SOME NOTES ON SYZYGY FROM ARTHUR SZE'S NEW BOOK QUIPU

“Even without understanding intricate details of a theory, the fact that it has supersymmetry built in allows us to place significant constraints on the properties it can have. Using a linguistic analogy, imagine that we are told that a sequence of letters has been written on a slip of paper, that the sequence has exactly three occurrences, say, of the letter “y,” and that the paper has been hidden within a sealed envelope. If we are given no further information, then there is no way that we can guess the sequence—for all we know it might be a random assortment of letters with three y’s like mvcfojziyxidqfqzyycdi or any on of the infinitely many other possibilities. But imagine that we are subsequently given two further clues: The hidden sequence of letters spells out an English word and it has the minimum number of letters consistent with the first clue of having three y’s. From the infinite number of letter sequences at the outset, these clues reduce the possibilities to one word—to the shortest English word containing three y’s: syzygy.”

from “The Power of Symmetry” in the chapter, “Beyond Strings” from “The Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene

syz·y·gy
n. pl. syz·y·gies

1. Astronomy.
1. Either of two points in the orbit of a celestial body where the body is in opposition to or in conjunction with the sun.
2. Either of two points in the orbit of the moon when the moon lies in a straight line with the sun and Earth.
3. The configuration of the sun, the moon, and Earth lying in a straight line.
2. The combining of two feet into a single metrical unit in classical prosody.

Syzygy

I notice headlights out the living room window
then catch the bass in a pickup as it drives by.
I am shocked to learn that doctors collected
the urine of menopausal nuns in Italy to extract
gonadotropins. And is that what one draws,
in infinitesimal dose, out of a vial?
I remember a steel wool splinter in my finger
and how difficult it was to discern, extract
under a magnifying glass; yet—blue mold,
apple dropping from branch—it is hard to see
up close when, at the periphery, the unexpected
easily catches the eye. Last Thursday night,
we looked through binoculars at the full moon,
watched it darken and darken until, eclipsed,
it glowed ferrous-red. By firelight, we glowed;
my fingertips flared when I rubbed your shoulders,
softly bit your ear. The mind is a tuning fork
that we strike, and, struck, in the syzygy
of a moment, we find the skewed, tangled
passions of a day begin to straighten, align, hum.

"Syzygy" by Arthur Sze from his latest book Quipu is quintessential Arthur Sze. The word, syzygy, has a meaning in astronomy as I have quoted above, a discipline explored deeply in Arthur Sze’s work. The word also has a meaning in classical prosody. Most do not associate Arthur Sze with classical prosody but from the first line of this poem we are not only set in the domestic, but also something in classical prosody, something almost iambic.

(I’ll also toss in that the word syzygy shares a sonic quality with Arthur Sze’s last name…as if the way "edge" is turned into "edgy," we get syzygy from Sze. Before you dismiss such trickery, let’s take a close look at what might be at work in the poem.)

The scan of the first line of the poem, “I notice headlights out the living room window,” might be o- / o- / o- / o- / o- / -o or perhaps o- / oo- / oo- / o- / -o. But we are already clued in by the title that, perhaps, a blurred foot is involved here somewhere. A quick scan ahead to the second line, “then catch the bass in a pickup as it drives by.” Thankfully, the tetrameter third line gives away how to scan the initial line and how to scan what follows.

The first line reads, and scans, o-/ oo- / oo- / oo-(o). The trickiness is that final foot with the feminine ending.

The second line, “then catch the bass in a pickup as it drives by,” at first seems to scan regularly but the “in a pickup” is elided into a single foot. So the scan without typographic modifications to my scan symbols would be something like: o- / o- / oo-o / oo--.

The third line is a long time to wait for establishing the fundamental underlying prosody of a poem but with Arthur Sze rarely is anything standard or simple. The third line reads, “I am shocked to learn that doctors collected” and it sounds as if it will scan regularly and this time, it does: oo- / o- / o- / oo-(o). That is a pretty standard tetrameter line with a feminine ending. Here I gain some comfort that my insight into his use of syzygy is accurate.

But the fourth and fifth lines put to the test my read of the prosody at work. The fourth and fifth lines read: “the urine of menopausal nuns in Italy to extract/ gonadotropins. And is that what one draws.” Here I am pressed to elide many syllables to get back to a regular tetrameter. My ear hears something like, oo- / ooooo- / ooo- / oo- // ooo- / o- / o- / o-. You can see the intention, and the joke. I mean, since the English language and its prosody was never meant to accommodate spoken American colloquial nor the hypertensive Latinate constructions of scientific jargon one can easily justify moderating syllabic count against word use in the broadest concept of an American prosody.

Rather than continue to unravel the poem for you, I’ll leave the scan of the poem off here and let you resolve the rest of the poem into its tetrameter and its syzygy. I will add, be assured, it does resolve neatly.

I like the word resolve when used in reading Arthur’s poems. In the tension between a scientific theory and its experimental validation there is an honus on the scientist to resolve one with the other. In mathematics, the connection between two disparate theories can be resolved by looking for the deeper connections between them—not what disproves one or the other but what reveals them to be parts of a larger truth.

Arthur’s poems are like this. They seem to wrestle with disconsolate images, and motifs, and yet in their underlying nature there is an intuitive mind resolving their differences into harmonies.

I’ll add that just as in physics, the harmonies are not discovered logically but rather intuitively. The beauty of their harmonies are not understood only intellectually, rather once seen they are deeply felt. As in physics, the greatest minds of our age express their joy at uncovering the fundamental parts of the universe as “aesthetic” as “deeply felt” and as “inspired.’

I feel the same way about reading Arthur Sze’s "Syzygy." Even after I have wrestled away the prosody I feel the poems images, its surfaces, elide, mis-align, and then re-align into a harmony. Thus my quote from The Elegant Universe, a passage I found that links, at least for me, cosmology and an approach to Arthur Sze’s poem, "Syzygy." The passage from The Elegant Universe is about the power of symmetry, the “ability to nail down properties in an indirect manner—something that is often far easier than a more direct approach.”

For example the poem begins in the “window” of a home. Lights from a passing pick up truck enter through the window…so we know of the pick up truck from the sound of its engine, from its lights, and we even get sense of the person driving it from the “bass” sound of the music. But we don’t observe the truck directly. We don’t see it. Yet the reader, nor the poet, doubt that it is there.

Like the lights through the window, appearing as if randomly out of nowhere, the nuns and their gonadotropins make an appearance in the poem. Gonadotropins stimulate growth of the gonads and the secretion of sex hormones. I’ll also add that their appearance seems broadcast, and the speaker’s shock seems pretty ironic. I’d gather that this information is the result of a TV program in the living room or maybe from a conversation with a domestic partner. Let me put it this way, there is nothing in this poem from preventing me from accounting for the tone and the detail in this way. The poem’s lack of fixed axles to specify where such information comes from suggests that the reader provide such connections.

From the Nuns, the poem moves to the central question of the poem. The question is both humorous and direct. The choice of the word “infinitesimal” suggests even though we are talking about Nun’s pee, we are also talking about the connection between the desire for sex and the exploration of the universe. The universe in the Whitmanesque romantic tradition is a mystical place of sex and beauty. In the world of Arthur Sze’s “gonadotropins” it appears the pursuit of deep science is also the pursuit of the essence of sexual pleasure. In jest? In truth? Both?

The next move of the poem is out of the present, out of the living room, away from our Nuns on TV to memory:

I remember a steel wool splinter in my finger
and how difficult it was to discern, extract
under a magnifying glass; yet—blue mold,
apple dropping from branch—it is hard to see
up close when, at the periphery, the unexpected
easily catches the eye.

Here memory and perception elide. A thing observed directly is difficult, in a certain way of thinking, to “discern.” But things observed in motion, from an adjacent perspective, are easier to detect. The light glancing off things at an angle provides a better way of seeing than something started at statically. This trope is an extension of our never observed pick-up truck, and the over-directly-observed nuns.

This section considers how attention is caught. Why do things catch our attention? If we are attending to the thing we are looking at, then why would another thing catch our attention and pull our attending facilities towards it? The answer is that as light catches the blue mold or the falling apple, the changing light at the periphery attracts the eye. The suggestion is that the eye explores nature because it catches our attention through its peripheral changes more so than the changes we watch over directly.

The next move in the poem begins to harmonize the disparate images of the pick-up and Nuns from the present and the memory of the splinter and its implications about awareness:

…Last Thursday night,
we looked through binoculars at the full moon,
watched it darken and darken until, eclipsed,
it glowed ferrous-red.

In this section a partner to the speaker is added to the composition of the poem. In this reverie there is a direct observation through the two headlights of the binoculars. This observation of the moon has the full attention of the speaker and what appears to be a lover. An attention, despite the evidence of the poem so far, rewarded with a change, an eclipse. Have we been tricked again? The argument has been building towards that quality of the indirectly observed over the directly observed. So what is going on?

Well an eclipse while dramatic is actually a harmonic alignment, a syzygy. The observers do not see the underlying astronomy that puts the “ferrous red” moon in play. While the dazzle of the crimson has their attention, the planets of the cosmos unbeknownst to our lovers, has aligned around them. In addition, while they weren’t looking, what they weren’t looking at or thinking about: their bodies have aligned. Indirectly their feelings, their sensory experience has come into tune with the image of what they are observing.

This is as if to say, the observation of the eclipse enacts a physics on the bodies of the observers. That while the observers admire the beauty of what they watch, the cosmos, the universe quietly harmonizes the lovers to itself. The observer takes on the essential and invisible qualities of the observed.

The poem closes in a twist of sensuality and multi-dimensionality:

By firelight, we glowed;
my fingertips flared when I rubbed your shoulders,
softly bit your ear. The mind is a tuning fork
that we strike, and, struck, in the syzygy
of a moment, we find the skewed, tangled
passions of a day begin to straighten, align, hum.

The lovers glow like the moon. The speakers fingers are sensitized to his lover presence by the observation of the moon. The consciousness of the speaker and the lover are melded together as if they are not separate consciousnesses of the same moment, but one consciousness that recognizes the other in itself. The “we” asserts the synergy. The word syzygy takes on the phenomenological quality of the alignment of the cosmos with the lovers.

The "we" here implies an “our.” What I mean is that the duality of syzygy slips back over the poem like a membrane unveiling the poem as not only an expression of harmony between lovers but a suggestion about poetry. Is this poem not a turn on Dylan Thomas’ In My Sullen Art or Craft?

Consider:

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

Thomas was not keen on science and subtlety. Not the way Sze is. Have Thomas' "nightinggales and psalms" become "gonadotropins" and "nuns"? In Sze’s subtle and unique hands this age-old proposition of the art of poetry takes on a quieter and deeply resonant quality.

The epiphany here on the surface of the poem delights. The veiled resonances that emerge and vibrate along the seams of meaning harmonize with the surface of the poem so elegantly one becomes like the lovers. The reader’s attention is caught by the beauty of the observed, but they the reader is causally linked and made symmetric to all of the unnoticed and unobserved physics of the poem. The reader, like the lovers, hums.

I look forward to reading the rest Quipu. If it even remotely resembles the care, humor, and subtlety evident in "Syzygy" it will be quite a treat. I am sure many poems therein will exhibit their syzygy quality.

