convinced that what poetry really needs is a renaissance of metered verse, how she is doing her part teaching classes and classes and classes — which everybody totally loves, every student agreeing with her that their desperate thirst is being slaked at last — when I hit the place where suddenly it comes to me that Annie Finch isn’t just a poetry conservative, Annie Finch is crazy. I mean, crazy in a way that cuts through the crap about her meeting the needs of the world. 

When she finally shook off the fettering notions of the seventh grade teacher, Finch took to scansion with a will. Making up for lost time, it seems, she became obsessed.

“I scanned all of Whitman, and I scanned all of Dickinson … I learned to start to hear things so much, for years it drove me crazy, because I would be scanning while people were talking, with a headache, and it made me feel alienated, and it was so weird. Finally I got to where I am now, where I do it but it doesn’t interfere with understanding what people are saying.” 

Annie Finch learned to meet her own needs! Good for her. I don’t begrudge her the evangelizing — I’m sure there are those like her that need what she needs and need to hear that it’s okay to need that and she is there to help them access it. Do I not need it? I mean, I feel a little sheepish not knowing — or caring — about the difference between an anapest and a trochee, a fritterlil and a poncydue. But I can live with it. 

Am I a real poet?

source:

“Conversation Between Annie Finch and Timothy Green”

Rattle #82

v.29 n.4

winter 2023

suicidal ideation, part IV

Here’s my suicide attempt:

I’m lying in bed, depressed, feeling useless, life a burden, this thinking exacerbated by a terrible cold. I’m suffocating on snot, every breath a struggle. If I want to die, why am I struggling to live? I know, I say to myself. I’ll stop struggling. Let nature take its course.  

Since my nose was completely blocked, closing my mouth would finish me off. Keeping my mouth closed would be the last effort I’d expend. If my body agreed with my exhausted mind, I’d die. 

Kent hated this story, I suppose because he hated me talking about killing myself. But I found it amusing. Nobody dies from holding their breath. That’s not a thing. 

After 60 seconds I’d gasp, I knew. That’s what the body does. Reflexes take over. But at least I would get a break from fretting over how to breathe. My autonomous nervous system would take charge. I didn’t need to choose life.

But my body surprised me in a different way. As I now struggled to keep my mouth shut, something changed in the nasal passages. An odd twinge, a sensation I’d never felt before. A gap gradually opened through the mucus barrier. Instead of allowing me to stifle, my nose, which had seemed my enemy, brought me breath again. 

In the many years since when my sinuses have been blocked, I have used this skill taught me by suicide attempt. I hold my breath, a passage opens. 

suicidal ideation, part III

Even the most lethal methods of suicide have their survivors. In How Not to Kill Yourself Clancy Martin talks about people still alive after gunshot wounds to the head, massive ingestions of drugs, jumps from bridges. One of the fears of a person contemplating suicide is failure, ugly failure. If you survive a shot to the head you will be badly wounded, perhaps permanently disabled. How could life be better that way? Yet Martin reports on at least one man who survived the bullet and is glad to be alive. 

What could be more lethal than a fall from the top of a skyscraper? 

Elvita Adams, at age twenty-nine, in poverty and despair, leaped from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, eighty-six floors above the street below — and was blown back by a gust of wind onto a two-and-half-foot ledge on the eighty-fifth floor. She was pulled through the window by a security guard and taken to Bellevue, with a fractured pelvis.

When I read that, my jaw dropped. I had to read it to friends. 

“The universe likes to play such jokes on suicidal people,” Martin says.

suicidal ideation, part II

In How Not to Kill Yourself Clancy Martin talks about the dearth urge. Do we harbor a hunger for death? It seems counter-evolutionary. You can’t procreate when you’re dead. But if you think about it, lifeforms are programmed to die. Opossums and octopuses living their best lives rarely get past a second birthday. We barely notice that plants choose parts of their bodies to kill off, perhaps to conserve resources, perhaps out of pique. 

