Ghosts

I need to search library-holdings on line to discover the extent to which anthropologists have studied ghosts across cultures. Has there ever been a significant human community that was without some notion of ghosts--spirits of departed people that coexist with living humans and that prefer to occupy--haunt--certain places or times? Hard to imagine a ghost-free culture. Intriguing to imagine the differences, across cultures, in concepts of ghosts.

Some 25 years ago, an uncle of mine died, around Christmas time. He and his wife, my father's sister, lived about 100 yards from us all throughout my childhood. For a long time they had horses, and the pasture featured one of the greatest frog-ponds in history. I worked for my uncle for a couple summers; he ran heavy equipment, built roads, and operated a rock crusher. I spent one summer busting up boulders with a sledge hammer. It was like old-school prison with hard labor--except of course I got paid a minimum wage, was not surrounded by criminals, and could go home: quitting time was 3:30, I remember, because we started at 7:00 a.m.

One year after he died, we decided to visit his wife, my aunt. It was cold outside--winter in the Sierra Nevada. My father decided to drive the 100 yards in his pickup, so my brother and I, then in our 20s, got in the back of the pickup. We pulled up near our aunt's house; all the lights were out. We assumed she had made an early evening of it, and we decided not to go over and knock on the door. The truck was parked and turned off, and my brother and I sat in the back, freezing. Suddenly a blast of warm air came out of nowhere and poured down on us, disappearing as quickly as it had appeared. We were far away from my aunt's house, so the air could not have come from her fireplace chimney. The truck was turned off, so the heat didn't come from the truck. No doubt it was some explicable pocket of warm air. No doubt. Nonetheless, I'm still 40% convinced it was the spirit of my uncle, chiefly because the visitation was so mischievous, impulsive, mercurial, and not a little intemperate, just like him. Later I read that some African Americans, especially in the South, among others, think of such anomalous blasts of warm air as spirits.

I never wrote a poem about the incident because I couldn't find a way to do it in a way that seemed fresh. I just couldn't quite get the right strategy for the poem. These things happen.

But I have written ghost poems. Here is one. It imagines that ghosts can and may produce memoranda, and it attempts to empathize with ghosts, rather than demonizing them. I've often found it appealing to blend the language and rhetorical situation of something bureaucratic, like a memo, with a subject that is not bureaucratic. The blending creates a kind of torque, in my opinion. At any rate, the poem:

Memorandum From a Ghost

I prefer not to think of myself
as a ghost. The term “assertive absence”
stands nicely for me. After a while,
I exist if you want me to. If
you don’t materialize, nothing
will represent what represents
me. Imagine a connection between
me, you, and the building. Imagine
me, and I’ll brush you lightly
with a cool caress, just enough
to send some of your oldest instincts
scrambling up the ladders of your
DNA, then jumping into the fluid
of your spine. It is my pleasure.

Copyright 2007.

Elegies

To start by defining: An elegy is a poem of lament, usually concerning a person who has died but sometimes concerning something else that has disappeared. A eulogy is similar, but it's usually a formal address, not necessarily a poem, and it's often linked directly to a funeral or a similar rite.



If you just stuck to elegies in the poetry of almost any culture, you'd probably get a magnificent cross-section of that culture's poetic heritage. The elegy tends to get the best out of poets who try it. Sometimes, of course, its gets the worst, meaning the most cliche, overwrought, or sentimental. Poet Richard Hugo--I think he wrote this in The Triggering Town--suggested that poets wait a certain set amount of time after a person has died to write an elegy about that person. I think it was either six or ten years.



Two of the most famous elegies in English happen to be poems I don't much like. One is "Lycidas," by John Milton, written about a young friend of his who drowned; and the other is "Adonais," written by Percy Shelley about his friend, the great poet John Keats. It is hard not to recognize the mastery in these poems; they are learned, accomplished, eloquent, and finished. I've always found both to be overwrought, however; they take me away from the persons being elegized. They are like freestanding monuments--magnificent but ultimately unrelated to what they are allegedly about. But of course this is just my opinion, and my opinion is in the minority. Samuel Johnson agreed with me (that is, I agree with him) about "Lycidas," but most people who know Milton's and Johnson's work say that this judgment was one of Johnson's few slips.



My favorite elegies include Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Felix Randle"; W.H. Auden's poem about the death of W.B. Yeats; George Barker's sonnet for his mother, who seems like she was one tough woman; Randall Jarrell's "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," which, technically, is "spoken" by the dead gunner, but is in fact an elegy for soldiers in general--in six superb lines; John Crowe Ransom's "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter"; Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead," which contains the fabulous line, "A savage servility slides by on grease"; Langston Hughes' "Lament for Dark People," which is a daring but successful elegy, spoken by a collective persona, about people of color who have been enslaved and otherwise displaced; Emily Dickinson's poem # 68 (or #89, depending on the numbering system), which is an elegy that resists being an elegy; and Dickinson's #340 (or #280), "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain."



After my father died in 1997, I struggled with how to write about his death. I kept writing, but I didn't finish anything satsifactory. I kept Hugo's advice in mind and didn't rush things. Probably the most satisfying elegy, at least from my perspective, that came out of that writing sprang from a mundane, dutiful task: sorting his tools, something my two brothers and I did. I think the task and the tools themselves were subjects oblique enough to help move my language away from overt sentimentality. I do mention autumn in the poem, but only because we happened to sort the tools in the fall; that is, I wasn't going after the old autumn = death comparison. Anyway, here it is, "Sorting the Tools":





Sorting the Tools


With such fashioned metal and wood,
he didn’t mean to leave his mark, imprint
“I am.” Mostly he was building shelter,
earning wages, securing premises. Also,
he was one to impress his will on
the present, not the future. That
rubbed handle nonetheless bears
an inadvertent mark only his palm

could have left. This other handle’s
darkened by days, by years, of perspiration,
his specific salts. This mechanism here—
he repaired it himself. Note his deliberate,
improvised way, the practical jazz
of rural labor, making things keep
functioning when parts aren’t available
right away. This workshop is cold.

