Poetic Orientation

Questions and Answers from the American Poetry Association on Poetic Orientation

What Is Poetic Orientation?

Poetic orientation is an enduring emotional, poetic, or aesthetic attraction to poetry of a particular perspective. Poetic orientation exists along a continuum that ranges from exclusively mainstream to exclusively post-avant and includes various forms of bipoeticity. Bipoetic persons can experience poetic and aesthetic attraction to poets of both their own poetic orientation and the opposite.

What Causes a Person To Have a Particular Poetic Orientation?

There are numerous theories about the origins of a person’s poetic orientation; most poets today agree that poetic orientation is most likely the result of a complex interaction of environmental, cognitive and biological factors. There is also considerable recent evidence to suggest that biology, including genetic or inborn hormonal factors, play a significant role in a person’s poetic orientation. There are probably many reasons for a person’s poetic orientation and the reasons may be different for different people.

Is Poetic Orientation a Choice?

No, human beings can not choose to be either mainstream or post-avant. Poetic orientation emerges for most people in early adolescence without any prior poetic experience. Although we can choose whether to act on our feelings, poets do not consider poetic orientation to be a conscious choice that can be voluntarily changed.

Can MFA Therapy Change Poetic Orientation?

No. Even though most mainstream and post-avant poets live successful, happy lives, some may seek to change their poetic orientation through MFA therapy, sometimes pressured by the influence of family members or writing groups to try and do so. The reality is that neither the mainstream nor the post-avant is an illness. It does not require treatment and is not changeable. Not all poets who seek assistance from teachers or bloggers want to change their poetic orientation, although both mainstream and post-avant poets may seek help with the coming-out process or for strategies to deal with prejudice.

What About So-Called “Conversion Therapies”?

Some teachers who undertake so-called conversion therapy report that they have been able to change their students’ poetic orientation from mainstream to post-avant or vice-versa. Close scrutiny of these reports, however, show several factors that cast doubt on their claims. For example, many of the claims come from institutions with an ideological perspective which condemns either the mainstream or the post-avant. Furthermore, their claims are poorly documented. For example, MFA treatment outcome is not followed and reported over time as would be the standard to test the validity of any poetic intervention.

The American Poetry Association is concerned about such therapies and their potential harm to patients, and has passed a resolution reaffirming its opposition to both avantophobia and quietudophobia in treatment, and spelling out a poet’s right to unbiased treatment and self-determination. Any person who enters into a program to deal with issues of poetic orientation has a right to expect that such a program would take place in a professionally neutral environment absent of any social bias.

Is Mainstream or Post-Avant Poeticity a Mental Illness or Emotional Problem?

No. Professionals agree that they are not illnesses, aesthetic disorders or emotional problems. Over 35 years of objective, well-designed aesthetic research has shown that neither postmodernism nor post-romanticism is associated with aesthetic disorders or emotional or social problems. Postmodernism and post-romanticism were once thought to be aesthetic illnesses because poetry professionals and society had biased information. In the past the studies of mainstream and post-avant poets involved only those in MFA programs, thus biasing the resulting conclusions.

The American Poetry Association has confirmed the importance of the new, better designed research and removed both mainstream and post-avant poetics from the official manual that lists aesthetic and emotional disorders, and urges all poetry professionals to help dispel the stigma of aesthetic illness that some people still associate with mainstream or post-avant orientation.

Can Mainstream and Post-Avant Poets Be Good Parents?

Yes. Studies comparing groups of children raised by mainstream and by post-avant parents find no developmental differences between the two groups of children in four critical areas: their intelligence, aesthetic adjustment, social adjustment, and popularity with friends. It is also important to realize that a parent’s poetic orientation does not dictate his or her children’s.

Why Do Some Mainstream and Post-Avant Poets Tell People About Their Poetic Orientation?

Sharing that aspect of themselves with others is important to their aesthetic health. In fact, the process of identity development for post-avant and mainstream poets called “coming out” has been found to be strongly related to aesthetic adjustment—the more positive the mainstream or post-avant identity, the better one’s aesthetic health and the higher one’s self-esteem.

Why Is the “Coming Out” Process Difficult for Some Post-Avant and Mainstream Poets?

For some post-avant and mainstream poets, the coming-out process is difficult; for others it is not. Often post-avant and mainstream poets feel afraid, different, and alone when they first realize that their poetic orientation is different from the norm. They may have to struggle against prejudice and misinformation. They may fear being rejected by family, friends, co-workshoppers, and academic institutions. Some poets have to worry about losing their jobs or being harassed if their poetic orientation became well known. Unfortunately, studies have shown that nearly one-fifth of all mainstream poets and more than one-fourth of all post-avants have been the victim of a some form of aggression, from name-calling to aesthetic violence.

What Can Be Done to Overcome the Prejudice and Discrimination that Post-Avants and Mainstream Poets Experience?

Research has found that the people who have the most positive attitudes toward post-avant and mainstream poets are those who say they know one or more post-avant or mainstream poets well—often as a friend or co-workshopper. For this reason, poets believe negative attitudes toward post-avant and mainstream poets as a group are prejudices that are not grounded in actual experiences but are based on stereotypes and prejudice.

Why is it Important for Society to be Better Educated About Poetic Orientation?

Educating all people about poetic orientation is likely to diminish prejudice. Accurate information is especially important to people who are first discovering and seeking to understand their poetic identity—whether mainstream, post-avant, or bipoetic. Fears that access to such information will make more people post-avant or mainstream have no validity—information about poetry does not make someone either mainstream or post-avant.

Are All Post-Avant and Mainstream Poets HIV (Human Ironydeficiency Virus) Infected?

No. This is a commonly held myth. In reality, the risk of exposure to Human Ironydeficiency Virus is related to a poet’s behavior, not their poetic orientation. What’s important to remember about Human Ironydeficiency Virus is it is a preventable disease through the use of safe writing practices and not using drugs.

What is summer?

I remember it vaguely. I remember lying in the cooling grass to combat the heat. I remember pavement so hot you could fry the proverbial egg. And tomatoes on the vine. And sunburn.

The latest issue of POETRY is filled with what could be called, if not light verse, at least summertime poems. All the newspaper and online columnists long ago published their recommendations for summer reading.

Some people, in the face of summertime indolence, seem to hardly have energy for reading. At least that seems to be the gist of the piece I heard by Andrei Codrescu on All Things Considered the other day. He seemed to put down people who were too busy to experience the slow, lazy days of summer.

Well, we haven't been avoiding summer, but it's been avoiding us. Now that our Big Event is over and the deck (hah!) is built, we're busy paying for all that. Driving to work daily has actually been our only chance to see, if not experience, what other people call summer -- or at least sun. High up on a hill in San Francisco's Ingleside neighborhood, days go by without the sun coming out -- or with it coming out just long enough to set in splendor into the ocean. So yeah, in my brief walk from car to office at Moffett Field I can smell the star jasmine. And when John takes a break from his San Rafael studio to take the dog out, he can watch her kick up her heels in the nearby grassy lawns. That's been our summer.

We may have a barbecue on the deck this Sunday. That will mean turning on the patio heater we bought for it. But that's not real summer. That's not lying in the hammock under the sugar pines, smelling the dust.

So what? S'okay. We'll live. We're actually going to take a vacation in a little bit, in September -- probably miss a good part of the sunny weather here -- and visit John's family in Ireland. Life isn't bad, just busy. And I do miss summer.

An odd predicament

A week ago, I was reading the miniscule book review section of The Chronicle and there was a review of a poetry book by Ellen Bass. There are so few reviews of poetry in the local paper, that I usually feel obligated to read them, at least cursorarily. I didn't have much time, as the poetry group was coming and I had much cleaning to do. But though I read the review quickly, my eyes zeroed in on two lines -- quoted not from Bass, but from Mary Oliver: "There is only one question:// how to love this world."

Actually, the review misquoted it as "the" world, but I googled it and found it was from a poem called "Spring". I don't recall ever seeing this poem. It's not, to my mind, very earthshaking, though it's a good enough poem. The thing is, these are exactly two lines that appear in a poem of mine: "Copernican Revolution." Though that poem has gone through many overhauls including the recent addition of a stanza, the original poem, which very much centers around those lines, was from the late eighties. The Oliver poem -- at least the book it was published in -- is from 1992. My poem is unpublished -- though it's in my well-circulated manuscript. I sure don't think Mary Oliver copied those lines from me -- but neither do I remember ever reading that poem or that book or even much Mary Oliver.

So has this ever happened to you? What would you do? Should I remove the poem from my manuscript? Here's the last stanza of "Copernican Revolution":

There’s only one question:
how to love this world, how to find
the will to serve it—
each morning, the new baby skin of light.

Blogging under the influence ...

I said I would blog this weekend, and here it is, past 7:00 p.m. on Saturday. It was a busy day: John and I took the dog to Pine Lake with the minor detour of neighborhood garage sales. (I bought some lovely linens and crochet doilies and such, the kind of things I had hoped to inherit from my mom, but which disappeared during her final illness. You can't dwell on such things.) Then we went to Sloat Nursery to replace plants that bit the dust during the deck construction. I planted them later. Then we visted the Urban Farmer store so John could get advice and thingies for repairing our garden irrigation -- also mucked up during the deck work, although John believes a gopher or something was gnawing on the underground tubes. He worked on the garden irrigation while I got groceries. I worked back there while he had a beer and kibbutzed. And here it is evening, and I'm sipping some of the wine we have leftover from the wedding. The fog and the wind have come in on our hill. In a short while I will cook some red snapper and rice pilaf and maybe some broccoli stir-fried with garlic and red pepper. But you don't really want to hear any of this.

