ABC = All But Comatose

Well, I tried. I watched the Democratic debate, hosted by ABC News, for 50 minutes. Then I couldn't take it anymore. The pressing issues of the day, according to George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson, were the following:

1. What Obama meant by "bitter."
2. What actually happened when H. Clinton landed in Bosnia once.
3. The matter of wearing a flag-pin on one's lapel.
4. The (retired) pastor of Obama's church.

Why not ask about the exact blend of rayon and cotton in Obama's socks or the precise shade of Clinton's makeup? Why not really drill down into the big issues?

Why is George Stephanopoulos even in a position to be asking questions? He was a hack in the Clinton White House whom Bill Clinton and James Carville mocked. Why is the unctuous, pompous Charles Gibson in a position to be asking questions? He's like the stuffed-shirt straight man in a Marx Brothers movie. As Butch said to Sundance, "Who are these guys?"

Two wars, economic collapse, environmental collapse, the largest prison population in the industrial world, a chasm between rich and poor, no solution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, a Vice President who wants to be a dictator and who got liquored up and shot his friend in the face, a circus clown as president, a Congress that seems to be on a permanent morphine-drip, a Supreme Court that looks like the Spanish Inquisition, a concentration camp in Guantanamo, a Justice Department that argued in favor of torture up to the brink of organ failure, the use of ethanol helping to worsen famine worldwide (feed cars, not people), the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and so on--and what do Fatuous Gibson and George Boretheshitoutofus ask about?:

Flag pins, the Bosnian tarmac 15 years ago, a retired pastor, and the word "bitter." I'm now convinced that all journalists except Helen Thomas have been taken over by the pod-people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and are incapable of asking pertinent questions.

I ask of American journalism what I believe Casey Stengel once asked of his hapless New York Mets, as he watched them flinging themselves around the diamond like characters from Monty Pythons's sketch, "Twit of the Year": Can anybody play this game?

Of course, because HC is behind, she was only too happy to play the pin-the-flag-on-the-pastor's-tarmac game of trivia, but at least Obama had the decency to look nauseous and to ask, implicitly, "Who cares about this shit? People are out of jobs and homes." Not that Obama is some kind of hero. It's just that his brain seems still to work, so of course he was perplexed (as any normal person would be) by George and Charlie.

Is All But Comatose still owned by Disney? Are any television-journalists required to study journalism anymore?

Poem By Katie Cugno

Here is a poem by Katie Cugno (that's Ms. Cugno to some), who kindly gave me permission to reprint it from her blog; the sounds and imagery of the poem are splendid:

The Shingle Life

by Katie Cugno

Sneakily surveying the scene
rain spatters and bursts
at the seams
shattering through dreams
of the asleep

streams charge,
change jingling onto shaking shingles
after jumping (joyous) from the sky
anxious to rouse a ruckus
on the roof
jitterbugging into tin and wee hours,
co-mingling caution with wind

Success: the innards of this monster have been rattled--
roused as well as ruckus--
rest abating,
guts awakened and waiting
for the storm to stop
or the roof blow off

brave shingles grow afraid as well
shuddering and fluttering they
stutter and mumble to one another

will we make it, this time?

will wind subside before
we lose...our lives?


As hopefulness sways,
and faith like rest abates
a shingle is broken and bounces away


the others dismay
for a moment
but then notice
their own attachment still
to the roof.


Always to the roof.

Through the howling scowling wind and rain,

The ones who remain remain attached,
and afraid...


and some stationarily stuck
shivering shingles
stop and think wait,
to where could that wind rip a shingle away?

to certain sudden death...
or freedom, by a bay?
Free from constraints,
Far from battery by beating rain...


And the next little shingle that flittered away
lifted its own single self from its space
and fluttered--
not stumbled or violently tumbled--
off to freedom
from sleet, snow, most wind...

and rain.

To live a cozy little life on a bay.

Copyright 2008 by Katie Cugno

He Heard Dead People

The kid in The Sixth Sense sees dead people, and unfortunately, I guessed what the hinge of that movie was way too early, so it got a bit tedious for me. But it was an interesting film. I think the director, M. Night, started to imitate himself, and things haven't gone so well since then. I wasn't even tempted to see the one about the woman in the swimming pool. I saw clips of it on TV, and I just thought, "Drain the pool; that ought to do it."

Edgar Lee Masters heard dead people, at least when he sat down (or stood up) to write A Spoon River Anthology (1916), still a great achievement--and perhaps an overlooked one now--in American poetry. The premise is simple: dead people from a small town finally have their say; they speak interior monologues through Masters' poetry. The poems resonate for me because they're so tough, taciturn, and down to earth, and because they do remind me of people I knew in a small town. However, I don't think you have to be from a small town to enjoy Masters' poems. Here's one called "'Indignation' Jones." That has to be one of the great nicknames--Indignation. It could apply to all of us at one time or another.

"Indignation" Jones

YOU would not believe, would you,
That I came from good Welsh stock?
That I was purer blooded than the white trash here?
And of more direct lineage than the New Englanders
And Virginians of Spoon River?
You would not believe that I had been to school
And read some books.
You saw me only as a run-down man,
With matted hair and beard
And ragged clothes.
Sometimes a man’s life turns into a cancer
From being bruised and continually bruised,
And swells into a purplish mass,
Like growths on stalks of corn.
Here was I, a carpenter, mired in a bog of life
Into which I walked, thinking it was a meadow,
With a slattern for a wife, and poor Minerva, my daughter,
Whom you tormented and drove to death.
So I crept, crept, like a snail through the days
Of my life.
No more you hear my footsteps in the morning,
Resounding on the hollow sidewalk,
Going to the grocery store for a little corn meal
And a nickel’s worth of bacon.

I love the false pride of Indignation Jones, even in death. He thinks his coming from "Welsh stock" is something special. The part about having been to school and having read some books is poignant--painfully insufficient evidence for the assertion he's trying to prove. Masters' sense of what somebody like this might say is spot-on.

The poem makes me think of two men I saw this past Saturday. Before I went to Mass, I stopped to pick up some groceries, and a ragged, gaunt, bearded man was crouched behind a wall near the store. He whispered, "You wouldn't have some change . . . ?" At first I didn't know where the voice was coming from, but finally I located it. I went over and pulled a bill out of my wallet, and the fascinating thing is that he knew it was a five-dollar bill even before I did. "You're giving me a five?!" he said, incredulously. "Yes, sir," I said. I gave it to him, and he said, "God bless you." As I returned to my car, I glanced at a woman who was near her car; she had apparently observed the wee scene, and she had a bemused smile on her face. I don't think she disapproved of my giving the guy money, but I'm not sure she entirely approved either.

Then I went to church, and as I walked toward the entrance, I saw another homeless man who'd wedged himself into a nook of the church's exterior and was having a nap. He didn't wake up. He was gone when I came out. It's not uncommon to see homeless persons around our parish because there is a big food bank connected to the parish, and their is a "hospitality kitchen" that serves a meal a day. Also, economically strapped people can get free bus-passes from the parish.

Indignation Jones wasn't homeless, apparently, but he was dismissed in his town, and in his posthumous monologue, he tries to explain that he was somebody. Of course, everybody is somebody, but when someone crosses a line--into being a recluse, a pariah, or a homeless person--they officially become nobody. They have to crouch and whisper. They feel as if they have to creep, "like a snail": what a great simile.

When I see people like the ones I saw Saturday, or when I think of Indignation Jones, I think about what might have happened to keep them from crossing that social line, and I think about what might happen to bring them back across. I know the answers aren't simple. But at one point, presumably, these people were relatively content, functioning people, more or less accepted by society. One wants to hit "rewind" and go back to some mythical crucial moment when it all changed, and change that moment. It's a sentimental desire, I realize. So we write poems out of empathy, or give five bucks, or work on "the homeless problem." Or we ignore "the snail" entirely.

In poems, sometimes the best details are the oblique ones, and I love how this poem ends with the corn meal and the nickel's worth of bacon. Perfect. These details make me think of all the obscure, strange, reclusive "old timers" I saw in my hometown. One was an old miner, Bill Nichols, who seemed to wear the same pair of bluejeans and the same flannel shirt year-round, and never to take a bath. He lived in a shack outside of town. We used to take a bus 12 miles to another town to school, and every once in a while, Bill would flag down the bus and hitch a ride. Often he was wearing a holster with his six-gun: I'm not lying. Bill was from a claim-jumping era when you had to pack heat. Bill wore a gun on his hip, the way some older women wore a feather in their hats. Nowadays, I think, a bus driver would a) not stop for a hitch-hiker an b) even if he or she were tempted to stop, would probably look at the gun and think, "Maybe not today."

Murder-Mystery Poem

In a course on the Harlem Renaissance, we finished Rudolph Fisher's detective novel, The Conjure-Man Dies, not long ago. It's a well plotted novel immersed in Harlem society of the 1930s, and it also plays some inventive riffs on detective-novel conventions. Fisher tries to get it all in there: amateur-genius detective, police-detective, gothic elements, a locked room of sorts, the gathering of suspects, a whiff of the supernatural, science and forensics, and so on. Fisher, a physcian and experimenter with X-Rays, unfortunately died in his 30s; otherwise we might have a series of detective novels from him, but it's nice at least to have this one. On my own, I've been reading some detective novels by Michael Innes, Agatha Christie, and Chester Himes, too. Himes's crime novels are set in Harlem, too, but their grittier and more hard-boiled than Fisher's book.



