Celebrating a Chinese poet

 

“TO LIVE IS TO SHOUT AT THE SKY”

(With apologies to Nianxi Chen, whose title I have appropriated)

 

I woke because I had heard my name

Muttered in the lyrics to “Diamonds and Rust.”

I’d fallen asleep over an article about

A Chinese miner, an explosives worker, who

Had also been a poet. Waking, I sat, a dog

Curled against my haunch, my customary

Middle aged position, the middle finger

Of my right hand holding closed my right eye.

The second knuckle curled against the lid, thought-

Lessly, holding down a broken window shade

That keeps flapping up.

My favorite Bly poem

 Well, Robert Bly is dead. I can't say he has been my favorite poet but he is certainly one of them. I've read and appreciated him for decades but I don't think his forms show up in my poems except in our shared sense of the poem as a Polaroid of a particular moment. So in that light, here is probably my favorite Bly poem. 

DRIVING TO TOWN LATE TO MAIL A LETTER

It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time. 

Poetry from a dozen years ago

I mentioned in passing recently that it's been a while since I've written poetry. Most of it has not been confessional but it often is based in my experiences, sometimes on work or relationships. These are, I think, the last I had worked on. In 2009 I was teaching creative writing and produced these as examples for the classes. I wanted to present them before I publish the new work, maybe to show the changes I'm making, the focus I'm recalibrating. 

ON THE APPEARANCE OF KURT VONNEGUT
IN A RODNEY DANGERFIELD MOVIE 

This face that looks like it has covered a lot of ground

Or ground much under it.  This face looks
Like it has ground much and covered much.
This face is a dog’s lapping unconcernedly at water.
This face considered granfalloons and I hear the sirens, I hear
The call to my karass.  It would fit so beautifully next to
Dangerfield’s, with whom he never shares a
Scene, GE PR beside aluminum siding.  Nixon, Hitler, Pol Pot,
They would not fear this face, this sleepy, disheveled
Face with a crazy son and coughing while he’s dying.  I see
Frustration and laughter, anger and resignation, this face
Cracking under the strain of living too long, asking for not much, a glass
Of water, some of my time. 

Of Your Rope
You’ve reached it not
when everything
stops, but
when nothing
is anymore,
when it wraps
around you
like your grandmother
’s afghan but
warmthlessly, no
cold there
either, the eyelets
she embroidered
staring like
her own dead eyes. 
How will you know? 
The end will
be a taunt, a bolt
that stares
up from
the floor
uselessly
beside the engine. 

 

SUZI QUATRO IN SAN REMO
I can’t get her out of my head.  Like an
            ice pick jabbed over and over
                        into my hippocampus, she’s
burrowed into my consciousness.  Those lips,
            that mullet framing a face already running to fat.
                        Years later latex pants make
sausages of her legs.  She’s
            the girl of my dreams, circa 1974, now
                        in early 1980 singing her biggest hit, her worst song,
duetting on Italian television with a guy whose muttonchops
            are probably more familiar with English
                        than he is.  But
there she is, little girl face, this voice that can
            burnish steel, can melt the paint off a car,
                        siren song of so many coke dreams, hash reveries.
Drummers are the “Q” keys of rock music. 
I would be her drummer, fold her cellulite
in, zip up that latex.

 

The Dead Girls Club 

It’d be nice if ghosts filed in,

like the future kings in MacBeth,

stately, decorous, in order.  But they don’t.

They enter like students, noisily, banging desks, dropping bags,

full of outside life.  And they don’t take their places

either, whether you’ve set them up in assigned places

or all in chairs facing one way but arrange

the room to fit around them, a corner here

to accentuate The Cutter’s curls.  A window there

so The Junkie can stare out when she gets bored.

The Crazy One makes the walls, the furniture, the others ricochet around her, mouth

open for an occasional comment or a shriek.  But that’s the thing.

They never utter a word, or none you hear.  Except for their entrances, ghosts are silent.

Except The Silent One on the floor, now spread eagled, now fetal,

mewling like a hungry kitten.  They’ve come

with the others—The Successful One,

The Trust Fund Punk, The Cold-Handed Sculptor, The Big Mother

(Big Grandmother now!), The Really

Crazy One you never fully see, the Others you don’t have names for—to do what?  Serenade you? 

