In the Meantime

...eschewing the blog. This is part of the profession: those moments where one says, "I'm tired of examining my own experience." That's what writers do, in one way or another: one must be open, curious, willing to look at what's there, committed to the impulse to observe and reflect -- with the additional commitment to do so with style on the page, trusting that others might find it interesting. How that works out doesn't always butter other people's turnips, as Philip Larkin liked to say. At the moment I'm weary of the vulnerability and turning to private life. For now.

Alternative Activities for Non-Mothers

A good thing to do on Mother's Day, if you don't have any kids, is go
grocery shopping when everybody else is waiting in line for the
buffets. That's what I did. The aisles at VG's around noon were
almost empty except for the abashed few running in and out furtively
to get that last minute cake and fistful of flowers. By the time I
swung past on my way to the checkout lane, the flower case was
stripped to the last petal. Ha ha, I said to myself, I'm glad I'm
free of this day's guilt and ambivalence, as I said in my latest East
Village Magazine column.

And then while you're shopping (preferably in the sweat pants and
"Minot Beavers" sweatshirt and no makeup that would make any
teenager connected to you grimace and run for her life), get all the
foods you like that children can't stand. Like organic carrot juice,
asparagus, brussels sprouts and maybe a hunk of smelly bleu cheese.
How about a big carton of plain yogurt -- really, PLAIN -- but the
kind with the cream on the top. Oh, lordy, I'm glad I'm an
unemcumbered grownup and can eat that stuff with a spoon out of the
carton if I want to.

And when nobody's looking, light up one of those sweet brown cigarettes from Paul's Pipe Shop on the back porch and blow the smoke over toward the house with all the little kids who're usually on the jungle gym but today are inside giving their mom painted macaroni and glitter-glue cards. Then pour yourself a generous jigger of Black Bush and make noises when you drink it like Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider. What the hell. Cut a fart or two if you want to, and let go with an f-bomb when you're talking on the phone. Say it loud.

I also recommend listening to Sam Cooke. May I say that "Little Red
Rooster" is one of the best songs ever recorded? Cooke laid down this
Willie Dixon classic in 1963, and in addition to the song's delicious
blues riffin' and salacious implications, Billy Preston's organ work
is rich and audacious, adding to the naughty tones of the whole thing.
What a great song to revel in on the day when non-mothers can rejoice
in this simple fact: we don't have to clean anything up for anybody.

Also, of course, that same collection includes a wonderful "A Change is Gonna come," which American Idol finalist Sayesha Mercado mauled last week. What a travesty -- I'm with Randy Jackson.

So that's my deeply sober offering for the moment. I hope every
mother out there got the love and thanks she deserved.

Linda Gregerson in Flint: Taking the Human Spectacle Seriously

What a pleasure today in the quaintly named "Happenings Room" at UM-Flint to hear poet and Spenser scholar Linda Gregerson's keynote address to the Third Annual "Critical and Creative Conference" sponsored by the English Honors Society Sigma Tau Delta. She is a tiny, tidy woman with an immense and immensely warm intelligence. She weaves a Mozartian vocabulary with complexity and precision, reminding me of how remarkable it is that we're in this language business to begin with. See, I want to say to my students, see what can be done with it?

Emphasizing that arbitrarily cordoning off creative and literature-based endeavors is "a silly impoverishment," Gregerson, a longtime UM -- Ann Arbor professor and author of the award winning poetry collection "Waterborne" and the new "Magnetic North," said critics in the academy can benefit from the "textures and specificities" of the creative mind, just as creative writers flourish under the influence of scholarly curiosities.

Both disciplines, she asserted, are shaped by habits of reading -- reading books, of course, but also reading other cultural artifacts as if they are texts -- devoutly reading the world, as she put it, "taking the human spectacle seriously." Out of that practice, for writers at least, comes the act of creating in the reader a moment of "recognition" -- when the reader sees something she has known before but never could capture.

She also explored the limits of language and how those limits create schisms, distances in the academy itself. It was particularly sweet that she chose as one of her keystones the Robert Hass poem "Meditation at Lagunitas," since a group of the UMF students in the room had met Hass in his Fall '06 UMF visit and heard him read that poem. She lingered over his breathtaking opening lines "All the new thinking is about loss./ In this it resembles all the old thinking." I made rapid connections to a poem of his in the new collection, Time and Materials, "The Problem of Describing Trees," in which he writes of his glittering aspen, "...There are limits to saying,/In language, what the tree did./It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us."