A great afficianado of detective fiction, W.H. Auden wrote a kind of tribute-poem for the genre. Auden very much favored the "village cozy" subgenre of the form, and in an essay, he developed a rationale for his preference, asserting that the setting of the murder should be Edenic. Here's a link to his detective-story poem:



http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetry/cpjrn/vol32/diemert.htm



I decided to write a murder-mystery poem, too:



Murder-Mystery Poem


Among fictional live bodies lies a fictionally dead one,
made so not by itself but by one or more bodies who
had minds, means, and opportunity
to kill. Identification ensues. Who is dead, who
killed, who will mislead, confess, and reveal? Enter


empiricism, wearing a thick coat and having a look
around with those unmistakable Aristotelian
eyes. The empiricist is foe of secrecy, friend
of plodders who trod paths of data, and assistant
to the plot. In death, on ice, a body in this fiction
forms information incarnate. It is cause


for apprehensiveness and apprehension,
justice and correction. Ah, there in a meadow
of likelihood stands a murderer, defined
by spores of imperfection and pride, caught
by humble fact, a residue of act. Under
arrest, a fictional transgressor is held, as I,


satisfied, hold the soft paperback book in my hands.


(Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom)


The last line alludes to one of the main reasons I like detective novels: I love the feel of those pulpy paperbacks in my hands. I've been reading them for several decades, after all, and the physical aspect of a book contributes a lot to the experience--if, that is, you're a bibliophile. If you haven't read an Innes book yet, you might try From London Far, and even if you're not a detective-fiction fan, you'll probalby enjoy The Conjure Man Dies.

If you're a poet and haven't done so yet, you ought to write a poem about a kind of reading you like to do, or a memory of reading, or a genre. Or an homage to a favorite writer. The homage need not be full of unalloyed praise; it might express ambivalence, or even a kind of love-hate attitude toward the writer and/or her/his works.

Dickinson and Hope

Having promised solemnly, as opposed to effervescently, yesterday to write something more hopeful today, I must immediately call in reinforcements in the form of Emily Dickinson's poem #254 (according to one counting-scheme):

"HOPE" is the thing with feathers--
That perches in the soul--
And sings the tune without the words--
And never stops--at all—

And sweetest--in the Gale--is heard--
And sore must be the storm--
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chillest land--
And on the strangest Sea--
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb--Of Me.

It's almost always unwise to paraphrase a Dickinson poem, so I won't, but I will say that the poem makes me consider whether hope is given to most people, as part of the hardware and software package, at birth. The speaker in this poem reports having heard hope "in Extremity" --in extreme situations--but, returning to the equation of hope to bird, reports that even in such moments, when hope is arguably as important as it ever is, it doesn't ask anything in return; were it a bird, it wouldn't even ask for a crumb.

What hope has to offer to us as so many apparently intractable problems face us: well, there's the usual--things could be worse. Also, people seem at least ready to acknowledge there's a problem, Houston, with the globe's environment, Bush's catastrophic foreign policy, and race in the U.S.. The present twenty-something generation in many parts of the world seems precocious, alert, and tenacious. I feel as if I should knock on wood while saying this, but the prospect of thermo-nuclear apocalypse seems much less likely now than it did in the 1950s through the 1980s. Although Bush expanded the executive branch's power to the brink of dictatorship (arguably), there's a chance Congress might reel in the next president in this regard. For communication between peoples and fresh ways of getting and analyzing information, the Web seems to be a net-gaine (pun intended). The need to use alternative fuels (something that seemed obvious to many decades ago) seems to be close to being accepted as fact. And finally, in Tacoma, the sun is out, meaning this is our fifth try, I believe, at Spring. We'll see how it goes. The things with feathers seem pleased, and students from Hawaii are preparing for a Luau.

Watching Bush With a Political Scientist

In our Iraq-War discussion-group today, we started by playing about half of Bush's 17-minute speech on Iraq. Lately, I've found Bush almost unwatchable, but today I was fascinated by the look on his face, which suggested that even he might be having trouble getting the lies out. He simply looked like a teenager lying to his parents. Sometimes he seemed repulsed by his own language. However, I was determined not to share my views with the group because I'd much rather facilitate the conversation. I already know what I think, and I'd rather listen, in hopes that someone might change my mind.

But then the political scientist in our group--a moderate in both politics and temperament--said essentially that he didn't believe a word Bush said. That is: Things are not "better" in Iraq. A majority of Iraqis want us out. The Iraqi army is in no sense trained or ready. The "Surge" did very little to affect things "on the ground"; rather, Sadr's decision to pull back his militia was the main factor. There will be no real troop-decline. Al Qaeda is not the main problem. Shi'ite militias are. Our military is close to exhaustion, and our economy is broken. And on and on. This political scientist is so moderate that although he agrees with much of what Juan Cole writes on his blog, he doesn't like Cole's "Bush-bashing." The political scientist also thinks William Polk is a person worth listening to and reading.

Oddly enough, before class, a student was fiddling with a camera that turned out to be an infra-red one, so that if you look at the screen of the camera, and the camera is pointing at a black shirt, the shirt looks white. It was a great emblem for Bush's speech. Make everything he said the opposite, and you'll have the truth.

I had to ask the political scientist this question: "Then, assuming Bush is lying and knows he's lying, should we assume that his strategy is to stall (keeping the military in Iraq) until he's out of office." "Yes," my colleague said, "and then when things go badly, and if Obama or Clinton are indeed in the White House, the Republicans can and will blame the debacle on the Democrats." --Not that the Democrats don't have it coming. They've done almost nothing to oppose Bush on war, torture, the economy, and the erosion of civil liberties. And if McCain is in office, he's a one-term president anyway.

As Helen Thomas told me when I had the privilege of chatting with her in a hotel lobby in D.C. some three years ago: "Bush is the worst president in U.S. history."

A student in class asked, "Assuming Bush is lying, I have to ask: is it common for presidents to lie to this extent and in connection with such serious matters." The American historian then walked us through all of Johnson's lies leading up to and during the Viet Nam War--as a way of saying, "Yes, it's common."

I wish there were a poem I could read tonight that would make me feel better about the country of which I'm a citizen, its awful foreign policy, its widespread use of torture, its failure to do right by the environment and working people, and all the rest. Maybe it's the one I just posted--"The Vanity of Human Wishes." I vow solemnly to write something hopeful tomorrow. It will probably have something to do with my faith in many younger American citizens--their smarts, their will to do well and good.

Sam Johnson's Best Poem

My favorite 18th century British poem (not that you asked) is Samuel Johnson's "The Vanity of Human Wishes," an imitation of Juvenal's 10th satire and a noble poem of over 360 lines. It is Johnson (1709-1784) at his best: incisive, erudite, and articulate, in full command of rhyming couplets, deploying all his learning.

Aside from this poem, Johnson's poetic opus isn't that impressive, and the one novel-like work he wrote, Rasselas, is quirky. But he's still a remarkable literary figure because of his criticism, biographies of other writers, essays, and a dictionary of the English language--which, astoundingly, he wrote himself, often quoting examples of definitions from memory. No matter how might want to measure it, his intelligence was rare and ferocious. His personality is preserved in Boswell's biography. Although Johnson seems to have been in control of conversation and prose, he was a painfully self-contradictory figure, plagued by nervous disorders, depression, self-doubt, fear, rage, poverty, and procrastination (he wrote some of his best essays in one draft, while the printer waited nervously for him to finish). He was both a rationalist and a Christian, a person of enormous apetites and one of great self-discipline. He could be cruel and sexist, but among his close and genuine friends were an Afro-British man and several women. He's one of the most quotable writers and conversationalists in the language.

A few lines from near the end of "The Vanity of Human Wishes":

Where then shall Hope and Fear their objects find?
Must dull Suspense corrupt the stagnant mind?
Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate,
Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?
Must no dislike alarm, no wishes rise,
No cries invoke the mercies of the skies?
Inquirer, cease; petitions yet remain,
Which Heaven may hear, nor deem religion vain.
Still raise for good the supplicating voice,
But leave to Heaven the measure and the choice.

"Roll darkling down the torrent of this fate." That's a fine line. Classifying "ignorance" as "sedate": that's a nice move, too. An ignorant citizenship is, arguably, a sedate one.

As usual, Johnson's (and Juvenal's) advice is hard: go ahead and pray, but as for the response (if any): "leave to Heaven the measure and the choice."

My goodness: Johnson's three-hundreth birthday is coming up. --Cause for celebration, but nothing too vain.

Proliformation

It's fascinating to watch the digital revolution get its second or third wind, with all manner of hybrid gizmos being dumped on glassy-eyed consumers, who've been told they "need" this or that. For the moment, the monopolists seem to want everything to go through the phone, which is the portable talk-device, telegrammer (text-messaging is the new name for it), data-storer, and locater (that is, law enforcement and Homeland Insecurity can locate you if your phone is near you). The phone is starting to look like a combination leash/security blanket/homing device/wiretapper to me. It wouldn't startle me to see some people sucking on them like pacifiers. I do own a cell phone, but I almost never turn it on, and I like to keep it away from my body. It's a hideous little beetle of a thing, although I like the way it flips open like William Shatner's old communicator on ST. There are only about three people I call on it (or they me), anyway. I do like the fact that my son rigged it so Johnny Cash sings "I Walk the Line" when somebody calls. The wee numbers are so close together that the few times I've tried to text-message, I look like a polar bear trying to open a candy-bar.

But I'm as attached to the (old-fashioned) computer as some people are to their souped-up phones and their boysenberries, or whatever those other things are. Gooseberries? I like the old screened beast for word-processing (now an old-fashioned term), emailing, finding information (especially academic), following threads on LibraryThing, blogging and reading blogs, poking around on Google, getting a whiff of politics, and checking on the Oakland Raiders.

