Happy, Happy Quake Day!

It’s the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. As this recent study warned, “if that same magnitude 7.9 temblor strikes again along the San Andreas Fault, the toll would be far, far worse.” More specifically, according to what the article calls a “chilling forecast,” “At least 3,400 people in a 19-county region from Mendocino to San Benito would die if the quake struck during the day when streets were filled, offices were occupied and children were in school; if it hit at night—at, say, 2 a.m.—the death toll would fall to at least 1,850.”

Did other people have the same reaction to this as I did? I know I live in at least as much denial as the next person. People like me who have lived here all our lives are even more in denial than most residents: “Earthquakes? I know all about ‘em. I’m used to ‘em. No problem.” Of course nothing I’ve experienced in my lifetime, including the big 1989 quake, would be anything like a really big one.

I keep some emergency water and food supplies on hand, but I’m not at all prepared the way I should be. And I’m afraid “chilling forecasts” just do not have the desired effect. All I thought was, “3,400 people killed—at the worst?” There are millions of people in the Bay Area! Rather than chilling me, this made me jump for joy! My chances of surviving The Big One are roughly 999 out of 1,000! I always assumed a really big quake would kill tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands. My life expectancy has just gone way up! (And yes, I know this is just another form of denial.)

Rising From Computer Hell for Easter

Our wireless connection has been AWOL for a week and I’d been avoiding calling Dell “Support” (euphemistically named) because I knew it was going to be frustrating, but I didn’t know how frustrating. Yesterday I spent SIX HOURS on the phone with Dell before the problem was solved.

After spending 45 minutes on hold, it took another 45 minutes of troubleshooting before the Dell tech concluded (surprise!) that the problem was not with Dell hardware or software but with the modem that Comcast had supplied. The tech said he’d be happy to transfer me to the sales department so I could purchase technical support for the modem, and did so before I had a chance to sputter any objection.

I finally convinced the sales guy I was already entitled to tech support, so he transferred me back to tech support. Every time you talk to one of these guys, they write up a report and assign you a case number so the next tech can look up the report so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. But every damn time, they ask you the exact same questions and have you try the exact same things the last guy did.

I talked to the second tech for almost an hour until I got cut off because the battery on my phone died. He hadn’t figured anything out, but at least he wasn’t blaming the modem anymore. He had managed to disable our virus protection, though. He should have called me back after we got cut off but he didn’t so I had to call back and jump through hoops again so they’d let me talk to tech support without paying for it.

I then talked to a third tech until my phone died again. This time the guy at least called me back and I gave him my cellphone number so he could call back on another phone. He said he’d call back in five minutes, but it was yet another tech who called back. I think the other guy had decided I’d gone through enough hell and he’d finally give in and connect me with someone who knew what he was doing, because Jonathan, the last guy I talked to, knew what he was doing. By now I’d spent five hours on the phone.

Jonathan also had more tools at his disposal. He was able to connect remotely to my computer and see directly what was going on. He found my lost virus protection and reactivated it, cleaned up a bunch of screwy settings, and finally—after six hours—found the problem and fixed it. For the record, he deleted the DNS server addresses after “Use the following DNS server addresses” (found under Wireless Network Connection Status Properties, Internet Protocol Properties), and instead checked “Obtain DNS server address automatically.” That fixed the whole problem! It took about 30 seconds.

Happy Easter!

DRAGGING THE LAKE Reviewed

Read a great review of Robert Thomas's DRAGGING THE LAKE.

Dorset Update

Though I am very grateful for all my finger-crossing friends the past month or so while I was a Dorset finalist, I'm not really upset about the outcome, never really believing I could win. Here are the results, straight from the horse's mouth (Jeffrey Levine):

Winning manuscript: Dismal Rock, by Davis McCombs

Daivs McCombs' first book, Ultima Thule, was chosen by
W.S. Merwin as winner of the 1999 Yale Series of
Younger Poets, called "the finest Yale Poets selection
in years" by Publishers Weekly, and one of five
finalists for a National Book Critics Circle Award in
Poetry. Among many other honors, Davis has won Ruth
Lilly, Henry Hoyns, Wallace Stegner, and NEA
fellowships.

First Runner up: Sweet Darkness, by Greg Rappleye

Additional Runners up:
Shaggy Parasol, by Susan Gubernat
The Book of Sleep, by Eleanor Stanford
The Little Hour, by Kathleen Jesme
Red Door, by Donald Platt

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order):
Biogeography, by Sandra Meek
Emphatic Numeral, by Molly Tenenbaum
The Transits of Saturn, by Leslie Ullman
The Lost Tin Myth, Lytton Smith

Thank you all for giving Tupelo Press such exquisite
work. It's hard, I know, to be philosophical about
coming so close, but I hope that you will temper that
disappointment with the knowledge that we would have
been just as delighted to publish any one of this
years' finalsts. Know also that among those who did
not "make" the finals this year were dozens of
manuscripts from poets of national and international
reputation, some with as many as a dozen books.

Maybe someday someone will publish my book....

Papa and Liza

Talk about guilty pleasures! Not only was I watching Inside the Actors Studio, but I was watching Liza Minnelli on Inside the Actors Studio. Liza (with a Z) had some ideas of possible relevance to poetry. She said when she prepares for a concert, she puts together a book with the song lyrics on one side and notes on the other. She writes notes about why the person is singing the song, and includes details like “the color of the rug on the floor” where she’s singing. She said the secret of great singers is that they have a secret. While they’re singing they keep in mind a secret that the character singing has but that is not revealed in the lyrics.

This sounds like Hemingway in A Moveable Feast:

It was a very simple story called “Out of Season” and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

When I stopped writing I did not want to leave the river where I could see the trout in the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it.

I am intensely interested in the idea of lyric poetry not as poetry that has no story, but as poetry in which the story is a secret. In fact I’ve been stuck on a poem recently and this may just offer a way out. I’ve got a secret!

Summertime / Workshop

I've been trying for a long time to get a teaching gig, but run into the Catch-22 that I don't have experience teaching. Well, so, life is hard and then you die. But finally, it seems, I've got a break. I will be teaching three (count 'em) sessions with City College Continuing Education on Thursdays in June at Fort Mason. I was so excited by this, I forgot to even ask if I'll be paid for it. (I assume I'll be paid something, though.)

I'll post more details as the date nears, but please, if you live in the City or Bay Area, spread the word. If you know people of any age who want a basic Poetry Workshop experience, this will be a welcoming, informative, non-intimidating place for them to start.

Bishop / Birthday

The Bight
[On my birthday]

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.

--Elizabeth Bishop

Fear of the Sticky Web

I’ve been absent from the blog for a while. Blame it on a backache and a foot-ache. I’ve been reading Tony Hoagland’s essay in the March issue of Poetry, “Fear of Narrative and Our Skittery Poem of the Moment.”

I don’t think of myself as a narrative poet, but Hoagland talks about narrative as just one example of the “poetries of continuity.” More strikingly, he talks about poems that keep narrative “at arm’s length, without being caught in its sticky web,” and about “a claustrophobic fear of submersion or enclosure” and “the sweaty enclosures of subject matter.”

This seems exactly right to me, and it’s what I’ve tried to talk about in some earlier posts, where I’ve talked about poems that have a sense of an “entered” world, and their connection to mortality. This all comes together for me in Lynn Emanuel’s stunning poem “The Burial.” Even if you think what I’m saying is ridiculous, read this poem. It may be the only poem I can think of that combines the two kinds of poetry, beginning in distance and manic association (“it burns like fire on amphetamines,” in its own words) and ending in confrontation with the ultimate claustrophobia: the poet burying her father in “the cold, dark, closed places,” shoveling dirt on his casket.

Hoagland talks about poems that have a “passive-aggressive relation to meaning,” and quotes Czeslaw Milosz: “a poet discovers a secret, namely that he can be faithful to real things only by arranging them hierarchically.” That is a very curious thing to say! I think most poets, for that matter most people with any political awareness, are deeply suspicious of hierarchical arrangements of anything.

Hoagland talks about poets’ “ambivalent relation to knowledge,” and I would add an ambivalent relation to power. Most of us are deeply ambivalent about power, the possession of power, the exercise of power, and poets are particularly ambivalent about the power of language. Is using language in a “powerful” way inherently oppressive?

The issue of power divides our whole society. Is gun control a solution to violence, or is the solution that good guys need more guns to fight bad guys? Any thinking person is suspicious of solutions that depend on the exercise of power by one group over another.

But when it comes to language, and the power that writers exercise over readers, I don’t see any other way. The civil rights movement wouldn’t have gotten very far if Martin Luther King had said, “A have dream I” and congratulated himself for breaking the back of oppressive syntax. Abandoning the use of powerful language as politically incorrect doesn’t “liberate” the reader—it just bores the reader. I think this is what Milosz means when he says that a poet “can be faithful to real things only by arranging them hierarchically.” Poems need to weave a sticky web to catch the reader, not leave the reader free. Readers want to be stuck in the poem’s web.

Inspiration

I was interested in this article from the Guardian on “divine inspiration.” What struck me was this quote from T.S. Eliot:

“If the word ‘inspiration’ is to have any meaning,” TS Eliot wrote, “it must mean just this, that the speaker or writer is uttering something that he does not wholly understand—or which he may even misinterpret when the inspiration has departed from him.”