Outside, oaks have dumped all leaves
and acorns, have stripped themselves
down to gray, lithe muscle, ready
for Winter. A bear broke down
the biggest apple tree. This duty
makes us sorters sad when
we’re not smiling. Mostly this
is tedious work. Every now and then
we recognize we’re awed by what
the tools tell us about how difficult,
steady, and determined his work
was all those years.

from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006.

Paradise Lost, Presumptuousness Feared

John Milton's epic religious poem, Paradise Lost, is, like the Odyssey and Hamlet, one of those great works that seem to insist upon remaining central to the (Western but perhaps even global) culture, although I grant that "the culture" now consists chiefly of video screens--like this one--of one kind or another; corporate franchising; and the fusion of military, industry, media, and capital; and great chasms between poverty and wealth. I am cautiously pessimistic about the centrality of literature, but to the extent canons of literature exist, Paradise Lost remains among them, even as the canons do and should shift over time. Some works are carried downstream or evaporate, sometimes for good reason, but Paradise Lost seems as close to permanent bedrock as you can get.



To continue, ill-advisedly, the geologic comparison, Paradise Lost is a Mt. Rainier or Mt. Everest kind of work. Even if you don't love it, you still have to stand in awe of it. Samuel Johnson said, famously, of this epic poem, "No one wished it longer." (I usually think the same thing about movies by Oliver Stone.) But Johnson still granted its greatness. The complete and consistent mastery of blank verse for over 300 pages; the superb imagery and phrasing; the fusion of Classical and Biblical learning; the fabulous scenes and plotting; the rhetoric (look at the speeches by Satan's cohorts as each one develops a different argument for attacking God); the wonderful combination of structure and decoration: all this comes together to forge a monument of words.



Therefore, when I mention the following quibble with the work, it is as if I'm throwing a pebble at Mt. Rainier: the poem is as astonishingly presumptuous as it is accomplished. That's my quibble. Milton presumes not just to know what God thinks but what exactly God says, and by this I mean not that Milton quotes the Bible but that he makes up speeches by God--and by Christ, and by Satan, and so on. That is, of all the awe-inspiring characteristics of the poem, the greatest one may be the characteristic of, well, pride. Rereading Paradise Lost recently, I admired it as much as if not more than I always admired it, but I also found myself, upon reading a great passage, thinking a) that's a great passage and b) that's a great passage that compeletely fabricates "God's" mind. Of course, Milton might say, "And your point is . . .?"



The pebble I'm throwing is theological, although that term is a bit fancy for the situation. Temperamentally, intutitively, I am simply much more likely than Milton to begin by assuming I know almost nothing about God. No doubt Milton would agree with this assumption--I mean with regard to how little I know. The issue of my learning vs. Milton's learning aside, I'm aligned with St. Denis, to whom is attributed the work, The Cloud of Unknowing, one premise of which is this: If you think you know something about God, you are wrong, no matter who you are, what you've studied, and how much you think you know.



Having read and digested, so to speak, St. Denis's work, I wrote the following poem, which is rather on the opposite end of several spectrae (I hope I have the Latin plural correct) from Paradise Lost, to say the least:



Mortal Devotion


(The Cloud of Unknowing)


Life suggests I
should prepare to die,

implies it would be
glad to help me

get set. Death might occur
before the end of this or

that sentence. St. Denis,
about prayer, says this:

Start by praying you may
live long enough to pray.

I try to get ready,
am no quick study,

think that it is all
done, that I hear a call.

I don’t know, so
help me, God, to go

on.


Copyright 2006, from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006.

A Visit to a Movie Studio

I heard on the radio today that those who rate movies according to who should see them (children, adolescents, teens, or adults) have decided to take cigarette-smoking into account, as well as representations of sex, violence, and cursing. Apparently they will take the context of smoking into account, so apparently some smoking would be appropriate for all ages. The premises underlying and assumptions connected to this decision by the movie industry are too abundant and contradictory even to begin to discuss. As I understand it, the old Hays Code, which is the ancestor of the present rating system, arose in part because of the scandalous trial of "Fatty" Arbuckle for rape and murder. (I think he was acquitted, but his career was ruined.)

At any rate (or rating), the news-story made me think about the only time I visited a movie studio--Paramount--some years ago. A friend I'd met at a screen-writing workshop (at the Squaw Valley Writers Conference) took me there. We took the workshop from Tom Rickman, who wrote "Coal Miner's Daughter" and received an Oscar nomination. My friend's been in the business a long time, and I admire his resilience in such an unforgiving industry as the movies and in such a tough town, professionally, as Hollywood. He's a writer and a producer, and he's even done some acting and directing. He's talented, versatile, down to earth, and of good cheer.

First we visited the bungalow area, where the Ladd Company (as in Cheryl and Alan and, if I have it right, Alan, Jr.), which was/is housed at Paramount. (The intricate web of production- and distribution-companies and studios is but one element of Hollywood that mystifies me.) The actor William Atherton, who's in the Die Hard movies, was walking around outside. We exchanged hellos, kind of like ordinary human beings.

Then my friend and I walked around the studio. My first impression was how quiet it seemed. Not much going on. Then I seemed to get the idea that a studio is mainly a hive of sound-stages--so of course the studio, per se, would be quiet. (I remember seeing the sound stage for the TV show, "Soul Train.") We also saw an (empty) concrete tank, really just a parking lot with little walls, which, when filled, serves for all manner of lake or ocean scenes. I like that part of Hollywood--making "reality" out of something very simple, so that Griffith Park will do very nicely for the "Africa" of Tarzan movies, thank you very much. Movies are supposed to be "fake"; that's what makes them movies. I think that's why I like BBC productions so much; they do so much with so little, rely a lot on costumes and interiors and not too many fancy camera-shots.

For some reason, the studio, especially the back lot, made me melancholy--something about the sight of those fake "New York City" streets and storefronts, on the backlot. Something about all the unplugged lights, all the grim, basic, hard work that goes into "making pictures." It is an industry, after all, one that has an uneasy relationship with "art." I think I tried to capture the melancholia in the following poem:

Back Lot, Paramount Studios

Like a prostitute’s face, the facades

are blank and professional, ready

to be reeled into routine fantasy.