I also got on facebook about a year ago, when almost no faculty were doing so. At first it seemed like it was me and some faculty members at Abilene Christian University (go figure). Now more faculty members are hopping aboard. One hidden benefit has been keeping in touch with alumni.

But I loathe all the new "applications" they've heaped on facebook, like a bad chef ruining a simple, elegant dish. Most of the applications are moronic, but even if that weren't the case, they just make the whole thing look like a strip-mall. The process seems at once self-propelling, self-accelerating, and self-defeating. Proliformation for proliformation's sake: the diseased need to keep producing products productively, prodorrhea.

I especially loathe the Top Friends facebook application--and the ones about what cartoon character you are. What the hell is that? Cartoon characters are cartoon characters, not people. I thought we covered that. Top Friends is a middle-schoolish thing, in my opinion. Next, people will list their second-tier friends, their bottom friends, their Top nemeses, their charming acquaintances, their mid-level Jungian shadows, and their moribund enemies. Some of the facebook groups, I like, however; they seem to serve either a practical or a whimsical purpose and sometimes both.

Beyond the aforementioned few digital engagements, I'm pretty clueless. (Oh, I forgot Ipod.) I know virtually (so to speak) nothing about this Second Life stuff, but it looks a lot like what we used to call "the imagination," except some programmers created it and sold it, and I gather you have to mold your fantasy-life according to what the programmers have established, like sheep going through a chute, or kids at recess. (I always hated organized stuff at recess. The whole point was to take a recess from regimentation.) Apparently there's another fantasy-thing called Entropia. Over there your Top Friends are, by definition, running out of energy, so they just take Top Naps. Thinking about Second Life annoys me as much as thinking about bed-and-breakfasts. I start feeling like Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining, and I want to take an ax to a B&B door in First Life or to all of Second Life. My two main gripes about B&B's are that they're "cute" (meaning uncomfortable and creaky, with lousy beds) and that you're forced to talk to strangers at breakfast. If I'm forced to talk to people at breakfast, then the B&B owners should pay me, is the way I think about it. The strangers are no doubt better people than I am; nothing personal; it's just that I want them to stay strangers, and I want to eat breakfast--in a place where old-pro waitresses work and don't make small-talk.

I think there should be an application-process ("application" in the old sense, not in the facebook sense), and you should have to be doing a few things right in First Life before you're allowed to play much, or at all, in Second Life. Are you a good friend? Do you imagine you're better than other people (if so, do not advance to Second Life)? Are you reducing your carbon footprint? Do you leave a good tip for hard-working servers? Have you read enough poetry? Any poetry? Have you shown a modicum of generosity? Have you sworn not to express road-rage? Do you clean up after yourself? Do you arrive on time? How are your listening skills? After looking at your answers, a counselor would come over and say, "Well, we'd like you to try a bit harder in First Life before you start playing Second Life, okay?"

Now it looks like I might, in connection with my work, have to try something called Moodle. Oy. I think I might have named it VooDoodle or Schtroodle.

Fish Out of Water

"Like a fish out of water," used to describe someone or something that is completely out of its element, milieu, or indigenous turf, is actually a bit of an odd simile, as well as being cliche. Being cliche, it doesn't get much analysis even if it may still get some use.

When I go fly-fishing now, it's strictly catch-and-release, with barb-less hooks and a careful return of the unharmed trout to water. However, I grew up catching and keeping fish, chiefly because my family ate them regularly. Native rainbow, with the occasional German brown or Eastern brook trot, were part of our diet. Among my earliest memories is of my father going fly-fishing "down to the river" after work, returning after dusk with a creel full of trout, and dumping them in the porcelain kitchen sink. The smell of the slimy trout--with bits of fern stuck to their slimy sides--was overwhelming but appealing. As a child, I viewed the event simply as part of life, the fascinating thing unfolding before me. Now I'm more likely to think that he was a) getting out of the house & away from the family to clear his head and de-compress, and b) supplementing the grocery budget.

Later, when I started catching fish, I decided early on to knock out a caught fish--euthanasia. I'd read somewhere that Native Americans had done that (I have no idea if that's true.). --For a fish out of water is a fish experiencing a kind of drowning, slowly.

So the simile doesn't really work because it's supposed to suggest discomfort--maybe extreme discomfort, culture shock, to dredge up, so to speak, Toffler's term--but not reverse-drowning or death. It certainly does suggest that a person is out of his or her element--but it goes too far.

Assuming "fish out of water" is more poetic than literal, I think I've been a fish out of water a lot in my life. As I've moved from place to place, the places have seemed quite different from the earlier places. Remote town to suburban high school; suburban high school to community college; cc to large state university (full of pre-meds and pre-vets, while I studied English); undergraduate life to the labyrinth that is graduate school; and on to a liberal arts college, a kind of college with I was completely unfamiliar. At the same time, let's not lose sight of the fact that I'm male and white, and even though I certainly had to work on the way from there to here, I didn't have to incur the debt that most college graduates incur now.

At any rate, I think I've been more like a fish from a high-country creek that ends up in ever larger rivers--murkier waters, more fish, more kinds of fish, more complicated rules, a deceptively deadly current. Like most people, I've not been a fish out of water (thank God), but a fish in different waters. The main thing is to keep facing into the direction from which the water is flowing, look for food and other sustenance, be cordial to other fish who may swim one's way, and hope that if God or fate is fishing that day, the fisherperson is practicing catch-and-release.

Poetry Out Loud

"The spoken word" and "performance poetry" have certainly gained a higher cultural profile in the last decade or so; that is good news. Alongside of that development, traditional poetry readings seem to have flourished again as well. By traditional I just mean reading poems-in-print out loud, as opposed to performing poetry written more or less for the stage.

However, I think people in general and even student and faculty on campuses in particular are a bit reticent about poetry readings, viewing them as effete, perhaps, or potentially boring. If and when those unfamiliar with readings attend, however, they are usually pleasantly surprised. So are those who read poetry aloud to an audience for the first time.

Yesterday a few of us gathered to celebrate National Poetry Month by reading some of our favorite African American poems. About 15 people showed up, and we all took a turn reading one or two poems. As I told the group, any time there's more than 2 people at a poetry reading, it's a success.

I noticed that there was a calming effect on those listening--not calm as in sleeping, but calm as in attentive but re-composed after a harried day. I wonder if people's stress-levels, physically, are lowered at readings, in fact. I'm sure they're raised again once the person has to get up and read, even to a small audience.

The choices were great: a poem about a father, African American, who had served in the air force (or army air corps) in World War II--when the corps was still segretated. A poem by Etheridge Knight, who spent some time in prison, about photos and memories of his family--the photos pinned to his cell-wall. A poem by Audre Lorde about how all of get silenced but must find a way to keep speaking. A poem by Countee Cullen about poetry. A poem by Frances Harper about a slave-mother and one by Alice Walker paying tribute to African American mothers and mothers in general. One by Ruth Forman, and one by Langston Hughes: "Ballad of the Landlord," read by a student who has had some landlord-problems this year. I read "America" by Claude McKay and "Frederick Douglass" by Robert Hayden.

Of course, the usual poetry reading features one poet reading his or her work to an audience (I gave one of those this week), but I'm quite fond of readings at which people read the work of others, including, perhaps, some so-called established poets. There's something at once more informal and more communal about such readings. We're going to try to do more of that kind of reading next year.

Also I found out yesterday that my colleague Bill Kupinse, a fine poet (I've posted a couple of his poems here) was a) named poet laureate of Tacoma and b) in connection with that honor, "opened" for poet Billy Collins last week at a big reading in Tacoma. This is the best news I've heard in quite some time. Coincidentally, I visited Bill's poetry class yesterday, and there was much out-loud reading in there--of students' own poems and drafts, and of poems by David Wagoner. Bill happens to be a great teacher of poetry, too--very discerning in his comments about students' poetry, extremely knowledgeable about a huge range of poetry.

--Poetry out loud, often and everywhere these days, it seems: What's not to like about that?

What About Food?

I've always been a bit mystified by how economists measure "the economy." Rates of joblessness: these make sense, as do the other categories, such as GDP, "housing-starts," the Dow Jones (which I think of as the Tao Jones because it's essentially mystical), "consumer-spending," etc. What's left out, though?
Why don't we hear regularly (daily) about the following: is everyone getting enough food? Is everyone able to get medicine? Does everybody have access to a good school? I guess what I'm asking is: Who decides what the measurement-categories are, who appointed these people, and why doesn't measuring "the economy" involve really basic things? If the stock market goes up and a bunch of people still aren't eating, in what sense is the economy okay? I'm just going hard-headedly practical hear, nothing Marxist about it. If a disinterested observer arrived from outer space, and we told the entity that the economy was okay except for the the 3 trillion dollar deficit, poverty, famine, and a sooty atmosphere that's cooking where we live, the entity would say, "Who in the hell is in charge of measuring things down here? Fire that person."

Poets, rightly, have a reputation for having their heads in the clouds, but I think because we often think about common objects quite concretely, we occasionally can display useful "bullshit detectors"--I think Hemingway (not a poet) may have invented this term. I mean, I see Wall Street guys (never women) , wearing those goofy pin-striped suits from Guys and Dolls, yammering on MSNBC about whether "the market has found its bottom," and I want to allude to a phrase from my father's generation: "You couldn't find your ass [or the market's bottom] with both hands and a flashlight." If a nation's "economy" isn't working for huge segments of the population with regard to basic needs, then it's either not working, or it's not an economy in any practical way. Same for the global economy. I hate to use the household analogy again, but I will: What if person came home and said to his or her significant other, "You know, our household economy is in great shape, except there's nothing to eat, we can't afford to get sick, and our kid's school sucks. But our mutual funds look good."