I think most people would agree, or at least pay lip service to that idea, but it’s a weirder definition of inspiration than it seems at first . Usually when people think of inspiration, they think of an “Aha! experience.” For example (SPOILER WARNING), when David Chase wracks his brain to figure out how to end the first episode of The Sopranos, he must go “Aha!” when he gets the inspiration of Tony being shot by his own uncle. Once the inspiration comes, it immediately feels right. This is typically what inspiration means to scientists and detectives and cooks (“What shall I serve tonight? I’ve got it—goat curry!”) and, yes, poets.

When Shakespeare ends King Lear with Lear’s heartbreaking “We will sing like birds in the cage . . . ,” or has Lady Macbeth say “unsex me here,” it’s inspired but he understood what he was saying, didn’t he? When Dickinson imagines a fly buzzing around her deathbed, it’s inspired but comprehensible. Usually we imagine inspiration as the cliché light bulb. Suddenly we know what panel to press to open the secret door in the Temple of Doom. Eliot’s idea of inspiration that in effect leaves us in the dark is a pretty radical idea!

I’m exaggerating to make my point. Inspiration typically happens somewhere between light and darkness, in the shadowy realm of the inspired “hunch.” But poets vary widely in how far they want their reach to extend beyond their grasp, their words beyond their understanding. If it’s too far beyond, all criteria are lost. We haven’t found the secret door, but who cares? We can write “cackling sinecures behold local rumors of Arnold” and call it inspired. Why not? Maybe it is, if inspiration is by definition beyond your ability to know whether or not it’s inspired.

But genuine inspiration feels utterly right and mysterious at the same time. As someone said, it would not even have occurred to any other actor in the world to make the choices Marlon Brando does in the “contender” scene in On the Waterfront (the radical gentleness, for example, with which he pushes aside Rod Steiger’s gun), yet it feels utterly natural.

As far as how this relates to my own writing, well, I wrote “Sleepwalker,” the poem Diane links below, years ago, but I swear it was only when I reread it a couple days ago that I realized it could be about a man discovering his wife’s infidelity (“One night I found you pumping / from the neighbors’ well . . .”). You learn something new every day—especially in the dark!

Check Out Poetry Daily Today!

Go to Poetry Daily. Robert's got a poem there from his new book!

Snowboarding in San Francisco

For about ten minutes this evening, following violent thunder and lightning, hail came down, peppering against the windows like rocks. When it was over, the neighborhood was entirely white. Now you have to understand I live on a VERY steep hill. It was incredible. Kids came out like it was Fourth of July and New Year's and everything rolled all together. Of course cars couldn't come up. People could barely walk up. Boogie boards and snowboards appeared. One guy went the full length at least six times. I'm no photographer, but John caught the tail end of the action as he and the pooch trudged up the hill. This is the way it looked when it already had started to melt.

Right to Privacy

An interesting post by Josh suggests that there are three types of poetry: (A) social formalism (“critical, antimetaphysical, constructivist, and politically engaged”), (B) the private-romantic (“the poem as guarantee of some minimal subjectivity (legroom in coach)”), and (C) the metaphysical-romantic (“It has the highest ambitions for poetry within the private-spiritual sphere to which poetry has traditionally been allocated (whereas Poetry A seeks to explode or implode that sphere)”). As suggested by Josh’s “legroom in coach” aside, he finds it hard to take B seriously.

What strikes me is how crucial the issue of privacy has become in our lives—in so many areas. In the political arena, progressives are often the defenders of privacy, both on issues like the Patriot Act and wiretapping and, of course, abortion. The existence of a Constitutional right to privacy has become a central doctrine of the left, and it’s ironic that, as Josh says, the effort to “explode or implode” the private sphere has become a central goal of some of the most “politically engaged” artists. It also is interesting to note that “the earliest recognition of the concept of privacy is in the Muslim religion. . . . ‘In Islam the law is God-given and the right of privacy is a sacred right’” (OK, that's according to Wikipedia).

As one of those people—one of those poets—who feels “continual outrage” (as Josh says) at the attacks on privacy by self-righteous preachers (whether religious, political, or literary), I am fascinated by America’s love-hate relationship with privacy. It goes back for hundreds of years: the Puritans demanded communal, public confession (think of the witch hunts, both literal and figurative, conducted by extremists of both the right and the left throughout history), while the American founders were determined to protect privacy (and, not incidentally, private property).

Artistic privacy needs to be protected as much as political privacy, even though it’s dangerous. Just as freedom of speech protects offensive speech as well as enlightened, defense of the private sphere in art inevitably protects the sort of “fiddling while Rome burns” poetry (or perhaps “sipping my latte on a snowy evening” poetry or, as Josh nicely puts it, “culinary” poetry) that reduces privacy to self-indulgence, as well as makes possible the genuinely sublime that can only emerge from privacy.

My final answer

I haven't completed the application yet, and it may take a few days. Tomorrow is a physical therapy appointment and a job interview (production editor, but something). But here is my essay about my four (and more) lessons. See below for what this is all about. Essay:

If I could teach my students only four things during the semester, I would teach them to read as if their lives depended on it, that they cannot know everything, but can learn how to find what they need to know, that writing is a way of thinking, and that the right word matters.

To read as if one’s life depends on it would be my first real lesson because I think it is key to everything. Unlike some teachers, I don't think that reading need be instructional, politically correct, or of high quality to have the desired effect — to open up the world for the student to its full 360°. I think the beginning student should read everything he or she can get their hands on, that, like panning for gold, the good stuff will sort itself out, and that as the student continues to read, she or he will be drawn to exactly what she or he needs. (However, I have very strong opinions about what I think is good literature, and I can tailor a reading list to the individual, to help a student find books that will stimulate and make him or her want more.)

The quantity of information that exists in this Information Age is daunting. Sophocles didn’t have this problem, nor did Shakespeare. Beginning students in the 21st century need to learn how to use the Internet and libraries (both!) to discern for themselves what is information and what is opinion, what is fact and what is fiction, what they need and what they don’t.

Writing is thinking. It requires sorting and ordering information. It isn’t easy. To get from the beginning of a sentence to its end requires using gray matter that for most American students is flabby and slack. But writing does not have to be intimidating, with word processors as allies. Getting something (anything) down on the page is the best way to start. And then you edit.

My fourth lesson, that the right word matters, is a lesson in precision. Whether writing an essay or a technical paper, I want my students to learn to focus their writing like a lens on what they are trying to persuade or explain or illustrate. If they are writing a poem, it should be equally important to get the precise word in the precise place. Don’t say nails when you mean screws, pants when you mean jeans. I think that it is important to care to get it right, that it matters that it matters.

The above are my four lessons. But I would also teach my students that life doesn’t have an undo button, that one person can make a difference, that they must love themselves before another can love them, and that a paragraph does not have to have five sentences. These last four lessons would only be to equalize the effect of high school and Hollywood and give us a good place to start.

Wish I were going to Austin.

If you can (I can't) and are anywhere near Healdsburg, in Sonoma County, California, go hear Robert read! You'll be glad you did.

-Diane

Cheating (sort of)

As some of you know, I’m trying to find work, having been laid off from a technical writing job last summer. I’m still looking in the high tech field, but I’ve been trying to find work in teaching and publishing as well.

Today, a community college near me posted the following ad for an English instructor on Craigslist.

Include with your application an essay (500-750 words) on the topic:

The College of San Mateo offers two developmental courses below transfer level. Imagine that you are teaching the lower of these two courses. If you could teach your students only four things in this course during the semester, what would they be? Explain your rationale.

I love the idea of this, and it may be a way to get around the fact that I don’t have years of experience as a teacher.

I’m asking for your help to come up with the four things I would want my students to learn. I can think of two right off the top of my head:

• You can’t know everything, but you can learn how to find what you need to know.
  
• Precision is key to the best writing, from technical writing to poetry.
  

So what were some of the things you wish someone had taught you in your early years in college? Remember, this is a developmental English class. No idea too far out or silly to consider….

Air Guitar

It was an NPR day here. All week it was beautiful and sunny, daffodils blooming, springtime in February--perfect weather for our visitors from Boston, John's sister (and my old high school chum) and her youngest daughter, a high school junior, here to check out the California colleges. As soon as they left, the weather turned cold and gray, rainy and blustery. We listened to NPR on the radio in the car while we caught up on our errands and at home while we made dinner.

We listened to the Adam Gopnik and Daniel Handler talk from the Hearst Auditorium here in SF, about the New Yorker, about writing, about children's books, and eventually and inevitably through the Q and A about Harry Potter. Gopnik said one aspect of the HP books bothered him, how Harry's heroism was because of the nobility of blood and breeding (if I got that wrong, forgive--I have not read the HP books). This bothers me too--it's also a theme in the Tolkien books. It's not so much my unalloyed democratic spirit that is offended as the fact that for me reading and writing is an escape from family and background and "inheritance." I hate the idea that what we are is somehow "in our blood." I'd rather think that we invent ourselves and our fate.