Not all of us can be so sanguine as the robustly humble Hass. I was relieved, freshly contemplating my own fumbles to set the stage in the first two class meetings of a graduate class on "green writing," when she added, "who is not afraid that language will be insufficient?"

One response is to turn to old stories. This week I offered my students an essay by Barry Lopez, "Language and Narrative," in which he argues that myth is as authentic to human experience as "the wolverine in the man's lap," (okay, look it up...it's a good anecdote). He celebrates the "inexplicable renewal of enthusiasm" he feels after hearing a good story, and he goes further to say that stories "nurture and heal," repairing a "spirit in disarray." (One of my students, interestingly, didn't like the idea that we need nurturing and healing, but that's another matter)

"The stories that we already know accumulate resonance and recognition" of our human spectacle, Gregerson said, helping us see how our experience "resembles all the old thinking," like the Dido myth that she has woven into a seven-part piece she shared with today's crowd.

Walking down Kearsley Street afterwards for sandwiches at the Lunch Studio, one of my colleagues asked, "Do you think she was over their heads?" We agreed that even if she was, good for her. Perhaps they heard her angst about the insufficiency of language and noticed that she kept on spinning stalwart and lovely efforts anyway.

It's what we do, we writers, convinced perhaps beyond reason that words matter -- that they can sometimes be sufficient, if we just get the best ones in the best order, to paraphrase Coleridge and Stephen Dobyns. It was a good way to spend a Friday afternoon.

Spring Cleaning

Winter semester is over. I've got only one class for the spring, and an itch is overtaking me to clean up, organize, sort and toss. We're undergoing major remodeling and we all have to move out of our offices for part of the summer. When I get back from my two months in LA, I'll be in a new office with a WINDOW for the first time in my tenure as a faculty member. I've been knocking around these parts since '93 and it's inevitable that huge piles of detritus have accumulated: too much history, too much paper, a torpid and claustrophobia-inducing disorder.

So I plunge into pile after pile. It's a relief to throw out artifacts of the past, some good, some bad. I don't need to be reminded of all this stuff again. It's good to begin to travel lighter in the world. Not to make too much of it, but this feels a bit spiritual in effect: expunging, forgiving, taking a deep breath and calling a quiet end to unproductive clingings and obsessions. If one's not careful the weight one tugs along in life gets heavier and heavier, when really a person moving into old age needs to be as nimble and graceful as possible. I'm starting to see how much it matters to strip things down, not to hang on so tightly to disappointments, failures, slights, dashed dreams, old fights. Sometimes I feel like a sea creature weighted down with barnacles and sea weed. I want to focus the mind. I want to swim more freely into clear waters.

Crazy about Skype

I don't have an iPod or iPhone and I don't have a FaceBook or MySpace page, and I continually feel technologically sluggish and behind, torn between wanting to avoid all of it and compelled to "keep up." It's usually a wrestling match; I don't think my brain is wired for fast changes anymore, and, while it may sound like lame self-justification, I don't think all this stuff is making us better. Every day I face 18-year-olds, (it's customary in university parlance these days to call them "The Millenials") walking around school continually talking on their tinier and tinier phones, It still startles me. If they're walking alone, I sometimes think they're talking to me: I've said something like "Beg your pardon?" until I make out that little ear cocoon. In today's life on the street, I uncomfortably realized the other day, I'm the one who seems crazy in that circumstance: everybody else knows by now that somebody walking along alone, talking loudly, is connected. I wonder: does this make it easier or harder for those hearing other kinds of voices -- the kind not conveyed via satellites?

Anyway, my point is that despite the above disclaimer, I'm crazy about Skype. On my new MacBook, a little green light at the top of the monitor is a tiny camera, and I can make free calls that allow me to show my face to my husband when he's in California. More important, I can see his face. The other day Lynn Rossetto Kaspar said, about the importance of eating together, "the only time most of us look at each other's faces these days is across the table when we're eating." My heart cramped a little: this winter I've been alone too much, and I've missed seeing my beloved's face. Sometimes when his mug pops up on the screen my hand reaches out automatically -- I want to touch him. But seeing him smile -- at my pixilated image, but still some recognizable semblance of me -- it makes my day. Sometimes when we connect I just want to watch him, without saying anything. I just want to take him in and watch him smile at me and say hello.