I never stop thinking about poetry even when I am stopped from doing poetry. Even when I am writing about thermal protection materials for NASA. I meant to comment on the essay by CK Williams in APR, republished in Poetry Daily that Greg Rappelye discussed-quite a while ago -- and that even before that Robert Thomas pointed me to. Whew! All that linking about wore me out.

But really, I thought it was quite an interesting essay, though after a glass of wine, damned if I'll be able to say anything cogent about it. What I meant to do all along is just quote the bits that I liked most, so here goes.

I might in fact be talking to the poor self I was in those days, who thrashed about in so many unknowables, not the least of which was how to think about itself, and what to ask of itself, because so much was asked that seemed off the point, and had nothing to do with anything except the host of dull imperatives with which it had been conditioned by its very disorganized education. We're inflicted with many lessons about ourselves in the course of growing up, but most turn out to be not only useless but possibly detrimental to any sort of artistic creation.

In some odd way, it feels as though the most abiding element of all this has something to do with having from time to time given myself and the very problematic mind which is mine permission to make a poem.

The right to not concentrate, by which I mean the right to allow one's mind to skip and skid away from any prescribed subject without worrying that some aesthetic or moral commandment is being violated.

Poems can take a long time to arrive, and to find their final form, so surely patience is the word here, but it's worth emphasizing that what actually happens doesn't seem to have the maturity and dignity the term patience implies. There's much more flailing about, and hesitating, and clearing the throat; and taking out the trash: we have to have the right to all of this.

Another, related, right: to be wrong... The corollary to this would be to realize that the judgment that something is wrong, or imperfect, or unrealized, has a dialectic concealed in it of which one can be unaware, and that working through this dialectic in itself can be fruitful.

From this follows the right of the mind to be able to remark in itself and not repress, or at least not too quickly, anything that comes to it, even such ostensibly inadmissible emotions as, to mention just a few, lust, greed, envy, anger, even rancor, even genres of otherwise unutterable prejudice. [N.B. certain people who know who they are.] We have, for poetry, to have as accurate an awareness as we can of the quality of our ethical consciousness, but we also need a firm sense of the difference between sins of the heart and sins of the hand: the mind has a life of its own which cares little for the parameters culture and society propose for it, and it is often this inner awareness which is most potentially interesting as aspects of a poem. [N.B. Same people.]

Remembering is necessarily inventing, and inventing is often remembering, but this doesn't mean there are no standards for judging how things are remembered in poems; on the contrary, the poetic memory is art under oath, but real accuracy has more to do with the aesthetic efficacy of the poem, rather than its fealty to any "real" past.

Corollary: to be able to keep confidence in one's work flexible enough so that useful criticism of it won't be rejected out of hand... But we still should be able to believe in and enjoy now and then our own and other people's appreciation and acknowledgment of what we do.


The last right I'd like to propose sounds odd: it's the right not to know what you're doing, even to not know what you've done.... Yet the fact is that much of the best work produced by artists (and maybe everyone else) is accomplished by small or larger leaps into the obscurity out past our intentions; much of what we come to value most in our own work are evidences of that unfathomable phenomenon we call inspiration.

The hardest thing is that inspiration is neither something that can be willed, nor something you can wait around for.

That's enough for now.

Even the Stars Are a Mess

I enjoyed Dana Stevens’ recent review in Slate of Rescue Dawn, Werner Herzog’s new film. I particularly enjoyed her link to what she calls “this unforgettable clip” from Les Blank’s documentary about Herzog, Burden of Dreams. It must be 25 years since I saw Burden of Dreams, but I’ve never forgotten that scene either. I probably disagree with everything Herzog says in that interview, but it still shows why, perhaps more than any other living filmmaker, he makes movies that are poetry.

Post-wedding post

One week ago, on 7-7-07, our one and only son got married. It's taken me this long to recover enough to post about it. We were much involved; for reasons I'm not quite sure of, our daughter-in-law did not want to involve (or invite) her parents. So our support was (in all ways) needed.

We also decided this was as good a time as any to replace the deck behind our house. We expected family here from all over, and it just didn't seem right to say, "Come on in, but please don't step on our deck." You see, the deck had been rotten and dangerous for years, and even though we weren't going to have an official party there, it would be (and was) a great idea to be able to invite people to hang there on the day after, on their way to the airport and points homeward.

The actual wedding was north of San Francisco in the town of San Rafael -- the weather in July in SF is more often than not miserable (and sure enough was dripping on the wedding morning). But it was hot and sunny in San Rafael. Friday, the day of the rehearsal, was almost too warm. We were to have the rehearsal barbecue -- for the cast of thousands in the wedding party and all the out-of-towners -- at the gorgeous home of an architect friend of my husband's. Friday morning, I had the privilege of going to Costco with bride and groom -- with my wallet. There was no actual plan for the barbecue. According to my son, it would just come together, and it did, thanks to the amazing venue, the friends and family who set up, cooked, and cleaned up.

The wedding was lovely. Nathaniel promised a short ceremony -- "I do, I do, and we do," and he pretty much kept his word. Although I had given them the anthology of wedding poetry edited by Stephen Mitchell and Robert Hass, there was no poetry. Still, I almost cried, but not as much as I did when my husband was practicing his toast that morning.

The wedding was a vintage 20s-30s theme and sometimes seemed a bit like a costume party or a prom, but it was what the bride and groom wanted; it was their party. Their friends and their cousins were great and worked and played hard. The caterer screwed up on about 20 counts, but even so didn't ruin things, although it seemed as if they tried to ....

And sure enough Sunday happened on our deck, and lo and behold, the sun came out. Everyone marveled at our view. The Texas relatives told us our house would be worth 50K there -- of course that's practically what our view is worth here in SF!

'kay, there's no poetry in this post, but Robert said I had to blog about the wedding. The bride and groom are in Ireland on honeymoon. For us, it's been back to work since Monday, gettin' up at 5:30 and walking the dog and driving down to Mountain View. We slept in until 8:00 this morning. How prosaic can you get!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
John is out late shooting an event at a vineyard in Napa. I'm trying to wait up for him, but I'm sinking fast. I printed out a chapbook ms. for a last-minute submission. And then I did something crazy. I added seven poems to my book manuscript, the one that's been out making the rounds, getting weary and old. These were poems that I had been saving for BookNext -- but at this point that doesn't seem like it will ever happen. I just had a feeling BookOne needed some tartin' up, a makeover, if you will. Well, sticking seven poems in pretty much willy-nilly might be more like buying an extension than a makeover. Something tells me I better see what this looks like in the morning.

Submission

Recently I did a quick, inaccurate survey of poems I’d submitted to magazines over the past three years, and found I’d submitted 94 poems and had 7 accepted (one was long). I was prompted by a friend who’d checked his numbers and had about 10 times as many poems accepted as I had and also submitted about 10 times as many as I had. I am very interested in what other people’s experiences are—not acceptance rates but just submission numbers. Some people send out 10 poems a year and others (who amaze me!) send out 1,000.

Let's Do It

It’s time for another William Logan quiz, now that his latest review, “Let’s do it, let’s fall in luff,” has been published in New Criterion. The rules are the same as last time. The six poets reviewed are:

1) John Ashbery
2) Henri Cole
3) Cathy Park Hong
4) Frieda Hughes
5) Robert Lowell
6) Frederick Seidel

And here are the six excerpts from the review. Match the poet with the quote that refers to his or her work!

a) “Misery doesn’t love company—misery is company.”

b) “Were _____ unfortunate enough to develop Alzheimer’s, the poems wouldn’t change a bit.”

c) “ … so near to being illiterate, you weep for English syntax.”

d) “_____ sees the advantage … of making things new by making them partly incomprehensible.”

e) “The fretted, distressed lines itch to be something else and end up like nothing but themselves.”

f) “a restless artist who believes that originality requires constant change (unfortunately, as with urban development, if you tear down too much, you have no urbs any more).”

On a more serious note, Logan’s observations on poetry and class are interesting:

The rich are different from you and me. They write better poetry, or did when poetry was an art of leisure. It sometimes seems that, in the centuries after scops stopped singing for gold rings in the meadhall, few men except Sir This or Lord That had the free time to bother with verse—if you weren’t nobility, or landed gentry, or clergy, you were about out of luck. Later, poetry made some great poets rich, like Shakespeare and Pope, and some rich poets great, like Byron and Shelley. Wordsworth and Coleridge were able to scrape by without much by way of day jobs; and neither Tennyson nor Browning ever had to shovel coal. There are exceptions, but many well-known poets never earned a pay check. Only in the twentieth century did poetry become a middle-class art not just read but written by the middle class.

First Day of Summer

Can it be that I've not posted here since May? -- and even then was circumspect and silent about what was going on. I was teaching a course that I hated (not poetry) -- someone else's program, from start to finish, and, I couldn't please that person nohow. The class has been blessedly over since Memorial Day. Then my work revved up into a new gear, and now I am working on staff (80% now, full time come July).

More about the job later. First, I want to post some exciting news: On Saturday, June 23rd, my poem will be featured on Poetry Daily. This is the poem that was published in Field last April, and that, in itself, was exciting. So many stressful things happening right now -- my son's wedding in three weeks, construction on our deck out back, the new job with its mega-commute -- and that's just part of it -- that I haven't been sending things out. So this is a real boon. The email came while I was at work and totally surprised me. I've had Poetry Daily as my home page for years, and it's been a dream of mine to be featured there. I hope you will read the poem, and I hope you will like it.