Notes Towards An Affirmation of Poetry, Writing, Reading, & Teaching

Caveat
I don't believe teachers or writers should make statements. They should ask questions. Even when they are making statements. Is that a contradiction? Very well then.


Hello
I believe in the power of language. I believe in the strength of narrative. I believe in entrusting the self. I believe in the lyricism of the lived experience. I believe in the spaces between words left unsaid.


What I Want
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds what we want.

--Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching


Reading
I have a picture of myself when I was about three or four. In it, I am wearing a pair of pale green polyester footsie pajamas, and I am stretched out on my stomach on the floor, my two hands propping up my chin and my legs curled up in the air behind me. I am staring at the comic strip section of a newspaper, engrossed in whatever I see there. I have not yet learned to interpret the glyphs on the page into sounds with my voice, so it must be the pictures I am enthralled with, the stories laid out in large squares with speech balloons bubbling forth from so many silent mouths. I like to believe it is the spaces between the words I have yet to learn which draw me.

This is why I read.


Writing
At night, when my wife has fallen asleep after getting our children to bed, I sit in front of the computer and write, sometimes on the computer, sometimes in a journal. I've been doing this for as long as we've been married, which is over ten years now, staying up until midnight, writing until my eyes strain and the room starts to feel hot despite the ceiling fan rotating lazily above my head.

I gave up smoking when I got married, and every night when I'm writing I crave a Marlboro Light and a bottle of Budweiser.

This is why I write.


Making the Connection
In the mid-1980s, during middle school, I was enthralled with heavy metal music. I don't know what drew me in, but it did, and I found some weird level of comfort with the lyrics and music of bands such as Metallica and Iron Maiden, bands whose songs were often based on literature. I can still vividly remember hearing Metallica's For Whom The Bell Tolls for the first time in 1984, how that song resonated in my headphones as I listened to the throbbing bass and cascading guitar rhythms as the cassette tape unspooled in my cheap Walkman knock-off as I turned the lyric sheet over and over in my hands, scrutinizing the words for any indication that this wasn't just another angry song glorifying death, but was something more, because Metallica was just too cool to be another hair band. And I found what I was searching for when I mentioned the song's title to a teacher I thought of highly, Jane Crater, my eighth grade English teacher, and she thought I was referring to Hemingway's novel of the same name. And by God if I didn't go and find that book at the public library and devour it in one sitting and come back to school the next day full of questions, wanting to ask Mrs. Carter about why the Spanish Civil War was fought in the first place and why in God's name would any sane person volunteer to fight in a war that didn't involve their own country only to hear the news that one of my classmates, Mark Johnson, had committed suicide the night before with his father's service revolver.

That week I was in charge of the computers--top of the line Commodore64s--and when Chad Venable and I were left alone in the room, we popped in Mark's disk, fired up Bank Street Writer and read what he had been working on for our storytelling assignment: a Tolkeinesque tale of an elven party dodging falling stalactites in a spelunking expedition only to be obliterated by a large unknown explosion. Even at fourteen, it was easy for me to see this awkward piece of juvenile fiction as a thinly veiled parallel to whatever unknown events in Mark's own life drove him to pick up his father's gun.

When Mrs. Crater came back in the room, Chad quickly flipped off the screen and I slid Mark's disk back in the stack. We didn't tell Mrs. Crater what we had read.

It wouldn't have made a difference if we had.


Learning
I consider myself a writer who teaches. I love the written word and what it can do to and for us, how words on a page can evoke responses in a reader miles or years away. And as a writer, I realize all written works are works in progress: they need a reader to make the text complete.

Students often don't think about this. They think something is done when the teacher says it's due. But what if it isn't due? Is it still done? Who said it has to be done? When is it done? How do you know?

The student's duty is to learn collectively over time. Here's why: I can't teach anyone to write. I can only tell someone what's working for me and what isn't working for me--I can only tell you how I complete the text you started after I read it. And if I can't complete the text when I read it, then you haven't done your job as a writer.

Scary, but true.

But that shouldn't stop you from trying. Read what others have written. Then try again. Learn the rules. Learn there are no rules, only conventions. Break the conventions. But only after you can explain why you needed to break them. And then read some more. Keep at it. We're all in this together.


Hannah
Back in 1986, I saw Woody Allen's movie Hannah & Her Sisters for the first time. In the movie, Eliot, played by Michael Caine, lusts after his wife's sister, Lee, played by a drop-dead gorgeous Barbara Hershey in mid-career. I had a thing for Barbara Hershey for a long time. In an attempt to woo Lee away from her live-in painter boyfriend Fredrick, (a crusty misanthrope played by Max Von Sydow), Eliot gives her a book of e.e cummings' poetry with instructions to read a certain poem, LVII. Late at night he sits up in bed, and in a voice over we hear him recite the poem as she reads it while lying in her bed.

For the sake of brevity, I'm not including the poem here. You can find it on page 366 of the 1980 edition of cummings's complete poems published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. You should read it. It's a good poem. Of course, Lee melts after reading the poem, and it isn't long before she and Eliot are having an affair.

I felt an immediate connection to this poem, felt the urgency of the speaker's words as he tried to explain in precise detail how his love for whomever he is speaking to overwhelms him in the subtlest ways, how even the smallest gesture intensifies these feelings. My date started crying when the poem was read on-screen, and in my hormone-addled adolescent brain it suddenly clicked that poetry could help me get laid.


The next day, I walked to the Webster Groves Bookshop and bought cummings's Complete Poems. I read it straight through, all 845 pages of it, and while I understood the words, I didn't understand most of the poems and completely misread the techniques.

In other words, I wasn't ready to listen yet.

But eventually, I was.


Revision
I started writing verse in fifth grade. It was bad, pale imitations of Shel Silverstein. Ask me to show you sometime. I still have it. What, you mean you don't keep anything you've written? Why not? How else can you tell if you've gotten better?


Wilco
I miss the innocence I've known.

--Wilco, Heavy Metal Drummer


Honoring the Holy
I do not throw the word holy around lightly. I do joke that because poetry is the holy art of language that I'm an unrepentant sinner. It's a weak joke. You have to read my poems to get it. At any rate, I do not consider myself pious by any means, and although I converted to Catholicism in 1995, two years after marrying a cradle Catholic, I find myself wrestling with the intricate precepts and dogma of faith on a daily basis. I find it hard to pray, to meditate, to sit still and empty my mind to the wholeness which is the elimination of the self in submission to the unity of silence.

I think I have problems with this because when it comes to religion, I'm a mutt: I was born with a Jewish last name to a lapsed Catholic father and a mother who was indifferent to religion after being raised by a Southern Baptist mother and a lapsed Roman Catholic father. It was this grandmother who brought me to Candlestick Baptist Church in Humble, Texas, every Sunday for three years straight after my parents divorced and my mother, sister, and I moved in with my mother's parents. I was seven, and it seems Candlestick Baptist Church was my cliched home away from home until I moved to Missouri to be with my father in 1981. This second home thing isn't true, because my mother moved us to an apartment once she completed her LVN degree at the local community college and got a job administering shots at a pediatrician's office while my sister and I ran wild in the apartment complex's playground after school (I think I was in fourth grade) when we could escape the babysitter's stifling living room. We lived like that for about a year, and I know I didn't go to church too many Sundays that year. But I went enough in the previous three years to make up for my absence. But I digress.

What I remember most about the church is the baptism pool set above the choir behind the pulpit, built into the wall with a Plexiglas facade so that all might see the saved cleansed in the waters from the comfort of their hard backed, cushionless pews. When it was my turn to stand in the lukewarm water, I stared out the window at the congregation, trapped. It was the only time I ever saw my mother in a church, sitting next to my grandmother, who was prouder than spit that her eldest grandson was embracing the Risen Lord despite having raised six kids who had lapsed into secular indifference. I was seven when I was saved the first time. Nine when I was saved the second time. Twenty-five when I finally got it right in another faith and place.

I also remember that the pastor, Brother Bob, a kind-faced man with a million dollar smile and a two-fifty haircut who had a fondness for string ties and slapping his Bible on his left knee when he wanted to make an especially important point about a particular verse, fondled me before I was baptized the first time and threatened to cut off my privates with a pair of kitchen shears if I told anyone. The blades were sharp and cold.

This, too, is why I write.


Risks and Rewards
That was a difficult passage to write. I haven't told anyone other than my wife about this incident. The textbook response is to tell me I should not blame myself and that I should not be ashamed. And I don't blame myself and I am not ashamed. But it happened. I own it. And for some reason I wanted you to know about it. And I'm not sure why.

What I am asking you to do is to accept that it happened, to validate my voice as authoritative in regards to what I have experienced, whether by choice or circumstance. Maybe something similar happened to you. Maybe something different happened to you. Maybe you've written about it. Maybe you should. And you don't have to share, because no one's forcing you. But it might be helpful if you did. Because it's important. Because you are important.

This is why I teach.



Marriage
She clutches what sleep leaves to her chest
and when I turn my back against the wall
she moves away, the bed creaking beneath
the weight of dead air that lies between us.


Vanity
Try this. Go to and type your name in the search box, enclosing your name in quotes, like this: "Matthew W. Schmeer". Then hit the search button.

How many results do you get? Are you impressed? Or indifferent?

Don't worry. That number doesn't matter, even if it's zero. What matters it that you write. It doesn't matter that no one knows your name. Yet.

By the way, I got around 554 hits, the last time I checked. Still, I'm nobody compared to Paris Hilton. But then, she's not writing now, is she? What? She's got a book deal?

Damn.


On Appreciation
The first thing I ever wrote that was professionally published--published in a non-academic setting--was a letter to the editor of the Webster-Kirkwood Times I dashed off one high school afternoon in the middle of AP English (where I sat in the back near the open window and discreetly smoked clove cigarettes with Aaron Smith) after the paper ran a cover story about punk rock and heavy metal music and how kids who listened to it were juvenile delinquents.

After it appeared, I received a few pats on the back from my friends who were hardcore fans of The Butthole Surfers, The Meat Puppets, Black Flag, and The Dead Kennedys. Curiously, my long haired headbanger friends didn't say word one to me about the article, and I hung around them far more than I did the punks (although I will always hold a secret affinity for The Dead Milkmen's Taking Retards to the Zoo, which in this politically correct age has received far more attention than it ever did when it was released). Yes, my closest compatriots just flat out didn't read the local free newspaper that showed up every Friday in their driveways.

This just goes to show that sometimes you can't choose your audience.


Modes of Writing
No one believes me when I say it, but I got into teaching because of the dress code. Silly, but true. In what other job can you wear shorts and a pair of Birkenstocks on a daily basis and still be considered a professional? Although my preferred attire is a pair of jeans and a pair of Chucks, I like to know my options are open. In this respect, the clothes are a lot like writing. You gotta know your audience and what they need from you. Need to look professional? Wear the tie. Need to impress the Dean? Tie plus jacket. Meeting the College Vice President or President for lunch? Freshly pressed shirt plus tie plus jacket plus shiny dress shoes. It's all about the presentation. Same shit wrapped in prettier paper, sometimes with a bow on top.

Any questions? No? Class dismissed.


Ink
When I first started teaching, I didn't use red ink when I commented on student work. I opted for green or purple on the advice of the Director of Composition of the institution where I did my graduate work. Red signified confrontation, she said. I saw the logic in this, as I had not-so-fond memories of papers ripped to shreds in my literature and non-major classes. Green and purple, she advised, were friendlier colors..

