Geof Huth

Spend some time visiting the world of Geof Huth. Scan down the right side of the page and visit his sub-blogs -- Mailartworks, for example.

Rumi, #82:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

today's amusement

Your Linguistic Profile:

40% Yankee

35% General American English

15% Dixie

10% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Thank you, Jilly.

a sniff of Eliot

A moon sighting from T. S. Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night":

A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets
And female smells in shuttered rooms
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.

I picked this out of an essay called "Effects of Analogy" by Wallace Stevens, some of whose sound occupies a similar range. Listen to the beginning of "Sunday Morning":

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

Okay, not that similar. And, of course, Stevens likes to launch into things like this, from "The Comedian As the Letter C":

Portentous enunciation, syllable
To blessed syllable affined, and sound
Bubbling felicity in cantilene,
Prolific and tormenting tenderness
Of music, as it comes to unison,
Forgather and bell boldly Crispin's last
Deduction. Thrum with a proud douceur
His grand pronunciamento and devise.

Such a refined turn scintillates after one's been with Crispin and his creator for a while, once the poem, as Stevens says, "comes to possess the reader and . . . naturalizes him in his own imagination and liberates him there."

love poetry

from Michael Ondaatje's Handwriting:

The Siyabaslakara

In the 10th century, the young princess
entered a rock pool like the moon

within a blue cloud

Her sisters
who dove, lit by flares,
were lightning

Water and erotics

The path from the king to rainmaking

—his dark shoulders a platform
against the youngest instep

waving her head above him
this way
this way

Later the art of aqueducts,

the banning of monks
from water events

so they would not be caught
within the melodious sounds

or in the noon heat
under the rain of her hair

poetry submissions

Visit Beverly Jackson's blog for many fine things, including this link to a thoroughly useful article about how to submit poetry for publication.

Carol Peters

Years pass when death and safety suffice
like hibernation
until the air warms and shatters, again,
the fissure of tussle, feint of slash, fiery gouts—
that struggle with the bear.

Stevens feeling his way

From "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction":

X

Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night,
How is it I find you in difference, see you there
In a moving contour, a change not quite completed?

You are familiar yet an aberration.
Civil, madam, I am, but underneath
A tree, this unprovoked sensation requires

That I should name you flatly, waste no words,
Check your evasions, hold you to yourself.
Even so when I think of you as strong or tired,

Bent over work, anxious, content, alone,
You remain the more than natural figure. You
Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational

Distortion, however fragrant, however dear.
That's it: the more than rational distortion,
The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational,

Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street,
I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.
You will have stopped revolving except in crystal.

He does seem a dandy, yet so loving, so attuned to mysteries.

my green, my fluent mundo

Imagine being able to do that.

Thoughts on Frost

Remarks by Ezra Pound in 1931:

As a matter of history it should be stated that since 1912 Robert Frost had been producing New England Eclogues. Sincere, very dull, without tragedy, without emotion, without metrical interest, a faithful record of life without intellectual interest or any desire for anything not in it. The work, inferior to Crabbe, but infinitely better than fake. A great deal of New England life is presumably as Frost records it. It is difficult to see how such life differs greatly from that of horses and sheep.

I understand now why Randall Jarrell felt obliged to defend:

Back in the days when "serious readers of modern poetry" were most patronizing to Frost's poems, one was often moved to argument . . . In these days it's better . . . not much: the lips are pursed that ought to be parted, and they still pay lip-service, or little more. But Frost's best poetry . . . deserves the attention, submission, and astonished awe that real art always requires of us

I've never been wild about Frost, but I attribute that to my ignorance. Maybe all I object to is the adulation.

Carole Maso

Months ago my friend Bev loaned me a novel called Defiance by Carole Maso, in which Bernadette, a Harvard professor, is three months from being electrocuted by the state of Georgia for murdering two of her male students. The text is her Death diary. She is not repentent. She intended her crimes, but they did not succeed at annulling her losses. She dies enraptured by the grief of her childhood.

There is no way, I suppose you know, to atone for the theft of childhood.

That is her theme, and here is a writing sample:

The dream is green and I am fetus clinging. Clinging to your emerald bones in that time, that time before . . . Clovered to you. The last free place. Verdant, rich. The shining pelvis bone to which I clung. I flare at your waist. Unwilling to live outside. My first bit of real intelligence. A forcepped birth. In the year of our weariness, 1960. Taking the tongs. Traumatically. How the scene now stubbornly asserts itself again and again. Extracted. The patient etherized. Mother.

Before I disappoint you or let you down. Before you disappoint or let me down. Before you disappoint or let me down. Before numbers or stars, before language, before notions of beginnings or endings. Before a hand was raised. Before a hand existed at all. Before the brain. Sensing the body forming, quickly and slowly. There are miracles. Here come the fingers. Small toes. Frog heart. Amphibious in the watery dark. In the time before the world had anything against us yet. In the time of reprieve—suspended, lingering. Last forever. Never end.

The novel is brutal, mesmerizing, and superb. Maso fractures the storytelling into thousands of small pieces and completes the story of the deepest hurt only moments before the protagonist's execution. The reader has understood for a long time what happened, and therefore the final details only tattoo the truth.

I've already ordered another of her books, and I can imagine reading everything she's written. She teaches at Brown.

19th century transport

Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book II:

I deem not profitless those fleeting moods
Of shadowy exultation: not for this,
That they are kindred to our purer mind
And intellectual life; but that the soul,
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, to which,
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain, they still
have something to pursue.

                   . . . that universal power
And fitness in the latent qualities
And essences of things, by which the mind
Is moved by feelings of delight . . .

Oft in those moments such a holy calm
Did overspread my soul, that I forgot
That I had bodily eyes, and what I saw
Appeared like something in myself, a dream,
A prospect in my mind.

                   . . . Wonder not
If such my transports were, for in all things
I saw one life, and felt that it was joy.

silly book quiz

Avoiding the Muse said check out this Book Quiz.

You're Animal Farm!

by George Orwell

You are living proof that power corrupts and whoever leads you will
become just as bad as the past leaders. You're quite conflicted about this emotionally
and waver from hopelessly idealistic to tragically jaded. Ultimately, you know you can't
trust pigs. Your best moments are when you're down on all fours.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Countering with this pig extravaganza.

Carol Peters

Face it. I don’t like dogs.
I fear them. In our culture
you can’t always dislike something you fear,
but you can if it’s a dog.

Silly, but I was bitten,
by a St. Bernard, no less.
Well, I was almost bitten.
A dog with a head bigger than mine
took my leg in his mouth
before his owner caught and beat him.
I wasn’t hurt, not physically, but
now people protect me.

Three houses down a little dog barks at night.
Everything startles him
so he bleats, he cries out for help,
and then someone beats him.
The cry turns to a yelp,
sometimes two, and then silence.

I don’t know who does it. I don’t
know those people, my neighbors,
but when I heard the man shouting
at his son, maybe beating him,
I called the police.
Three burly blues: “Which house, ma’am?”
I tried to tell them
but the houses are three deep here,
one driveway serves many.
It might be someone else’s dog.

I went to see it once—
a young black dog barking
behind a chainlink fence.
No one walks the dog.
I know because I walk.
The dog never leaves the property.

Today I’m driving down a city street
next to a young woman draped in black.
Every few seconds, she stops
and raises her arms, snarls and shouts,
makes faces at no one, at me.
She’s afraid, too, and I’m afraid of her.
We’re all afraid.