Red Flash

This spring red-winged blackbirds seem to have flocked into our neighborhood, uncharacteristically. Grain-lovers, they're more common on fence posts near corn and wheat fields -- their hearty appetite has made them a problem for some farmers. But I love them; I love their call and that splash of red on black. They're very dashing and each time I hear them or catch that flash of red, I feel happy.

Thanks, Chad Swiatecki

Did anybody else hear departing Flint Journal reporter Chad Swiatecki's charming "Valentine to Flint" on Weekend Edition's Weekend Soundtrack yesterday? Thanks and best wishes, Chad. Here's the link: http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/04/25/weekend_soundtrack/

Playing My Ex's Keyboard a Journey Back to First Music

So, as my first husband emptied out the house we were married in after its recent sale, he offered me a keyboard he'd bought his current wife that she no longer wanted. It's a convoluted way to start this story, except to set the emotional context and to get me to the point where I said yes and took it home -- the place that I now call home. I set it up in my dining room -- with its big table and expensive chairs we hardly ever use, and with my relatively new, upright hutch with its glass doors and inside lighting, the hutch that symbolizes, as I've written here before, my perceived ascension to full adult womanhood. It seems right to me to have the keyboard in a room devoted to womanhood; if I had not turned into a heathen and left the church as soon as possible, defying my parents' hopes for me, I might have been the kind of woman who'd play piano (and organ) on Easter Sunday, at prayer meetings, at revival meetings, and at funerals as needed.

So I set the keyboard up there, facing the wall in the northeast corner. For ten years of my childhood -- six to 16, when my mother mercifully agreed I'd learned enough and let me quit -- I took piano lessons from a trio of long-suffering teachers; first delicate young Carol Martz, a dark-eyed beauty in Canton; then a sturdy, intelligent woman named Pat Ramsay who tried to teach me how to improvise hymns in Akron; then sweet Jesse Williamson in Coshocton, a powdery, formal old dame who wore lacy dresses and cried when I played Berceuse. I faced the wall in three different parsonages, banging away on our dark brown Estey and setting the Seth Thomas metronome dutifully at adagio or andante or larghetto depending on the piece. Looking back, I liked it. When I quit I had had enough of my daily hour on the piano bench, but I liked making music, learning the keys, working first the left hand (always awkward and plodding, a slow learner) and my spunky right, then putting them together. I had a good long reach and long fingers. But I wasn't obsessed enough or driven enough to really get every piece down. I showed up in party clothes for a few recitals, an important part of childhood, but performed unreliably positioned somewhere in the middling mediocre.

Nonetheless, sitting down now to the keyboard -- which has only six octaves, not eight -- I've been remarkably soothed and delighted by re-discovering the old patterns. My sheet music, saved over all these years in a dusty box, remains in the attic for now, so I've been playing only hymns, from an ancient Evangelical Hymnal from one of the churches of my childhood. Luckily for my neighbors, I quickly discovered the volume option, and thus I can save them from cringing at my repeated attempts to get the sharps right in "Christ the Lord is Risen to day" (labeled "Worgan 7777 -- the metrics -- with Alleluia, words by the prodigious Charles Wesley, from a 1708 tune) or handle the charming left hand in "Christ Arose," which although it's in the sharp and flat-free key of C still flummoxes me every time.

Anyway, I'm enjoying this re-emergence of an old skill. And the hymns, even to my apostate self, are fun to play. They were, after all, my very first music.

Smells Like Summer

Ahh! Somebody's barbecuing chicken tonight. Walking along Calumet, I could smell it for at least five blocks. Red spiricles are uncurling from the tips of every silver maple and the chickadees are making that earnest LOVEyou LOVEyou call from the rooftops. Can true summer be far behind?