We all die. It seems wrong to think anyone could strive to. But just because something seems wrong doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Maybe suicidal thoughts are connected to the bedrock, the death urge bubbling up like hot lava into the thin air of consciousness. 

Here is Clancy Martin on suicidal ideation as normal:

[W]e all desire [death], in much the same way we desire sex or food or love or fame. Some of us desire it unconsciously; some of us semiconsciously; and some of us, like me, can’t get the desire out of our heads. On this account, the suicidal person, and also the person who is often contending with suicidal ideation but not making a suicide attempt, is in her way giving death its due. She is not suppressing a part of her thinking that other people manage or subjugate more expertly.

Suicidal ideation is not a topic of your average conversation. If it is as standard in our heads as Martin suggests, wouldn’t it be more commonly talked about? Not that there aren’t universal experiences we somehow fail to process with our friends. Just about everybody masturbates, yet you’re unlikely to overhear the best brand of vibrator being discussed in a cafe. Sex is embarrassing. Death is, too.

source:

How Not to Kill Yourself: a portrait of the suicidal mind

by Clancy Martin

2023. Pantheon Books, New York

suicidal ideation

“Suicidal ideation.” I think I heard that phrase first from doctors at the Community Hospital in Santa Rosa. I think about suicide. That’s what you’re doing when you ideate — you’re thinking. As one who can be mesmerized by a word I find myself toying with “ideate.” It’s such an unnecessary word, right? Who decided they needed it? The phrase, “suicidal ideation,” becomes detached from its meaning, and I laugh about ideating. Ideate about breakfast, ideate about the weather. I am ideating about thinking.  

My thoughts can get intense. Surprise. Suicidal thoughts among them. Telling people that makes them worry about you. Naturally. You don’t want to make people feel bad. You don’t want them to panic and call in the authorities. So you don’t say anything about it. It’s kind of embarrassing, isn't it? Suicide brings up strong emotions — many people become enraged at suicides, contemptuous even. You wouldn’t want to tell a person like that that you’ve been having suicidal thoughts. They’d get mad at you, sneer at you. 

I was intrigued by Clancy Martin’s memoir/self-help book How Not to Kill Yourself when I flipped it open and found Martin talking frankly about suicidal ideation and how it seems an unbanishable presence, whether he’s depressed or no. I haven’t come across that before. People thinking about suicide — they only do it in extremis. When they’re fucked up in the head. They don’t idly think about suicide while throwing a frisbee for the dog. Do they?

Although Martin suffers from chronic depression, he says suicidal ideation pops up on good days, too. Most of How Not to Kill Yourself is about that crisis point where thoughts shift to action. That makes sense. It’s where intervention is necessary, where the conflicted self needs to do something — hopefully to hold off death rather than jump into its arms. But I’d be curious to read accounts from people who experience suicidal ideation like a hangnail — an affliction that’s seemingly minor, in that a suicide attempt has not resulted, but where such thoughts niggle, tease, madden. 

In this passage Clancy Martin talks about the ambiguities of suicidal urges: 

Is it possible I don’t really want to die? Of course. You can want both things. On many days I did want both things: to die, so I didn’t have to live this life anymore, so that I could stop struggling, stop suffering, stop failing, stop disappointing — in an instant, all my problems, gone; and to live, because to die meant — who knew what it meant?

To die means the cessation of all pleasures as well as all pain. When the pain is overwhelming, joy ideation seems ridiculous, trivial. Joy? Fun? That’s nothing that will ever happen again. Besides, it’s so fleeting. It doesn’t have the grip that pain does. Does it? For someone?  

