3 years of DIR

Dare I Read had its third birthday yesterday.

Three years of working my way through my reading life.

I’ll get back to mining the diary. I’m one post away from finishing with the 1988 diary in London, the summing up post. As has happened before, I just got tired of going over it. The old stuff.

I’ve lately been responding to whatever strikes me in current reading. When I have something to say about it. Sometimes when I just want to pull something out and point at it.

The “notes toward an autobiography by others” is growing faster than I’d expected. I could imagine it turning into a separate thing, a book maybe. (One can imagine all sorts of things.)

How long have you been reading Dare I Read? Any favorite moments?

more notes toward an autobiography by others

Joe Brainard wrote a long piece called “I Remember”. Every paragraph (sometimes no more than a sentence) starts “I remember …” as in “I remember that little jerk you give just before you fall asleep. Like falling.”

I remember being scared the first time that “little jerk” happened. It’s only happened to me a few times but it sure gives meaning to the “falling” part of falling asleep. It really feels like falling and your legs jerk out to catch you and the jerking of the legs wakes you.

A section from “I Remember” appears in Another World: a second anthology of work from the St Mark’s poetry project, edited by Anne Waldman, the latest anthology to rise to the top of the pile.

Since I’m excerpting Brainard memories that could be mine there’s also this:

“I remember having a paper route.”

Abyss by Abyss

On the whole I can’t say’s I’m a fan. Of Emily Dickinson. Yes, there is the occasional poem that really hits me. But mostly, I’d have to say, I don’t get her.

I’ve blogged before about working my way through The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (edited by Thomas H. Johnson!) … “I think I'm past halfway. Through Emily Dickinson's Complete Poems.” That’s from the January 2004 LuvSet post where I also said, “There are Dickinson poems I really like. But mostly she's not a poet that makes poetry for me.” It doesn’t look like four years and hundreds more Dickinson poems have altered my opinions.

Recently I came across one that’s a variation on a Dickinson poem I copied out some time ago. First, the poem (340, Johnson’s numbering), that I copied out May 2002:


Is Bliss then, such Abyss,
I must not put my foot amiss
For fear I spoil my shoe?

I’d rather suit my foot
Than save my Boot –
For yet to buy another Pair
Is possible
At any store –

But Bliss, is sold just once.
The Patent lost
None buy it any more –
Say, Foot, decide the point –
The Lady cross, or not?
Verdict for Boot!


#


Nearly a thousand poems later (editor Johnson gives it the number 1322), we have Dickinson saying this:


Floss won’t save you from an Abyss
But a Rope will –
Notwithstanding a Rope for a Souvenir
Is not beautiful –

But I tell you every step is a Trough –
And every stop a Well –
Now will you have the Rope or the Floss?
Prices reasonable –


#


Two Abysses! Are they the same? One is Bliss. The other? But what’s with Bliss spoiling a shoe? My reading of the first poem is unstable. She has decided against stepping forth into Bliss but why? She says she can always buy another shoe and opportunities for Bliss may not come again. Yet she seems to decide against the step. I can’t help thinking about Patent Leather from which shoes are made, when Dickinson says, “The Patent lost / None buy it any more.” Which is for sale? Boot or Bliss? Both?

The second poem I tend to think the Abyss a more conventional Black Mood, a Depression. But reviewing the earlier Abyss and that poem’s items for sale (Boot & Bliss versus Rope & Floss) … pairing them like that I see they off-rhyme poem to poem, a typically Dickinsonian kind of off-rhyme … what is the merchant’s recommendation? Skip the Abyss!

I’m not going to add #1322 to my personal anthology of favorites, not because I don’t like it, but because I don’t think it’s as funny. I’m tickled every time I see the girl hovering over the muddy puddle of Bliss-Abyss, holding back in order to save her shoe, which, anyway, she could buy another of, but Bliss, what could suit a foot so well!

That practical rope, on the other hand, is not only “not beautiful” it’s rather dull. She’s turned in her fashionable boot for sensible shoes! “Prices reasonable”?

no significance

In a recounting of her experience at the viewing of a total eclipse of the sun that’s included in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard gives this definition of what’s significant, what matters:

“If you were to glance out one day and see a row of mushroom clouds rising on the horizon, you would know at once that what you were seeing, remarkable as it was, was intrinsically not worth remarking. No use running to tell anyone. Significant as it was, it did not matter a whit. For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance.”

Really? Frankly, I have a hard time drawing a line here. If it only matters because people matter, then whatever happens (whatever ever happened) when people go unaffected, by definition, does not matter. Well, then, how much affected do “people” have to be before something matters? If one person is stung by a beetle indigenous to one swamp, and the person slogging alone through the turgid water into which, starving and lost, she eventually sinks, drowns, decays, and is never again encountered by any human sense (the beetle sting had nothing to do with killing the woman, it was just one of many discomforts, one of the most minor) – does the beetle matter? If a virus wiped out twelve villages eight thousand years ago then mutated into harmlessness forever would that virus matter? It hardly matters what rain falls on Titan, that smoggy moon circling Saturn; there’s nobody there to need an umbrella or galoshes. Huh, you say, looking out the window at what Dillard assumes is doomsday. I needn’t bother turning my head to tell the hubby. He’ll be dead in two minutes. Why make those two minutes more uncomfortable with the knowledge? Besides, being as humanity is about to wiped from existence, well, pff. So what!

I don’t know. Considering how fascinated Annie Dillard is by the detail, even the non-human detail (her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a lot of nature-watching), I wonder what she’s talking about here. Perhaps she was so freaked out by the indifference of the sun and moon to her emotional needs when they went about throwing and obstructing light that she couldn’t help herself – she had to claim that only what happened to her mattered, dammit, then subconsciously masked that egotism with “people”, which rung a reassuringly humane tone. People matter!

“Truth is, I THOUGHT it mattered. I thought that MUSIC mattered. But does it? Bollocks! Not compared to how people matter.” – a line from the movie Brassed Off, as sampled for the Chumbawamba song “Tubthumping”.

Happy Birthday, Ishmael Reed!

When I came across Ishmael Reed’s “The Author Reflects on His 35th Birthday” in his New and Collected Poems (1988), I saw that Reed’s second 35 were almost up. As of today Mr Reed gets to start on his third batch.

The Author Reflects on His 35th Birthday

35? I have been looking forward
To you for many years now
So much so that
I feel you and I are old
Friends and so on this day, 35
I propose a toast to
Me and You
35? From this day on
I swear before the bountiful
Osiris that
If I ever
If I EVER
Try to bring out the
Best in folks again I
Want somebody to take me
Outside and kick me up and
Down the sidewalk or
Sit me in a corner with a
Funnel on my head

Make me as hard as a rock
35, like the fellow in
The story about the
Big one that got away
Let me laugh my head off
With Moby Dick as we reminisce
About them suckers who went
Down with the Pequod
35? I ain’t been mean enough
Make me real real mean
Mean as old Marie rolling her eyes
Mean as the town Bessie sings about
“Where all the birds sing bass”

35? Make me Tennessee mean
Cobra mean
Cuckoo mean
Injun mean
Dracula mean
Beethovenian-brows mean
Miles Davis mean
Don’t-offer-assistance-when
Quicksand-is-tugging-some-poor
Dope-under-mean
Pawnbroker mean
Pharaoh mean
That’s it, 35
Make me Pharoah mean
Mean as can be
Mean as the dickens
Meaner than mean

When I walk down the street
I want them to whisper
There goes Mr. Mean
“He’s double mean
He even turned the skeletons
In his closet out into
The cold”

And 35?
Don’t let me trust anybody
Over Reed but
Just in case
Put a tail on that
Negro too

February 22, 1973


#


Here’s to 35 times two!

more notes toward an autobiography by others

The New Yorker, Dec 25, 2006 issue, includes Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s “Nobel Lecture” from that year. Toward the end of the piece Pamuk says, “The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write?”

Pamuk’s answer is a series of statements, some of which could easily be my answer, some of which could be anyone’s answer for doing whatever, washing the dishes maybe. One motivation stood out for me because it’s not one that comes up in every author’s story: anger.

Anger has pushed a lot of my own writing. Sometimes it’s anger at the very piece I’m working on – why won’t it work, goddammit. I’ll show you, you dumb poem, you’ll work if I have to blow you apart with a wild grenade and sew your nasty pieces back together, elbow to nose, tongue to asshole.

Pamuk: “I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone.”

And: “I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.”

a language is just its words

I’ve long been unimpressed by anxiety people feel about the degradation of English. John McWhorter in his The Power of Babel: a natural history of language doesn’t seem worried either. In this paragraph he dresses down the language purity police:

“The Association for the Preservation of the German Language and similar organizations, such as the Academie Francaise’s famous vigil against English words ‘taking over’ in French, are laboring under a misconception that, for all intents and purposes, a language is just its words. This is a natural feeling, because words are what we are conscious of – we don’t think about … the grammatical rules when we talk. There is a folk conception that learning a language means picking up the word for hat, the word for sleep, etc. – but we all know that, in actuality, you could memorize thousands of a language’s words and still have less ability to communicate than a three-year-old, because how the words are put together is equally central to what ‘a language’ is. English … lost most of its original words. However, because we still use a sound system similar in broad outline to that of our Germanic relatives (it’s not hard for us to get a good German accent, and vice versa), as well as a broadly similar grammar (for example, adjectives before the nouns), and retain original English words as our bracing beams and girders (the grammatical words like will and the, basic words like boy and like), the language remains fundamentally Germanic – that is, English. It could be nothing else.”

in the business of talking

Tony Snow, spokesmodel for the White House, quoted in The New Yorker, Dec 25, 2006 issue, “The most important thing is that the President continues to be engaged in the business of talking about the way forward.”

Does it matter what particular stimulus caused Tony Snow to produce words that could be transcribed to provide a look familiar to us, such that he seems to be speaking English and saying something one could understand?