This segues into the second talk we heard, a very interesting talk on the art of bullshit, including a radio performance (!) by the defending champion of air guitar. Yeah, well I used to think I was a great actress because I felt I could take on any persona someone expected of me. Okay, that was when I was a teenager. Still, my master's thesis book of poems (my true first book) was very wrapped up in aspects of this idea. I'm very interested in BS and art, not lying, but faking it, and the 360 degrees between creation and reality. How much (now don't throw things, please) of John Ashbery or Jorie Graham is art and how much is air guitar?

Crossing my fingers

I got an email this evening telling me that my manuscript Demimonde is one of the 20 or so finalists for the Dorset Prize. This is about the 16th time it's been a finalist. Still, I'm fairly gulping for air.

Linda Gregerson will be judge.

Friends, oh, cross your fingers and toes for me.

I like you a lot, but...

Note on adverbs: I've been taking a French class at Alliance Francaise in Berkeley and our teacher showed us an interesting point on using adverbs with the verb "aimer." If you say "Je t'aime," it's simple: you love her/him. But if you say "Je t'aime bien" you've altered it to "I like you." And if you say "Je t'aime beaucoup," well, the relationship's over and your lover might as well pack her/his bags: it carries the sense of "I like you a lot, but..." The more adverbs you throw on love the weaker it gets. No wonder poets hate adverbs.

Figure Skating and Poetry

I probably disagree with Ron Silliman about most things, but I couldn't agree more with his eloquent post today about the Olympics:

This year watching Coatesville’s Johnny Weir skate himself out of medal contention in the Olympics was hard to do, because you could see him fighting himself all the way. With Evgeny Plushenko, easily the best male skater now going, so far ahead, Weir committed the same blunder that has cost Michelle Kwan more than one Olympic medal – he skated “safely” which then meant that he skated poorly as well. Trying only not to make mistakes, he made more than ever.

There is a lesson in this for poetry. When I say, as I have more than once, that there are more good poets now writing than ever before in our history, I don’t necessarily mean that more great poems a la ”The Waste Land” or “Howl” (or whatever your iconic preference might be) are being written at this moment, tho that’s not inconceivable. What I mean is this: there are more poets who are not making Johnny Weir’s mistake – they are putting everything they have into the poem, not at all holding back. That to me is the test of a poet, regardless of which school they aspire to. Do they give everything to the poem? If the answer is yes, then I don’t see how you or I could ever ask anything more of them. Let’s just marvel at the effort.

Will You Be Mine?

For Valentine’s Day it’s hard to beat this anonymous 15th century poem:

Western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!

Or if you prefer it in the original (I especially like westron and rayne):

O westron wynde when wyll thow blow
the smalle rayne downe can rayne
Cryst yf my love wer in my arms
and I yn my bed agayne

I confess I think of this poem whenever I feel discouraged about my work. Do my poems mean anything to anyone? Who would ever want to read them or remember them? I imagine this 15th century poet who may have spent their (his—or her?) whole life writing and their name is forgotten and their life’s work is forgotten except for four lines, but what does it matter? It encourages me to think that’s all it takes—just four good lines! Maybe even four words would be enough: “small rain . . . my love.”

No Such Luck

On Thursday morning around 8:30, I was walking my pooch, Greta Garbo, around Pine Lake, the miniscule pond west of Stern Grove and its meadow. It's a popular place for dogs and their owners, in a pocket valley like Stern Grove itself, very quiet, hidden from the street. A blue heron lives there now, and lately, an egret, though it's not yet certain the egret is taking up residence. There are crayfish (crawdaddies) in the lake, probably tasty to the heron and egret. By the way, don't ask me how I know, but a crayfish's pincers hurt like hell, they do.

Anyway, at 8:30, there were few walkers around, human or canine. It was starting to warm up, but it was still damp and shadowed. I looked down at one point, looking for the right kind of stick to toss for Greta, and there was a lottery ticket. I thought it would be an old one--it wasn't. It was for the Megalottery drawing on February 10, and Thursday was the 9th. It was a multiple ticket, ten chances at winning 102 million.

A lovely reverie. I was going to start a poetry / arts foundation, provide jobs for all my friends. A four-day week, month long vacations. A gorgeous magazine. Competitions with huge prizes for the deserving.

I just checked the ticket. Ten tickets, 6 numbers apiece, and we got two (out of 60!) numbers. Oh well. It was a nice dream while it lasted.

At least whoever lost the ticket didn't lose anything.

Getting Lost

Some time ago, I read an essay in a Harper's that Robert lent me. I don't remember if this essay, by Rebecca Solnit on "The Blue of Distance," was what he had recommended or whether it was something else, but the writing stunned me. I sought out and bought her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. It went on the pile of books beside my bed, I lent it to someone who kept it for months and "couldn't get into it." It got back-burnered as I started my alphabetical trek through my poetry shelves. (It's February and I'm at Bishop.)

But I picked it up and read it obsessively the last few days, the way I used to read everything but, distracted by one responsibility or another, I scarcely can read any more. This book... this book... I don't know what to say, what can do it justice or encompass all my thoughts about it. Just. Read. It.

The book is prose but has the effect of poetry, of the best poetry. It stuns, it sits there in me. I want to steal its words and have them come out of my mouth. The book is composed of chapter essays that inter-relate and tie together. One follows the stream of her consciousness, but the stream is always interesting and relevant and even when it is most personal seems to focus out at the reader as much as it comes from the self. It's also about nature and the land, love and death, art and other ways of thinking. So I've probably made it sound boring as all getout, but it's not ever boring.

I could quote from anywhere in this book to show you what I mean. Here are the opening sentences of the section called, "Two Arrowheads:"

Once I loved a man who was a lot like the desert, and before that I loved the desert. It wasn't particular things but the space between them, that abundance of absence, that is the desert's invitation...."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I better get going if I'm going to get to Robert's reading (details here under news ---->).

Some thoughts...

This post is going to be an attempt to gather my thoughts on reading Emily Lloyd's recent post (and the subsequent comments) that started with poetry's accessibility and progressed through how to teach poetry to high school students. I'm going to start at the end, as is my fashion, at what and how we teach. (As an aside, let me state that I'm about as equally annoyed with those who run the accessibility theme up the flagpole and salute it constantly--folks, instructions to operate your VCR: those, should be accessible--as I am annoyed with those who don't want to admit to the fact that words do, in fact, have meaning.)

But I was thinking about high school students. My experience with teaching one starts and ends with my own son, who survived (that is, graduated) high school six years ago. He started out liking poetry, I think. At one point, as a child, he'd asked to hear Frost's Stopping by the Woods so many times that he inadvertently memorized it. (I believe it was the combination of snow falling, which he'd never seen, and a horse sleigh that he found magical.) But despite or because he went to the best public high school in our city, his English teachers drummed the love of poetry right out of him. They, with their mandatory five-sentence paragraphs, were as determined to extract meaning from those poems as someone cooking stones for soup. What symbolized death? What symbolized sex? Discuss the blinkin' metaphors. Though I would tell him there wasn't any right or wrong about these things, that all he had to do was back it up, they were fond of the triple underlined all-cap multiply exclaimed WRONG.

But I was a high school student once too. I remember clearly the moment I fell in love--with Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Renascence," followed by a tumble for everything written by Dylan Thomas. Neither the romantic abstractions of the Millay nor the convoluted metaphors of the Thomas were easily accessible (to me). I clearly fell in love with sound first, and to this day sound is most likely to be the way I enter into a poem.

I don't remember assignments connected with poetry. Well, wait, yes. As seniors, we had to talk for five minutes minimum about a poem or poet, and I brought in Caedmon recordings of Dylan Thomas from the library and my little phonograph. I talked for a half hour, maybe more. Clearly, teaching poetry is one way to learn to love it.

[So these are all disconnected thoughts at this point. I hope, but don't promise, to successfully connect them.]

I was interested in the comment on the post from the art teacher(?) who said that students need to learn to appreciate art and literature a lot less literally. I so agree with that, and yet, from my studies of Picasso's era, I know his contemporaries had a hard time seeing what he was doing. It takes time, distance, and education--an education of taste--to learn to see art and sometimes to read poetry.

So how do we get kids--and adults--to put in the time to pay attention? Well, I don't think there is ONE way. It doesn't come down to sound, to accessibility, to charm, to searing reality or incredible fantasy--or it does come down to ALL these things and more. The reason is: I'm not like you, and you're not like the next person, and high school students do not come in one flavor. So we need a diversity of approaches, not diverse as in one part your background and two parts mine, but diverse as in a little bit of everything, because we don't know what the next student is going to respond to.

We need to keep 'em awake, we need to keep 'em listening and we need to keep 'em reading. I don't think, despite the fact that many of my good friends make their living teaching poetry writing in the elementary schools, that teaching kids how to write at an early age is key. I do think memorization is wonderful. How else to make a poem truly yours, from your ears to your entrails?

Okay, a lot more went through my head when I tossed and turned last night, but I'll offer this up for now....

10 Days to Go! (BFD)

Only ten days until February 10, the publication date of my book, Dragging the Lake. The question is: what the hell does that mean? Not only do I have no idea, but the publisher seems to have no idea either. Does it mean that on February 10 you’ll magically find the book at your favorite bookstore? No way! (Unless your favorite bookstore happens to be the one in Chula Vista where my sister-in-law works.) Does it mean your favorite bookstore will be able to order it for you? Well, yes, but they've been able to do that for over a month already. For that matter, you can already order it yourself just by calling the publisher. Does it mean the book will suddenly burst into existence in ten days? That can't be, because I've had a box of books on my living room floor for a month. Does the publication date mean anything? I guess it just means, "If you want to have a party with your friends, this might be as good a time as any." If it means something else, I wish someone would let me know now, before I go out to Trader Joe’s and buy a case of champagne.