The three blues talked to the angry man,
but the dog is still there barking
at night, crying out,
and then he is beaten.
I am not, yet.

fighting the good fight

If you're hoping to find a publisher for your fiction, take the time to read Sue O'Neill's saga over at The Cusp of Something.

authors I've always meant to read

This week it's Jung and Wordsworth.

From Book I of The Prelude:

But speedily a longing in me rose
To brace myself to some determined aim,
Reading or thinking, either to lay up
New stores, or rescue from decay the old
By timely interference. I had hopes . . .
But I have been discouraged: gleams of light
Flash often from the East, then disappear
And mock me with a sky that ripens not
Into a steady morning . . .

The Poet, gentle creature as he is,
Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times,
His fits when he is neither sick nor well,
Though no distress be near him but his own
Unmanageable thoughts.

death

From the April issue of Poetry, an report from Aleksandar Hemon on Semezdin Mehmedinovic’s Sarajevo Blues:

"The precision of the detail, coupled with the awareness of what it all means, is everywhere in Sarajevo Blues. In 'Animals,' Semezdin writes:

I do not know how much longer I can bear a life like this. I get thrills every time, when at the thundering [of the artillery] outside, the cat snaps out of sleep and then, on my chest, I feel the slow unsheathing of her claws.

The sensory exactness of moments like this brought the siege home for me, quite literally, and made me comprehend what it was like to exist in Sarajevo. But Sarajevo Blues was not just bearing witness—although that would be admirably sufficient—it was also exposing the flimsy ways in which “our” reality (“we” being the unbesieged) is assembled to be comforting and bearable. For in the end, the central fact of every life is death, a fact that “we” choose to ignore for as long as possible. The purpose of “our” reality is to cover up the fact of death, and one of the things writers and poets can—and should—do is to unpack the lies of reality, beginning with the lie of life eternal in the present. What Semezdin did in Sarajevo Blues, with the heart and mind of a superb poet, was to recognize that the collapse of reality in Sarajevo was directly related to the ubiquity of death, which makes the city different from any other place on earth only in degree but not in kind. Nowhere is that more clear than in the poem called 'Corpse':

We slowed down at the bridge
to watch dogs by the Miljacka
tearing apart a human corpse
then we went on

nothing in me has changed

I listened to the snow bursting under the tires
like teeth crunching an apple
and I felt a wild desire to laugh
at you
because you call this place hell
and you flee from here convinced
that death beyond Sarajevo does not exist

Reading Sarajevo Blues, I not only understood what it meant to live in Sarajevo under siege—I understood what it meant to live."

Poetry is well worth reading. If the poetry sometimes disappoints (why is this?), the essays are often thrilling, and sometimes a review causes me to buy a new collection, e.g., Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinovic.

like bog oak . . . like a basalt egg

The Grauballe Man
by Seamus Heaney

As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep

the black river of himself.
The grain of his wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg.
His instep has shrunk
cold as a swan's foot
or a wet swamp root.

His hips are the ridge
and purse of a mussel,
his spine an eel arrested
under a glisten of mud.

The head lifts,
the chin is a visor
raised above the vent
of his slashed throat

that has tanned and toughened.
The cured wound
opens inwards to a dark
elderberry place.

Who will say 'corpse'
to his vivid cast?
Who will say 'body'
to his opaque repose?

And his rusted hair,
a mat unlikely
as a foetus's.
I first saw his twisted face

in a photograph,
a head and shoulder
out of the peat,
bruised like a forceps baby,

but now he lies
perfected in my memory,
down to the red horn
of his nails,

hung in the scales
with beauty and atrocity:
with the Dying Gaul
too strictly compassed

on his shield,
with the actual weight
of each hooded victim,
slashed and dumped.

music for Saturday

From Hart Crane. Sing this aloud.

Voyages I

Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.

And in answer to their treble interjections
The sun beats lightning on the waves,
The waves fold thunder on the sand;
And could they hear me I would tell them:

O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.

Voyages II

—And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,—
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

Mark how her turning shoulders wind the house,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,—
Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

. . . This just in . . .

Stevens to Frost, "The trouble with you is you write about things."

Frost to Stevens, "The trouble with you is you write about bric-a-brac."

channeling Wright Morris

Wright Morris in About Fiction via my friend Madge:

Good fiction especially would seem to be at the mercy of the reader’s vulnerability. If he is en garde he is off target. He must be open to fiction at precisely those points where he has been closed to life.

Which I read as this:

The writer must be open to writing fiction at precisely those points where she has been closed to life.

Ho, Wallace!

My dear friend Caroline sent me Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, an oral biography by Peter Brazeau. I cannot put it down. For one thing, it brings back the old life, the life of my parents back in the 30's, 40's, 50's, a life that is truly lost. And it explains in a non-directive fashion who this man was, Wallace Stevens, the bond-claims lawyer who wrote such poetry, his frequently devastating sense of humor, devastating in the sense that other people often didn't get the jokes, took offense even. How did I grow so old without knowing that Stevens and Hemingway had a fist fight in which Stevens broke his hand? So musical, this Wallace:

Snow and Stars

The grackles sing avant the spring
Most spiss—oh! Yes, most spissantly.
They sing right puissantly.

This robe of snow and winter stars,
The devil take it, wear it, too.
It might become his hole of blue.

Let him remove it to his regions,
White and star-furred for his legions,
And make much bing, high bing.

It would be ransom for the willow
And fill the hill and fill it full
Of ding, ding, dong.

Brazeau has done a similar book about Elizabeth Bishop, which I've purchased to read this summer. I plan to turn into Bishop during the month of June.

how it feels, learning to write

From Seamus Heaney's "The Mud Vision":

                         We sleepwalked
The line between panic and formulae, . . .
Watching ourselves at a distance, advantaged
And airy as a man on a springboard
Who keeps limbering up because the man cannot dive.

staying here

I live in a house surrounded by a concrete pad. Eight concrete steps lead from the pad up to the driveway and the carport.

Yesterday the painters painted the pad and the steps, and as they finished, it began to rain. It's been raining for sixteen hours, and the paint is still sticky. The only way to exit the house is through the slider onto the deck. From there I can walk down the stairs and down the path to the cottage, below which is impenetrable tropical vegetation.

I didn't think about the consequences of painting the concrete pad and steps. That I can't leave the property except by clambering across to a neighbor's yard. I don't know the neighbors. That means I can't easily reach my car. I should have gone grocery shopping because I'm down to a few eggs and a half a package of fake crab. Even the bread is gone.

I'm claustrophobic. My thesis is due in nineteen days. Did I mention it's raining?

This, too, shall pass.

123.5

from James Tata via Superfluities:

A new book meme circulating around the sphere is going by the name “123.5,” and its rules are these:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

Here's mine:

This part of the poem closes with the nineteenth-century gold rush:

      Then came the white man: tossed up trees and
         boulders with big hoses,
         going after that old gravel and the gold,
      horses, apple-orchards, card-games,
         pistol-shooting, churches, county jail.

This from Helen Vendler's Soul Says: On Recent Poetry. She's discussing Gary Snyder's poem "What Happened Here Before."

Ellen Dudley

Good interview with Ellen Dudley of the Marlboro Review.

a Rilke sonnet

The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, Number 12:

Will transformation. Be inspired by the flame
where a thing made of Change conceals itself;
this informing spirit, master of all that’s earthly,
loves nothing more than the moment of turning.
What’s heartset on survival is already stony;
how safe is it, hid in its innocuous gray?
Look out, from afar a far harder hardness warns it:
feel the approach of a hammer held high.

Whoever flows forth from himself like a freshet, Knowledge
        will acknowledge,
and lead him, entranced, through her wondrous world,
where endings are often beginnings and beginnings ends.

