Off to AWP

Well, I'm going. I'm working all day tomorrow and not leaving until 11:00 -- on the redeye, but I'm going. I figure I will be in the air 10 hours and in New York, from touchdown to takeoff, a total of 37 hours. (I could only take so much time from work, and even at reduced conference rates, could only afford two nights at the Hilton.) I am looking forward to my Hilton stay. I mean I can't remember the last time I had a bathroom all to myself.

Well, other than a spiffy bathroom and a room of my own for two nights, why am I going? Hell if I know. It's just I figured if I were ever to go to this thing, I might as well go to it the year it's in NYC. I'm from the New York area, though after 31 years in SF, the Big Apple (do they still call it that?) is only a dim memory. I mean, the twin towers were only there a few years before I left. I guess I'm hoping to make the acquaintance, if only in passing, of people I know in print or on blogs. I'll go to Robert and Greg's panel. I'll sneak out for drinks with a couple old friends. And then it will be time to return. Maybe I'll meet someone who will ask me to send my manuscript. Maybe not.

Kitsch: Thought for the Day

I’ve been reading The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross and was struck by this in a chapter on the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius:

“Mainstream audiences may lag behind the intellectual classes in appreciating the more adventurous composers, but sometimes they are quicker to perceive the value of music that the politicians of style fail to comprehend. Nicolas Slonimsky once put together a delightful book titled Lexicon of Music Invective, anthologizing wrongheaded music criticism in which now canonical masterpieces were compared to feline caterwauling, barnyard noises, and so on. Slonimsky should also have written a Lexicon of Musical Condescension, gathering high-minded essays in which now canonical masterpieces were dismissed as kitsch, with a long section reserved for Sibelius.”

Pink Ocean

I really should fire up my work computer and see if there's any work for me. I am glad to be home! I did take Greta out in this storm this morning. My jacket kept me dry down to my thighs. The rest of me looked and felt like I'd slipped into the Bay. So I'm not any too anxious to shower and get all wet again. I'm sitting here at the table, dawdling over a second cup of coffee.

I just read the Stuart Dybek piece in the new Poetry. They call it "fiction," because it isn't really comment, though it's in their Comment section, and it's not shaped like a poem. But it is the most incredible piece of writing I've read in, what, years? Ages? I can't think of an appropriate hyperbole. It is absolutely wonderful. It has so many levels -- the aural and oral and tactile and visual and psychological and critical (as in literary) -- and narrative as well.

I don't know if it's on their website. Wait, I just checked. It is called: Pink Ocean. Read it now!

End of day / End of year

Last of the winter light here in the living room, John and I sitting on the sofa, reading our Christmas books -- mine, Di Piero's Chinese Apples , John going though Salgado's Africa. I like Di Piero for his combination toughness and vulnerability, his originality, the tighness of his lines. John loves Salgado's photographs but says this one is a hard book to browse through, "rips your heart out." He stops to show me this one, and this one. "Look at that; nobody can match him; he's the best there is." The dog is lying between us, old girl, snoring/purring away. She loves nothing more than being between the two of us.


It's a nice quiet end of day -- one more before year's end. I have to work tomorrow, and then we are meeting friends for an early dinner at a local restaurant and come back here for bubbly and to comfort Greta from the fireworks. We cleaned a bit for that, so it's nice to just sit here, watching the seagulls fly in from the Pacific.

It's been a momentous year for us -- Nathaniel getting married, a trip to Ireland, a new deck, a new job for me, some health issues, a few minor victories in my art and John's but not the big ones either of us have hoped for. It's hard to just sum it up, like that. It's just another day, another year, really.

Figured Dark

Many years ago I went through a period where I lost interest in poetry. Then I happened to pick up one of those “World’s Favorite Poems” anthologies and to open it to Blake’s “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,” and I was hooked again. With all the arguments over poetics and the thousands of trendy and conventional poems published every day, it’s easy to forget the original impulse to poetry and why you fell in love with it in the first place.