Lucid Dreaming

This morning I looked at a letter I’d written to a friend almost five years ago. It’s amazing how the same issues about poetry keep coming back over and over. I could have written this yesterday:

I also think of “lucid dreaming”—you know, those dreams where you know you’re dreaming. Very occasionally I have had a very brief “lucid dream,” in which, for example, I might be walking down a path and then realize I’m dreaming and simultaneously realize I can stay in the dream if I try very hard to pay attention. I know if I just keep strolling down the path, I’ll wake up in a second, but if I look very closely at the shrubs at the edge of the path and the shapes of the clouds in the sky and so on, I will stay in the dream and it will in fact become more and more vivid . . .

The point is the analogy to poetry—paying intense attention to the sensual texture of the imagery so that it becomes more vivid and you enter into it—so that it becomes a story instead of just a vision, maybe not a story in the sense of a traditional narrative, but in the sense of an entered world, the sense of entry that results from commitment to an image, following it instead of just using it.

This idea of poetry that enters the world it imagines is still important to me. I don’t necessarily mean a fantasy world. It could be Harry Potter, but it could just as easily be a re-creation of the “real” world. It could simply by a lyrical wildflower. But I think there’s a difference between poetry that makes the commitment of entering its own world—whatever that world may be—and poetry that keeps its distance.

I don’t necessarily mean to criticize poetry that “keeps its distance.” It can have tremendous energy, freedom and spontaneity. It defends its freedom to visit multiple worlds, but I think that freedom is mental freedom. Your mind can go from San Francisco to Shanghai to the moon, but if you actually get into a space capsule and go to the moon, your body is stuck there.

I think there’s a kind of poetry that makes an equivalent commitment—an entering the body of the poem. Partly I’m talking about something pretty obvious. When Rowling creates the world of Harry Potter, she has to play by the rules of that world or else ruin the book, and in the same way Milton has to play by the rules of Paradise Lost—he can’t just interrupt the story of Adam eating the apple to tell the reader about a delicious apple tart he had the night before in a London pub, or start discussing the politics of Oliver Cromwell. But if he could—it might make a very different but very exciting poem! In a sense that’s what Ezra Pound does in the Cantos, and in fact I think much of modernism and postmodernism is all about holding onto that spontaneity, that freedom of mental movement.

Part of the attraction of that freedom, I think, is its honesty: it would be so refreshingly honest to hear Milton talk for once about his evening at the pub. But there’s also something lost in poetry where the consciousness is, well, flitting, and sometimes what’s lost is the sense of death. Once you commit yourself to the poem’s world, you immediately invite death in, too. It’s all Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz — when I died.” Even if there’s no narrative, once your body is in the room of the poem, there’s no escape.

Lorca Returns to New York

“Standing the Whole World on Its Ear,” an article by Jeremy Eichler in today’s New York Times, makes me wish I could go to New York this afternoon to see Osvaldo Golijov’s new opera, Ainadamar, named for the “Fountain of Tears” near Granada where Federico García Lorca was killed in 1936. Interestingly, the main character in the opera is not Lorca, but Margarita Xirgu, the great Spanish actress for whose voice Lorca wrote some of the greatest roles in his plays.

The New York production was directed by Peter Sellars, and much of what Sellars says about it seems just as relevant to poetry as to music:

“The high energy in Bartok and Stravinsky’s music was this ethnic energy, a Jewish energy, a Gypsy energy, and it was precisely the energy that was literally exterminated in the death camps of Europe,” Mr. Sellars said. “It is what has been missing from most European music for a while. It’s that huge, unbearable melody of lament which is devastating and life-affirming at the same time. Which is, of course, a huge tradition of Jewish music, and which has been missing in action. Osvaldo has brought it back from Eastern Europe, through Israel, through Argentina. It is transformed but still wailing.”

Mr. Golijov speaks of the traditional synagogues he attended in Argentina and Jerusalem as a primary musical model, less for their liturgical melodies than for the churning energy he heard emerging from the semi-chaos of a restless congregation engaged in a thousand varieties of prayer. “You enter,” he said, “and somebody’s screaming, somebody’s mumbling, somebody’s meditating, and you don’t know how, but they suddenly start singing the same tune.”

I don’t know about you, but that strikes me as an exciting image of what poetry could be.

[Later attempt at clarification:] What really interests me is the idea that a lot of avant-garde music and poetry has a bloodless, cerebral quality, and Sellars' connecting that to the actual shedding of blood and persecution of Jews and other minorities in the 20th century—in effect that fascism had a destructive impact on the arts that the arts have yet to fully recover from, and the destructive impact is seen in the arts' being overly cerebral, not yet able to be fully human again, not yet able to scream and mumble and meditate and sing all at once.

Old poems

It's high time I said something on this blog. Here we are, well into the new year. Been working out again, trying to work off the holidays. Been looking for a job. Hah! Not much luck there, and the unemployment due to run out....

Been working on Demimonde again, though Lord knows I'd like to be done with it. Didn't do too much to it besides adding three bright and shiny poems and removing two oldies. There was nothing "wrong" with the ones I removed. One was actually a prize winning poem once (in 1992). But I'm sensitive to the possibility that it and the other may seem dated or seem to come out of a different sensibility from the [newer] others. I mean, I'm glad I'm not writing the same things or in the same ways I wrote ten, fifteen years ago. But if they were really good poems, would they have "held up"?

I'm interested in this question in a larger context as well. I've set myself a crazy task for 2006--not quite a resolution, more like an outlandish hope, like those held by runners who do ultramarathons in Death Valley: If I don't die in the process, I will arrive at the end a changed person. The task is to read through my poetry books, four shelves, from A-Z, about eight or ten linear feet. So far, I've read Atwood and most of Auden (Selected Poetry). For all the good stuff in these books, I have to say that there is much that does seem dated. I liked the Atwood more than I thought I would, but there was no doubt it was written in the 1970s: lots of bone, muscle, stone, earth words, and just a different feel. The Auden (this is a Modern Library edition, first published in 1933) is of course even more dated. There are the wonderful standards: "Musee des Beaux Arts," "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," others. There's the strange, huge, poem-essay, "Caliban to his Audience,"--with its sentences that go on for ages, that, in itself, seems impossibly dated to my attention-deficit mind. And there are poems like this one, picked randomly (I'll quote the first of four stanzas), called "Rimbaud."

The nights, the railway-arches, the bad sky
His horrible companions did not know it,
But in that child the rhetorician's lie
Burst like a pipe: the cold had made a poet.

My point is not that it's good or bad, but that its sensibility seems dated. Or that's the question I'd like to pose, anyway. Comments?

Addendum: BTW, I know it will seem odd to many of you that I don't have any Ammons or Ashbery, but I just don't....

Refusing Heaven

I read Jack Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven over the weekend. The book came out a year ago and you may remember blog talk about the poem with the woman wiping barbecued chicken grease on her breasts. It’s an understatement to say Gilbert is controversial. He represents everything the “post-avant” despise in poetry, and everything the “romantics” wish that poetry would return to being—poetry’s “true business.”

Most of the reviews I read on Refusing Heaven took one side or another in this controversy. Unfortunately, this does not tell us very much about the poetry itself. I am tired of reviews that point out the differences between, say, Jack Gilbert and John Ashbery, and then take sides. This is no way to shed light! What’s enlightening is to point out the differences between a good Gilbert poem and a bad one, a good Ashbery poem and a bad one.

I loved Gilbert’s 1994 book The Great Fires, even though I am not generally in love with that “type” of poetry. Often Gilbert is too direct and “sincere” for my more decadent taste. I have little patience for lines like “The man slices / tomatoes and lemons. Takes out the fish / and scrambles eggs,” and am similarly impatient with abstract generalities like (opening the book at random) “Grief makes the heart / apparent as much as sudden happiness can.”

Nevertheless, anyone who doesn’t recognize the greatness of The Great Fires seems stubbornly blind to me. Gilbert reminds me of Hemingway more than anyone else, and of course a lot of us are tired of that sort of writing, but like Hemingway, Gilbert’s best work has an undeniable greatness. Read “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart” and other poems on Scoplaw’s blog.

So why was I so disappointed by Refusing Heaven? I like the opening poem, “A Brief for the Defense,” very much. But the book pretty much went downhill from there for me. Perhaps the concrete and the abstract don’t come together the way they do in the earlier book. So many of the poems end in abstractions that don’t quite work: “The soul is ambitious / for what is invisible. Hungers for a sacrament / that is both spirit and flesh. And neither.” There is also the question of Gilbert’s attitude toward women, which some readers find offensive partly because of his excessive “romanticization” of women. I am about as romantic as anyone can be, but I do cringe when a line begins “The reason we cannot enter the same woman twice is . . . .”

