Scrub Brush: "This is It"

Tools of Rage and Poetry, With Cat


A new era...is how it feels, continually adjusting to life events. I'm struggling in my own quotidian rhythms to embrace and accommodate to and balance among my particularities -- the personal wrestling of my individual circumstances -- and a concept of "greater good" -- the ways in which the community -- my community or communities -- and in fact the natural world go on with or without me. What is my role in this? How do I keep my individual body going, my mysterious individual consciousness, the consciousness that inhabits me and in which I am trapped for the duration -- as are we all, of course, humans moving around in these limited containers held together by our sturdy skins.

Saturday night's reading (see below) was a fine moment -- four readers, as it turned out, an audience of 50, double-digits of wine bottles, red and white, flowing along with the concertos of voice and word. Connections with my history; I was present at the opening of Buckham close to 30 years ago; I was present when Alan Ginsberg performed there; I have reviewed many art shows staged there; I have read there myself a number of times over the decades.

Waiting for people to show up the other night, I stood in the open window at the back wall and looked down at the Torch parking lot, the brick law offices, the southbound traffic on Beach Street; it was a mild lovely evening and downtown Flint smelled like a city, delicious, evocative -- a mix of asphalt and exhaust with a bit of stubborn spring green mixed in. Framed in the window, that swatch of Flint on a spring Saturday night seemed romantic and melancholy, my own history and desires and sadnesses inescapably in the air. I went to the gallery's bathroom where I've retreated for solitary earthy functions uncountable times during uncountable art openings. There's a full-length mirror in there, and I inevitably looked at myself, my whole self, before going back out into the world of the life I've made. Hmm: yes, that's me, I had to say. Still me. I recognized myself, still there. In that one specific moment. As Sheldon Kopp says in Item One of his Eschatological Laundry List: This Is It.

Before the reading I was in a foul and volatile mood. Trying to load paper into the empty printer, I couldn't get the packaging on the ream open and in a sudden fury, slammed the whole pack down onto the floor. Ripped off my glasses and threw them on the floor too, violently swearing. The symbolism isn't lost on me. Language, my beloved, trusted soul tool, so often resists. The world so often resists our words, or doesn't care. And what I see, sometimes clearly, the evidence of my senses, often leads to pain and disappointment.

So I abandoned the upstairs and, in the spirit of Gaston Bachelard, stomped down to the basement. To clean the cat litter. In the pungent cool darkness. Still in a fury. The place smelled so strongly of ammonia my eyes watered. Back from Pedro, we had somehow forgotten to check: forgotten our duty. Three litter boxes overflowing, the cats had peed on the concrete floor and pooped in cool corners. I took over the basement with dangerous energy. Ted came with me. That fact. The man who loves me: In the basement, holding the bag for cat shit, holding the dustpan for piles of scattered litter. I filled a bucket with bleach and water and got down on my knees, slopping the mix onto concrete; me in a teeshirt, old socks, raggedy shorts and rubber gloves, daring Ted to laugh at my flaggellating getup. He refrained. He simply held the bag. I scrubbed down the stink and my rage with an old scrub brush. I like that word "scrub brush." My scrub brush helped.

The basement smells clean now. The floor is soothing and cool and free of crud.

The eight poems I read Saturday night were, as my new literary pal Matt Falk said, a "set" encompassing a range of emotion. On the whole, indeed, I felt them as a sequence, a cri de coeur from my whole Flint life -- one poem I first drafted in the 80s, several others I wrote within the past few months. It felt good to cry them out, to declaim. I am at cusp these days and the act of witness, of saying my life, of working the sounds of my life -- all of it was gratifying. I slept well that night.

See, I am taking this as a serious occasion in my life, even though my current poetry manuscript has been rejected at least ten times since September. I am taking this as an act of scrubbing into my life, doing what I can do. On my knees in the cool basement, taking it in, taking it in, making my life whatever it will be.

Ink Takes a Village: and that village is FLINT

Nic Custer, Alan Matthews, Kelsey Ronan, Grayce Scholt, Jan Worth-Nelson

Join in to hear and see a dynamic lineup for a memorable night in Flint-Town -- the East Village Magazine writers.

Those of us who have lived here for years have powerful stories to tell. AND there will be wine from D'Vine Wines and hors d'oeuvres from Oliver T's. This is a literary event not to be missed.

