Thursday, October 25, 2007

1954 and I

I love what the OED online has to say about "autobiography," so I will cut and paste the whole main entry:

"The writing of one's own history; the story of one's life written by himself.

1797 Monthly Review 2nd Ser. XXIV. 375 It is not very usual in English to employ hybrid words partly Saxon and partly Greek: yet autobiography would have seemed pedantic. 1809 SOUTHEY in Q. Rev. I. 283 This very amusing and unique specimen of autobiography. 1828 CARLYLE Misc. (1857) I. 154 What would we give for such an Autobiography of Shakspeare. 1859 B. POWELL Ord. Nat. 252 Geology (as Sir C. Lyell has so happily expressed it) is ‘the autobiography of the earth.’"

The complaint from 1797 about the word's combining Greek and Saxon roots is lovely. (I have a colleague who loathes words that combine Greek and Latin words.) I almost never agree with Carlyle, but I agree with him on this sentiment: oh, for an autobiography by Shakespeare. And calling geology the autobiography of the earth: inspired. Thank you, Sir C. Lyell. And finally: how surprising that the word seems to have entered English as late as the late 18th century. I wonder when the term "celebrity autobiography" was first deployed.

Here's a (non-celebrity) autobiographical poem:

1954: The Situation

On January 29, 1:06 a.m. I was made available for appointments
with the world.
Meetings occurred between me, air, light, milk, mother, father,
brothers, snow, odors, trees, fabric, belly aches, noise. Like
other newborns, I did not know who or where I was. Did I know
that I was? Like some other newborns, I had the makings
of brown hair, blues eyes, and one hammer-toe.

Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
Permanent Committee on Investigaions. Korean Peninsula. Eli
Lilly designs LSD for the CIA.

Rather late in the game, I walked: May of 1955.
I was neither reluctant nor satisfied. Lore says
I walked for a beer held by my Aunt Nevada;

more is the pity.
I wouldn’t have walked just for beer or
just for Aunt Nevada,
but the beer and smiling
Nevada (nicknamed "Babe") together
were too much to resist, says the lore.
Questions persist: If your name
is Nevada, why do you need a nickname,
and if you do need a nickname, why must
it be Babe?

Emmett Till. Allan Freed coins “Rock `n Roll.”
Sun Records signs Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins,
Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley. Emmett Till.

Also, I gathered (I gather) that walking
was expected of me. Okay, fine.

Distant Early Warning. The French withdraw
from Viet Nam. Good idea.

Many years later I took up dancing.
Also, I costumed myself in pajamas,
six-gun holsters, a variety of hats.

I was a humorless, earnest dancer
and had general problems with specific gravity.
Brother Sven was always quicker on the draw.
I learned to fall down dead.

Dick Nixon. Little Richard. The deaths of Henri
Matisse and Charles Ives. Emmett Till.

I took up reading and shadow-boxing.
I’ve since abandoned shadow-boxing
except in the most figurative sense.

"Friday Night Fights" on black-and-white TV.

At six I sat on slate steps, warm in
Sierra Nevada sun. My father had built them.
Mother was inside the house or sun-bathing
on the vast porch beneath a vast Sierra sky.
I thought, “I am six, and I will remember this.”
I remember this because I willed myself
to remember this then: Memory for its own sake.

The invention of TV Dinners, advertised on TV.

Also I remember the magpie that would not
leave the woods. It let me come close and stare.
A rational bird, it was not afraid of me.
A discerning boy, I appreciated the gesture.
It seemed to want to be more than a magpie
or at least not wild. Having not been entirely
committed to walking, I understood the magpie’s
reluctance to fly, migrate, act frightened, etc.:

That is to say, “What’s the point—in what ways
will flying, migration, and fear materially
change the situation?”

It is much later now.
I have completed another sentence.

Bring in `Da Noise?

There is an excellent chance that tolerance of noise may be age-related: youth tend to be more noise-tolerant than the aging and the aged; that may be the situation. There is an excellent chance that this situation, if in fact it is the case, is ironic, for with age comes a diminishing capacity to hear, so one might think that the older one got, the more tolerant s/he would be of noise.