Charlotte’s Web

In the Introduction to the Penguin English Library edition of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights editor David Daiches quotes Charlotte Bronte (author of Jane Eyre) saying of herself & her siblings, “We wove a web in childhood.”

I suppose someone knows whether this is the source of E.B. White’s title Charlotte’s Web? That book, of course, has nothing to do with the Brontes. Charlotte is a spider who adds words to her morning web in order to dissuade a farmer from killing a pig.

E.B. White was quite the erudite writer; coming across the Charlotte Bronte quote might’ve sparked an idea that grew into a story. Where do you get your ideas?

notes toward an autobiography by others

Once in awhile in my reading I come across a passage that I might have written. This is what I think! That happened to me! It leads me to suppose one could write an autobiography via collage, the source texts all written by someone else but arranged so they tell one’s own story.

The following short piece from Barbara Tomash’s Flying in Water sounds much like my own experience with warm surf:

She had learned how to meet the waves. How to wait for them to grow large, to leap into the swell at the deepest point when it is massive yet gentle, like a giantess mother who takes you in her arms and swings you over the kitchen chair. Sometimes her timing was off – the wave crashed on top of her head, spun her around in the storm of salt and sand. The directionless confusion, the disintegration even of gravity, she liked these, almost as much as being held and rocked. The terrific impact of the water rendered her weightless and limp. When she could see sunlight through the murky swirl, or when her knees crashed into the sandy floor, and it was evident where top was and where was bottom, she propelled herself upwards kicking.

The ocean I grew up with was cold, nothing one would swim in, closest I’d gotten was wading barefoot, and then only till my feet got numb. I would retreat to dry sand warmed by the sun until my toes shook off the chill. When I was about 12 my brother and I joined my dad’s family for a vacation in Hawaii. On that trip I learned the delights of walking out beyond the breakers and bobbing, the rollers lifting me from the sandy bottom, and gently dropping me back.

I would also lie down where the surf foamed up onto the beach. Waves would pull my body out, then push it back in. When the water abandoned me, I was surprised at first, then scared to see it had rushed away only to regroup in a big wave that would smash down on me and carry me, tumbling, out of control, much as Tomash describes it. After the scare faded I decided I liked it. I spent a whole day doing that. (So it seems in my memory.)

In this next excerpt from Flying in Water the woman is older, with children of her own, and she needs to feel in control:

Now she would hate the sensation of tumbling, of being flung and pushed out of control. She feels, looking out at the ocean, how much of her girlhood she has lost. In Mexico she swam again in the Pacific. The waves were warm and calm. She swam parallel to the beach so she could judge the distance between herself and her son and husband on dry land. As lovely as the water felt, she couldn’t rest in it. The edgelessness bothered her. She has grown used to swimming pools. Most of the earth is covered by oceans, she thinks – like it or not, we are always at sea.

This one wouldn’t fit in my autobiography, not having kids, but I understand unease at the sea’s great expanse, one little body lost in it.

ant head sutures

Saw Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto recently. When one of the forest Indians uses ants to suture closed a wound it looked like an illustration of something I’d read recently. Robert M. Sapolsky in his A Primate’s Memoir writes about his time in Africa studying baboons. His nearest human neighbors were Masai.

In a passage about army ants Sapolsky says, “Once they dig in your skin with their pincers, they hold on so tightly that when you pull at them to get them off, the head detaches from the body, leaving the pincers still in you. The Masai use them to suture people – bad cut, and someone grabs an army ant, holds the two sides of the cut together, lets the pissed-off ant sink its pincers in, and, quickly, twists off the body, leaving rows of ant head sutures in place.”

I don’t remember having heard about the same practice in MesoAmerica (where Apocalypto takes place), yet a quick web search brought me this reference concerning the Leaf Cutter Ant at Answers.com, “Indians used the jaws of the soldier ant as sutures to hold together the edges of wounds.” So there you go.

clumping into complexes

Switching his vantage from earth to the clouds themselves John H. McWhorter tries to assess the boundaries (from The Power of Babel: a natural history of language):

“Typically, what looks from the air like ‘a language’ is actually a much hazier business on the ground. Korean is relatively uniform, but Japanese speakers in Tokyo can barely follow speakers from the Ryukyu Islands … Hebrew is pretty tidy, but its neighbor and relative Arabic differs so much from country to country that the various ‘dialects’ differ about as much as Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese do from one another. …

“The best we can say is that there are innumerable dialects in the world, related to each other to various degrees, sometimes clumping into complexes particularly close to one another, but generally not so close that all are mutually intelligible, with distances often so great between some of them that their speakers do not consider themselves to be speaking ‘the same thing’ in any sense.”

Remingtons from Rimbaud

I’ve read some translations of the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, the enfant terrible of French letters, and, so far, I haven’t caught the magic. But when Paul Theroux in Dark Star Safari, his book on his travel through Africa, makes a special trip to a city in Ethiopia to check out the country where Rimbaud landed after flying from France and literature, I was surprised to discover the fruits of Rimbaud’s new vocation (puts one in mind of the other “Rambo”):

“Harar [a city in Ethiopia] was a place I had always wanted to see for its associations with … the boy genius [the French poet] Arthur Rimbaud: after he forsook poetry and civilization Rimbaud had been a trader there off and on for ten years. In spite of his whining in letters home, he had liked Harar’s remoteness and wildness.

“…It was normally quiet in Dire Dawa [the train stop nearest Harar], but even quieter the day I arrived because of … the 105th anniversary of the Battle of Adwa … The Adwa victory, a sweet one for Ethiopians, an early anticolonial one, was accomplished in 1896, when twenty thousand Italian soldiers, hurrying into northern Ethiopia from Eritrea, met ninety thousand ‘perfervid, battle-hungry Ethiopians,’ commanded by King Menelik II … Trying to group for an attack in the rocky landscape near Adwa, the Italians became lost and disoriented. The Ethiopians, outnumbering them by more than four to one, surrounded them, harried them with spears and arrows, killed more than fifteen thousand, and wounded or captured the rest. They also had rifles – two thousand of them were Remingtons that Rimbaud had sold to Menelik in Entotto in 1887.”

her fifteen foot barnacle-scarred head

David Matlin describes a visit to the gray whales of Baja in “It Might Do Well With Strawberries” (which is a reference to what Herman Melville suggests would go with a serving of whale milk). As we are going to be visiting the whales this spring I was surprised to stumble upon Matlin’s account in Golden Handcuffs Review, v.1 no. 8, the latest literary magazine to drift into my active reading pile. I’m trying not to build my hopes too high concerning whale communing possibilities. After the sleepy manatee experience I remind myself not to be expect a performance. Still, Matlin makes his whale visit sound sweet:

The Lagoon this morning was unusually calm. … The guide began to slow [the boat] and in this silence the backs and sides of grey whales surfaced all around us, cows and calves arching up, exposing their spines and flukes; glittering, and slithering into the depths, great mammalian dragons, their spouts creating instant flower-like rainbows over the nearly glass-like water nursery. We could hear the huge animal breathings, the wind carrying their breath-spray and ourselves immersed in the raptures of these life sounds for maybe an hour … drifted, and listened.

A single cow suddenly rose up from the whale generated sea-whip. At first she appeared and then subsided; ascended again and then let us touch her. She was 45 feet long and had extraordinary control of her tremendous body. She could float on her back under our small boat not moving even an inch for minutes as she watched us with her great eye or turned and floated up to the side of the dory, her fifteen foot barnacle-scarred head fully exposed, her blow hole expanding in spray with the force of a geyser … We could see her flukes, her huge fins, her multicolored body as she floated around us in circles, gentle, curious, elegant, distinct and I don’t know quite how to reach for any of the words that might help me to say how suddenly relieved we were of cynicism and malice …

David Matlin visited the whales at Scammon’s Lagoon, also called Ojo de Liebre, which is near the village of Guerrero Negro and a huge salt works. We won’t be going there. We will spend our time in a tent at the more remote San Ignacio Lagoon.

They asked for you

Douglas Messerli founded Sun & Moon Press and its successor, Green Integer. An excerpt from his manuscript “Nine Nights in New York” appears in Golden Handcuffs Review, v.1 no. 8. There are no dates in the piece, though internal clues suggest the mid-70s.

Among the stories Messerli recounts about his first months in New York is one amazing coincidence:

“Upon completing my junior year of college at the University of Wisconsin, I was nearly desperate to get to New York City.” He snagged a ride with “ a co-worker … and her husband. [After a meandering trip] we … stay[ed] with her husband’s brother and wife in a small apartment on 72nd Street.”

Though Messerli had no idea how he was going to live in New York – he hadn’t even told his parents he was going there! – he managed to find work and places to stay, including apartment-sitting for a puppeteer on tour, and the YMCA.

“I had still failed to inform my poor parents that I was in New York! Today, it seems unbelievably cruel of me … my parents would be terrified by my unexplained absence … My only excuse now is that I was young … Life was exciting.

“One evening during my tour of the various bars, I met a young man who, following the usual pattern after hearing of the far-away location of my habitation, suggested we go up to his place. … ‘I know this street,’ I blurted … I was more than a bit startled when he entered the same apartment building in which lived the relatives of my Wisconsin friends. I was even more overwhelmed … when he … opened the door to the very apartment where they had lived. ‘I just moved here a few months ago,’ he mysteriously reported …

“We had sex, and I was preparing to leave – or perhaps to stay for the night. I can’t remember my intentions. For before I could take any actions, the telephone rang. It was for me, reported my new friend. … ‘They asked for you.’

“’But no one knows I’m here.’ … It was my mother! Where was I? Where had I been? She’d had to call the University to find out that I’d gone away to New York with some friends, and they had told her that I’d stayed the first night with their relatives. My mother had called here now to find out if they knew where I might have gone. Why hadn’t I told them? Was I coming home? … She was in tears.”

clouds clouds clouds

Linguist John McWhorter in his The Power of Babel: a natural history of language likens languages to clouds:

We look at a cloud formation with full awareness of its inherently transitory nature: we know that if we look up again in an hour, the formation will almost certainly be different and that if it isn’t, then this is due to an unusually windless interval that will surely not last long. Language does not change that fast, of course, but it changes just as inevitably and completely over time. Language is an inherently dynamic, rather than static, living entity.