In other news … Robert's panel has been approved for AWP '08 in NYC. He'll be presenting on a panel on "poetry and religion" with Marianne Boruch, Laura Kasischke, Greg Rappleye, and Roy Jacobstein. I so want to be able to be there! I'm sure Robert will want to post the details as the day nears.

Not So Plain Style

As a counter to the lines from Rilke below and another favorite quote, here’s a passage from Tony Hoagland’s “On Disproportion,” from Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft:

I have a friend who once edited a poetry magazine and returned manuscripts with a note saying, “a little more savoir faire, please.” Arch and arrogant, I thought at the time. Now I can understand, I think, what he meant, and reading many poems I, too, often want to say, “a little more excess, style, violence, savoir faire, please.” It was Rilke, our great model for the ecstatic poet, who asks in the Ninth Duino Elegy, “Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: “House, / Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Olive tree, Window,— / possibly: Pillar, Tower?” These lines, suggesting a life’s work in the plain style, imply that an artist would be well exercised if kept on a diet of all nouns.

But Rilke the poet, in the poem itself, hardly slows down at his own suggestion; he whirls, pirouettes, leaps, spins, commands, begs, refuses—and goes on to add, “but for saying, remember, / oh, for such saying as never the things themselves / hoped so intensely to be.”

The Gazer Within

This may be my favorite quote ever, from Larry Levis’ essay “The Gazer Within”:

“I find I’ve been speaking, all along, about the attempt of the imagination to inhabit nature and by that act preserve itself for as long as possible against ‘the pressure of reality.’ And by nature I mean any wilderness, inner or outer. The moment of writing is not an escape, however; it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.”

The Knock on the Door

Greg posted ten quotations on poetry that are important to him and I thought I’d try the same, but maybe I’ll start with just four or five.

First, this is from Robert Pinsky’s Poetry and the World:

I want to say—as humbly as possible—that despite all the complexities of literary theory, for all the ingenuities of ambition or expectation, the trouble with most poems that fail—one’s own poems, or poems written in workshops, or submitted to magazines, or published in books—may be described simply: they are not interesting enough to impart conviction. Most of them fail to be surprising or musical or revealing enough to arouse much interest; to read them, one must be a professional (and certainly not an indolent or drowsy professional). It sounds silly to say so, but some explicit sex, or a few jokes, or a bizarre personal confession, might make these poems more interesting.

Second, here’s Rilke from the Duino Elegies:

Praise the world to the Angel, not the unsayable: you
can’t impress him with glories of feeling: in the universe,
where he feels more deeply, you are a novice. So show
him a simple thing, fashioned in age after age,
that lives close to hand and in sight.
Tell him things. He’ll be more amazed: as you were,
beside the rope-maker in Rome, or the potter beside the Nile.


It’s true that my own poetry doesn’t exactly follow that prescription,
but then, neither does Rilke’s!

Third, here are three short quotes from Charles Simic’s book of prose, Orphan Factory:

America is God crazy, as everyone knows. It’s impossible to be an American writer without taking that into account.

The secret ambition of every true poem is to ask about gods and devils even as it acknowledges their absence.

Aestheticism, humor, eroticism, and all the other manifestations of the free imagination are suspect and must be censored.

Obviously that last quote is Simic’s comment on the negative impact of the American critical bias.

Fourth, Adrienne Rich also has something to say about the “free imagination” in her great essay “When We Dead Awaken”:

For a poem to coalesce, ... there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is no way passive. And a certain freedom of the mind is needed—freedom to press on, to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that your motion can be sustained, that the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away. Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. … To be a female human being trying to fulfill traditional female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination.

Finally, Yannis Ritsos’ poem “Motionless Swaying”:

As she jumped up to open the door,
she dropped the basket with the spools of thread—
they scattered under the table, under the chairs,
in improbable corners—one that was orange-red
got inside the glass lamp; a mauve one
deep in the mirror; that gold one—
she never had a spool of gold thread—where did it come from?
She was about to kneel, to pick them up one by one, to tidy up
before opening the door. She had no time. They knocked again.
She stood motionless, helpless, her hands dropped to her sides.
When she remembered to open—no one was there.

Is that how it is with poetry, then? Is this exactly how it is with poetry?

—Yannis Ritsos

Top Five

I happened to read Wikipedia’s entry on Robert Hass, and I noticed this: “In Hass’ opinion, the five most important poets of the last 50 years were Chilean Pablo Neruda, Peruvian Cesar Vallejo, and Polish poets Zbigniew Herbert, Nobel-winner Wislawa Szymborska, and Nobel-winner Czesław Miłosz.” There’s no citation for the quote and I’m not sure Wikipedia can be trusted that Hass really said that, but it’s interesting. Were three of the five most important poets of the last fifty years Polish? Were none English-speaking? Is there no place for Seamus Heaney or Sylvia Plath? I’m not sure who my own picks for the Top Five would be, although I’d probably save a place for Tomas Tranströmer (see his poem “Grief Gondola, #2” here) and Yehuda Amichai (see his poem “A Jewish Cemetery in Germany” here, which by the way is interesting to compare with Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Facing It”).

Poetry — with integral bra support

I am on a lot of mailing lists: pleas for support from organizations (poetry and otherwise) that have never given a dime or a minute's worth of support to me, credit card come-ons, political organizations, and many, many catalogs. I used to get three or four catalogs a week; now I get three or four a day. Yesterday, I got one called Poetry. Is it an academic program, a summer conference, a new magazine--experimental, conventional, or slam? No, it's a clothing catalog — for women of a certain age, I infer, like yours truly. It's a UK company, and not bad stuff, some of it, with wearable clothes, mostly. But Poetry? What is up with that? Some marketing genius wake up in the middle of the night with this brainstorm? I can't decide if I'm offended, amused, or just dumbfounded. Geesh!

Meantime, in real life, things go from crisis to crisis, as things do. I am swimming, not drowning, at the moment, although it was hard to tell here for a while -- coming up for air, now that the teaching semester is ending (one more class!) and getting ready to jump into the pool for the duration. What I mean is, I've been offered a permanent full-time position (technical writing). Since July 2005, I've been contracting, and except when there's no work, too much work, mixed signals from addled supervisors, or other problems, I liked it. I'm looking out the window of my office now at the Japanese maple, the lavender, the iris, the rose bush in full bloom. I'm going to miss this! I'm going to have to work on site for this new position, and it's a nasty commute to boot. And yet, with John self-employed and no other benefits, it seems to make sense. I like the work and the people at this new job, and can honestly do with less stress. So there it is, I am -- or will be -- a worker bee once again.

Will I write, will I read, will I be able to be part of the poetry (writing, not wearing) community? I hope so. I know that the past six months I've scarcely had the available brain power to read through a poem, let alone write one. So I'm thinking this may be an improvement, or the way to go, for the moment.

Aesthetic Amniocentesis

Last night I dreamed I was at the beach rubbing suntan lotion on Ellen Bryant Voigt’s back—while discussing poetry, of course. I will try to take this as a good omen for my writing. If you’ve read Voigt’s wonderful poem “Plaza del Sol” from Shadow of Heaven (“a woman tanned already, dried fruit arranged on a towel …”), you’ll understand that whatever the dream was, it was not exactly erotic. Diane suggests it means I need to get more “hands on” with poetry, or at least with something.

Diane and I were also talking about Bemsha Swing’s recent post about “that overwritten Derek Walcott effect.” I tend to have a similar response as Jonathan’s to Walcott’s work, yet I am sensitive to the criticism because I’m sure some people would consider my own poetry overwritten. Whether one tends toward overwriting (fat, drunken language—think Dylan Thomas) or underwriting (anorexic language—think the exquisitely spare poems of William Carlos Williams) is another of those spectra along which poets define themselves.

What interests me about the spectra is that there’s a place for a judgmental attitude toward them and a place for a nonjudgmental attitude. In Twentieth Century Pleasures Robert Hass gives great examples of both. In his essay on Stanley Kunitz, he distinguishes between dramatic poetry (think Yeats) and meditative poetry (think Stevens):

[The dramatic lyric] goes into the crucible over and over again, goes into desire, not past it, and it’s anything but non-attached. Much of the original work done in the twentieth century has been in the meditative vein …. The dramatic lyric is a peculiarly Western form, I think. Yeats was its great modern practitioner, and in this he was Kunitz’s master. … I think [Kunitz] is the least non-attached poet I know of.

It’s fair to say that Hass himself is a meditative poet according to his own definition, yet there is no hint in this essay of his valuing the meditative over the dramatic or vice-versa. When I first read this, what struck me is that “the least non-attached poet” is precisely what I aspire to be!

On the other hand, in an essay in praise of James Wright, Hass condemns Wright’s weaker poems with almost an Old Testament (or Ginsburg-like “Moloch!”) prophetic fury:

Aestheticism is what I am talking about, decadence. It’s a cultural disease and it flourishes when the life of the spirit, especially the clear power of imagination and intelligence, retreats or is driven from public life, where it ought, naturally, to manifest itself. The artists of decadence turn away from a degraded social world and what they cling to, in their privacy, is beauty or pleasure. The pleasures are esoteric; the beauty is almost always gentle, melancholy, tinged with the erotic, tinged with self-pity.

Hass is one of the very few poets who seem capable of a non-judgmental description of the spectrum of mainstream to post-avant poetry, as in his introduction to Best American Poetry 2001:

There are roughly three traditions in American poetry at this point: a metrical tradition that can be very nervy and that is also basically classical in impulse; a strong central tradition of free verse made out of both romanticism and modernism, split between the impulses of an inward and psychological writing and an outward and realist one, at its best fusing the two; and an experimental tradition that is usually more passionate about form than content, perception than emotion, restless with the conventions of the art, skeptical about the political underpinnings of current practice, and intent on inventing a new one, or at least undermining what seems repressive in the current formed style.