Specifically, Pat Endings: A Post Pretending to Sound Like I'm Tenure-Track at least at the Beginning, While Obsessed with Revision

Windblown Coastal Grasses
I was reading Robert Lee Brewer's "Poetic Asides" interview in Writers Digest with H_NGM_N Press impresario Nate Pritts while revising my ms. this week. One paragraph stood out. Pritts, one of the golden boys of the Warren Wilson MFA program, who's since become a Doctor, was describing how he used comic books as "ekphrastic" triggers for his book Sensational/Spectacular. (Throwing around words like "ekphrastic" is how we know Dr. Pritts might qualify for a tenure-track job some day; pairing"ekphrastic" with comic books, smart aleck that this young Doctor is, is how we know he's STILL SO COOL). Anyway, this is what he said:

First, the project was a reaction to the fact that there seemed to be an accepted language for poetry, or at least an accepted diction, that I found stifling. In some ways, I was developing a voice in my poems that was coming from the poems I was reading and not coming from me. At the time I was reading a lot of poems that were incredibly reverential and too serious, pious poems that seemed to be simultaneously thrilled with and in awe of their precious ability to turn the quotidian into something messianic. There’s a teenage version of me inside me still that calls bullshit on my poems sometimes – why is Nate writing about arias or “a cacophony of larkspur” or, in short, relying on images and experiences that are not him to tell things that are?

Ouch. That tiresome turn from the quotidian to the messianic. Eeek. Oh how many times have I slid messily down that inviting mossy rock? And now Pritts has me picking at another hangnail (h_ngn__l?) the notion, that the "accepted language for poetry, or at least an accepted diction" might be stifling. Oh jeez. Especially since I've never written a poem from a comic book, now I feel all old and, well, rusted. But that's not really what I wanted to say.

What I want to say is that I'm newly examining how my love of the language I see as available to me means that I'm limiting myself and my poems' vivifications. I started my professional writing life as a journalist, and I've always doggedly sought clarity, coherence, what I think of as architectural or structural integrity. My poems have a beginning, a middle and an end. As I've looked at the poems in my current ms., they seemed designed, like a sequence of yoga poses that should be executed in a particular order, or a dance designed to fill a particular stage, or a piece of music that I can follow, like Miles Davis's "Blues for Pablo" or Lyle Lovett's grand collage "I will rise up/Ain't No More Cane" with swoops and transitions that on repeated listening, I've learned to cherish and anticipate. I wonder if I should bust them up -- the poems, that is. And I think it's likely I should.

I'm thinking of Pritts's poem "Endless Summer" in which his repeated use of the "f-bomb" propels the poem's exaggerated anger and hyperbolized regret, and in which the syntax begins to drop off, twist and fall apart. Or Pritts' buddy Matt Hart's poem "Broken Foot Effusion," in the latest H_ngm_n, in which he writes,

"I use the word flamingo,
my one leg gleaming as I stand for something
resonant: beauty in the face as the sun cracks
up. Truly, I have used the word flamingo
maybe ninety-five hundred times in an attempt

to achieve some kind of devastating balance"

and then he throws the poem open into an exuberant, stream-of-consciousness list of all the people who love him. I heard Pritts perform "Endless Summer" and Hart perform "Broken Foot" a month or so ago at the Court Street Gallery in Saginaw, and they were riveting; the effect these two poems had on me, spoken aloud, was to wake me up from a lugubrious rut. I drove home as fast as I could. I couldn't wait to write some more myself. Anyway...

In another interview, on Elizabeth Hildreth's raucous blog "Bookslut," Pritts said, "...maybe I’m worried about the word “narrative” as it implies a starting point, a stopping point & that, in between, something happens."

And that's exactly what's bothering me about my poems these days, and so I'm looking to these young scalawags of verse for triggering and transformative energy. Maybe their audacity will help me pry apart the resolving declarations that seem to conclude almost every damn poem in my manuscript. Here are a couple examples:

from "Missiles, October 1962"

There was going to be
plenty of time for me, to revel in
my vivid hurts, my lucky changes,
my charmed survival after
my mother and father were history.

from "The Blissfield Parsonage," (this is really embarrassing)

"Something grew, spring came."

from "Begonias Then and Now":

To my relief
I see that they are just begonias –
they stand for nothing.

Okay, and there are a lot more where those came from. I'm not sure what else I want to be reaching for, but it'ssomething -- something more: surprise, uncertainty -- or something less, ending before it's over...whatever. I'm looking forward...to different endings. Now that's damn existential, ain't it, for a Saturday night?

And for the next post, comes the question, what is the function of the poem? For me, as I'm free associating and/or balancing on at least one leg of my reflections, I think the poem is for comfort. Damn, I can't believe I just said that. Well, it's a complicated matter. I want my poem to be, as I wrote in one of my explicitly architectural poems, "Message to my Neighbors on Seventh Street," (look it up in MQR about a million years ago), a "fist of order thrusting up between your opulent oaks." Yikes. Put away that Freud, asshole.