Economists, add to categories, get more basic, become more practical, and pull your heads out of your NASDAQ.

I think this may have been a rant.

Property and Stuff

So: we were going to "go condo," but we decided not to. The building was distinctive if not unique, but the price almost left the earth's atmosphere, and owning a building (but not really) with nearly 30 other people as well as having a pseudo-landlord proved too complicated for us. So we bought a house, a real solid beast that's close to where I work and energy-efficient. We're trying to reduce our carbon-footprint, as if I knew what that meant.

Owning a home is such an American ideal--for working- as well as middle-class folk. My father--a hard-rock, underground gold-miner turned carpenter and stone-mason--got his houses the old-fashioned way. He bought land with cash and built a house himself. --Sold it when I was six, bought other land further out in the sticks and built another house himself. He thereby cut out the realty middle-person and never had a mortgage. He "designed" the homes himself. Oh, my goodness. "Eccentric" and "idiosyncratic" don't quite cover it. In what he called "the rumpus room," there was a piece of exposed steel and vaguely rusted I-beam running down the middle of the ceiling. It was holding up the second floor, but it could have held up Trump towers. Why he made this architectural choice remains anybody's guess. He used to make his sons do "pull-ups" on the thing, and until I was about 10, I thought all families did this sort of thing.

No doubt my inclination to own a home was influenced by my father's attitudes as well as the over-arching, steel I-beam American ideal. I suspect I like to own a house (or own a mortgage) for three main reasons: I don't like landlords. I like peace and quiet (harder to find in a rented place, usually). And I've almost always grown a garden. I probably won't get into gardening again much, but even growing some herbs and the odd vegetable is satisfying. (And the produce I produce is indeed often odd. I grew a red potato once that was almost as big as a football. I wanted to bronze it.) Maybe an apple-tree, too. If I could get these three things (no landlord, quiet, garden) by renting, I might have never bought a house. Who knows? Also, American apartment-buildings tend to be badly constructed, whereas ones in Germany and Sweden (two countries in which I've lived) are built to last, so one is more likely to find a rented "apartmental" place there that doesn't surround you with noise and cracked walls and a kind of stucco-hell.

Having found the house, we're on the lookout for "stuff," of course. For example, we want to modify the kitchen slightly, so we went in search of granite today. We ended up at a place called "Warehouse Liquidators." When I saw the sign, I was immediately suspicious because I wondered how they managed to turn wood and metal warehouses into liquid, and I wondered why we would be interested in buying such liquid. I was going to raise my concerns to the other person in the car, but I knew she would develop a powerful counter-argument, such as "Shut up."

Once inside, I discovered the kind of "market-place" I love: no frills, no "salesmanship." They just leased a big old place, got some stuff cheap, threw it on the floor, plugged in a cash-register, and called it good. The staff there was exuberant and irreverent, and there was even a store-cat, who was probably thinking, "I have no possessions, and I have a great life; what's up with humans?"

We didn't get much "stuff" there, but the adventure was great--exploring the raggedy edge between wholesale and retail, looking at "stuff," most of it made, I suspect, by grossly underpaid workers half a globe away. I've seen a lot of bookstore-cats, but that was the first Warehouse Liquidator cat I've ever seen, so I may have to write a poem about her. We were looking at some tile, and she came over and sat on the box, as if to say, "Let me know if I can help you with your color-selection." Knowing cats, I imagine she's both on salary and commission and probably owns a piece of the operation, too.

Ultimate Frisbee

Recently I seem to have quite a few students in my classes who play Ultimate Frisbee. I've seen frisbee-golf played on the campus for years, and I'd heard the term, "Ultimate Frisbee," but I didn't know the extent to which it's a widely played organized sport until I asked a student last semester. He happens to be a good poet, fiction-writer, and blogger, as well. He's so active and accomplished at the sport of UF that he even traveled to Brazil recently to compete. I confess I don't know what the rules are, and I've yet so see the sport played--although I have seen photos of people in the midst of U.F. I think there are some rough parallels to football, soccer, and rugby. I should probably just look up the rules on the web, but so far I've been too lazy to do so, or perhaps I just like thinking about the sport from a distance that exoticizes it. As far as I know, all that members of my generation did with a frisbee was toss it back and forth or have dogs go after it. I remember getting bored with the tossing pretty quickly, much faster than I did with "playing catch" with a baseball, for some reason.

I wonder what Penultimate Frisbee would look like. Maybe it's the equivalent of AAA baseball, or maybe its rules are different, making for a slightly less interesting or competitive game. Another possibility: the rules of PF are the same as those of UF, but the frisbees that are used have manufacturers' flaws, so they wobble, careen, and crash, and the PF players simply have to bear that burden. I suppose people would be reluctant to admit they played Penultimate Frisbee.

Clearly, from my point of view, at least, Ultimate Frisbee is better for civilization in the long run than Ultimate Fighting, which I gather is quite popular. Surfing through the channels, I can't bear to watch more than about 5 seconds of ultimate fighting, partly because I suspect all the participants will suffer head-trauma and brain damage. It's just a matter of evolution; the head wasn't "designed" to get beaten on. It was "designed" to hold our organic version of the hard drive; it's a casing, among other things.

I think Penultimate Fighting would be more entertaining than Ultimate Fighting, certainly less degrading (to contestants and audience alike) and injurious. Contestants would move out into the ring or cage and demonstrate clearly that they were in a bad mood--miffed. They'd shove each other and trade insults, perhaps denigrate one another's fashion-choices or coiffures. If either tried to land a serious blow, he or she would be disqualified. After each round, the "corner men" would suggest additional insults or encourage their charge to go out and try to tie the other contestant's shoe-laces together. The crowd, reading paperback novels, would look up occasionally and cheer if one contestant made the "rabbit-ears" sign behind the other person's head. The "loser" would be the first one to get fed up and say, "I have better things to do than to tussle with you, you insufferable fool!" Penultimate Fighting: I think there are some real possibilities here.

Giving an Author Multiple Tries

Over the years, I've tried to read and like the mystery novels of Michael Innes, but I could never get past a chapter or so in any of them. The other day someone on LibraryThing recommended two books by him, Lament for a Maker and From London Far. I read the former and liked it all right, even though I tend to dislike mystery novels with multiple narrators. It's an extremely intricate and whimsical book, set in Scotland. Now I'm reading From London Far, and I love it. A scholar of 18th century British poetry gets pulled accidentally into intrigue. The book reminds me a bit of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, but it's not quite as manic and idiosyncratic. There's a bit of Edmund Crispin in Innes's books, too, but Innes exhibits more gravitas; the book lies more toward Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear on the spectrum.

Anyway, I am most pleased that--what? my fourth or fifth attempt to read Innes--resulted in a successful meeting of author's books and reader's mind. I had to be willing not to write off (or is it read off?) Innes forever. It was a matter of patience more than persistence, of flexibility more than patience, and probably of serendipity more than flexibility, for I probably wouldn't have tried again if it weren't for the recommendation on LT, where bibliophiles party down with their bad selves.

Generosity

I don't think "an economy of false scarcity" and "a zero-sum game" are the same concepts, but they seem to overlap. The former, I gather, is both an economic and an anthropological concept. The latter is a game-theory concept. As you've already gathered or know, the former means there's enough or more than enough but someone has a stake in pretending there's not--and in enforcing circumstances that make for scarcity. The latter means that in "the game," there must be a total winner and a total loser; a win/win situation isn't possible, nor is it possible for one of the "players" to become a spectator and enjoy the achievement of the other player.

I was thinking about this topic both in terms of academics and the world of poetry today, as well as life in general.

As you might imagine (if you're not an academic), academics can be at least as insecure as the next person. So sometimes if a fellow academic has some success, that's seen as taking something away from another academic; there's only so much success to go around (the insecure person fears). I think it's more than mere envy or insecurity. I think maybe they the person believes there's only so much to go around, when in fact there's so much work to do in academia, so many possibilities, that abundance reigns. After all, new literature gets published and republished every day, so in the field of English, there's no end of work to do in terms of interpretation, editing, theorizing, thinking about teaching X or Y, and so on. The reservoir is always full.

Generosity is rather toward the other end of a spectrum from zero-sum thinking, insecure thinking, time-wasting, fake-competition thinking. Sometimes generosity's driven by less than noble intentions, of course; it is faux generosity. It gives to get. But real generosity fuels itself. Since I'm older, I now, by definition, have younger colleagues. It's not so much that I get great satisfaction from providing some assistance or advice, or an avenue for publication, or whatever; it's that the generosity seems like part of a process that's working well. I feel as if I'm part of the rhythm of how things should work, partly because it's so simple to be of basic help. It takes a while to get to the point of expecting nothing in return--literally not even a "thank you." You just just sort of throw your wee grain of generosity into the mix of things and know it will at least do no harm and probably do some good. If nothing comes of it, what have you lost? If the person is "ungrateful," so what? Maybe they fear they're in a game in which they owe you something, and they don't like that game, so maybe their response is understandable.

In the world of poetry and art in general, whole systems are built upon an economy of false scarcity. There are just a few elite publishers of poetry, for example (Knopf being the prime example), a few elite writers' conferences (Bread Loaf, for example, and even at Bread Loaf, there's this hideous pecking-order, I've heard), a few big awards, an Academy of American Poets with a static number of slots, and so on. At the same time, there's always been a sense in which there are too many poets, too much poetry being produced. The systems that can admit only so many poets and poetry depend upon scarcity.