I think it’s crucial for poets to ask themselves these questions with an open mind: “Am I more passionate about form or content, more passionate about perception or emotion?” Without that open mind poets will inevitably make choices that depend on superficial criteria—what’s fashionable, what’s stamped with academia’s seal of approval, what’s politically correct, etc.—rather than finding the answers within themselves. What is the poem within me that’s struggling to force its way out, whether or not it matches my latest intellectual convictions?

Your only responsibility when writing is to the poem, and if you’ve got post-avant opinions but (please God, not that) a Kooser-esque poem within you—or vice versa!—you need to be true to the poem. Anything else is like being a parent who rejects a child if they’re the “wrong” gender. I don’t think you can invent yourself as a poet. You can only discover that you’re a dramatic poet or a meditative poet or whatever. At some point you’ve just got to do the aesthetic amniocentesis and discover that “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!” and celebrate!

The Terrifying Angel

Reginald Shepherd has a wonderful essay, “Notes Toward Beauty,” on his blog. As he says, “It is very fashionable, indeed almost de rigueur, to condemn beauty as oppressive.” He goes on, “It was Edmund Burke who first distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime as that which submits to us versus that which overwhelms us,” and then he points out that genuine, “Rilkean” beauty is the sublime. I think Shepherd is profoundly right to make this personal—“I have felt haunted by the beauty of men that I did not possess and could not make mine”—because it is through such personal haunting that we are compelled to submit to beauty in our everyday lives.

In the myth of the judgment of Paris, Paris must choose between Athena, goddess of wisdom, Hera, goddess of marriage, and Aphrodite, goddess of beauty. It seems possible that, like us, Paris would have condemned beauty as oppressive. He would have wanted to choose the wisdom of Athena or the constancy of Hera. But he was overwhelmed and made the inevitable choice, and so began what Joyce called the nightmare of history: the Trojan War and ultimately all wars.

It seems to me that this is the connection between beauty and justice, beauty and truth, that Shepherd (and Keats!) are talking about. We can’t truthfully say that life is happy or just, only that it is beautiful. In that sense beauty and tragedy are intertwined, and the wariness people have of beauty is justified to the extent that beauty can be used to rationalize a complacency towards tragedy, as if it’s the way things will always be so you may as well not try to change anything.

The image of Aphrodite anadyomene (Aphrodite rising from the waves being born) is a classic image of beauty, but what do we mean by that? Is this beauty as “sublime” or beauty as “pretty”? There’s certainly an erotic component (Venus in wet T-shirt), but that’s not all. There’s something deeply moving and beautiful when contradictory elements are united (when “the fire and the rose are one,” as Eliot and Dante said), and in this case it’s something about how the water from which Aphrodite is rising is reflected in the watery texture of the gowns—and all of this communicated through the medium of stone!

There’s something about how the sculptor is learning to convey the presence of a human body beneath the pleated fabric of a gown—again, both the flesh and the fabric (that both conceals and reveals) created out of marble, out of nothing, a solid nothing. And there’s also something about how the illusion of flesh is more real because the illusion of fabric is real. Seeing the flesh through the fabric, we forget that all we are seeing is stone, and the flesh within the fabric becomes a metaphor for the real mystery, Rilke’s terrifying angel rising within the stone. If stone can become water and flesh, then what metamorphosis is impossible?

The Profile Makers

I know I’ve been absent without leave for a long time, but I’m coming back because at Melissa’s urging, I’ve been reading The Profile Makers by Linda Bierds. I’m probably biased because Bierds so often seems to do so dazzlingly exactly what I try to do in my own poems but do somewhat less dazzlingly. I realize it’s a project that doesn’t interest many people at all, although those may be the sort of cynics who walk into Chartres Cathedral and say, “This God stuff is so yesterday’s news. Been there done that.”

As I’ve said before, I am always struck by poems with wheels within wheels of imagination. In “The Ghost Trio” by Bierds, for example, the poet imagines herself as Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) imagining a painting he’d once seen of ice skaters and imagining how the skate blades would look to imagined fish below in the imagined ice in the imagined painting in the imagined world of Erasmus Darwin—and indirectly imagining how Charles Darwin’s vision might have evolved from his grandfather’s imagination.

Perhaps they are stunned
by the strange heaven—dotted with

boot soles and chair legs
and are slumped on the mud-rich bottom—
waiting through time for a kind of shimmer,
an image perhaps, something
known and familiar, something

rushing above in their own likeness,
silver and blade-thin at the rim of the world.

Sometimes when imagination is fully realized, it seems there’s nothing more to ask of a poem. Any “epiphany” would be superfluous, as the simple act of immersing yourself so completely in the quiet winter of 1748 is already as meaningful and dramatic as, say, Juliet’s suicide: “This is thy sheath; there rust.”

Bierds’ poem “Balance” is about L.J.M. Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype, but only refers to photography briefly at the start of the poem: “before time balanced / on a silver plate.” The rest of the poem is about Daguerre as a youth balancing on a tightrope, his inevitable falls, and how the world looks to him on his back on the flagstone streets as he looks up at “the rooflines and eaves, / all the doves in their darkening chambers.” That image of “all the doves in their darkening chambers” suggests so exquisitely how the experience led him to photography. The earlier reference to “time balanced on a silver plate” seems almost superfluous. Daguerre was in theater when young so my guess is the poem is biographically accurate, but it’s wonderful to think that Bierds might have invented the whole tightrope-walking period of his life.

Bierds’ poem “Shawl: Dorothy Wordsworth at Eighty” describes Dorothy and her brother William coloring eggs as children, when suddenly violence enters the poem. Typically, it’s not anything Dorothy experienced but something she was told:

Once, I was told of a sharp-shinned hawk
who pursued the reflection of its fleeing prey
through three striations of greenhouse glass:
the arrow of its body cracking first into anteroom,
then desert, then the thick mist
of the fuchsias. It lay in a bloodshawl
of ruby flowers, while the petals of glass
on the brick-work floor repeated its image.
Again and again and again.
As all we have passed through sustains us.

What amazing language: “the thick mist / of the fuchsias”! What an amazing image! “As all we have passed through sustains us” seems unnecessary. What is wonderful is how the final image echoes another image repeated throughout the book: how the glass plate negatives of Mathew Brady’s “lesser” Civil War photos were used as greenhouse windows.

I’m still left with the question of whether imagination by itself can ever be enough. When I read a poem like “The Geographer”—“They are burning the flood fields—such a hissing, hissing, / like a landscape of toads”—it seems it could be. The poem imagines what the geographer in Vermeer’s painting sees outside his window, and also imagines how what he sees is colored by his heart disease: “When the flood waters crested, dark coffins / bobbed down through the cane stalks like blunt pirogues.” Sometimes imagination is wedded to such a passionate compassion that there’s nothing more to ask of a poem.

Never rains, it pours

Two weeks since I posted last, and nobody else, not even Robert, seems to post here lately. I've had a tremendous amount of work--on top of the ongoing problematic situation about which I can't post. On top of this, we had houseguests, people I really love, but still …. And John was away for days during their visit. I tried to be calm and forgiving about this, but it's not really my nature. Still, he stayed up last night with me as I worked until 1:30 a.m., so okay.

I got my copies of FIELD with my poem in it. I got it, but I haven't had the courage to actually look at it yet. I am, at least temporarily, changing the name of the manuscript, BTW, from Demimonde to Conjugated Visits. Maybe it will have better luck.

Gotta run!

Another garden post

Nothing actually poetry related to post here, though my NER came today, which is nice. All the poetry journals John got me for Xmas presents are coming home to roost, which is a good thing. I need to find time to read them before turning in at night, though. If I plan to read them in bed, I usually don't get very far before falling asleep. And I'm waiting for my FIELD to arrive -- with my poem in it, not that the world will change one bit, but it will be nice.

Today I am savoring being home and working in my office, overlooking our gorgeous garden that is sparkling in the sun after the morning's spring rain. I shouldn't say sun too loudly, or it will bring on the fog and the wind, no doubt. But you can't imagine how lovely it is to be here, especially with the very real possibility of not being here much longer. How I wish there were some way I could just work at home, editing or writing as the mood takes me. But it is not going to happen, and the stress of not having the wherewithal to pay the bills isn't fun either. I keep waiting for John to get that Great Big Contract that will lift us out of debt into the style to which we want to become accustomed, that of two not-so-young artists working at their art. I keep waiting to win the lottery too.

The Cecille Bruner rose bush has started to bloom. By May it will be covered with thousands of small, intensely pink, perfectly formed roses, no bigger than a quarter. The Douglas iris, the red Peruvian lilies, the periwinkle, the little pink and white daisy-looking things whose names I forgot--all these and more are blooming, and the Japanese maple, new green and tinged with red moves in the breeze like a creature breathing.

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Greta likes her walks. And she likes nothing better on her walks than a well-kept lawn. Greta is a connoiseur of lawns. And she really shows her pleasure.

Spring Break!

Yes, almost two whole weeks before I have to deal with it again. Delightful! That is all I will allow myself to say. (And actually, there are some loose ends to tie up, despite my freedom.)

I'm still waiting on some editing work that is supposed to come in today. Meanwhile, I've been revising my Picasso women poems, which I may send out as a chapbook. It's a very rich repast -- revising one poem after another -- so writing this post is sort of cleansing my palate. (I've revised 6 out of the 20 pages, the first four women, since Tuesday.)