Ted & Syl’s Day at the Beach

It seems Sylvia was pining for her beaches back in Massachusetts. England is so dirty and gray and drab and ugly. A nice cleansing day at the beach. That would be the thing! And Ted knew just the beach:

… It was dusk when we got there
After a steamed-up hour of November downpour
And black cars sploshing through pot-hole puddles.
The rain had stopped. Three or four other cars
Waited for walkers – distant and wrapped in their dowds.
A car-park streetlamp made the whole scene hopeless.
The sea moved near, stunned after the rain,
Unperforming. Above it
The blue-black heap of the West collapsed slowly,
Comfortless as a cold iron stove
Standing among dead cinders
In some roofless ruin. You refused to get out.
You sat behind your mask, inaccessible –
Staring towards the ocean that had failed you.
I walked to the water’s edge. A dull wave
Managed to lift and flop. Then a weak hiss
Rolled black oil-balls and pushed at obscure spewage.

I first read “spewage” as “sewage”, an available confusion Ted probably chose for. Ah, the ocean had failed the missy! And the husband?

That stove – that stove! Comfortless, the thing that is, on nasty days, the very source in a house of warmth and glow. It is cold, it is iron (so black?), it is standing (confrontationally?), it is surrounded by the dead, and it is exposed to the elements; if it is not a ruin itself, it is ruin’s peer. And it is not even there!

Pathetic wave, so beaten down it’s got hardly the strength to raise itself, and fall, without grace, on a fouled shore. Perform! Damn you!

I bet Ted felt like somebody who snagged one of the hottest tickets in town, only to – get to the theater late, find out there’s a support beam blocking the view of the stage, learn the ingenue has been replaced by an understudy, your sweetheart’s chair has a broken spring … in other words, responsible for the disaster.

source: Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes

A Table for Sylvia

Sylvia Plath wrote a lot of angry, mythic poems about her father. In his Birthday Letters Ted Hughes can’t let that go. Some lines from Hughes’ “The Table”:

I wanted to make you a solid writing table
That would last a lifetime.
I bought a broad elm plank two inches thick,
The wild bark surfing along one edge of it,
Rough-cut for coffin timber. Coffin elm
Finds a new life, with its corpse,
Drowned in the waters of the earth. It gives the dead
Protection for a slightly longer voyage
Than beech or ash or pine might. With a plane
I revealed a perfect landing pad
For your inspiration. I did not
Know I had made and fitted a door
Opening downwards into your Daddy’s grave.

I like that Ted can’t resist a pun. He uses a plane to smooth the rough cut surface of the board, the board becoming a landing pad for the plane carrying Sylvia’s inspiration. Landing pad / writing pad.

And coming into that plane we go from the earth’s covering soil / metaphoric waters drowning a coffin to a coffin as bark for voyages, thus from boat to plane. Isn’t that little consumer advisory the best? Elm “gives … protection for … slightly longer … than beech or ash or pine.”

Ted made a nice table – but it was really a coffin, no, a boat, no, a plane, no, a landing pad, no, a door – a door to the grave!

memory

In my post about Jonathan London I said I’ve remembered two things for twenty years about Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980, that it had an Oz-themed poem and that it contained a poem by Jonathan London. After writing that, I remembered a third thing – there was a poem in it by Ronald Reagan.

So I read the last poem in Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980. It’s not Oz-themed. Nor were any of the others. No poems by Ronald Reagan. I read more than one of these anthologies?

Alvin Toffler, poet

I didn’t know Alvin Toffler wrote poems! The one that appears in Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980 was first published in Antioch Review, which ought to mean something. (Does it?)

Alvin Toffler is famous as a futurist – you’ve read Futureshock, haven’t you? I read some other book, too. Megatrends? I remember finding his thinking worth the engagement, though I’ve long since forgotten specifics.

In “The League of Selves” he seems to be arguing for the interchangeability of individuals. If Oswald hadn’t shot Kennedy, it would’ve been someone else. History made him do it?

Sighting down the silver barrel,
crosshairs on his temple
I could Kennedy his cranium …

“Kennedy his cranium”! Kennedy having become a verb meaning to shoot a bullet into.

I could Kennedy his cranium
or Luther King his eyeballs.
I could RFK his chest
or Lincoln his lung.

Lincolned lung!

RFK would be the opposite of CPR?

The poem ranges through history with “the League of Selves” (they all seem to be assassins), killing the Archduke of Sarajevo, splattering the gore in the room Hitler just stepped from (oops!).

”If history books had holes …
where names like Ray or Booth appear,
I’d find a different way
to manifest my destiny.”

paper, piper, pit

Is this a found poem? It looks like Warren Slesinger grabbed three definitions from a dictionary. He liked the way they fit together? If these were lifted directly from a dictionary it’s not one currently online.

Sandpaper, Sandpiper, Sandpit

sandpaper (sand pa.per) n. –sPaper that
is covered with sand or some other rough,
abrasive substance used for smoothing or
polishing a surface. -v.sandpapered,
sandpapering, sandpapers. To work with it
or as if with it: My mother sandpapered
the edges of my father’s moods until she
made their marriage smooth. See true grit.

sandpiper (sand pi.per) n. -s 1. An Eastern
shorebird that walks at the water’s edge
quite rapidly; it frequents the flats of
the tidal estuaries whenever the beaches
of the region are enveloped in a chilly
fog; it is streaked with a brownish gray
or a buff, but it is completely white at
the breast. 2. A woman with the impulsive
movements of a sandpiper: She hurried on
ahead of me just like a little sandpiper,
peeping with pride.

sandpit (sand pit) n. -s 1. A deep hole
in the sand. 2. A point of depression.
3. A hollow of loneliness that is left,
if a loved one is lost. See true grief.


#


If the definitions are invented they are convincing pastiche of dictionary speak.

I’ve worked with the dictionary in poem-making. Words in random (& arbitrary) orders create new meanings. The reader seeks patterns, sees connections that become stories. I’m not completely taken with Slesinger’s poem but I like the method. There is something these words are saying to each other, he asserts. Even if I don’t see it I still like the words and the definitions, those bits of figurative language that illustrate a context for the words. I keep expecting a whole to coalesce from the parts. That one doesn’t would be the reason I leave the poem behind, a backward glance or two, an appreciative shrug, and I’m off.

source: Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980

Poetry & Pizza goodies

Last Friday was the monthly Poetry & Pizza reading. We had Bruce Isaacson, MK Chavez, and John Attardi.

I didn’t bring home any of their books. However, I did bring home the Zeitgeist literary zine, a photocopy staple in the upper left business. You can download your own here (pdf): Neon Geyser, Porcelain Sky. Contains poems by Chavez and Isaacson, as well as Joie Cook, Q.R. Hand, Brian Morrisey, and Katharine Harer, et al. Katharine is one of the P&P coordinators.

I bought Clive Matson’s latest chapbook, Chalcedony’s First Ten Songs. Clive is the other P&P coordinator (besides me). I see Clive has his own page at the new lit site Red Room. I’ve been meaning to put up a post about Red Room. Most of the writers so far seem to be SF Bay Area, but the site builders aren’t locally focused so much as starting with who they know.

Mel C. Thompson, who I haven’t seen in years, showed up to support his old buddy Bruce. I’d love to have Mel read for P&P. He handed me his latest self-published chapbook: A Poetry House Built With Four-by-Fours: an ongoing collection of pseudo-immortal poems: Chapter One: shortsighted works written for transient profit. Make sure you stop by the Mel C. Thompson website.

Katharine also put out a stack of brochures for the annual WOW: Women on Writing conference that takes place at the school where she teaches, Skyline College. It takes place Saturday, March 1st. Looks like there are workshops on travel writing and “sense of place” and “your life as story” by such as Carol Lem, Nancy Shelby, Harer herself, Adair Lara, etc. No one turned away for being an XY. I’m not planning to go. Frankly, another workshop on how to write or where to send it sounds depressing. But if anybody wants to buddy up maybe two would be fun. Looks like it runs about $85 or $100.

I’m still working on the readers for Poetry & Pizza March. Should be able to make an announcement shortly.

poem as metaphor, another

As I said in an earlier post on the poem poem it usually occurs inside a longer poem. In Ishmael Reed’s “Beware: Do Not Read This Poem” the section that seems most poem-as-metaphor would be this one:

do not resist this poem
this poem has yr eyes
this poem has his head
this poem has his arms
this poem has his fingers
this poem has his fingertips

this poem is the reader & the
reader this poem

In an earlier section the poem was eating the reader piece by piece (“it has drawn in yr feet … it has drawn in yr legs”), so I’m puzzled by the switch from “yr” to “his” – as you the reader are incorporated into this poem do you become someone else, a third person? Are you now only the eyes in “his” body? Who is this? The poem? The poet?

source: New and Collected Poems, 1988

some ancient pain

In Bettie M. Sellers’ “The Morning of the Red-Tailed Hawk” the speaker seems to liken herself to the hawk, seeing herself as a predator, a source of pain, her religion the religion of the hawk rather than the dove.

The Morning of the Red-Tailed Hawk

In holy books, in church, I hear curses,
see stones hurled at bodies caught in acts
that spurn the law of Moses and of God. I,

like Saul, have judged, held coats in hands
washed clean in the blood of a Bible-belt Lamb.

But, from my window now, I follow the red-tailed
hawk, gliding, imperceptibly adjusting
to turbulence, scanning his territory
for unwary rodents in the tall marsh grass.

I too cruise, needing emotion, words to write.
Today, I intercepted a man’s glance, saw his eyes
smoothing the light hairs on another man’s arm
as they walked the beach.

