Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Last year, I bought Lawrence Ferlinghett's Poetry as Insurgent Art at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. It's full of statements that feel like aphorisms, some of which seem a little too simple. But they are fun to read, and the book is the sort of thing one can pick up and consume quickly in one sitting, or, as I sometimes do, pick up and browse one or two pages at a time. Last night, unable to commit to a new book, I read it all again. It's also been several days (oh let's not count) since I've started a new poem, and so I feel restless and unsatisfied. Ferlinghetti's book is the just the thing for these times. Here are some highlights, all quoted directly from the book:

Your language must sing, with or without rhyme, to justify it being in the typography of poetry.

Your life is your poetry. If you have no heart, you'll write heartless poems.

Can you imagine Shelley attending a poetry workshop?

Pursue the White Whale but don't harpoon it. Catch its song instead.

Write short poems in the voice of birds.

And this, from the section titled, "What is Poetry?"

It is private solitude made public.

Memphis or Nebraska

I started my morning with a walk and I came home to a sunny kitchen, which spurred me, somehow, to clear old newspapers from the table. I can't do this without flipping through each section and making sure I didn't miss something good. "Something good" often means something from Verlyn Klinkenborg, who often contributes a short editorial at the back of section A in The New York Times. I found one of his pieces in Monday's paper. Most of his editorials concern "The Rural Life," but Monday's is titled "Memphis" and falls into the miscellaneous category. It begins with this statement, "If I had to name the best short story in the form of a song lyric, I suspect the winner would be Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee," first released as a B-side in 1959."

This might be my first disagreement with Verlyn Klinkenbourg. Berry's lyrics reveal a desperate man, and they are sad and haunting. But in the genre of the two-minute song (give or take), the 10 songs on Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska tell some of the finest, and saddest, tales. It's hard to pick a favorite among them. "Highway Patrolman," "Used Cars," "Open all Night," "My Father's House, " "Reason to Believe"....these songs straddle hopelessness and hope so deftly that one can sink into a deep meditative funk during one listening.

I listened to Nebraska over and over in my senior year of high school, and despite the violence, loneliness and despair depicted on that album, I did not depart for the badlands with a sawed off .410 or mess with the gamblin' commission in Atlantic City. I smiled at customers when I scooped their ice cream and I headed off to college with a sunny take on life. I think this will be a useful memory to keep in mind in the years ahead, when Tom will, most likely, slink off to his room to sink into that deep, ruminative space we all sometimes need when we listen to music. And I think I'll always feel fiercely loyal to Bruce Springsteen and Nebraska.

What I Want To Read

I don't have either of these yet, but they are on my list.

West Branch

Coffee and eggs and good news! The fall/winter issue of West Branch is out, featuring my poem, "Isle Royle, 1928," AND two poems by my friend, Karin Gottshall, "Operative" and "Household Gods."

Where the Wild Things Are

Yesterday's New York Times included an excellent piece by David Brooks, Where the Wild Things Are. In this he discusses the competing views of conduct and character, using Spike Jonze's new film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are to explore the differences. It is such a thoughtful analysis of behavior, willpower, weakness and virtue. "There is no easy way to command all the wild things jostling inside," he writes. "But it is possible to achieve momentary harmony through creative work. Max has all the Wild Things at peace when he is immersed in building a fort or when he is giving another his complete attention..."

I am nearing the end of another month of a (modified) poetry collaboration with my friend Karin, and am keenly aware that my "momentary harmony" is achieved when I'm working on a poem. This time around we've only committed to sending each other three poems each week for the month of October. It's a nice pace, and it's a lot of fun to find her poems in my inbox.

David Brooks is always worth reading. So is Where the Wild Things Are.

New York

New York, how do I love thee? Let me count the (10) ways.

The Carousal in Central Park. It’s like riding a lollipop stuck into a cloud.

The Brooklyn Bridge foot path. I hummed all the way across.

The Savoy. Intimate.

Cinnamon Raisin Twists at Amy’s Bread. Perfect.

Lobster rolls at Mary’s Fish Camp. Greenwich Village.

The Rose Reading Room in the New York Public Library. Sunshine slanting in across those great tables...

Bryant Park. Boules and coffee.

The elf owl in the display case at the Museum of Natural History. Smaller than my hand.

Astor Court (Chinese Scholar's Garden) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Elegance and Serenity.

The Strand. Oh, the Strand!

What I'm Reading

City of Thieves, by David Benioff. Oh, it's good. Russia. Winter. Leningrad, circa World War II. It's quite a story.