I find that time is the best tool for revision. If I can put something away wholly for six months to a year, I can hear it with new ears and see it with new eyes.

The good news is I think it isn't bad. I've been pretty discouraged lately re po biz. Look, I'm not going to be the next new new thing. But I can write. Still.

Tying in this post with Robert's post that came before it and with the mini-brouhaha that has arisen about David Sedaris's making a story out of his life, I have always asserted that there's a very porous membrane separating truth and fiction (or truth and poetry, as in my Picasso poems). Of course I'm putting words in these women's mouths and what "actually" happened was different, but so is any recounting of one's life or another's. As soon as you write it, you put a frame around it, much as a photographer takes what he sees and frames it. This idea was the "subject" of my Master's thesis, way back in the last century.

This Actually Happened!

Slate has an interesting dialogue this week between poets Dan Chiasson and Meghan O’Rourke on autobiography and poetry, as part of a “Memoir Week.” What most interests me is not really the issue of autobiography and memoir, but what Dan Chiasson calls “the reality guarantee”:

But what about when writers play to the readerly preference for facts? Here we are on riskier grounds. “This actually happened!” writes Allen Ginsberg at the end of “Howl,” of a story so fantastical—a man jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge and walks away unharmed—that we might otherwise categorize it as “surreal.” But if we DID categorize it that way, it would be just another one of the marvelous, incandescent, surreal details in “Howl”—nice but forgettable. Because Ginsberg underwrites it with this remarkable assertion—”this actually happened”—(and because, importantly, he says that only ONCE in the whole poem) the bridge-jumping episode becomes, for me, the most powerful thing in the poem. It’s as though the curtain parted and the “real” Ginsberg, suddenly playing by the ordinary rules of “factual” depiction, addressed the “real” reader.

This move—let’s call it the “reality guarantee”—needn’t be so explicit as saying, “This actually happened.” There are other ways to cue a documentary response in readers, other terms of the documentary contract. The visually ingenious detail, so real it feels like a snapshot (the doilies, for example, in Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station”) or the affective detail so open and attractive as to feel “artless” (as when Frank O’Hara says “fun” in the first line of “Having a Coke with You”). And there are acts of strong intimacy, like Hopkins when he tells God, “I am gall, I am heartburn,” or like Herbert’s when (in “The Flower”) he exclaims, “Who would have thought my shriveled heart / Could have recovered greenness.” Or take it further back: you mention Sappho. When Sappho describes turning “greener than grass” at the sight of her beloved in the presence of a man, or when the anonymous poets of the Greek Anthology proclaim across the millennia, “I press my lips to yours.” These moments read as “real,” no matter what cultural or historical distance intervenes, and I must say, these moments are more or less what I look for in poems.

Whine Glass--Half Empty

I know it's because I had a lousy night -- awoken at least four times by my own internals, by the cat outside, by the tightening and tightening of the chains of our quotidian constraints -- but I'm having an awful hard time doing what I need to do today. I don't need anyone to remind me that I am in the larger existential sense lucky. And I don't really think there's any cosmic force weighing things, allowing this much angst for that much fortune. But I'm worried. I'm worried that at this stage of life we haven't figured out how to play the game well enough to win more than we lose. I'm worried because my strength is failing me. It's not even that I don't want to fight any more, but that the wear and tear is killing me. Three steps up and two down, two steps up and three down. How long can one bear this?

I'll stop, I promise. The day is lovely. Maybe later on today I will be able to nap and probably the world will then improve. Maybe there will be a letter, a phone call, an email that will help me see it.

Just Musing

I know, it's been forever since I've posted anything here, but I couldn't resist responding to a message about poetry and muses on the Warren Wilson listserv so I'll post it here too.

Hey, Carlen, sometime last week you asked, “If any of you believe in a Muse (or muses), what is it you believe?” I’ve been thinking about this, as I really do believe in a muse. I suppose I believe in an inner figure who is not me and who I’d damn well better treat as real if I care about my writing. It’s rather corny but (like Greg, as I recall) I’ve been influenced by James Hillman. It may be corny but I think it works. When I’ve felt stuck in my writing it’s really helped me to sit and write a dialogue with my muse. In fact I think the corniness and the shallowness and the whole intellectual shamefulness of it is part of its essence. I think we’ve got to be willing to look stupid in order to be creative. I think we need less Derrida and more Mary had a little lamb.

Anyway, if you’re interested in reading further, here’s a short excerpt from Hillman’s Healing Fiction:

The next example is from an elderly man, well past sixty, who came from abroad after his wife had died. He had no children. He came to Zurich, took a little room, and began studying everything psychological that he could lay his hands on. He kept a journal. Here is an entry from the journal:

“August 27. Still so cold, I cooked a hot lunch, then back to Neumann. After a while my attention wandered and I heard a clear young voice say, “Where have you been staying, Father?” It could have been the voice of a boy or a girl. If I jump to the conclusion that because of the letter from B, the dream father is dead, then I can now take the father role. I am becoming a father. If it was a boy talking, then is he the divine child in me? Or what? If it was a girl, then presumably she will be an anima figure? But why do I become her father? I am lost ... Later: Since the above, I tried to contact the voice with all the most inviting phrases I could summon, but to no avail. Just sit back and love the voice, you old fool. Relax.”

I do believe you have felt this man’s simple and rather tragic mistake. It is simple because all he would have had to do was hear the child’s question—where has he been?—and try to respond to it. And it is tragic in that he answered the voice by psychologisms and interpretations, that is, he used psychology against the soul. ... The child did not say ‘love me.’ It asked him, loud and clear, where have you been staying, father. He missed the moment. All his beseeching and cajoling could not bring it back ....

Other echoes / Inhabit the garden

… shall we follow them? A lovely lamb-like March day, almost 60° -- not as warm as the next few days are forecast. I opened the shades in my office that I need to keep closed in the morning to see the monitor and looked out at the garden. One of the Douglas irises was in bloom, so I went out to look at it. Outside, I saw that another had bloomed and gone already, without my seeing it. Hopefully, John saw it, and the Greta sniffed at it. But it made me sad that my life is so busy and in turmoil that I'd missed it entirely. Maybe this weekend we can put in some time out back.

Elsewhere in the garden is a volcanic-type rock with a hole in it. A calla lily is blooming straight through the hole. Well, okay, I suspect John set that up to happen but still, it's neat, isn't it?

Here's a question that needs to be asked: If you have submitted a ms. to a competition one year, is it worth resubmitting it the next year if it's unchanged or hardly changed?

Stay-at-home Cinderella

Well, I wish I'd been to AWP, though I would probably be a hundred times green with envy and consumed by desire to be read and admired. But I would rather be anywhere than in my little life right now, for reasons I'm not at liberty … Though I love my John, my son and his sweetie, and my dog.

If I can drum up any excuse, I'll be at the next one in NYC, the city that is like someone I sort of knew a long time ago. And I will see if the old haunts are still haunted -- or there.

Dorset Update

Received notice this a.m. that Sandra Meek of Mt. Berry, GA is the winner of this year's Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press). I'll bet she has fun at AWP.

My ms., Demimonde, was one of 23 semifinalists out of 1,200 submissions. Oh well.

Sunday bit

We now have a decorous, little, yellow No Through Street sign on the corner, where the huge rude red Dead End sign was for a short time, only a little while ago. Still, you would be surprised at how many people drive up this hill, only to have to do a U-turn on top. Once, there was even a police pursuit up here, just like the movies. You used to be able to walk over the top of the hill, part of the Orizaba bump, a huge rock that is city owned, but the houses up there encroached, and they say possession is 9/10 of the law. So now it's No Through Street for people too, and when I walk the dog over the hill, we have to come down Orizaba or Jules and walk back up ours.

I'm sure that was fascinating. Not much poetry happening here. As usual, lines pass through my brain, but I don't feel at liberty these days to grab them and write them down.

We may get the house painted, adding another huge bit to what we owe the banks. Well, we've been driving around and looking at colors.

Rain was fierce last night, or so John tells me. I've been sleeping poorly for days and last night was so far gone, I slept right through it. In this caesura of sun I should take out the dog.

Waazat?

Two loud explosive noises that startled me, and then, even louder, a third. But I don't hear any sirens, so I guess it's nothing. There is construction on Grafton, our cross street (all morning the jackhammers were hammering; now it is quiet). I suspect they were just unloading some large delivery there.

The sky is gray and blue, a serious pretty. The way the light is hitting the ocean -- the closer portion a pearly white, the farther part a deeper pewter -- it looks like the container ship that's out there is defying gravity, floating. Yes, I know it is floating, but it looks to be floating on a cloud.

I was at SF State today for a meeting with a student. When I finished my miscellaneous business, the one-way street I was parked on was blocked by a delivery truck. About 15 or so cars were stuck, everyone just waiting. We could see that the shuttle driver behind the truck had called someone, and everyone, like me, must have just figured what is there to do? People were bored, but relatively resigned. No one leaned on a horn.

Speaking of resigned, I got notice in the mail today of another competition where I am a semifinalist.

I'm reading Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. I love her writing, how she ties things together, makes you experience the shifts of consciousness that happen, takes you into the mind of an earlier time. I'd like to do as much in my poetry somehow.

Gosh

So I'm filling out an application for a scholarship -- yeah, you can guess, I'm sure. And I swear that I read that you need to provide the names and addresses of two people in the writing field who can provide references. This isn't easy for people like me who got their graduate degrees decades ago and who aren't that good at schmoozing. But I got my courage together to write to two people who have been kind to me in the past. One answered immediately; the other took some tracking down. But both said v. nice things, agreed to be references. Okay, now I go to fill out my application and only one name is needed! I have half a mind to put down both anyway! I can't decide. And what could be the harm?