Revising at a Table Set for One

Self Portrait at the Korean Bell

Settling in to my hillside LA life, I've been working on my poetry manuscript this week, a joy in many ways. It was a challenging and tempestuous winter, during which I was thrown into questioning my own role and value in the world and during which I felt confronted (thornily, nettlesomely) by others' judgments of my life's work and obsessions. At the same time, I was operating at full bore as a writing teacher, reading and judging the works of 80 other writers -- 45 freshmen, 20 intro creative writers, 10 advanced poetry students, 5 graduate students/poets.

So, interestingly, even though the winter's tumults could have set me up for a period of deep doubts about myself -- and certainly I did descend, for a time, giving in to the perils of the frazzling darknesses of February and March -- on this glistening hillside, 2500 miles from Flint's turmoils, I'm experiencing in contrast a self-healing impulse to turn inward, back to my "material" -- the material of my life as a writer that has always sustained me. In a way it's not really a choice. It's just there -- like my blood type (A+, vainly pleasing to an old teacher's pet like me). It's a relief to return to my own work, to plunge into the trance that is revision. I believe what "they" say about writing being one of the activities that takes the brain into its most salutary brain waves. After a few hours of working, rewriting, rearranging and rethinking, my brain feels deeply massaged and gratified.

And I am grateful for that.

Some of the poems in my current manuscript go back, in a couple of cases, 25 years -- a realization that astonishes me -- and some of them were written as recently as three months ago. Yet putting them together, I see connections, and some fairly consistent tendencies in style and method. Some of this hits me anew -- some sort of understanding of "who I am" as a poet, something I'm able to see because of how long I've been at this, how many poems I've written and rewritten, what I chose to throw out, what I dug into old files to reclaim. I'm not comfortable with all that I see there, but doubt is a necessary condiment for this work.

I'm not sure I've found the "right readers" for this poetry collection, or for my body of work in general. I'm not sure I ever will. Recently, somebody I've never met emailed me that one of my old poems is one of her favorites, and that she's been using it as an example in her own creative writing classes for years. She wanted to know which collection of mine it appears in, and I had to tell her it appears in no collection, because no collection of mine, other than my three self-generated chapbooks, has ever made it into the mainstream.

But that doesn't change what's happening to me, in my brain and recouping spirit, as I work and rework the words of a lifetime. Some gifts are like that -- self-generating, self-healing and always there, inviting tender and scrupulous attention. In a way, it's a table for one, set up with nice cloth napkins and a candle. A dinner for one. I could be there awhile.

Another Self Portrait at the Korean Bell

Here's the Thing

Art is not nice. This is a place to be angry. Tonight, while we were trying to have an "open mic" poetry reading at Churchhill's, a drunk guy barged in, loudly asking where was his "wagon." Then he slurringly demanded a cigarette from one of the young women there, who gave one to him, and then he begged money off of her, which she gave him. It was an annoying and frightening moment. After he finally left, having disrupted most of a performance by one of the hardy readers, a Flint cop showed up and sat down among us, in full uniform. It was reassuring, especially in these tight budget times. If cops are stretched thin in Flint, it was nice that one of them was devoted to us, the Saturday night poets of downtown.

And art is not nice. There are times when we need to be angry, rude, intrusive...noisy.

Au Courant and Sleepless the Night Before Class

Getting ready for bed, my husband tells me
a joke that I don't get.
To make matters worse,
I'm propped up on six pillows reading
the latest touted book of poems.
It won a prize in New York.
On the jacket the poet is an eminence,
bearded, gray, a this-is-serious
kind of guy.
I read these poems and I don't understand.
What's with the marble wall, and how
can it be "dark" and "sunbaked" both?
And why are lemurs suddenly swimming
down the third verse?
My forehead furrows and my lips
tense up. I crimp my glasses and
look again.
I don't want to be lost the night before class.
I feel completely dumb.
Maybe I'm not smart enough to be alive.
Is the true thing finally here,
my smarty ruse a bust at last?
I took Valerian an hour ago.
I'm not sleepy.
Did you get to the first poem yet? My husband calls
from the other room, where
the electric toothbrush whirrs.
I didn't understand it, I mumble from
my billowed perch, the poem my bean
a mattress down.
Good, he intones,
You're not supposed to "understand" a poem,
Remember?
But I'm the teacher, I say. I'm the teacher.