A few years later, I realized this was bullshit. It's not the color of the ink that matters--it's what's said in response to what the students write. If all I do is circle grammar and mechanical errors, then students will learn nothing about writing; they'll learn that all I care about is whether all their commas are tucked neatly in place or if all their infinitives have been cemented together. But that's not writing. That's merely tidying the ink on the page.

So I don't care what color ink I use, or whether I use a pencil, or a crayon, to comment on papers and poems. What I care about is whether I've said something useful and that students know a human being read their words.



Poetry
I was sixteen when I fell in love with it. I've been a writing fool ever since.


Success
My first poem that was published in a non-academic setting happened years later, when The Crab Creek Review accepted a three line poem entitled Why I Lie to My Wife. I wrote it during a tough patch in my marriage, when my wife and I had been married for just a few years but I was spiraling into what I now recognize was an undiagnosed depression. Instead of going to my university classes to finish my Bachelor's degree, I would waste hours sitting and browsing in the campus library, or driving around the interstates that curl around St. Louis, or riding the cross-county bus from one end to the next, sometimes three times a night. And I was lying to my wife about it the whole time, telling her I was working on the degree and that I would be graduating soon, this year in fact, when of course, I wasn't. And when the day of graduation rolled around and I didn't say anything, well, it wasn't pretty.

Please note: we are still married. She's one tough cookie.


Making the Connection
I don't think of Mark Johnson too often. Mostly, I remember him as a kid with a wispy blond mullet who had the annoying habit of wearing a polo shirt under an untucked oxford dress shirt, the collar of the polo sticking up in that quasi-preppy fashion that was all the rage that year in our safe, suburban enclave of Webster Groves, Missouri. But when I do think of Mark, I can't help but connect him to what I know about writing, as Mark's story was the first time I realized that words carry far more weight than I thought they did, that what he was writing about could have stemmed from his own life and was not just pulled whole cloth out of thin air. Writing, I realized, was real. Even if it was made up.

It was at that point that I realized that writing and reading--no, the writer and the reader--were so tightly interwoven that it was impossible to separate one from the other, that they were tools from the same forge that worked to make connections with the world, be that through imagined worlds dreamed by those creative souls who live among us or the world that our experiences tell us we exist in. No matter how individualistic we think we are, we share common experiences, feelings, emotions, needs, wants, and dreams. Even if we do not recognize that the sum of who we are as a people is present in our private experiences of the world, what we can add to the shared knowledge of human experience is invaluable, precious, and holy. Writing, and the sharing of that writing, is a gift to ourselves and each other.

Of course, I lacked the vocabulary to express these concepts at the time. But then two years later I was sixteen and discovered poetry.


Wilco, again
Sometimes
I can't find the time
to write my mind
the way I want it to read.

--Wilco, Box Full of Letters


Technology
I've been using computers to write since 1987, when my high school newspaper received two Macintosh SE 30s for layout purposes. I quickly learned how to word process in MacWrite and do simple paste-up in Aldus PageMaker and became one of the chief layout artists for the Webster Echo. This started my long love affair with Macs. I've owned several stock machines and built several FrankenMacs from scavenged parts. But I didn't always use computers to write, and sometimes I still don't.

Before using a Mac, I wrote longhand and typed everything on a beat up Olivetti electric typewriter that my step-mother used to get though college in the early 1970s. The keys would stick, especially the e, which would make typing anything in English nearly impossible. But I suffered through.

When I started college in 1989, my step-grandfather--the same man who taught me how to play chess and never let me win--bought me a SmithCorona WordProcessor 2000, a hybrid typewriter that had a small 300 character screen and could save documents to a fragile 2x3 inch disk that was completely incompatible with any other computer or word processor available then or since. I typed a lot of term papers on that thing, lots of bad poems, lots of shit I'm glad could never be retrieved because it deserved to die a disgraceful death.

Even though for the past fifteen years I've used computers or a PDA for nearly all my writing, which these days tends to be oriented toward online forums--such as my personal blog, blogging communities to which I contribute, listservs I subscribe to and web sites I maintain--I sometimes find myself longing for the feel of pen against paper. I find myself writing longhand in journals again, using a fountain pen or roller ball (Parkers only, please) to scratch my jangled alphabets across the page.

In other words, writers gotta use the tools that work for them.


My Struggle
I have a difficult time finding worthy writing subjects. I invent voices and situations because the everyday seems so mundane, but when I read Pablo Neruda or James Galvin writing about watermelons and lemons, I wonder what the hell my problem is with writing about common objects. Why shouldn't I write about a piece of fruit or a doorknob or the birth of my daughters? Should these things be difficult to write about? Probably. Has someone written better poems on these subjects? Most likely.

I've come to recognize that my writing revolves around at-risk relationships: mismatched lovers, cops and murderers, students and teachers, gods and mortals, mothers and sons, husbands and wives, disembodied hands floating in water. My wife asks me why I don't write "happy" poems; it seems I'm locked into writing poems that have a mean underbelly, a threatening edge that can't be sanded and softened.

The other problem I have is recognizing when to stop revising and let a poem go; witness, for example, the three years I spent revising a small poem entitled "Digits" that eventually found its way into the Salt Fork Review. This zeal to revise amazes me. When I started writing, I didn't understand revision, didn't know I needed/had to/should revise. Like most young writers, I thought it was enough to put words on paper--they would stick to the page on their own. I thought that just because I had something to say that it was worth writing and therefore worth reading. And for the most part what I was writing wasn't worth saying or reading. Now that I am writing better poems (having practiced lo these many years), I find peace in revising.

Either that, or I have the revision monkey on my back.


An Aside
Verse equals poetry, but Poetry does not verse. It's the square/rectangle thing. If you don't get it, then you are going to have a hard time navigating the geography of the poem. Or the essay. Or life. Yes, it's that important. Ask William Carlos Williams.


Grades
I don't teach English. I don't teach writing. I teach students. And that's why I don't like grades. Grades don't tell students anything about what they've written; they only tell students what they've done right or wrong, not the effect that writing has had on someone. That's why I only use grades when the registrar demands them at the end of the semester. Everything else is open to discussion. Let's talk about this, maybe over lunch. Or coffee or tea? Do you take one lump or two? Or do you prefer beer? Domestic or imported? Boxers or briefs? Commas or semicolons? Here, read this. And this. And this. Now, write. Good. What about doing it this way? Or this way? Here, now write this. Yes, now. Yes.

QUINTON DUVAL—JOE'S RAIN

Quinton Duval's book Joe’s Rain revels in the slow wisdom of knowing that losing one's aspirations is a kind of achievement. The spirit of "hanging on" rises and animates nearly every poem in the book. The various speakers in the book, invariably mapped onto one shade or another of Duval, feel perfectly at home with the errant turn in life as well as reference made by the speaker to himself as "fat, bejeweled maggot." That'd be pretty harsh stuff if it weren't coming out of such an affable, self-deprecating guy.

Duval's earnest and straightforward work matched the Mark Bowles Central Valley landscape paintings behind him—flatline horizons. Listening to Duval read his poems at The Art Foundry in Sacramento reminded me of an interview with B. B. King I heard recently. King’s outlook was always gracious for whatever fortune had smiled on him as he held firm to the things he claimed as his own. Duval keeps the familiar in his clutch at all times. The poems are laced with generous amounts of Central Valley ephemera and natural phenomenon. As is the frequent trope for many Sacramento poets, the familiar and home are mainstays. Sacramento is a place that inspires fierce loyalties and myriad reflections, and though happening upon the Central Valley by chance in the mid-60’s, Duval has firmly ensconced himself within the literary imagination that Sacramento’s weather and rivers inspire.

Joe’s Rain is a tidy collection. Slightly more than half of the poem titles are one or two-word titles. It is a collection of six groups of seven poems bookended by a welcoming and farewell poem. In this way it appears as though you’ve been visited by a very sociable and amiable fellow with good manners who knows not to stay too long nor say too much. These are characteristics I admire because, for me, they're so damned elusive. One looks up after an evening with Joe’s Rain that isn't too taxing or intimidating and discovers a relaxed feeling arriving unexpectedly. His presence is the kind one saves a special bottle for. The bottle is brought out solely for the two of you when he visits. Indeed, beer, wine and bourbon (but no saké) flow throughout the book, but in "Joe’s Rain," another elixir is proffered.

Joe’s Rain

This late rain drives
into the dry soil
silent through the windows
that look out back.
One big robin bathes
in a saucer left out,
but that doesn’t mean much.
Two weeks ago a man stood
where the rain is falling,
frail, stooped, but standing,
forming words and making sense
about plants and birds and
what a garden does for your soul.
All the daylight is nearly burned,
smoke and ash of evening.
Lights from the house shine
back from wet concrete
this late rain has darkened.
The moon, we learn, reflects
the sun, so that’s what’s real.
I swear I hear a mockingbird
sound just like an alarm clock
mornings when I don’t have to
get up. So that is real too.
And today, wet streets
under the overpass, trucks above
barreling somewhere hurried,
a shower of cherries, shaken
from their crates around a curve
rained down in front of me
and adorned the roadway.
Farmers don’t like rain
when their crop is on the tree.
But I like rain almost always.
Bury us all near water,
scatter us all on water.
If it can rain cherries, it can rain
anything. Does this help?
Have a glass of rain on me.

Rhetorically speaking, this poem ends the way several poems in the collection do. The you understood suggests a giving of advice or a giving of directions. "Have a glass on me" is an invitation, but it's also a warning that slaking thirst can seem like a useless gesture in retrospect. The speaker knows that a glass of rain really isn't going to help with the bitter pill, but he offers it nonetheless. In this way, "Joe’s Rain" can be offered as a kind of Duvalian ars poetica that says—"Hey, I'm just making these poems as a way to take care of what ails you, but I can’t vouch for their effectiveness at alleviating a lifetime of your pain." Does this poem help or does that poem help? Duval isn’t presumptuous enough to even hazard a guess. However, in "Shine" he makes his humble proposal to embrace optimism such as it is.

Shine

This paper hides in back
of a book I’m reading
because it is sad and beautiful,
the last book of poetry
written by a man who knew
he was dying, and still he found
joy and life and shine in most things.
this paper with nothing on it
asks, I suppose, by its blankness,
to be filled.
I don’t believe in curses,
good or bad, rubbing off.
Maybe I have a pencil
and this paper to put down
how the turkey vulture came
straight toward the house
so I could see its red head
like stewmeat in the noon light.
Or across the bay, from this high,
a road looks like a backwards C,
like fingers and thumb showing
how much you missed something,
when what you missed by was slight.

I know, I’m not going anywhere
like the eucalyptus that waves
back at something constantly.
I can only describe what’s out there
and try to make it shine
like a ring pressing into a finger,
like the shallow water
the boats are careful to steer around,
like, like, like the sun dropping,
the blood spatter on that one gull’s beak.
Pencil on paper, I still have things
to say. Here’s to everyone trying
in some way to make shine out of shinola.
You know what I mean. It’s the difference
between the vulture’s beaded eye
behind his meat face, the rain
pouting miles offshore, the lizard
that comes out to share the sun,
the one my wife doesn’t like
but I think is a bright little motor
pulsing up and down in this light.