Objects and people here exist

in quotation marks: Two “police”

cars sit outside a “bank.” A “criminal”

gets made up. The virtual hush is

holy. Then someone drops a portable

light in the “barber shop.” The loud sound

is real. Ghosts of dead stars are paid

scale. Spirits of dead executives scrub

pots in the commissary.

Sunlight has an agent.

Shadows have hired a publicist.

Copyright 2007

Animals and Humans, Part Two

The "Sea Monster" blog referred to old concepts such as personification and anthropomorphism. There is also an ancient form of literature that seems unabashedly to personify, for it uses animals as the characters in stories; this form of literature is the fable. By being so explicit in its use of animals, however, fables actually don't personify. Instead of turning animals into humans, the fable turns humans into animals--sort of in the way actors become characters.

Probably the most satisfying part of ascribing human motives or attributes to animals is that we know we're wrong; the ascribing we're doing isn't literal; that's what makes it, and makes animals, humorous. Mules persist in certain behaviors, but they aren't stubborn, literally, in the way humans are. Foxes may be clever, but they are clever in an entirely foxish way. They're not being clever. They're being foxes. One way for us to appreciate their being foxes is to speak of them in human terms, all the while knowing we're not literally or scientifically speaking of them as humans. The use of figurative language and figurative thinking is simply a process of appreciation, not of scientific description, which can of course co-exist with figurative description. That is, a scientist can enjoy a good fable, especially one in which a scientists is played by--by a lemur, let's say.

Following is a fable-poem, a story that has simple origins: I simply noticed that a raven is mentioned in the story about Noah's ark. The dove from that story is famous, but I wondered about that raven, so I made up a story, which is mostly tongue-in-cheek, so I hope you take it that way:


Fable: Noah and Raven


And he sent forth a raven
Which went forth to and fro
Until the waters were dried up
From off the earth.

Genesis 8:7


Notice: Raven didn’t return and make a report.
Didn’t like the voyage from the first in fact.

Wasn’t surprised when, deep into the cruise,
Noah went sea-mad, tossed birds

Up into the wind. They fluttered back
To deck, bewildered, bruised, and flappable.

Raven thought, This isn’t working.
Then Noah, becalmed, dispatched Dove

And Raven on recon. Dove cooed.
Raven cawed, wondered Why not send

Seagull or Duck? Hence the term “water
birds.” Humans—as thick as two planks!

A portly black kite, Raven rode the breeze,
Alighted on a shred of dry land,

Ate surfaced slimy creatures. Told Dove,
Hey, you’re nuts to complete the mission,

Said, You watch, they’ll make your image
A symbol of something fine, hunt

Your kind, cook tenderness off your hollow
Bones, thank God not you for it, eat.

No big surprise to Raven when
The Noahs finally showed, parked the Ark,

Unloaded, promised God to be good,
Began to subdivide. The grandkids

Laughed like apes, threw rocks at Raven,
Flung filthy anti-avian epithets.

The little bullies wept for days
When Raven hired snakes to put

The fear of God in them. Old
Bird-brained Noah, though, turned out

To be almost all right. His hair went wild
Eider-white. He’d stumble out,

Toss bread-crumbs Raven’s way,
Tell the brood, Stop being s’goddamned

Mean to animals. The Old Man seemed
To have his doubts about Dry Land,

Spent most nights alone in the mildewed
Ark, playing cribbage with God. So

Wonder not, children of the Weather Channel,
Why millennia later ravens are resentful,

Strut snidely, rustle wings,
Curse us in Squawkese—us and our endless

Multiplication. They build nests like
Carpenters, love hard rain, keep their black

Exteriors as sleek as gangster cars,
Dive-bomb languid lovers two-by-two

In the pigeony park, know how
To read the rainbow signs.


Copyright 2007

Sea Monster

One of the first things we learn when we learn to analyze literature is the concept of personification, wherein something non-human is described in human terms: the sun awoke, the tree waved at me, the boulder ignored me, etc. Around the same time, we're likely to get introduced to the broader epistemological concept into which personification fits: anthropomorphism, wherein everything is fitted to a human scale.

It is always tempting, of course, to describe something in human terms; metaphors, similes, and analogies that personify come much too easily to mind, so we're likely not just to personify but to do it in a manner that's cliche: a double error. And if the personifying metaphors are mixed, then (to mix metaphors) we have a hat trick--a triple error.

Even if we don't personify, per se, however, is there any way not to view the world in human terms? True, it's probably better to describe a tree in a way that doesn't compare it to a human body (arms, hands, etc.). In fact, Joyce Kilmer's infamous tree poem gets into trouble because the personification is mixed and the tree-human seems to be doing impossible things, even as we agree to let the tree be human for a moment. But even if we're not explicitly anthropomorphic, aren't we still always implicitly anthropomorphic? . . . . Some colleges have courses with titles like this: "Literature and the Human Experience." As opposed to what? Literature and the dog experience?! All we know is human.

But as poets (not philosophers), we can pretend to emphathize, I suppose. That's what I did in a poem I wrote many, many moons ago. It was the first poem I published in a national journal, as opposed to a school-publication or something local. The basic move I make in the poem is a very old one: writing "as" a creature, so that the creature "speaks." Of course this is not literally possible. It's clumsy poetic ventriloquism. At the same time, the exercise does force a body at least to try to think less self-centeredly; to imagine.

While I was attempting to imagine and empathize, however, I was really mainly just playing with language. The poem is really "about" certain words and sounds I like, and the business about the sea monster is secondary, from my point of view if not the reader's. Also, I think this poem is from a time when I had just begun to study "deep grammar"--the Chomsky idea about the grammar that's allegedly in the bedrock of all our brains. I was learning to diagram sentences using "transformational grammar"; it was great fun, but I have no idea how accurate transformational grammar is with regard to describing what goes on in our brains when we produce language. I see another philosophical problem has reared its head (personification): how well can we know the brain by studying the brain with a brain? Hmmm.