Of course, folks from my generation think back reflexively to all those loud concerts we blithely attended, decibels smashing into ear-drums. Huh?

I'm a wee bit surprised that, based strictly on the profit-motive, more developers don't build and "market" more houses and condominiums based on the noise-factor. There is a cornucopia of new and venerable noise-reducing and noise-eliminating products in the building trades. Of course, they add cost, but I believe a significant percentage of potential buyers would be willing to pay the extra cost for the extra silence. Quiet Estates. Come Home. . . To Silence-Ridge Properties! Wouldn't You Like to Live in Shhhhh! Towers?!

A small, quiet poem about noise, then:

I Beg Your Pardon?

It’s so noisy here, what
with automobiles, airplanes,
motors, guns, missiles, TVs,
ear-pods, crowds, amplifiCAtion, snarling
gasoline-drunk tools. The
blasting, roaring, whirring, whi-
ning, humming, droning, rum-
bling are incessant. How

funny if God were to turn out to be
slightly hard of hearing, willing
but unable to catch the melodies
of most prayers because of
these furious sounds we manufacture
all the time. How odd if God
would love to care, if it just
weren’t for the blare, the volume,
of our self-debilitating decibelity.

Jack and Jill: What Really Happened?

For some reason, "Jack and Jill" seems to be the main nursery-rhyme to have stuck in my memory since childhood. It's from the Mother Goose collection, of course. According to mothergoose.com . . . ,

The first collection of stories to bear the name "Mother Goose" was produced by Charles Perrault in 1697. His book of ten fairy tales was entitled Tales from the Past with Morals, and under the frontispiece picture of an old woman telling stories to children and a cat appeared a subtitle for the book: Contes de ma mère l'oye, or "Tales from My Mother Goose."

The name "Mother Goose" and the tales and rhymes seem to have sprung from France, although no one is sure about this. Apparently in the 800s, Queen Bertrada--mother of Charlemagne--was known as Bertrada Greatfoot and/or Queen Goosefoot. Really. And she was married to Pepin the Short, Chuck's dad. "Honey, do you want to meet Queen Goosefoot and Pepin the Short for coffee this weekend? They're in town for a few days."

But the connection between the big-footed queen and the Mother Goose collections is tenuous.

I do love the fact that in Perrault's book, the old woman is telling tales to children and a cat. Even back then, apparently, people knew cats liked a good story. The part with the pail of water must have terrified the cat.

To the matter of Jack and Jill, then:

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.

To people who read or write poetry, this is great stuff because of the meter (a mix of trochaic and iambic), the alliteration, the internal rhyming, and the half-rhyme (very modern!): water and after. Like all children, I just loved saying this rhyme, back in the day, and that was one part of Mother Goose's genius: it got children immersed in the play of language.

However, the plot of the nursery rhyme confused me then and confuses me now. Who sent Jack and Jill up the hill for water? Were they friends or brother and sister or cousins or what? Why was the water on a hill? Shouldn't it have been in a creek or a well or a pond? Who goes up a hill for water? As a child, I wondered whether Jack a) figuratively broke his crown and literally suffered major skull-trauma or b) literally broke a crown he was wearing. If b, where did he get the crown, why was he wearing it (for fun, for looks, or was he a prince?), why would the crown break when he fell (wouldn't it just fly off?), and why did he wear it on the water-run? If a, did he recover? This worried me, no end.

How and/or why did Jill tumble after? Did she stumble over Jack's body? Or was she shocked by Jack's tumble and did she then lose her footing? And did the pail of water spill? What is the moral of "Jack and Jill"? Don't go uphill for water? Leave the crown home? Boys are clumsier than girls? Don't send young children up a hill for water? Install indoor plumbing? These and other questions have been with me since childhood. You're right: I need a life.

Nonetheless, why hasn't there been more investigative reporting on the Jack and Jill story?! There's so much we don't know! In the meantime, I have sought to play a riff on the old n-rhyme:

Nursery Rhyme

Yet and Still
Went up a hill
To fetch
A connotation.