Unless you're compulsive and believe you have to read all the poetry, how can this scarcity really be so? What if everyone in the U.S. (for example) wrote a poem tomorrow? What would be the harm? There's a good chance some good might come of it and an excellent chance almost everything else the people would do would be more harmful. But if, somehow, a person gets invested in faux scarcity or zero-sum thinking, then productivity, abundance, generosity, exuberance, and diversity all become threats. Someone has to lose! The basic fear (besides thinking that someone else is going to take all the peanuts), I think, is of a loss of control.

Of course, like everyone else, I have my regrets about giving X to Y in life and remember that Y probably took advantage of me. But I have almost no regrets about being generous--providing assistance or advice if asked, providing a bit of an opportunity, an opening, an avenue. Answering a question; giving a tip; saving somebody from some unnecessary grief I had to go through when I was in the same spot. As I mentioned, it usually feels as if it's the way things should work. It feels deeply practical; forget altruism. Yes, it's a tough, competitive world out there, and no amount of generosity will likely change that soon, but by the same token, there's nothing really preventing a person from being generous within that person's powers (however meager they may be), genuine personal limits, and sphere. That is, there's only so much I can do, but at least I can do that, and withholding it doesn't mean I'll "have more" (as the zero-sum logic would dictate).

--Which is one of the reasons I enjoy teaching poetry-writing. The more poets, the better, as far as I'm concerned. The more readers of poetry, the better. No need to create false scarcity; it's not a zero-sum game. If some writer who took a class from me publishes a book (let's say), that simply does not take anything away from me or anyone else. I've neither won nor lost. I just get to be a spectator and enjoy the person's achievement. I "win" (falsely) only if I indulge myself by taking some credit for the publication. ("You know, that person took a class from me once.") I lose only if I imagine that the person's achievement somehow limits me, but it doesn't limit me, so there's no reason to "go there."

Marcus Aurelius: 7:73: "When you have done a good act and another has fared well by it, why seek a third reward besides these, as fools do, be it the reputation for having done a good act or getting something in return?" Translated by Jacob Needleman and John P. Piazza. Tarcher Cornerstone Editions/Penguin, 2008, p. 59.

I suspect generosity is a renewable source of energy.

Iron and Irony

Apparently the etymology of "iron" goes back through the Celtic language to an early time in what we now call England or Britain and is linked to the word iren, with an accent on the e. Irony, on the other hand, is of Greek origin: ‘.

On the surface, however, it does look as if iron is embedded in irony. Extrapolated from this etymologically ironic situation, one could, I suppose, manufacture other outcomes from other metals. That is, one kind of irony comes in the form of unintended consequences--a twist of fate.

A goldy, therefore, might be a surprisingly wonderful outcome, an unknotting of fate. A leady would be a disappointment--heavy, sure, but nothing like irony.

A silvery would be less then wonderful but still satisfactory. "You know, I have to say that the end result was at least silveric if not entirely goldic."

What would a steely be, as a noun? Would it be an extremely strong version of an irony? I think so. "Oh, how steelic that was," we'd say, "almost too ironic to bear."

A tinny would be a cheapened outcome or situation, I assume--as a sequel in Hollywood is almost always a cheapening of the original. "I found Big Explosion II to be a tinnic version of the original. Big Explosion I was explosive and big in such an original way."

A coppery, as a noun, would be a softening of a situation, an easing of tensions. "The diplomatic talks were regarded as copperic by all parties involved."

We run into some syllabic complexity with an aluminumy, which would be a lightening of a situation, perhaps almost a giddiness. "He won the lottery--how aluminic!" If the giddiness occurred in a play, it would be dramatic aluminy, which I don't think Aristotle covered in the Poetics, ironically enough.

Is Our President a War-Criminal? Sullivan Thinks So

Conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan now seems to think that the President of the United States is a war-criminal:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/03/the-war-crimina.html

Colleen McElroy

Thanks to a colleague of mine who invited her, poet Colleen McElroy read at my campus on Friday. What a wonderful 50 minutes. She's not just a fine poet but a real pro at reading, providing just enough background to each poem and, in cases where none is needed, none. She has a fabulous sense of humor and a warm sense of self-irony. She also loves movies from the 1940s, so I felt immediately that she and I shared at least one wave-length.

Chiefly she read poems from her new book, Sleeping with the Moon, published by the University of Illinois in 2007.

In addition to being a poet and having been a professor, she is also a trained linguist and a professional collector of stories and folklore--worldwide, from Madagascar to Tibet to Cuba. She reminded us that, sadly, languages are becoming extinct worldwide as quickly as species of animals and plants.

In addition to the systematic reading she has done as a professor, linguist, collector, and editor, McElroy clearly does the kind of indiscriminate, voracious, and impulsive reading that many poets do. There's a certain kind of poet who finds almost anything and anyone interesting and therefore almost any kind of reading interesting. Part of the impulse springs, I think, from finding even commonplace utterances or texts full of possibilities, and another part springs, perhaps, from a stubborn refusal to let go of that readiness one has in childhood to find the world fascinating. It's not so much that one remains childish or naive; in fact, McElroy is, I assure you, quite the opposite of that. She has lived and learned. It's really more of a tenaciousness, a refusal to agree to be bored by what other people find boring or to agree to ignore what other people ignore. In some ways, poets like McElroy use reading to forage, scavenge, rummage, and detect.

Not surprisingly, then, when a student asked for advice for young writers, McElroy's first word was "Read." But she didn't follow that up with "read poetry" or "read the classics." She said something like "read anything and everything, and read all the time [when you're not writing]." She also advised keeping a journal at the ready, and she advised a colleague of mine to keep a journal in almost every part of the house--what a great idea. A kitchen journal, a bedroom journal, a living-room journal, etc.

McElroy writes and reads poetry with great care; the poems are filled with precise, evocative imagery, and there is an easy but by no means careless voice in them all.

A poetry reading on a Friday afternoon: what a fine way to end a work-week.

Two, Four, Six, Eight . . .

Vaguely, I remember our high-school's cheerleaders leading a cheer that began as follows:

Two, four, six, eight.
Who do we appreciate?

Somehow, it made sense back then, partly, I suspect, because I was on the football field (or the sidelines thereof) or the basketball court (or the bench next to it), and I regarded all cheers as background noise, which makes "sense" because it just has to be noise.

Now, of course, I realize that the first line has nothing to do with the second line, that we're dealing with some inexpensive word-play, and that, because I'm an accursed lifelong student of English, I think the second line should be "Whom do we appreciate?" Accursed is just the term for this condition. Those former cheerleaders probably have their feet up and are appreciating a glass of wine, watching a movie, and not thinking or blogging about subjective v. objective forms of a word.

Nor can I remember whom, exactly, our cheerleaders did appreciate, although I certainly still appreciate the energy they threw into their organized optimism. (When I was a sophomore, I ended up one night, after an athletic contest, in a car full of senior [wow!] cheerleaders--a Ford Mustang, no less--and the young women had a bottle of blackberry wine with them. I appreciate my dim memories of that evening as well.)

In any event, I thought of the cheer when I thought of Adelaide Crapsey [no jokes, please] (1878-1914), inventor of America's very rough counterpart to the haiku, the cinquain, which is a five-line poem in which line one has two syllables, line two has four, line three has six, line four has eight, and line five has two. So the form is both incremental and circular, in my assessment. Subsequently, those attempting, unwisely (in my opinion), to improve upon Ms. Crapsey's invented form, have tried to dictate not just syllables but parts of speech, so that a noun should go here and a verb there, or whatever. Nonsense. The simple elegance of 2-4-6-8-2 endures.

My cinquain this evening concerns cities, which depend for their existence upon convincing large numbers of people that they should live in cities. If people who live in cities (large or small) woke up one day and truly realized that they live in a crowded, dirty, noisy, over-priced place, and if they decided t do something about it, they'd leave, go to the dwindling countryside, and--start another city. Oh, well.

I do find it amusing when people positively swoon at the mention of this or that city--NYC, London, Paris, Rio, L.A. An individual's sense of identity and importance gets entangled with the mythologizing of urbanity, of the central market-place, of the alleged hub of civilization. (If we ponder that metaphor just a bit, we might speculate that the more interesting part of the wheel--the outside, where the rubber meets the road--is analogous to villages and small towns, far from the hub.)

I am as guilty as the next person, whoever he or she is, of a robotic acceptance of the notion that city = good. I've convinced myself I'm fond of San Francisco and Stockholm, for example. I also find it amusing when one city's residents pretend to be better than another city's residents. Seattle v. Tacoma. S.F. v. Oakland. Philly v. Pittsburgh. Rome v. Naples. Whatever! It's all just streets and sidewalks, sewers and towers, cars and dog shit, "bistros" and homeless shelters, retail and wholesale, smog and bad water. The bigger the city, the smaller the living-space for twice (at minimum) the rent/lease/mortgage. ("But the restaurants! The nightlife! The museums!" Uh-huh.)

Cinquain: Urbanity

City
will always tell
you that it’s grand, sophis-
ticated, as you stand over
sewers.

Two, four, six, eight. Whom do we appreciate? Adelaide Crapsey.

In Praise of Agatha and LT

In addition to reading some poetry while we were at the (Washington) coast, I read an Agatha Christie novel, There Is a Tide, more recently known as Taken at the Flood. It's taken (so to speak) me decades to warm up to her books, and I still don't like them all, but I'm now very fond of the Poirot books. The Clocks is my favorite. There Is a Tide is a terrific Poirot book, too--and it's also a very good novel of manners--the crime and detection aside.