Still, there are lines I love in Refusing Heaven, and some of the best are about Pittsburgh, as in “A Taste for Grit and Whatever”:

. . . Is it because
Pittsburgh is still tangled in him that he
has the picture on his wall of God’s head
torn apart by jungle roots? Maybe
growing up in that brutal city left him
with a taste for grit and whatever it was
he saw in the titanic rusting steels mills.

Gilbert makes great discriminations, like “the quiet that is the music of that place, / which is the difference between silence and windlessness” from “Music Is in the Piano Only When It Is Played.” But while there are wonderful lines, it’s hard to find wonderful poems in this book. The poem about Pittsburgh, for example, goes on to a conclusion that I just don’t find credible: “Why the erotic matters so much. Not as / pleasure but a way to get to something darker.” One could come up with a dozen adjectives to describe Gilbert’s poetry, and they would apply equally to Refusing Heaven and The Great Fires. I find it fascinating that poems so alike in their style and form and voice can be so different in quality.

Gotta go: Y Tu Mamá También is on TV and I feel a need to see something great.

Invitation to comment

I just want y'all to know that you are welcome to comment here. Apparently, our comments were set to allow team members only. I don't know how they got that way. I'm sure I would not have done that , and I'm pretty sure Robert would not have done that, and we're the only ones on this blog who have administration rights, so... it's a mystery.

However, hopefully it's changed so that anyone (using word verification) can comment, and I hope you will--especially on some of those pithy posts Robert has written lately.

Strange Case

I enjoyed Wendy Lesser’s review of Julian Barnes’ new novel, Arthur & George, today on Slate, “The Strange Case of Julian Barnes.” Before you read it, be warned that, as Lesser warns at the start, it gives away what happens in the novel. This blog, however, contains no spoilers, as I’m not even going to talk about the book, which I haven’t read. In fact I haven’t read any of Julian Barnes’ books, though the review certainly got me interested.

What really interests me is Lesser’s belief that in Arthur & George Barnes finally found a subject matter to suit his talents. I think this search for the right subject is something we poets hardly ever talk about, maybe hardly ever think about, in our own work or others’, but it seems crucial to writing good poems. Lesser puts it this way:

Not until now, it seems, has Barnes had a subject that allowed him to maintain exactly the right distance—neither too close nor too far, neither helplessly indignant nor cowed by admiration, neither mired in the plot nor caddishly manipulating the heartstrings of his characters. Flaubert, perhaps, was too chilly a model for him [in Flaubert’s Parrot], and too grand a one. He needed somebody he could stand up to—someone whose thought processes he could reasonably hope to emulate and maybe even outdo. He needed a figure who cared, as he evidently does, for logic, order, and structure. He needed someone who was both English and not-English, because one of Barnes’ constant strengths, especially in his nonfiction, has been the ability to see England from the outside. And he needed at least one character whose inner life he could hope, respectfully, to convey.

Instead he got two, Arthur and George. Their solid reality gave him grounds for respect; their placement in time gave him the necessary distance; and their eccentric combination of merits and shortcomings (different merits and shortcomings in each case) gave him the room he needed in which to create believable characters.

I don’t think Lesser is saying that writers in general need characters sufficiently distant in time from themselves, with sufficient eccentricities, etc. She’s saying this is what Barnes needs. I think the most important skill for poets to learn may be how to pick a subject that suits their temperaments. (Yes, I realize the whole notion of “subject” is suspect, and maybe what some writers need is to avoid any subject.) Maybe John Ashbery needs to write about Daffy Duck and Kim Addonizio needs to write about “the Guerra brothers slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly.” It seems almost impossible to save a poem if you’ve picked the wrong subject, but it’s so hard to know what you need. Do you need a subject that’s very close to the bone (your bones) or far away—or exactly where in the middle? Do you need a character who loves logic and structure (like Barnes), or just the opposite?

Brokeback Mountain

No, I haven’t seen the movie yet—I’m one of those people who almost always waits for a film to come out on DVD. But all the talk about the film inspired me to go back and reread the original story, Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” from Close Range: Wyoming Stories. What a great book! What a great set of stories, from the opening “Half-Skinned Steer” all the way to “Brokeback Mountain.” Well, maybe a couple of the stories in the middle go a bit over-the-top, a bit too far into the melodramatic “gruesome things that happen in bad weather” genre, but Proulx is such a great writer.

Occasionally when I get discouraged in my “Why doesn’t anyone read poetry?” mode, the possibility crosses my mind for a disturbing half second that maybe it’s because we poets are all a bunch of lazy sons of bitches who just don’t work hard enough at what we do and don’t write very well. What contemporary American poet writes half as well—as poetically—as Annie Proulx? And I could name a dozen other fiction writers. As the judge said about obscenity, I can’t define it but I know it when I see it. Maybe I can’t define good writing but I know it when I read it, and “Brokeback Mountain” is it. It’s poetry.

The Master

I spent part of the holidays reading Colm Tóibín’s wonderful novel about Henry James, The Master. The Washington Post’s book review called it “hardly a typical summer book,” and it does seem like a perfect winter book.

The Master is convincingly written from the start: “As he moved his head, he could hear the muscles creaking. I am like an old door, he said to himself.” Tóibín creates a style that seems true to James without mimicking him. When Aunt Kate suggests trying to contact the dead, Tóibín has Alice, Henry’s 16-year-old sister, forcefully dismiss the idea: “One need pray for nothing. Reference to those whom we should meet again makes me shiver. It is an invasion of their sanctity. It is the sort of personal claim to which I am deeply opposed.” This sounds so true to James’ own spirit! Who else would object to contacting the dead, not so much out of scientific skepticism as out of a sort of “good manners” that reaches beyond the grave?

I really enjoyed the book, but I did have some reservations. Now that I look back on it, maybe the problem is that none of the other characters seem as strong as Henry. Perhaps this was part of the tragedy of James’ life: he knew women, like the novelist Constance Woolson (who committed suicide partly because of James’ unresponsiveness to her), who were his match in intellect and insight, but the men he was closest to were like the narcissistic sculptor in the novel. This may have made it all the harder for James to confront his own homosexuality (it’s hard to think of him as “gay”!), but the novel frustrated me because so often James seems to get away without confronting anything.

I haven’t read that much of Henry James, but I love The Golden Bowl. It has a great scene where Charlotte confronts “the Prince” with her love for him, and he can’t deal with it, and James makes us see just how thoroughly and terribly he can’t deal with it. Tóibín similarly shows us a James who “can’t deal with it” either, in so many ways, but we never really get a confrontation. We just get James wistfully looking down the canal in Venice where Constance killed herself and wondering if he might have done something.

This all interests me because I’ve been writing poems about the lives of artists, and it brings up the question of what the difference is between a historical novel or poem and a biography. At times I felt that Tóibín had written a very sensitively and vividly imagined biography, but one that didn’t quite come together as a novel. I felt that something was missing for me from The Master, and as I feared that what was missing might also be missing from my own poems, I got rather obsessed trying to figure out what it was. I hope someone else has read The Master and will tell me what they think.

Lull

How nice it is to be home alone today in the quiet, in the lull between holidays. I was out walking in the sun this morning with my dog, Greta, but already, as I look west to the ocean, the next storm seems to be moving in. Christmas was pleasant, and everything worked out--the morning with the family here, dinner at my son's new flat with his fiancée. We'll do Hanukah later in the week when I can handle the idea of celebration by frying. And New Year's Eve we'll be meeting old friends for dinner in an East Bay restaurant. Right now, I'm feeling more inclined to think that I'll never eat and drink again--and look forward to restarting my YMCA membership in January, now that they approved financial aid. My brain and body need it.

I realize though things may not be happening as fast as I want them to, I really am lucky with all the important things: love, family, friends, my work in poetry. And right now, that is enough. And I'm happy for the Internet and the blogs, which let me feel connected to others, to share ideas and words.

Happy holidays and a wonderful New Year to all of you.

Poetry Reading

It was really a thrill over the last couple weeks to get to do three readings with poets like Robert Hass, Ishmael Reed, Lyn Hejinian, Chana Bloch, Alan Williamson, and Brenda Hillman—all to celebrate the new anthology Zack edited, The Face of Poetry. I don’t know if I’ll ever get a chance to read with a group like that again.

One thing I learned is that, while I’m reasonably nervous about reading my own work, I love reading other poets’ work. The readings’ format was that each poet read just one of their own poems and then a couple of their favorite poems by other poets in the anthology.

Well, I am just a total slut when it comes to reading other people’s work. I love it all. I could read all night long, everything from Lyn Hejinian to Billy Collins, John Ashbery to Sharon Olds, soup to nuts. (Actually I limited myself to Agha Shahid Ali’s “In Arabic,” Robert Hass’s “Interrupted Meditation,” and Mary Ruefle’s “Merengue.”) I’m not a great reader, but I think I do all right and I sure enjoy it. I only hope someday I’m as relaxed when it comes to reading my own work.

Woohoo! Dragging the Lake!

Friendship has its perks. I 've got Robert Thomas’s new book, “Dragging the Lake,” chosen by Carnegie Mellon this time last year. I have my own copy already, for that matter. All right, so do the rest of the members of our group, but that’s what I mean.