Yet met Fret,
A mongrel pet
Owned by
Procrastination.

Still fell ill
From sipping Nil,
Disgorging
Agitation.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Science Poetry, As Opposed to Science Fiction

I'm not quite sure how I ended up writing the following poem or what led me "into" it. Ultimately the poem turned into a little science-fiction scene. "Science poetry" isn't an expression parallel to "science fiction." I think to most people, "science poetry" would mean poetry that somehow concerns the topic of science, not poetry that speculates about other worlds or creates imaginary futures (and so on).

I think I added the title, which obviously alludes to Coleridge's famous "Kubla Khan," after the poem was pretty much done, or as done as it was going to be. Sometimes I write the title, or a title, first, but more often than not, the title comes late if not last.

I believe this is the only thing I've published in a science-fiction magazine. It was published in Hadrosaur Tales, which prints mostly science-fiction stories but also takes some "science poetry," so to speak. Anyway, I think I was playing around with the idea that one day, nobody will go outside; already a great number of American teenagers don't outside, except to get in a car or a bus to go to school--or so they tell me. Maybe--who knows?--"outside" is over-rated. I still like it quite a bit, but that's just me. The poem:

Suburban Xanadu

In this present
mood, mist filters
through massive
oaks, settles on
gravestones. Birds
are not far off.
It’s all computer-
generated, of course.
We haven’t been
outside our assigned
dome for thirty years.
We suffer from VTS—
Virtual Trauma Syndrome,
in which even
thoughts of visiting
a forest or an un-domed
sector give us terrors,
savage this present mood.

Poe; Cats and Echoes in the Coliseum

I don't recall ever having read "The Coliseum" by Edgar Allan Poe before, even though I've been reading Poe since high school. Somehow I missed that one. As in some of his other poems, Poe starts at too high a pitch and has nowhere to go, rhetorically, so the poem seems overwrought and gravitates toward self-parody.

The poem is of interest, however, because it's in blank verse, whereas Poe in most of his other poetry prefers to rhyme. In a couple of places, he seems to rhyme almost accidentally here (Gesthemane/Chaldee). Also, as far as I know, Poet didn't ever visit Rome--or Italy. As a youth, he did live and go to school in England, but I don't think he visited Italy then, and I'm pretty sure he didn't visit Italy as an adult, but I could be wrong. His not having actually visited the Coliseum may explain why, a few lines into the poem, he turns literal thirst into figurative thirst, so that the speaker is thirsting for lore, not for water (after having traveled a ways to see the Coliseum).

I remember being hot and thirsty when I visited the Coliseum. It is an impressive structure, considering when it was built, that's for sure. Many cats live there, so that speaks well of it, too. However, cats are everywhere in Rome, so I don't know how discerning Italian cats are. I suppose Poe would have preferred black cats. Anyway, here's the unusual poem:

The Coliseum

Type of the antique Rome! Rich reliquary
Of lofty contemplation left to Time
By buried centuries of pomp and power!
At length- at length- after so many days
Of weary pilgrimage and burning thirst,
(Thirst for the springs of lore that in thee lie,)
I kneel, an altered and an humble man,
Amid thy shadows, and so drink within
My very soul thy grandeur, gloom, and glory!
Vastness! and Age! and Memories of Eld!
Silence! and Desolation! and dim Night!
I feel ye now- I feel ye in your strength-
O spells more sure than e'er Judaean king
Taught in the gardens of Gethsemane!
O charms more potent than the rapt Chaldee
Ever drew down from out the quiet stars!

Here, where a hero fell, a column falls!
Here, where the mimic eagle glared in gold,
A midnight vigil holds the swarthy bat!
Here, where the dames of Rome their gilded hair
Waved to the wind, now wave the reed and thistle!
Here, where on golden throne the monarch lolled,
Glides, spectre-like, unto his marble home,
Lit by the wan light of the horned moon,
The swift and silent lizard of the stones!

But stay! these walls- these ivy-clad arcades-
These moldering plinths- these sad and blackened shafts-
These vague entablatures- this crumbling frieze-
These shattered cornices- this wreck- this ruin-
These stones- alas! these grey stones- are they all-
All of the famed, and the colossal left
By the corrosive Hours to Fate and me?