Nonetheless, I did want to demythologize sea monsters--I do remember having that particular goal in mind. Assuming they exist, sea monsters must have a pretty rough time of it. Being a monster in the ocean has to be a tough job. And as if things weren't tough enough, there's always some Ahab out there wanting to turn you into a nemesis or a symbol or both. At any rate, here it is--an old poem about an old sea monster (and thanks to the late Quentin Howard, the editor who took this poem, giving a young writer a boost of confidence):


Sea Monster



I drift beneath a grammar of sharply etched shapes
and clear contrasts. Eddies dance as if to mock
my dumb back as I pass under a cove’s calm surface.
Sometimes a seabird’s shriek thuds through thick
water. I feel forever dark weight of water.
It’s as present to me as my own body as I push
through it with ridiculous flippers. One day I will
just stop and drop to ancient mud;
clouds of mud will mushroom out about me, swirl,
disappear on currents. I’ll roll on one side
with one eye buried in muck and one still staring
at black water mottled with insinuations of light.
A sound will grow in me, rise out of my
mute years, build into a moaning like a sunken
ship’s crushed hull, then race into a scream smothered
by seawater, seaweed. A white bird will cock its head, thinking
it’s heard a fish, dip to the surface, and seeing nothing,
sail back to bright bluffs. I will have become
an inundated continent of grief, overwhelmed.


Copyright 2007

Official Language in Poetry

W.H. Auden was one of the best, in my opinion, at using official language in poetry, partly as a way to mock official language but also as a way to absorb it into poetry and thereby detoxify it, removing the numbing poison that Orwell told us, in the essay, "Politics and the English Language," was there. By "official language," I mean the language of news, politics, advertising, business, and/or bureaucracies--the language forming the nest we lie in, sedated, all day, every day. Even in his grand homage to Yeats, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," Auden includes official language:

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.


One implicit irony here is that if you want to assess the impact of a great poet's death, don't turn to the news or to your "instruments."

Auden's "The Unknown Citizen" fully mocks official language. It begins . . .


He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he
was a saint.


The satire of the state and the parody of the state's language work superbly here, even in just these four lines from the longer poem.


cummings' "next to of course god america" is a wonderful parody of the politician's empty stump-speech, concluding with the politician's gulping water, as if to wash out the nasty taste, or as if to indicate, "Well, that propagandistic chore is done."


I think I may have been going after an Audenesque or cummingsesque (Orwell probably wouldn't approve of the "-esquing" here) blend of satire and parody in the following poem, which may have sprung from my feeling annoyed at being surrounded by nothing but official language:



Official Correspondence



According to our records, three
moons orbit the planet of consciousness
inside your brain.

Also, we do not regret to inform you
that, by privilege of eminent domain,
the City intends to build a boulevard

through an area zoned formerly
for your long-term memory.
You have the right to remain silent.

If you have reason to believe
our records are in error, you shall suffer
the added pain of knowing you are correct.

Copyright 2007

Rex Stout and Georges Simenon

Like a lot of lifelong readers, I started reading detective-fiction in my early teens, beginning--in my case--with Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes. More people of my generation probably began with the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, but in the house I grew up in, novels featuring them weren't available, and I don't know that I would have liked the books anyway. Even as a kid, I didn't much like kid-detectives.

. . . I've been re-reading Poe, and truly it is amazing how much he anticipated, in the detective-fiction tradition, with his three stories: "Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Roget," and "The Purloined Letter." With these three stories, he gave us the genius-detective; the peripheral narrator who plays sidekick to the genius-detective; the locked-room mystery; the invasiveness of "the colonies" (strange people and animals from the far-flung empire come back to haunt the imperial nation and its main city: Paris in Poe's case, London in Conan Doyle's); the conflict between the police and the amateur/private detectives; forensic science (this is explored by Ron Thomas in Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science); crime-and-detection as psychological drama; the rational detective as the torch-bearer of the Enlightenment--or: Descartes solves crimes. With "The Mystery of Marie Roget," Poe also foreshadows the interplay between the popular media and crime. In that story, Dupin shows how journalistic sensationalism not just exploits crime but also how it erodes rational detection. Just as Sterne, with Tristram Shandy, seemed to anticipate by centuries countless elements of the novel, Poe seems to anticipate, in just three stories, massive parts of the detective-fiction tradition. One gdevelopment Poe did not anticipate is the rapid, hard-boiled pace that most detective-fiction readers have come to expect. His stories are long and labored. His prose-style is Victorian, and even Conan Doyle seems quick by comparison. Watson's narrative voice is deliberate and unhurried, but those tales do move along. . . .

There were quite a few paperback detective-novels by Rex Stout and Georges Simenon floating around my house, in part because my aunt and my father used to trade paperbacks. My father, however, went in more for Westerns: Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour, Max Brand, Ernest Haycox. As a teenager, I just couldn't "get into" Stout's Nero Wolfe novels or Simenon's Maigret novels. Too much subtlety for a teen, methinks. But later, when I did discover these two great authors and their fascinating, compulsive detectives, I found the reading irresistible. . . .

Nowadays, we would diagnose Wolfe as an obsessive-compulsive person who also suffers from agoraphobia. And, as readers, we get pulled into his obsessions. We come to depend upon the narrative's dependence on his iron schedule: breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the same time; beer at the desk while opening mail at the same time (and the counting of the caps from the bottles); orchid-care in the greenhouse atop the brownstone, at the same time every day. Because his brownstone and the lifestyle it cages require capital, Wolfe must work, but he hates work and fears leaving the brownstone. Hence the need for Archie, his life-line to the world, to normalcy, to work, which brings capital. Archie goes on dates, goes dancing, drinks milk, buzzes around NYC in a car. . . .

Maigret's Simeneon, the French inspector, is a cop, a man of the people. Like Wolfe, he is a man of routine. The stove in the office must be kept going. He must have his assistants on hand--Luca and Janvier. He smokes the pipe obsessively, and he orders beer and sandwiches from the brasserie. Whereas Wolfe tries to avoid work until the last minute and then solves cases with a bolt of genius-lightning (after Archie has brough back evidence like a birddog), Jules Maigret broods over cases. He attaches his mind, even his body, to them until they crack. Relentlessly but patiently he asks questions. He asks himself questions. But he always goes home to Madame Maigret, who often prepares coq-au-vin or a stew for lunch; good grief, who could go back to work after that?! Answer: a Frenchman.