And Tommy is reading this:


Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda Leopard, by Patrick O'Brian. My parents got this in London at Heywood Hill. Patrick O'Brian won the Heywood Hill Literary Prize several years ago. Pretty neat.

Caesar was O'Brian's first novel. He wrote it when he was 14 and it was published when he was 15! In 1999, O'Brian wrote a Forward for the book, which appears in the edition Tommy has. Here is the final paragraph of that:

"It may seem absurd and pretentious, above all apropos of this piece of juvenilia, to say that writers, once they have experienced this intense delight, live fully only when they are writing fast, at the top of their being: the rest of the time only the lacklustre shell of the man is present, often ill-tempered (deprived of his drug), rarely good company."

Poetry and Movies

I’ve had a strange concentration of Japanese culture in the last month or so. Yes, Tommy and I saw Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo, but I also recently read Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, mostly set in a bourgeois building in an upscale neighborhood in Paris. The concierge in that building is fascinated by Japanese culture, reads Tolstoy, listens to Mozart, and shares a kindred spirit and a wonderful friendship with a new resident, the wealthy Japanese filmmaker Kakuro Ozu. Last week, I rented Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story. I have not seen that yet. I was going to watch it last night, but the evening was too nice to sit in a dark basement, so I walked up to Wells Hall to see Departures, presented by the East Lansing Film Society. This was directed by Yojiro Takita and won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

If you haven’t seen the film but intend to do so, skip on ahead to the next paragraph but don’t read anymore of this one. I’m heading straight to the end of the film here. It’s the endings, in part, that differentiate so many films from so many poems. (Among other things, of course. Cinematography. Popcorn. Soundtracks.) Is it fair to compare two genres? Maybe not, but I can’t stop considering the differences. That scene at the end of the film, in which Daigo is kneeling beside his dead father, preparing the body for departure, is incredibly sentimental. On my walk home last night, I kept thinking how this sort of sentimentality works in a film, but wrecks a poem. I knew when Daigo was trying to unclench his father’s hand what was inside the fist. There was this sudden swell of knowledge, which maybe every viewer felt and registered as a private knowledge. But when the stone drops out of the fist, it is not a surprise. We know it’s coming. And that is one difference between a film and a poem.

A film can still be good even when it is predictable and sentimental, but a poem must surprise the reader. There are so many ways of describing what a poem is, or what a poem does. Yeats said a finished poem makes a sound like the click of the lid on a perfectly made box. I read a review of Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist in Thursday’s New York Times. Here are the last three sentences of that: “An essay, he says, is a glass of water. But if a few drops of that water fall on a hot frying pan and sizzle? Then you have a poem.”

I think, in a good poem, one cannot read the first half of it and figure out what happens in the second half. If there is a clenched fist in a poem, one cannot guess what is inside it. If one can guess what is inside the clenched fist, the poem has probably failed. I’m not saying a poem has to end with fireworks…or even sizzle. Fireworks can be pretty predictable. But when a poem clicks shut it ought to leave the reader feeling a little… unbalanced. Poetry is not yoga. It’s not intended to relax us or help us sleep well. It’s also, usually, not terribly cathartic. Which means it often stops short of making us cry. The thing with poems is, they will often make you ache without delivering, or inducing, the full relief of tears. Films are good for tears, and that is why I’d classify most films as entertainment. Poems, like much of life, leave us aching.

Goodbye Summer

Kettlecorn at the farmer's market, peaches, bouquets of zinnias and snapdragons, scent of basil, clarity of sunshine, last swim... it all feels unbearably poignant. If we are lucky, we have 80 or 90 or maybe 100 summers, 80 or 90 or maybe 100 autumns. I remember standing outside with my grandma on a spring day when she said this of spring. Of all the numbers out there in this world, 80, 90 and 100 are not big numbers.

I have worked on a few poems this summer, but it is not a productive time of year for me, generally. I feel the long absence of writing and am excited to return to my work.

Summer

Finally! A few days of heat and languor, sunshine and swimming.


We introduced Gibson to the Au Sable. I settled him, gently, into a still, shallow spot by the bank, but he squirmed away and scampered right out. Hopefully this will change. He preferred walking in the woods and resting on the cool concrete of the porch. It is a fine porch, with a view of the lake and a little wood stove waiting for cool fall mornings. I set up a table in the path of a breeze and carved two stamps. The little brown job is supposed to be a wood thrush.




The kingfisher is a bit more recognizable.


I used this book for a reference, which I brought home from my grandpa's house last fall. It was published by the National Geographic Society in 1927.