Last week I read Greg Rappleye’s new book Figured Dark. Greg gets as involved as anyone in the blogosphere in arguments over poetics, but what I love about his poetry is that he seems to forget about all that when he sits down to write, and to sink into a place deep within himself, maybe within all of us. His poems make me remember what made me love poetry in the first place. Here’s a link to “Figured Dark,” the title poem of the book. Somehow it brings together Whistler’s Nocturne, Chet Baker’s music and morphine, archaeology and breasts and fireflies, and makes it all feel utterly natural. Not to mention the gorgeous sound of my new favorite word, Cremorne!

December, Life and Death and Everything Else

With blogs, as with email, the more often you write, the more you can get away with the quotidian details: what you had for breakfast, who called, the weather, what you are wearing, your recipe for French Provincial vegetable soup. If you only blog every once in a while, your posts seem to have more portent. You start getting shyer. Is anyone going to want to read this? Do I really have anything to say?

Twenty-seven years ago today John Lennon was murdered. Other bloggers were talking about What They Were Doing then. I remember I brought in the SF Chronicle and there it was in the headline. I remember friends being pissed off that I didn't want to stand outside on a prayer vigil. But what was the point? He was already dead. In any case, if you want to know what I was doing then, I was having a miscarriage. Well, a long time ago, wasn't it?

So holidays. Grinning and bearing it here. At this stage of my life, I've done more than my share of cooking and all, and so sometimes I'd like to just hide under the covers and wait for all of it to pass. Not going to happen, so deep breath, and deal with it, Diane. (At this moment, I'm sitting on my couch with my sweet dog Greta snuggled up against me. You know everything seems fine when your dog loves you.)

Meantime, thanks to Jilly Dybka's blog, I read this and following in the New York Times Book Review:

No contemporary poet is famous, but some are less unfamous than others. That’s because the poetry world, like most areas of American life, has its own peculiar celebrity system — and if the rewards of that system rarely involve gift suites filled with swag from Jean Patou, they remain tempting enough to keep grown writers hustling. The problem is, poetic stardom is an unpredictable business. Good writing doesn’t guarantee a reputation; bad writing doesn’t guarantee oblivion; nor can grace, money or nimble careerism entirely explain why Poet X reads to overflowing auditoriums, whereas Poet Y reads to his cats. Maybe it’s simply the case that, as William Munny remarked in “Unforgiven,” “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

Anyone who knows me the least little bit knows why I identify with the above.

In other news: my niece in Texas just had a baby. Hurray! A girl named Sydney. And we are making plans to go to Port Clyde, Maine, for another niece's wedding in May. A week on the Maine coast! I'm really looking forward to it.

Cold here. Don't you Midwesterners and Northeasterners laugh, but it has been in the 40s. I don't deal well with cold, so that's quite enough.

Quick now, here, now, always…

It's just that this is so cool. It makes me want to write a poem -- except I'm at work. Oh yeah. And they just gave me a nice token of appreciation 'cause they like me.

*****

I would give my two front teeth -- and more! -- to hear something (preferably something positive) about my manuscript, especially before having to send out another half dozen competition submissions before week's end.

Not So Fast, Eye of the Beholder!

Before reading any further, look at the images of the three sculptures and decide which one you find most attractive. No, this isn’t an offshoot of C. Dale’s caption contests—or is it? It’s from a study done in Italy (of course) on people’s responses to works of art. Actually the study itself may be somewhat less interesting than a comparison of the original study to a somewhat popularized summary in LiveScience.

The LiveScience story emphasizes the study’s implication that human perceptions of beauty—specifically, human responses to the classical “golden ratio”—may be genetically hard-wired, because most people pick the same image as their favorite. (Well, it’s not really “most people”; rather, it’s a majority of 14 Italian college students “with no experience in art theory.”)