A friend recently said, “I think we are both mildly depressed.” I wanted to object, but why? Because it’s embarrassing? Because that suggests we need to be fixed? Lifted out of depression, made happy? Am I okay? I don’t know. I am maintaining — feeding myself, doing the dishes and laundry, scheduling get-togethers with friends. I am getting things done — tried on a drawerful of Kent’s tshirts, took a bag of clothes to the homeless shelter. There are a lot of things to do. I can panic over things undone. Not that panic helps anything. I remind myself. I relearn lessons, I pull out consciously composed scripts that have been helpful in the past. One-day-at-a-time atomizes to one-task-at-a-time, one-thing-at-a-time. The dishes, a bill, writing a list, asking myself what right now I could do that would bring pleasure. 

source:

How Not to Kill Yourself: a portrait of the suicidal mind

by Clancy Martin

2023. Pantheon Books, New York

there’s a psychedelic utopian community in the Amazon? why wouldn’t there be!

“Ceu de Mapia … Heaven of Mapia .. a psychedelic utopia … a town of six hundred people  … carved out of the jungle by devotees of Santo Daime, a religion based on ayahuasca, a drink brewed from psychoactive plants that triggers visions and euphoria. Santo Daime, the ‘holy gift,’ combines Catholicism with African and Amazonian nature religions. Its practitioners drink ayahuasca in group rituals that involve chanting and dancing all night long, everyone locked in a hallucinatory mind meld. …

Santo Daime was founded in Amazonia in the 1930s by a poor rubber tapper … Under [the] influence [of ayahuasca, given to him by native shamans] he looked up at the moon and saw the Virgin Mary, whom he called the Queen of the Forest. … Like the followers of many utopian movements before them, [the former rubber tapper’s followers] developed an ethos of self-sufficiency, living off the land in simple harmony with their environment. …”

Entirely self-sufficient the community never became. One recent way they’d found to bring money in was to harvest wild cacao and sell it to a German chocolate company. Luisa Abram was introduced to Heaven of Mapia because she had learned of wild cacao and was hoping to market it within Brazil itself. The German company had pulled out of the project so Luisa Abram putt-putted up in a little boat at an opportune time. Abram lugged back bags of unsold cacao beans and busied herself making chocolate out of them. The bars she made tasted terrible. 

After two years of struggling to figure out what she was doing wrong, Abram found a man who promised to help. “Luisa sent [Mark Christian] a couple of her [bad-tasting chocolate] bars … [Christian detected] ammonia, manure, ‘a lot of other detritus with it … cardboard, chalk, maybe even the blackboard itself.’” But Christian was familiar with these noxious flavors. They were the result not of bad beans but of bad processing. Cacao beans require a lot of careful processing to be edible. God knows what the German company thought of the beans they were buying, but the Mapia community had no idea what they were doing. 

Cut to the happy ending:

The Mapia community has been taught how to do all that processing in just the right way. Luisa Abram is making chocolate bars which rank among the best in the world. On a visit to the village Abram for the first time asks to partake of the ayahuasca ceremony. 

The preparation given her “was thick and bitter, like a mud smoothie. … Guitars and drums and maracas and flutes filled the air. … Luisa began to feel lighter as if she were floating in place. The dancing became effortless, the songs flowing through her. She closed her eyes and heard the trilling of the tree frogs … their rhythmic whoo-whoo merging with the singers … There was a second shot of Daime, and then a third. Waves of color poured through Luisa’s body, swirled around the church, flowed out into the night. … She lost track of where her body stopped and the next one started. … They were all in it together, all part of the forest.”

source:

Wild Chocolate: across the Americas in search of cacao’s soul

by Rowan Jacobsen

2024. Bloomsbury Publishing, New York

word of the day: raglan

word of the day: raglan

 context:

“[During an] 1895 interview, [Peter] Doyle brought out a raglan of [Walt] Whitman’s and explained, ‘I now and then put it on, lay down, think I am in the old times. Then he is with me again. … When I get it on and stretched out on the old sofa I am very well contented. It is like Aladdin’s lamp. I do not ever for a minute lose the old man. He is always near by.’” [ellipsis in the original]

definition (Merriam-Webster): a loose overcoat with raglan sleeves; raglan sleeves are sleeves that extend to the neckline with slanted seams from the underarm to the neck

Peter Doyle was one of Walt Whitman’s lovers. Whitman only had a few with whom he was together long enough that one could see the two as a couple. Whitman loved getting his portrait taken but he was typically solo. There’s a well-known photograph of Peter and Walt facing each other, clearly gazing into each other’s eyes. 