The Eagle and the Owl

Two stamps I've carved recently:

Brick Factory

Sunday we hiked around Lincoln Brick Park, just north of Grand Ledge off of Tallman Road. We saw a scarlet tanager dip over the old quarry, walked along the river, and felt the odd fascination of a place where the remains of an old industry are crumbling among meadows and woods. The park has 6,000 feet of river frontage and the trails are interesting. We looked for one letterbox but could not find it.

Walks with Gibson

On our way home from the Bruce Peninsula, we stopped and brought home Gibson, an eight-week-old Chocolate Lab. That was at the end of July, and I greeted August with some understanding that the itinerant days of summer had passed, and the dog days were ahead. It's true that it's not a good time to travel very far, but we are getting out for short adventures with Gibson near home. Last Saturday, Tommy and I took him to Lake Lansing Park North. Gibson trotted cheerfully along the longer loop trail and rested, occasionally, when we stopped to find a letterbox. On Wednesday we walked through the meadows and woods of Woldumar Nature Center with our friend Julie and her kids. Yesterday we took Gibson for a long walk on campus, and today we took him to The Ledges at Fitzgerald Park and to Hawk Meadow Park along Delta River Drive. He's a good woods walker, and his little legs go like a wind-up toy. We've letterboxed nearly everywhere we've gone. The stamps hidden at the Ledges are impressive: intricate, hand-carved, and relevant to local history. The first stamp we found at Hawk Meadow was not homemade, and though it was fun to find we did not bother stamping it into our book.

Here's a stamp from the Ledges:

J.S. Mudge built his folly in the late 1800's on one of the small islands in Grand Ledge. He designed the tower to have rotating levels topped by a centrifugal swing out over the river. A flood damaged it in 1893 and it was never completed.

Here is Tommy retrieving a hidden letterbox:



It was a fun walk. I have not been out there since I was a girl, and it is still fascinating to see those rocky outcroppings along the banks of the Grand River.

The Bruce Peninsula

We left early Saturday morning, drove through rain to the Blue Water Bridge, and crossed over the bridge as boats in the Port Huron to Mackinac Race passed beneath us. Then we headed north to Goderich, had lunch at Bailey's, and headed to the Benmiller Inn. We hiked along the Maitland River, swam, had a great dinner at the Inn, and read in the top floor of the old Woolen Mill as rain pattered on our windows. In the morning we had breakfast beside the river and headed north again, up to Wiarton and then along the curvy, narrow road to Cabot Head. That is a wonderful drive. We explored the old light house and wandered down to the rocky shore, where we saw FOUR Eastern Rat Snakes in about four minutes. Then we searched for a letterbox hidden along a side trail and headed north again to camp in the Bruce Peninsula National Park. It's a fantastic stretch of country. The Niagara Escarpment bulges up through there, and there are beautiful cliffs, streams, hills, and wildlife habitat. UNESCO has recognized it as a World Biosphere Reserve.

This hike was beautiful.



Among many fine moments: Reading the latest issue of the New England Review at the camp ground.


The road to Cabot Head:

Poet House

Sometimes, in stretches when I am not writing, it's hard to think about how to start again. I suppose it's like trying to time your entrance into or under an already skipping rope. Whole rotations swing by and still you stand there, trying to figure out how to jump in. Well, you just have to jump. And I just need to write. My poem-a-day partnership with Karin in April was fantastic. I didn't think about timing. I didn't think about tripping or getting tangled. I just wrote. Yes, Tommy was in school. Yes, I had whole chunks of the day when I could isolate myself from interruptions. And yet, I wrote on weekends. I did not let any activity stall me. I wrote almost anywhere. Something has changed, and I have a thousand excuses why I can't squeeze in writing. Last week, I canoed the North Branch of the Au Sable from Dam Four to Kellogg Bridge. (Exactly. One cannot paddle and write at the same time.) It's a pretty stretch, and along the way I spotted this little screened hut on a small island. I can't stop daydreaming about it. It's enough to get me writing.

More Letterboxing

I wrote earlier about letterboxing, and now I write about it with actual experience.

Here is the stamp I carved today. This was my first attempt at carving, and I'll look forward to doing it again, and making more stamps. My friend Julie joined me, which made the process very satisfying. I also baked scones, so the kitchen is full of flour and rubber shavings.



