Room with a View

The sun is out and I'm feeling (sorta) optimistic. This morning it was too sunny to work on the laptop in my new office (my son’s childhood room--posters removed, staple-holes filled in, and walls and moldings painted a lovely shade of gray-green). Really, we will have to get shades for an office that faces East or give up working there mornings. Our new office looks out on the garden, the white Adirondack chair nestled among the lavender, the Douglas iris and ferns, the bright patch of orange poppies, the little path. True, the deck is rotten and dangerous. True, the best-case scenario short of winning the lottery is a job that will take me away from this bucolic scene. But hey, right now I’m optimistic.

I figure my manuscript will eventually get published. I may even still be alive when that happens. I toy with the idea of writing a novel or screenplay, just so I could sit here and write every day and not have it be “self-indulgent” like poetry. Well, even if I knew how to do that (I don’t), it doesn’t erase the fact that we will soon be living off our line of credit.

The job leads come and go. In half an hour, I will have a phone interview, the second step in an employment ritual that may or may not get to a third step. I’m trying not to put too much weight on it. I figure if it’s the right thing for me right now, we will both recognize that. But I don’t want to screw up by saying the wrong thing --as I did at that contract position I was supposedly starting in March—screw up by being too trusting, too naïve. (It’s not something I want to go into in detail—really, I’d rather forget it – but to make a long story short, friends, don’t ever tell an employer you have carpal tunnel syndrome. You may think that will make them take your needs seriously, but they will likely, as they did me, show you the door.)

So, be it. The office is mostly done. I’ve got my garden to look at for now. I’ve got a small teaching gig coming up in June (Please point your poet friends my way! Or see this listing for more information.) Maybe all the puzzle pieces of my life will fit together one of these days. Maybe not. But at least the sun is out right now.

On a Break

I've been in a state of almost-suspended animation vis a vis poetry for a while, on hiatus from the group, not writing a lot or even reading a lot of poetry. I've been writing a piece on depression for a psychotherapy forum and another on infidelity for a chapter in a book. It was challenging, thinking about what infidelity actually is and how/whether it's possible for people to heal from betrayals.

I'd been feeling too much like a consumer, even a purveyor, of poetry, losing the essential thing (that which perhaps cannot be said without a poem) in the process. Backing off clears the palate a little. I miss writing more than reading and have begun a few small things, but the limited reading I've done has been enough. For example, Mary Rueffle, from "Parallelogram":

All those I love
and all those who love me
are unequally sad,
which is the only sadness,
besides a little fence
with lambs on the other side
who disappear into fractions.
Pity the rain.
Pity the silence.
Pity the slow passage
from the soul to the esophagus.

(How's that for a meditation on infidelity?) I would never write a poem like that, but reading it is almost as good as writing it. You have to be "writing" along with it to get into the poem.

On another note, did anyone read William Logan's piece in the Times Book Review on the new Oxford anthology of American poetryy? Did anyone besides me think, Get that man some Pepto-Bismol? Please.

What happened yesterday

About a year ago, I got a message from the folks at Lunarpages, my web hosting service, that my "Advanced Guestbook" was vulnerable to exploits. Apparently, it could "be hacked to gain access to the guestbook's administrative area and upload a php mailer script, which in turn sends out mass numbers of PayPal phishing emails." Well, the Guestbook being more trouble than it was worth, and the blog being more fun, though I have my doubts sometimes that anyone reads it, I revamped the website so that there wasn't a Guestbook any more. I didn't delete it from the server at Lunarpages. I guess I knew I should, but I never got around to it.

Well, yesterday, I got an email restating the above nastiness and telling me that my "account was running 13+ mysql processes continuously due to this script, causing high load and almost crashing your server" and so my account was suspended. Okay, so that got me off my ass and I remedied the situation. Nevertheless, they had the site under observation until the early hours of this morning.

Now we're back up -- and maybe more important -- the sky is blue and the sun is out!

Happy, Happy Quake Day!

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

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

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

Rising From Computer Hell for Easter

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Easter!

DRAGGING THE LAKE Reviewed

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

Dorset Update

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

Winning manuscript: Dismal Rock, by Davis McCombs

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

First Runner up: Sweet Darkness, by Greg Rappleye

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

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

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

Maybe someday someone will publish my book....

Papa and Liza

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

This sounds like Hemingway in A Moveable Feast:

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

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

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

Summertime / Workshop

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

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

Bishop / Birthday

The Bight
[On my birthday]

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

--Elizabeth Bishop

Fear of the Sticky Web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspiration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check Out Poetry Daily Today!

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

Snowboarding in San Francisco

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

Right to Privacy

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

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

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

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

My final answer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wish I were going to Austin.

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

-Diane

Cheating (sort of)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Air Guitar

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

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

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

Crossing my fingers

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

Linda Gregerson will be judge.

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

I like you a lot, but...

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