Every fortune-favored space you wander through, astonished,
is the child or the grandchild of Change. Even Daphne,
as she leafs into laurel, wants to feel you become wind.

[from Reading Rilke by William H. Gass; his translation]

From The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke:

I am lying in my bed five flights up, and my day, which nothing interrupts, is like a clock-face without hands. As something that has been lost for a long time reappears one morning in its old place, safe and sound, almost newer than when it vanished, just as if someone had been taking care of it—: so, here and there on my blanket, lost feelings out of my childhood lie and are like new. All the lost fears are here again.

The fear that a small woolen thread sticking out of the hem of my blanket may be hard, hard and sharp as a steel needle; the fear that this little button on my night-shirt may be bigger than my head, bigger and heavier; the fear that the breadcrumb which just dropped off my bed may turn into glass, and shatter when it hits the floor, and the sickening worry that when it does, everything will be broken, for ever; the fear that the ragged edge of a letter which was torn open may be something forbidden, which no one ought to see, something indescribably precious, for which no place in the room is safe enough; the fear that if I fell asleep I might swallow the piece of coal lying in front of the stove; the fear that some number may begin to grow in my brain until there is no more room for it inside me; the fear that I may be lying on granite, on gray granite; the fear that I may start screaming, and people will come running to my door and finally force it open, the fear that I might betray myself and tell everything I dread, and the fear that I might not be able to say anything, because everything is unsayable,—and the other fears . . . the fears.

I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.

from the days when we knew about death

Mary Rowlandson was captured in a Narragansett Indian raid back in the seventeenth century. This excerpt is from The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson:

Thus nine dayes I sat upon my knees, with my Babe in my lap, all my flesh was raw again; my Child being even ready to depart this Sorrowfull world, they bade me carry it out to another Wigwam (I suppose because they would not be troubled with such spectacles) Whither I went with a very heavy heart, and down I sat with the picture of death in my lap. About two houres in the night, my Sweet Babe, like a Lambe departed this life, on Feb.18.1675. It being six yeares, and five months old. It was nine dayes from the first wounding, in this miserable condition, without any refreshing of one nature or another, except a little cold water. I cannot but take notice, how at another time I could not bear to be in a room where any dead person was, but now the case is changed; I must and could ly down by my dead Babe, side by side all the night after.

[quoted in Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, a remarkable book; in my opinion, Howe gets Dickinson, whereas nearly everyone else I've read doesn't.]

From Duino Elegies: The Fifth Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by A. Poulin, Jr.

You, who fall a hundred times
a day, with the thud only green fruit
know, out of that tree rising from
a cooperation of motion (rushing faster than water
through autumn, spring, and summer in minutes)—
you fall and bounce on the grace:
sometimes, half pausing, you feel a look
of love for your seldom tender mother
surge up to your face; then it loses itself
in your body whose surface quickly absorbs that rippling,
shy, barely tried expression . . . And again
the man’s hands are clapping for that leaping;
and before a pain has gotten near
your ever galloping heart, the burning
in the soles of your feet arrives ahead of
its own spring, chasing a few live
tears into your eyes. And yet,
your blind smile . . .

Carol Peters & G. W. Waldrep

What if I said the yellow dog was me wanting to be bowled over
plowed under by desire.
When a person says beauty, it means they are feeling something.
Terror is the opposite of being dead
of being gray and safe.
Why am I walking on the beach in bare feet over shards of coral
if I don’t want yellow dog head
teeth tearing my hands my heart to bloody rags—
Look. I am alive and will still be alive after this experience
or not.

G. W. Waldrep, on the other hand, knows what he is doing:

What Begins Bitterly
Becomes Another Love Poem

The earth has a taste for us, in its unknowing
appetite there yet resides a hunger, incompletion
that draws all life to its dark self. What, then,
shall we say of the flesh's own desire, distal
thumb-brush at evening? There is nothing to say,
the vowels cluster uncertain in the beautiful vase
the throat makes, fricatives corralled behind
ridge of gum and bone-splinter. Flesh and earth:
fire is an illusion, to which water is the antidote.
The day was a bright one, there seemed no need
to move about with mirrors, the usual circumspection
and indirect approach. The abundance of small life
argued some measure of clemency, likewise
the Jerseys lowing in the paddock breeze, tender
shoots of cress and sweetpea spiralling upward.
But fire is a cruel hoax: now you see it,
now you don't, the object of your affection
cast in carbon on the hard ground which will,
in time, receive. Roadside the irises bloomed
two or three feet max above the soil's surface,
rough tongue resting lightly on each leaf, each
violet exclamation. In full sun your hand guided mine
to the wound. A small one. Water and blood,
like the nurse said: prestidigitation of the body.
We stood without shadows on asphalt at midday.
What we call patience is only fire again, compressed.
I remember: your face flushed, stray petal lodged
in the damp whorl of your dishevelled hair.

Carol Peters

Dog No Dog

The yellow dog head advances, swinging
from side to side, followed by muscles,
the yellow body, flippety puppet tail.
Me all terror, not terror, supplicating
hands outstretched, petition, that is to say,
my threat: Stop here. No. Stop here.
Lippy horsy mouth, teeth behind.
Hey, Pup. Stop here. Go away. I hate
dogs, bounders, that is to say,
this is my day and my beach.

[20" rain in 3 days = duck bliss; still raining]

Carol Peters

Doggy Day

I cup my hands to meet
the yellow head of a dog
plows ahead of his body
I jump down from the coral
plinth the stippled riot
fractures my pace slow and pickety
my big toes gambol dive
down into wet sand
the dog’s weight
motion intent
nose and mouth like a lippy horse
unreined the ancient child
collapses around him
absorbs dogness
frothing devotions
encompasses the head
the dog wrapped in palms
breast where love comes from
what he is testing
his fever my truth

[With a forecast of partly cloudy possible showers, we've had 4-6" since last night and if I walked outside, I'd be wet. Wireless to the world rocks.]

talking back and forth

In 1979, William Stafford and Marvin Bell attended a conference in Fairbanks, Alaska and afterward, began a correspondence that carried on for two years and produced a book called Segues: A Correspondence in Poetry.

Eventually I found the book buried deep in the Hawaii State Library system, and I read it through last night, am reading it through slowly again this morning. Here are the fifth and sixth poems in the sequence:

Hunting What Is
by William Stafford

There are days when everything waits—you run
down the street, and it’s cool, and now has a light
inside it, and you are entering that light
as a part of time, by giving your look—

But things are hiding. As you run the street
angles widen ahead even as they close
behind. True, you felt close, back there,
but what opens is also true, and the street. . . .

So it all marks your life—what you pass
and almost find will define your part.
You claim, “Things are happening to me!”
And the world goes hovering on as you pant, “Mine.”

Slow
by Marvin Bell

I go out to find whatever comes
but the first fifteen minutes
are for trying to breathe, the next
fifteen for using both legs
without almost having to count
cadence, and the second half hour
for water, two cheeps at a bird,
and the reassurance that important chemicals
are now in the bloodstream. The first
fifteen minutes are the hardest,
anyone will tell you that, the first thirty
are the hardest, and the first hour
is the hardest hour, but in the second hour
something goes right without your knowing:
a mixture of good motions, oxygen
and a certain giving up
that permits you not to hurry
and gives you back for every slow minute
two that are beyond you. It’s the slow
who have to keep going who get to take back
the possessive note they struck
when they were strong. Weak, they find
fatigue is buoyant, they can coast, float,
and they sometimes have thoughts
too pure to be brought home
but not righter than others, despite
what you see on the talk shows
with your legs up and your toenails blacker.
Out-and-back runs, says David,
are like folding a piece of paper.
At the far end, you know what to do.
Loops are the worst, repeating what you see
as if you owned it. You look forward
to the past; the run lengthens.
I like runs that take a hill in one direction,
pass a body of water,
go down one street no one knows,
and find a breeze. Most of us save the long run
for Sunday, which is sensible
not religious. No believer, after all,
but no doubter, I do
look around, except uphill, the more so
after the first two hours
(when it gets easier).