"Not all"- the Echoes answer me- "not all!
Prophetic sounds and loud, arise forever
From us, and from all Ruin, unto the wise,
As melody from Memnon to the Sun.
We rule the hearts of mightiest men- we rule
With a despotic sway all giant minds.
We are not impotent- we pallid stones.
Not all our power is gone- not all our fame-
Not all the magic of our high renown-
Not all the wonder that encircles us-
Not all the mysteries that in us lie-
Not all the memories that hang upon
And cling around about us as a garment,
Clothing us in a robe of more than glory."

I do like how the Echoes insist that they and the Coliseum still matter; that's rather charming.

Fishing for Poetry

James Henry Leigh Hunt, known now and in his lifetime as simply Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), was among the lesser British Romantic poets. His most important achievement occurred in journalism, especially with The Examiner, which he edited, but also with other journals. He changed the reviewing of drama from a kind of inside-job to a more objective assessment of plays, and for calling the Prince Regent "a fat Adonis of fifty," he was thrown in jail for a while. British defamation laws then were and now are more strict than American ones with regard to the press and public figures.

In politics, Hunt tended to support such left-leaning issues as enfranchising common citizens and other kinds of reform, things that don't seem so left-leaning now to most people. He produced a lot of poetry, much of it so-so; he published one novel, a piece of historical fiction called Sir Ralph Esher; and he was known as being a tad silly and as being cheerful but improvident. He and Lord Byron were friends for a while, but Byron got tired of Hunt, especially after Hunt visited him in Italy, large family in tow; the Lord got annoyed with the kids. Hunt also helped John Keats get published early on. His most famous poems, perhaps his only famous poems now, are "Jenny Kissed Me" and "Abou ben Adhem." Both are widely available on the web and elsewhere. The following poem by Hunt intrigues me:

To a Fish

You strange, astonished-looking, angle-faced,
Dreary-mouthed, gaping wretches of the sea,
Gulping salt-water everlastingly,
Cold-blooded, though with red your blood be graced,
And mute, though dwellers in the roaring waste;
And you, all shapes beside, that fishy be,—
Some round, some flat, some long, all devilry,
Legless, unloving, infamously chaste:—

O scaly, slippery, wet, swift, staring wights,
What is't ye do? What life lead? eh, dull goggles?
How do ye vary your vile days and nights?
How pass your Sundays? Are ye still but joggles
In ceaseless wash? Still nought but gapes, and bites,
And drinks, and stares, diversified with boggles?

The poem is actually part one of a three-part poem called "The Fish, The Man, and the Spirit." In part two, the fish answers the man (in English, not bubbles--this is called poetic license), and in part three the fish turns into a man who turns into a spirit, who observes the extent to which humans are rather a lot like fish. Part one, "To a Fish," interests me in part because, refreshingly, it doesn't like the fish much. I'm surprised the speaker doesn't go even further and ask the fish, "Hey, why don't you get a job?!"

I guess fish were "infamously chaste" back then--because they make little or no contact when reproducing? I reckon there's some logic to the view.

The poem does get a bit silly, with the joggles and boggles and the "How pass your Sundays?" But it's still amusing--and unexpected.

It's difficult to say what fish-poem is the best fish-poem, but I might have to go with Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish." I include the poem in courses often, and students tend to like it.

The following poem includes ten fish, but they're dead. It's an odd little poem, I must admit. I wrote it quite a while ago, but I think the idea was to "answer" hum-drum questions with references to creatures, and in the last line, I think I was going for a wee echo of Basho's poetry. The poem first appeared in Poetry Northwest.

From Another Part of the Forest

How are you today?
Ten dead fish float in the lake.

May I help you?
Five cattle lie in the shade.

Won’t you please sit down?
A bobcat rakes a deer’s back.

Do you love me?
A butterfly folds up its wings.

What are you waiting for?
Seven geese waddle toward a pond.

Are you sure?
A frog jumps from a log into mud.