And it’s a wonderful book. Robert was worried about the cover and apparently is not too sure what he thinks about it, even now. He selected the photo, but didn’t get to see the treatment until the book arrived on his doorstep in South City. I like it! The swath of sea green gives it a woozy surrealistic feel, and that part of the photo is kind of slightly out of sync, as if it is being refracted by water.

But of course, it’s the inside, the poems that are the best part. Brendan Galvin calls it: “…deeply satisfying and snazzy.” Chase Twichell says it’s …“smart…and profound.” I call it astonishing. It will be in bookstores in February.

25 Years Ago Today

...John Lennon was shot and killed in NYC. I didn't go to any memorials. I wasn't sure what the point was, and in any case, had my own problems (was going through a miscarriage at the time). But friends called me to tell me about JL--some considered him "mine." Some of us sat around talking about him--I guess that was our own memorial.

We put the cocoanut John gave me on our make-do coffee table and I told the story I've told about a thousand times, about the weekend I spent with the Lennon entourage in Syracuse, NY in 1971 and how it changed me. Curiously, I've never been able to place the essay I wrote about the weekend--mostly, I get back comments like, "beautifully written, but not for us." But everyone wants to hear the story.

Death is a funny thing--that is not funny-haha, funny-peculiar. I get why people have developed concepts like heaven. It's hard, nearly impossible, to conceive of someone you know and love not being there anymore, not being anywhere. It feels like they're simply someplace else. And just as oddly, they never grow old, never change. People who are recorded or on film are, as they say, immortalized--immortal. But he was such a human immortal, the John Lennon I met that weekend.

Everyone's got needs...

I realize that this is not exactly a profound first blog posting. But I'm far too agitated by sleep deprivation and baby-gear shopping to post anything of depth. In lieu of such, I offer:

Lisa needs a stable environment, love and attention.
Lisa needs a tree.
Lisa needs braces.
Lisa needs a bigger grin and lots more warmth from an overly conscientious Julia Roberts.
Lisa needs to more clearly communicate to clients how they can benefit from LISA membership.
Lisa needs to go to the museum tomorrow, and I think you should take her.
Lisa needs a miracle healing.
Lisa needs a kick in the arse.
Lisa needs to be attended by trained medical personnel.
Lisa needs Help! Will you help Lisa out?

All true, save the braces (had those for 6 years, and boy are my teeth straight). I especially like the idea of offering my clients membership, with its many clear and compelling benefits.

Diane needs....

Yes, I couldn't resist the meme that's going around. Diane needs... a little entertainment, now and then! These are pretty good (Google your name and "needs"):

Diane needs a pigfoot and a bottle of beer, some reefer and some gin, and crawlin' kingsnake.
Diane needs to apply herself more conscientiously ...
Diane needs to get some sleep or perhaps this is her glass ceiling. ...
Diane needs to meet with Doreen and set up security.
Diane needs to see these paintings
Diane needs help right now.
Diane needs to be more sexy and more out there,
Diane needs to put her hair up and Cowboy volunteers
Diane needs to consider her contractual obligations
Diane needs: a little discipline and a little training. ...


Hehe. What Diane really needs is to hear about her effin' manuscript!

Poems I’m Sick and Tired of Reading

All the poems on How the Things in My Writing Space Symbolize My Life. You know the poems I mean: “As I write this poem I look at the dull blade of the letter opener, the postcard Brian sent me from Machu Picchu, and the snowflake of dried cat barf on my desk, and I realize that this simple collage symbolizes my entire life.”

A poem related to the “collage” poem and equally over-symbolic might be called the “tableau” poem: “As I walk through the park I look at a red-haired boy climbing the red steps of a slide, ketchup wrappers scattered like autumn leaves, and a robin in the shadow of an Exxon sign, and I realize that this scene captures the entire meaning of life.”

Yes, I’ve written poems like this myself, and I’ve read good ones. Still, I’m sick of them. What poems are YOU sick of?

Poets as Heroes (Not)

Some people have commented on Ira Sadoff’s recent essay in APR on William Stafford, believing that Sadoff crossed the line with some “mean-spirited” criticism (William Logan Lite) of Stafford’s poetry. What interests me is what we mean in general when we say that negative criticism “crosses the line.” I’d say we mean criticism that crosses over from criticizing the poem to criticizing the poet.

There’s nothing wrong with harsh, even viciously mocking, criticism of a poem. Hey, sometimes it’s fun! And you can learn something from making smart, nasty fun of John Ashbery or Sharon Olds or even Wallace Stevens or Yeats. After all, if you haven’t read Mark Twain’s hilarious and merciless skewering of James Fenimore Cooper, you haven’t lived. “Cooper hadn't any more invention than a horse; and I don’t mean a high-class horse, either; I mean a clothes-horse.”

When criticism turns into ad hominem Swift Boat-style attacks on someone, though, that’s something else. Of course it’s a fine line, and critics probably shouldn’t self-censor themselves anymore than poets should. Twain pretty much said that Cooper was a total idiot, after all, and the world would be a poorer place if he hadn’t said it.

On the other hand . . . I think it’s crucial to maintain the line between the writing and the writer. How often we cross that line! How often we say, “What a courageous poem!” as if the poet were some sort of moral hero for writing it, and implying that so many other poets are cowards. And often when someone accuses a poem of sentimentality, they’re really accusing the poet of personal shallowness, not just having written a flawed poem.

I think it’s a mistake whenever critical judgments of writings turn into moral judgments of writers. Some of Emily Dickinson’s profoundest poems were turned into sentimental drivel by editors who unforgivably changed her punctuation or added a syllable to even out the rhythm. It proves how thin the line is between the profound and the sentimental.

Sometimes an embarrassingly sentimental poem can be revised into an electrifying poem by changing one word. The point is: the same person wrote the electrifying version and the sentimental one. You can’t go from judgment of the poem to judgment of the poet. For one thing, it makes poets too determined to write “courageous” poems, or “compassionate” poems, or “honest” poems, and they forget about just writing good poems.

Poetry made of Goose Liver...

First, I am thankful that Thanksgiving is over. My mom is no longer there for us to go to (John's mom is in Boston), and I cook. This year, John was really busy outside the house (well, someone's got to earn money, and I haven't been doing much of that lately). He did help me on Thursday with last-minute everythings, but mostly I did all the cleaning, shopping, cooking, and organizing. I brined the turkey, made two pies, a dozen-ingredient stuffing, and... well, everything but the cranberries and the sweet potatoes, which others brought. By the time everyone left, and we cleaned up and finally turned in at 1:00 this morning, I was so exhausted you could have mopped the floor with me, and I wouldn't have had the energy to protest.

Today is very quiet. I don't even mind doing more cleaning (but no cooking!) at my own pace. John and dog are gone to the studio, the rain has stopped, and it's a lovely fall day. I just had a small piece of leftover brie cheese (didn't get any yesterday), a toasted roll, and a big bowl of cold, cooked brussel sprouts (no competition there).

Oh yes, the title of the post. We were sitting around the fire drinking liqueurs, and I remembered I wanted to try Deborah Ager's suggestion of Exquisite Corpse. I got some resistance, but we did it twice, and while no memorable poetry resulted, everyone got a kick out of it--especially with one funny line about a lobster complaining about being put in a pot. But then we played the parlor game (I don't know the name) where a word that no one knows is picked from the dictionary, then the real definition is put in a hat along with each person's contribution of fake definition. The object is to guess the real definition and fool the others into believing your fake is it. Poetry must have been one everyone's mind, because one definition--pastry made of goose liver--was read, "poetry made of goose liver." Well, I s'pose you had to be there, but we laughed so hard it hurt....

So, it was a good Thanksgiving, and as I said, I'm glad it's over.

What Kind of Dog Am I?

Sounds about right!


What Common Breed of Dog Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Long time, no post

Robert has posted, Beverly has posted, but it's been ages since you've heard from me. I realized that today when I invited someone to look at our blog here, and looked at it myself, this evening, with a stranger's eye, and realized there's no trace of me. Maybe an explanation is warranted.

I haven't been myself of late. I'm waiting to hear word on my manuscript (to give the plot line without the details), and what I wanted to do was post some hurrah here, some celebration, but it's been ages without word (two possibilities, no promises), and it could all go poof now or the next instant. And that's all I can say.

I do have ideas I want to post. I've been gestating this idea about subject, about the concept of what a poem is about. I've also got some responses to Charlies's posts about rejecting aesthetics--mostly terminology. But I can't think clearly, can't get beyond the idée fixée (and I hope the accent marks work on Blogger).

So anyway, i'm still here, if not wholly, at least in part. TTYL, as they say--soon?

Proust’s Wrinkle in Time

I promise this will be my last Proust post, but I can’t resist. Just look at this one sentence. Yes, it starts as an embarrassingly corny metaphor. What do you expect from a book called In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower? The adolescent narrator is infatuated with a “gang of girls” he meets at the seaside. But if you can get past the girls-as-flowers, past the ludicrous “having botanized among such young blossoms,” and keep going, it’s worth it. He’s watching the girls walk along the seashore with the ocean in the background:

For this present object [the girls] was the one I would have preferred above all, as I knew perfectly well, having botanized so much among such young blossoms, that it would be impossible to come upon a bouquet of rarer varieties than these buds, which, as I looked at them now, decorated the line of the water with their gentle stems, like a gardenful of Carolina roses edging a cliff top, where a whole stretch of ocean can fit between adjacent flowers, and a steamer is so slow to cover the flat blue line separating two stalks that an idling butterfly can loiter on a bloom that the ship’s hull has long since passed, and is so sure of being first to reach the next flower that it can delay its departure until the moment when, between the vessel’s bow and the nearest petal of the one toward which it is sailing, nothing remains but a tiny glowing gap of blue.

