Because Reality Doesn't Tire

I moved a stretched-out worm
from wet concrete to dirt. Heard
a U.S. Air Force plane scrape
the space between here and that
imaginary sky. Noticed how
people do what they can
to maintain wood and masonry
exteriors of their abodes but
eventually surrender to stains,
cracks, rot, moss, and grit.
Because reality doesn't tire
and we do, it's easier to watch TV
and recover from work than to work
on shelter's exterior all the
goddamned time. It just is.


Hans Ostrom, 2012

Edward Thomas, part two--or Ulex europæus

Since last I posted about Edward Thomas, I took a walk--or an "urban hike." A walk (or similar kind of basic exercise) has to be one of the least expensive, most effective elixirs. The body and mind say, "Hey, thanks for the walk."

Thomas liked to walk, too; more specifically, as Peter Sachs writes in the intro to the collection I'm reading, Thomas liked roads, walking them. My sense is his average distances were much longer than mine, and his roads were "country," whereas mine (at the moment) are urban/suburban. Here's part of a poem by Thomas that seems to have sprung from a walk:

[from] The Lofty Sky

by Edward Thomas

Today I want the sky,
The tops of the high hills,
Above the last man's house,
His hedges, and his cows,
Where, if I will, I look
Down even on sheep and rook,
And of all things that move
See buzzards only above:--
Past all trees, past furze
And thorn, where naught deters
The desire of the the eye
For sky, nothing but sky.


Thomas seems to have wanted to get some height on this walk. The poem could be placed in tradition of "prospect" poems in which the speaker looks out over a "prospect" or a landscape. Lots of these got written in the late 18th/early 19th century, although it's hard to imagine any poetic era anywhere that didn't include such poems. You know, you take a walk, you reach a perch of some kind, you look, you see, and later you remember and write. Or maybe you write on the spot. That never worked for me.

By the way, according to the OED online, "furze" is a popular name for Ulex europæus, which is a thorny evergreen bush that has yellow flowers (according the OED) and is also called "gorse" by some. By gee, by gosh, by gorse, by golly, by gum.

Happy Mother's Day (which originated in an anti-war movement, incidentally--you knew that), and happy walking or otherwise basic-exercising, and no, you don't need find a big ol' hill. Huff, puff.

Boring

An apt title for the blog, don't you think? Speaking of boring, I looked it up in the OED online--a terribly boring thing to do if, unlike a tiny percentage of the population, you think (quite rationally) that looking words up on the OED is tediously nerdy or nerdily tedious, or just plain wrong. Anyway, some info:

1840 T. HOOK Fitzherbert III. iv. 66 Emily was patiently enduring..Miss Matthews's boring vanities.

I was a bit surprised that the word, with this connotation, apparently arose in the written language so relatively late, a mere nine years before the California Gold Rush, which was probably more boring than its name makes it sound. Digging for gold is terribly boring work, although my father didn't think so.

Anyway, it looks as though the adjective, as deployed this way, springs directly from boring as in boring into--like a drill. Monotonous, unrelenting. Let us leap to the next point and avoid a boring transition:

Karl Shapiro, among others, insisted that the single most reliable test of a poem's worth [aside from historical worth, etc.] was whether the reader wanted to read it again--not necessarily right away (although that would be fine), but tomorrow, or next week, or five years from now. I think this also means that the poem isn't boring, but I suppose the poem has to be more than just not boring. Now a hop, as opposed to a leap:

Samuel Johnson, one of the most discerning readers ever, apparently got bored with one of the great poems ever, Paradise Lost. He agreed that Milton's blank-verse tour de force, or tour de paradise, was terrific, but he also famously said of the epic poem, "No one wished it longer." I feel the same way about films by Oliver Stone and John Cassavetes, not that the latter two are in Milton's league; on the other hand, did Milton ever direct a film? I think not. A sideways hop:

My "urban hike," which I attempt to take every other day (cycling in place on the other every other day, speaking of boring [but heart healthy, or so they tell me] exercise), takes me on the same vaguely circular route. Going in a different direction helps, and sometimes I stop halfway and do something, like drink espresso or observe Moldavians. Today, however, I was thinking that what really makes a familiar route interesting is simply paying attention. To the tiniest scrap of something someone throws away, for example. Or one weird rock. Or what people try to do with and to their yards. Or a cat, watching you as if you were dinner.

A high school teacher, attempting to teach us to write poetry, made a similar point. He told us to go outside and "really look at the world"--and then write. His implicit argument was that whatever one saw (and heard, etc.) was interesting, by definition, because it existed and because we would, he hoped, apply attention to it. I think it was a vaguely Zen point he was making, and I'm not sure whether "vaguely Zen" is redundant or not. It's still a great prompt for writing a poem--or story or essay: A) Assume that wherever you are, you are in an interesting place, and B) just observe the heck out of the place, pouring your attention into it and receiving all its particularity in return, and C) write.

Write.