We have gone letterboxing too, and collected two stamps: one in the Baker Wood Lot on campus, and one at a local park. Here is the first one, collected in the Baker Wood Lot:

The Woods 40

Last weekend, my family gathered at "The Woods 40," a chunk of land in Oceana County that was once my great-grandfather's. My great-grandpa cut wood there, taking along his dog and, often, my grandma. She loved it. It was a couple of miles from their farm -- close enough to visit with some frequency, but just far enough from daily life that it must, always, have felt special to be there. She missed it when she went away to college, and as much as she loved the farm she created with my grandpa, I think she needed the Woods 40, and Oceana County, in her life. We camped there every summer when I was a girl, in a meadow by the edge of the woods, up the hill from a creek where we waded, swam, and collected clay. They were wonderful trips, full of cousins and aunts and uncles, and, always, my grandma and grandpa. We returned there last weekend, without my grandma or grandpa. We missed their physical presence, but it was easy to feel near them, easy to believe they knew we were there. We had such fun bushwacking and bird watching and wading and exploring. It makes me happy to think how satisfied my grandma would be to know we were there together, watching bats and fireflies, cooking pie irons in the camp fire, and looking for wild flowers.


Here is the result of a mud fight.



Here is the meadow.

Strawberry Picking

We picked strawberries this morning with friends. We didn't have to drive too far, just far enough that we, maybe especially Tommy, could appreciate the shift in the landscape, the sense of country that, fortunately, is not all that far from us.

The Raft

Last weekend my dad and Tom built a raft. Tom is nine, so this summer it's time to light out for the territory...

Wandering Poet

We had a quick trip to Charlevoix last weekend, and I wandered around Esperance looking at nuts and tea and wine and chocolate and cheese. I was tempted to get this bottle of sake, but didn't.

Letterboxing

Last Friday, I had a picnic with a friend who told me about letterboxing. It sounds like a low-tech, artful version of geocaching. I googled it, told Tommy about it, and am now thinking about our own stamp-making project. Here is the summary, as I understand it: you carve your own stamp (ideally...though you could purchase one too), get a notebook, and find clues online. These clues will direct you to woods or gardens or parks, with specific clues about where to find a hidden "letterbox." In that letterbox, you will find a stamp and a notebook. You use that stamp to imprint a new image in your notebook, and you use your own stamp to share your inked carving in the hidden notebook, which you return to the hidden waterproof container for someone else to find. I'm excited to do this but skeptical about my stamp-making skills.

Better than a Backpack

This new bike accessory has already carried 11 books to the library and seven books home. I really like it! The books are good too. Among them: Jim Harrison's In Search of Small Gods, which I am savoring.

Out

School is out, frogs are out, poppies are out, and we are out.

Quick Trip

A quick trip to Nordhouse Dunes for one night of camping seemed to cure the aches that were left in me. I drove over on Saturday afternoon and met Thad and Tommy and friends Erik and Emma. Tommy had a birthday party to get to at 3:30 on Sunday, so we didn't have much time to linger, but we did have coffee by the fire and a chance to use pie irons. We got on the road at about 12:30. I learned, later, that a room at the Ludington Area Arts Center was dedicated to poet Judith Minty at 3 p.m. It would have been nice to attend that ceremony.

Erik and Emma


Emma: a delightful and confident young aviator, without goggles. Or a plane.


Tommy: Tree Dweller.


Me, Thad, and Tommy

Other Worlds

My friend Karin sent a wonderful card with a picture of a faerie house, built with stones, roofed with moss, bordered by a little stone walkway near a little stone bench. I would like, so much, to fit inside that house, and inside so many others that must certainly contain miniature tea pots and wonderful books. Here is a picture of my neighbor's homestead, a favorite little garden spot on the corner of two quiet streets in our neighborhood.

Afterglow

I had a fine day yesterday full of surprises and good wishes. Here is a photo swatch of some pajama bottoms my sister sent. Birthdays are a good occasion to be thankful for family and good friends, and I am grateful for both. I also had a great surprise in the mail: the latest issue of Bateau arrived, with my poem, "The Musician," included in it. That was an extra birthday treat!

Carmen

"Carmen" tonight at the Wharton Center! I'm very excited. Michigan Opera Theatre brings everything in -- sets, costumes, orchestra, everything. I don't think MOT is doing anything here next season, and I'm sort of surprised this production wasn't canceled. Last October, I read an article in The New York Times about MOT's budget cuts. They canceled a performance scheduled during the Final Four tournament because they thought they could make more money renting out their parking lot to basketball fans than selling opera tickets (and incurring the expense of a production).

Good Things

The East Lansing Art Festival was last weekend, my birthday is coming up soon, and this frog is back in the garden.