The study itself focuses more on the different responses of the subjects (as shown by brain scans) to the three questions they were asked—whether they “paid attention” to an image when it was shown to them, whether they “liked” it, and whether they found it “proportional”:

In the condition in which the viewers were asked to indicate explicitly which sculptures they liked, there was a strong increase in the activity of the amygdala, a structure that responds to incoming information laden with emotional value. Thus, instead of allowing their nervous centers to “resonate” in response to the observed stimuli (observation condition), when the viewers judged the stimuli according to their individual idiosyncratic criteria (explicit aesthetic judgment), that structure was activated that signals which stimuli had produced pleasant experiences in the past.

This raises a lot of interesting questions! Were people’s responses to the images more spontaneous and honest when they were merely asked to observe them “as if in a museum” than when they were asked if they “liked” them? Were their responses more “conservative” when they were asked to shift into critic mode and pass judgment on the images, because then they applied the criteria they had developed from looking at other works of art that “had produced pleasant experiences in the past”? Were their responses more “romantic” because of activation of the amygdala, which “responds to incoming information laden with emotional value”? When I picked the same image as most people picked in the study, was I really responding to the “golden ratio” of the distance from his head to his navel to the distance from his navel to his knee, or was I just responding to the cute little swivel of his hip?

Riding to Moscow on Chairs

The current New Yorker has a wonderful review by James Wood of a new translation of War and Peace. The whole review is worth reading: it captures some of the novel’s most vivid, and “poetic,” moments, and the fact that they're poetic and what we mean by that are what interests me. The young man Petya is killed in battle, and his comrade Denisov “approaches the body and, as he looks at Petya, ‘irrelevantly’ recalls him once saying, ‘I'm used to something sweet. Excellent raisins, take them all.’ I think that “irrelevance” is of the essence of poetry.

One passage about the variety of translations seems particularly relevant to poetry:

In the novel’s epilogue, Marya enters the nursery: “The children were riding to Moscow on chairs and invited her to come with them.” That is exactly what Tolstoy writes, because he wants us to experience a little shock of readjustment as the adult meets the otherworldliness of childish fantasy. But Garnett, the Maudes, and Briggs [earlier translators] all insert an explanatory “playing at,” to make things easier for the adults. As the Maudes render it, “The children were playing at ‘going to Moscow’ in a carriage made of chairs, and invited her to go with them.”

This might seem like a trivial point, but it is a little clue to the vision of the whole novel. Tolstoy sees reality as a system of constant adjustments, a long, tricky convoy of surprises, as realities jostle together and the vital, solipsistic ego is affronted by the otherness of the world. Nikolai Rostov thinks that warfare is a glamorous business of “cutting people down.” But warfare is nothing like that, and when he finally has the chance to cut down a Frenchman he cannot do it, because the soldier’s face is not that of an enemy but “a most simple, homelike face.” He gets a medal and is called a hero, but can think only, “So that’s all there is to so-called heroism?” By the time Prince Andrei fights at Borodino, he has lost any sense he once had that a battle can be successfully commanded, and applauds General Kutuzov for at least knowing when to leave well enough alone. On a trip home, he sees two girls stealing plums from the estate’s trees, and is comforted, feeling “the existence of other human interests, totally foreign to him and as legitimate as those that concerned him.”

That difference between the alternative translations of “riding to Moscow on chairs” and “playing at ‘going to Moscow” in a carriage made of chairs” seems to capture perfectly what poetry is all about—as Wood says, the ego “affronted by the otherness of the world”—and also captures perfectly why language that is too “accessible” does not always serve the poem.

Tofu Stir-fry

I'm posting today because I haven't posted for ages. I've seem to have had things to say, but my sluggish brain has not been ready to follow through. I'm still not certain how successful this post will be, so you might as well lower your expectations. Regular visitors to this blog already know that the posts that have meat in them are Robert's. Yeah, this is a tofu post. Tofu stir-fry.

Wanted to post this link to an interview Zack Rogow did with Bob Hass. (I feel obligated to my fellow po groupers, to wave their flags, having been one who started our workshop way back. Way back. Yes, once upon a time we even met in John's studio across from the ball park when the ball park wasn't even a gleam in anyone's eyes and the neighborhood was dumpsterville. Way back Bob Hass came to our group too -- only once, and it was on his side of the Bay, in Orinda. I remember the poem he brought. I remember the poem I brought.)