You’ll never know.  They come, they shuffle around

the room, themselves.  One by one, softly,

one by one they leave you.

Ghosts always eventually leave you.

What I'm reading

The book that changed my direction toward the moments described best by poetry is one I happened to begin a couple weeks ago, Danse Macabre, a biography of Francois Villon by French historian Aubrey Burl. I vaguely remember reading Villon many years ago, mostly because I was reading a lot of erotic or bawdy poetry then as much of my own poetry was focused there. 

But Burl writes of him

Villon was born in an age of turbulence, a time of vast contrasts in wealth and poverty, in piety and villainy, in barbarity and artistry. It was a period of change during which he rejected the sterility of [common] verse in favor of sharply realistic poetry...Villon was himself a contrast...Many of his verses are remarkable descriptions of the decent delights and indecent depravities of the Paris that he knew so well: bishops and brothels; priests and prisons; clerics and criminals; Te Deums and taverns; ladies of the nobility and ladies of the streets. This empathy with everyday life and his awareness of its brevity enabled him to write poetry so ingeniously crafted that it seems to speak without art, person to person, to his readers.

I don't claim, as Burl also writes, "artistic brilliance" as a condition of my writing, although there was a period when I wrote formal poetry. It made me appreciate the work that goes into that. Here is a bit of Villon.

When I consider the dry bones 

In charnel houses, skulls lacking name, 

Which were the poor or the wealthy ones?

Masters of Requests, men of fame

Or common porters? Now the same.

King's man, merchant, soldier, baker, 

To this none-ness they all came,

Bishop like a candle-maker.

My other primary read, or rereading, is Poets on Street Corners, an anthology of Soviet dissident poets by Olga Carlisle, with her husband half the team known for translating Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. This 1970 paperback was the place where I'd first found the Anna Akhmatova poem I quoted in my last post, and it has remained with me since at least the early 80s when I bought it for the .25 cents penciled on the cover. Aside from Akhmatova the other poet I remember best from this book is the controversial Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose opening to "Babi Yar" still haunts me.

There are no monuments on Babi Yar, 

A steep ravine is all, a rough memorial. 

Fear is my ground--

     

 

 

 

"By Way of Introduction"

I've wanted to note what has been going on in the world for quite some time but find myself in the position of someone trying to write history as it's happening, trying to write about the events as if they've ended only to discover a new ingot of information that explains or confuses the situation further. Finally, I've decided the medium I need to use is poetry. 

I used to write a lot of poetry and for a long time. It's hard to say I gave it up; rather that I found prose was better for what I was writing. I'm returning to verse because it's the vehicle in which I can identify a moment. 

For my inspiration, I am looking to the resistance poets of many periods. But my model is Russian poet Anna Akmatova, specifically "By Way of Introduction."

In the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent

seventeen months in the prison lines at Leningrad.

Once, someone recognized me. Then a 

woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold,

who had of course never heard of me, woke up from

the stupor that enveloped us, and asked me, whis-

pering in my ear (for we only spoke in whispers):

"Could you describe this?"

I said, "I can."

Then something like a smile glided over what was

once her face. 

Giving Praise in a Quiet Way

I've been thinking about how to welcome--and I do mean it, the welcome--in the new year with some positive spark lighting up the void surrounding it, and this song does it for me. I've written a sermon about it before, but here I'm just going to post the video and lyrics. Let it wash over you and see if you can stop from smiling.

The Sing by Bill Callahan

Drinking while sleeping strangers
Unknowingly keep me company
In the hotel bar
Looking out a window that isn't there
Looking at the carpet and the chairs
Well, the only words I said today are "beer" and "thank you"
Beer, thank you
Beer, thank you
Beer
Giving praise in a quiet way
Like a church
Like a church
Like a church that's far away
I've got limitations like Marvin Gaye
Mortal joy is that way
Outside a train sings its wail song
To a long, long train long, long fone
Then silence comes back alone
High as scaffolding
'Til the wind finds something to ping
When the pinging thing finds the wind
We're all looking for a body
Or a means to make one sing

 

My John Ashbery Story

Lost in the bustle yesterday of both Labor Day weekend and Walter Becker's death (and that is tragic; I am a closet Steely Dan fan) was the death too of American poet John Ashbery. Ashbery is eulogized quite nicely by the New York Times but I want to add my memory too.