These two are lovers in some sheltered cove,
where my claws could intrude, sharp
as the red-tailed hawk, his talons sunk in flesh.

I will not write their names. Deeper than books,
than church, I have caught some ancient pain,
accepting it to cup, as in a chalice,
between my trembling hands.

#

It’s an intriguing poem on homophobia, the speaker obviously conflicted, having been steeped in the ideology of hatred, but able to put herself in the place of the victim of “stones” and judgment. She seems to know the men (“I will not write their names”) so could expose them to danger, be a danger to them herself.

I’m having trouble getting a read on the last sentence. To what pain is she referring? The pain of social rejection & judgment? That’s certainly older than and “deeper than books, / than church …” Is it empathy that fills the chalice; she’s feeling the pain she’s served others – in philosophy & imagination (“I hear curses … have judged … my claws … sunk in flesh”)?

Odd use of the one word: cruise. It’s gay slang for seeking sex. “I too cruise, needing emotion …” And eye contact is a significant part of cruising, “… intercepted a man’s glance.” Is jealousy one of the emotions behind the poem? He’s already taken? The poet has a female name so I’m reading the speaker as female, but a poet can speak from a persona not herself; does the poem change if the speaker is male?

source: Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980

sonnet

A grisly sonnet! Who knew there were such a thing. Skip this poem by Liston Pope if you are not ready for gore:

Sea Turtle

Long after his great carapace was wrenched
And torn with grapnels, slung on hooks and hung
Endwise above the pier; and sailors drenched
In slime and blood had carved and hacked among
His giant parts, had ripped his sea-green limbs
And cut his ancient head away; when all
His form was bleeding film, a crimson lens
Of gelatin upon the dock: withal
The great sea turtle’s massive heart beat full
Against the plastron, throbbing audibly
Its plea: this was no easy thing, to still
A century of roaming through the sea;
And beat long after sunset had dispersed
The blood wrung from the cursing sailors’ shirts.

#

A single sentence, too.

Is it true a sea turtle’s heart will beat on after the poor turtle’s head (&, it sounds like, virtually everything else) has been hacked away?

(My internet research neither conclusively confirms nor debunks the notion. The only explicit reference I can find is a quote from Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, not exactly firsthand testimony.)

source: Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980

Ted & Syl’s roadtrip

Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath took a road trip across America. I was delighted by the sensuous horror show in Ted’s vision of the Badlands of North Dakota:

“… A landscape
Staked out in the sun and left to die.
The Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
Long ago dead of the sun. Loose teeth, bone
Coming through crust, bristles.
Or a smashed industrial complex
For production
Of perpetual sacrifice, of canyons
Long ago disembowelled.
When Aztec and Inca went on South
They left the sun waiting,
Starved for worship, raging for attention,
Now gone sullenly mad.
As it sank it stared at our car.”

source: Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes

letter press

Don Emblen offered to make a chapbook for me on his letter press, the big one in his garage, a massive metal thing with type you set by hand. In Marcel Proust’s Within a Budding Grove (C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation) the narrator contemplates his ambitions:

“As an author becomes alarmed when he sees the fruits of his own meditation, which do not appear to him to be of great value since he does not separate them from himself, oblige a publisher to choose a kind of paper, to employ a fount of type finer, perhaps, than they deserve, I asked myself whether my desire to write was of sufficient importance …”

Am I that humble? I remember Don describing a poet who came and helped set type for her book. After experiencing what work goes into making the thing she decided, Don said, in the future she would use fewer words.

dialect in Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte includes a character in Wuthering Heights who speaks in dialect. Usually his speeches are brief, so when I can’t figure out a word or two I can at least get the gist from the context of the conversation.

But I just came across a paragraph in which Joseph is reporting to Nelly on the goings on at the old house where she used to work and some of it stumps me:

“’Nelly,’ he said, ‘we’s hae a Crahnr’s ‘quest enah, at ahr folks. One on ‘ems a’most gotten his finger cut off wi’ haudin’ t’ other froo’ sticking hisseln loike a cawlf. That’s maister, yah knaw, ut’s soa up uh going tuh t’ grand ‘sizes. He’s noan feared uh t’ Bench uh judges, norther Paul, nur Peter, nur John, nur Mathew, nur noaon ‘em, nut he! He fair likes he langs tuh set his brazened face agean ‘em! And yon bonny lad Heathcliff, yah mind, he’s a rare un! He can girn a laugh, as weel’s onybody at a raight divil’s jest. Does he niver say nowt of his fine living amang us, when he goads tuh t’ Grange? This is t’ way on ‘t – up at sun-dahn; dice, brandy, cloised shutters, und can’le lught till next day, at nooin – then, t’ fooil gangs banning un raving tuh his cham’er, makking dacent fowks dig thur fingers i’ thur lugs fur varry shaume; un th’ knave, wah, he carn cahnt his brass, un’ ate, un’ sleep, un’ off tuh his neighbour’s tuh gossip wi’ t’ wife. I’ course, he tells Dam Catherine hah hor fathur’s goold runs intuh his pocket, and her fathur’s son gallops dan t’Broad road, while he flees afore tuh oppen t’ pikes?’”

Some helpful context: Heathcliff has returned to Wuthering Heights (it’s a house) and is staying with his stepbrother, the inheritor of the house, who has been surly and depressed ever since his wife died in childbirth three or four years previous. Catherine, Heathcliff’s stepsister, has married a wealthy neighbor, master of the Grange.

Now let’s see if I can translate Joseph’s speech:

”Nelly,” he said, “we have [?troubles?] enough at our folks [your former employer’s house]. One of them almost got his finger cut off with [?hauling?], the other through sticking himself like a calf. [Joseph is talking about the men who work the ranch?] That’s master, you know, who is sure of going to the grand assizes. [An assize, according to the Microsoft Word dictionary, is ‘a judicial inquest or verdict’; as Joseph often quotes from or refers to the Bible and Prophecy, I suppose he’s talking here about God’s judgment on the master.] He’s not afraid of the Bench of judges, neither Paul, nor Peter, nor John, nor Matthew, nor none of them, not he! [Joseph’s saying the workmen’s injuries (or somebody’s) are the fault of the master’s inattention & sloppiness? God’s judgment doesn’t worry the master, no sir!] He really thinks he longs to set his brazen face against them. And that pretty boy Heathcliff [‘bonny lad’ is surely meant ironically], mind you, he’s a rare one! He can have a laugh as well as anybody at a right devil’s jest. Does he never say anything of his fine living among us when he goes to the Grange? This is the way of it – up at sundown; dice, brandy, closed shutters, and candle light till next day at noon [Heathcliff is playing dice & drinking brandy in the house by himself? or does he have friends over? he & the master gambling?] – then the fool goes banging and raving to his chamber, making decent folks dig their fingers in their ears for very shame; and the knave, why, he [? ‘carn cahnt his brass’? I haven’t a reading!] … and eat and sleep and off to his neighbor’s to gossip with the wife [that would be Catherine]. Of course, he tells Dame Catherine how her fathers’ gold runs into his pocket [Heathcliff’s?], and her father’s son gallops down the Broad Road while he flees before [?to open the gates? ?the upper peaks?]”

a peach

I like it when a poet bets on his metaphor. I mean, really goes all in. Looks at the cards in his hand and sorts them until they tell a story. It won’t always be a winner but it’s a fun strategy and what’s the game for if it’s no fun?

Michael D. Minard:

A Musician Returning from a Café Audition

of the Owner

Now that guy was a real fruit. A peach,
To be exact: smooth, sweet-smelling, kind
To the eye, fuzzily attractive. Oh, but to the reach,
To the closer look, damned if you don’t find
Him a rotten dripper, bruised on the back side,
Brown from sitting on his soft butt;
Past ripe, but unaware that the tide
Of his past-ripeness is flowing, hungry to glut
On his easy pink pulp: O God! drop
A blight on café owners, the entire crop.

#

I misread this poem several times. The speaker is a musician angry at café owners. I kept reading it as a café owner angry at a musician. I worked up four paragraphs on that reading.

Now that I’m clear on what’s happening I’m not sure what confused me, although I do still find that title & subtitle awkward. How about something like, “A Musician, Returned from an Audition, Complains about the Café Owner”?

The poem’s first sentence is a slur, an anti-gay slur. But the poet immediately checks it with attractive qualities. “A peach”, according to my Microsoft Word dictionary, is “somebody … particularly good or pleasing”. I’ve probably heard it (& used it) more often ironically. But we’ve only begun the metaphor. Like a peach the café owner is “smooth, sweet-smelling, kind / To the eye, fuzzily attractive.” All of this has an androgynous quality – he’s nice but there’s something about him, and that something has traditionally feminine qualities – sweetness, kindness, physical attractiveness.

Suspicion that something is a bit off is confirmed when you look closer, “find / Him a rotten dripper … / Brown from sitting on his soft butt …” This is a bit too clever, chewing the metaphor like scenery. Yet I like imagining a peach sitting on a stool judging the music. The owner is rotten -- because lazy? His tastes are old fashioned? He hasn’t kept up with the times, expects the musicians he books to play the same old tired tunes?

Minard allows in an unrelated metaphor here – “the tide [which] is flowing”. It is a metaphor once removed. The tide is a metaphor for the unstoppable (over) ripening of a peach; it is the sickly sweet rot of the peach that is the metaphor for the café owner’s … the café owner’s what? And whose hunger is it – “hungry to glut / On his easy pink pulp”? The tide’s hunger? Not sure there’s another candidate. What is the effect of the tide’s glutting on the café owner’s soft meat? A blight? The café owner goes out of business? He gets a fatal disease?

The musician doesn’t hold out hope the café owner (this or any other) will wise up and see the musician’s quality. It’s not a stretch to hear a poet talking about an editor, or a poetry reading coordinator.