Love it or hate it, you’ve got to wonder: What is going on here? What begins as a dated (to put it kindly) image of girls as gentle rose stems suddenly, uh, blossoms into a convoluted image of an ocean liner and a butterfly. This is metaphor deliberately out of control: girls equal flowers, ship’s hull equals . . . what (aside from some phallic overtones)? And what does that “gap of blue” equal?

An image of girls on the beach turns into a meditation on the relativity of time and space and perspective and . . . what? One thing it suggests is that from a certain perspective an ocean liner and its world of power and commerce are nothing compared to a flower petal. Another is that someone who loiters moves faster than someone who steams full-speed ahead, and that a “tiny glowing gap of blue” is (from, let’s say, an artist’s perspective) all that separates two worlds that are light-years apart.

Doesn’t this remind you of A Wrinkle in Time? It’s as if Proust is learning to time-travel by crossing those wrinkles, going from a madeleine to his long-dead aunt, from an ocean liner to a rose, ultimately from the living to the dead and back, because something may survive death only if a cookie is as strong as the ocean. Somehow from the girls on the beach Proust moves to an almost abstract manifesto: “Nothing remains but a tiny glowing gap of blue.”

Watching John Ashbery Write

I love the piece (subtitled above) by Larissa MacFarquhar in the current New Yorker on Ashbery. Here's a nice passage: "He's trying to cultivate a different kind of attention: not focussed, straight-ahead scrutiny but something more like a glance out of the corner of your eye that catches something bright and twitching that you then can't identify when you turn to look."

This is why I can't read Ashbery for a long stretch but like him in small doses. A whole book becomes numbing, unlike, say Charles Wright, where a book keeps building on itself to something huge. Ashbery's books (not that I've read many of them, maybe just a couple) are really collections of singular poems, and while the cumulative effect might force another kind of experience, it's not one I want to stay with long. Picking up one poem at a time though (at least certain ones, including two of the three in the New Yorker this week) is kind of a thrill.

Swimming In It

You know that paragraph on water from Joyce’s Ulysses?

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire? . . . Its universality: . . . its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers . . . .”

And so on it flows for one glorious 500-word sentence. What do you call that? That moment in a poem or story where the writer has discovered a vein of ore and decided to mine it for a while, where a musician has discovered a riff and decided to swim in it for a while. It’s interesting because it’s controversial. When Joyce starts in with his list— “torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells”—part of you just wants to tell him to shut up: “OK, I get it! You could have stopped after the first couple words, and you certainly didn’t have to keep going with “geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms . . . .”

Perhaps prose writers are more prone to this sort of indulgence (I think of it as characteristic of Salman Rushdie, for example), but at the same time—isn’t it almost the essence of what is meant by lyrical? Writing becomes lyrical at the moment when speech becomes song, and isn’t that the moment when we discover something worth repeating? Not an idea but a gesture, a rhythm, a pattern:

The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,
And the Third-month lambs, and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and the mare’s foal, and the cow’s calf,
And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-side,
And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there—and the beautiful curious liquid . . .

Isn’t repetition (with variation, of course) the essence of song, whether it’s Walt Whitman or the song of the indigo bunting: fire, fire; where? where? here, here; see it? see it? (Digression: you may think this is a crock, but check out this cool “transcription” of birdsongs by Tomm Lorenzin.)

I’ve been thinking about this because I think I’ve become way too afraid of repeating myself, way too cautious and embarrassed by this sort of self-indulgence. It’s interesting because it demands a lot of a reader. It demands something different from what a poem full of broken syntax or literary allusions demands, but it demands a sort of surrender and trust: No, this poem doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, or maybe I think I already know where it’s going and I’ve been there, but . . . maybe I don’t, and maybe the writer doesn’t know either. Maybe I wouldn’t have guessed that “hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides” would end in “faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.”

Chameleon in the Blogosphere

I just can’t keep up with all the arguments on poetics. Have you checked out the “three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system” of poetics being discussed—and very perceptively, e.g., by Robert (no relation)—on various blogs? The three axes, by the way, are “tradition/innovation,” “self/community,” and, uh, “polemical/nonpolemical,” or something like that.

I find these arguments very interesting, but (interestingly) I can’t get very interested in taking a position. Perhaps this only proves I’m at the extreme of the nonpolemical axis. It does occur to me that a better name for that axis might be “negative capability/positive capability.” Maybe I’m just weak when it comes to standing up for my convictions, but I’d rather think I’m like Keats’ “chameleon poet,” as he said in one of his letters:

What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon Poet. . . . The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures. . . . It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact hat not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature – how can it, when I have no nature?

Blackbird

Check out Nancy Taylor Everett’s poems from her “Juliet As Herself” series in the current Blackbird. Nancy is a member of our group although currently “on sabbatical.”

While you’re at Blackbird, also check out the feature on Larry Levis, one of my absolute favorite poets. I liked Tom Andrews’ moving and funny review, “The World as L. Found It,” of Levis’ Elegy, made more moving (and perhaps funnier, in a way Levis and Andrews would appreciate, I think) because Andrews, like Levis, died at a young age.

I was particularly interested in this statement by Andrews:

I’m thinking of John Koethe’s helpful essay on Ashbery, “The Metaphysical Subject of John Ashbery’s Poetry” (in David Lehman’s collection, Beyond Amazement). Koethe makes a distinction between poets who write out of a “‘voice,’ which basically amounts to a projection of a personality—either the poet’s actual personality or one he assumes” and those, like Ashbery, whose work “is informed by a nonpsychological conception of the self . . . .

This also reminds me of Beverly's comments below about poetry and psychology. I think it’s probably true that poetry is divided between poets whose work is profoundly psychological and poets whose work is based on “a nonpsychological conception of the self,” and that the two are so far apart they hardly speak the same language. That’s why some poets are so contemptuous of the “Poet looks at a daffodil (or a dune buggy) and has a shattering insight” type of poem: it’s because it’s psychological, so even if the insight really is shattering (and not a sentimental cliché), it still can never get beyond (from their point of view) the limitation of being psychological.

I don’t know if it’s possible ever to bridge this gap, but if anyone does bridge it, I think it’s Larry Levis. Andrews (whose essay is a lot funnier, in both senses, than I’m making it sound!) argues that Levis is, like Ashbery, on the nonpsychological side of the fence. I agree that Ashbery is, but it’s awfully hard to categorize Levis. Andrews quotes this wonderful passage (“Swollen with the eucharist of failure”!) from Levis’ “Elegy with an Angel at Its Gate.” It seems both psychological and nonpsychological, and beyond both:

We were never the color-blind grasses,

We were never the pattern of the snake
Fading into the pattern of the leaves,
Never the empty clarity one glimpses

In water falling, in water spreading itself
Into the thin white veil of what is never there,
The moment clear and empty as a heaven

Someone has just finished sweeping

Before the moment clouds over and again
Becomes only an endless falling of water
Onto stone, and falls roaring in the ears

Until they ring, and the throat suddenly
Swollen with the eucharist of failure,
A host invisible and present everywhere,

Or, anyway, present everywhere we are.

On A Novel Jag

I just read (a) HOWARD'S END because I wanted to read (b) Zadie Smith's ON BEAUTY which is based on the Forster book. Then I had to start (c) A ROOM WITH A VIEW and finished it last night. Hard to believe I got through an MA in Lit and never read E. M. Forster. Sadly true but his books are all fresh to me now, one of the virtues of having a haphazard education.

Anyway, I'm enthralled. A gay male Jane Austen! (Whom I did not read in school either--what was I doing? oh yes, modern poetry). Mordantly funny, I believe the phrase is. Though his attention to courtship and domestic life transcends hers, IMHO, because he's absorbed in the transcendant meaning of these things, the "love more mysterious." His books read like poetry, slower and with strange compelling sentences.

Zadie Smith's book is also wonderful. She extends Forster's attention to gender and class to race and further questions of aesthetics and physical beauty. What a deal that book is, morphing the plot line of H-E just enough to keep it interesting and totally up to the challenge. She's brilliant.

I recommend choices a, b, and c, all of the above.

“Interesting” “Interview”

I liked the interview with Thomas Lux featured on Poetry Daily this week. I found particularly “interesting” Lux’s response to a question from Mary Karr: “You wrote in an essay that the last thing you want to hear someone say about your poems is that they are ‘interesting.’ Ditto!”

I’d have to agree with that, even though I’ve been known to complain that so many poems are profound and passionate and true but just not very interesting. By “interesting” I partly mean entertaining, intellectually entertaining, poems that give you that feeling of “Ah, I’ve never thought of it that way before but . . . .” Yes, I want to get that feeling from poems.