Another Rilke girl

[from The Sonnets to Orpheus, translated by Stephen Mitchell]

XVIII

Dancing girl: transformation
of all transience into steps: how you offered it there.
And the arm-raised whirl at the end, that tree made of motion,
didn’t it fully possess the pivoted year?

Didn’t it, so that your previous swirling might swarm
in the midst of it, suddenly blossom with stillness? And above,
wasn’t it sunshine, wasn’t it summer, the warmth,
the pure, immeasurable warmth that you gave?

But it bore fruit also, it bore fruit, your tree of bliss.
Aren’t they here in their tranquil season: the jug,
whirling to ripeness, and the even more ripened vase?

And in the pictures: can’t we still see the drawing
which your eyebrow’s dark evanescent stroke
quickly inscribed on the surface of its own turning?

there's this stick being passed around

Jilly passed it to me:

1. You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

The Bone People by Keri Hulme. Cause I am.

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Between the ages of ten and twenty, I had a crush on everyone in all the books in the world. I thought all their lives were what I wanted mine to be. I wanted to be Anna Karenina and Kitty. I wanted to be all the ruined women and all the ruinating men. I wanted to be Heathcliff. I guess having a crush on is not exactly like wanting to be, or is it?

3. The last book you read.

Deep Song and Other Prose by Federico Garcia Lorca.

4. What are you currently reading?

Gettysburg Review: Winter 2004, E. P. H. Jephcott's Proust & Rilke: The Literature of Expanded Consciousness, Helen Vendler's Soul Says, Federico Garcia Lorca's Collected Poems, Rainer Maria Rilke's Collected Poems, Wallace Stevens's Collected Poems, Wallace Stevens's The Necessary Angel,, and Segues, which is a poetry badminton match between William Stafford and Marvin Bell.

5. Five books you would take to a deserted island:

I would have to kill myself because I could never choose. I'd take Proust and the largest anthology of poetry I could find but it would have to include all the poetry of Shakespeare, Rilke, Heaney, Bishop, Dickinson, Wright, Ashbery, Graham -- wait, isn't this a stupid question? Couldn't I take my laptop and my wireless Internet connection? I'd take the OED. The Secret Garden and the Narnia books. I'd take a pencil.

6. Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

I’m going to pass the stick on to Cliff Garstang, Myfanwy Collins, and Katrina Denza because they all have blogs and are responsible literati.

Three by Lorca

[from Collected Poems by Federico Garcia Lorca, edited by Christopher Maurer]

Venus

Sure enough,
you've got two big boobs
& a string of pearls
on your neck.

A child of the mist
holds your mirror.

Though you're very far off
I still see you,
placing a hand like a rainbow's
over your sex
or lazily punching the sky
into shape, like a pillow.

We're looking at you through a lens—
the renaissance & me.

Clock Echo

I sat down
in a clearing in time.
It was a pool of silence.
White silence.
Incredible ring
where the bright stars collide
with a dozen floating
black numbers.

Question

Why was it the apple
& not
the orange
or the polyhedral
pomegranate?
Why this virgin fruit
to clue them in,
this smooth & gentle
pippin?
What admirable symbol
lies dormant at its core?
Adam, Paris, Newton
carry it inside their souls
& fondle it without a clue
to what it is.

Wallace, are you listening?

I promised to write an imitation of Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by today, and great news -- I did. It's not ready for viewing, but a poem sits there on the page, and a later walk down Diamond Head beach gave me ideas for revision. Interesting that Stevens studs his poem with concrete nouns (blackbird, snow, mountains, eye, tree, winds, icicles, window, glass) and uses few active verbs. Among his abstract nouns, some of my favorite words in the poem: pantomime, inflections and innuendoes, bawds and euphony (both in the same line!), equipage.

Meanwhile, here's the Wallace Stevens poem of the day from The Auroras of Autumn. My faithful blog readers already know how I feel about any poem that contains an elephant.

Puella Parvula

Every thread of summer is at last unwoven.
By one caterpillar is great Africa devoured
And Gibraltar is dissolved like spit in the wind.

But over the wind, over the legends of its roaring,
The elephant on the roof and its elephantine blaring,
The bloody lion in the yard at night or ready to spring

From clouds in the midst of trembling trees
Making a great gnashing, over the water wallows
Of a vacant sea declaiming with wide throat,

Over all these the mighty imagination triumphs
Like a trumpet and says, in this season of memory,
When the leaves fall like things mournful of the past,

Keep quiet in the heart, O wild bitch. O mind
Gone wild, be what he tells you to be: Puella.
Write pax across the window pane. And then

Be still. The summarium in excelsis begins . . .
Flame, sound, fury composed . . . Hear what he says,
The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale.

[Latin: puella = girl; parvula = very small]

a Rilke sonnet

Wait . . . that tasted good . . . But already gone.
. . . A little music now, a tapping, a humming—:
you girls who are silent, you radiant girls,
dance the taste of the fruit you are tasting.

Dance the orange. Who can forget it,
how, drowning in its wealth, it grew
against its sweetness. You have possessed it,
as it transforms the delicious into you.

Dance the orange. Fling its sunny clime
from you, so that ripeness may shine
in native breezes. All aglow,

peel perfume from perfume! Share the relation
that the supple pure reluctant rind
has with the juice that fills the joyous fruit.

[From Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, 15, Feb 2-5, 1921; Gass translation]

Gass decanting Rilke's entire life

More from Reading Rilke: Reflections on Translation by Willam H. Gass:

"If, from earliest youth, your inmost self had cried out to escape its circumstances; if you’d looked about and wondered why your presence had been needed even for a moment where you were; and if that meant you had to disappear into an inner distance, leaving your face and figure to fend for themselves, seeking a realm where you could claim an absolute autonomy; if, somewhat to your shame, considering your abject and unaccomplished condition, you had immortal longings in you; if you knew without being told, without having seen any evidence, without therefore knowing, that you were unique, that inside your small delicate body, behind your heavy-lidded eyes, a wide world was contained, and every house there was haunted by dreams, dreams of greatness, ambitions that Ewald Tracy, your namesake, gave away in a petulant moment—“I am my own lawmaker and king,” he’d said, “nobody is above me, not even God”—and furthermore, if, to write the great poetry you meant to write, you had first to be a great poet (for where would this sublime stuff come from if not from a sublime soul?), then the fatal division of the self is set; then that hidden ruler must remake both actor and role and push them onto the stage. So his childhood name is eventually altered; so is his handwriting, at Lou Salome’s suggestion, though that is accomplished through the persistent efforts of his will; consequently he must change his nature, change his life; change . . . change . . . with the worry that (in unhappy harmony with his mother’s practice) a fine label would not improve the cheap wine that had been decanted down the bottle’s slender throat to create a successful deception. Henceforward the poet will be nothing but a Poet, and wander if he must, free to find his inspiration, free to wait for the Muses’ touch, despite life’s temptations, despite the need for the crowd’s applause, because he’ll be Orpheus, singing though he seems only a head now, floating downriver in the furious flux of things, for really he’ll be whole, head and heart will be at last one. Yet in all this there is the possibility that he’ll fail in the role he has assigned himself: which is? that the perfect self (an Angel) must play the part of a perfect appearance (the puppet); in other words, in the first place, that the poetry won’t come, and he’ll be an ape or a mimic, or, in the second place, that the audience will not be there to applaud, wll see the puppet is a puppet, and that, in the third place, the puppet, full of resentment at having lost a normal life for nothing, will turn upon this inside Angel and pull upon his strings, the strings once, solely in his hands, and haul him down from on high (since he’s not as on-high as all that, not as perfect as the imagined Angels of the Elegies); whereupon the whole show will be over. Doctor Serafico will have failed to heal himself—and there will be no Angel, no poetry, and no poet."