It’s playful work and I haven’t even mentioned the rhyme scheme. But then it may be the rhyme scheme takes the blame for that overstuffed third sentence.

source: Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980

birds, pistons, sawblade

I thought Ed Hoeppner’s metaphors a clashing mess. Jim Wayne Miller in his “On the Wings of a Dove” also offers up a disparate set – starlings & doves, pistons, a sawblade. But he sells them well.

… His troubles sat
right under his breastbone, black
as a treeful of starlings, all talking at once.
[Listening to the radio] his mind throbbed and hummed
like pistons under the hood of a good truck
hauling his thoughts over an open highway,
and the lights on the riverbank, and out
on the island got in tune with the bluegass and throbbing
pistons, and his mind turned into a whining sawblade
spinning so fast it grew invisible and quiet

the starlings under his breastbone stopped talking.

Then, white doves rose out of his ribcage
and flew out over the river toward the island.

A man is sitting in his truck, listening to the radio, drinking, looking out at the evening river. He’s a bit depressed, feeling noisy with unpleasant thoughts, his mind working them hard. But the drink and the music soothe him, quiet the noise inside.

I didn’t expect Miller to pull birds, pistons, and a sawblade together successfully. He invests in his metaphors – his thoughts aren’t just revving “like pistons” but “pistons under the hood of a good truck,” not a rattletrap laboring to make it to the next light; though the truck is “hauling” rather than traveling light. And the motor of his mind is in tune with the music on the radio, not clashing, so in tune that they become one music, a music that becomes a form of silence, not distraction, meditation. And the music is a tool, sharp and useful, that attracts no attention to itself.

Now the birds come back. They come back to listen to the perfected music so are silent themselves. And through their silence they are transformed from a chaos, noisy & black, to a peace, white & light, rising with no additional effort over water already hosting the sparkling lights of night fishermen.

Rather than a clashy collage these metaphors feel like transformations. The sort of thing that happens without effort in dreams every night.

source: Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980

Jonathan London

For twenty years I’ve remembered two things about the Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980 -- that there’s a poem in it that uses imagery from The Wizard of Oz, and that there’s a poem in it by Jonathan London. I haven’t come across the Oz poem yet. But I will, I’m sure.

I remember the Jonathan London poem because Jonathan London was someone I knew. Not well, really. But he was a Sonoma County resident, west. I’d heard him read for the Russian River Writers Guild and he had a book, a small one. For a long time I owned the book; it had a lizard on the cover. I don’t remember the title.

When I began working for the Berkeley Public Library I would work at the North branch and, while at the circulation desk, would sometimes overhear the children’s librarian doing story hour. One of his favorites at the time seemed to be Froggy Gets Dressed. Little Froggy struggles with each piece of clothing and the librarian’s voice would accentuate the effort. I was pleased to learn the author and the Sonoma County poet were the same. London’s been making his living from his writing for years now. Good for him.

For those of you who haven’t read any of London’s poems, well, here’s the one that appears in Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980:

Batches of New Leaves

for Maureen

batches of new leaves
spurting green out the window
backyards filling up
with bird song
as i sit gazing
seeking snatches
of poetry
and then you come
swinging braids
running cold fingers
down my back
beneath my shirt
pressing crotch to my shoulder
dipping and encircling my nose
with lush warm lips
as the heat comes on and rises
from between the legs
of this desk straddling me
but
it’s just a tender moment
and you say goodbye
kid
as you swing away
leaving me
to fill my hands with
this poem for you

#

Read it to your kids, folks!

he hates tipping, too

"Tipping confounds me because it is not a reward but a travel tax, one of many, one of the more insulting. No one is spared. It does not matter that you are paying thousands to stay in the presidential suite in the best hotel: the uniformed man seeing you to the elevator, inquiring about your trip, giving you a weather report, and carrying your bags to the suite expects money for this unasked-for attention. Out front, the doorman, gasconading in gold braid, wants a tip for snatching open a cab door. The bartender wants a proportion of your bill, so does the waiter, and chambermaids sometimes leave unambiguous messages with an accompanying envelope, demanding cash. It is bad enough that people expect something extra for just doing their jobs; it is a more dismal thought that every smile has a price."

That's Paul Theroux in Dark Star Safari: overland from Cairo to Cape Town. He's on a cruise on the Nile, looking at ruins.

the reverse page

Careful description works well as poetry. The poet seeing, and putting down what is seen.

Careful description often requires a vocabulary that captures precise distinctions. In my own poems I tend to flee into metaphor, especially a story-heady metaphor that turns an object into a character in motion rather than a stone made of this mineral and posed on this slope. It’s fun. And you don’t have to fact check.

With the advent of the internet, research is so much easier than it’s ever been; for a recent poem I did a bunch of research and tried to incorporate the results, something I’ve always wanted to do but – well, one could spend hours and hours at the library, right? I get distracted doing that.

I would like to be able to describe what I see, not just conjure colorful whirls around it. I appreciate careful description. Reading Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980 I came across “The Library”, a poem by John Logan.

The first half of the poem blathers on about Ireland and tries to conscript the rows of library books into the big old organ by saying they look like organ pipes. OK, OK. But then Logan looks down at one book, propped open in a display case, and he begins to describe what he’s looking at right then:

Its goat skin pages open up for us under glass
in a wooden case. At this place:
a dog nips its tail in its mouth,
but this dog is of ultramarine, most expensive
pigment after gold, for it was ground out of lapis,
and the tail is of the lemon yellow orpiment.
Other figures are verdigris, folium or woad –
the verdigris, made with copper,
was mixed with vinegar, which ate into the vellum
and showed through on the reverse page.
Through the text’s pages run constant, colored arabesques
of animated initial
letters – made of the bent bodies
of fabulous, elongate beasts.

#

John Logan doesn’t push a metaphor in these lines. He does use some of the specialized vocabulary of the bookmaker, and I love the words – orpiment, folium, woad, vellum. The syntax doesn’t call attention to itself, nor does the poet dance around wearing a florescent ego. I read this over & over.

The stamp that made an impression

Reading “The Super Alkaloid”, one of the short stories collected in Spectral Snow: the dark fantasies of Jack Snow, I found myself experiencing a little flash of déjà vu. I read the following:

“You believe then,” I broke in, “that the theory asserting that the brain retains a history of every sensation, event and scene experienced by the individual, is tenable?”

“Precisely,” Olmsted answered sharply, “nothing, not even the stamp of a foot in childish anger, is left unnoted.”

I knew I’d encountered that stamping foot before. Wasn’t it in a description of the comprehensiveness of Glinda’s Book of Records?

With that amazing new research tool Google I found the passage I was looking for in L. Frank Baum’s Tik-Tok of Oz:

In her magnificent castle, which stands far north of the Emerald City where Ozma holds her court, Glinda owns a wonderful magic Record Book, in which is printed every event that takes place anywhere, just as soon as it happens.

The smallest things and the biggest things are all recorded in this book. If a child stamps its foot in anger, Glinda reads about it; if a city burns down, Glinda finds the fact noted in her book.

Jack Snow was a big Oz fan. When he was twelve he wrote to the publishers of the Oz books, offering to take over the series after Baum’s death. They found someone else.

But twenty years later Snow’s childhood dream came true. He wrote and published two Oz books with Reilly & Lee, the publishers who had brought to print all the Oz books since Baum’s Land of Oz.

And there, as well, in Snow’s own Magical Mimics in Oz was the child and the stamping foot:

Glinda's Great Book of Records is a marvelous book in which everything that happens, from the slightest detail to the most important event taking place anywhere in the world, is recorded the same instant it happens. No occurrence is too trivial to appear in the book. If a naughty child stamps its foot in anger or if a powerful ruler plunges his country into war, both events are noted in the book as of equal importance.

Magical Mimics in Oz was published in 1946. “The Super Alkaloid” first saw print in Jack Snow’s collection of short fiction, Dark Music and other spectral tales which was published in 1947. I don’t know whether Jack Snow consciously noted his use of the stamping foot in both places, if so he probably didn’t figure it mattered. Or maybe he thought of it as a tribute to Baum.

a fateful deficit

I found a bag of purchases from the 2004 Alternative Press Expo. It was hiding behind the mountain of sampler CDs I just finished selling off (and giving away). One of the items in the bag was a collection of scary stories by Jack Snow, author of two of the Oz books. The collection, Spectral Snow, was published by Hungry Tiger Press and illustrations by Eric Shanower are included. They do manage an old pulp action illo feel. Some of the stories originally appeared in Weird Tales.

In “Dimension of Terror” – sounds like an EC title, don’t it? – the first person narrator is honeymooning at a mountain lake. Curiously, there’s a fresh new island in the middle of the lake. What better way to start their lives together than on a lark, he and his sweetie decide, be “the first humans to set foot on that newly born shore.”

Ah but had our narrator “the slightest suspicion of the true origin of the island, the very thought of setting foot on its accursed ground would have chilled me with revulsion.” Later, it’s suggested the island was a meteor. A meteor from Hell?

“If only we might have faintly suspected the unutterable terror that lurked there for us on that island, we would have shuddered at the mere hint of its exploration!” Sadly, they went forth with nary the faintest of unuttered hints, a paucity of slight suspicions, a fateful deficit in the very thought department. Poor kids.

Bronte as EC

I’m reading Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Not long ago I read a version of Wuthering Heights in the comic arts anthology Drawn and Quarterly, volume 5. At the time I remember thinking, as I was planning to read the novel, perhaps I ought to skip the comics adaption. I didn’t.

The writer-artist R. Sikoryak renames the story, “The Crypt of Bronte”, and presents it as an EC comic. EC’s most famous title is probably Tales from the Crypt; it was the inspiration for an HBO series. You’ve had the experience, haven’t you, of only half-remembering a story when seeing an adaptation of it but nevertheless recognizing scenes or plot turns just as they come up? So it is with Wuthering Heights. I don’t remember how the Sikoryak comics adaptation turned out but, now & then, as I read Bronte’s original, drawings from the comics version swim up from the darkness to illustrate a scene.