Stout and Simenon are wonderful inheritors of Poe's treasures, and here is an homage-poem, from an avid reader of detective fiction to two of the splendid greats:


Homage to Stout and Simenon, Wolfe and Maigret

Rex Stout (1886-1975), George Simenon (1903-1989), creators, respectively of Nero Wolfe and Jules Maigret


Crime disrespects. It exploits
routine. It is impolite, time-
consuming, and distracting.
Grudgingly, the good detective
identifies those who
should have known better,
most especially the entitled.

Intelligent cooking; sufficient
rest; optional, moderate
consumption of alcohol and
tobacco; solitude; reflection—
these are worth preserving,
even if it means working
for a living, extracting
folly and vice.

Hence Jules Maigret and Nero Wolfe,
who would rather be left
alone but are drawn into prose
by their creators, into frays by
fate, necessity, and duty. Efficient
plots spring from good manners.

Whatever takes one away from
reading, dining, conversation,
solitude, repose, or—however modest
it may be--one’s enclave must be criminal.
Good manners and good detection
don’t belong to social class but
come from a certain strength of mind.
If only everyone would think things through.

Everyone doesn’t; therefore, detection
is called for, is restoration of balances, is
a bother to be concluded with swift precision,
for the rich life of common routine awaits.


Copyright 2007

Uncle Poem

I've been blessed with an abundance of fine uncles and aunts. Especially if a person grows up near uncles and aunts, or if the aunts and uncles visit a lot, the person is likely to perceive these sisters and brothers of parents as parental supplements, sometimes as advocates, certainly as interesting--and, if fortune smiles--eccentric personages.

. . .One of my uncles, Fred, is perhaps the wryest, funniest person I've met in my life. His humor is deadpan, but it also contains more than a small dose of absurdism, partly perhaps because he was a bombardier in World War II, flying numerous missions in a "Flying Fortress," experiencing too much; a very little bit of war must certainly be too much. One of my aunts, Nevada (whose nickname is "Babe"; if your name is Nevada, you wouldn't think you'd need a nickname), is certainly one of the bravest people I've known. She simply won't back down from a fight. Arguably, she started the only bar-fight I've been in; she slapped a man in the bar. Yes, he had it coming, but the chaotic brawl that ensued probably did not need to happen. Another uncle was one of the most ferocious people I've ever met; another ucnle is one of the kindest. One uncle was named Edsel, was born in the 1920s, but was truly a child of the 1940s, with a rakish, thin moustache, a chain-smoking habit, and a liberal use of place-holding names for people, such as "Bub," "Pal," and "Doll." If you've seen the actor Jack Carson in the film Mildred Pierce, you will have seen a bit of my uncle Edsel. Who names their kid Edsel--after (it seems) one of the least successful automobiles in U.S. manufacturing history? Answer: Henry Ford; and my grandparents on my mother's side. Actually, Henry Ford named the car after his son, or so I've read. . . .

. . . I think most aunts and uncles seem to children to be kind because they're not the children's parents. They can afford to have a sense of humor; to be overly generous; and to leave if something complicated comes up. Also, they know at least one of your parents well (most likely), so they add some information, if not some accountability, to the picture. They help make the paents seem less mythic because they give the parents a concrete past. . . .

. . . .Many of my students, who are in their early 20s when they graduate, are now becoming aunts and uncles for the first time. It's interesting to see how excited and proud they are of this new status, which brings much potential satisfaction with very little (in most cases) responsibility. Certainly, "aunt" and "uncle" are official kinship-posiitons, but to some degree, they are also ceremonial posts. . . . .

. . . .Lore has it that the phrase "Say uncle," meaning "Give up" when a person who has another person in a headlock utters the phrase to the headlocked person, originated in Roman civilization, when uncles held quite a bit of filial power. Apparently the phrase was "Patrue, mi patruissimo"--uncle, my best uncle. Children wrestling would say it to another. I'm not sure if this linguistic history is accurate, but it sounds good. . . .

. . .I've found that poems about aunts and uncles are difficult to write. In fact, the following poem, "Return to Uncleton," really isn't about uncles, per se, certainly not about any uncle I know. I think the poem springs from what poet Richard Hugo called a "triggering town," in a book by the same name. The town imagined here has arisen out of images, emotions, and fictional scenarios that live in my head. Partly, the poem may be about feeling oppressed by family or by the past; partly it may concern being an outsider; and it may contain the residue of my having passed through countless, vaguely depressing small towns--vaguely depressing to me, I hasten to add, not necessarily to those who lived there. . . .

"Return to Uncleton" is one of those "construct-poems," which synthesize a lot of free-floating material and which do not, for example, spring from one strong memory or one self-contained observation. Most of all, I think I liked inventing a town called Uncleton. For some reason, I felt compelled to have someone--the persona in the poem?--sing an impromptu lyric at the end.

I should probably add that the Edsel was actually a good car. It certainly is interesting to look at, and I think it was one of the first widely manufactured (but alas, not widely purchased) cars to use automatic transmission.



Return to Uncleton


His uncle had named the town Uncleton,
served as mayor for fifty years.

Except to tidy up the dog’s grave,
he goes back only for the annual

Rust Festival. He owns snapshots
of the Rust Queens and their Oxidized Courts

from the last twenty years. The lake looks
different from before and smells.

His trousers slip off his buttocks,
and teenagers laugh, their goddamned

music thumping out of cars. He’s inherited
just a pinch of his uncle’s rage

but no property. The sun off the lake
makes him scowl. Where exactly is

the dog’s grave? He remembers how,
just a pup, the little bastard nipped him.

Uncleton, O Uncleton, I hate the way you
draw me back like English on a cue ball.

Copyright 2007

St. Petersburg, Russia

When I had an appointment as a Fulbright lecturer at Uppsala University, Sweden, in 1994, I was determined to get over to Russia. The proximity was simply too tempting for an American of my ilk.

There it was, a few miles across the Baltic Sea; there it was, the Great Ogre that had dominated the political consciousness of my American generation. Russia. If you were of what's called the Boomer Generation, your politics might be simplistic or sophisticated, left, center, right, or out of the park (anarchist), but your politics would nevertheless have to register the great atomic equation of global politics: the U.S. versus the U.S.S.R.