Does Being Alone Equal Solitude?

Lord Byron wrote a poem that presents an unconventional view of solitude; the poem is conveniently called "Solitude":

Solitude

To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,
Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean;
This is not solitude, 'tis but to hold
Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unrolled.

But midst the crowd, the hurry, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel and to possess,
And roam alone, the world's tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendour shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endued,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less
Of all the flattered, followed, sought and sued;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!

I like the simple organization of the poem. Stanza one explains what solitude isn't. One may read the poem as an implicit disagreement with Wordsworth, one of Byron's contemporaries. Wordsworth did, in fact, celebrate the kind of solitude in which one is alone "in nature." Indeed, Wordsworth believed that such solitude brought out the best in him and others. Wordsworth would probably not take issue with the idea of "conversing" with nature--not literally talking to a tree, maybe, but allowing one's consciousness, for lack of a better term, to be influenced subtly by nature. Ironically, Byron, very much an urban, cosmopolitan creature, thinks of genuine solitude as a condition of being alone in a crowd, which seems to be a paradox and brings to mind one of Yogi Berra's dry comments: "Ah, nobody likes to go to that restaurant anymore; it's too crowded!"

So stanza two presents the second "thesis": real solitude occurs when you are in the midst of a crowd.

Certainly it's easy to grasp Byron's implied rhetorical question: Is there a greater feeling of "aloneness" than that of feeling all alone amongst a crowd of strangers? And the crowd, according to Byron, is composed of "the flattered, followed, sought and sued." That phrase might well apply to Hollywood these days.

Perhaps Byron has highlighted what is chiefly a semantic distinction. Perhaps his "solitude" is someone else's "loneliness," and it is true that you (or you and another person) can feel a sense of belonging--of not being lonely or isolated--when you are "in nature." --Maybe not literally in nature, but, say, staying in an isolated cabin in the hills. Here's a poem that contemplates that circumstance:

Cabin in Snow

Outside a cabin in snow,
we are, and hear our, breathing here.
And wind in pines shucks

itself through sound like snakes
slipping through their summer skins.
And it is easy out here. And out

here it is easy to admire
an image-aided concept
of cabins in snow. And

it is easy inside a cabin
now to believe in an Idea
of Winter, for notions of snow

furnish our true cabin,
consciousness—which, fragile amidst
oblivion’s drifts, stays sturdy against howling.

--Hans Ostrom

In other words, I think one's mind can feel quite occupied and connected when one is alone, and I certainly agree with Byron that it's possible to feel isolated and lonely in a crowd, especially a crowd that seems to be a "shock of men." What a great phrase. We might bring it up to date by writing "shock of humans" or "shock of people" (and thereby ruin the rhyme--oops), but a crowd can "shock" one even if it isn't doing something shocking, even if it isn't a mob. And sometimes, I think, a person can be quite comfortable walking in a crowded city, but maybe the person turns a corner and for some reason sees the crowd differently and is shocked by a sense of the sheer mass of people.

The converse of Byron's thesis can be true as well, of course; a hermit who has chosen to be contentedly alone might wake up one morning and feel terribly lonely, and a person in a crowd may feel quite connected to others in the crowd.

"Minions of splendour shrinking from distress." That's an intriguing line from Byron's two-part poem. If I were to associate something with the line, it might be the scene of manic shoppers at a mall in December. They do seem to be in servitude to brights lights, much noise, and lots of stuff to buy--hyper-consumerism; and maybe they are shopping so as to shrink from distress. Who knows? Such a scene can be distressing, however. In spite of custom and relentless advertising, I wouldn't be completely shocked if, one year, almost everyone stayed home and thought, "How about if we don't go out and buy a bunch of stuff this year. Let's stay home!" Such a massive, collective sigh of relief one would hear! "You mean I don't have to shopping?"

D.H. Lawrence and Thinking Too Much

Here's a poem by D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930):

Conceit

It is conceit that kills us
and makes us cowards instead of gods.

Under the great Command: Know thy self, and that
thou art mortal! we have become fatally self-conscious, fatally self-
important, fatally entangled in the cocoon coils of
our conceit.