We are sick, sick, sick about the oil spill in the Bay! How can you crash into the Bay Bridge? Isn't it big enough? Oh, it was foggy. Well, duh. I am so upset about this, my brain starts to sputter when I think about it. I cannot look at the wildlife-coated-in-oil photos.

I am off from work today, thank you, veterans. As a pacifist, that's about the extent of my gratitude. I know most people think some wars are necessary or inevitable, but I don't understand how you solve anything by killing X number of people.

I have not been writing a lot. I don't want to make excuses. Even my reading has been sporadic. But I read a very interesting essay on Creeley by Charles Simic, published in NY Review of Books, October 25. Now Creeley never really did much for me, was just sort of on the periphery of my vision. But Simic totally impresses me as a poet who can talk about poetry in a way that is more interested in substance than in impressing you with his erudition -- a rare and totally welcome breath of fresh air -- and yet who doesn't look to get extra points for folksy ways, like some other poets laureate. (Not talking about BH. Bob is the best!) Anyway, what he said, by way of preamble, was "Unless one is an inmate serving a life sentence in a state penetentiary, a book of a thousand poems is nearly impossible to read... More to the point, there are not many poets, even among our best ones, who are likely to have more than eighty pages worth reading."

I personally, don't want to argue the point -- it is the emperor's-no-clothes attitude of the statement that impresses me. He also said -- and here I'd like to get input, if you have any opinions on the matter -- that "They [Creeley's early poems] were almost all about love, a subect of considerable interest to a vast number of human beings that for some curious reason is absent from the work of many of our poets today, who, unlike poets in other cultures, generally stay away from any overt expression of erotic feelings, as if love and sex were of little concern to them."

Do you think this is so? Not whether or not love and sex were Creeley's early subjects, but that many of our poets today shy away from this?

Bronze by Gold

The more I read, the more I come back to James Joyce. Radically innovative in both form and content, Joyce also wrote language unrivaled for sheer beauty and told moving human stories. He was both radically traditional and revolutionary. I really can’t think of a 20th Century poet who came anywhere close to Joyce’s success in creating the literature of the future without sacrificing the artistic values of the past that deserve to be saved. William Carlos Williams? Please. Eliot, Pound, Stein, Stevens …? If there had been such a poet, I suspect more people would be reading poetry now.

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing.
Imperthnthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.
Horrid! And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the.
Goldpinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile.
Trilling, trilling: Idolores …

—James Joyce

Fear of the Past

I fear this will be one of those posts that will interest no one but me (they come so fast and furious), but I’ve been thinking about my feelings about the future and the past. Readers of Ron Silliman’s blog will have noted his recent use of the term neophobe to refer to poets “afraid of the new.” That argument doesn’t particularly interest me at the moment, but I’ve been thinking about whether there’s a corresponding “fear of the old” (perhaps we could call poets who suffer from it senaphobes).

What interests me is the idea that there really is validity to this observation about the relationship of different poets to the past and the future. If we avoid derogatory terms like neophobe and talk in less loaded terms like “postromantic” and “postmodern,” there are clear differences between the typical interests of postromantic and postmodern poets. It is a cliché, but a valid one, that “romantics” are interested in love, beauty, imagination, and nature. I think it is equally true (if less noticed) that romantics are typically interested in the past, both historical and mythological. Of course this is not the same as saying that romantic poetry is of the past. If anyone is still reading anything five hundred years from now, chances are good they will still be moved by a poem like Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us,” because if human beings survive that long, they will probably feel all the more that the world is too much with them and will long to hear the sound of that old horn:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Happy Birthday, John Keats!