It's hard to think of something the Cold War didn't inform. It affected daily headlines, every level of politics, television, literature, culture High, culture Low, the economy, dinner-conversation, whether the U.S. decided to support or invade a nation, any nation, or not--and so on. To some degree, you can even trace the current war in Iraq back to Eisenhower's decision to depose an Iraqi leader, way back when, based on Cold War "logic." The Bay of Pigs, Oswald's connection to the Soviet Union, Kruschev's shoe, the six-foot-tall Russian fashion model (Veruschka--was that her name?), The Man From U.N.C.L.E, James Bond, Dr. Strangelove, strange words like the Kremlin and politburo: all of such stuff was the furniture, however tacky and badly arranged it might be, of my consciousness. I had to go to Russia.

Considering the experiences of the Swedish, French, and German armies, among other people, I can't say it was difficult to get there. But it was complicated. After all, Leningrad had been St. Petersburg again only for three years in 1994. Things were shaky in the former Soviet Union. The Swedes tended not to travel there; many colleagues at the university, for example, had never been to the Soviet Union, in spite of Sweden's neutral status. Also, St. Petersburg existed, after all, because of the Russian army's having defeated the Swedish army in 1703, if I have the year right. After the defeat, Peter the Great built a fort on the site, and a city followed the fort--rather like the way things happened in the U.S.

But through a Swedish travel agent, I was able to get a visa, get a flight on SAS, buy a certain minimum amount of rubles--and book a room in a new tourist hotel, chiefly to stay on the safe side. The travel agent, newspaper accounts, and other sources seemed to agree that Russian cities had become as dangerous as American ones!

It was a thrill to have these things called rubles in my pocket because they were always in the pockets of characters in spy novels. Also, it's fun just to say, "ruble."

At Arlanda airport in Stockholm, there was almost no one at the gate. In fact, at one point, there was (in addition to me) only several famous tennis players: Bjorn Borg, Jimmy Connors, and John Lloyd. They were apparently headed to St. Pete for an exhibition. They were getting major $ to go there. I hadn't been invited. Celebrity athletes were apparently in greater demand than obscure American professors. Go figure.

In the St. Pete airport, some kind of Russian dignitary met the tennis players. She was a short, middle-aged woman with a lot of spunk. She walked up, and looked up, to Conn0rs and, counter-intuitively started scolding him for being early. He seemed amused, and I immediately had a good feeling for the country. The woman may well have been late, but she wasn't going to do something predictable like apologize. She was going to put it on him. I took a Mercedes taxi to the hotel on a big boulevard--Nevsky Prospekt.

Visiting St. Petersburg was like visiting a mansion that had been closed for many years. It was a city that desperately needed fixing in all sorts of ways, but its bones, if you will, were grand. If Paul Bunyan had designed Paris, St. Petersburg might have been the result. Massive avenues, huge buildings, wide canals, hard, cold wind like Chicago's. I can imagine designers bringing drawings to Peter the Great, who would shout, "Well, that's fine, but make it bigger!"

People were fixing things as best they could, with 19th century tools, like wooden wheel barrows. Older women, with great dignity, strode stalwartly to church. People sold things, anything, on the streets. Rolls of toilet paper, soap. I gave all my hotel-soap away to beggars, and dumped as many of the rubles I had had to buy back into the economy as I could (although of course people liked American dollars even more). At a restaurant, I paid with a credit card. A Russian couple were seated next to me. The man paid in rubles, and the waitress returned several times to work out the bill because--this is the sense I had--inflation was something they were tracking by the hour.

Of course, I got only the merest taste of the city, but I loved the taste. Not unlike Italians, Russians seem able to mix absurdity, comedy, and tragedy into almost every moment of life. They seem unfathomably resilient. . . . I loved hoofing it across the long bridge to the famous train station with its Bolshevik history, Finland Station, which seemed charmingly cramped and folksy. What a scene that must have been, however, when Lenin arrived. . . . At the grand museum, the Hermitage, which the Finns were helping to rebuild, a chip of stone had fallen off an outer wall, and I picked it up and kept it. . . . I visited a house that Dostoyevsky had lived in; it was now a museum; what a thrill. A literary nerd, I love visiting authors' former abodes. . . The tennis players stayed in the same hotel, and McEnroe later arrived, looking very perplexed and put-upon. I set a silly goal of getting the autographs of Connors, Borg, and McEnroe all on one page, and I managed to get it done. The first two were easy, but I think McEnroe signed only because he saw the first two signatures. I found the process amusing. . . . The best thing, though, was just to be in a real place, the streets of a city in Russia, that had been so heavily mythologized, so bizarrely filtered through the lenses of the American media's versions of the Cold War. As I customarily do when I travel, I often just walked around, buying hot drinks and cheap books, getting a whiff of the city, looking at the light (all cities seem to have their own quality of light), watching people work and talk. Reality can have enormous appeal. . . .


. . . A symphony I have not heard but now must hear is Shostakovich's "Leningrad" Sympony (number six?), from 1941. . . .

One poem that came out of my quick trip to Russia appears below. I've published it before, but without the stanza about the woman selling things on the street. The magazine editor didn't like it. I fully agreed with her at the time. Today I like the stanza again. Tomorrow I might agree with her again. That's the way it goes.

Here's to the ordinary Russians I encountered but didn't really meet. Here's to the big shaggy novelists, Fyodor and Leo. (This year I've been re-reading Crime and Punishment and War and Peace, the former with a student book-group, the latter on own--the third time through, I think). Here's to Sonya from C & P and Pierre from W & P. Here's to peace. Here's to Petrograd (1914-1924), Leningrad (1924-1991), and St. Petersburg. Here's to countless soldiers who died invading or defending Russia. Here's to Putin, who may be no bargain, but at least he's not Stalin. And here's hoping I get back to St. Pete, this time for more than three days.

St. Petersburg, Russia

A stain on

linen is a flower

represented

if we see it so.

So we saw it so.

A train at

Finland Station

was a hope

represented

when we saw it

from the frozen bridge.

The old Russian

woman’s cough seemed as

deep as pneumonia. Still

she stood, posture bold,

selling bars of soap, rolls

of toilet paper,

on the sidewalk, Winter.