My friend Rick Robbins has a collection titled Famous Persons We Have Known and I've often thought about writing a book with just such a title. My John Ashbery story would be one of the best, in my opinion, because I've rarely met anyone as full of grace and politesse as John.

In the late-80s, between my divorce and last marriage, I spent a lot of time spooning with many, many people (sorry, none of them were famous), and one of them was Shelley. I've spoken a little of what's become of her since but she's not the focus here. Anyway, Shelley came from money and she knew a lot of moneyed people, most of them through her dad, a nutrition guru. One day she was driving me back from somewhere up north we'd gone, Vermont or the Adirondacks, and we passed through the town I'd grown up near, Hudson, New York, in those days just becoming a tourist mecca, and as we drove down Fairview Avenue, the main drag into town, she pointed at a pretty, older home  and said, "My friend John lives there. Let's go see him."

Now, keep in mind two things. While I had grown up near the town I knew almost nothing about it or the more well-heeled people who lived there. And that this was 12:30 at night and we had been drinking wine since probably 3 the afternoon before.

Shelley swung into the driveway--there was almost no traffic on the street--and we noisily got out of the car and giggled our way to the door, where she rang the bell. The bell's sound was mellifluous, less like a buzz summoning the host and more like a relaxed chime saying, "Hello, I've come to see you." A light came on in the hallway and the curtains covering the window on the door parted a bit to admit a white, questioning face, that became more questioning as it recognized who had rung the bell.

The door opened and John Ashbery asked, "Shelley? Is something wrong?" And she said quickly, "No, we just dropped by so I could introduce my friend Bobby to you." I was a dabbler in poetry then, writing some and reading more, and while I hadn't read any of his work, I had heard the name John Ashbery, so I knew if I'd heard it then it must have been a well-known name. We shook hands and he said, "Well, come in, please." He led us to a small cozy room that I could probably remember if I'd been more sober, but I was not. He offered us something to drink, and we wisely asked for water as we had at least an hour's drive ahead of us.

So the three of us sat there in his little sitting room in the town near where I'd grown up, the so-famous-I'd-heard-of-him poet, the drunk girl from money, and the drunker me who didn't need fame or money. The two of them carried the conversation, which was good, because it mostly revolved around Shelley's family and other wealthy people they knew, and my head was reeling at the recognition we'd just rung the doorbell of a famous person and waltzed in during the middle of the night when by rights we should be sleeping our drunks off and he should have been let alone. His water I can describe in detail: It was wet and cold, probably Poland Spring and doubtless kept cold in the refrigerator, and the glass, which was the same heavy, dull glass my parents had, sweated in my hand. It tasted lemony and clear, not like the water I'd grown up with around there. John asked me some polite questions--"What do you do? Where do you live? How do you know Shelley?"--none of which really had the sorts of answers I wished I could have told him.

But I mentioned his politesse and I can describe that, if not as completely as his glass of water, then nearly so. The word I would use about him was attentive. I felt as if he was completely there in the room with us, which again remember were two people who had invaded his home in the middle of the night for no better reason than an introduction. That he should be that way with Shelley, the daughter of a friend, didn't surprise me. But that I should be treated the same way did surprise me. I remember thinking, "This man is paying attention to me, an overfed, long-haired hippie who showed up on his doorstep out of nowhere to drink his water and take up his time, and who really has no claim on that time beyond sharing his sitting room for a little while." (This is in retrospect. I think I thought more in pictographs back then as I was rarely coherent enough for words.) I never felt, either, that I was being watched closely because of what I might do or break or steal--a sort of watching I was very familiar with in those days--but because this was how he sat with everyone. This attention I think came from his being at peace with himself and with the world, an impression that he knew what his place in life was and how he was to live it. I have since tried to emulate that peace, and if I have, it's a tribute to how well John Ashbery treated me.

After about 20 minutes, he said, "Well, if it's all right with you I would like to go to bed," which sounded from him less like an invitation to leave and more a straightforward telling us of his plans. I drank the rest of my water--Shelley had gulped hers down in a quick, impulsive way, the way she did everything--and we stood up and he walked us back to his porch and bade us goodnight. We got back in the car and drove the rest of the way talking about mundane things. At one point she asked, "What did you think of John?" and I said, "I liked him. I really liked him. He was a real human being."