Well, I don't know, but I'm thinking about it.

I'm in a decent frame of mind this morning -- class over and almost a week before the next. I need to start preparing for my other class, my poetry workshop, if indeed there are enough registered for it to happen. And I actually have some editing work coming in tomorrow.

Valentine's Day was good. Lovely lavender roses, champagne, smoked salmon and marscarpone on sourdough toast for dinner, Jon Stewart and old SNL on the TV.

Signs and Wonders

Out this morning with the dog a little later, around 7:00. Clouds a pale pink with underside of taupe, the frivolous and the solemn. As we walked -- without my noticing the transition -- the sky turned a steadfast blue. John's fleece-lined yellow jacket I had borrowed became a redundancy, as did my gloves and white wool beret.

Now it's mid morning, breakfast of sourdough cracked wheat toast with peanut butter, grapefruit juice, and black coffee over, John and dog gone to the studio, I pulled out the yoga mat. I think it's been months since I've done yoga -- I've been so stressed -- and it's stupid, stupid, stupid not to, because it always makes me feel less stressed, optimistic, not yet cured of my winter soul, but better.

Oh yeah, I checked the flower boxes in front of the house. Tulips beginning to push up beneath the violas.

California Gothic

It's a nice quiet rainy weekend in San Francisco -- well, at least, for me. I've been very involved with the class I'm teaching at SF State in the TPW program. It takes almost all of my time and energy. In between, I try to keep up with po biz -- submitting, applying, and so forth.

We got a lot done today, a lot of little things, like putting up paintings in my office. And, of course we spent quality time with Greta la pooch. We cleaned, we got groceries. What? You want something more exciting here? You want poetry?

Here's an old poem, an old, old poem. How old? It was written when I lived at my first San Francisco address (a totally cool address: 789 Tenth Avenue). We moved from there in 1982. The poem was in my Master's thesis. But it was written on a rainy day, like this.

California Gothic

More rain comes down on streets already slick --
    purple liquids  iridescent greens
ooze, effulgent
    scum, jewels -- cool, radiant, evil ...

Two doors away, medics remove a small white parcel,
    the elderly lady who lived there
who, bird-boned, beak-nosed
    neither spoke or smiled
but only, over and over
    swept her piece of sidewalk.

Sick or dead? you ask, as I enter.
    I don't know, I tell you.
I want to forget her, now that I'm next to
   your dry, warm skin
but the palm fronds sway,
    retreat and beckon --
shadow of a hand trying to get in.

A good evening

Last night was a really good evening here on my high, gray hill. (BTW, someone stole the new and enormous red "Dead End" sign, recently at the foot of the hill. I imagine the sign is decorating some dorm room somewhere.) Well, I came back from class, survivor that I am, and John was home about five minutes later. Over a bottle of 2-Buck-Chuck Shiraz and a baked frozen Trader Joe's pizza, John told me the good news. The SF Opera director, David Gockley is pushing for John's photography, has told "his people" to make the show happen. Oh, it won't happen right away. They need more of the divas represented, they want every opera photographed. (John has photographed principals, chorus, and supers in costume -- gorgeous and unusual detailed portraits that knock you out.) But he's got a virtual guarantee now that it will happen. John has been working on this so long and so hard. It is just wonderful news.

As for me, I've got a bad cold, have used up enough tissues to deforest a small forest. I very rarely get sick, and I'm fairly annoyed that I have. I was planning on going out this morning to distribute fliers for my City College C.E. poetry workshop that starts in March, but I'm probably going to stay in with my green tea and my space heater, the fog outside in the city and inside my head.

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Here's an article from the Boston Globe about what eleven poets are reading. What are you reading?



*****

In the mind of the beholder

Oh, tired. That second cup of coffee better do it for me. It's bad enough to get up in the six o'clock dark to walk the dog, but when you wake up an hour earlier -- I heard John's "grandfather clock" chime and could swear it chimed six times, but it must have been five -- well, I lay there wondering if I hadn't set the alarm. I am too nearsighted to see a clock without my glasses, and putting on my glasses … Okay, enough of this.

Yesterday was my first class (teaching) at SF State. I'm teaching not poetry, but a course in the Technical and Professional Writers Program. The first hurdles were tough: getting an ID card and email account and so forth -- and getting this all in the name I use now vs. the name I used as a graduate student. But I've cleared most of those hurdles, and yesterday was the class. Hooboy. I won't say I was awful, but, if I had a buck for every time I said "uh," I could retire and write. So, okay, I guess it will get easier, and I do have a lot of real world experience to impart, but let me say that last night, when I was back home to John's hug and a large glass of wine, it was an immense relief. And now there are just fifteen more classes to go.

Meantime, my contract writing job has gone dormant, which means ouch …

The other day, I sat in my car, eating a tuna sandwich and listening to the public radio while waiting until it was time for my appointment with the TPW director. I was listening to a program discussing the death of -- no, not poetry! -- classical music. The whole discussion was word-for-word identical to those we've all heard bemoaning the lack of audience and respect for poetry. They even had Dana Gioia there (who, by the way, never brought up poetry, though he talked about the necessity of maintaining public school programs for music, journalism, and theatre). Well, they also brought on the prize-winning composer John Corigliano. And he changed the tack of the discussion a bit.

He started talking about how necessary it was for radio to broadcast and people to attend concerts for new music, "classical" compositions by modern composers. This was because of the important "adventure of of learning what you think of what you are listening to." (I hope I got that quote right.) By making critical judgments for oneself, he maintained, one particpated in the art experience. He said he wasn't saying not to listen to the old masters, but that you lacked this experience when listening to a performance of their work. You could listen for all sorts of things in the performance, but you accept that Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and so forth are great.

This rang all sorts of bells with me. For one thing, I remember growing up in NYC and attending fine arts films when I was a teenager. (Yeah, I actually watched movies then, before I was hypersensitive to them.) And I remember once or twice leaving the movie with my friends who would like something and I wouldn't or I would like something that they wouldn't, and what a thrill it was, to think about the reasons and to have an opinion. It was all new then!

I love this part of reading new poetry too, of reading something -- one reason I like tackling poems one at a time, instead of book-wise too -- and savoring it in my mouth and hearing it in my mind and deciding for myself what I think ot it. It brings up that whole idea of different people being ready for art at different times too. But the experience of art for oneself. Think about it.

From the Spaceship

I switched over to the new Blogger and am trying to post again. As I said in my comment below, I’ve been combing through old stuff in my mother’s house, including some of my old records from high school. Surrealistic Pillow, Cheap Thrills, Blonde on Blonde. One that brought back memories was Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. I actually saw Miles play several of the pieces from Bitches Brew at the Monterey Jazz Festival (in 1969?), and, unbelievably, I saw him with my mother.

All this music and recording also reminded me of the wonderful Ralph J. Gleason, jazz (and later rock) critic for the San Francisco Chronicle for many years. I found Gleason’s liner notes for the original Bitches Brew. Here’s an excerpt:

it will never be the same again now, after in a silent way and after BITCHES BREW. listen to this. how can it ever be the same? i don’t mean you can’t listen to ben. how silly. we can always listen to ben play funny valentine, until the end of the world it will be beautiful and how can anything be more beautiful than hodges playing passion flower? he never made a mistake in 40 years. it’s not more beautiful, just different. a new beauty. a different beauty. the other beauty is still beauty. this is new and right now it has the edge of newness and that snapping fire you sense when you go out there from the spaceship where nobody has ever gone before.

Today this attitude feels to me like a breath of fresh air: celebrating the electricity of new art without denying the beauty of the old. Isn’t this the only honest attitude to have? I would love to hear someone praise cutting-edge experimental poetry and at the same time say, “How can anything be more beautiful than Keats’ ‘To Autumn’?” I would love to hear someone praise James Wright and at the same time praise the snapping fire of contemporary experiments with language. Isn’t anything else just posturing and hypocrisy?

Post post

I'll be brief: I went through with the dental torture that I've put off since November. I guess my dentist is very persuasive. She let me know that the choice was: bad now or really bad some time down the road. I'm a real wuss, though, and even having a good excuse for ice cream this evening did not remotely make this fun.

Well, back to the ice pack -- peas and carrots, carrots and peas. Wish the ibuprofren would kick in.

Just noticed

Um, so we're on the new Blogger now, and it's just like the old Blogger. Little different, but not much. But I just realized we've lost our team list on the right here ----> and instead, my picture is smilin' at you. But only until I figure out how to get our team list back. So don't worry.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is the scoop: "Team members who have not yet switched to the new version will still see the blog on their dashboards, but it will be grayed out and inaccessible. Once those members move their own accounts to the new version of Blogger, they will be able to access the blog as before."

Let's work on this ...

Whoohoo! We're back in business!

Yes, I haven't fallen off the planet, but was having publishing problems, as is evident below. I finally figured it out about ten minutes ago (will spare you the details).

And no, for all that, there's not much news. Maybe I'll think of something by the time I get back from walking the dog.

Testing (again)

Been trying to publish, without success, for about 5 days now. Will this work?

Let's see if this works ...

Been having a lot of trouble republishing the blog. Last night, I switched to the new Blogger in hopes it would help, and well it didn't. But let's try it this morning.

New post, same as the old post

Anyone know where I got that title from? No matter. It would only prove how old I am. My point is, I don't really have much to say, but it's been more than a week since someone posted here, and there's nothing as boring as a stagnant blog.