Famous tennis players—

Connors, Borg, McEnroe—

paced the lobby of

Hotel Nevsky Prospekt,

caged in opulence, waiting

for the Exhibition Match. They were merely the latest

invaders, would be gone by

the next evening on SAS

to London, and St. Petersburg’s

massive avenues continue, grandly, to yawn.

© 2007

Ursology

Ursology, or the study of bears, is endlessly fascinating, even for ill-informed amateurs like me. I grew up in bear-country (although, in the Northern Hemisphere, what isn't bear country?!)--in the High Sierra of California. The first piece of writing I ever submitted for publication was a nonfiction account, handwritten and illustrated with a sketch, of a brief non-lethal bear-hunt to which I was invited by my father. Someone had spotted two relatively mature cubs (and their mother?) near our home, and if I recall correctly, my father took the opportunity to let his three or four hunting-dogs practice. The "cubs" probably already weighed well over 100 pounds at that stage. The bear on that tree was certainly a large animal, even as I take into account my having been a child, to whom much seems immense.


If I have the particular canine-era correct, the dogs were probably Jack, Shorty, and Jocko, although Jocko might have been replaced by Striker (this is sounding like a history of the Three Stooges). Of course, to someone 8 or 9--I don't have the exact year--the event seemed utterly chaotic but at the same time not unusual. A child thinks, "This is what my family does; therefore, this is not unusual."

Less than a mile from our home, up on a steep, rocky timbered hillside, the dogs "treed" the bears--lovely how a noun becomes a verb in this instance. Far above us loomed the dark grey diorite peak called the Sierra Buttes, 8,000 feet. They were Black bears--the name of the species common to the Sierra and to many regions of North America. It's a confusing name because Black bears are usually some shade of brown, often a dark brown. Sometimes the color is lighter, however, and one of the cubs in this instance was reddish brown--a "cinnamon" bear, my father called it. In my visual memory hangs the image of the cinnamon bear clinging to a pine tree, not far off the ground, but well out of the hounds' reach. I also see the dogs; they were completely transformed into hysterical, sloberring, leaping, howling beasts. They were trained dogs, however, so when they were called off, they reluctantly but professionally came away from the tree. I don't exactly remember the anticlimactic ending, but essentially we went home, and the bears ran off. I presume, too, that my father had a rifle (at least) and a pistol. He was not a foolish man, even if running the dogs after a young bear is arguably a foolish, even cruel, hobby; my father was of another era, his consciousness attuned substantially to a nineteenth-century way of life. He knew that a mama bear might well attack and that bears are almost incredibly quick and fast--among the very best athletes on the planet. Indeed, I don't remember hearing about or seeing the mama bear, so he may have just been treeing, brifely, the adolescent cubs.

I doubt whether the young bears enjoyed the event, but they were unharmed, and (I am straining here) perhaps the exercise did them good, and at least they learned more about how humans and dogs will misbehave, must be avoided.


At any rate, at my father's suggestion, I wrote up the account, sitting at the chrome-dinette table, with that meserizing pattern in the yellow top. I included the sketch, and sent off the manuscript to Full Cry, "America's Leading Tree-Hound Magazine." Full Cry. What a great name for a magazine, which still exists. Breeds of so-called "tree hounds" include Plot Hounds, Redbones, and Blue-ticks, all fairly sleek, quick, muscled dogs with great noses and big voices. Often such dogs do double-duty as hunters of raccoon and bear, as was the case with my father's dogs. Such hounds are, however, trained not to hunt ubiquitous deer, which they can run down and kill, as opposed to "treeing" and not killing, and indeed in many states, it is illegal to hunt deer using dogs.

I recall my father being able to distinguish one hound's "voice" from another's when the dogs, far away, had treed the object of the hunt. Believe it or not, it is this choral-music of the hounds for which owners of such hounds live. My father also distinguished between dogs that excelled at finding "the track" and dogs that excelled at staying on the track--literally for miles, and sometimes to the extent that the dogs would disappear, only to wander back days later, or indeed to be picked up by good Samaritans and returned, owing to the name and phone number on the brass plate attached to the collar.

Some hounds were good at picking up a "hot" or fresh scent, just left by the animal. Others were good at picking up a cold scent, left by an animal passing through some time ago; hence the term "cold nose": the arcane terminology of a sub-culture. . . .

Of course, throughout my childhood I was friendly with the dogs and they with me, but nonetheless they were professionals, not pets. I was a small human, and I amused them. But they lived for the hunt. The rest of life was tedious if not unpleasant. . . . At any rate, my manuscript was, of course, rejected, but the process of writing and submitting fascinated me, almost as much as the quick, impromptu, bizarre hunt. . . . Of course, Faulkner's novella The Bear has special resonance for me. . . . Bears figure into all manner of folklore around the world, as we know. . . Technically, polar bears don't hibernate, I have learned, although they do go into repose, "bear" cubs in late Fall, and get active in Spring. . . . My brother figuratively stumbled upon a "bear tree" once--a massive hollow log in which a bear had hibernated, deciding not to use the classic cave. What he remembered above all else was the overwhelming, unapologetic, ursine, gamey stench that came from the hollow. . . . I conclude, then, with a poem about bears, waking:


Bears Waking



All over one hemisphere,
bears stir in hot stench
of imperial naps. They
don’t know from latitude
or axis, orbit or equinox.
They feel knowledge in blood
and brain, gland and tongue and paw.
They wake to thirst
that nearly blinds them.
Hunger tears
into guts like a wolverine. Their
noses lead them out to sunshine
or warm rain. Their noses devour air
for food-news. Waking
bears don’t think about
next winter or this summer.
They lope into hollows
of odor, groves of sound,
putting their bodies on rocks
and brush. Sunlight is;
and it is just fine with waking bears.


First published in The Acorn #41 [El Dorado Writers’ Guild], 2004

After Great Pain

After terrible and constantly televised events like those at Virginia Tech, one's response--or at least my response--is to clam up. A subsequent response is to comment, and yet any comment that comes to mind is most notable for its inadequacy.