Here Duvalsides with the little guy (doing his push-ups in order to survive). That lizard isn't "going anywhere like the eucalyptus." If I weren’t sure that Duval doesn’t have green skin and a tail, I'd swear he had manifested himself as this reptile sunbathing in the nude. The speaker seems to be getting at the ol' accepted wisdom that there is truth ringing through all the sorrow and disappointment. A little shrine of abdications can be built to glimmer in the afternoon heat, fending off a world of menace.

Duval makes great sport of ridiculing the grandiose and celebrating the simple pleasures of common experience. Everywhere in his work there are gestures made to common experience. He is very self-conscious about sounding like a poet with a capital p, like in "Trying to Read Mythology,"—"Or more beautiful,/a pitcher of moonlight spills over/the heat-faint garden and lights up/ a fig tree laden with ancient, ripe fruit./Maybe we should shut up and eat.” Here the poetic gesture is trumped by more basic demands. This kind of deflation is pervasive in Duval's poems, and it tends to nestle into the body of a poem between the yearning and wrenching detail the way a cactus wren hunkers down in a scabbed-over hole in a saguaro.

In I Remember SaltDuval takes the reader to a non-descript Spanish-speaking venue—my best guess places me in Mexico, but I wouldn't rule out Neruda's Antofagasta plains ( I must admit, though, that this second option is unlikely as Duval usually opts for direct experience as his subject matter rather than traveling through to an imagined space). Once there, the reader is greeted by a rather harsh and bitter domain. Life is hard—sleeping and eating and laundry, the trifecta of a barren life. The scenes are working class scenes, and Duval becomes aware of his alienation in such a place where "salt is taken in kind and bitter olives yield the oil year after year." Here again, the focus is on expectations dashed. In such a place dreams are not even worthy of idle chatter. Revealing something like a dream might get one arrested for indecent exposure. Residents of this visited place might be too familiar with the truism Duval offers in "Honey"—"we rarely get to taste the honey we've made." And when we do taste it, Duval in "On a Hot Summer Day" reminds, "being grown up is accepting/the diminishing of all things/we imagined ours forever." Duval seems specifically in tune with this sensibility of accepting the echoing sentiment of nostalgia in "Into the Sea."

Into the Sea

Take your tarnished halo
and sail it into the pale blue
line between sky and water
this evening offers you
here at the edge of the world.
Take your faded blue shirt
and strip it to bandages
for the wounded souls
you’ll meet along the way.
Bring what you can carry
and remember that no one can tell
what lingers behind your smile.
You know some songs, yes,
but the words seem to have fallen
from the board, as the birds
this evening fall off the face
of the sky and into the ocean’s turmoil.
How many songs have you ever known
with "pilgrim" inside, wander
the directive, and the needle
pointing north? A squad of pelicans
clears the space west of you.
Your path leads to woods, a bridge,
a hill, a bluff, a bench
where rest the weary. The sunset’s
glorious, it’s not so cold,
and everything goes off, everything
except your full heart, your waving hand,
your watery eyes. Into the sea
everything goes.

At the end of the book, the reader might feel like he/she has been witness to a lemon-sucking contest. The leftover lemon rinds are the dregs that serve as reminders of tattered lives, still loved like stuffed bears with their patina of wear and tear. The hard truth of the matter, though, is that the reader is probably better off than those dismembered lemons. The Germans call this schadenfreude, joy at another’s misfortunes. It is a strange way to get to catharsis for Americans, but I presume Duval would allow for any of his readers to get there any way they might manage. Besides, all the self-deprecating humor Duval employs, Americans generally don’t get that anyway. When was the last time you heard an American tell a joke that started out, “There were these three Americans . . ." Duval is one American who might just rise to this occasion.

FROM ROCKMIRTH: SOME NOTES ON SUPERSTRING THEORY

Today, I took a long walk up across the far ridge of the grounds: followed some elk tracks up across the plateau above the valley and then followed the contour of the ridge’s drainage back down to the studio. I found, deep in the high country, a torus of stones set at even intervals around a small campfire circle. Off to the right was a mushroom-shaped table with bits and pieces of shell and necklace atop.

This walk was different than my other walks this week. I could feel my mind disentangling itself from the land. My consciousness turned back to the world of my business. The appointments to be made. The press releases to be written. Only by pushing farther and climbing higher could I get that sense of lightness I so easily achieved my first few walks.

I returned from my walk and read more of the “Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene. String theory posits that the smallest unit of the universe is what amounts to a small torus-shaped object called a string. The string is equal in size to the Planck length. What is interesting about a string is that it can generate physical elements “smaller” than itself. Also, it can also be swollen by massive energies to be macroscopic—that is, it is possible that the big bang supercharged a string that is floating through the universe. So if you see a glazed doughnut passing by the moon in your telescope, you just might be looking at the fundamental construct of the universe.

What makes strings predictive of our universe is that they have been mathematically proven to vibrate and resonate in ways that manifest all the known qualities of time, space, and gravity. But in order for strings to produce the resonances that manifest our known universe, they MUST also resonate to 7 other dimensions. They must resonate in time and volume: four dimensions. But since they produce reality, they require the existence of 7 other dimensions that are linked at all moments and at all points to the known dimensions. In all times at every moment we exist in 4 known observable dimensions and 7 anticipated and mathematically proven dimensions. We occupy more unknown dimensions than known. Hey I didn’t make this stuff up…this is what the mathematics indicates.

Additionally cool is that string theory changes the notion of the big bang to the big reversal. Since the fundamental shape of the fundamental construct of the universe is not a massless point but a vibrating volume the results of the end of time when all the universe re-compresses, all mass, light, energy, etc… is drawn back into its minimal size—with string theory this minimal size is reached before total reduction is reached. This means that as everything is compressed to smaller than the minimal size, it becomes the inverse of the previously manifested universe. That is it unspins in reverse the equivalent physical laws of the previously maximized universe. Every testable physical property of the previously manifested universe will hold true in the now emanting universe—except in mathematically inverse terms. The ultimate compression of the universe is the energy that causes its next emanation and expansion.

I also like to read a daily reflection out of “The Essential Kabbalh.” Today’s was “RIPPLES.”

“Thought reveals itself through contemplating a little without content, contemplating sheer spirit. The contemplation is imperfect: you understand—then you lose what you have understood. Like pondering a thought: the light of that thought suddenly darkens, vanishes; then it returns and shines—and vanishes again. No one can understand the content of that light. It is like the light that appears when water ripples in a bowl: shining here, suddenly disappearing—then reappearing somewhere else. You think that you have grasped the light, when suddenly it escapes, radiating elsewhere. You pursue it, hoping to catch it—but you cannot. Yet you cannot bring yourself to leave. You keep pursuing it.

It is the same with the beginning of emanation. As you begin to contemplate it, it vanishes, then reappears; you understand—and it disappears. Even though you do not grasp it, do not despair. The source is still emanating, spreading.”

A poem for today’s journal:

.3636~

“Thought rises to contemplate its own innerness until its power of comprehension is annihilated.”
THE ESSENTIAL KABBALAH, Daniel C. Matt

According to superstring theory
There are seven additional dimensions
To the four we currently inhabit
Accounted for by time and space.

I am 36 years old and the closest I can
Come to the proof of my own soul
Is dividing four by eleven. I understand
That I understand only .3636~ of my

Oneness: seven dimensions of my body,
My consciousness, all that I understand
Are not visible in the visible spectrum
Of physics: I am .6464~ unknown

To myself, to the world of science,
To even a godhead as I might think
Of a godhead. And what if even one
Of these dimensions are another dimension

Of time: as I type, sometimes, words
Do not appear on the computer screen.
I have to re-type them. Then for some
Reason the words I typed in the past appear.

I assume this is an error in the electromagnetics
Of my computer, but imagine that ideas,
Feelings, thoughts, dreams, depart
Into these other dimensions in the same way.

My inability to see the dish soap underneath
The kitchen sink where my wife screams
With certainty it has always been and always
Will be is the result of these extra-dimensional

Characteristics and has nothing to do
With my own personal character flaws.
You see it is the holes in the theory
That re-assure me the dish soap, its future

Bubbles in the sink, their coagulation
Like memories of moments I have forgotten,
Will always be there, there underneath the sink
Beside the Fantastic and the Drano.

SOME PICTURES FROM MY STAY AT ROCKMIRTH

Today is my last full day at Rockmirth in Sapello, NM. While I didn't write 100 pages of the novel...I did get some of it done. Also, I wrote a few poems. Here are some pics off my phone from my stay at Rockmirth...

Left to right, top to bottom 1. (l) two faces of the Boddhisvatta at the center of the Tarbiyat Labyrinth. 2. (r) food baked and harvested for meals at Rockmirth 3.(l) the octagon bedroom above the valley floor 4. (r) looking out from the center of the Tarbiyat labyrinth 5. (l) my shadow on a stone in the cliffs above Rockmirth. 6. (r) one of my stacks of stones, 'round here they call it "mirthing."

SOME NOTES ON GARDENING AT ROCKMIRTH

Yesterday I took my customary walk up through the highlands here on the grounds at Rockmirth. Afterwards I settled back in at the studio. I popped in the player the Lannan video of Thom Gunn. I’d studied Gunn’s first three books while in Grad School and later followed the opinion of my thesis advisor, William Logan, that Gunn’s later work had gone slack.

I formed this opinion without the proper rigor, for I’d only taken cursory looks at the later work. I’ve been in the process of reconsidering that position for almost a decade now. I continue to adore Gunn’s early work. But as I’ve read and re-read some of the later poems I’ve found them better than I expected them to be. In the Lannan video I was particularly taken by the Jeffrey Dahmer, Troubador poems and by the poem AS EXPECTED.

AS EXPECTED details a draft dodger named Larry and his experience working with the mentally retarded at a mental health facility in Sonoma, CA. The poem details how the mentally handicapped react to people who show them affection and respect.

I was raised in mental health institutions. I lived on campuses in North Carolina, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. I have fond memories of my school bus stopping in front of our house on the grounds and being greeted by a half dozen of the residents. They had been waiting for me to arrive. There smiles were huge! And all they wanted to know was if I’d had a good day at school and whether I was going to visit with them that evening.

Also, as a child I spent several summers as the unofficial ward of my Down syndrome uncle. He spent a half-dozen summers with us. During these summers I treated him as if he was one of the guys and we fished, and biked, and swam, and hunted night crawlers together. Oddly enough my buddy Dana Pugh didn’t seem to mind, I mean we never even discussed the peculiarity. My uncle was as much a part of my summer as Little League. That’s just how it was for me.

Years later in Alaska I would find myself in a special ed classroom. I’d mentioned to the local district my experiences with my uncle and that I’d lived in mental health institutions as a kid. A pair of local teachers had a Down syndrome son that was mainstreamed into the school. He needed a dedicated ward. So I became, for a year or two, the primary resource in the district for mainstreaming Down syndrome students.

My experience there was that even the roughest, toughest kid in that school—the kid the teachers were afraid of—the kid that was as likely to get into a fistfight with you as say hello—would have defended my Down syndrome students to the death. I don’t think I’m overstating. The “normal” kids at that school took ownership of the love and care of these mainstreamed students. This speaks to the unbelievable character of these students. They radiated the divine and the “normal” kids at that school felt that and knew that.