Keats was born on October 31, and this great poem of his seems appropriate to Halloween. It was written toward the end of his life in the margin of another, very different poem he was working on, and the story is that he was thinking of Fanny Brawne when he wrote it, but no one knows for sure. It may simply have been notes toward a drama he was thinking of writing.


This Living Hand


This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

Stupidest Man Alive

So yesterday afternoon I'm home working on a poem. I go out to the garage to look for mail, and I hear a door slam. The front door has blown shut and I'm locked out without keys or phone. I feared I'd be there all day, but luckily, with the help of a small stepladder from the garage, I was able to go around to the back of the house and climb over the back fence (not so easy for an old guy like me!) and (again luckily) I'd left the back door open because I'd been going in and out of the patio. Actually I think it's because the back door was open that enough of a wind went through the house to blow shut the front door, because that's never happened before. Now does that make me the stupidest man alive? Of course not. It could happen to anyone, right? No, what makes me the stupidest man alive is that a couple hours later I DID THE SAME THING. Yep, locked myself out the exact same way and had to take the stepladder around the house to the back and climb over the fence for the second time to get back in. Possibly I can blame it all on my being in a poetic trance. Or perhaps I'm just The Stupidest Man Alive.

Checking In

I’m three weeks into my four-week “writer’s colony at home,” and yesterday I finished the draft of a new book. There’s still a lot (months) of work to be done, but the draft is on the table! I’m not sure I’ll follow C. Dale’s method of letting it sit for six months, but if I start working my way through it now, it’ll probably be at least six months before I get to the sections I wrote recently.

I couldn’t sleep last night and got up early and found myself rereading Robert Hass’s Twentieth Century Pleasures, particularly his essay on James Wright. I read Wright’s Shall We Gather at the River when I was 18, and it was my first love in contemporary poetry (I’m afraid my own poetry still has its weaknesses without its strengths). Later I got into the poets like Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Gary Snyder who were considered cooler and hipper, especially in the Bay Area, but you never get over your first love.

A Day Off

A gorgeous day in paradise, and just given to me, handed to me on a blue-sky platter. Yes, I got the day off, a total surprise, but then the company I work for contracts with the government; they're off, so we're off. After days of errands and appointments and (yesterday) baseball, I needed some time of quiet and peace. The baseball was on TV and was the choice of son and daughter-in-law and niece, and so they watched and I was in the (figurative) bleachers, working the aisles, plying them with food. I pretty much cooked all day -- though no one made me, I guess -- and by evening was exhausted and feeling guilty that I had squandered the gorgeous day of a thousand things to do in the city. (Yeah, those that know me know guilt comes to me as easily as a blush.)

So, okay, today, Greta (see pic) and I were determined to get out and enjoy the best weather of the year in San Francisco. My fumble with the camera made me miss her legs-in-the-air delight, but you can see her pleasure nevertheless. Now the renovation of the park by Pine Lake is just about finished, and dogs and the ducks, the heron and hawks, and the two somber cormorants all concur that they did a fine job.

Later, I sat out back of my house and invited the Muse to join me, but he was petulant, implying that ignoring him for months at a time and then just expecting him to show the one day I can finally find the time, well, it just doesn't cut it. I put a few lines down on paper, but they're going nowhere. Maybe Muse and I can rendevous again before too long.

Vanishing Point

That’s the name of a poem of mine recently accepted by Blackbird, one of my favorite litmags. It’s been a dry spell for acceptances so I’m taking that as a good omen. The title is also appropriate as I’m vanishing for a month, taking four weeks (four weeks!) off from my job to stay home and write: “my own private Yaddo,” as a friend of mine calls it. My plan is to generate as much new work as possible and worry about revision later. Ideally I'd like to finish a draft of a new manuscript I've been working on. I am going to try not to get distracted by the house remodeling we’re in the middle of, nor by preparing for my upcoming brief panel presentation at AWP on poetry and religion. I will say that “Vanishing Point” is a poem that fits right into that topic! But here’s a poem by Emily Dickinson that fits even better. One thing that makes the poem so great, I think, is that 150 years after Dickinson wrote it, it’s still hard to say if it’s a poem about the glory of creation or the terror of a lonely, chaotic universe—or both.