Ann Patchett

I went with a group of friends to hear Ann Patchett speak tonight. The Capital Area District Library brought her in as part of the 2009 Spring Author Series. She was fantastic! She shared hilarious stories and talked of her reluctance to tell people that she is a novelist. On some recent occasion -- a gathering of people in Tennessee who share the same (long and odd) last name as her husband -- she did tell someone she was a novelist. The woman said, "We are all novelists. We all have a novel inside us." Patchett said, "Oh Really? Are we all mathematicians? Do we all have an algebraic equation in us?" She mentioned the much-discussed rule of 10,000 hours and did not hesitate to emphasize how hard she has worked, how many hours she has logged. She also shared the story of her friendship with Renee Fleming. After Bel Canto was published, Patchett found out that all of the arias her fictional character sang happened to be all of the arias Fleming sings. People started saying Patchett had written a book about Renee Fleming. One day, Renee Fleming called Patchett and invited her to lunch. Patchett hadn't known anything about opera before she wrote the book, and still didn't know much about it when she met Fleming. Now they are great friends. I came home and pulled out my copy of Fleming's The Inner Voice, which I have not read, just to check when it was published. Yes...it was published after Bel Canto, and among the many acknowledgments printed at the beginning of the book, the first listed is a tribute of thanks to Ann Patchett. Ha!

Lilacs

In the waning days of NaPoWriMo, I got sick. I kept writing, but on the last day, my doctor said, enough, and put me in the hospital. So NaPoWriMo ended, for me, on April 29 instead of April 30. But I think I fulfilled the spirit of the mission, and I will return to my 29 poems in the days ahead and tinker with some of them. I was in the hospital two nights -- long enough, this time of year, for leaves and blossoms and yards to change. And long enough to weep when I returned to leaves and blossoms and yards. Our lilacs are blooming, and they scent the neighborhood with something that for me will forever be associated with hope and excitement. It's graduation time, and my head returns to those spring days when I was 21 and felt like I had so much poetry ahead of me. I still feel that way, especially when I smell lilacs.

Poetry and Weather

It's April, a month of poetry and strange weather. In March, my friend Karin invited me to be her NaPoWriMo partner. I agreed without hesitation, mostly because I admire her a great deal and I was honored that she asked me, and also because the 30 poems in 30 days challenge is a fantastic excuse to get a lot of writing done. I had almost two weeks to worry about my commitment before the month began, and during that time I felt a wonderful surge of adrenaline, a strange excitement I have not felt for some time...pre-race jitters. I woke up to my own sort of shotgun blast start on April 1, and felt something like a great caffeine rush for a fews days. It was fun. That feeling has settled down some as I have discovered that writing a poem a day is possible. A big reason it is working is because of Karin. It means a great deal to know she is there in Vermont, working on her poems and checking her email, waiting for my poems. Her invitation was a gift. She is a wonderful poet, and when May arrives I will miss this month of daily contact.

As for strange weather, here is a good reminder that April has always been mixed up.

From "Two Tramps in Mud Time," by Robert Frost:

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.

April

It's April. The sun knows it, and I know it. The air is hard to convince, but the sun will charm that soon enough.


Hopping streams is a pretty good way to spend spring break.


I love these.

A Word from Lego

Rajma Masala, basmati, and naan... is that good fuel for NaPoWriMo? It smells wonderful right now. NaPoWriMo sounds like its own dish, really....something with tofu and brown garlic sauce?

Happy (early) National Poetry Month.

A Poem a Day

For those considering the poem-a-day challenge for NaPoWriMo, here is an argument in favor of quantity.

From Art and Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -- albeit a perfect one -- to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes -- the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Note: I have not read the book, but I may look for it today when I walk into town.

Where the Wild Things Are

This has promise (and hope and fear and something wild).

The Man in the Red Shoes

We saw this documentary about Garrison Keillor (narrated, mostly, by Garrison Keillor) tonight at the Hannah Community Center. The auditorium was packed! The film was produced and directed by Peter Rosen, who was in attendance tonight and who answered questions after the film. We stayed for about four or five Q&A's, then snuck out because it was approaching 9:30 p.m. and Tommy needed to get to bed. The questions were interesting, or at least the answers were interesting. Sometimes you get good answers from bad questions. Sometimes you get bad answers from good questions. I'd like to think there is some correlation between the quality of questions and the quality of answers....but I don't always think that's the case either. One guy asked about the title, Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes. Peter Rosen said the title was originally Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Tennis Shoes. Keillor asked them to delete "Tennis." Rosen shrugged a bit at this, as though it was easy enough to accommodate, but sort of quirky. I get this completely. For one thing, Tennis shoes are for tennis. All other sneakers, which I do not call sneakers because I am in my 40's not my 70's, are Tenna shoes. Tenna. Tenna. Not Tennis. Enunciation is good, but it has its limits. Rosen said that request was G.K.'s only edit. The film is fantastic.