Here is a poem by Ashbery. I like to pretend he might have written if he'd known what my meeting him had done for me.

"My Philosophy of Life"

Just when I thought there wasn't room enough
for another thought in my head, I had this great idea--
call it a philosophy of life, if you will.Briefly,
it involved living the way philosophers live,
according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?

That was the hardest part, I admit, but I had a
kind of dark foreknowledge of what it would be like.
Everything, from eating watermelon or going to the bathroom
or just standing on a subway platform, lost in thought
for a few minutes, or worrying about rain forests,
would be affected, or more precisely, inflected
by my new attitude.I wouldn't be preachy,
or worry about children and old people, except
in the general way prescribed by our clockwork universe.
Instead I'd sort of let things be what they are
while injecting them with the serum of the new moral climate
I thought I'd stumbled into, as a stranger
accidentally presses against a panel and a bookcase slides back,
revealing a winding staircase with greenish light
somewhere down below, and he automatically steps inside
and the bookcase slides shut, as is customary on such occasions.
At once a fragrance overwhelms him--not saffron, not lavender,
but something in between.He thinks of cushions, like the one
his uncle's Boston bull terrier used to lie on watching him
quizzically, pointed ear-tips folded over. And then the great rush
is on.Not a single idea emerges from it.It's enough
to disgust you with thought.But then you remember something William James
wrote in some book of his you never read--it was fine, it had the fineness,
the powder of life dusted over it, by chance, of course, yet still looking
for evidence of fingerprints. Someone had handled it
even before he formulated it, though the thought was his and his alone.

It's fine, in summer, to visit the seashore.
There are lots of little trips to be made.
A grove of fledgling aspens welcomes the traveler.Nearby
are the public toilets where weary pilgrims have carved
their names and addresses, and perhaps messages as well,
messages to the world, as they sat
and thought about what they'd do after using the toilet
and washing their hands at the sink, prior to stepping out
into the open again.Had they been coaxed in by principles,
and were their words philosophy, of however crude a sort?
I confess I can move no farther along this train of thought--
something's blocking it.Something I'm
not big enough to see over.Or maybe I'm frankly scared.
What was the matter with how I acted before?
But maybe I can come up with a compromise--I'll let
things be what they are, sort of.In the autumn I'll put up jellies
and preserves, against the winter cold and futility,
and that will be a human thing, and intelligent as well.
I won't be embarrassed by my friends' dumb remarks,
or even my own, though admittedly that's the hardest part,
as when you are in a crowded theater and something you say
riles the spectator in front of you, who doesn't even like the idea
of two people near him talking together. Well he's
got to be flushed out so the hunters can have a crack at him--
this thing works both ways, you know. You can't always
be worrying about others and keeping track of yourself
at the same time.That would be abusive, and about as much fun
as attending the wedding of two people you don't know.
Still, there's a lot of fun to be had in the gaps between ideas.
That's what they're made for!Now I want you to go out there
and enjoy yourself, and yes, enjoy your philosophy of life, too.
They don't come along every day. Look out!There's a big one... 

They don't all go gently into that good night

Tonight I attended the funeral of a patient I'd barely gotten to know before he told me he didn't need my coming around any longer. He went, in the course of less than a year, from 300+ pounds to the less than 90 pounds at which he died.

What made being there tough wasn't that he had told me I wasn't needed--I rarely take things like that personally--but that his death was so agitated. He fought, I'm told, to the last moments, flailing, swinging, muttering, so that his mother compared him to a very old man held under water. But he was less than 40 and the quiet death, I find, rarely appeals to the young.

I don't know whether to admire him or pity him. Personally, dying peacefully is my dream, as I think it is for many others. Alternatively, given his history, if anyone deserved to be pissed off at the lousy cards he was dealt, it was him, and maybe fighting until every last breath is exhausted is the way some should go. I'm uncertain, ultimately, what to make of it. We spoke of it, his family and I, in a mix of awe and sadness, and perhaps that's the best epitaph someone so young can hope for.

258 candles-days 39-48 (maybe we are not so different from the leaves)

May I admit this to you? I have been feeling overwhelmed lately. It isn't the paucity of good news deserving to be lit up. No, if anything I am surprised by the amount of things happening in this world, and I emphasize it is in the world and not just the US, that is worth celebrating and the opportunity to make others aware of it is sometimes itself a tidal wave that becomes a case of "this one" or "this one". 