Ted rescues a bat

Here’s an excerpt from “9 Willow Street” in Birthday Letters, the book of poems by Ted Hughes:

Something under the chestnuts
… black, soft, wrinkled,
Was wrestling, somehow, with the fallen
Brown, crumpled lobe of a chestnut leaf.
Suddenly, plainly, it was bat.
A bat fallen out of its tree
Mid-afternoon. A sick bat? I stooped
Thinking I’d lift it again to tree-bark safety.
It reared up on its elbows and snarled at me,
A raving hyena, the size of a sparrow,
Its whole face peeled in a snarl, fangs tiny.
I tried to snatch it up by the shoulders
But it spun, like a fighter, behind its snarl.

A crowd collected, entertained to watch me
Fight a bat on Boston Common. Finally
I had to give it my finger.
Let the bite lock. Then, cradling it,
Gently lifted it and offered it up
To the wall of chestnut bark. It released me
And scuttled upwards backwards, face downwards,
A rearguard snarl, triumphant, contorted …

What a mensch. But, uh, Ted, you let it bite you? Not till he gets home does he remember, American bats have rabies.

Naturally, the encounter is highly symbolic, and Ted makes sure we don’t get away from the poem without a good talking to about it, but I won’t go down that path.

smelling the cat

Here’s a fun one by Margaret Holley, for those of you who like to press your face into your kitty’s tummy:

Your Woods

I can’t do it often.
My wild cat sleeps
splayed on the sofa,
underchin up like a fishbelly,
a floating wreckage
on the airy currents
of his birdstorming dreams.

Gently, I lower my face
into the downy fur
and its scent of clean oils,
woodsmoke and rosemary,
and this fragrant memory
so subtly awakening
and so tentatively kneading
its claws into my temples.


#

source: Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980

skate, sword, pocketwatch

In his poem “From Garvey’s Farm: Seneca, Wisconsin” Ed Hoeppner offers us this sentence:

On clear nights, the moon goes
skating past the northern lights
which flicker like the sword outside Eden;
if it’s cloudy, the stars drop
their pocketwatches: snow comes ticking down.

That’s a skate, a sword, and an uncountable number of pocketwatches, three very different metaphors in one sentence. I picture the stars getting fumbly with their pocketwatches, disturbed, no doubt, by the swishing of that weirdly pretty sword, just as the moon swooshes by backwards in one of those skin tight skate racer suits.

Then he bothers the old paperboy in me:

The paper is late, comes in a pickup.
Spread on the kitchen table, it says
that the boy who usually delivers
has dropped from an iceboat
into the moving water below the dam.

Too bad. But there’s good news:

The weather promises to hold:
another clear night, another moon
skating …

source: Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980

thoughts on “Grave”

So last night in bed I was thinking about Elizabeth Flynn’s “After Grave Deliberations …” (posted yesterday). I was thinking it would be better if she hadn’t made the body she sent God so literal. She wants the “ashes slipped into / an 8 x 10 manila envelope” … then when the Divine poetry editor decides, nope, not for us, back she will be returned to herself, presumably to live another life, or something. Something other than death, yes? This reading is made more difficult by the literalness of the ashes, the already destroyed body. How does that live on “elsewhere”?

Maybe if the body was more metaphorical to begin with, as in:

When my life is finished
I shall fold it twice,
join it with a cover letter
and an envelope, stamped & self-addressed,
and send them together, sealed with one wet kiss
to God in His capacity, etc.

Then when God rejects this submission, sending it back to be offered elsewhere, the reader’s imagination wouldn’t have to deal with a gritty bunch of cremains.

rejection as new life

Those of you who write and send work out in hopes someone will publish it, have strong feelings about the process, I’m sure. Have you written a poem about it? In Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980 there’s a poem by Elizabeth Flynn that turns the often discouraging process around. You type up your poems, you fold them in thirds, you jam them in an envelope with another envelope helpfully stamped & addressed to yourself. After a few months that envelope returns to you full of your poems, and “a neat note / acknowledging [your] insight and … craft, / [and] regretting that [your poems] do not … fit … [the magazine’s needs].”

Here’s what Flynn does with the scenario:

After Grave Deliberations …

When I Go
it should be by cremation,
my ashes slipped into
an 8 x 10 manila envelope
with a second (stamped and self-addressed)
inside, posted to God
in His capacity as editor
of Everything.

I stand
a better than even chance
of being returned to myself,
along with a neat note
acknowledging my insight and my craft,
regretting that I do not,
at that time, fit
His divine needs,
wishing me luck in placing myself
elsewhere.

[ellipsis in original title]

source: Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980

poem as metaphor, another

Most of my poem poems are quite short. Most of the poem poems I run into in my reading are actually parts of larger poems. The poem will go on about this or that and at some point the poet will refer to the poem as though it were a creature, or physical object, the poem itself will take on metaphorical qualities. Excised these passages would, I think, be poem poems. Among the denunciations in Joseph Duemer’s “Curses” are two directed at the poem:

Damn poem, dead on the page, accident
victim. Damn that it expects me
to read it from its blue coma.

source: Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980

chug

Ah, sex. Here’s the version in Rhoda Donovan’s “No Signal for a Crossing”:

He rides me like a locomotive
chug and chug and chug and chug.
…
I am a stuffed dummy, tied to the tracks.

source: Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980

etoffe

It is not included with the dictionary that comes with Microsoft Word. This is the context (from Margery Dodson’s “Poem”, discovered in Anthology of Magazine Verse 1980):

Entombed in my heart no blood flows to you.
Shadows shine and forget, streamers of strength suck me
great as with child into the etoffe of living.
Who can say what a stone within a stone will do?

I always try to get a word from context before I look it up. Etoffe is posed opposite the “tomb” and “a stone.” So I’m guessing it is a vibrancy, a fertility (joined as it is “with child”).

I ran a Google definition and got only French. Running those through Babelfish I get a compromise definition: richly colored, densely woven, packed with intense but harmonious flavor.

The trouble with all that is, it doesn’t do much for the poem.

Dodson ends “Poem” thus: “walk hand in hand / each long and lovely day, the rutted rue.”

Rue?

Your turn.

poem as metaphor

The poem itself can be metaphor. In Premonitions: the Kaya anthology of new Asian North American poetry Patricia Ikeda’s “Wild Iris” has the poem growing rather like a plant. The poem grows its own way, defying some of the poet’s preferences, “I wanted to describe the wild iris / … / But instead this poem wants to express …”

The poet muses about the state of the world & family life, what she “knows” about this or that, then comes back to her perplexity at the poem, “I cannot guess / what this poem wants to be, growing / … into my life. … This poem says / it doesn’t want to end … / … it wants to rise up / amid the ordinary course of our lives.”

Perhaps the poem as metaphor is a genre. I know I’ve written many variations.

hackneyed language & cliches

Another poet in Premonitions: the Kaya anthology of new Asian North American poetry, this one familiar and a favorite, John Yau.

He uses a technique in “Angel Atrapado XX” that I like. It’s a way to make tired old phrases work for you, revivify them. Take a cliché like … oh … Kill two birds with one stone. (I just heard it on an episode of the TV show Rome; I turned to Kent and said, “Caesar coined that phrase, first time it was ever said. So it wasn’t a cliché yet.”) So you have Kill two birds with one stone, right? What you do is you feed the reader enough of it that they think they know what to expect, then you give it a little twist: One lady watching the chef whispers, “All that stuffing! He’s gonna fill two birds with one stone!” (Stone, the weight measure, right?)

When the words start coming the reader thinks all necessary work on understanding was done years past and the phrase can slip effortlessly into that slot in the brain shaped for it, but then what was supposed to fit doesn’t quite and the brain wakes up a little. The piece has got some puzzle to it after all.

A couple lines from Yau (in no particular order):

This tongue is a flower. Someday you will hear what it has to pay.

… at tall costs.

… the clouds are free for the baking.

I hear this spoken at the edge of repair.

metaphors

One of the first things that blew me away when I started reading a lot of contemporary poetry (back in the 80s) was the startling metaphor, especially the simile. There hasn’t been so much of that lately, at least in what I’ve been reading. So I had a sense of nostalgia as well as delight when I came across a poem by Juliette Chen in Premonitions: the Kaya anthology of new Asian North American poetry. “Tai Po Mei” has a former inhabitant returning to her old neighborhood. It’s raining:

In the pungent wet
the village huddles like a stray.

Like a stray! That’s both too cute, pathetic, charming, and works for me. The poem crams in a few too many metaphors. By the time the final line has the “Night fad[ing] like an old bruise,” I was thinking that was one too many. Maybe I just don’t like the old bruise.

Oh, here’s the whole thing:

Tai Po Mei

Came back to a discreet rain,
to the shyness of distant lightning
mussing mountaintops.
In the pungent wet
the village huddles like a stray.
Windows flicker with a firefly pulse.
The way dips in the dark.
Now and then a swaying bulb
spills silhouettes of dancing vines
on broken walls, plays its lurching light
over shards of snail.
This trail of shell leads home.
This is home then –
this black iron door
that clangs shut so finally.
This is real then –
the balcony rail under the hand,
the lights that rim the bay
like salt on a margarita,
fishing boats throbbing
to cicada rhythms.
In the night
a rising wind will usher rain
and send the mosquito net flying
like a surrendering flag or sail of mourning.
There will be music
in the agitation of bells,
in random notes struck by moths
alighting on the zither strings.
Like flowing grass
the wavering shadow of gauze
crosshatches the pillow case
to net the flutters of ragged wings.
Fossilized on a wall,
a gecko waits.
Waits for brazen birdsong to flaunt the day.
Waits for sunlight sparkling on jewelled web.
The mat has left its weave on the skin.
Night fades like an old bruise.

#

I find myself enjoying so much -- the “windows [which] flicker with a firefly pulse”, the “random notes struck by moths / alighting on zither strings.”