After watching the Gunn video from the Lannan series. I walked out into the Rockmirth Garden. I realized that I have spent my life living with and around the mentally retarded and yet I have avoided bringing the subject into any of my writing, especially my poems. Perhaps I felt protective? Maybe I was feeling that to broach the subject was to take advantage of those people I’d known. They have a dignity of their own that is intrinsic and does not need me to speak for it nor about it. So if I feel that way about my own writing process, why did I not feel that way about Gunn when he wrote his poem, AS EXPECTED? He certainly had far less experience with the mentally challenged than I.

The beans and peas of the untended Rockmirth garden intertwined between zig-zag rows of carrots and small stands of beets. The zucchini and squash wound their way through the dazzle of wildflowers. As I admired the fecundity of the garden, and resisted my urge to somehow fix this wildness by weeding—I reflected on gardening with my uncle. My family once had a small garden in our backyard and he would work his way along the row of yellow wax beans and fill a bowl until it would overflow. In the kitchen as we washed the wax beans he would turn on his small AM Radio and tune it to his favorite station, a polka station. My uncle, he adored polka. Then, he would dance a little jig.

I thought about swimming with him later that summer. At the lake my friends and I were goofing around dunking each other, or trying to. My uncle wanted in on the action. He was much stronger than us and we had a great time as he would lift us high into the air and throw us—splashing into the water. I climbed on his back but could not pull him under water. He quickly flipped me over his back and dunked me under the water. He held me there much too long.

I don’t know what to think of that except that when I was finally able to escape and surfaced desperate for air, I saw he was still smiling. There was some sort of strangeness in me at that moment. I could not be angry though I tried. There is no such malice in him. Because of that there was no malice for him in me. This had me thinking, that “mindless violence” as an expression is a misnomer. For if the violence were truly mindless I would not feel outrage when it occurs. The expression “mindless violence” really means violence intended. This intended violence carries with it, its anti-particle, outrage.

Yesterday, I rewrote an old poem, re-casting it in the light of this reflection on my uncle and Thom Gunn's poem, AS EXPECTED...

A PERFECT FEAST

In Kufa, Iraq, Dr. Al Musawi found

The same cytogenetic abnormalities

In his patients as elsewhere in the world.

Here, in Eden few things grow imperfectly.

I collect the vermiculated apples,

The weak-necked lily, and three-eyed frogs.

My uncle? His eyes sit far apart like a toad

And his hands are birdlike for such a large man,

And his nose is flat and wide and upturned like a pig,

And his bifocals magnify his moony cow eyes,

And he smiles that dumb, doughy, dog-eared

Smile all the time. Where the water is brackish

He pushed me under as if to baptize me,

But would not let me surface. Perhaps

That was the first time I died. Perhaps

He thought my ears were fish gills

And I could breathe under water.

To kill his nephew and keep smiling,

In this alone I could have loved him.

Slogging about, his hooves knock

Over a bowl of misshapen baby gourds.

Toad, pig, cow, man, my uncle,

When he grazes in my untended garden,

Sometimes he remembers

I am there and he asks me to join him.

All the intelligence in the world will

Not stop the bullet that darkens the heart

Of Ali Saad Mohamed kneeling in the desert

Next to his dead nephew so near the Euphrates

One expects the waters to rise and carry him away.

SOME NOTES ON WALKING THE TARBIYAT LABYRINTH

Yesterday morning I woke here at Rockmirth in Sapello, New Mexico refreshed. After my coffee, I took a walk up into the hills. On one of the cliffs I built a tower of stones: a tall sculpture of weighted and counter-weighted sandstone. I secretly hoped that someday some wanderer would stumble across it and admire it and wonder what fool would take so much time to build such a thing a in the middle of nowhere. The stones were heavy and as I gathered them my arms ached.

After I finished I walked down to the garden and admired the squash blossoms, the tomatoes, the green beans, and lettuce. Later in the evening I would return and collect a basketful of each for my dinner.

After the garden, I went into the common area, read a few pages of “The Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene and a few pages of “The Street of Crocodiles” by Bruno Schulz…and then at long last began to write. I wrote dream sequences for two different characters in the novel. With that success underneath my belt, I decided a drive into town was in order.

On my drive into town I noticed the Tarbiyat Center, a Baha’i retreat. The sign also read, Tarbiyat Labyrinth. I was intrigued. The last labyrinth I walked was also near a writers retreat, The Ropewalk Writer’s Retreat in New Harmony, Indiana with Stephen Dobyns, Andrew Hudgins, and others. New Harmony was a small town built as a utopia by Robert Owen in I think 1814. The founding group members were known as Harmonists. I was there in 1996, I think, um, maybe 1997? I wasn’t of a very clear mind when I was there, though I learned a lot and had a lot of fun.

Though I did not walk it, I was also recently at the floor labyrinth at Siena’s Cathedral, the Duomo. I had the good fortune of bumming around tuscany for my sister-in-law’s wedding. From a brochure: “Inside it is the famous Gothic octagonal pulpit by Nicola Pisano (1266 - 1268) supported on lions, and the labyrinth inlaid in the flooring, traversed by penitents on their knees. Beneath the Duomo, in the baptistry is the baptismala marvellous font with bas-reliefs by Donatello, Ghiberti, Jacopo della Quercia and other 15th-century sculptors.”

I was struck by the Duomo's labyrinth above all else. As a retired catholic I have some ill-feeling about religion, but I found the idea of the ritualized labyrinth walk mythopoeaic--almost pagan in its history and practice. Isn’t the minotaur in every labyrinth the self? The result of the ritualized practice is often recorded as a distortion of time.

As I walked around Tarbiyat, I looked for the labyrinth. The local dogs were confused by me driving back and forth on the main road looking for the labyrinth. I couldn’t find it. I gave up and drove into town to get a few supplies and to stop into the local used book store, The Second Tome Around.

On my drive home I decided to stop back at Tarbiyat. For those of you not familiar with the Baha’i Faith. The basics are pretty simple, 1. All religions are valid. Each reflects a different version of the same unifying light. 2. Hard science and intellectual education are the foundations of spiritual study. 3. No church, no priests, just a “feast” once a month to gather folks together for hanging out and deciding how the group can help out the community. That’s about it, in it simplest form.

So I drive up toward Tarbiyat and the dogs come out to greet me again. I drive up and around. This time I walk around the far facilities and give the place a closer look. No luck. So I hop in my car and drive down the dirt road toward the exit. As if out of nowhere, on my right hand side I see a clearing and in the clearing? How could I have missed it before? The labyrinth.

This is another notebook poem. Closer to a diary entry really. It is what it is...

WALKING THE TARBIYAT LABYRINTH

At first I cannot find it. I follow the local dogs

Up the dirt road past the windmill whirling

On its stilts: space, time, gravity, and light.

Let go, release, I tell myself, everything

Travels at the speed of light. I tell myself

Let go, release, it takes the sun’s light eight

Minutes to travel to earth. Words break down

In the echo chamber of my consciousness.

The word “release” changes meaning

For me, becomes, rent this life again.

“Let go” becomes make departure free

From your control. Back at the workshed

Hangs a visage of Boddhisvatta

With a welding mask tilted back off the brow.

Up past the stone lined pond, on my return,

The Holsteins will stare me down. A contractor’s

Pick up truck bumps past, he waves.

I walk, I wave back. The valley lined with purple

Asters, this path lined with stones,

The days into tomorrow lined with their hours,

And the sun rippling its pull guide me

Towards, then away, then towards.

At the center, a small circle of stones, inside

Three thin twigs and two thumbnail medallions:

One pewter, one clay, both the face of Boddhisvatta.

At the center I open to, no, I am opened by blue

Sky: at first I am a glass vase filled dark blue

With ink poured from naked air above the red

Cliffs where black hollyhock has taken hold.

Then the vase dissolves. And the ink is air

And the world is the world and is not the world.

I walk out of the labyrinth, I pick clean stalks,

Shoots of fennel, dandelion, and grass

That litter my path. Acceptance: I weed.

I need not weed, but do. Minotaur, I stay

You your diligence. Two hands full of uprooted

Weeds, two hours later, I reach the exit.

MORE FROM ROCKMIRTH: SOME PICTURES FROM INSIDE THE ROCKMIRTH COMMON AREA

Some pictures from inside the Rockmirth common area:

SOME NOTES ON MY FIRST MORNING AT ROCKMIRTH, SAPELLO, NM

I recently posted SOME NOTES ON HATCHER PASS, AK. I mentioned therein that I was looking for a retreat or residency experience to complete some projects I was working on but concluded I had not the time nor the temperment to really get away. This conclusion made me question my own motives...why wouldn't I afford myself a retreat or residency if I really wanted to put together a book of poems for a manuscript, or finish writing the novel? So I recently accepted a series of residencies and fellowships hear and there. First, to see how I will react in such spaces, and second, to try and take advantage of large blocks of writing time.

Today was my first morning at Rockmirth in Sapello, New Mexico after a late arrival last night. Last night I re-read some of Jerome Seaton's translations of Chinese poetry as he recently contacted me about work of mine he'd looked at and rejected but liked. I read bits and pieces of Horace Gregory's translation of Catullus...I have 5 different translations but I had never read the Gregory translation and was very pleased that the local proprietor Judyth Hill let me borrow her copy to look over. I also re-read bits and pieces of Galway Kinell's "Selected Poems" and watched the video of his reading from the Lannan series.

I awoke this morning at 5 am to a coffecake, cobbler, and cheescake left for me by Judyth Hill the proprietor. I stayed in the octagon shaped bedroom that hangs over the valley floor. The main building is a wide open, airy studio space chock full of sculpture and paintings. The grounds themselves are half-ranch, half-sculpture garden, half hippie "whole earth catalog." That is one half too much...but you get the picture. The clutter is part of the charm.

After fielding a call with Johnson and Johnson for work I walked high up in to the highlands. After my walk I sat down and wrote a poem. It is not a good poem, but it does mark my first morning here. This is a poem for my journal, not for publication, the kind of poem you take a private joy in sticking in the back of a notebook and returning to as a reminder. For fun and as a symbol of my joy at being here in Rockmirth here it is.

AS IF

The sculpture garden waits with me, I have two hours
Before my 8 a.m. call with Johnson & Johnson
On the East coast. Yes, the sun is almost risen,
And yes, the air smells almost like tripe from the fungal
Sporing of mushroom all through the unusually damp
Highlands of New Mexico, and yes, this means the insect
Hatch greets me with its flitting and cricketing.
But there, still between the stones, my head, my hands,
My cock, I feel the receding dark whizzing around
Me as if I was in its way. In my white boxer shorts
With the green whirlygigs, in my sandals, I emerge
Into morning as if I were Galatea in reverse. The receding
Dark unveils the darting color of the field birds:
The aggressive flutter of the lemon starling,
The mysterious black hood of vaux’s swift,
The long-tailed thrust of the olive-sided flycatcher,
And the airy embrace, kiss, and dart of the barn swallow.
The air above the field is a field of light and pollen
Littered with pursuit of seed, of sap, of hatch.
And I am there like a sculpture in the garden
Placed appropriately as if to fit in with this scene
As if I belong there but like the sculpture, only, as if.
Later in the day I share this poem with my beloved.
She wonders, “Why do you always mention your cock
in your poems.” I tell her that is not really what
I was hoping she’d say. I tell her it is the best part
Of me. It never lies about what it wants, or feels, or desires--
As if it represents that part of me that stands
For and within, but apart from, love, but only, as if.