Hard Stuff in Cheboygan

This week I loved my life, even its bedevilments of memory and sadness triggered by retracing old paths. I want to praise the "mutilated world" in the words of Adam Zagajewski, and I am grateful for the blessings of language. Driving the 280 miles north up I-75 on Thursday, I found myself marking treasured mileposts: the three "G's" -- Gladwin, Grayling, Gaylord -- the 45th parallel, halfway between the Equator and the N. Pole, the turnoff for Hartwick Pines, where some of the oldest trees in the country still majestically survive. Then there's the exit for Topinabee and Cheyboygan, where my first husband and I used to get off 75 in our dash for the ferry from Cheyboyan to the property we once owned on Bois Blanc Island. It is hard not to reflect on the past, a past refusing to behave itself, an incorrigible past which sometimes still insists on nosing back into the present.

So, I did not successfully resist the flood of memory from those years. We used to have to leave at about 6:30 a.m. to make a 10:30 ferry, as I recall it. After pounding up the highway at about 90, keeping an eye out for tricky cops in the piney byways, I remember once making it to the parking lot just in time to meet two old friends who were joining us for a camping trip. I see us standing there in the morning dampness trying to catch our breath, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee spiked with whiskey from a green thermos. Man, I was younger then and could get away with such deliberate self-abuse and cherished decadence. I remember the gray water of the Straits, rippling and melancholy, and maybe some mallards or the occasional cormorant gliding up past the pier. I think we liked ourselves standing there in that parking lot enjoying strong drink in the morning, waiting for the ferry. I mourn the passing of that particular self-conscious wildness. I'm healthier now but less interesting to myself -- I suppose that is one of the disadvantages of growing up. Perhaps I simply haven't cultivated enough of a taste for moral and intellectual complexity -- pleasures available to an aging mind as the body retreats from the turbulent exertions of youth.

Now that I think of it, that's the moment I wanted to see again, from all the memories of my trip north -- the four of us huddled in a parking lot in the fresh and evocative Michigan fog, cracking wise, downing slugs of hard stuff, and waiting for the boat that would take us across the Straits to our next adventure.

Big Mac Always Bigger Than This

Last weekend at Interlochen, in a panel titled "Five Things I Know," Keith Taylor said "art is always bigger than our definition of it." The same could be said of the breathtaking Mackinac Bridge. No matter how many times I see this span across the Straits, its splendor always delivers and is hard to capture in pixels. Here it is just this morning from the north side. It was chilly in Bridge View Park at 11 a.m., an hour after I'd left Sault Ste. Marie. Yesterday when I shot up from Flint, there were still piles upon piles of ice chunks in the straits, something I had never seen in my many years as a Down Stater. But remarkably, over night most of them either melted or moved on.

My Buddha Loves Scilla Season

He's sat through months of snow, laughing though it all, but his countenance with the little blue flowers in full bloom under the mulberry tree is especially delightful. Happy Spring!

The Rose or the Melon? Femi Osofisan on Art and Politics

If I am hungry and if everybody around me is hungry, will I grow a rose or a melon?

Nigerian playwright and poet Femi Osofisan offered this question by way of probing the writer's responsibility when he visited my poetry class today at UM - Flint, Osofisan, a Yoruba and one of Africa's foremost writers, is on an extended visit in Flint in a collaboration with UM - Flint's Africana Studies Program and the Flint Public Library. Thanks to Ernest Emenyonu, the Africana Studies director and an Ibo Nigerian, a precious slice of time in Osofisan's schedule was eked out to share with my students in our aerie on the fifth floor of French Hall.

In an earlier talk today, Osofisan noted what he characterized as a dearth of political art in America -- a suspicion of it, in fact; he added that what he does, in plays such as Once Upon Four Robbers or poems such as "Fodder," or "The Announcement" are likely to be considered "propaganda" here. Several of us humbly objected to what felt like a contestable generalization, so in the class, after he'd marvelously sung, chanted, tapped at three Yoruban drums and performed several poems, we asked him to elaborate on his views about political writing.

He asserted he resists the notion of art for arts' sake. He said he understands American writers take for granted the right to create art for itself, but that African artists have never had that luxury.

The literature of his country, he said, has been wrenchingly shaped by suffering, by tyranny, by privation and bloodshed and hunger. Describing how the high hopes of the liberation movements of the Sixties were violently dashed in a new victimization -- the tyranny of black on black in the country after country in the forty years since -- he said, "Writers have not had time to write about the rose. Writers have had to concentrate on speaking for the victims. We have had to worry most of all about surviving." Noting how many of his contemporaries have been killed, jailed, or driven into exile, Osofisan said he is lucky that he has escaped all three of these fates and continues to work, though sometimes quietly and inconspicuously, sometimes deliberately avoiding publishing his work overseas, in his homeland. The result is a fiercely brave body of work, based on circumstances I can scarcely imagine.