I thought seriously of changing to the new Blogger template, but I thought better of it. I will, eventually, just have too many things on my mind right now. Not that I'm very busy ... Okay, FedEx just delivered a template I needed, so I actually have something to do. Sort of. But mostly, two jobs on hold (bills not on hold, unfortunately). My teaching job at SFSU to start in two weeks. My other teaching job at CCCE to start in two months. Lots of po biz deadlines coming up. I NEED TO GET ORGANIZED!

But where to start? When my son used to freak out about disorganization, I would tell him it doesn't matter where you start. Start anywhere. I also would say not to get overwhelmed about the magnitude of the problem. I need a mom, that's what! Alas.

What I really need is not nagging but to stop the nagging feeling that it doesn't matter. I need something good to happen. I've been holding myself up, like a suspension bridge, too long.

Parties are over, new year's begun

Must remember to go out and get New Year's cards. It's not premeditated, my sending cards so late, but it's happened for years now. There's just all this other crap to do by a certain date and now, well, theoretically, I have 363 days to write and send them. Okay, I've also been waiting to do a family photo for the cards. With a family of *3* -- now 4 -- and a photographer in the family, you'd think that wouldn't be a problem, but then you don't know how things happen around here. If I'm going to insist on the photos, I may need 363 days ....

It was hard getting up this morning in the dark, hard getting back into my typical weekday routine of throwing on my clothes and taking the dog out, continuing my dreams while I sleepwalk, just as long as I don't get doggie or self run over. But I'm not sorry the holiday routine is over. I'm tired of parties. My body is tired of living on cheese and crackers; I need to get back to my three times a week working out; I have a mountain of laundry, an empty bank account, and anxiety dreams. And I'm all out of small talk.

Yesterday, at a party, a probably very well-meaning person asked me what kind of poetry I wrote. Well, Robert was at the same party and he introduced us as poets. I had to assure the questioner that no, we didn't make our livings writing sonnets. But to the question of kind, I had no answer. Robert started to answer for me, and I didn't agree with his taxonomy. I went off in search of wine to help my answer. But then it seemed easier to avoid the question entirely, to stick to the easier party topics like neighborhoods and schools and college applications -- for which everyone has opinions.

Well, then, hoping that Robert isn't mad at me for copping out, I thought I would post the question here. I'm hoping it's at least a few months before I'm in party mode again and have to have an answer. But what answers do you have for that question (what kind of poetry do you write?)? How much do assume your questioner knows or doesn't know? Do they just want to hear whether you use rhyme? Would you give the same answer to all questioners, or do you tailor it? I often give the short, snotty answer, "my kind." But I know that doesn't mean anything. Is that insulting to the questioner? Tell me what you think!

BTW, I never kept last year's resolution to read through my entire poetry shelves from A-Z. In fact, I never got out of the Bs. So this year, like the perpetual dieter who always swears to lose X number of pounds and can't keep to it, I'm going to generalize my goals. So, I will read more (poetry). And God help me, this year, I'm going to have my book accepted.

Gneiss going!

Robert Thomas will read as part of the Gneiss Poetry Series (with Gayle Brandeis) on Tuesday, January 9, 7:00 pm at:

Auditorium - Room B-100, UCR - Palm Desert Campus
At the corner of Cook St. & Frank Sinatra Dr.
In the building closest to the parking lot.
 
See University of California Riverside for directions.

Wish I could go and hear Robert and maybe get some warm weather!
 

End and beginning

Merry, happy everything to all of you out there. Our Christmas was quiet, the only less-than-perfect was Nathaniel waking up at 4:00 in the morning with food poisoning from the party the night before. (John, Jen, and I had been at the same party and were fine, but none of us ate the sushi.) N's being off put a crimp in our Christmas -- and meant that John ate all the bacon himself. But after a bit, N. was not exactly fine but in good enough shape to have some of the maple pecan wreath bread that I make every year.

We had a quiet day -- eating and sitting by the fire and watching SNL from the first season (John and I just going out and were living together in Manhattan back then and, boy, those shows bring back memories. We had in-jokes about the Great Fabod and ...). But still it fell to me to do all the cooking and more of the cleaning than I would have liked, and so I am not too sorry that I'm stuck today at the Superior Court for jury duty and forced to sit. John probably doesn't mind too much either, since his plan for today was to do nothing and I'm not sure I could have allowed that :)

But it's raining, I've got Internet access. So far, a room full of people is just waiting and waiting. The dog -- she liked her presents, esp. the dried chicken breasts, and she lost no time burying her new bone in the back yard -- will miss me today.

We did hear sobering news of two deaths -- three if you count James Brown, and you really gotta. One of these was one of John's poker buddies who was part of the group we had dinner with last New Year's Eve. He wasn't exactly a friend of mine, for reasons I don't want to go into here, but still. Hella difference a year makes ... .

May be my last post before the big night, so best to you and may life be good to you in 2007.

Christmas Eve Miscellany

Sunny, chilly weather (chilly meaning 50, not 35 degrees), a perfect California Christmas Eve. We got the last of the decorating done (lights on the big schiffelera plant on the front porch). Annie did the tree and stashed greenery around the living room, quite artfully. I didn't have to do much this year.

We have various social plans but the real holiday means no one getting up early, no shopping, no work, just music, reading and the 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Clark Cable (I actually typed Clark Bagel first--time for breakfast) on the dining room table now that the wrapping apparatus has been cleared. We don't have to cook Christmas dinner, we're eating with friends tomorrow. I'm making a persimmon cake though (with the most fabulous ginger-lemon whipped cream). I think I have a poem brewing. At last.

Happy Holidays!

And so it goes ...

I don't know how I knew, but I did, that Demimonde would not make the cut at Tupelo. The story so far: I submitted my ms. to Tupelo for their July open submissions last year, in 2005. We were supposed to be informed by the end of October. Finally, I emailed at the end of the year to find out that my manuscript came close but was not chosen. As a booby prize, Jeffrey Levine entered it in the Dorset Prize for me, even though the deadline had already passed. And Demimonde was a finalist.

I submitted it to the Tupelo Prize, which was first books only, and it was not only a finalist, but one of five runners up.

I submitted Demimonde to the July open submissions again this year, along with 999 others, or thereabouts. I was told it was one of 25 that would be considered -- four would be taken.

Earlier this week I learned that it was one of nine still on the table, but I didn't have a good feeling about it. A few minutes ago, I got the following email:

Dear Diane,

We have made our final decisions. Your book was on the table until the very end, but . . .

I know it must be off-the-charts frustrating to keep coming so close. I wish I could offer something more helpful than it's a great manuscript (which it is), and that it WILL get taken -- here or elsewhere.

Best,
Jeffrey

I'm grateful for the closure. The waiting and hoping was driving me crazy. And so, in less than 2 weeks, we start another year.

Red-haired poets, etc.

Did anyone hear the live Prairie Home Companion from NYC today? We were on our way to Funston to walk the pooch and heard it on KQED. Guy Noir was hired to help? cheer up? someone's daughter who had moved to NY, dyed her hair red (!), adopted an all-black wardrobe, and become a poet. Regardless of what one thinks of Keillor's avuncular approach to poetry or his perhaps ill-advised anthology, this was very funny! A "former poet laureate," played, I think by Billy Collins, reviewed this poet's first collection in the Times and said its major mistake was that it was legible. He, the PL, is revealed to be the person who invented MFAs, wherein a poet is put in a room for 2 years, made to write, and charged $20,000 -- and at the end of two years is awarded an MFA. Ah well, maybe you had to be there -- there being listening to the radio -- but it was quite amusing, if you can find it to listen to on a podcast.

And believe me, if I can be amused these days, you can be amused. Though I have no information of any sort, I'm pretty sure the news I'm waiting is not good. I'm so tired of hoping.

My life is getting busy, busy, busy. I will be juggling two different contracts soon, a writing and an editing one. As of the end of January, I should be teaching writing (not poetry, alas) at SF State. In March I'm doing another Poetry Workshop for City College CE.

But all I want for Christmas is for my manuscript to get picked up by somebody. How can all these people like it but not enough to publish it?

Oh, I also want Santa to bring me some new reading glasses, because I lose the damn things all the time.

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Can anyone out there help us with our updating problem in BlogRolling? It was working fine for ages but now doesn't seem to work at all (doesn't show blogs as updated when they have been)? I haven't been able to get any help from them, though I'm still trying. Thanks,
-d

Grease

Hard to believe we're going to the Sing-Along Grease today at the Castro theater. Annie and three of her friends, Linda and I and two of our friends. Love that movie but I'm not sure about this. Also hard to believe I'm going to wear a little knee-length pleated skirt and a fuchsia-colored boat-neck sweater. Linda's wearing a leather jacket and white T-shirt and plans to do something icky with her hair. I'm sure we won't be the only grey-haired Greasers there. The audience will be as entertaining as the show. Annie is being very tolerant. At 14 I wouldn't have gone out in public with my parents dressed like their high school days.

Will report back later.

Malaise

Malaise is a nicer word, I think, than dis-ease, though they have the same root meaning. I've been suffering from mal-ease for weeks (mais je ne suis pas malade), not a consequence of the holidays, nor the weather, nor my girlfriend spending too much time watching football nor my daughter barely touching ground at home, these being explanations I've been tried on. Besides, Linda (girlfriend) is who she's always been, Annie (daughter) is having a great time being a freshman in high school, a remarkable accomplishment, I like Christmas this year for no good reason and the weather has only been dreary for a week or so (should change on Sunday anyway).