Although numerous obvious differences exist between what occurred on the infamous September 11 and what occurred at Virginia Tech, I found myself thinking similar things about both occurrences. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say I have found myself feeling similar emotions.

Consequently, I reviewed a brief speech I was asked to give (I did not volunteer to give it) at a college-event held not long after "September 11." Because it includes references to poetry, I thought I'd post it on this blog.

Here it is:

Between Tuesday morning [September 11, 2001] and today, there have been moments when I've wanted to talk about what happened and moments when only silence seemed appropriate. Like you, I've experienced shock and a tumult of emotions. At a University, we are accustomed to putting our minds to things. This is a place of thinking. But extreme violence can paralyze thought and shake our confidence in the worth of our daily teaching and learning. Emily Dickinson wrote, "After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The nerves sit ceremonious like Tombs-the stiff heart questions." [from Dickinson's poem #341]


In recent days, I have also felt appreciation for family and friends, for colleagues and students, for life itself. My heart has gone out to strangers pictured on television. Good people and the good in people are more dear and seem more fragile to me than before.


As much as we may wish otherwise, the events of Tuesday will change our world forever in ways we cannot know or control. Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the United Nations forty years ago, grappled in his time with such uncertainty and died in an airplane crash while on a mission of peace. He once observed that "acts of violence, whether on a small or large scale, contain a bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death-and the meaninglessness of killing." [from Markings.] For us all, I wish for wisdom as we struggle with our responses to the killings, and as we strive to create meaning out of the deaths.


(from September 14, 2001)

Liberating Constrictions

One of William Wordsworth's best poems, in my opinion, is the sonnet "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room":


Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their Cells;
And students with their pensive citadels:
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his Loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth, the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, `twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such their needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.


The main argument of the poem seems fairly straightforward. Acknowledging that to paraphrase is heresy (who said that? Cleanth Brooks?), we might roughly paraphrase it this way: "Often tight boundaries or constrictions satisfy, as opposed to stifling." The poem begins by listing examples before it tells us (beginning with "In truth, . . .") what precept the examples support; that strategy supplies tension. (Often Shakespeare's sonnets go the other way--from precept, premise, or question to specifics.) Nuns, hermits, and students seem to like tight quarters. Why? Because they are living lives of the mind or the soul. Women and men who spin or weave may find the work satsifying or even uplifting. That may be a tougher proposition to sell; on the other hand, I think we've all experienced a kind of content from focusing on a specific task or job that might look monotonous to an observer. We get lost in the work, in a good way. We might also get a repetitive-motion ailment, but that's another story.


Once Wordsworth gives us the precept, "In truth, the prison, unto which we doom/Ourselves, no prison is. . . .," he links it to his own love for a constricting form of verse, the sonnet.


That such a poem should come from a British Romantic is, superficially at least, an irony, for the Romantic poets were allegedly all about freedom, organic poetry form, overflowing emotions, intuition, and inspiration. It turns out, of course, that each Romantic--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Hunt, et alia--forged his own poetics and that none of these poetics was quite as dramatically different from 18th century poetics as one might imagine. . . .


. . ..Are all constrictions liberating? No, but Wordsworth doesn't have the space, in this "scanty plot of ground," to go into that. Because the sonnet to Wordsworth and others seems like a pastime, may we conclude, with Frost, that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net (assuming that's a bad thing to do)? We may conclude as much, but we don't need to do so. Writing free verse is no picnic, unless you believe that whatever you write is great, but if you believe that, then the problem really has nothing to do with formal verse vs. free verse. Verse/versus.


In any event, the poem points to an issue almost all poets face: what attitude to take toward form. Any poet who has tried to write a sonnet will have found the form to be, in at least one case, too constricting. The form makes you torture your syntax or say (write) something, anything, just to make that next rhyme or to finish the iambic pentamenter. Or the form will make you rush to "get it all said" in 14 lines. Frustated, you want to smash this little 14-line X 10 syllable cage and go off and write like Walt Whitman or D.H. Lawrence, at least with regard to form--long lines of free verse--if not subject-matter.


However, almost all poets have discovered that sometimes the constricting form can liberate. So focused are you on the form that surprising images, words, or phrases sneak in while you're not looking. Richard Hugo makes this argument in his book, The Triggering Town, wherein he describes a hellish form-poem assigned by his teacher at the University of Washington, poet Theodore Roethke. Roethke gave the assignment as a kind of test, and of course students went into it as they would into most tests: with dread. But once inside the seemingly impossible rules--so many many verbs and nouns, so many lines and stanzas, so many beats and repeated sounds, etc.--some students discovered subjects or language they would not have otherwise discovered.


And to write a sonnet, a villanelle, or a sestina that, upon honest inspection, is good enough at least to hold up, to appear in public, is a little piece of heaven. And Roethke's villanelle, "The Waking," is a little piece of heaven for the reader.


The Furness-fells, by the way, comprise a little range of hills--large by British standards, perhaps--in Cumbria. By Sierra Nevada or Rockies standards, maybe not so much. But that's all right. The best part of the bee-reference in the poem concerns the fox-gloves, not the soaring to heights. To watch a bee go deep, deep into the narrow bell of a fox-glove blossom is, in its own way, thrilling. Like Wordsworth, you can get the sense that the bee is on a great adventure, spelunking, in its own way--diving deep into a cavern of nectar. A gardener, I never tire of watching bees go into fox-glove blossoms, and of waiting, waiting, for them to come out. Sometimes I think they never will.


"In truth, the prison, unto which we doom/Ourselves, no prison is. . . ." Actually, I disagree with this thesis, in general, although I agree with it insofar as Wordsworth applies it to the nun's narrow room or the poet's use of the sonnet. I think that, in general, although the prisons to which we doom ourselves may only infrequently be as bad as literal prisons, they can still be awful. I tend to imprison myself in worry, for example, so much so that it's only just a stretch to say I have doomed myself to worry. . . .

. . . .Can one experience too much liberty? Of course. Perhaps the best example is an all-powerful, maniacal dictator, who can and may do whatever he wishes. Hell ensues, for others, for him.

--But so much, so many complications, come out of Wordsworth's seemingly simple sonnet, and thats' one reason I like it so much. It's a very productive poem.