SOME MORE NOTES ON FRANK BIDART'S TRANSLATION OF TU FU #6: FLORENCE AYSCOUGH'S DAZZLING WOMEN

This post is a follow up to the previous post: SOME NOTES ON FRANK BIDART'S TRANSLATION OF TU FU #5

The following is the line-by-line translation from Florence Ayscough’s “Autobiography of a Chinese Poet: Tu Fu.” I’ve added the line numbers to assist the reader in comparing the characters in my previous post of the poem to Ayscough’s lines, though I’ve tried to keep Ayscough’s line breaks, stanza breaks and separations.

DAZZLING LADIES: A HSING

Vol. II, Leaf 6

1: Third moon, third day, Heavens breath new;
2: Ch’ang An water’s edge, many dazzling ladies.

3: Of gracious demeanor, far-reaching ambition, and virtue moreover undeviating;
4: Their skin fine of grain, glossy and smooth; bones and flesh well proportioned.

5: Upper garments, lower garments, of embroidered silk gauze, reflect gleaming light in the sunset month of Spring.
6: It beats down on gold peacocks and silver Ch’I Lin.

7: Upon their heads what is there?
8: Ornamental leaves made of kingfisher feathers droop past the line of their lips from hair bound on the temples.

9: Their backs behind, what can be seen?
10: Pearls pressing down loins, skirts hanging straight, their bodies perfectly fitted.

11: Among the ladies are relations of the Cherished One who lives behind the cloud screen in the Spiced Plant Chamber;
12: Bestowed upon them are names of great Kingdoms, Kuo as well as Ch’in.

13: Peaked hump of purple dromedary comes out from kingfisher cauldron;
14: On crystal platter clear as water’s essence, lie rows of white and shining fish.

15: The ladies dislike to eat to repletion and not to put down their rhinocerous horn chop-sticks frequently;
16: Green fire-bird knife with tinkling bells cuts to a thread; the food is like strands of fine silk cord.

17: Members of the Yellow Gate fly as on wings, rein in their horses abruptly, but no dust rises from the polished paving stones;
18: Imperial kitchen lets fall in an unbroken line the eight delicacies sent as gifts.

(The Emperor is supposed to dine on these delicacies, which are: bear’s paws, deer’s tails, duck’s tongues, turbot’s roe, camel’s hump, monkey’s lips, carp’s tail and ox’s marrow.)

19: Pitiful sounds of flutes and drums bite the hearts of demons beneath and spirits above;
20: Distinguished Visitors of official rank follow each other, a confused throng; a solid mass desire to cross the ferry.

21: Afterwards come the Yang Clan, riding horses; why do these hesitate and shrink back from the crowd?
22: The Yang, pushing through, reach the long summer house, dismount from steeds and step on flowered rugs.

23: Flowers of Yang, willow flowers, fall as snow, weighing down the frogbit;
24: A black bird flies away, holding in his beak a rose-red handkerchief.

* * *
25: A hand held out to warm can scorch: his power and authority cut short comparison;
26: Be cautious: do not draw near nor come in contact with the Ruling Minister’s blustering rage.

With Ayscough he see a character by character translation with only subtle editorializing. As I compare the characters to Ayscough's sentences, she does a decent job of approximating. Though as I'll discuss later, approximating in this tranlsation falls short of providing the deeper aesthetic experiences available in the poem.

All of this background work with Ayscough, Hawkes, and the raw Chinese is important because the translation by Bidart takes advantage of this information and moves towards a less literal exploration. But my sense is that without the underpinnings of the poem, Li Ren, exposed one may lack some of what is required to take a close look at another's translation.

In my next post, some more details from David Hawkes' book--and then I'll post the translation by Bidart with some discussion of it.

JOSH McKINNEY—THE NOVICE MOURNER

Josh McKinney, sporting his new Gary Snyder haircut (or was it a Lance Armstrong cut?) read nearly twenty pieces from his new collection The Novice Mourner published by Bear Star Press. The short-cropped hair and cowboy boots seemed apropos of a redneck shitkicker past that McKinney claims in the book, which is very distant from the effete elliptical type that Stephen Burt and others have proclaimed him as. Nowhere was this neatly compartmentalized past self more apparent than in McKinney’s piece called “Gun,” the highlight of the evening. In “Gun,” a collection of short prose poems inhabited by Bonnie Parker and populated mostly by childhood vignettes about his father’s sidearm pistol, McKinney intoned the words descriptive of his father’s (and now his own) pistol—the Ruger “Blackhawk” .22-caliber single-action revolver—in such an incantatory manner that it made it possible for a brief moment to truly believe in and devote oneself to the raw power of firearms.

Many of the poems in The Novice Mourner stand in stark contrast to Saunter, McKinney’s previous book that won the University of Georgia Press Poetry Series Open Competition in 2002. The Novice Mourner is seemingly much more autobiographical. It is the place where McKinney negotiates and wrestles with his past (in particular with the spectre of his bitter and authoritative father) at the same time providing reminders of his experimental tendencies. The discontinuities and fragments which are emblematic of much of the work in Saunter often give way to, in a case like "Gun," brutally straightforward narratives where McKinney’s aim is to reveal arrived-at truth rather than truth searched for, shaken, separated, and reticulated.

This adaptation of style to fit content shows that McKinney is not a slave to current fashion and that he understands that form needs to serve the content it delivers. The poems I admire most though are the ones that maintain their narrative thread while introducing a healthy amount of meditation on the events, placing the events within the arc of humanity’s struggle and exhibiting the reach of an energetic mind. A Principle of Perspective is a terrific example of how a son’s battle with his father (though the son is not completely equated to McKinney through the use of the first person I) can be the backdrop for a meditation on the need to acquire distance from a colossal event. In this poem the event is one that upsets the typical father-son power relationship. The perspective that evolves passes through normal tones until a “sinister” one develops to inform the living.

But it is not enough for many to simply admire poems. Many readers wish to love poems and the authors who write them. They look for the familiar forms of persons they know in them. And McKinney delivers this to them as well. In “In Other Words” the speaker informs the reader of how the past wreaks havoc on his thinking. Then in stanzas four, five, and six, a scene with an old woman begins to emerge. An old man (the father who likely appears in "A Principle of Perspective") exhibits some odd behavior, and the speaker is left to interpret it, to interpret the slow dissembling of this man at the end of his life. The last two lines prove that the thing that makes one human might also be the thing that leads one to ruin. McKinney cautions that the higher faculties doth lead us astray.

IN OTHER WORDS

Light tactics splay over the ground,
and the clothes twisting
in wind, the shirts and skirts
forming like tall thoughts,
make sight a plea for mediation.

What sinful, crazy architect
concocts a past in tatters?
The light. The wind. I grew up
tall, thinking the way a chain twists,
winching engines into air.

“Back in the spring of” is how
it begins. In, at, on—the little
words that make place possible.
Telephones revise the fields,
which is why I am twisting even now

into the patchwork of an old woman’s
apron, her hands without tactics
to clothe her husband, naked,
stumbling into a field to call
his dog, dead now for years.

I call no one and the tale survives
another telling. We embroider place.
We clothe the wind and lash it
to our backs. Power is always naked.
How could I tell them his stories grew

better in his last months,
the squeamish garments of a past
cast away in tatters, his words
strangely light, attendant to the world
and free from the idea of it.

Death seems singularly prepared to make its face seen on nearly every page in The Novice Mourner, not unexpected in a book primarily about grief and loss. McKinney read his pieces plaintively, in an even tone that enhanced their solemn nature. The stare into the harsh abyss requires such a steady voice. That earnest tone is spread liberally throughout the book. There is very little of the nimble elision and undercutting of pronouncement seen in McKinney’s other work. The speaker in the poems of The Novice Mourner is urgently delivering a message to his readers: the world is cruel and crueler when looked at in hindsight. In fact, in “In Earnest,” the only piece in the book that takes respite from the past and places the reader in a decidedly Sacramento landscape, McKinney seems to elevate death to a kind of noble gesture, a kind of success that can be had when the time comes for there to be no more expectations about living. The salmon gracefully move towards their end, and in doing so, reach something like epiphany at the moment they expire. In this, they are “almost nothing, almost all.”

Even the love in The Novice Mourner is brittle, susceptible to disruption by catastrophe knocking at the door. “The War at Home” is one of the most beautiful and poignant poems about the current war in Iraq and how the presence of war can unnerve even those in a remote domestic setting. The effect that the war has on the speaker is reminiscent of how young Israelis who serve in the Israeli Army seem to inherit blindness and fury just by their proximity. The young soldiers are poisoned by the atmosphere. In “The War at Home” husband and wife suffer the same fate at the hand of a world that rudely encroaches and destroys habits of caring for others.

THE WAR AT HOME

It’s Tuesday, nearly Christmas,
and the kids have gone to school.
It’s the day I work at home, the day
we’ve planned to set aside
some time, a few hours, to talk,
to touch, to take a walk around the block
among the falling leaves, and then
beneath the quilts to feel the chill
go out of us. Perhaps to say
some soft and secret thing unplanned,
perhaps to doze—if only to wake
still holding one another—and then
to rise again, to carry the glow
of union through the day.

We sit down to read the news
and by the second cup of coffee,
stop. The specters of the daily dead
assert themselves, and I can read
the disappointment in her face,
and worse, the shadow of a tired resolve
that looms up now, a merciful distraction:
there are goods to buy, and the car needs
gas. And I, too, in the mood now
only to be intimate with my anger at
the world. What used to come so easily
to us is now the victim of our broader view,
which narrows like this season
and its sun, like our grim smiles
as we tell each other, silently,
that we will make no time for love.

These lovers are a little too experienced in the world. They let their grief about its violence and chaos manage their time. However, not every poem’s speaker is similarly afflicted. In “The Novice Mourner,” the speaker seems psychically unprepared for the next calamity even though he expects it. Knowledge is scarce. What befalls the speaker is a sense of living in the world among the disparaging ingratitude of imminent tragedy. The tragic always announces itself as essential.

THE NOVICE MOURNER

This may not be the end of something.
If the cat in the window knows anything,
she’s not talking. For three days

his hands have smelled of pine,
clear eyes closed to study the blue moon
where the hammer kissed his thumb.

Food shadows lengthen, counting lulls
between determined moans of ambulance
and cottonwood. All those dishes to return.

His neighbor leans on a lawnmower
purple-faced; even his once-luscious
wife wears life like a thin gown.

He scans obituaries for names of the living.
The mail slot sings its avalanche of grief,
anticipating spaces for every shotgunned

sign post, for every forgotten squash
turning to water under a canopy of leaves.
Any minute now, the phone rings.

Perhaps the great irony (or is it justice?) in The Novice Mourner is that the view of the world as harsh and unforgiving that the father in many of the poems inhabits is now adopted by McKinney himself. The circle is complete. Another father has jettisoned his burden for a son to carry. As McKinney’s past surfaces and is processed, it cannot escape submission to the grim requirements of the serious consequences given on any particular day.