It includes some extremely astute observations about post-WW II England, its economy, the status and self-doubt of men who did not go to war (some farmers were exempt, for instance), and the views of women who did serve (as nurses, for example), who had "seen the world," and who returned with ambitions to be more than housewives and to live somewhere besides a cozy village. In the book, there's also a sense in which England no longer knows who or what it is when it isn't fighting the Germans anymore.

Christie's novels tend to develop a bit slowly during the first 30-40 pages, but one's patience is usually rewarded because her plotting is superb, deceptively tight, and she works well with an ensemble cast. There Is a Tide turns out to be a gem, and the bonus is that I secured an older, very pulpy paperback with a lurid cover--my favorite. Hats off to Agatha and Hercules.

As if reading Agatha Christie novels weren't sufficiently nerdy, I now rush to heap praise on LibraryThing, a site on which one catalogues all one's books, "tags" them, ranks them, reviews them, and on which one may join groups based on authors, genres, topics, periods and eras of literature, and so on. It's just too much fun. One may instantly generate "author clouds"--the more books you have by an author, the large the font is for that author's name in the cloud. One may also generate a photo-collage of one's authors. I was explaining all this to some people at a restaurant, for some inexplicable reason, their eyes got glassy. ("Check, please!") Gee, I wonder why.

There's a group on LT called The Black Orchid: A Nero Wolfe Group, dedicated (obviously) to Rex Stout's famous detective, and the conversational threads on there are hilarious--for their minutiae, their passion for Wolfe and Archie, their discussions of food, orchids, and NYC, and all manner of things, with wildly circuitous detours. I also started several groups--one called Working Class, one called The Harlem Renaissance, and one called Karl Shapiro and Company--all about mid-20th century poetry. --Also one on Robinson Jeffers and one on Langston Hughes. The latter two have yet to "take off," as it were.

It's astonishing (perhaps it shouldn't be) how much bibliophiles from every culture on the planet have in common. There are versions of LT in numerous nations and languages, but they are also linked to the main (U.S.) LT site, so I can (for example) get to the Swedish site via a group called (with typical Swedish obviousness) Swedish Thing. The conversational threads on that group-site are few, measured, deliberate, serious--and of few words, whereas Americans and Brits do tend to go on a bit (like some bloggers).

It's too bad (or maybe not) that bibliophiles don't have more political clout. --Which makes me think of one of my very favorite droll bumper-stickers: I PLAY THE BAGPIPES, AND I VOTE. Bag-pipe players and bibliophiles--political forces with which to be reckoned. Something arcane this way comes. Mere eccentricity is loosed upon the world, the ink-dimmed tide is loosed, and what rough first edition, its hour come round at last, falls off the shelf in Toledo to be read?

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

Today is an anniversary of the Traingle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a tragedy in general and, more particularly, a tragedy in the history of labor and of women's labor. Another blogger alerted her readers to the annivrsary, and she included a fine poem she wrote that evokes the infamous fire. Here's the link to poet Karen J. Weyant's site:



http://thescrapperpoet.blogspot.com/

I think you'll really enjoy the poem.

More Poet's Political Questions

Some more political questions from a poet's point of view:

1. Because reporters don't seem to ask good questions anymore, why don't they ask candidates who their favorite poets are? Sure, it's irrelevant to the election, but so are most of the other questions. I figure Obama would answer straight-up. I think there's a 35% chance he'd say Langston Hughes, chiefyy for the sense of humor, not necessarily for the ethnicity. I figure the Clintons (plural) would stall, consult their team, do some polling, and then (if it were today) name a poet from Pennsylvania. I figure John McCain would get angry and hell at the reporter, "What kind of question is that?! Shut up!"

2. Why doesn't Ralph Nader run for mayor of a city first? Why does he always have to start at the top? How about mayor of Toledo? What if we made Ralph activist-poet-laureate?

3. Will the Dems manage to lose what most political scientists view as the easiest election to win in decades? Or should I ask, How will the Dems lose . . . .?

4. If "gay marriage" is, as some allege, a "threat" to heterosexual marriages [I still don't get how it could be a threat, and I'm still in search of one good example of such a threat], does it then follow, logically, that gay divorce would be a threat to traditional divorce and therefore an aid to traditional marriage, meaning we should make gay marriage legal so that gay divorce would be legal?

5. In the 2004 election, the GOPers allegedly used ballot initiatives on gay marriage to get out (so to speak) the vote on their behalf, in Ohio, for example. What ballot initiatives are they planning this Fall?

6. Instead of sending all taxpayers (in certain brackets) a $600 refund, why doesn't the government "bundle" that money and give it to the people who can't make their house payments?

7. What is one success Bush has had? I thought about this question hard, and I came up with the following: he has given a lot of money for AIDS relief in Africa (even though he insists on so-called abstinence programs). That's a good thing. I'm even willing to take the Iraq war off the table and say that people can agree to disagree about that. But leaving that off the table, what remains? Economy = bad. Environment = bad. Eroded civil liberties = bad (in my opinion). Foreign policy [even excepting Iraq] = bad. Support for veterans = bad. Energy = bad. Response to disasters [Katrina] = bad. Speeches = bad. Appointments = bad (strictly from a competence-angle). Polar bears = bad. Immigration = no policy one way or the other; a zero. Closing gap between rich and poor = bad. But I suppose some people want that gap to widen--I mean, seriously, from some kind of effed up philosophical point of view.

8. Would anyone be in favor of electing Obama, Clinton, and McCain and giving them each roughly 16 months in office? I guess we'd simply draw straws to see who started first. Or we could give each one 8 months and then hold a referendum to see if we wanted that person to continue. Why wait four years to see how bad things can get? Society moves at a much faster pace than it did in, say, 1808, so should we speed up the presidential cycle?

9. Did you get the sense, as I did when I watched Obama giving his speech on race, that he was thinking, "I can't believe I have to explain such simple things to [white] people"? I thought it was a great speech, but I did sense an understandable weariness on his part. A kind of "I thought we covered this already in high school history" feeling.

10. Is Obama essentially doing to the Clintons what Bill Clinton did to Bush I and Bob Dole? Hoisted on his [Bill's] own . . . ?

11. Who would be in favor of a heavy tax on presidential campaigns? Not on the people who give money, mind you, but on the candidates' campaign-machines. I'd put the money directly into Medicare, Social Security, and/or homeless programs. That way, society would benefit from each campaign, no matter what. And we'd take the money from them right away, before they spent it on attack-ads or whatever. Right off the top.

12. Does Congress matter anymore? Is it even logistically possible for any Congress to say No to any president at this point? Are we pretty much working with elected dictators at this point?

Ashbery, Dunn, and Kunitz

At the beach on the Washington coast, I read three books of poetry by three venerable poets: Where Shall I Wander [no question mark] by John Ashbery; The Insistence of Beauty, by Stephen Dunn; and a later Selected Poems (circa 1995) by Stanley Kunitz.

Although Ashbery is of the New York School and bears some relation to L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E* poets, he's pretty much a school unto himself, drawing on a vast range of diction, creating expressionistic collages of language, infusing his poems with allusions and droll linguistic wit, and almost never, it seems, being interested in straightforward rhetoric, accessible narrative, or otherwise conventionally representational poetry. I've always found his poems to be amusing and extremely clever, but I don't like them as much as many of my cohorts do. I tire of them quickly, and I do get the sense that sometimes he's just effing around--that one could take out a couple lines and replace them with other lines, give the poem to someone, and not have that person catch the switch. (I can't imagine doing that [and getting away with it] to poems by Housman, Hopkins, Dickinson, or Auden, for instance, but I think it would work with some of Ashbery's poems.) As linguistically rich and surprising as his poems are, there is nonetheless something insular or insulated about the work. I start to yearn for poetry that's more sanguine, robust, and grounded, less academic, upper-middle-class, and enervated. Ennui abounds. A lot of his poems sound like J. Alfred Prufrock on roids or Franz Kafka on laughing gas. But Ashbery's an extremely famous, celebrated poet, so I think I'm in the minority in my view; also, Ashbery's ear for all the odd phrases we're flooded with each day is extraordinary; out of nowhere will come a line like, "Attention shoppers."

Dunn's poetry is quite clear and grounded, and his voice is interesting. This particular book is a bit too insular for me--not in the way Ashbery's is, however. The book seems centered on Dunn's own immediate experience, including such things as romantic break-ups. I found myself wanting a broader range of experience represented, and sometimes things got predictable. In a poem apparently about a new lover, he speaks of the woman's former lover and brings in the old reference to three people (figuratively) being in the bed. That idea seems worn out. "Grudges" is an intriguing, well crafted villanelle, modified, about 9/11. It doesn't quite capture the global nature of the mess we're in, however. For me, it personalized 9/11 a bit too much--shrank the event. There's more than a grudge involved when planes get flown into towers and the U.S. invades a country for trumped up reasons--at a cost of a trillion dollars. Like Ashbery, however, Dunn is a venerable, much celebrated poet--of the plainer style.

I read Kunitz's book third and was glad to do so, for I felt as if earth, sky, water, air, fish, ordinary folk, fire, wood, recognizable landscapes, and less preciously rendered experiences were suddenly let back into the room. Things had gotten a bit stuffy with Ashbery and Dunn. As much as I enjoyed Ashbery's rare, relentless cleverness and Dunn's spare, self-grounded work, I was really hungry and thirsty for the kind of poetry Kunitz writes, so the order of the reading worked out beautifully.

Anyway, props to these three veterans of American poetry. Solid books, established reputations.