I still struggle some how “the wavering shadow of gauze” is “like flowing grass”, and “the lights that rim the bay / like salt on a margarita” had me wondering which country this village was in, whether margaritas are popular in Chinese (or Vietnamese?) villages.

The poem has a cuteness (the lightning mussing mountains, the vines dancing) and a chilliness (“the black iron door / that [prison cell-like] clangs shut so finally”), a too-muchness – really, both a surrendering flag and a sail of mourning?, and the plain observed detail – “the mat [which] has left its weave on the skin” that makes the whole quilt-like, flashy pieces sewn to gaudy pieces sewn to the already a bit worn. I like running my fingers over it.

he wanted to go to Vancouver

So I’m reading Premonitions: the Kaya anthology of new Asian North American poetry, right?, and yesterday I posted about the difficult relationship between the “mainstream” and the margin. Here’s another take, this time from a two part poem by Joy Kogawa. (I’m just going to reproduce the first part.)

Driving down the
highway from Revelstok –
the road built by
forced labour – all the
Nisei having no
choice etcetera etcetera
and mentioning this in
passing to this Englishman
who says when he
came to Canada from
England he wanted to
go to Vancouver too but
the quota for professors
was full so he was
forced to go to Toronto.

Nisei is the word for the children of Japanese immigrants. I like the way the speaker sounds a bit tired of the whole thing, “etcetera etcetera,” do I really have to repeat all this? she seems to say, “mentioning this in passing.”

Ah, yes, the humorous anecdote.

Polish your craft, that small boat

In Premonitions: the Kaya anthology of new Asian North American poetry edited by Walter K. Lew I came across a nice acid satire of multicultural paternalism by Thelma Seto. The poem’s speaker, winner of an arts grant from the Canadian government, wishes to enlist Seto (or some other person-of-color artist) into their project.

First, the speaker offers a couple pieces of advice for the future, and maybe Asian artist will get her own grant next time:

Polish your craft, that small boat.
Learn our structure, that mausoleum.

Later the speaker gets confiding:

We’re glad you were born here
instead of there
which is why we offer you this token
of our esteem,
in payment for making it possible
for us to remain white.

White, not better.
We aren’t the dominant culture,
just mainstream. So dull,
which is why we adore your work.
It adds such color!
How could we be white without your color?

White, as a race, was only imagined once it was necessary to make stark the difference between the master and the slave, the civilized and the native. Up till then your people were your people, those who spoke your language, who lived nearby, who worshipped the same gods, and everybody else, whatever the color, was Them, nice enough maybe, enemies often, but Us was not a color and neither was Them.

their whole story hung – a miasma

I picked up Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters again this morning. All the poems are directly addressed (“You yourself were a whole Antarctic sea”) to Sylvia Plath, the mother of his two children, wife, a poet whose fame (despite Hughes’ being named England’s Poet Laureate) has virtually eclipsed his own, and a woman long dead, a suicide. These poems are fun! Having recently read Plath’s collected poems (edited by Hughes) I’d say Ted & Syl were a good matched pair -- both tending to the histrionic in their poetry (& in their lives!), but with Goth obsessions this side of campy (usually). So much contemporary poetry is restrained to the point of bloodlessness, but these two, they reveled in / sopped in / coughed up blood, pointed at it and went, “Ooh, Daddy, come look!”

Of the house they bought together, the last owner a widow whose husband died in the house, Hughes writes, “She had left the last blood of her husband / Staining a pillow. Their whole story / Hung – a miasma – round that stain. / … / [T]he grease-grimed shelves, the tacky, dark walls / Of the hutch of a kitchen revolted you / Into a fury of scouring. I studied the blood. / Was it mouth-blood or ear-blood, / Or the blood of a head-wound after some fall?”

Hughes paints Plath a freak for cleaniless and modernity, while he claims the wildman title, probably a distinction Plath would have owned, too (more or less), but she needed her wildman, she did, madonna of the churchyard claimed by the old gods.

male parturition

I’m reading the 1980 edition of Anthology of Magazine Verse, edited by Alan F. Pater. When I first read it a few years after it was published I was not yet copying out poems and I saw reading its 456 pages as an education. I believe returning the book to the library and wondering if I would ever again read poems by those poets whose work I enjoyed or know it if I did, was one of the pushes toward the copying out project. I recognize more of the names now. Haven’t run onto one I know I have to hang onto this time, although I did read this one aloud to Kent (who has a horror of kidney stones):

Thirty Childbirths

by Millen Brand

In James Street,
as if my pneumonia had not been enough,
I started to have attacks of kidney gravel,
human penalty
for emerging from inanimate matter – pain.
The pain of one daylong attack of gravel
has been compared to the suffering
of childbirth. I must have had
thirty attacks. I thought of suicide.
One time an attack lasted three days
and in my male parturition
I screamed like a woman.
Hospitalized in Jersey City,
I had a doctor, assigned by Uncle Sam Cosgrove,
who without anaesthesia pushed a tube
up my penis, and this scalding insertion
let me be flushed with liquid and the liquid
washed out the gravel, or I pissed it out.
No birth, but still
a delivery
giving me back to life.

love rinses its hair full of stars/starfish

Last night I finished Harold Norse’s collected poems, In the Hub of the Fiery Force. There was one experience reading this hefty tome (615 pages) that I found unusual. I kept having the feeling I’d read a line before, sometimes an entire poem. Now it’s typical for me to flip open a book and read a bit here or there (entire poems sometimes) then when I work my way through the book from first page to last find familiar the piece I’d read before. At first I thought that the most logical explanation for my little bouts of déjà vu. Then I came upon the second of the two poems to follow. And I recognized it immediately and knew the title of the poem of which it was a minor variant.

I’d thought “parapoem 35” one of Norse’s more successful surrealist pieces and used it to generate a text of my own. (Maybe I’ll post that at the LuvSet blog.) So I was primed and when “love rinses its hair full of stars” appeared I could locate “parapoem 35” in but a moment and compare. Since the poem appears under different titles and has a different first line in each case neither the contents page (poems by title) nor the index of first lines would have been much help.

Herewith I reproduce “parapoem 35” and “love rinses its hair full of stars” (Norse uses a variety of indents and spacing that I won’t try to duplicate):


parapoem 35

love rinses its hair full of starfish
the frozen hotel wears a collar of lips
we follow corpses into a lake
of newspapers and dead flags
flowers scream, images sprout from their sticky leaves
a voice proclaims: I ERASE ALL MEMORY!
a man bleeds in the mirror
a radio scratches the sky with raucous announcements
ice cubes take possession of Vesuvius
chimneys write news items in Persian Rose Smoke
a man comes out of the ground saying
WE HAVE SEEN THE WRECKS OF OUR DAMAGED BRAINS


*


love rinses its hair full of stars

the frozen hotel wears a collar of lips
we follow corpses into a lake
of newspapers and dead flags
flowers scream
images sprout from their sticky leaves
a voice proclaims: I ERASE ALL MEMORY
a nun bleeds in the mirror
a radio scratches the sky with raucous announcements
ice cubes take possession of Vesuvius
chimneys write news items in Persian Rose Smoke
a man comes out of the ground singing

Love rinses its hair full of stars


*


I typed them both to make sure I got everything, though they are so virtually the same that a mere copy & paste wouldn’t have missed much.

Differences: titles; in “love” the line “flowers scream, images sprout from their sticky leaves” is two lines (eliminating only instance of comma); in “para” the bleeder is “a man”, in “love” it’s “a nun”; in “para” the man “comes out of the ground saying / WE HAVE SEEN THE WRECKS OF OUR DAMAGED BRAINS” while in “love” the man is “singing” and what he sings is the title “Love rinses its hair full of stars” (italics in original); and, of course, “para”’s “starfish” has become “love”’s “stars”. If there are any other differences I can’t see them.

Norse notes that he wrote a series of “parapoems” while at the Beat Hotel in Paris. I presume, then, that “love rinses its hair full of stars” is a later revision.

This is the only instance in which I knew how to quickly find & compare a familiar-sounding poem with its earlier appearance. As I suggested above, I suspect there are other poems with twins or substantial pieces of recycled language. I don’t mean when the poet writes more than once about the same incident, I mean when the words are reused unchanged. I can certainly see reusing bits to create new effects (or to recreate old ones) but it seems to me the editor was remiss in including poems so nearly identical.

Best Poems of 2007

As I read a book of poems I keep handy a stack of bookmarks. Should I read a poem I want to revisit I tuck one of these scraps of paper in beside it. I read marked poems several times. After I’ve finished the book and am ready to put it away, I decide whether I can leave the poem behind. If I can’t I copy it out by hand in a notebook. I’ve been doing this for almost twenty years.

These are the poems I copied out in 2007:

Allen Ginsberg … “America”
Amy Allara … “so I would be ready to set about”
David Antin … “Endangered Nouns”
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa … “Third Lesson”
F.J. Bergmann … “Atonal Bisque”
Edward Smallfield … “Secret Lives”
Sara Littlecrow-Russell … “Russian Roulette, Indian Style”
Nikolai Gumilev … “A Baby Elephant”
Pablo Neruda … “Dream Horse”
Sylvia Plath … “Snakecharmer”
Sylvia Plath … “Moonrise”
Sylvia Plath … “In Plaster”
Spencer Selby … selections from “Text From My Visual Book”
Michele Ruby … “Apostrophe”
Iain Crichton Smith … “You Are at the Bottom of My Mind”
Ibaragi Noriko … “When I Was Prettiest in My Life”
W.S. Graham … “Night’s Fall Unlocks the Dirge of the Sea”
Kyle Kaufman … “fog the fold the name the”
Vicente Aleixandre … “The Bottom of the Well”
Else Lasker-Schuler … “Parting”
Yannis Ristos … from “Romiossini (VI)”
John Olson … “The Conservation of Strangeness”
D.L. Emblen … “A Rule to Keep One from Losing a Mountain”
Laynie Brown … from “Daily Sonnets”
Spencer Selby … “Original Veneer”
Emily Dickinson … “914: I cannot be ashamed”
Anna Deavere Smith … “Your Heads in Shame”
Larry Kearney … “The Soul”
Wang Wei … “Magnolia Basin”
Srikanth Reddy … “Circle (I)”
Kirmen Uribe … “The Cherry Tree”
Wang Shih-chen … “Arriving After Rain at the Temple of Heavenly Peace”
Mei Yao-ch’en … “Eating Shepherd’s-purse”
Liu Tsung-yuan … “On Covering the Bones of Chang Chin, the Hired Man”
Essex Hemphill … “Civil Servant”

Best Poems of 2006

Best Poems of 2005

Best Poems of 2004

El Raton

Kent and I went to a New Year’s Eve party in San Francisco. We’ve been to the house of these friends many times and I’ve looked at a set of drawings (prints?) on the wall and I’ve found their simple iconic quality appealing. The art was done by the sister of the host. Inspired by cave paintings, he says. Doesn’t know from where. Lascaux? Seems he remembers his sister saying the drawings were based on the famous prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux in France.