721

Behind Me—dips Eternity—
Before Me—Immortality—
Myself—the Term between—
Death but the Drift of Eastern Gray,
Dissolving into Dawn away,
Before the West begin—

’Tis Kingdoms—afterward—they say—
In perfect—pauseless Monarchy—
Whose Prince—is Son of None—
Himself—His Dateless Dynasty—
Himself—Himself diversify—
In Duplicate divine—

’Tis Miracle before Me—then—
’Tis Miracle behind—between—
A Crescent in the Sea—
With Midnight to the North of Her—
And Midnight to the South of Her—
And Maelstrom—in the Sky—

—Emily Dickinson

What I Did On My Vacation: Ireland

How to sum up two weeks in one blog post? Would have been better to keep up to date daily as I've done with holidays in the past, but we brought no computer and only accessed one briefly at a home in which we stayed. I didn't write a word either. Mostly, unless we were asleep, things were happening. In that way, though it was only two weeks, it felt like a year, and though it was Republic of Ireland, it felt like we had traveled galaxies.


First the backstory. This was my second trip to Ireland. When I was 18 and graduated high school, I had the opportunity to travel to Ireland (and other places in Europe) with my high school friend. We spent a good part of the summer there, including traveling around rural Ireland with her uncle the priest. All of her relatives were amused that I was the one, with my red hair, who looked Irish, although, in fact, I'm Jewish by heritage. Well, her brother, a budding photographer, took photos of us at the airport. Six years later, John and I celebrated our wedding. This trip was John's first time anywhere in Europe. He turned 60 on September 3, our Labor Day, and being Somewhere Else would help him to deal with it. Well, it was apparent that if we were going to wait until we could afford a European vacation, we were never going to go. So off we went anyway.

These pictures I'm posting here are John's -- well, except for this one I took of John on the john, on a toilet hole we found on the fourth floor of Carrigafoyle Castle. These were just the snaps. We brought with us a suitcase apiece and one probably bomb-proof case of John's studio camera with digital back (16 megapixels). So in addition to these, he did some serious picture taking. Oh, he wanted castles and we found castles. When he is occupied in this way, there's no hurrying him up. Here's a picture of me being patient/bored while waiting for him to capture every angle and shadow in the Glendalough monastery.

We arrived in Dublin and stayed in a B&B for the first two days and then John's cousin Ursula picked us up and brought us to her sister Geralyn's. Ursula lived in the same apartment house as John in Brooklyn when they were small and has been to the States many times and we know her well. She's a successful playwright and fiction writer and we have always gotten along. As we got into Ursula's car, she looked out and said there's Roddy Doyle walking down the street. He was carrying a newspaper and his groceries.

The really, really sad thing is Ursula and Geralyn's brother Michael was dying. He was fading, we knew, as we left, and John got to see him and squeeze his hand on one of his last days. When Michael was 8 and John was 16, Michael idolized him, so it was so important. Yes, he did die, and we cut short our travel in the West to come back for the service in Glasnevin cemetery. Michael was a staunch atheist and insisted on being cremated, so the service was different to all. Hundreds packed into the chapel -- SRO. It was amazing, like a scene out of a movie, only we were in it. And most of the folk were related to John. He met uncles and cousins and cousin's progeny. Did I say that his mother was one of eleven?

Before we returned to Dublin for Michael's memorial, we saw Dublin for five days and then left for points south and west. Dublin is a vibrant and bustling place, where the old and the new are side by side. Gone are the days of poverty and hardship! Yeah, it was our luck to visit Dublin when the Euro was at its highest. Here's a flower stand on Grafton Street, the street where, it's said, Dubliners go for retail therapy.