Now we have to admit we
can't know ourselves, we can only know about ourselves.
And I am not interested to know about myself any
more, I only entangle myself in the knowing.

Now let me be myself,
now let me be myself, and flicker forth,
now let me be myself, in the being, one of the gods.

D. H. Lawrence

Lawrence was an extraordinary writer, truly as accomplished in poetry as he was in novels and short fiction. His most famous poem might well be "Snake," and his novels include Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterly's Lover and Women in Love. "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" is an oft-anthologized story. He was "counter-Modernist" insofar as he believed that 20th century humans thought themselves to death and that they should be more spontaneous, earthy, and instinctive. He found middle-class British bourgeois, "Victorian" values especially stifling. A professor of mine once pointed out the irony that Lawrence, who celebrated the body and earthly life and opposed "over-thinking" things, wrote poems and novels that were actually full of ideas--even if they were anti-idea ideas.

Obviously, "Conceit" is written in opposition, so to speak, to psychology and to the classical adage, "know thyself." The poem implicitly advises, "Be thyself" or, even more simply, "Be. Live." Nowadays, of course, our culture seems obsessed with our knowing ourselves; this is the age of self-help books and programs, of thinking about oneself almost constantly. I guess Lawrence saw it coming, back there in the teens and the 1920s; he died in 1930.

I love Lawrence's poetry. His free-verse has a hint of Whitman's about it, though much less oratorical, and with regard to style, he and Robinson Jeffers are certainly first cousins. His novels, once scandalous (Lady Chatterly's Lover was banned for a time in the U.S., partly because of the f-word), now seem a bit old-fashioned, mannered--partly, I think, because we look at them from the other side of the sexual revolution and the influence of feminist criticism. To me, his poetry remains fresh, but even with "Conceit," I will certainly acknowledge that Lawrence may seem naive. Is it possible now simply to be oneself in the manner he desires? And what if "oneself" is a self-absorbed self? Good for him or her, I suppose, bad for the ones who have to deal with that person. Nonetheless, the poem does seem refreshingly to suggest "get on with it": you may not be perfect, but you're all you've got!

(Incidentally, there's an interesting "bio-pic" about Lawrence, a film made some 20 years ago called Priest of Love. It is not well known and may not have made it to DVD. I believe it may be Ava Gardner's last film. There is a better known film that dramatizes Women in Love, with Glenda Jackson, Oliver Reed, and Alan Bates. The nude wrestling in front of the fireplace is an especially famous scene from the novel/film. I think there was also a film made of the short story, "The Fox.")

I'm not sure whether Lawrence would have liked the following poem. I'm going to go with the odds and guess "No." To some extent, the poem may concern "just" being oneself, although there is a bit of a paradox in being oneself because if you change yourself, are you still yourself? Naturally (pun intended), Lawrence would accuse me of over-thinking, but then I like to read books and write poetry, and these activities can call for (but need not necessarily include) thinking. Put more broadly, maybe some people are being themselves when they think, even if they're over-thinking or not thinking very well. The poem:

You and You

You must be you for you to be.
I know to be the only you
is difficult. You must repeat
the same old strengths and flaws, ensure
quirks and habits stay organized,
a regiment of personhood.
You cannot disappear from you.
When you’re asleep, you’re sleeping you;
you’re altered consciousness is al-
tered you, but you-never-the-less.
It could be worse. I know you can
supply examples of just how.
But still—how strange to have just one
attempt at consciousness in all
of Time, to have to spend it on
one incarnationality—
the only I you’ll ever be.

from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, by Hans Ostrom.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

How To Be a Sonnet

If you know any aspiring poems, as opposed to aspiring poets, out there that have set becoming a sonnet as a career-goal, then this poem may be of use to them:

How To Be A Sonnet

You have to utter what you have to say
Iambically, and then you must transmit
Whatever poet using you that day
Decides that she or he desires to get
Across compressedly and cleverly.
However well you carry out this task,
Please know, my dear, that you'll fail utterly.
For every sonnet-sampler now will ask,
"How can this upstart thing even presume
To carve its iambs anywhere as well
As Shakespeare's little monuments that loom
Or all the sonnets that still help to sell
Anthologies to students who view verse
As if it were a body in a hearse?"