If I didn't say it before, this is a thrilling book that every poet (writer, artist, human) should read.

Carol Peters

Plumbing

Here is a thing I can never get used to—
standing at a kitchen sink,
squirting soap into my palm,
clasping and unclasping myself.
Who is this, all sinew and backbone?
Shoulders dipping with the motion of her hands.
Why does she want her hands clean?
What will she do next?
I don’t believe myself.
I wait
to be unmasked.

how do poets do it? part umpteen

I'm going to try to do an imitation of a Wallace Stevens poem -- ha ha -- so I picked a simple one. Who's doing it with me?

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
by Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Due date March 17th. Go.

how do poets do it?

Crawling along one of my referential threads, I have recently read the two Edward Hirsch books about poetry and am in the middle of reading Gass on Rilke. One book leads to the next. These three are outstanding.



The Gass book is subtitled Reflections on the Problems of Translation, and the book is certainly about that, and the subtitle will likely prevent all of you from buying it. I warn you, it's much more than that. In the introductory chapter, the one where Gass skims rapidly across Rilke's short life, are two paragraphs so outstanding that I'll quote them here:

"This is love, Rilke is told—and aren’t we all told?—take a look: here are mother and father being nice to one another, exchanging gifts, adoring their furniture, their pets, their child; here is a faintly smiling madonna, and there a stern saint, and now a priest, to whom one is unfailingly polite, next a nurse, a friend, a dog whose tail wags; but on top of what we are told, like a cold hand, soon rests what we see and feel and finally know: the mother who picks us up and puts us down as she would a piece of knitting; the joyful union that parts, perhaps like wet paper, without a sound, in front of our fearful eyes; the cat who sings its sex in the night and runs away; those saints who swallow only candle smoke and say nothing; the dog whose devotions knock us over or dirty our pants; or the priest, with a forced warmth heating his polished face, who twists the arm of an unruly acolyte because the boy doesn’t dare yelp during the service; the nurse who says “good night, sleep tight” over the closing latches of her traveling bags; and finally those friends . . . those friends who skip scornfully away to play with children who have called us dreadful names: which layer is the layer of love? is it only made of words—that kiss called “lip service,” that caress called “shake hands,” that welcome that feels like “good-bye”?

During childhood, contradiction paves every avenue of feeling, and we grow up in bewilderment like a bird in a ballroom, with all that space and none meant for flying, a wide shining floor and nowhere to light. So out of the lies and confusions of every day the child constructs a way to cope, part of which will comprise a general manner of being in, and making, love. Thus from the contrast between the official language of love and the unofficial facts of life is born a dream of what this pain, this passion, this obsession, this belief, this relation, ought to be."

Imagine if more biographers thought and wrote like this. Imagine if anyone did. By the second chapter, Gass is comparing at least sixteen translations of the Duino Elegies, including multiple versions of his own, and it's a lesson in poetry and translation, training, creativity, inspiration, synthesis, choice. It's remarkable. Every poet should buy this book.

Gass so convinces me of his authority that I don't wink when he launches into something like this:

"Rilke's easy way with words led him astray, and he was late in his mastery of Goethe, Holderlin, and many others. Rilke's salad days were followed by arid stretches, by doubts, difficulties of all kinds, and these were painful for him, but no doubt necessary. Meanwhile, he was trying to understand his own conflicted nature. It is important to remember that the body fuels the mind. And that character controls both. The creative life of the mathematician is usually over by age forty. Perhaps the emotional problems the scholar is fleeing, by working in a world of total abstraction, no longer exert the same fearful pressures. Rilke needed his neuroses, he thought, and he refused, for that reason, to undergo psychoanalysis, although it was suggested to him."

Knowing that one of Rilke's lovers was Lou Salome, who ranged from Nietzsche to Rilke to Freud (I'm leaving out the really famous lovers), I imagine Rilke was resisting strong arguments.

the 6th of 6

from Six Significant Landscapes by Wallace Stevens in Harmonium:

VI

Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses—
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon—
Rationalists would wear sombreros.

hanging with Wallace

Floral Decoration for Bananas
by Wallace Stevens from Harmonium

Well, nuncle, this plainly won’t do.
These insolent, linear peels
And sullen, hurricane shapes
Won’t do with your eglantine.
They require something serpentine,
Blunt yellow in such a room!

You should have had plums tonight,
In an eighteenth-century dish,
And pettifogging buds,
For the women of primrose and purl,
Each one in her decent curl.
Good God! What a precious light!

But bananas hacked and hunched . . .
The table was set by an ogre,
His eye on an outdoor gloom
And a stiff and noxious place.
Pile the bananas on planks.
The women will be all shanks
And bangles and slatted eyes.

And deck the bananas in leaves
Plucked from the Carib trees,
Fibrous and dangling down,
Oozing cantankerous gum
Out of their purple maws,
Darting out of their purple craws
Their musky and tingling tongues.

reading those moderns

The National Poetry Almanac is celebrating "groundbreaking poetry books" this month, and on March 5th, they named Harmonium by Wallace Stevens, which happened to be on the shelf, and I happen not to have read it since I was eighteen and certifiably psychotic. Here are the first two poems. I often wonder how much Stevens and Plath contributed to my psychosis in those days.

1. Earthy Anecdote

Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
To the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.

2. Invective Against Swans

The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks
And far beyond the discords of the wind.

A bronze rain from the sun descending marks
The death of summer, which that time endures

Like one who scrawls a listless testament
Of golden quirks and Paphian caricatures,

Bequeathing your white feathers to the moon
And giving your bland motions to the air.

Behold, already on the long parades
The crows anoint the statues with their dirt.

And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies
Beyond your silly chariots, to the skies.

[my bolding]

more Carl Phillips

A fine interview with Carl Phillips here.

I highly recommend From the Devotions. Here is a scrap from "The Blue Castrato" that flared at me:

II. To His Diary

Played Mister Lazy, mostly. Found
the weather fine, but did not step
inside it. Prayed, as usual. Read
the new books that, if I don’t watch out,
I shall find myself fairly whelmed
by. Over soup, had wrongful thoughts—
only of wanting something like more
variety, but bad is bad:
said prayer again. Restored, I glued
the handle back on the broken pot
I’ve never loved: no color, badly
fired. Though it looks more humble now,
I like it more. . . . The evening quiet.
Some hunger (food, et al.). Resisted.

Also, this exquisite bit from "On Restraint":

II.
There are horses in the distance, so say so.

There are horses in the distance,
not running, smoke-still.

Not running yet: the idea of To run.

Not running but getting ready to run.

There are no horses in the distance, but
say so.

There is smoke,

or a fog that, from this distance,
is any number of horses, not running.

Demons, Angels, and Spirits that Walk in the Night

Here's the project I've set myself for the next week.