It made me think about what Barry Lopez said this weekend in Interlochen. Like Osofisan, Lopez calls for an art that "helps," noted in the entry below. It's a contention that calls for further consideration. I've argued here that the greatest vitality in the Flint poetry community, for example, is in the spoken word world largely peopled by African American writers, and their work is frequently and lustily political, invariably voicing anger and calling for change.

I'm not part of that scene, though I regularly visit, support and appreciate it. But here's my view. I've lived a life of incredible privilege. I have never been hungry. I've never had to choose between the rose and the melon. But I believe it's possible that if ecological collapses continue, I well may have to make that choice in my lifetime. So when I write about the rose, I increasingly find myself writing out of elegy and urgent mindfulness. I mean to say, "See here. This is what we must not lose." The literature of "the rose" is a literature that documents and celebrates possibilities for a life lived in peace and plenty -- a possibility that has been enacted in unparalleled ways -- not perfectly, and not without violence, but with remarkable durability -- in my homeland. It is a possibility we must cherish and believe in while it simultaneously becomes more and more imperiled. We deeply need that vision, that hope, the remembered experience of peace. I will continue writing about the rose. And I ardently hope the literature of the rose does not turn out to be yet another tragic extinction.

Barry Lopez at Interlochen: Facing Down the Barbarians

Before I get to Barry Lopez, though, I want to start with a comment from novelist Jack Driscoll, who's retiring after 33 years at Interlochen Arts Academy, that idyllic incubator of creativity in northern Michigan. Driscoll, author of nine books, said on Friday, "the impulse to write is the impulse to love -- to love humans, to love language, to love the world." While I sometimes suggest to my students that writing is the best revenge, thus exposing my own less evolved attitude, I found Driscoll's contention moving, and a heartfelt and apt description of what's in the air at Interlochen.

I'm freshly back from a conference there called "Between the Lakes: A Symposium for Writers and Educators." Its keynoter was the deeply quiet and reflective Lopez, who arrived a day late after a 27-hour ordeal from Texas thanks to American Airlines. The conference coordinator was Anne Marie Oomen of the Interlochen writing staff, and Driscoll and Michael Delp, another longtime Interlochen teacher, offered readings and discussions. Other writers featured were Keith Taylor from U of M -- Ann Arbor and Patricia McNair and Randy Albers from Columbia College Chicago.

Stories that sustain community -- "the coming of all men into one fate," as Lopez quoted Robert Duncan -- those were the stories that the symposium writers sought to nurture. Lopez recalled an old man from a tribe with a long storytelling tradition instructing him, "if the stories don't help, you're not the storyteller." The storyteller, the old man said, was the person who "creates the atmosphere in which wisdom can develop." And the fate that is to be shared, all voices raised in the gentle spring contours of a rainy Michigan weekend suggested, is to live without destroying the planet -- to live in mindful reverence and active love for our imperiled world.

Lopez said it raises his hackles to be called a "nature writer." "My subject," he said, "is justice" -- attempting to build good relations with other people and with the other elements of the world." The real issue, he said, is community. Looking around him at the many young faces of the Interlochen high school students, many of whom joined in the conference proceedings, he said, "When you meet a genius, you are meeting everybody who ever loved that person, including the animals."

Plaintively, in his keynote address he asked the crucial question, perhaps, of our remaining time on earth: "Who will be the inventors of peace?" Addressing the almost-packed house of Interlochen kids, adult writers and dozens of silver-haired and avidly attentive seniors from nearby towns, he got down to business.

"Your job," Lopez said, "is to make the barbarians irrelevant -- to create beauty that will overpower them." His deep and focused anger at U.S. leaders. minced no words: they are "men who have never grown up," who dominate brutally with ignorant cultural narcissism, who "silence the middle ground with their extremism." "The strong man," he asserted, naming Musharaf, Putin, Bush, "has nothing enlightened to say."

And he concluded with the following gorgeous poem, after which we all walked out into the chilly, rainy April day:

Try To Praise The Mutilated World
Adam Zagajewski


Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.