But I also want more, and when someone says a poem is interesting, that’s often all it is. I read a lot of poems that are interesting but leave me feeling that while they’re interesting enough to make a great essay, or a great op-ed piece in the newspaper, or a great stand-up routine by Bill Maher, or a great set of facts for Harper’s Index, they’re just not poetry. Where’s the imagination and passion of, well, say, Shakespeare? Where’s the fury of “Out, out, brief candle!” or the playful magic of “Where the bee sucks, there suck I” or the dark imagination of Cleopatra: “Dost thou not see my baby at my breast that sucks the nurse asleep?”

Creeped Out

It's not just the fact that some people are spending lots of money to string orange bulbs over their shrubbery (really, folks, it's just two short months until Christmas!), and it's not just the huge fake spiders--only slightly less unpleasant than real huge spiders, not my kind of fun. What really bothers me about Halloween decorations is the death stuff: the hanged effigies, the tombstones in the front lawn, the skeletons with the heads detached. It's not that I don't understand the origins and psychological need and cultural resonances. And yes, I know I'm showing no sense of humor.

But ever since 9/11--really, right after that horror--when people trotted out their death-is-a-joke stuff, I thought, wait, this is too real, too soon, too close for comfort. Since then, we've had no dearth of death, man-made and natural: car bombs and hurricanes, earthquakes and soldiers in body bags, far away and up close and personal. Last year, I was in a red state right before the election, and the face of Bush and fervor for the war along with the Halloween torture scenes put a real ghoulish twist of irony on the landscape--in my mind anyway.

And today's paper: a teen is charged in a murder by beating, an unhinged mother tosses her three babies to their death in the ocean, death toll of US soldiers in Iraq climbs toward 2,000, hurricane Wilma wreaks havoc in the Caribbean. And then we have the jolly--ho, ho, ho tombstone inscriptions and knives hanging.

Okay, I'm ready to admit I have issues. Maybe I'm just soured 'cause I no longer have a little person to make a Halloween costume for. I made some great costumes, in the day. And carved a mean jack o' lantern.

Lyric Equals Narrative Times the Speed of Light Squared

I went to see Doctor Atomic Tuesday night at the San Francisco Opera. Like Diane, I had some mixed feelings. Unusual for opera, it was the libretto, not the music, that wowed me. Peter Sellars’ juxtaposition of texts was inspired. Where else could you hear at once the poems of John Donne, Charles Baudelaire, and Muriel Rukeyser, sacred texts from the Bhagavad Gita and the Tewa Indians, and the memoirs of Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer, and other scientists and soldiers who developed the atom bomb? As Diane said, one of the most inspired moments was Oppenheimer singing Donne’s “Batter My Heart” sonnet while almost singing to the Bomb:

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Oppenheimer himself may deserve the credit for this particular stroke of genius, as he himself named the site of the first atom bomb test Trinity because of Donne’s sonnet. To me the tortured syntax seemed expressive of Oppenheimer’s tortured conscience, and I even liked the clash of dictions when Donne’s sonnet followed the general’s discussion of his calorie-counting.

I thought much of Sellars’ staging was inspired as well, though it occasionally seemed heavy-handed, like the Bomb hanging over the baby’s crib. One touch I particularly liked was the ending where the chorus watches for the explosion of the first atom bomb while facing the audience. Yeah, where else would the chorus face but toward the audience while they sang? But to me it was a powerful statement addressed to the audience: The Bomb is not some gadget; no, it’s you. Very likely that interpretation did not occur to anyone but me, though, including the director!

As far as the music, overall it did not do a lot for me. The San Francisco Chronicle review (and many others) said things like “haunting lyricism” and “shimmering beauty,” and maybe all that was there, but I’d be lying if I said I heard the lyricism and beauty. I did hear rhythmic drama and excitement, though it never quite had me on the edge of my seat. The truth is that if Jon Stewart did a parody on the Daily Show tonight of George Bush singing “in the style of a John Adams opera,” I doubt I could tell it from the real thing.

But the words! As a poet I couldn’t help being thrilled to hear poetry sung like this, and I thought the singers were great, especially Kristine Jepson as Kitty Oppenheimer, but really everyone in the cast. The vision of Rukeyser’s “Easter Eve, 1945” was strikingly original—“now I name death our black honor”—and for some reason the phrase “promiscuous as mercy” sticks with me. The “duet” of the Bhagavad Gita’s prayer to Vishnu, “flame-eyes staring,” and the Tewa song to the cloud flowers of thunder was dynamite. It’s worth seeing this opera if you have a chance.

To Pantoum or Not To Pantoum

I've been working on a poem that I couldn't get to come together in any interesting way, then I happened to be reading BAP again, finally getting to the end, and came to Cecilia Woloch's "Bareback Pantoum" which I liked very much and there it was, what the poem needed was to be a pantoum.

The puzzle of it, making the lines work, is what's appealing about writing a pantoum. I know, you can easily go astray with the puzzle of a poem (I'm really susceptible to that, love word puzzles). Now I 'm thinking about whether to bring my pantoum to group today—I don't think my group likes pantoums much. The last one I brought, they disliked the repetition. Maybe it just wasn't very good. Though North American Review took it.

So I'm thinking the problem with pantoums is that they're fun to write, not as much fun to read. Repetition DOES get numbing. I vary the lines quite a bit to try to offset that, keep some element of surprise in the poem, but still... I did like Woloch's. I don't like to read sestinas much, though there are exceptions. Even villanelles, in spite of a few great ones like Bishop's "One Art" and Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle" and one by Roethke that I'm forgetting the title of. The challenge of keeping the form alive, not feeling predictable, having great lines, etc.—the usual poetry challenges ramped up in a determined direction. It's the love-hate relationship (like to write, don't like to read) I have with all formal poetry, sonnets included. Though again, big exceptions. Maybe just the attempts of us more ordinary, plebian poets.

Me Bad

I’ve been back from Paris for over a week and still haven’t posted anything here. We had a great time, though I’m not sure to what extent any of it will ever show up in my poetry. In some ways it was a vacation from writing, although I did finish reading the second volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time on the hellish 12-hour plane ride home (more on Proust in a future blog). My favorite day in Paris may have been the day we visited the Marmottan Museum, which has an amazing collection of Impressionist paintings, especially Monet (the images on the website, by the way, do not do it justice). If you visited Paris and missed the Musee Marmottan, you blew it.

The Musee Marmottan is a small museum off the beaten track on the west end of Paris near the gorgeous park the Bois de Boulogne, and combining the museum with a long walk through the Bois de Boulogne makes a beautiful day. Visiting the park also gave me an opportunity to try out my primitive French, which apparently I knew just well enough that when I asked people for directions on how to get to the Bagatelle Gardens, they seemed to think I knew what I was doing and in a very helpful, friendly way rattled off five minutes of directions in French that were incomprehensible to us.

What struck me most, I think, was the vast emotional range of Monet’s paintings, despite (or because of) their narrow range of their content. How much complexity and depth was plumbed in painting after painting of the waterlily pond and rose arbor in his garden! What began as almost a scientific experiment on capturing the varied effects of light on water became in some paintings an evocation of deep beauty and peace and, in others (often those painted during the horror of World War I), an almost abstract blaze of violent passion. The rose arbor becomes a tunnel of fire with no light at the end. The peaceful blues and greens of the Japanese footbridge become a Jackson Pollock-like explosion of yellows and reds of a bridge going nowhere. Perhaps Monet was responding to what was going on in the world, perhaps he was simply going blind, or perhaps both, but it’s amazing how much he was able to express by his obsessive focus on a few simple images.

Meanwhile, I had a long talk with my editor on Sunday going over the final corrections to my book manuscript. Supposedly the book went to the printer on Monday and I should have books in my hand in a couple of weeks! I’m awfully excited, but also anxious because . . . I still haven’t seen the book cover, although I know they’re using the photograph I selected. I’m not 100% sure the book has gone to the printer, though; there may be some last-minute kinks to work out on the cover design. The suspense is killing me!

Overwhelming (link)

Yeah, even I, in my obsessions, can see an overwhelming need.... I poke my head out of my turtle shell and realize... here the sky is blue, days warm, nights crisp, and there are no real problems. Sure, we have complaints--who doesn't?--and I can complain with the best of them. Yeah, life isn't fair. Yeah, some people have all the luck.

But we really have been luckier than a lot of people. In five minutes, tens of thousands of people were gone. Are we getting inured to disaster? Is this just another one of them?

I thought I wouldn't miss a chunk from my unemployment check this week. Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres) simply goes where there's a need. And that seems to be everywhere, of late.

If the above links work the way they are supposed to, you can visit their site and donate too.

Small question, big poem

I've got a question for the blogosphere out there--in case anyone is actually reading this blog... I have just completed (again) a long poem or poems in the voices of the women who were associated with Picasso. Yeah, some of you may know that I started this in 2003 or thereabouts and finished it (or got sick of it) about a year later. But I had second thoughts or a second wind or something and in the last month or so have added four poems to the series. I think it is done--minus tinkering.

The Gallerie des Femmes, as it is presently called, will go in my second book--if the first one ever gets published. But I'd like to attempt to send Gallerie itself out for publication. Does anyone know of a journal that will even look at an 18-page poem? I would be willing to publish some of these poems separately, though I'd like to give the editor a chance to choose which one(s). But I'm afraid if I send 18 pages anywhere the reflex will be to toss it into the trash.

Suggestions? Any of you ever tried to publish something really long ?