Wake at least once in the night and write for ten minutes.
Write with a pen on paper about demons and angels.
Write in the dark or near dark if possible.

Write whatever comes.
Let it come.
No censor.
Drivel.

If I can stay awake, I'll write for longer than ten minutes.
Write for thirty minutes or an hour.
Try not to wake up.
Write.

Some time during the day, I will type whatever I can understand from my scribblings into a computer file and print it out. Put it away.

The rest of my life, I plan to live in my normal fashion.

So who else wants to do this with me? Jilly and Thom -- I'm counting on you.

numbers for geeks

Thank you Sally Rosenthal for

What's Special About This Number?

AND

further numerical wonders here

Junot Diaz in LA

Interesting commentary about Aimee Bender talking to Junot Diaz found at Moorish Girl.

Am particularly interested in what Diaz is reported to have said about culture of shame and 3rd person vernacular voice.

a Carl Phillips reveal

From Rock Harbor published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux:

Loose Hinge
by Carl Phillips

Of the body: most,
its resilience, have you
not loved that, its—its

endingness,
that too?
And the unwitting

prayer getting made
between them,
as when we beat at

what is closed,
closed against us, and call
the beating, in time,

song. To have been
among the hands
for which the stone lets go

its sword,
or the tree its gold
crepitating

bough,
what must that
feel like? With what speed

does the hero grow
used to—necessarily—
the world’s surrender

until—how
else—how call it
strange, how

not inevitable? Heroes,
in this way at least, resembling
the damned

who are damned
as traitors, some
singing. We could not

help it, others
Fate,
Circumstance,

X
made me—as if
betrayal required more than

one party, which it
does not.
Admit it: you gave

yourself away. We are
exactly what
we are, as you

suspected, and—
like that—the world
obliging with its fair

examples: rain and,
under it, the yard
an overnight field

of mushrooms,
the wet of them, the yellow-
white of, the

nothing-at-all, outside
themselves, they
stood for. You’ve been

a seeming
exception only. Hot;
relentless. Yourself the rule.

a poem by Victoria Redel

Victoria Redel, poet, novelist. In 2002 I studied with her at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. This poem is from her first volume of poetry, Already the World:

Maybe There Is Nothing Special Going On

Maybe there is nothing special going on.
We are reading or we are eating supper,

Maybe we are driving a back road. I look over
and see that if I stopped the car and got out,

if I started dancing and singing on the loose dirt,
if I put down the book and held your face in my hands,

or pressed myself to you, it would not matter,
You are too far from me.

Grief—I’ve seen her at night;
the way she dresses up, my god, she sparkles,

she shimmers. I can't blame you. I'd go to her too.
Who wouldn't want her and then want her again

once they'd felt all the ways
she makes a body shake.

beginning to read Ashbery

this from John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror:

As You Came from the Holy Land

of western New York state
were the graves all right in their bushings
was there a note of panic in the late August air
because the old man had peed in his pants again
was there turning away from the late afternoon glare
as though it too could be wished away
was any of this present
and how could this be
the magic solution to what you are in now
whatever has held you motionless
like this so long through the dark season
until now the women come out in navy blue
and the worms come out of the compost to die
it is the end of any season

you reading there so accurately
sitting not wanting to be disturbed
as you came from that holy land
what other signs of earth’s dependency were upon you
what fixed sign at the crossroads
what lethargy in the avenues
where all is said in a whisper
what tone of voice among the hedges
what tone under the apple trees
the numbered land stretches away
and your house is built in tomorrow
but surely not before the examination
of what is right and will befall
not before the census
and the writing down of names

remember you are free to wander away
as from other times other scenes that were taking place
the history of someone who came too late
the time is ripe now and the adage
is hatching as the seasons change and tremble
it is finally as though that thing of monstrous interest
were happening in the sky
but the sun is setting and prevents you from seeing it

out of night the token emerges
its leaves like birds alighting all at once under a tree
taken up and shaken again
put down in weak rage
knowing as the brain does it can never come about
not here not yesterday in the past
only in the gap of today filling itself
as emptiness is distributed
in the idea of what time it is
when that time is already past

Randall Jarrell touting art

I'm not sure when Jarrell delivered a lecture titled "The Obscurity of the Poet," but I believe it must have been some time in the late 40's or early 50's at a Harvard conference called The Defense of Poetry. I found the lecture in a volume called Poetry and the Age, pub date 1953.

"Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself. From Christ to Freud we have believed that, if we know the truth, the truth will set us free: art is indispensable because so much of this truth can be learned through works of art and through works of art alone—for which of us could have learned for himself what Proust and Chekhov, Hardy and Yeats and Rilke, Shakespeare and Homer learned for us? and in what other way could they have made us see the truths which they themselves saw, those differing and contradictory truths which seem nevertheless, to the mind which contains them, in some sense a single truth? And all these things, by their very nature, demand to be shared; if we are satisfied to know these things ourselves, and to look with superiority or indifference at those who do not have that knowledge, we have made a refusal that corrupts us as surely as anything can."

He goes on eloquently to deplore a democracy that shares material but not spiritual goods, and concludes with this:

"If a democracy should offer its citizens a show of education, a sham art, a literacy more dangerous than their old illiteracy, then we should have to say that it is not a democracy at all . . . Goethe said: The only way in which we can come to terms with the great superiority of another person is love. But we can also come to terms with superiority, with true Excellence, by denying that such a thing as Excellence can exist; and, in doing so, we help to destroy it and ourselves."

He ends by quoting Proust:

"All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying the burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be fastidious, to be polite even, nor make the talented artist consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his body devoured by worms, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much knowledge and skill by an artist who must for ever remain unknown and is barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations which have not their sanction in our present life seem to belong to a different world, founded upon kindness, scrupulosity, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this, which we leave in order to be born into this world, before perhaps returning to the other to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we have obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, knowing not whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only—and still!—to fools."

You can find this essay and other greats in both of these books:

Wickett interviews Lit Journal editors

Dan Wickett conducts this interview with the editors of The Kenyon Review, Other Voices, storySouth, Arts & Letters, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Another Chicago, and Hobart.

juvenile delinquency

Writing fiction takes me everywhere. This month it's juvenile delinquency, and in reading a book on the topic, a serious book published in 1990, I read this sentence:

"Children in pornography are at risk to be sold into white slavery, sexually or physically abused or contract sexually-transmitted diseases such as AIDS."

And here I thought I was reading non-fiction. I shan't mention the author or title of this book, but I will ask a few questions:

1. Is white slavery an anachronism, an urban myth, or a serious threat to today's children?

2. Are you amazed that children in pornography are at risk to be sexually or physically abused?

3. Can you diagram the sentence I quoted above?

4. Can anyone recommend a decent book on this subject?

Mapquest maps

Yesterday I bought the Roadmaster 2005 Large Print Road Atlas of the United States published by Mapquest. Not that I noticed the Mapquest logo until I arrived back home. Hell, I bought it because I was tired of looking at the country through tiny Mapquest windows. It's a great road atlas. I highly recommend it.

Now, if you wouldn't mind telling me where you live again, I will look you up on the map. And Cliff? I already found you.

Amazon doesn't stock it yet, but here's last year's edition:

the anti-Christo

Thanks to Myfanwy Collins for pointing me to The Somerville Gates. Am whooping here.

Paul West's Master Class

If you've not decided to buy the book yet, consider these flavors of being Paul West.

West mentions Beckett's advice to immerse oneself in one's own precious ipsissimosity, aka selfhood, aka "what will this particular work do to me?"