What I Missed

The 12th Annual East Lansing Film Festival is mostly over, and though I had a few minutes of pleasure reading the schedule, I didn't make it to Wells Hall for popcorn and movies. I missed A Plumm Summer (set in 1968 Montana), The Music Lesson (a documentary about ten classically trained musicians from the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra who travel to Kenya for a cultural exchange with a group of African students), Fresh (a documentary about farmers, philosophers, and business people who are re-thinking approaches to raising and distributing food), and Mining Madness, Water Wars (a documentary about a proposal to blast a sulfide mine beneath a trout stream in the Upper Peninsula). I missed a lot more, of course, but those were four I really wanted to see.

Dreams

Pure whimsy from The Fortune-Telling Book of Dreams, published by Chronicle Books. A few samples:

CONVICT:
A career in the arts, particularly music, is in your future if you dream of being a convict.

FROST:
A most fortunate dream. Frost on a window augurs a unique and enriching experience.

JAZZ:
To dream of listening to jazz is a warning that you should start to live within your means.

NOVOCAIN:
You will finally come to a resolution regarding a current problem if you dream of being under the effects of Novocain.

PANCAKES:
If you make pancakes in a dream, you will soon make a new friend.

TOMATOES:
To dream of tomatoes foretells travel and success.

XYLOPHONE:
Beware if a xylophone is played out of tune. This is the prediction of an accident.

Natasha Trethewey at Albion College

Last night I heard Natasha Trethewey read at Albion College. I had read Native Guard and have heard Trethewey on NPR, but it is great to fill out those experiences. Thad and I drove down, and though he accompanied me primarily out of kindness I think he enjoyed it too. I bought Domestic Work there at the reading, and read Rita Dove's introduction to it this morning. It's a good introduction, though I found one comment odd. Trethewey, writes Dove, "resists the lure of autobiography and is careful to avoid such narrow identification, weaving no less than a tapestry of ancestors..." It is true that this poet's work is not limited to or by autobiography. It is not solipsistic. It is relevant and meaningful, and it is poetry, not memoir. But history, as Dove does acknowledge, is a part of Thethewey's poetry, as is personal history. There is something of autobiography in Trethewey's work. One does not feel mired in it, but the lure of it is clear. What is important is that she has transcended it: she has created art, in her case poetry, out of autobiography.

It was good to return to Albion, and as I watched a group of students interact with Trethewey I was reminded of the benefits of learning in the intimate environment of a small college. Trethewey had met with many of these students and one sensed that they had all enjoyed the chance to get to know each other. At one point, she stepped back from the podium and smiled at one student, mentioning that student's fondness for and knowledge of a particular poem. Then she invited that student up to read that poem, and the student did so with obvious delight. Trethewey listened with appreciation and said, after the student finished, "That is just what a poet hopes. You hope that if you get the words down on the page in the right way, somebody can read it aloud just like that."

It was a good evening. We had sandwiches and coffee in the car, and I really enjoy that drive between Eaton Rapids and Albion. After the reading, I had a chance to talk with one of my old poetry professors.

Ottawa

More pictures...

Parliament:


One of the many wonderful images carved in the facade of Parliament:


Skaters on the Rideau Canal:


Our hotel:


More skaters:

Art and Ice

Art: "Shooting the Rapids," by Frances Anne Hopkins
People in Picture: Unknown

We just returned from Ottawa, which is a fantastic city. The drive there from the airport feels nothing like the approach to Washington D.C. Ottawa feels like a northern outpost, and it has some of the magic associated with such a place. People USE winter there, and everywhere one walks one sees people dressed for the outdoors. I have long wanted to skate the Rideau Canal, and the experience exceeded my expectations. I can't stop thinking about it. It was a grand and glorious trip, full of delightful, unexpected things. We skated each day, and it was such a surprise, that first day, to reach the Bank Street bridge and find framed art from the Portrait Gallery of Canada hanging on the cement walls underneath the bridge. Reproductions, yes, but ART...hanging there for people in hockey skates to discover outside in February. It was a wonderful intersection of art and outdoor sports, and everyone, it seemed, appeared to appreciate it -- to pause and linger and study the pictures.

Elsewhere

It has been a fine, wet day of English rain. Mist has hovered in low places and settled on my cheek and delivered me to strange new lands. I brought home this train station from my grandpa's house today, ostensibly for Tommy (who thinks it is sweet). I like crouching beside it and staring at the platform and entering an older world. I like thinking about Glendale.