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Mum's the Word, or a Word

With apologies to the musical, grease is not the word. Mum is. "Mum's the word," people used to say (I don't hear the phrase much anymore) when they wanted a secret kept.

Indeed, mum is a word, meaning (in but one of its four noun-incarnations) "an inarticulate sound made with the lips closed," according to the OED online, and--this is lovely--the earliest reference is to Piers Plowman in 1400. I can imagine Piers making that sound a lot.

Oh, I thought I was in the vicinity of clever when I decided to write a poem envisaging a club devoted to quietness and playing off the phrase "mum's the word," but then (I should have known) I found out that the quirky 18th century got there way ahead of me. The OED online cites one of Joseph Addison's essays as referring to . . .

1711 J. ADDISON Spectator No. 9 ¶6 The Mum Club (as I am informed) is an Institution of the same Nature, and as great an Enemy to Noise.

It was a great age of clubs and--the Mum Club notwithstanding--conversation: the exuberant 18th century in London.

Meanwhile, our own era seems to be a great Friend to Noise. Alas and alack. Here's the poem:

Mum Is The Word

The League of Quiet Persons meets
monthly. Its quarters are a cavernous
warehouse away from traffic. Its
business is not to discuss business.
Minutes are read silently and tacitly approved.
Members listen to rain argue with corrugated
iron, a furnace with itself. Glances
are learnéd. It is not so much refuge
from noise the members seek in such company
as implicit permission not to speak,
not to answer or to answer for,
not to pose, chat, persuade, or hold forth.
Podium and gavel have been banned,
indeed are viewed as weaponry.
A microphone? The horror.
Several Quiet Persons interviewed
had no comment. A recorded voice
at the main office murmured only, “You
have reached the League of Quiet
Persons. After the tone, listen.”

McCoy Tyner

This poem remembers my seeing/hearing jazz pianist McCoy Tyner and group play in Berkeley--probably almost exactly 30 years ago: yikes. I'd certainly seen/heard jazz pianists attack the piano before--but nothing like Tyner did. He and the piano seemed to be having a boxing match, and yet great music came out. At one point some strings did, too. He broke them banging on the piano so hard.

Tyner

Once

in Berkeley, smoke like Bay fog lay
over heads of cool-hip-jazz-club-clientele &
waitresses slivered through tables/bodies/chairs,
kept drinks coming, ice and glass and liquid held aloft &

McCoy

--he hit the mthrfckn keys
so hard one time strings
popped & whipped around like snakes out
‘the belly of the grand dark

piano

& the percussionist had some
weird shit hanging from racks—
bones, steel tubes, feathers—

all

humid and scratchy and knock-talk
click-back bicker-bock-a-zone
sounds, & McCoy was rippin and roarin,
working the shit

out

of keyboardedness. And the horns. It was a big
marrow-filling, ear-enlightening night. Night-outside:
cool, misty Berkeley. Had a look around.
Got in the ’67 Camaro, drove back up I-80
to plain brown-cow Davis,

brain

humming like the lowest pianoforte
E-note pedaled through the measures.

Brains and Branes

Yesterday I made the terrible mistake of purchasing a copy of Scientific American. Actually the purchase was all right (if expensive); the real mistake was to read an article titled, "The Great Cosmic Roller-Coaster Ride: Could Cosmic Inflation Be a Sign That Our Universe is Embedded in a Far Vaster Realm?" by Cliff Burgess and Fernando Quevedo (November 2007). This article is all about "string theory," a unified theory of . . . everything, really--the whole physical enchilada, from the universe(s) to particles--although I don't think they use that term, enchilada. Instead the use the following terms:

observable universe--self-explanatory

other universe--"an unobserved region of spacetime" [if you say so!]