When we left Dublin, we rented a car. I should say John did the driving, and it was terrifying. Not only do they do everything entirely in reverse from the way we do, but the roads are often incredibly narrow. Here's a picture of what was supposedly a 2-way road in Wicklow County. When someone comes the other way, you back up. These roads were actually less terrifying than the ones that were wide enough for opposing traffic that would whiz by you at terrifying speeds -- no shoulders -- we often brushed the high hedges along the side of the road.

In Wicklow, we visited the above-mentioned monastery and took a three-hour walk around a lake. In Kilkenny, we visited the castle and cathedral and climbed the round tower. Also got to hear some trad music. Here are some Kilkenny snaps. We went to Kilarney, a tourist town if there ever was one, and from there, like everyone else, drove the Ring of Kerry.

On the Ring of Kerry we found the picture-perfect castle John was looking for -- Ballycarbery -- overgrown with ivy and crumbling. That was also where I slipped on a cowpie and fell (fortunately, not in a cowpie). We came back in the glowering twilight, careful not to hit meandering sheep.

We went from Tralee to Listowel to Tarbert and took a car ferry next to a trailer filled with terrified longhaired horned sheep and drove to Ennis. There we stayed one night in a guesthouse built in 1650 and then headed back to Dublin, or more specifically, to Howth where stayed with another cousin. This is the Howth, as Robert reminds me, of Molly Bloom's monologue: "...the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head ..."

Our last day in Dublin, a cousin, Tadgh, who seems to know everyone who is anyone in Dublin, took us around, full of stories about teaching Arnold Schwarzenegger to say "I'll be back," in Irish...


That night, we dined with four cousins in Trocadero, a photo-lined restaurant that caters to the theatregoers and actors. They did not hurry us out and gave us free drinks. By the time we got back to Howth and then packed, we had less than four hours to sleep.

We never got to see any theatre -- it seemed enough to be in our own movie, and anyway, the timing wasn't right. (The following week there would be a production of Synge's "Playboy of the Western World," a version Roddy Doyle was involved in that was supposed to be provocative and experimental.) I did get to see a street performer who mimed the James Joyce statue pick up his take for the day and stride home. I got into one argument about poetry and bought a Seamus Heaney collection and a book on Irish birds.

The Kitchen

This is the kitchen of the house where I grew up. When my mother died Cheryl and I decided to fix up the house and move in, but as you can see, we’ve got a ways to go: it’s radical revision. This is the kitchen where my grandmother baked chocolate chip cookies and I licked the bowl. This is the kitchen where years later my grandmother tried to bake bread at 3:00 a.m. and couldn’t remember how. This is the kitchen where I carved pumpkins and played Monopoly. This is the kitchen where I read Peanuts every morning in the Chronicle and, later, the jazz and rock reviews by Ralph J. Gleason. This is the kitchen where my aunt slammed the door and I pretended she had slammed it on my finger and she got hysterical and my mother screamed and hit her so I couldn’t confess what had happened and had to sit for an hour with my hand in a bowl of ice water to keep down the nonexistent swelling. This is the kitchen where I paid my mother’s bills when her eyesight got too bad to write checks, and this is the kitchen where my stepfather broke his hip when he tried to kick the beach ball across the floor. This is the kitchen they would kick Cheryl and me out of when they had us over for dinner so they could cook in privacy and argue in privacy over who had put what in the salad dressing. This is the kitchen where the liquor cabinet was a shrine full of mysteries, not so much the liquor as the jars of ancient maraschino cherries and, especially, the Angostura bitters that I watched my mother grind into sugar cubes and that smelled like nothing else in my world. This is the kitchen where I washed the pots and pans (my main household chore) and wasted a Tahoe of water. This is the kitchen where I ate Cream of Wheat and chuck roast with prunes and soft-boiled and fried and poached and scrambled eggs and frozen “Italian vegetables” and frozen French fries and Chinese chicken salad and (the worst) German “wilted salad” and “tuna boats” on Fridays and (the best) burnt sugar cake and English muffins and sliced apples and watermelons and papayas and plantains and pineapples and pears and persimmons and pomegranates and white peaches and black plums.