No, what is overwhelming me, and depressing me in the same instant, is the number of my friends who are finding themselves caught up in the intricate folds of partisanship and frustration and anger, aligning themselves with one worthwhile candidate over another, one goal over another, one outcome over another, that seems to carry with it the taint that if this one is good, the other must be, if not outright evil, then at least not as important. I am sick to death watching friends match "my cause beats yours."

So I have found myself unwilling to come here, perhaps thinking my attempts are worthless themselves because my friends, as the days dwindle, scream at one another "Your candidate/cause/concern puts me at risk!" In my imagination I find myself playing a version of "I have only a dollar, who deserves it more?" Bernie or Hillary? Black Lives Matter or Equality North Carolina? My friends seem under the impression that loyalty to one cancels out, or at worst, makes a villain of the other.

It is in this frame of mind that I find myself needing to slow down and heed the words of Clint Smith.

"They promised us poetry! Where's the poetry!"

As I've mentioned before, I have been reading this book for over three decades. I finished it on the most recent New Year's Eve, just a few hours short of midnight, determined that I should not carry it around another year, or let it become four decades.

Do I recall much of the plot? No, but I don't think that matters much. What I retain is the flavor of post-war Paris, or at least as De Beauvoir and her circle experienced it. As I've also said before, I like to envision myself living the life of a commentator on what goes on in people's daily lives, noting the minutia of street and cafe life. I'm currently reading The Mauve Decade by Thomas Beers and Absolute Friends by John Le Carre, both of which provide glimpses into lives and times I couldn't otherwise know anything about, early 21st century cultural life in the case of the former, mid-century British post-colonial individual experience in the latter. I've often pointed out, to myself if no one else, the reason I read is to experience lives I couldn't otherwise.

This is the passage that, in my final days of reading The Mandarins, resonated most with me. In it I hear the sound of what it was like in those days in that place.

The Communist papers had announced the reading of a masterpiece in four acts and six scenes in which Lenoir "reconciles the demands of pure poetry with the concern for delivering a broadly human message to mankind." Julien intended to sabotage the meeting in the name of the old para-human group. In the articles written by Lenoir since his conversion, there was such a servile fanaticism, and he had put his friends and his own past on trial with such malignant zeal, that Henri was looking forward without displeasure to seeing him put in his place...
The auditorium was overflowing. The whole Communist intelligentsia was gathered together--all the old guard and many new recruits. A year earlier, many of those neophytes were indignantly denouncing the errors and faults of the Communists. And then suddenly, in November, they understood--they understood that it could help to belong to the Party. Henri went down the centre aisle in search of a seat and, as he passed, faces filled with hateful disdain. In that respect, Samazelle was right: they weren't the least appreciative of his honesty. All the year long, he had laboured mightily defending L'Espoir against the pressures of the Gaullists, had firmly taken his stand against the war in Indo-China, against the arrest of the Madagascan deputies, against the Marshall Plan. All in all, he had taken exactly the same position as theirs, but that didn't stop them from calling him a liar and a traitor. He went as far as the front rows. Scriassine looked up at him and smiled, but the young people grouped around Julien eyed Henri with hostility. He retraced his steps and sat down on a stairway in the back of the auditorium.

Eventually Lenoir reads a very dull, very conventional poetry/play that is broken up by shouting from Julien and his supporters, in which Henri joins. As he leaves the place later, he's joined by Lambert, a fixture at L'Espoir, who says, "I was hoping it would be more fun." Henri replies, "As a matter of fact, it wasn't any fun at all." The cause of writing and what it was meant to accomplish, and how, is deadly serious in this time and in this place, and even the disruption of an opposing faction is political and deadly serious. I can't say I miss that but being in the center of a situation where the reading of "a scene written in Alexandrine metre [in which a] young man was bemoaning his melancholy state...Parents, teachers, friends, each urged resignation, but he swept aside all bourgeois temptations while a chorus commented on his departure in sibylline stanzas..." That such an entertainment could overflow an auditorium, think of how seeing that must feel. I don't want to attribute it to some Gilded Literary Past in which the Word takes on divine powers--the audience is there more out of a sense of duty, some at witnessing the spectacle and some at making it a farce. But that enough people had read about it and cared enough to show up for whichever reason: Now there is something.

suzi quatro in san remo

I heard this song yesterday on my drive home and was reminded of this poem from a creative writing course I taught four years ago. It was an example of a type of poem I asked the class to write: a memory of a celebrity. The format was one I followed from whatever model we were using (from the 2009 Pushcart Prize collection). I rather liked it and am reminded, in rereading it, of the series of poems in the collection Famous Persons We Have Known by my friend Rick Robbins. 