25 Things

1. I am an introverted extrovert. Or an extroverted introvert. I’m not sure which, but because I was an English major I believe in the difference.

2. It bothers me when I hear someone use the phrase, “kill some time.”

3. I played the ukulele in elementary school. My son started playing the guitar in kindergarten. One always wants more for one’s child than one had….

4. When I was a girl, I wanted to be a professional cross-country skier. I skied most every night, usually in my grandparents’ orchard. There was also a time I wanted to be a geologist. I readied myself for this by pulling all of the clothes out of my closet and moving in a chair, a small chest, my rock collection, a magnifying glass, and several field guides.

5. My inner life is a big part of my life.

6. I broke my collarbone when I was in fourth grade. I was riding my bike (fast) down our street and tried to pop a wheelie. My front tire hit a rock, my handlebars kicked out, and I landed next to the curb.

7. I have had two reconstructive knee surgeries. I tore the ACL in my left knee in 1989 when I was in Scotland. Five years later, I tore the ACL in my right knee.

8. I love the weird, looping logic created in sestinas.

9. I miss my grandma fiercely.

10. I grew up working and playing in my grandparents’ apple orchard. I ate apple-something (fried apples, cinnamon apples, baked apples…) every day of my life for a very long time.

11. I don’t have much use for Red Delicious apples.

12. I like shoveling snow.

13. When I was 21, I spent the night on a cliff in the Peloponnese above the Mediterranean Sea. I hiked there with my friend Lori because we could not find a place to stay in town (Koroni). We huddled on a rocky outcropping all night, listening to Greek men shout unknown things somewhere off down the hill, and hoping -- really really hoping --they did not climb up the hill to drink ouzo and kill us. They did not.

14. There was not a train that served that little village in the Peloponnese, so in the morning we found a ride with a man who needed to deliver some chickens to a friend. We rode in the back seat with the chickens.

15. I misplace keys frequently. Duke Ellington’s granddaughter once found a set I had been missing for more than a year.

16. I love children’s books. I love reading to children.

17. Galway Kinnell visited Albion College the semester I was in Scotland. I was so disappointed to miss him that, a year or so later, I took a train to St. Paul to hear him read at The Hungry Mind.

18. I like trains. I took one to Austin, Texas to see my sister. I could have flown for $2 less, but I had books to read, strangers to meet, poems to write….

19. I miss doing things with my sister.

20. I don’t like butterscotch.

21. I love cilantro.

22. I want a unicycle.

23. I don’t care about the Super Bowl (ever), but I watched Bruce Springsteen at half-time tonight.

24. I like climbing trees.

25. I am a tent camper, though I sometimes skip the tent. I have slept under the stars in many special places. Maybe the best was Isle Royale, where I woke in the night and heard wolves.

Perfection Wasted

Garrison Keillor just read Updike's poem, "Perfection Wasted," on PHC. Of course, it's the perfect selection. My friend Julie Stivers beat him to it, though. She posted it earlier this week, and so I have had fine reminders of it twice in one week.

Perfection Wasted

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market--
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, these loved ones nearest
the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,

their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,

their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

--John Updike

Spent

I worked beside these today. So many love the tight buds of early blossoms, but I love the spent, and the nearly spent, just as much.

John Updike

John Updike
March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009

Just checking news, a bit randomly, which I don't tend to do online. I wait for the morning paper, and I listen to the radio, and I do not, generally, do either at 11:30 p.m. I stumbled on Updike's obituary just now and felt some sorrow, maybe more so because of the unexpected fashion in which I discovered the announcement.

William Kurelek

A few year's ago I discovered William Kurelek's A Prairie Boy's Summer at the library. Then I discovered A Prairie Boy's Winter. We now have our own copy of the "summer" book, and this morning I ordered the "winter" book. In February, we're going to Ottawa to skate the Rideau Canal. I just learned that the National Gallery of Canada (in Ottawa) has some of Kurelek's work. I am excited to see it.

Sunshine

More beauty today, and some of it is just in sunlit corners of the house.