They parted ways, but not acrimoniously. Peter Doyle came to Walt Whitman’s graveside service. It seems he “almost was not admitted.” There were, however, at least two close friends of Whitman who remembered Doyle and made sure he could stay. One of them, Horace Traubel, conducted the 1895 interview three years after Whitman’s death. 

source:

Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman’s working class camerados

edited by Charley Snively

1987. Gay Sunshine Press, San Francisco, CA

acknowledgments

A book of poetry almost always includes an acknowledgments page, where the poet thanks magazines for publishing poems that are now being collected. I read two recent books by good poets, and looking over the lists of their prior publications I see few magazines appear on both— wait, I see no overlap at all. Huh. That’s interesting in its own way.  

Poet #1: 

The Adroit Journal

BODY Poetry

Beloit Poetry Journal

Colorado Review

Diode

Frontier Poetry

Gulf Stream Magazine

Harpur Palate

H.O.W. Journal

Indiana Review

LAMBDA Literary’s Poetry Spotlight

The Los Angeles Review

The Missouri Review

Narrative Magazine

Nashville Review

New South 

Nimrod International Journal 

Ninth Letter

North American Review

Passages North

Thrush Poetry Journal

Tinderbox Poetry Journal 

Tupelo Quarterly

Waxwing

West Trade Review

Poet #1’s book is out from BOA Editions.

Poet #2:

Wise Owl

Old Red Kimono

Avant Appalachia

Tenth Muse

Clamor

Pulsar

San Antonio Review

Schuykill Valley Review

Steam Ticket

Lullwater Review

Uppagas

Amulet

Whistling Shade

NOD Magazine

US1 Worksheets

Umbrella Factory

Door Is A Jar

California Quarterly

Pinyon Review

Isotrope

Kennings

Bethlehem Writer’s Roundtable

Havik

Illya’s Honey

Off Course

Firelight

EKL Review

Abbey

South Florida Poetry Journal

Floyd County Moonshine

Shot Glass Journal

Suisin Valley Review

Poetry Superhighway

Chronopolis

Lost Pilots

Adelaide Literary Magazine

Fourth and Sycamore 

Triggerfish

Trajectory

Blueline

Doubly Mad

Cool Beans Lit

In Between Hangovers

Perceptions

La Presa

Poet #2’s book is out from Cyberwit.

The magazines publishing Poet #1 are mostly known to me. I published in one of them. Many of the others have declined my poems. These are relatively high prestige venues. Poet #1 hasn’t hit the heights of Poetry Magazine or Paris Review, but the magazines he lists are very competitive. If you look at the names in a current issue you will recognize some — that is, if you recognize the names of contemporary poets. 

Many of the magazines publishing Poet #2 are unfamiliar. I have published in four of them and been rejected by a few others. I will look up more of them, curious to see what they’re like. Some have such fun names! Old Red Kimono, Whistling Shade, Umbrella Factory. Wouldn’t telling people I have a poem in Umbrella Factory get their attention more than telling them I had a poem in Indiana Review? Indiana Review is a handsome, perfect-bound, digest-sized literary magazine, the kind of product that, as a baby poet, I remember awe-fully flipping through at the newsstand or library. Whereas Umbrella Factory (I just looked it up) is web-only. Umbrella Factory’s latest issue has six writers in it, so they must be pretty picky, even if I don’t know them as “prestige.” But then, I don’t recognize the names of any of the six.  

Based on these lists, which poet would you rather be, Poet #1 or Poet #2.

The careerist in me (yes, he’s still alive, the fucker) says Poet #1. The populist in me says Poet #2. The realist in me would be thrilled to be either.