It is a testament to Beth Spencer at Bear Star Press that she is able to let a variety of styles commingle in The Novice Mourner, for the real glue is the emotional weightiness of the subject matter. The stylistic variance is also tribute to McKinney’s understanding the game of sloughing off labels that have been affixed—as X kind of poet or Y kind of poet. The tone of the book can deaden joy at times, again understandable in light of the subject. However, if one bears down and is willing to immerse oneself into the craggy depths of McKinney’s level-headed look at the somber, the result will be that one begins to feel like a cancer survivor (on a long bike ride), like one has endured a long, tough battle with an adversary who plays as unfairly as life in the world does.

SOME NOTES ON FRANK BIDART'STRANSLATION OF TU FU, #5: THE CHARACTERS OF 麗人行

This post is a follow up to the previous post: SOME NOTES ON FRANK BIDART'S TRANSLATION OF TU FU #4

三月三日天氣新, the first line of Li-ren, Dazzling Women, is interesting to me in that there is an explicit character to the line setting a date and time. The date and time is actually not the third of March as one might first think, but a corresponding date on the Chinese calendar, April 10th, 753. In a more general sense the "third day third month" festival was a festival marked by open air and water side gathering. In Chang'an there was only one place that all favored for such retreat, Tu Fu's oft lamented and celebrated "crooked" lake. Also translated as Serpentine Lake, it is actually a river that flowed through the park in the south east of the city. In line 2 長安水邊多麗人 the characters indicating "water-side," refer to the river Serpentine Lake.

But there are also secondary or periphery meanings available to the translator. I'd like it to be true that Tu Fu is using his skills to language the poem elegantly, to cloak the event's "bad breath." But as I fiddle with these characters I'm not yet convinced Tu Fu was really up to such subterfuge--however desperately I want him to be.

For a character by character translation of line 1 click here: 三月三日天氣新.

In Tu Fu's autobiography liberally edited by Florence Ayscough ( a text I have been liberally excerpting from in all my posts) the line is translated, "Third Moon, third day, heaven's breath new;" --which as a function of its translation excludes the suggestiveness of the character 日. And the subtext of "heaven's breath," as the character 氣, means more than just breath so some of the potential play of the words is lost--this character might be seen as indicating "weather" or even "foul smell." I'd like to believe Tu Fu intended this irony, dressing up the occasion in a language that cloaks the event's flattulence. I suspect I want Tu Fu to be more devious than he really was. We'll see...

Here is a line by line set of links to a character-based translation of the poem:

1: 三月三日天氣新
2: 長安水邊多麗人
3: 態濃意遠淑且真
4: 肌理細膩骨肉勻
5: 繡羅衣裳照暮春
6: 蹙金孔雀銀麒麟
7: 頭上何所有
8: 翠微盍葉垂鬢唇
9: 背後何所見
10: 珠壓腰衱穩稱
11: 就中雲幕椒房親
12: 賜名大國虢與秦
13: 紫駝之峰出翠釜
14: 水精之盤行素鱗
15: 犀箸饜飫久未下
16: 鸞刀縷切空紛綸
17: 黃門飛鞚不動塵
18: 御廚絡繹送八珍
19: 簫鼓哀吟感鬼神
20: 賓從雜遝實要津
21: 後來鞍馬何逡巡
22: 當軒下馬入錦茵
23: 楊花雪落覆白蘋
24: 青鳥飛去銜紅巾
25: 炙手可熱勢絕倫
26: 慎莫近前丞相嗔

As I look through the character by character translation I see that much of the surface silkiness masks much irony. I see a poem festooned with the wit despite its apparent proper manners. In line 6 Tu Fu focuses on the pattern of the Mythical Chimera or Qi Lin---it combines the features of deer, ox, and unicorn--odd, beautiful in its own way but also frightening. The image seems commentary.

In line 15 the women never put down their rhinocerous horn chopsticks--this at first suggests they never stop eating, but on further investigation such rhino horn sticks were used for detetcting poison as they were beleived to have magical properties that warn the user if there is poison in the food. So wouldn't this suggest that they were always on guard for attack from others?

In Line 20 the poem focuses on a crowd of followers--but this applauding throng is not for the "dazzling women" but for Yang Kuo Chung, their cousin, who has just entered the scene. Tu Fu calls Chung a saddle horse literally but the reader is to take this as "metonymy for the rider." I quote this because it is an idea from another text, David Hawkes, "A Little Primer of Tu Fu." Hawkes' book is attributed by Bidart as being essential to his translation. Hawkes asserts that in lines 23 and 24 there is an obfuscated double meaning.

Hawkes adds, "They can be taken at their face value as a description of the scenery in the park. But Yang, [the first character in line 23] as well as meaning 'willow', is the surname of Yang Kuo-chung, the subject of this stanza. According to an ancient bit of Chinese folklore, frogbit (the bai-pin of line 23) was generated by the mutation of willow-down when it fell into water. Now there was a popular rumor, apparently believed by Tu Fu, that Yang Kuo-chung was carrying on an incestuous relationship with his cousin, the Duchess of Kuo. The 'Yang flower covering the frogbit' therefore has an indecent meaning concealed beneath its harmless exterior."

I'll continue to refer back to these notes at times and pair these character explanations with renderings from "The Autobiography of a Chinese Poet: Tu Fu" by Florence Ayscough in my next post. In following posts I'll look directly at Bidart's translation in combination with the study of Li Ren in David Hawkes' "Little Primer of Tu Fu."

RECKONING WITH THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: JEAN FOLLAIN'S POETRY & PROSE

"The chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history," wrote R.G. Collingwood in An Autobiography. Collingwood's statement could also apply to the prose and poetry of Jean Follain. The French writer and magistrate made the twentieth century the subject matter of his work.

Born in 1903, Follain watched closely as the twentieth century irrevocably changed the world into which he was born, a world that had enjoyed a century of relative peace after the Napoleonic wars and the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) . What the French called the War of 1914 would change the course set during the nineteenth century, and usher in a century of warfare. In this prose piece, from A World Rich in Anniversaries, Follain shows us his home town of Canisy before and after the first world war. Of course, the town could be any town.


One evening at the turn of the century you see a mathematician
reach home carrying a birdcage. Absent-minded as scholars will
be, he took it without even noticing from a sidewalk display on the
birdseller's quay. Threading his way through black and yellow han-
soms, he didn't see the dog running down an alleyway with a leg
of lamb in its mouth, or the furious, mustachioed butcher giving
chase. In the future the memory of such ludicrous times will flicker.
Citizens who have survived the massacres will be sitting on caned
chairs, arms crossed, before their eyes the ghost of the professor
all in black, his well-brushed cutaway, the uninhabited cage in his
hand.


"Follain merges the quotidian with the historical and somehow stretches their union over a huge mythological canvas." This is how Peter Johnson describes Jean Follain's work in his preface to Dreaming the Miracle, Three French Prose Poets: Jacob, Ponge, Follain (White Pine Press, 2003). Mary Feeney, in her introduction to the section on Follain, wrote: "Each of his densely worked prose pieces is less a vignette, or even a poem, than a small world in itself." Ms. Feeney, who translated--with Williams Matthews---Follain's A World Rich in Anniversaries, went on to write that what Follain "has tried to record and recreate is the world that, as he stated, vanished with the war of 1914-1918...Follain involves us in the discovery of community, of things, animals, people, emotions, and even the community of time."

These are the subjects of both Follain's prose and poetry. W.S. Merwin writes that it is the present, though, Follain finds most mysterious. "Memory, as distinct from the past it draws on, is what makes the past a key to the mystery that stays with us and does not change: the present." Follain's "October Thoughts," translated by W.S. Merwin, provides a good example. This poem can be found in Transparence of the World (Copper Canyon Press, 2003).


OCTOBER THOUGHTS

How one loves
this great wine
that one drinks all alone
when the evening illuminates its coppered hills
not a hunter now
stalks the lowland game
the sisters of our friends
seem more beautiful
at the same time there is a threat of war
an insect pauses
then goes on.


Merwin asks whose voice is speaking in Follain's poems and prose. "Is it the child of eleven or so, or the man who left when that war was over, and has gone to Paris and the legal profession, and the literary world? It is more than both: it is the suspended regard which they share, and the evocation of the 'impersonal,' receptive, but essentially unchanging gaze often occupies, in Follain's work, the place of the first person."

I've immersed myself in reading Follain after reading a wonderful Stephen Dobyns' essay titled "Metaphor and the Authenticating Act of Memory" (Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry. Palgrave, 2003). Follain's poem "Signs" was used to illustrate how direct and indirect, or hidden, metaphors are employed in a poem. Despite my best attempts to consider "Signs" with my most critical, unemotional eye, the emotional content of Follain's poem resonated in me.


SIGNS

Sometimes when a customer in a shadowy restaurant
is shelling an almond
a hand comes to rest on his narrow shoulder
he hesitates to finish his glass
the forest in the distance is resting under its snow
the sturdy waitress has turned pale
he will have to let the winter night fall
has she not often seen
on the last page
of a book of modest learning
the word end printed
in ornate capitals?


Follain's work is relevant to all who try to "reckon with twentieth-century history," and who wonder what the twenty-first century holds for humanity. Especially today, when we think about the long-term implications of 9/11. Will humanity ever again believe, as Lord Acton did when he proclaimed, "Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity."

EFFORTS OF GOOGLE EMPLOYEE TO SAVE KEPLERS

The Bay Area once sported three hubs of the universe of free speech.

1. City Lights, San Francisco
2. Cody's Books, Berkeley
3. Kepler's Bookstore, Menlo Park

Kepler's recently closed its doors. The startling closure caused an upswell in support.

Check it out: http://savekeplers.com.

OUT OF THE PROBLEM AND INTO THE SOLUTION: IN PRAISE OF WALGREENS

"DEERFIELD, Ill., Aug. 30 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Walgreens (NYSE, Nasdaq: WAG) announced today that employees affected by Hurricane Katrina can call 1-800-344-6859 for information that will be updated regularly."

"Doctors Joe Pulvirenti and Chad Zawitz were among those who trudged through sewer water with armed escorts to get supplies from a nearby Walgreens and "then we just started taking care of people," Pulvirenti said." Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 6th, 2005

Per capita, if you worked for Walgreens your chances of recovering from Katrina are perhaps the higher than for any other people from the area.

You are being given a place to live, your paychecks never stopped and you can pick them up today, you can work in any Walgreens nationwide if you are outside the affected areas, if you are in the affected areas you can go to work today to provide services to your neighbors, and you can sleep in the 100s of RVs and temporary homes brought to you by Walgreens from as far away as Canada.

Walgreens has petitioned congress to get their supply vehicles allowed past checkpoints, and they have petitioned and acquired gasoline reserves for you and their own convoys. Walgreens asked the government to get out of the way so they could more quickly and more effectively help their employees and the communities they serve. They have asked congress to provide security to their employees and customers. If you are afraid--get to a Walgreens store--security both private and governmental is available.

Call Walgreens at 1-800-344-6859. Walgreens will assist you in getting your FEMA loan, they will loan you money, and they have direct pay to you from their own distaster relief fund. If you need a prescription you can go to any Walgreens nationwide and you will receive your approved prescription. If you are an employee of Walgreens and you are hungry you will be fed.

SOME NOTES ON TAKING A HOLIDAY IN LOUISIANA

Periodically I receive commentary from Silicon Valley Bank with opinion pieces. The following opinion piece comes from Jim Anderson, their Chief Investment Officer with the following disclaimer "Investment Strategy Outlook is published each week to highlight issues we hope you find relevant and topical. The views expressed in this newsletter are solely those of its authors and do not reflect the views of SVB Asset Management, Silicon Valley Bank, or any of its affiliates."