calabi-yau--this sounds like the name of an interesting dessert, but it actually refers to a six-dimensional shape; because I am able to visualize only shapes that have a maximum of three dimensions, 6 might as well be 66, as far as I'm concerned. SA tries to illustrate a calabi-yau, but it just looks like a splash of milk: a highly confused three-dimensional space, although I'm sure they were doing their best.

brane--this is short for membrane. Why don't they just say (or write) "membrane"? What's so hard about that?

scalar field--"a field described by a single number at every position. Examples: temperature, inflation field." I guess this means heat as measured by temperature is one slice of the universe.

moduli--I think this would be a good name for a car. "What are you driving these days?" "Well, I'm leasing a Moduli." Instead it refers to "scalar fields that describe the size and shape of hidden space dimensions." Oh, I see. It describes something hidden. If it's really hidden, then how can it be described? Answer: by guessing, under the cover of mathematics. Sez me.

annihilate--no, this doesn't mean what you think it means. It means "to convert completely to radiation." I believe I have done this to dinner a few times, in the oven or on the stove-top.

So I talked with my computer-science/math colleague today in the coffee shop (ah, the perks of being a professor--you can find an expert on the premises), and I said, "I think physics is looping back to philosophy." He said, "It never left philosophy!" I said, "I think these guys are just making stuff up." He smiled. I said, "I can't visualize any of what they're talking about." He said, "You [he meant "one"] can with math. Math can visualize it." Math became very uncomfortable to me after basic algegra and geometry--Euclidean geometry, I should say. I loved that kind of geometry. It made sense, and it seemed to apply to my world, or my "scalar field."

From a philosophical point of view, I approve of the idea of multiple universes, because at least it stalls for time. Otherwise we have to confront the question of what's outside the boundary of this universe. "Nothing" is one answer. To which we respond, "What does nothing look like, and where does it begin, and why does it begin there?" From a theological point of view, heaven could be one of these additional universes. So could hell, but I prefer not to talk about that, and I refuse to make a joke about the "scalar field" of "temperature" with regard to hell. Anyway, with string-theory, we can say, "There's some other stuff on the outside of the universe, and we're going to have a look at it some day, but for now . . . look at the pretty bird!"

Of course, there's also something called an anti-brane. I think it's something that annihilates a brane, but my brain was annihilated by the article, which must be some kind of anti-brane in my case.

My colleague says that string theory is pure theory insofar as it cannot (at the moment) be observed, nor can it make predictions, whereas people were able to make accurate predictions based on Einstein's theories of relativity. One prediction was that the path of light from a distant star (I guess they're all distant, including the sun) would bend when it went past the sun and was observed from Earth. Apparently this was verified during a lunar eclipse of the sun. I don't know if they just eye-balled it or whether they used instruments. :-)

I said, "Well, if you can't observe phenomena, repeat experiments, or make verifiable predictions, then you're not doing science, are you?" My colleague said, "No, and there are books out there that call string theory 'not even wrong'--that is, not even worth trying to disprove." Wow. Beyond wrong. That's pretty bad. That's almost anti-brane.

He recommended a book by Brian Greene called The Fabric of the Universe, which tries to explain string theory, I guess.

Let's talk size for a minute. According to the SA article, the observable universe is this big: 10 to the 26th power meter(s). An ant is 10 to the minus 2 power meter. Presumably an aunt is somewhat larger than that. The minimum meaningful length in "nature" is 10 to the minus 35th. That's a lot smaller than an atom, but don't go by me, because I've never seen an atom all by itself. They seem to travel in packs.

As far as poetry goes (and it seems remarkably similar to physics these days), I can get only as far as Einstein, and really I can't even get that far, but here goes:

Whereabouts Unknown

If I understand Einstein
correctly, and I don’t,
my whereabouts are, strictly
speaking, unknown.

No one is the center of the
universe, but anywhere can be.
Therefore everyone’s coordinates are
contingent, just a song at twilight.

Don’t worry: If I say I’ll be
somewhere at a certain time,
I’ll be then there—unforeseen
whereabouts notwithstanding.

That you know where to find
me, and I you, exemplifies relative
dependability, a feature of our companionship—
love’s old sweet Newtonian song.

from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, by Hans Ostrom.

Poet's Musings