Translated by Renata Gorczynski

Okay, no more geezer rockers

I'm just writing this because nobody commented about any of my recent posts. Maybe that demented shot of GeezerBoy Keith Richards is scaring you all away.

This is what happens to Boomers, children! We refuse to go quietly into that good night.

Tomorrow, in contrast to last weekend's Flint music orgy, I'm leaving for an interlude in Interlochen, where I'll be pleasantly ensconced with a cadre of geezer poets, headed up by Geezer Elder Poet Barry Lopez. I can't wait. There's nothing scary about that.

Bye for now.

Shine a Light on IMAX

So I admit it -- I'd never been to an IMAX movie. I know, I know, and I've never had an iPod and my cell phone is so old it's got a little antenna on it and I have to keep it taped together to keep the batteries from falling out.

Anyway, what better way to get deflowered, IMAX-ly speaking, than to see the new Scorsese Rolling Stones documentary "Shine a Light."

Imagine Mick Jagger's face about forty feet tall and sixty feet wide.

Imagine zooming in on Keith Richard's weather-beaten clown face, his koal-eyes sparkling, his silly head beads and feathers swinging.

I'm still absorbing the intense effects of the movie -- and what it means to me that Mick Jagger was 63 when this movie was filmed at the Beacon Theater in New York -- at Bill Clinton's 60th birthday party. SIXTY THREE. Still the boy-man boogied as if he was 19, pulling up the shirt on his skinny little torso, shaking his tiny butt. It's bizarre.

And irresistible. And those guys can still ROCK. I imagine kids might find it simply icky to see how old these rockers are. But you can't deny it -- that music is incredible. Still shaking my guts and my bones, two days after wandering, shell-shocked, back out into the sun from the Trillium Cinema.

It was a weekend deluge of oldster musicians -- I'm still ruminating.

Ain't Got No Euros

One of those Flint "backwater" moments.
This morning, in a burst of Monday ambition, I popped out of bed on a hunt for euros. My sister-in-law is going to Italy for her birthday and I thought it would be fun to send her a few euros: I know the exact piazza she'll be hanging out at in Rome, the one right in front of the Pantheon. I wanted her to have a couple of espressos on me.

Called my credit union. NO WAY, NO EUROS.

Called two banks: in addition to sounding incredulous that I wanted some euros, they said I had to order them and there would be a several-day wait.

Called what's supposed to be Flint's best hotel: clueless and apparently lead-poisoned.

I settled for express-mailing her a Franklin in her birthday card. Happy Birthday, Gail!

Earthy Etta James and the Roots Band at Whiting

Ted said to say about Etta James's performance at Whiting Auditorium Friday night, "She takes her diminishments with a certain degree of bumptious grace." He adds (exceptionally glib on this Saturday morning) that those diminishments, including a recent loss of 200 pounds after gastric bypass surgery, didn't seem to affect her rich contralto voice. (We did hear somebody say on the way out, "She's lost some of her range," but what would you expect from a 70-year-old rhythm and blues chanteuse who battled heroin addiction for decades and has been hitting the road since she was 15?)

We were in the third row, just to the left of center, and her aged-ness was at times, as Ted further commented, a bit macabre. Moving clearly pains her, and she sat during much of her performance in a padded chair with a padded armrest on one side. She sometimes leaned back, closing her eyes in a blues trance, and she seemed at those moments both extravagantly ecstatic and startlingly sexual. Of course she has always been unapologetically sexual, bawdy, outrageous in her lascivious tongue wagging and concupiscent remarks. She said, not once but twice, "I've been a clown since I was five years old." But now, coming from an old woman, her stage presence is clownish in a direction unnervingly close to the grotesque: heavily made up face with its big eyes and wide sensual mouth, her legs sometimes spread wide apart, her arthritic, beringed hands sometimes grazing her breasts and sometimes resting right between her thighs. She is a stereotype-busting performance artist of bold and wily innuendo. She's fascinating -- and a bit unsettling -- to watch.