Spring and All

I was interested to read this recent post by Ron Silliman. So often people talk in abstractions (“accessibility,” “slippage”) about poetic issues that it’s refreshing to see a couple specific examples, one of them Robert Creeley’s great poem “I Know a Man.”

I stopped when Silliman said, “Creeley’s famous ‘I Know a Man’ derives much of its power from precisely the fact that the reader situates the key verb, drive, into two possible contexts, one in which the word belongs to the narrator, the other in which the word belongs to John …. Creeley himself said that the former was his original intent, but even he had to acknowledge that readers everywhere could hear both.”

Is this true? Yes, the drive is ambiguous, but is it true that the poem “derives much of its power” from the ambiguity? I would guess that most readers, while acknowledging the ambiguity, read drive as belonging to John, for a variety of reasons such as the stanza break before “drive, he sd.” I would say that most of the poem’s power derives from the sudden shift to “John’s” perspective in the last stanza, and that the ambiguity is relatively uninteresting. What Silliman says about the poem being “a text about primal need in an existential universe” is undeniably true, but isn’t that still true if we read drive unambiguously as John’s command? I’m not objecting to ambiguity per se. I think some poems do derive their power from the multiplicity of interpretations open to the reader. I just don’t think this poem is one of them.

Silliman’s other example is a section of Rae Armantrout’s poem “Grace”:

a spring there
where his entry must be made

signals him on

What does this mean? (Don’t cheat and read ahead for the “answer” as I confess I did when I read Silliman’s blog.) My initial impulse when first reading the passage was to take spring as the season, and “his entry” as an almost abstract (dare I say Merwinesque?) quasi-spiritual quasi-pastoral being (let’s say the magical stag in Harry Potter rather than Merwinesque). I would have had a different take if I’d dwelled on it for another 30 seconds, and yet another take if I’d dwelled for yet another 30 seconds, which is partly the point. Anyway, Silliman’s very interesting point is this:

Whenever I’ve asked students to “tell me what this means,” whether at San Francisco State in 1981 or at Naropa as recently as last summer, I’ve been offered a variety of narratives – … one being the idea of a diver in that instant leaving the board before the arc & splash of the event, the other that of the “step into character” that comes over an actor or actress as they make their entrance from backstage. Never in 26 years has a student offered the narrative Armantrout herself gave me when asked, that of vaginal lubrication. But this doesn’t make any of these narrative scaffolds wrong. All three, in fact, line up the key terms in this passage into roughly the same configuration, tho Armantrout’s own version is the most intimate.

This raises so many questions. It’s certainly true that, of the three narratives, Armantrout’s is the most intimate, although the actor’s story may be the most interesting. The question is whether the power of the poem is increased or decreased by the openness and multiplicity of interpretations. (I just noticed I spelled “Rae” as “Ray” above, which might make someone think Armantrout is a he, which might or might not affect the interpretations, especially the “intimate” one.) Another question: If the multiplicity of interpretations is interesting, would it be more or less interesting if the ambiguity were “clarified”? If the simultaneous perception of diver/actor/lover is interesting, would it be more interesting or intolerably clichéd to make it explicit (“When he entered her he felt like an actor stepping into character …”)?

It’s interesting that Ron talks about how these poems derive their power, as power is the key issue. Obviously one of the distinctions between experimental and mainstream poetry is that experimental poetry typically wants to share more power with readers (regardless of readers' possible desires for a poem to exert its power over them), or to abandon all power in a Buddhist-like renunciation. My instinctive reaction is that if Armantrout is not “attached” to whether I “get” her erotic interpretation or substitute an interpretation of my own, then why should I care about the poem? (I like many of Armantrout’s poems very much, by the way—that’s not my point.) The instantaneous collage in the reader’s brain of spring as “stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf,” spring as erotic arousal, spring as Slinky toy, spring as Sierra thaw, etc. etc. does not inevitably strengthen the poem. So much of contemporary poetics seems to revolve around this strange power struggle where writer and reader fight over the right to transfer their power to the other like a hot potato.