Dig It

One doesn't hear the term "dig it" much any longer, in the colloquial sense of "enjoy it." I have not pursued any research on the etymology of this connotation, but I suspect that it may have originated in African American vernacular expression, gotten absorbed into the broader popular culture (including the "Beat Generation"), and then lasted a while--into the 1970s, perhaps even the 1980s? When people use the term now, they tend to use it derisively, gently mocking how out of date it is. In the 1990s, there was a quasi-Hip-Hop group called Diggable Planets, which produced some very intriguing music and lyrics. But that group, too, was deploying the term wryly.

I have a good friend, a longtime friend, who works at Microsoft now. He's one of the funniest people I've ever met, and among his schticks is a faux-hip one, in which the persona goes around saying, "Hey, I can dig that!" He happens to be a fabulous musician, so ironically, when it comes to music, he can play things that are genuinely diggable, even as, in one of his comic personae, he mocks the "cool" white bourgeois dude who's tragi-comically "hip."

I do wonder the extent to which "dig" is filially linked to the term "groove." One gets in the groove or finds something groovy, just as one digs or digs into an experience, but can one dig a groove? Hmmm. Perhaps one shouldn't use "one" when writing about "dig"--speaking of tragi-comically [un]-hip.

"Can you dig it?" is a rhetorical expression, although I believe in a tune by the group Chicago ("Saturday in the Park," if memory serves), the question is not treated thusly. "Can you dig it?" is followed by "Yes, I can." Chicago produced a great sound there for a while, but even from the beginning, the group was a bit nerdy. Nerd rock.

Anyway, here is a wee riff on the term "dig it":


Imperative Mood

When he said, “Dig the well,”
He wasn’t speaking Jazz or Beat
Or asking you to move your feet.
He meant shovel, and he meant hole.

The water-witching’s done, son.
Find that water-table,
If you’re able.
Dig the well good. Get it done.

It is not to my credit that I couldn't resist writing "Dig the well good." It amuses me, but I do apologize. Can you dig it? Don't answer that.

Obama's Speech

Luckily, I had the time to watch all of Barack Obama's speech about his pastor in particular and "race" in general today. Especially for a politician, Obama came perilously close not just to telling the truth but to indulging in complexity--two things we've come not to expect or accept from our political speakers.

Although the facts show I'm a privileged white male, I'm in the "minority" on a couple of issues. First, I didn't find the Reverend Wright's excerpted comments offensive or even incorrect. "G.D. America" was a bit over the top, theologically, only because I reckon it's G.'s decision whether to D. anyone or anything. But even that phrase wasn't over the top if you place it in the context of prophetic preaching. Look at the Books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, for example: preaching that calls down the thunder and makes the Reverend Wright seem mild, no offense to him intended.

Second, I'd prefer to retire the word "race" as it applies to categories of people, simply because there is no basis for this categorization in science. However, I understand the argument that because racism is alive and well, we might as well keep "race" in play. It's just that I'm persuaded by the human-genome project and its apparent discovery that our entire gene-pool may be traced back to what we might call Eastern Africa. That's where the "race" began. The stuff about Caucasians, "Orientals," Anglo-Saxons, "whites," "blacks," and "Negroes" is just invented nonsense. But I'm willing to defer to those who want to keep "race" in the lexicon for strategic and tactical purposes. Recently, scientists have found three or four genes that control skin-color--but they control skin-color, not "race."

Because I teach African American literature, I talk every day--or every M-W-F--about what Obama talked about--just not as eloquently. Or more accurately, my students and I talk about such topics--the complexities of spirituality and race, class and race, how a sense of "whiteness" depends on a complicated view of "blackness," how white folks are privileged to be "tired of talking about race," whereas black folks have to think about the topic all the time, and so on.

Of course, the mainstream commercial media and right-wing hucksters smell blood, ratings, and money in the water, so they'll continue to "harpoon" Obama--David Gergen's phrase. A moderate Republican, Gergen liked Obama's speech but allowed as how, in his opinion, the right would relentlessly attack now, no matter what Obama said. To his credit, Gergen seemed disgusted by the predictable harpooning.

Having read the works of Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, George Schuyler, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Iceberg Slim, Chester Himes, Rudolph Fisher, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and W.E.B. DuBois, among others, I would have regarded the Reverend Wright's comments as unremarkable. The media ginned up the controversy, as far as I'm concerned, and as far as I'm concerned, I'm constantly amazed that African Americans aren't more angry, dispirited, and incensed. I can't think of another ethnic group from which fate and history have exacted more suffering and asked more resilience and patience. That Obama was so resilient, patient, articulate, and nuanced today impressed me, even if, in my opinion, there was no controversy to begin with. No offense to the Reverend Wright, but his righteous indignation and its targets are not news, nor should they be. That they are news may mean that the U.S. is a bit more "static" than Obama's speech allowed. To me, white privilege looks as implacable and immovable as ever, but I'm willing to follow the lead of Obama's speech and think the best I can of this society. And Obama, in the words of Langston Hughes, let everyone know that he is "still here." (Hughes's "Still Here" is one of my favorite poems, incidentally.) To his credit, Obama expects more from his nation than I do; he is more optimistic than I. Good for him. Good, I hope, for us, too.

Fiction v. Poetry

I sent off sample chapters of not one but two novels I've finally completed. I'd sent a rare double-query to an agent, and the agency wants to have a look at both books, which are quite different from each other. All prayers, good thoughts, and karmic vibrations are welcome, of course.

For me, fiction is hard labor. There's just no two ways around it, as my mother used to say. Poetry is work, certainly, but I feel as if I have some control; even if a poem is turning out badly, I can recognize as much and quickly start again or revise or put the poem on hiatus. With fiction, I can write chapters and chapters, drafts and drafts, and still not know quite what I have. I'm much more comfortable with nonfiction prose--reviews, essays, textbooks, journalism, scholarship.

I've met quite a few writers whom I regard as "pure" fiction-writers; they really seem to know their way around fictional narrative writing. Many of them look at poetry and shake their heads; they don't even attempt it. One fiction-writer I know flatly says, "I don't know anything about poetry."

Quite a few poets are once-only novelists: Karl Shapiro published one novel, Edsel (great title); James Dickey published one (yes, that famous one on which they based a Burt Reynolds movie: "Aintree?! You can't get there from here, boy!"); and Richard Hugo published one--a mystery novel called Death and the Good Life (great title). I think Rita Dove has published only one novel.

At the moment, the most prolific double-genre writer that comes to mind is Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men, World Enough and Time, much poetry). I think Stephen Dobyns started as a poet and became a rather prolific mystery-writer. The fiction-machine, Joyce Carol Oates, writes plays, but I don't think she writes poetry. John Updike writes relatively light poetry. I remember reading his volume, Midpoint, about 30 years ago--or more.

I've published just one novel so far--a mystery novel that was, I found out later, a "police procedural"--because its detective is a sheriff. These other two novels have taken forever and a day to finish. Two long, strange writing-and-revision roads. Maybe they'll get published; maybe not. But it was good to get a yes to a query and fun to send them off--with the SASE, in which I expect to see them again, rejected but still my pals.

Greed Gone Wild, Lobbying Gone Looney

Maybe this is what the late 1920s felt like, financial "systems" (ha!) out of control, waves of foreclosures, no sensible planning on the part of private or governmental institutions, the never-free, loaded-dice "free market" cannibalizing itself.

What rational nation cuts taxes after hurling itself into an unnecessary five-year-plus war? Only George Herbert Hoover Bush would pull such a stunt, which enables the very rich to suck up loose cash but ruins the economy as a whole and devastates working people.

I was talking with a realtor today, who explained that after "the Fed" pumped a bunch of money into the banking system, with the idea of lowering interest-rates and getting the economy going, many makes raised interest-rates so that they would make money at both ends--from the Fed handout and from small investors (like home-buyers). Thus they stash a lot of cash, make the quarterly books look good, and raise the price of their stock. Meanwhile, the economy continues to slump, and the gap between rich and poor widens. Why wouldn't Congress (for example) regulate such behavior and instruct the banks that if they get an influx of cash for the government, the mustn't raise interest-rates? Congress/the Fed did step in to save Bear/Stearns--because they were afraid of a stock-crash. Save Bear/Stearns, but to hell with the working-class family in foreclosure. The realtor told me he has a client who can barely make house payments. He wants to negotiate a deal with the bank, but the bank won't negotiate with him unless he goes into foreclosure. It's in the bank's interest to see him fail, I guess. And the banks don't have to pay attention to Congress because banking-lobbyists own Congress.

Don't you just love the argument that lobbying, a synonym for bribery, is protected free speech? Checks, currency, and wire-transfers of money--from banking lobbyists to a congress-person's campaign, e.g.--do involve numbers and letters: texts, if you will. I will grant that technical point. But only amounts of symbolic stored energy are being expressed. No one is speaking, writing, performing, or peacefully protesting. They're just bribing.

I'm tempted to argue against lobbying and even to argue for outlawing it. I'd allow anybody to give any information they wanted to legislators. I just wouldn't allow any money to go from lobbyists and their employers to legislators. In fact, I'd require lobbyists to take a vow of poverty. Non-profit organizations would take care of their basic needs. Ideas, jokes, poems, riddles, statistics, reports, theories, draft-bills--yes to all of these. Money--no. It's not speech. It's money. Gifts--no. Favors--no. Maybe one batch of home-made cookies per year, that's it.

On second thought, however, I think I'd prefer to make lobbying not illegal but even more obviously crass and vividly bad for the common good. Like automobiles in NASCAR, legislators should have to wear patches and decals on their clothes representing every entity that's given them money. Failure to represent a lobbyist with a patch or decal would mean the legislator would have to give the money back--in a public ceremony.