From what I've just said, it might not seem obvious that I'm a huge Etta fan. But I totally am. I couldn't take my eyes off her, and last night she delivered some of the incomparable songs that have made her reputation -- "I'd rather go blind" -- one of her opening numbers -- gave me goosebumps that lasted into the next three songs, for example -- and "I want to ta-ta you baby." Two of the night's most riveting performances were Randy Newman's "You Can Keep Your Hat On" and Janis Joplin's "Piece of My Heart." Damn: the almost all white, almost all LATE middle aged crowd lustily sang along, with her encouragement. This is essentially the same show she's been delivering across the country, including at Carnegie Hall in 2006, where she even reportedly told the same story about going to Walmart with her grandchildren, but who cares -- it's a great show. She'll be performing next at Knoxville, Nashville and Detroit next week.

One other note: the Whiting, in its conscientious, politically correct way, provided surprising frosting for the show: its two deaf interpreters, who got into the sexy songs with remarkable panache. The slim, shaved-headed signer for "You Can Keep Your Hat On," for example, had most of the men in the audience and half the Roots Band watching her as closely as if she was Naja Karamuru stripping in a Boston burlesque house. I don't know how many deaf folks were in the audience, but she put on a memorable show for everyone there.

My husband, riding the high of recovery from an attack of the flu that's been plaguing us all, said, "Etta doesn't have the bawdy she used to." He gets points for this clever remark. But I think her bawdiness, expressed from that creaky body and the still amazing voice, is astonishing.

P.S. Etta's "Roots Band," as expected, was fabulous -- tight, cookin', irresistible. It features two of her sons, Donto and Sammeto. They're hot.

P.P.S. Where was the Flint Journal review of this performance? I scoured through all Sunday sections and came up with nothin'. Is this what we can expect after the departure of Doug Pullen -- a shriveling of local news? I expect so.

Walking into Venial Sins Having to Do with Hair

Sometimes I'm alert to every nuance, checking out every concrete bump, every change in the thawing pads of grass along the sidewalk, every person coming toward me and walking away from me in the distance, every breeze rustling at my collar. Today, though, I walked in to work head ducked down in a meditative trance, my mind raveling around what I hoped to do in class and worrying about Ted, who's recuperating from that damned virus that's grabbed so many others. I didn't even notice how far I'd gone, hardly looking up until I had marched straight through Mott and the Cultural Center and was crossing the Kearsley Street bridge onto campus. I was there and it didn't really matter how I got there, my body invigorated by its half hour of cold spring sun and fresh air.

Yet even after an equally soothing return walk -- this time down Avon to Crapo to Court, entering the neighborhood at Woodlawn Park Drive at mason David Smallidge's sturdy brick signpost -- I feel old and uneasy in the world tonight. My snazzy plans for helping my students move forward with "cause and effect arguments" were foiled by a mid-class tornado drill...no sense in dragging them back in. I just let them go. I wonder if my students even care about any of it. I wonder if they're learning anything. I think they just want to get out of there; the tornado drill was a blessing, a stroke of luck, sweet freedom.

Before that, I embarrassed myself, getting caught telling them a story I'd apparently already told them. It was about how I got kicked out of my parents' house at 18 for listening to the soundtrack to Hair. That was 40 years ago -- this summer, the exuberant musical of my youth will be performed in Central Park to celebrate the anniversary. My students, bored groans unsuccessfully suppressed, reminded me they'd already heard about it. I committed a venial sin, repeating myself, not to mention the possibly mortal sin of evoking my own obviously long gone youth in the present audacity of theirs. How dare I? I'm an old fart. Send me off to the floes, right now. Oh, wait, the floes are almost gone, too. I'm sunk.

"Maneuvers of Some Later Wars"

Here's the poem Grayce Scholt read Saturday that most knocked my socks off. It's in the section titled "In War In Peace" in Bang Go All the Porch Swings.

1. "The War to End War..."

The spinning reels flicker, stop,
biplanes (prop to prop)hang
(nose to nose), enemies (I/du-
you/dich) in fierce repose.
WW eyes are burning!
Ace-high hearts are bold!
Whirrr, the dim projector's turning:
silently we both explode.

II. "The Good War..."

From rubber raft I see
a blue stain sliding:
from broken sub below
your face is riding on the slick:
eyes are open,
lips are loose.
I lean out over you
(tooth to tooth)
of supernatural mile:
our death heads disap-
pear into the smile
of our first kiss.

III. "...hearts and minds..."

We fall across each other
near Saigon in the spring
not unlike lovers
rolling in embrace.
You draw your knife across
my jugular vein, I touch your face:
dying, with my careful gun
I shoot your balls off
one by one.