SUZI QUATRO IN SANREMO

 I can’t get her out of my head.  Like an

            ice pick jabbed over and over

                        into my hippocampus, she’s

burrowed into my consciousness.  Those lips,

            that mullet framing a face already running to fat.

                        Years later latex pants make

sausages of her legs.  She’s

            the girl of my dreams, circa 1974, now

                        in early 1980 singing her biggest hit, her worst song,

duetting on Italian television with a guy whose muttonchops

            are probably more familiar with English

                        than he is.  But

there she is, little girl face, this voice that can

            burnish steel, can melt the paint off a car,

                        siren song of so many coke dreams, hash reveries.

Drummers are the “Q” keys of rock music. 

I would be her drummer, fold her cellulite

in, zip up that latex.

"a god who condones greed and injustice"

The Old Testament record of the dramatic struggle between the worshipers of Yahweh and Baal is illustrative of the clash between a democratic people with a democratic idea of God and an aristocratic people with an exploiting God...The Israelites were born to the rugged freedom of the hill country, inheritors of a rich social idealism, worshipers of a God, Yahweh, who stood for justice.  The Amorites were a commercial people, with traditions of a slave class, worshipers, therefore, of Baal, who became the shekel raised to the nth power, a God who condoned greed and injustice...[The] victory of Yahweh worship by the Israelites over Baal worship by the Amorites [is rightly called] the first great victory of the common people, for it meant the establishment of the religious sanctions to democracy, brotherhood and freedom.

So the struggle has gone on through the course of history, a democratic people projecting onto their idea of the deity those social and spiritual qualities which were most highly developed...Each nobler and more just conception of God, therefore, becomes evidence of a new level of political life, and is in turn a magna carta of liberties yet to be won.

In the light of this undoubted law, the  problem of theology in the twentieth century becomes twofold.  First, the problem of imagining attributes of deity which are at least as democratic as the attributes of the most highly socialized [people], and second, creating an idea of God which shall bring [humanity] up to a newer and finer level of social experience.

The old idea of a God who created a spiritual aristocracy, who maintained partiality, whose sympathies were not as wide as the whole of humanity, are patently inadequate to meet the new needs...[The] democratic instinct in the new [people have a passion] after freedom and brotherhood...lays bare [their] heart and mind to the great human current and exult in the tides of feeling which pour upon [them], enriching and enlarging [them].  There is no mistaking the widening of sympathies, the greater sense of inclusiveness, the new solidarity of humanity...A democratic people demand a democratic God, a robust deity who likes his universe, who hungers for fellowship, who is in and of and for the whole of life...

--from The Social Implications of Universalism by Clarence Skinner, quoted in Universalism in America:  A Documentary History of a Liberal Faith, edited by Ernest Cassara (my emphasis)

What Skinner was trying to get at a century ago was the question "What becomes of Christianity when it has become what it triumphed over, when it becomes the religion of empire?"  Obviously, he says, it must change.  And change consistently or at least often to remain "robust."

By this point what had become the various forms of Christianity had been simultaneously hidebound and mutating for nearly two millenia, great attention paid to the words in the Bible but not to the spirit of the best of it, as if its modern world continued to be made up of nomadic people and Romans.  Contemporary peoples required a God who was at least as open to change and empathy as they were.