It's a writing malaise, or a not-writing malaise. I'm not writing and so I'm not all right. That simple. I can't get in the writing gear, my few efforts go bad. No disease, just a case of going nowhere now. A comment from Richard Powers (who just won a National Book Award) on NPR yesterday made it clear to me. He said "If you're a writer and you haven't been writing for a couple of days, everyone around you will see you're out of sorts." Or something like that. And if you haven't been writing for weeks and weeks? I guess you're ready for the recycling bin.

I don't suppose writing a blog entry counts.

'Tis the Season

I go about in my own little world, up here in the grayness that is San Francisco. I just jumped about a foot at a knock at the door -- the postman leaving a package I ordered (books for my son, AI and programming). Very heavy scent of cologne when I opened the door, even though the postman was already down the steps and jumping into his truck. Anyway, the books -- not the postman or his cologne -- reminded me of a conversation at a party yesterday. I was conversing with a physicist. He asked me what I did and I could have said, should have said, maybe, that I'm a technical writer and editor, but I said I was a poet. The next question is usually, "What kind of poetry do you write?" But this time, it was whether I was published. I said yes, and he asked me if I was in any publication he had heard of, like the New Yorker. Once we established that I was not in any publication he had heard of, he said he doesn't read poetry. He tried once or twice. He tried to read "The Wasteland" and couldn't get it.

I really want a good answer when some stranger puts me in the position of defending poetry, especially when they use Eliot as a weapon. I tried asking if he gets all the music he might listen to. I said if he just experienced the poetry he would get something out of it -- and why worry about "getting" everything. I said I thought part of the problem was one's high school teacher and all those papers that had you discuss three metaphors in XYZ and how they relate to the theme of death and resurrection in ... Oh, then he asked what my poetry was about. But we didn't get much further than that in the conversation. I joined a friendly group discussing photography, jazz, Hawaii, and various hilarious episodes about marijuana and flying.

Well, the season is in full swing (plugged in and running on its own momentum, as I said to someone in email). I'm both oddly calm and very tense (see above, jumping a foot) at the same time. Still waiting to hear about my manuscript in "early December." But I've already accepted that it will be a no go, so why should I be tense?

John's photography got a wonderful reception from the Opera hierarchy, but no date for a show yet.

Tomorrow is the twelfth day of the twelfth month. What does that mean? Haven't the faintest, but I'd be careful around noon, if I were you.

Some Like It Hot

I’ve been interested in the discussion among Mark, Eric, Josh and others about immersive vs. anti-absorptive literature. I think those terms originated in Charles Bernstein’s essay “Artifice of Absorption,” where he defines the terms this way:

By absorption I mean engrossing, engulfing
completely, engaging, arresting attention, reverie,
attention intensification, rhapsodic, spellbinding,
mesmerizing, hypnotic, total, riveting,
enthralling: belief, conviction, silence.

Impermeability suggests artifice, boredom,
exaggeration, attention scattering, distraction,
digression, interruptive, transgressive,
undecorous, anticonventional, unintegrated, fractured,
etc.

In other words, “absorptive” literature values all those qualities “prized” in “mainstream” “art”: “What a spellbinding novel!” As Susan Schultz says in her essay “Postmodern Promos,” “one cannot ‘get lost’ in a Language poem the way one can get lost in a Harlequin romance.”

The terms immersive and anti-absorptive capture just what I’ve been trying to articulate in a couple of earlier posts here, e.g., “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.” Obviously I have a different perspective, though, as I am praising the very immersion that others criticize. Of course it’s easy to see the point of the criticism, the value of writing that forces us out of our comfort zone (as opposed to a mystery or romance we immerse ourselves in like a warm bath). And yet, and yet … I can’t help feeling that criticism of immersion conceals a fear of immersing oneself in life itself, a fear of commitment. Not to mention fear of sexuality, fear of eros, fear of romance, Harlequin or not. Sure, when you take your kids to the park to play on the swings, it’s good to be meta-aware of all the sociological and class implications of what you’re doing. On the other hand, at a certain point doesn’t all that awareness become an excuse to maintain a safe and ironic distance from your own children?

The distinction between immersive and anti-absorptive may be post-postmodern, but it goes back all the way to Plato, the sort of smugness Plato seemed to have—all the time he was praising Socrates he was quietly arguing the superiority of his writing to Socrates’ speaking, the superiority of written literature to oral poetry, for precisely the reasons that writers now criticize immersive work: it encourages the listener to be passively entertained rather than an active and critical participant in the work.

Mark et al. talk about Roland Barthes’ distinction between the “readerly” and the “writerly,” and that seems exactly to the point: immersive literature is readerly and anti-absorptive is writerly. I wish I could remember what poet I was reading recently who talked about the crucial turning point in his writing that came when he realized he was not even writing the sort of poems he wanted to read. Isn't there something very curious about this fear of the terrible bourgeois corruption that will result if the writer ever dares to get into bed with the reader and share some pleasure? It seems to hide a writer’s contempt for the reader within himself, or within herself, as well as for the readers in the world.

God's Chatter

That’s the title of William Logan’s latest review in The New Criterion. But wait! Before you read it, take the quiz.

Match each of the six poets Logan reviews:

A. R. Ammons
Louise Glück
Paul Muldoon
Mark Strand
Natasha Trethewey
Franz Wright

with the line from the review that refers to their work:

Even if you paid through the nose to get a vanity press to publish this, you’d have to bribe the typesetter not to cut his own throat.

__________ writes of his/her parents with no fury or sympathy or even regret, just the blank courtesy of a barista at Starbucks.

These poems rely too heavily on props left over from the 1970s—night and moon and stars, all available by mail order.

The pleasure the poet takes in the senses lies partly in the gratification of disgust.

__________ writes so many poems about a blinding light, I wanted to buy stock in Sylvania

__________ never runs out of things to say, only things worth saying.

Snowman and bougainvillea

Walked the pooch this morning a little late, in the clear light of day. When she's in a good mood (she was), Greta likes to abandon our usual routes and explore. It was a fine morning for that for both of us.

The good burnt toast smell of D'Melanio's coffee roasting filled the neighborhood. The sun was shining. I past a house with a not-yet-inflated snowman and a Santa, then another snowman, then another -- all ghostly empty on square handkerchief-size lawns -- then a hollow plastic 3-D snowman, then a wicker snowman, then another empty one waiting to be pumped. Was there a sale on these things? Did I miss the memo?

I know why the snowman is pervasive, of course. After all, I brought up a kid in a mixed cultural family. For him Christmas was not about a baby Jesus at all. It was about Santa and presents, and he had a hard time giving up the reality of St. Nick! And a snowman is even less freighted with significance than the Santa; it's safe.

Still, it's an odd sign of the pervasiveness of the "dominant paradigm," isn't it? And funny, the snowman next to the bougainvillea.

A conversation about poems

I don't live where I grew up. I don't have to worry about bumping into someone from my past by the avocados in the supermarket (although this actually happened to John here on this other end of the continent). But seeing some people I knew from "back then" this fall, with thoughts of my manuscript actually (oh please) getting published before too long made me feel weird. I gave the manuscript to a few people to read. Tonight I heard from one old dear friend:

"If one purpose of poetry is to allow a reader to see things from a wholly new perspective, it worked …" he said first. That's a good thing, I think. If there can be one purpose of art it must be to change the way one person, maybe, views the world. I would never presume to say to see another reality. Who says my views are real? I do think we go here, go there, then later look back and connect the dots. Any actual cause and effect is fiction. Or we take A and add it to B and come up with an equation that works -- but is it reality? This may be what Charles was talking about recently … Was it?

My friend also asked, "Where DO you get all of your ideas from???" To this I answered: "It's really not a question of ideas. W.C. Williams said, in an injunction to poets of his day: "No ideas but in things."

A SORT OF A SONG

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
---through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

And I continued: "I'll go further than that, in a way. Some ideas come from things -- in those cases, it's a question of how much to reveal, explain, clarify, and how much to evoke and leave mysterious. ('---through metaphor to reconcile / the people and the stones.') But often my ideas come from words, rather than the other way around … The [poem we were talking about] is a poem about language -- at least as much as it is about anything else. (Okay, it's also about loss of innocence or whatever.) But the whole poem involves the way people spoke in Yonkers back then … though I have no idea if young people speak that way now. I'm hyper aware of how people speak. A lot of the poem was intent on capturing that."

He also said: "I admire your courage - I could never be so honest." To which I said, "It's not autobiography. I can be honest because: it's a poem, it's words, it's art." But also, what would be the purpose of being dishonest. It's not as if I'm going to get rich from this stuff.

As in Orwell, the rats ...

That line's from one of my own poems, so I can steal it. This is the story: It became obvious that the smell in the basement was more/other than just the turkey carcass in the compost. It came from under the basement stairs, where we have stored the wooden cradle, rocking horse, high chair. Recently, Greta set to barking, and I heard a rustling there. I asked John to check; he poked around and then, after a bit, the rustling quieted down.

I figured he'd scared away the mom rat, and, well, see below, the process of orphanization (but it won't help). Somebody had to check again, and my hero did so while I was showering this morning. All that was left for me to do was vacuum the dust and cobwebs with the shop vac before putting everything back. Anyway, I was right about the scenario. You want your movie plots ruined, I'll be happy to help.

In other news: In case anyone is keeping track, the reason I haven't posted about the outcome of John's meeting with the Opera personnel is it hasn't happened yet, has been put off until December 7. So we are both waiting on pins to hear news this first part of December. It's either going to be a very good Christmas … or it isn't.

News this morning that the documentary of the making of the Dr. Atomic opera (that my John was a top scientist in) is going to be at Sundance.