Now that I have the disclaimer out of the way, I'll add that I liked what Anderson had to say. The blogosphere is full of broken hearts and desperate plees and fitful disappointments about all of the very human, very tragic, dramas of Katrina. There are basic humanitarian reasons to worry about New Orleans. But I'd like to add that, as usual, if it is bad for people then it is just bad for business...which in turn makes it worse for people.

From Anderson's commentary, the implications are that the Fed will rightfully need to stall the economy while the United States flounders around the process of saving New Orleans. The impact of this stall is that for everyday we don't rescue a person stranded in New Orleans, for everyday we don't provide for those in need so that the economic vitality of the port is re-established, the business of the nation will be stalled by an order of magnitude of about ten.

What I mean is that if you were unemployed and in your future you were going to get a job, a job you didn't know about yet, say three days from now--that job is now 30 days in your future. In aggregate across the nation if your business was going to make one sale tomorrow that was affected by Katrina--for each day New Orleans's vitality is not re-established that one sale moves out ten days. So if New Orleans takes 100 days to get back to 50% of its vitality, that sale is about 5 years in the future. Now multiply that sale in aggregate across time, across industries, and across the nation and you have this skimming effect...the economy as a whole will lose all its cream for a period of time yet to be determined.

Economies are but interrelationships of trust and belief. The delay in New Orleans' recovery keeps broken down the physical interelationships of the Misissippi Delta economy--and the delay further breaks down the trust of the nation in its economic viability: a bad combination. The Fed has to, and will, assume the reins of the economy to stabilize the ripple effects of Katrina.

Here is the commentary from Silicon Valley Bank that started my thought process:

Blue Bayou

Since the beginning of recorded history man has attempted to ascribe deeper meaning to horrific natural catastrophes. The gods must be angry; we need to sacrifice something to prevent the next eruption or earthquake or typhoon. This is a human way of attempting to control the environment, at once reducing the randomness of nature and the fear. When we lived in central Africa and someone was struck dead by lightening it was said that a witch doctor had put a spell on the person. By appeasing the good doctor one could avoid being "foudroyé" — literally, murdered by lightening. This concept was easier for the locals to live with than the notion that people were struck down at random by accident. When the weather changed history it was God taking sides. The British have noted the "providential" storms that destroyed the Spanish Armada in 1588. Even today al-Qaida-linked Web sites explain that the latest storm in the south is evidence of the "wrath of God" striking an arrogant America

Then, sometime around the middle of the last century, the more technologically advanced countries decided that if they couldn't control the weather, at least they could mitigate its effects, so that major natural disasters devolved into a mere passing nuisances. This notion is probably most dramatically illustrated by the Dutch response to the massive flooding in Holland in 1953. Now, the re-routing of rivers, changing the shape of coastlines, and even dampening the shaking from earthquakes, have become just a matter of engineering and money.

The problem with all this effort is that when it doesn't work we have no one to blame but ourselves. This is what is happening now in the wake of the aggregation of thousands of human tragedies known as Katrina. The Army Corps of Engineers is blamed both for not reinforcing the levees and for building too many levees, in effect re-engineering the delta in such a way that New Orleans was more susceptible to disaster. In the more extreme example, environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. implied that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is responsible for Katrina, drawing the wrath of the "environmental god" for not supporting the Kyoto Treaty. The truth is that neither the engineers nor the environmentalists are as smart as they would have us believe.

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Financial Engineering

So if the civil engineers can't do anything to quickly reset New Orleans, perhaps a little financial engineering would help. At least that seemed to be the sentiment in the bond market last week as speculation took hold that our chief financial engineer, Alan Greenspan, would take a breather from his "measured pace" of increasing interest rates. There was a strong rally across the curve but most pronounced in the short end. Six-month bills saw their yield fall 18 bps to 3.621 percent and the two-year was down 21 bps to 3.74 percent. We won't need to wait long to find out; the Federal Reserve's next meeting is on September 20th. For the record, the futures market still shows a high probability of a move to a 3.75 percent targeted fed funds rate this month but of the 13 economists who have updated their forecasts on Bloomberg since Katrina, fully 11 are expecting the Fed to stand still.

There are two theories here. First, the magnitude of the human suffering in the disaster may dwarf the 9/11 attacks, and thus, the politically astute Mr. Greenspan will pause to show sympathy to the victims. We don't give this much credibility as Greenspan sees himself in the midst of global monetary events and would not be influenced by rising waters in a relatively small city in the U.S. Second, and more likely, is that the economic dislocation of Katrina will be severe due to New Orleans' central role as an energy center and port for Midwest international trade. To help mitigate the economic impact, the Fed will stay at 3.5 percent for the foreseeable future.

While compelling at first glance, the second concept has challenges as well. Recall that on Sept. 11, 2001, the economy was foundering from the collapse of the equity-dot.com bubble. GDP growth was flat to down and in the nine months prior non-farm payrolls had fallen by 935,000 jobs. The accumulating fear in both the business and consumer sectors led the Fed to cut 50 bps only six days later and an additional 125 bps by the end of 2001. The current situation is quite different. Despite what you hear in the major media, this economy has been chugging along above trend line for many quarters and unemployment is decidedly low. Finally, there is historical data that natural disasters have an immediate positive impact on GDP growth due to the rebuilding effort required. The more permanent damage, loss of jobs and relocation of industries, is felt two or three quarters later. The current thinking is that Katrina will have a greater lag with rebuilding delayed for two or three months or the time it takes to "de-water" the city. Although the Fed must develop a view and take action with only a fortnight of data in hand, the market is quite confident that the Maestro is up to the task.

What if anything does this have to do with art and or poetry? If anything it is my attempt at trying to get at the belief systems that have fed our disbelief that New Orleans could get so bad. We believe we are in control of our lives, our environments, our economies because we trust in entities other than ourselves to assure us of that safety. The fed, the government, or whomever...

The future is not assured, the past is certainly the past, all that is left to do is take care of the now, take care of those in need, and then do the next right thing. The reality is that we stand, always on the precipice, all of us. I can't feel sad enough to rebuild one home in New Orleans, or to bail one gallon of water. Only those comfortable and aware of this manage to live here and now in a way that brings them and others joy--whether it be in wealth, prosperity, or art.

One practical suggestion is for someone to start a campaign to get people en masse to visit New Orleans from everywhere. Instead of that vacation in Yosemite or the Caribean, visit during the recovery and spend money and time helping out in Louisiana. I will.

KENNETH REXROTH ON TU FU

"Tu Fu is far from being a philosophical poet in the ordinary sense, yet no Chinese poetry embodies more fully the Chinese sense of the unbreakable wholeness of reality. The quality is the quantity; the value is the fact. The metaphor, the symbols are not conclusions drawn from the images; they are the images themselves in concrete relationship. It is this immediacy of utterance that has made Chinese poetry in translation so popular with modern Western poets. The complicated historical and literary references and echoes disappear; the vocal effects cannot be transmitted. What comes through, stripped of all accessories, is the simple glory of the facts — the naked, transfigured poetic situation.

The concept of the poetic situation is itself a major factor in almost all Chinese poems of any period. Chinese poets are not rhetorical; they do not talk about the material of poetry or philosophize abstractly about life — they present a scene and an action. “The north wind tears the banana leaves.” It is South China in the autumn. “A lonely goose flies south across the setting sun.” Autumn again, and evening. “Smoke rises from the rose jade animal to the painted rafters.” A palace. “She toys idly with the strings of an inlaid lute.” A concubine. “Suddenly one snaps beneath her jeweled fingers.” She is tense and tired of waiting for her master. This is not the subject matter, but it is certainly the method, of almost all the poets of the modern, international idiom..."

from, Rexroth's "Tu Fu, Poems"

Online source: http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/cr/4.htm#Tu%20Fu,%20Poems

KEPLER'S RIP: HISTORIC BOOKSTORE AND VENUE FOR POLITICS AND IDEAS CLOSES ITS DOORS

http://www.keplers.com/

SOME NOTES ON THE SAUSALITO ART FESTIVAL AND BRANFORD MARSALIS

My family and I attended the 53rd annual Labor Day weekend Sausalito Art Festival. We hopped a ferry over to Sausalito from Pier 41...its the best way to get there for otherwise you are snarled up in traffic over the Golden Gate and through the byways into Sausalito.

Okay, so there are end-of-summer art festivals and then there is the art-festival-to-end-all-festivals: the Sausalito Art Festival is that festival. 300 or so artists from around the country show up to show off their wares for the art-erati of Sausalito. The real goal not being the piece meal sales but the larger commissions from high-net worth admirers, city commisioners, and councilmen.

I have a difficult time finding the sublime at these events as the venue does not lend itself to close consideratuon as one might experience in a museum. The experience is closer to "shopping" than to art appreciation. But that said, I was attracted to alot of the gimmicky and whimsical stuff on display. JD Hansen, Kina Crow, Todd Kurtzman, and Diane Komater attracted me to their work--all for different reasons. JD Hansen's figures echo Modigliani though they are far more plebian, a rather attractive quality. Kina Crow's visual riddles and jokes made me laugh out loud. Humor, especially slyness, done well is so underrrated I had to give her a mention. Her Tender just cracked me up. Todd Kurtzman's sculptures pervert the visual field by focusing the weight and volume of a sculpture into the part of a figure's gesture where the attention need be focused. Gestural drawings that stretch and swell anatomy are commonplace--it was amusing to see it done in 3-d in Bronze. Diane Komater takes the gesture drawing toward the sculptural as well but in another direction--she expresses contour drawings in wire. Weird, quirky, even hokey her hanging wire sculptures are part Calder part Klimpt part garage sale.


Also, I found Ted Gall's work compelling and eccentric if not slightly Marvel Comic even a hint melodramatic. In fact I found one piece so compelling I may try and buy it. There are those moments when you see your better self, your ideal self, your dream self in an object of art. I read certain poems and feel as if that poem has spoken a truth of myself that could in no other way be spoken--"The Wild Swans of Coole and "Hunchback in the Park" were like this for me when I was younger. In a particular piece by Gall I saw all my hubris and desire for the falsely heroic paired with simple elements: figure, wings, and mask.

But no joy is pure. Branford Marsalis took the Main Stage at about 2:00 pm. His quartet managed to splatter the audience with notes from a wide variety of his jazz repertoire for most of the hour and a half. But the moments I remember best are the two ballads he played...both dedicated to his hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana.

He is a consummate professional and a virtuoso--so no where was his sadness evident in his uptempo selections. In the two ballads the mad rush of the modern jazz attack of notes was set aside and one could listen in on a tune that carried concern and desire and sadness. Never a word spoken but the selections seemed to speak directly to the audience, to temper their enthusiasm and yet deepen their appreciation of where they were and what they were doing. The ballads seemed to suggest that we have no choice but to carry on--but that to carry on without carrying a dirge for New Orleans in our hearts would make us blind to the deepest part of ourselves. No joy is pure.

SOME WEB RESOURCES FOR HURRICANE KATRINA RELIEF

Web Resources for Hurricane Katrina Relief:

• Federal Emergency Management Agency
• The American Red Cross
• America’s Second Harvest
• Operation Blessing
• The Salvation Army