Winter

It is cold, yes, but it is also beautiful. Sunshine and icicles are a fine combination, but moonshine and icicles are brilliant. The other night the house was dark and I walked upstairs in that darkness and reached the top and looked up and out the window near the landing and there was the moon, and there was a collection of icicles glistening in the moonlight. This was just before I went to bed, which is when monsters are most active, and I looked at the icicles and thought, "Fangs. Magnificent fangs." And so I went to bed thinking of monsters and fangs but I slept very well and the dreams I dreamed were concocted of good things. This morning I got up and the house was dark and I walked down the hallway and paused at the window near the top of the stairs and looked out at the icicles and thought, "Teeth! Long, pointy, brittle teeth!" And I came downstairs and got my keys and went to the dentist. I am back from the dentist and the sun is shining on our neighbors' icicles and I can't seem to stop staring at them. They do not look like fangs. They are beautiful and surreal and they make me glad, so very glad, to be a creature of winter.

Hooked

On this:From this place:

Northern Shoveler

Do you see the similarities? The green head...

Ice

Oh! I've been away for 11 days. It began with a drive. It was not a long drive. The drive was even an adventure. My car made horrible metal-on-metal sounds. I pulled off and decided I shouldn't drive. Then I did drive. I made it to the place I wanted to be and called Subaru. Subaru sent a flat bed trailer to pick up my car. My car went away and I stayed. That was fine. I didn't need a car. I had ice. It was great ice! For three days. And three nights. Night skating! Oh! After three days and three nights of shoveling and skating and shoveling and skating and skating and skating and skating and shoveling and skating, we got rain. It all turned to soup. But it was pretty soup. Who needs a car when you have ice skates and Bean boots? I did, eventually, and it is back now, and I am back now.

Movies

I don't watch T.V. I just don't. But I do like movies. And I like reading movie reviews. Wendy and Lucy is on my want-to-see list.

Fun with Fire

I am working on another long poem, this one involving Olivier Messiaen, Paris, and birdsong. A fire seemed necessary. A colorful fire. So I added one of these pine cones, which came from my grandpa's.

Under the Tree

This morning, Tommy closed his bedroom door (rare) as I walked by. He's eight! He can have a little privacy! I walked by without commenting. Then he hustled out, asked for some pipe cleaners (I had pipe cleaners! I can't believe I had pipe cleaners!), some tin foil, paper clips, and a rubber band. Then he hustled back in, closed the door, and emerged before the walk to the bus stop with a fine grin. Today after school he wrapped something, and I found this under the tree. What joy! It is fun to watch him experience the pleasure of making something to share.

I Have Done So

Progress

Beethoven, Wordsworth and Fulton are getting along quite well now. We are all having tea at the kitchen table, though they have asked me to light a fire. We have had such a fine day together, I am inclined to indulge them.

What I'm Working On

It is approaching bus stop time and I have made little progress on a poem I started working on last Wednesday. There is a lot going on in it, and that accounts for much of my difficulty. I am trying to squeeze Beethoven, Wordsworth, and Robert Fulton into one poem and they are not fitting so well. I work on one part, which then requires some alteration to another part. It is like trying to carry too much laundry up from the basement. I can't see the steps, socks are falling out, and I'm bumping into walls. I stoop to pick up one sock and then a wash cloth falls off the top. I press my chin into a towel to hold everything in place but then I can't see where I am going. So it is with this poem. I add some historical detail and some other historical detail comes tumbling off like an errant sock.

Editorial note: It has been a week since I've posted, and a lint trap was featured prominently in the last posting. Maybe I should set aside Beethoven and Wordsworth and Robert Fulton and work on laundry.

The Lint Trap

I went for a walk today and realized, truly, how much I needed a walk. Sometimes I start walking and do not want to stop. It's like Forest Gump when he started running. I just don't want to stop walking. I went to the post office and the library, and I meant to walk in the little patch of woods behind the library. But somehow I came out of the library with a backpack full of books and a head full of thoughts. My mind had begun wandering far enough that I felt the need to catch up with it or at least keep pace with it and I forgot about the patch of woods until I got home and realized I was not ready to be home. I wanted to be in a patch of woods watching birds, but somehow there I was on my front porch with a key in my hand. The walk was not sufficient. I came home and the lint trap in my head was still full. Walking is the best way to empty it, but sometimes one must walk a very long way.

Margaret Atwood

I heard Margaret Atwood talk last night at the Wharton Center. She was funny, but her talk went something like this:

My talk this evening was titled "A Precision of Language," but that's not really what I will be talking about....I could talk about my childhood (insert a few funny stories to engage audience). I could talk about why I decided to become a writer (insert another witty story to engage audience). I could talk about my first reading, which I gave in a department store near the mens' socks (pause for laughter). Mention a few other witty things one could discuss and insert a few more anecdotes to charm the audience. Then launch into a full discussion to promote latest book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.

I enjoyed the talk but couldn't help assuming that she uses this format for many lectures, inserting the lengthy description/discussion of whatever her latest book is.