For the rule lovers, West jams into a paragraph what I needed to break into a helpful bulleted list:

- Sometimes suppress an aspect of your subject so as to reveal it later; readers may compare their guesses with the actual fact.
- Instead of editorializing, exemplify; let the reader construe your images and your selectivity.
- Don’t neglect the irrelevant; bring it in now and then, to turn the reader’s head away; then he or she will force it back with renewed interest in the world outside the story.
- Try not to streamline the world. Regard it as an almost ungraspable maze of unpredictable particulars.
- Ask if there’s a greater degree of specificity than the one you’re busy with.
- By the same token, now and then site a vague image amid fanatical precisions.
- Keep asking what the reader, with a little prompting, can supply; then omit it. Make the reader an industrious accomplice.
- As narrator, don’t be afraid to dominate or to intervene. Take complete charge of your work.
- A thoroughly dominant telling gives a greater illusion of a character’s autonomy than a slack one does.
- Remember how first person traps you. Have your first person narrator guess how a third person might tell things.
- Remember to say how things are done, how said, how responded to, and during what; don’t halt, numb, stifle the simultaneous world while staging dialogue.
- Go for contrast all the way. Describing someone weeping, conjure up someone who’d not feel sympathetic.
- Use what lawyers call the best evidence unless adducing minor but immediate particulars.

From Aeschylus's Prometheus, West quotes:

"HERALD: Submit, you fool. Submit. In agony learn wisdom."

In case you didn't read an earlier post, all these come from this:

Carol Peters

mixing blood

hiding in Mexico
I crossed to El Paso
to speak Spanish with Cormac
pendejo he would say to my obliggato
wrong tune he would say
try mezcla past well say noon

touching the cat in the night

on my way to the toilet
and on my way back
because what if she's not

getting more from an MFA

Three months away from receiving an MFA from the Queens University of Charlotte low-residency MFA program, I think about what I would do differently if I had the opportunity to do it again. At the top of my list is this. Every month, I would post the feedback I received from my faculty advisor in a place where my fellow students could read it, and I would convince my fellow students to do the same. Here's why.

In this two year program, I will have submitted 24 pieces of work, an average of 1 per month, to faculty. I have studied with 4 faculty advisors, so each advisor read and gave me feedback on 6 pieces. Every advisor gave me excellent help. Each had a unique teaching style. I go back and study their responses. I make lists of ideas and post them. My writing has changed, and I hope it's better.

However, the Queens program has many faculty who teach in the fiction genre, namely:

Jane Alison
Pinckney Benedict
Jonathan Dee
Daniel Jones
Helen Elaine Lee
Fred Leebron
Daniel Mueller
Naeem Murr
Jenny Offill
David Payne
Susan Perabo
Patricia Powell
Steven Rinehart
Elissa Schappell
Elizabeth Strout
Abigail Thomas
Ashley Warlick

[wow. look at the shape of that list; pregnant belly; brimmed hat]

I only studied with 4 of them. I chose 2 more as thesis advisor and thesis reader, and a second thesis reader from the CNF genre. Still, look who I missed. Now imagine doubling or tripling that list if I'd also been able to read the feedback remarks from the CNF and poetry faculty. Should I list them? Go to the Queens website and find out who they are.

I would have been so embarrassed back at the beginning. I was embarrassed anyway, to know that 2-3 other students heard about my gaffes every semester. But if I had been less fragile, more willing, and if everyone else in my class had done the same, we would all have heard from all the faculty, and even when the faculty were not reading our work, we still would have learned things we didn't learn.

Less ego. More ideas. And Monday morning quarterbacking, too.

Note that many Queens faculty also teach workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which is a splendid place to spend time.

from Mossman, Book 3

"I stood there, saying nothing. Hating him. Dawes. Thinking. Only: Yes, and he is not the only one who is mad in their way. I, too, am mad in my way. We are all, just standing here, mad in our ways. But it is only HE who is wanting terribly to make us see it, to act it out. For some reason. To make us look at it for hours on end. Without mercy or forgetting. Yes, it is I, Handsaw Williams, who is even better than Dawes, finer and better and madder in every way. More than Dawes. But who will tell him? And finally it will only be HE, the only one, who will make it out of himself someday. HE, not I, who will have the obtuse nerve to make it into something finer than himself. Someday. Someday he will compose a great lie. And call it himself. The possibility of himself. Not I. He is the only one. Something finer than himself. The Bastard. Not me. Only him. Dawes. Who is not even aware of it. Of himself. Of that thin stone of ever-woken seed. Who is not me, but only himself, Dawes. Who is not in me, but in only himself. Selfish. Mindless. Fool. . . He will make it out of himself someday."

who is this Paul West?

Try this, Paul West's Master Class: Scenes from a Fiction Workshop, instead of dinner.



"I am here to make a point about place-names and to remind [my students] to read intimately into them, make them live the lives of the people who have lived among them . . . I am Uncle Paul."

This after having assigned the class one page of Proust to read all night, it's page 422 in some translation, "my theory of humanity, that we are nature's raw material to be shaped into grotesque works of art."

He calls his students "a vehement motley" and "a hubbub, a maelstrom, a ferment" as he parses the Proust. He calls what happens in workshop "the amorphous sediment of notions exchanged."

When he gets to "really teaching," he starts this way:

"telling them to get what's unique right up front in the sentence. . . Gather up all that is strange . . . a fistful of novelty, and make the reader assimilate it before passing on to the noun or pronoun, thus ensuring the attractive, sensuous part of the sentence gets you off to a good start that keeps its momentum all through, shutting out the rest of the world. . . . I want a dozen sentences . . . that seem to flirt with an ablative absolute but actually specify without much warning the sensuous overture. Celibate gusto wetting his eyes, he . . . You know the rest."

I took this book out from the library, and now I must buy it.

Dow Mossman continued

Tonight I finished the second of the three books in Mossman's novel, The Stones of Summer. I'm guessing that this is the funniest book, but who knows. Maybe the third will be funnier yet. Funny intense adolescent tragic drunk. Drunk is front and center. Brings back memories, as they say. I'm not going to give anything away because if you want to know what happens in this book, you should read it. I love it. Would not have missed it for the world. Here are a few sentences from the last scene:

" 'I been thinking hell, Travis. I been thinking about Charles J. Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin. Travis! I been thinking about impersonators miming themselves mime themselves! About an endless succession of masks! What the hell do you think about that, Travis, you silly sonofabitch?' "

"But Dawes thought the night, mad, deep, lost, going under, witch-strewn, was his only brother, an idiot, a dwarf. In the foreshortened distance of quarried rock he rustled the nightsounds, like a fine shirt of bells, a vest of rings and frills. Dawes thought he waved him home with a flick of his wrist. An elf, twisted in his own mirrors, cast out from his own house, his illusions of possessing a self, Dawes could see he wore another face. His wink, a jaded star, hung out to dry on the green roof of a flooded barn, recrossed itself without effort. He sailed over the moon. Taking his suitcase full of slingshots and explosive pumpkin balls, he was gone."

"Waking, through a dream of falling timbers, on the epileptic sun of the concrete, Dawes could feel his heart exploding in his mouth. It was very quiet, strangely peaceful. For a moment Dawes thought he needed only a ride back to town. That for some reason he had only gone to sleep in the woods, become lost. Then it all came back in a rush of denser air. . . . Then, for some reason he wouldn't admit, he began walking fast circles in his mind without ever leaving it."

"The place was dead with sound; it was like small things, birds, leaves, sticks in the wind blowing up into a waterfall. It was as if the whole world were water and running up over the sky; and he could hear every drop, every note, every particle and gradation. It was music. Nature was a single sound, a blowing up of blood in his ears until thunder and melody came out in a single running water note. They would come."