So last night I was sitting and talking and sipping from a glass of champagne and I looked up at the animal shapes in the art and recognized them immediately. The drawings are details from the mural called El Raton near the town of San Ignacio in Baja California. I’ve been researching the cave paintings of Baja as part of the planning for the trip we’ll be making in the spring.

El Raton (The Rat) is apparently named after a dark figure in the mural that looks like a rat. More likely it’s a mountain lion.

Here are some excerpts from Harry Crosby’s description of the El Raton mural in his study The Cave Paintings of Baja California:

“A black mountain lion … painted representations of these animals occupy a special niche in the Painters’ repertory. For some reason … leon figures vary less than any other, animal or mono [human figure]. They all have the same long, stiff, extended tail, the short legs cocked at a similar angle. There is virtually no neck and the round, short-muzzled head is set with small round ears. Most leones are black but several red examples have turned up; the oddity is that these animals are never bicolored. They are unique in this respect.”

The image in this post comes from the bajaquest site (link); the lion is in the middle right, nose pointed up and to the right.

Norse’s Catullus

Harold Norse started translating Catullus (the old Latin poet) while in Rome. Norse’s versions from the 50s attempt to duplicate Catullus’ rhyme schemes. Norse’s versions from 20 years later, written in San Francisco, don’t bother. Here’s one of those:

XV

Commendo tibi me ac meos amores

I am entrusting to you, Aurelius,
all I love most in the world, this boy, and beg
only a small favor, if you’ve ever valued
something beyond price, to be kept chaste and pure,
then guard this boy for me. I don’t mean from strangers;
it is not the man in the street I fear; he’s busy
about his own affairs. It’s you,
you and your big prick
lusting after boys, molesting good and bad alike.
When you’re outside you may waggle your erection
as much as you please at anyone you please, but spare this one,
it’s not much to ask, but if lust
runs away with you, if your dirty mind runs amuch
and you betray me and my lover, you’ll suffer,
I promise you, a terrible fate.
Before the whole town’s eyes, with your feet in chains,
I’ll shove radishes and mollets up your ass.

Norse on Mariah

Working my way through Harold Norse’s collected poems (In the Hub of the Fiery Force) and on page 269 I find a poem dedicated to my old poet teacher, Paul Mariah.

Blood of a Poet

they sent him up for 5 years
set bail at 100 grand
& he did time in the hole
for making love
to a boy of 18
who wanted it
both lonely in Illinois
& he came out with an education
in pain
& breaks down when he tells it
& you feel ashamed
& dumb.

-- San Francisco, July 1972

I don’t know if the poem is completely factual but it tracks Paul’s life. Paul never laid out for me the whole story. I learned more from what appeared in his books than I did from him.

Raymond Luczak

Some time ago I read Raymond Luczak’s anthology Eyes of Desire, which collected writings by & about gay & trans D/deaf people. It seems he has put together a sequel, Eyes of Desire 2.

You can watch him describe it in American Sign Language here.

Josh Simmons

Recently read the first issue of Josh Simmons’ self-published Jessica Farm, a comic that he will be working on, a page each month, until 2049. Looks like he won’t be self-publishing any more as Fantagraphics has committed to producing new Jessica Farm volumes every eight years. That’s 96 pages each volume.

Sadly my copy of Jessica Farm was peed on by one of the cats. I threw away the other things that the cat pee seeped into. But I hadn’t yet read Jessica Farm, and it looked too interesting to just toss. I’m glad I gave it a chance. Having enjoyed it, I still couldn’t keep it. It smelled.

If you visit Josh’s website you can read a God adventure. I snagged page 2 to get you excited.

I hate tipping

In her collection of comics, I Love Led-Zeppelin, Ellen Forney includes a number of single-pagers, most of them non-fiction, even instructional. She devotes one to “How to Tip Your Server”, basing her suggestions (commands? requirements?) on interviews with two longtime servers, “Alianna is a dancer/choreographer, and Gary is a musician and ‘zine writer,” both of whom have been wait staff for years.

“15% is the minimum.” For “crappy service, a really irritating combo of bitchiness and condescension, totally ignoring your table, really, really inedible food,” among other things, a tip may be drastically reduced to “say 10%” – but no lower! Ever!

I tip. I tip because I’m supposed to. I hate tipping.

Restaurants get away with a price on the menu that ignores both taxes and service? Why don’t we tip at the grocery store? Why don’t we tip at the DMV? We could put out a tip jar at the library.

Frankly, I can’t think of any good reason for tipping. Because the servers are paid a shitty wage? They’re not the only ones. Far as that goes tips are a disincentive to unionize, least so far as poor pay leads one to get together with one’s peers.

“Remember,” tuts the book, “if you stiff your server, you’re also stiffing the hostess, busboys, bartenders, etc.” Yeah, you’re the one shortchanging all those folks, not the owner of the business who has no obligation to pay the workers what their labor is worth. If you can’t afford to tip, you can’t afford to eat out, right?

“To Insure Prompt Service”? You mean, without the tip I’m gonna get slow, crappy service? Apparently I’ll get that anyway (see paragraph 2 above).

If you get bad service, Forney’s informants insist, you tip anyway, then punish the restaurant by never going back. Yeah, right. Suppose you just had a shitty server and the next night she’s fired? How would you know? Check the restaurant’s website? Suppose there’s only one restaurant in town? I guess you’d quickly gain a rep among the servers as a bad tipper and be punished with even worse service.

Suppose you just want to be treated well; after all, you are a paying customer. If you get bad service you should complain to management? No way. According to Forney & friends your only recourse is depriving yourself.

A lot of wait staff make good money on tips, cash tips, which often aren’t declared so aren’t taxed. (Doesn’t the government assume now that wait staff get tips so require them to declare something?)

I understand that waiting tables has traditionally been women’s work, one of the few decently paid women’s jobs, and I can’t but sympathize with the idea that people ought to be paid well for good work.

But I still hate tips. And I resent waiters for expecting them.

beautiful beautiful beauty

I’ve been reading Dick Russell’s Eye of the Whale to learn about the gray whale. Next spring we will be visiting Baja’s San Ignacio Lagoon where the grays breed and give birth. During research for the book Dick Russell became fascinated by the former whaling captain, Charles Scammon. In the 19th Century Scammon wrote the first book on gray whales and many of his observations remained until very recently the best testimony on their behavior.

I grew up in Sebastopol. On page 593 I learned Captain Scammon was an early resident. After he retired from the sea Scammon, “his wife, and two of their sons moved more than seventy-five miles away from San Franciso not long after [his whale] book came out. Scammon had purchased a small apple farm in Northern California’s Sonoma County, in the rural hamlet of Sebastopol.”

Russell quotes an 1888 history of the county: “Among the noticeably beautiful residence properties in Analy Township is that of [Captain Scammon] … Captain Scammon purchased the land in 1874 and commenced its improvement in the same year, building a beautiful and convenient cottage residence and suitable outbuildings. … The view from his study window is one of surprising beauty, overlooking as it does the Laguna with its placid waters and the beautiful meadows on the lower plateau. … In fruit culture he confines himself to a family orchard and vineyard, in which he has some of the most valuable and improved varieties of fruit and table grapes grown in Sonoma County.”

Eventually he sold the farm and moved to Oakland.

Sebastopol is still known for apples. And for grapes, though wine rather than table. My mother participated in efforts to preserve what remained of a Laguna probably much reduced by drainage and landfill from what it was in Scammon’s day.

mixed metaphor

Every so often UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies sends me their magazine. The one I’m reading now was actually published in Spring.

In an article about the rocky first year of Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet analyst Kirsten Sehnbruch writes:

As long as her brooms continue to sweep independently of each other rather than being reigned [sic] in to some sort of order, the sensation in Chile will be that of a government adrift.

Brooms? What’s that about brooms? In the article Sehnbruch was likening President Bachelet to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Mickey Mouse?) who loses control over the brooms he has magicked to clean the house. You use reins on horses (whereas you reign as a sovereign or king). And boats drift. So. Bachelet’s gotta grab the reins on the brooms before they drift away on the spilled water (Mickey is, after all, washed out the door by the excess water the magic brooms have hauled and thrown on the floor). Splash!

out of town

I’ve been immersed in planning two vacations: one to Disney World & surroundings (supposed to be quiet there ‘tween the holidays), the other to Baja to see the gray whales at San Ignacio Lagoon in the spring, which trip may take us across the Sea of Cortez to the Copper Canyon.

Other than poring over guidebooks and websites like Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree (where travellers share tips) and tripadvisor.com I’ve been slowly drifting through Dick Russell’s Eye of the Whale and just began Harry Crosby’s Cave Paintings of Baja California.

One trip resource that’s proved valuable is the blog search. Lots of people like to blog about their adventures.