Skinner's resultant God was almost Whitmanesque as a God who "believes in the flesh and the appetites," who does "not ask the wounded person how he feels," but becomes "the wounded person."  In two years, Skinner's country would join the bloodshed the rest of Europe was already engulfed in, as destructive of life and complacency as Whitman's Civil War had been.  In a presaging of our contemporary dilemma, Skinner was trying to articulate a God who mattered when six year old children are gunned down.

basho & thoreau mashup

UPDATE:  unfortunately, the quality of the size of the video needed in order to make it possible to upload to the net precludes being able to read the copious information and quotes.  for most people, that won't be important, but I'm obviously going to need to learn to do this in another format (or find another way to size videos like this) if what I intend is to make this sort of thing academically presentable.  in the meantime, the music and pictures are pretty.

the past week and a half has been productive for working at various projects, few of which would interest anyone beyond the teachers they're intended for.  but this is the latest and holds a general appeal.  I'm proud of the start.  it's an integrative project comparing basho's and thoreau's status as "zen walkers" and tying that comparison into the uniquely human activity of wandering (at least on 2 feet) with little goal in mind.  I was astonished, in collecting material to use, that there were only 2 videos on google and youtube that had what I wanted--which was video of barefeet walking along a forest path or a paved road--but weren't obviously fetish vids (easily discernable by the person walking stopping every few seconds to arch his feet or show the soles slowly and fully to the camera or stretching her toes luxuriently before the camera as if it was someone's face) so I ended up making my own.  in my ever-evolving quest to make mashups as an academic alternative, I also cited all my quotes; but there's noplace to do such a thing on a mashup, so they appear in a document below the video.

“No One on the Road, No Traveler Crossing the Bridge: 

Basho and Thoreau”

Resource List

Quotations: 

[Format:  Approximate minute—Author Page Number]

1.      1:01:57—Solnit 10.

2.      1:15:80—Quoted in Solnit 33.

3.      2:09:57—Solnit 32.

4.      3:32:17—Solnit 40.

5.      4:54:60—Hass 15.

6.      5:24:47—Thoreau Loc. 18[1].

7.      5:30:23—Hass 11.

8.      5:35:97—JazzoLOG.

9.      7:24:63—Solnit 35-6.

10.  7:31:87—Hass 16.

11.  7:37:33—Thoreau Loc. 17.

12.  8:12:60—Aitken xx.

13.  9:10:87—Thoreau Loc. 7 & 10.

14.  9:58;53—Hass 36.

15.  10:23:33—Thoreau Loc. 20.

16.  10:34:77—Hass 13.

17.  10:48:57—Thoreau Loc. 92.

18.  10:54:70—Hass 45.

19.  11:21:37—Thoreau Loc. 242.

20.  11:31:57—Hass 16.

21.  12:03;20—Thoreau Loc. 430.

Works Cited

·         Aitken, Robert.  1978.  A Zen Wave:  Basho’s Haiku and Zen.  Washington, DC; Shoemaker and Hoard Publishing.

·         Hass, Robert.  1994.  The Essential Haiku:  Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa.  New York, NY; Ecco Books.

·         JazzoLOG.  2008.  “Flag Day.”  Last accessed May 15, 2012, at http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v63/__show_log/_p5/

·         Solnit, Rebecca.  2000.  Wanderlust:  A History of Walking.  New York, NY; Viking Putnam.      

·         Thoreau, Henry David.  2012.  “Walking.” Kindle Edition. 

In addition, I’ve quoted liberally from my sermon “Evolution and Revolution” available in three separate posts on my blog, Too Long in the Wasteland.

·         Sneakers, Bobby.  2011.  “Evolution and Revolution.”  Too Long in the Wasteland. Website. Posts from February 13, 16, and 19.  Last accessed at 2longinthewasteland.blogspot.com on May 15, 2012. 

---

[1] Kindle quotes are found by choosing the “Table of Contents” option at the bottom of the screen, choosing “Location,” and entering the numbers.

 

2 psalms

Psalm of Lament

Spirit of Life, what was it you saw in me,
What pride, what anger, what uncleanness,
That you would do this to me?
Was I so bad, so inhumane, that I deserve
This humiliation? Spending my days crying out in a chair,
Impotently stamping my foot, eating through a tube,
Shitting into a diaper, waving my hands and arms
At everything near me, grabbing it, pulling it closer.
My tongue is coated in thrush.
My eye is filmed over. My drool pools in the hollow of my throat.
I rely on others to do even the smallest things I used to do thoughtlessly.
If I could, I would thank them in moves of platinum.
I would dance for them a dance of thanks and joy.
I would, like my husband, take them from their own chairs of humbleness,
And like him pivot them in a dance of thankfulness.