And while I'm at it, let me say how disappointed I am in the Poetry Lobby. What are they doing? Why aren't they pushing the poetry-agenda more fiercely? Where are their offices, their newsletters, their think-tanks, their phony corporations, their email-alerts? I want Emily Dickinson's image to replace Jefferson's on the nickel, for instance. The Poetry Lobby could push for that. E.D. never owned slaves, and she wrote over a thousand great poems. TJ helped draft a few "founding" documents, but he's gotten enough press. He can give up the nickel.

I'd like a National Poet's Reserve. If you joined, you'd have to go to a workshop once a month and agree to be ready to be called up to active duty--for example, if the governor needed some sonnets written, or if an ailing poet needed some help with meals or errands. I'd like to see the U.S. step up poetry-exports, and I want NASA to send some poetry-satellites in orbit, so the spoken word could be broadcast around the globe more vigorously. I'd like to see the villanelle put on the Endangered Form-Poem list, and I want us to drill for poetry in Alaska. Poetry Lobby, where are you?

Deep

In a class today we talked about imagery, symbol, metaphor, and so on--the stuff of literature, but also the stuff of what we say and write, read and hear, every day. For instance, I heard someone speculate today that the Democrats will go into the November election "deeply divided." Why "deeply"? How deeply? What is the unit of measurement?

I do agree, of course, that the Democrats have an uncanny ability to find ways to lose presidential elections. This time, the Clintons seem to be in denial about the math and simply won't give up until a) many voters are embittered and unmotivated b) the current Demo money-advantage has dried up and c) the Republicans are once again positioned, essentially, to sweep the South, steal another state or two, and win. In my disinterested moments, I'm fascinated by this negative talent. The Democrats are so reliably inept. They lost to George W. Bush--twice! Yes, I know about the cheating in Florida and Ohio and the Supreme Court decision (Bush v. Gore) at which people will howl with laughter years from now. But why was the absurdist performance-artist, Bush, even close enough to win by cheating? He is a chronically failed businessman who went AWOL in military service and was addicted to cocaine. His own family, if accounts are to be believed, think he's the family loser. And the Democrats couldn't beat him! They can't even conduct basic primary elections in two of the most important states. This is disorganization that verges on the self-destructive. Maybe they were permanently infiltrated by Republicans back in the Nixon days. But "deeply" divided? I don't know.

We do seem to like these "depth" references. "Deeply" in love. "From the bottom of my heart." "He is deeply disturbed." "The depths of the soul." "Deep resentment." "Deeply wounded." Then you think, well, even full-figured people aren't really that deep. I mean the distance from any exterior point on the skin's surface to the innermost point--between spine and stomach?--isn't that far. "Depth psychology." Huh? Just drill down a few inches, and you're at the core of the brain.

Deeply convinced that the Democrats will lose deeply in the depths of Autumn, I dredged up an old "depth" poem in their honor.

In and Out of My Depths

My innermost being is a point located
somewhere between my spine and navel.
The very core of my being is a vertical line
intersecting with that point and situated
close to the bottom of my heart.

I plan to use a global-positioning satellite
to find my subconscious mind one day.
If I find it, it will become my conscious
mind, and I won’t have found it. Oh, well.

When I nap, my psyche naps with me.
In fact my psyche’s like a cat,
following me around the house. My dreams
happen inside my head—I’d say about
three inches deep, maybe less.

I can’t ask my brain why it dreams any more
than it can ask me why I sleep. The depth
of my soul—I wouldn’t know about that.
That is God’s business. I’m way
out of my depth on that one.

The rib-cage, friends, is a shallow basket,
and the skull, after all, is a shallow bowl.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

How to Read Dickinson's Poetry

I'm guest-teaching for a colleague tomorrow, discussing imagery and symbolism (in literature) with the class and analyzing, with them, Dickinson's poem 591 (which used to be 465), "I heard a fly buzz [...]. " Whenever I have doubts about my chosen main way of earning money (teaching literature and writing), I think of being able to analyze a Dickinson poem, and suddenly it all makes sense again. I have a friend who teaches Constitutional law, and he probably has at least one topic that similarly reaffirms his choice of professions.

--Not that Dickinson is easy to teach. In fact, she's unnecessarily hard to teach, chiefly because of the baggage the culture, the critics, the anthologies, and some other teachers have heaped on her poetry and our image of her. To use an old-fashioned phrase, people get "hung up" on all sorts of nonsense that simply isn't there, in the poetry. Often, when I go into a classroom, I'm facing all the things Dickinson isn't, the preconceived notions, so I try to get around those.

So my "rules" for reading Dickinson's work are as follows:

1. Her poems are to some degree like crossword puzzles or soduku. There is always a solution to the confusion. There is, in fact, never any (lasting) confusion.

2. To the extent her poetry is mystical, philosophical, or spiritual, it is so grudgingly; that is, her work is always firmly attached to the earth, sometimes directly to earthy imagery. One key, then, is to find what that more concrete thing is to which the spirituality (assuming the spirituality really is there) is tethered. Or: Always prefer the simpler explanation to the "confusion." And: Never leap to the spirituality or "mysticism." Because she's never in a hurry to get there, and she never stays there long.

3. Take out the dashes. Put in your own punctuation. Get comfortable with the poem. Take out your punctuation. Put the dashes back in. Or: don't make a big deal of the dashes. She didn't punctuate because she didn't publish. All the pauses, etc., were in her head. The dashes are a combination of universal place-holders and a writing-quirk. She wasn't trying to be difficult. She just didn't imagine the poems would go to print. Same thing goes for the capitalization. Just a quirky habit. Ignore it.

4. She never makes mistakes. She just makes quick moves. (See #1--there is no confusion.)

5. If she hadn't been a poet, she would have been a scientist. She observes everything very carefully. She's an empiricist. (See # 2.) (Just look at her descriptions of bees, snakes, and birds.)

When, for example, in 591, she writes, "And then the Windows failed," she means the windows of the house failed to work because she (the speaker of the poem) died. Or: dead people don't see through windows, even if, in literature, they're still allowed to speak poems. Emily will go only so far with poetic license. She won't go so far as to suggest dead people can see through windows. She's practical. When, at the end of the poem, she writes, "I could not see to see," she means that, owing to death, her brain has ceased to function, she is no longer processing sensory data, and therefore does not have the capacity ("could not see") to see.

Dickinson remains the smartest, drollest, most original, and yet still most earthy poet I know. It's hard to think of one important thing the Modernists did, for example, that she didn't anticipate. Things you find in Pound, Williams, Auden, Yeats, Lawrence, Cullen, Moore, cummings, Eliot, Woolf--they're there in her work. The outlook is Modern. It is feminist. It is anti-establishment. It is anxious (in the sense Auden meant the term). It is imagistic (Williams, Pound). It is new. "No ideas but in things" (Williams). The phrasing and especially the rhyming and improvisation with meter are Modern. She's still hip. Known as a recluse, she lived in the world--the tactile, stinky, pungent, messy world of the house, the garden, and the woods. When the "I" dies in 591, "the King" is witnessed (no confusion there--but plenty of room for debate), but note that he is preceded and followed by this: a common housefly, which is blue--meaning a "blue-bottle fly," meaning a fly the color of glass left in the sun for a long time (see number 2 above).

I like Housman almost as much as Dickinson, but his range is much more limited. There's more true joy in her work than his. I like her rich simplicity as much as I like that of Langston Hughes's, but she is even quicker, less predictable, and a little more tricky. L. and E. share a great sense of whimsy--but usually with an edge; they're not just playful. Williams's imagery is often as vivid, but her point of view is more original. You never know what Yeats or Pound might drag in (like a cat) to a poem, but she can be just as surprising. Eliot has gravitas, gotta give him that, but pound for pound (ezra for ezra), her poems can go 15 rounds with his. In her own way, she's as sexy and exuberant as Neruda (with adjustments made for lingering Puritanism), as defiant as Jeffers.

Eliot and Pound threw more allusions by volume into their poems, but she is as allusive--just more efficient, and less insecure. They seem to need to show off. She doesn't.

She's not "the Belle of Amherst." She was just one hell of a hardworking, focused, precise poet. --With the gift of, not so much talent (though she sure had that), but of believing, unwaveringly, in her talent. She justs didn't know (cf. "see to see"); she knew she knew--how to write.

Sonnet With A Low Battery

Having written a sonnet that rhymes on its left, as opposed to its right, side, and an extremely narrow sonnet, I will now continue my assault on the form by writing a diminishing sonnet, a fading lyric that starts out robustly in the usual iambic pentameter but withers to monosyllabic lines. At the same time, I attempt to adhere to the 14-line limit and to follow the Shakespearian or English rhyme-scheme, based on quatrains and a couplet.

Diminishing Sonnet

I have this sonnet, and its battery
Is running down. The sonnet's theme,
I think, is flattery.
--Not, it would seem,
The best
Thing.
Psst:
Sing!
Of
What?
Love,
nut.
Oh,
no.

There we have it, an entropic sonnet that goes from iambic pentameter to mono-meter in 14 lines, includes an internal dialogue, and rhymes best with Psst. I think of it as an old wind-up sonnet that came along before sonnets could run on long-lived batteries.

I'm considering the possibilities of a square sonnet, not "square" as in the way the Beatniks used the term (although maybe that, too), but geometrically square. This could be achieved simply by playing with spacing, of course, but maybe I'll go for a more figuratively square sonnet and write 14 lines with 14 words in each line. I could also throw in an acrostic or two--top to bottom and/or diagonal. This is starting to sound not simply like lyric madness but Shakespearian soduku. Somehow, I think John Donne would have approved.