Mossman takes all the risks he can think.

in a word

from The Stones of Summer by Dow Mossman:

“Well then,” she said, “I think it’s almost pure-dee simple finally. I think he was just another mad, run-of-the-mill old Celt, like me, like you I suppose, looking for a place, another deserted wood to stone himself off from them for awhile. For another hill to make walls on. The Celts you know,” she said, “were the Indians and weed smokers of Europe for centuries.”

“Awww, you never tell me anything,” Dawes Williams said, “ ‘Them,’ Who’s all these ‘they’ at least? Tell me about ‘them.’ ”

“Why, Dawes, they’re the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans,” she said, “and the Greeks and the Romans, and they haven’t even got the shit off their shoes yet for thinking about government and concrete hats all the time. You’ll find out about them all right, you won’t be able to help yourself, but when you do, just remember—just go about your business and pretend they was only passing through.”

In the weave of silence, a basket of tall blowing grass, her voice had stopped; but she was still looking at him so intently he had for a moment the illusion that she was still speaking. It was soft, nearly recognized, going through him cold as a knife.

“Is that what you think?” Dawes finally said.

“That, in a word, is what I think.”

“That sounds fine, that doesn’t sound like any word I ever heard,” he said, “but what does it mean?”

“You’re the best student I ever had, in fact the only,” she said, “but I can’t explain that. Fact is, if I had to, you wouldn’t be. You sense it, that’s enough. It’s blood thinking. It’s what they call intuitive, a priori thinking.”

“I don’t understand that either.”

“That’s all right, too,” she said, “no need to, ever, and you sense it, and you’ll figure it out some day and remember me by it. That’s enough.”

Frank Conroy

Frank Conroy interview from Narrative Magazine.

My thanks for Linera Lucas for this link.

Dow Mossman's novel

I started The Stones of Summer a couple days ago and have loved nearly every word so far, even the words that don't make any sense. Mossman is a stylist. His characters are extreme and extremely wondrous. I could quote by typing the book into this post, but I'll just hand you one paragraph.

"Dawes sat up in bed, feeling worthless, shaking the sand, the early and desolate hill of dog yips from his head. Arthur turned. He stood, leaning against the wooden jamb of the double glass doorway, looking back, and his eyes seemed almost dull, flatter than last year, muted somehow like reptiles not swimming in open water anymore. The doorway was wide and swinging apart and blowing the farm inward like morning fans; hot seepings of dogwood and fertile, silent manure. Arthur stood as if, even slightly slouching, he was holding up the house. A carefully weathered, twenty-five-dollar straw hat was on his head. Dawes decided suddenly that this would be, this must be, this might be the summer he would tell Arthur what a son of a bitch he really was . . ."

Speak, Vladimir

From the Nabokov interview in The Paris Review:

"In accordance with Nabokov's wishes, all answers are given as he wrote them down. He claims that he needs to write his responses because of his unfamiliarity with English."

Ellen Bryant Voigt on narrative vs. lyric

From The Flexible Lyric:

"In her [Karen Brennan’s] piece each action in sequence closed out the possibilities for succeeding action, and each descriptive detail narrowed the narrative circumstance: a STORY.

[By contrast, Kevin] McIlvoy’s scene-with piano was established and soon departed from, exaggerated, undermined, as the speaker bullied his sketchy opponents . . . Rather than dragging us forward inexorably . . . time was held in abeyance . . . Although there were many characterizing 'actions' planted shrewdly throughout, there was only a single consequential one, with the barest of circumstantial motivation, placed close to the end with the same deft efficiency as the couplet in a sonnet." [aka LYRIC]

Those were my brackets and my caps.

In my role as a fiction editor for a literary journal (Ink Pot), I read submissions that I reject because the writer seems intent on offering the world in a story instead of narrowing the world deftly to a single intense focus.

I read Voigt as saying that in narrative, aka story, the text acts as a funnel so that every action, every detail, further limits what may follow. A city becomes a street becomes a building becomes an apartment becomes a closet becomes a small child hiding in the folds of a winter coat. Now what? I have no idea, but I am intrigued. I know the story is about the child. I wonder whose coat it is. I anticipate the arrival of someone masquerading as an adult. This is all delightful compared to the story that begins with young people at a party talking back and forth, a scenario in which I don't know who matters and why and when they'll stop talking about football and sex and get down to one person and one problem I can care about.

Am blithering, but specificity is all, and as a writer, I respect the difficulty of putting only the relevant specificity on the page. Not a bar but this bar. Not young people but one young man, dressed in a gas station attendant's overall, limping slightly due to an accident with a parking meter across the street, irate at the noise level that has caused him to miss the cellphone call he's been waiting for since noon of the previous day.

Said another way, give away many secrets as fast as you can. Not only the existence of the secret, but the details of the secret. It's a fast way to funnel.

off-center reading

While writing along the hot highway of my own novel (pretend it's all at least that bad), I'm trying not to read fiction. Here's what I'm reading instead:



John D'Agata is the lyric essay editor for The Seneca Review, and this is his work. Off beat. How many of you know what happened to Napoleon's penis? Ranges from funny to loonily lost in the wilderness. I am a fan. Particularly liked the essay about the flat earth society.

The Flexible Lyric by Ellen Bryant Voigt has been on my list for some time. It's outstanding. Read it no matter what kind of a writer you think you are. Voigt tidbits:

[Voigt quoting Flannery O'Connor] "Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other. To know oneself is to know . . . the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world. . . . And to know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility'" (Mystery and Manners)

[Voigt] "Bishop’s restraint and indirection seem a good deal like O’Connor’s self-knowledge, less a ruse or a withholding, less a way to CONCEAL feelings, than a way to release and honor them."

[Voigt quoting Louise Gluck]: "Poems are autobiography, but divested of the trappings of chronology and comment, the metronomic alternation of anecdote and response" (Proofs and Theories).

[Voigt] "Without chronology and comment, what is autobiography if not character? And on what other grounds should a hero, a model, make a claim on us?"

[Elizabeth Bishop] "Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?"

[Voigt] "If the narrative writer is instinctively curious about the individuating 'story,' is hard-wired for the distinct sequence of events preceding that table and that wineglass, the lyric poet may be as naturally drawn to the isolated human moment of frustration, distilled, indelible, the peak in the emotional chart."

As for the Jim Thompson novel, well, I'm weak. I read it to study his style. I believe I need more of the violent and improbable in my work. Thompson is brilliant, and dead. Thank you Robert Polito for introducing Thompson to me (see post below on The Savage Art by RP. A bit from early on in The Killer Inside Me:

. . . The street was dark. I was standing a few doors above the cafe, and the bum was standing and looking at me. He was a young fellow, about my age, and he was wearing what must have been a pretty good suit of clothes at one time.

"Well, how about it, bud?" he was saying. "How about it, huh? I've been on a hell of a binge, and by God if I don't get some food pretty soon--"

"Something to warm you up, eh?" I said.

"Yeah, anything at all you can help me with, I'll . . ."

I took the cigar out of my mouth with one hand and made like I was reaching into my pocket with the other. Then, I grabbed his wrist and ground the cigar butt into his palm."

"Jesus, bud!"--he cursed and jerked away from me. "What the hell you tryin' to do?"

I laughed and let him see my badge. "Beat it," I said.

late to the Dow Mossman party

Watched Stone Reader last night and reserved Dow Mossman's reissued novel, The Stones of Summer, from the library this morning. Am looking for comments from people who've read the book.