Psalm of Praise

Spirit of Life, thank you for the delight
Of geese in the sky against the gray morning.
Thank you for the opportunity to be what others need me to be.
Help me be a half-full bottle
Whose contents are added to without complaint.

lost & found poetry

we had a call a few nights ago from a local charity getting together a crew to work on a habitat for humanity house and it reminded me of another recently found poem.

HOUSEBUSTING

It's snowing.

In the slow snow

the clack and crack of crowbars and hammers,

the scrape of shovels against charred wooden floors,

and the conversation of carpenters

discussing the builder's lack of technique

and watching the clean-up kid

scrambling around in the dumpster

like a monkey in the jungle.

bread

years ago, when I was writing poetry as part of my mfa studies, I mentioned to a classmate that my 1st wife was paranoid schizophrenic. she said, "wow, that's gotta be a dynamite source of writing!" and that's when I realized that I'd never written anything about that period. this poem grew out of that.

BREAD

When everything else fails you, you can still

believe in bread. She is anchored in lime jell-o

in the kitchen. His suits litter the pantry,

his books are their plates. Sex is sliding on ice,

only with her legs spread. When he pries

at her with meat-thick fingers, she feels too much,

too much. She always has wool on. She pounds

the dough. Her fist goes through the table

and clanks on the floor. The bread, why not,

can be a doughnut.

Did he ever love her?

Might as well ask if she was ever pregnant. Depends.

Or was it the slant of light? Well. The oven's on,

and bread is bread and not doughnuts. He reads,

oblivious to bread, to doughnuts. She grabs a knife

and a chair. She faces the chair backwards,

at the kitchen door. She kneels naked on it.

She balances the knife along the top of the chair,

its handle blunt against the door. She props the tip

just above her navel. Metal and skin are a finger

and water. This is the question:

Will he open the door first, or will I stand up?

Minutes pass. The blade

mirrors her: the tense lips, eyes hidden in her hair,

teeth monstrous and full.

He goes on reading. She has to pee.

The knife clatters. That sound

and the smell of burning bread bring him to the door.

Sunday Morning, Cuers, France

in the process of clearing out an upstairs room and getting rid of several years' worth of essays and research from students, I came across a batch of poems I wrote in the late 90s and thought I should let see the light of day (quite literally). I'll present 1 every little 1ce in a while. this one is a poem written about a mass killing in france.

Sunday Morning, Cuers, France

You'd have thought he was hunting birds,

each shot placed just so on an imaginary horizon,

each shot made to count. He worked with the precision of the practiced hunter,

which is what I took him for when he ambled past my shop.

He walked calmly. He wasn't in a hurry. The rifle

cradled in his arms, as if he were working out the best place to find pheasants.

The first to go, of course, was his family--parents, brother--bludgeoned with a hammer,

the way you take care of extra kittens. Why leave them the shame?

An old widow walked her dog on the opposite walk. Her husband had fought

with DeGaulle at Lucerne. I happened to look as a rose opened below her eye.

She dipped to pull up a stocking. Then she was down.

He shot the dog too, although no one seems to have noticed that.

There was a man with a limp, a regular customer of mine,

who preferred the smell of loose tobacco to cigars or cigarettes;

he dove through the glass door of the cafe a little harder than necessary

and went right through the glass. He did not get up.

Even then I had not placed the boy with the rifle.

There was no sound, I saw it all from the window of my shop

as a pantomime. Even then I had not thought to tell anyone what was happening.

It all seemed so familiar. My own boyhood in the fields outside Cuers had included

just this flush, this flash and drop; but here there was no retrieval.

He was well-placed beside the war monument in the square.

One woman, who had bokught a packet of chewing gum from me, and her friend,

ducked, I thought to hide. But when it was all over they stayed put too.

Finally, another man, who played boules with the pensioners for beer,

dropped his ball and his stance. Absurdly, I thought, That's surely a poor way to bowl.

Sure enough, the ball swooped, swung wide, rolled into the street.

The old man lay on his back, looking at the sky. His lips fluttered.

The boy stepped over. He was very calm, very poised.

He put the gun to his shoulder, held his gun steady, adjusted his aim

and fired. The old man's lips were gone, and much of that portion of his face.

Then it was over. The boy moved on, chose the seclusion behind a delivery van

to put the rifle in his own mouth. People cluttered the streets like feathers after a storm.

When I turned to the telephone, I could not open my fists to pick it up.

(photo: eric borel, the shooter)