Sixty

...For about three weeks now. Apparently there's nothing to be afraid of. Today, back from breakfast at the usual joint with 3/4 of the commune (the majority caucus, as "Teddy West" calls it) I meditated. On the coldest day of the winter so far, the sun through the southern exposure upstairs window warmed my forehead, that Third Eye chakra, and then I wandered downstairs and did a headstand on my new yoga mat, getting up to the wall on only the second try. Counted deliberately to 120, breathing from the diaphragm. Tried to hear my yoga teacher's voice urging the shoulders to take more of the responsibility. Couldn't remember which way is "up" for the shoulders in this pose.

Stretching, breathing, extending, bending...my body and I communing. It has been a long time coming, far from the stiff Ohio of my youth.

Later, a long Saturday walk, the sun of the morning's meditation long obscured behind thick clouds. What IS this universe, anyway? What IS it, going on and on out there forever? Sometimes I think it's the body of God, and we are tiny mitochondria in miniscule capillaries.

The photo above, ice on Cadet, on the curve to Pierce Park that feels like a little woods, a little country road in the middle of town. The essence of this time of year in the Midwest, brown, stripped down, tight, chilly. Poetry weather.

It's Almost Like the Greeks

Universal

Pulling a Rappleye here, not that anybody's noticed:


"poof!"

The reason, in my case: There's some suggestion that posting a poem (even in draft form) here counts as "publication" and in some quarters thus precludes official submission.

Metamorphosing in My San Pedro

Yes, we are. How can I not be at least a little bit in love with a place that advertises itself this way? This is at the grandly named "Galerie d'Arte" near the foot of Gaffey Street, across from the Korean Bell. it makes me smile.

And the sign suits the flavor of this visit, during which I've attempted to seal the deal with my recovery, taking long daily walks, getting lots of work done, eating right, breathing the therapeutic sea air, preparing for the next set of adventures, whatever they are.

Today, I sent out a packet of poems -- the first time I've done that in ages -- to a magazine that still won't accept electronic submissions. There was something nostalgic and comforting about printing off the poems, enclosing a simple little cover letter, and enclosing an SASE. Just like the old days. It's nice to retreat to something that hasn't changed: the mechanism for sharing an old, enduring devotion...an act of hope.

Here, then, is a salute to the restorative effects of my spring break in San Pedro and, for all of us, a life of robust and creative transformation.

Two glum poems from a hard winter

Perhaps the entry below will explain the sinister tone of these verses.

1. Winter Solstice, LA: Arrival

It’s dark here too, but wet--
harbor lights oily and only
someone else’s news.
I’m sick,
panicked from
the claustrophobic flight, sinuses
squalling and squirming
like preemies -- no, like
poor harridans shriveled and brittle in
wheelchairs in a hospice ward.
Enough of that. Black waves spread out
in waning moonrise.
I missed full monty, and what’s left
Is less, is less, a lunar solstice
cringeing into soggy waxen dawn.

2. Coming Home: "Light Chop"

...the pilot says, dry and neutral, businesslike
as puffed up little bags of peanuts jiggle
on a flight attendant’s tray. Things change:
the Continental Divide’s the culprit, wreaking
waves on earth’s upheavals
and, six miles high my body's fill of air and water
settles toward my feet, ankles bad balloons wanting
a joyless drift to land. My ancient heart
flutters, querulous. (I use a fancy word
to soothe my fear) as clouds rise up and bump us--no,
we are going down into all that cumulus like
a congested head, sliding into a sinus infection
we call Detroit, just a light chop, he says,
to get us drained all out on frozen ground.

A Flint Poem by Danny Rendleman: Shooting Nine-Ball with My Father at the Rainbow Bar

And Weesner's novel -- centered in a wrenching father-and-son relationship -- brought me back to a poem by another Flint native, Danny Rendleman, a poet whose depictions of growing up among "shop rats" in the Fifties and Sixties will break your heart. Here's one of my all-time favorites, from Danny's amazing 1989 chapbook from Ridgeway Press, Skilled Trades.

Shooting Nine-Ball With My Father at the Rainbow Bar

This is his second home, my mother says,
and not just for the money he leaves here Fridays.
No phone: no one is ever taking calls. Tonight
I am beating my father at nine-ball
and not just because he is drunk and old.

I'm pretty good, he's finding out, not just
some sissy boy who's always reading, though
pretty drunk, too. We are the last customers
and Trigger, the owner, wants us to leave.

But it's not even last call, and my father wants
one more Corby's on the rocks and one more game,
just about to get his touch back, to break even,
to show his son what's what. But he keeps scratching or
miscuing or missing widely, and I'm up about ten bucks,
but I'm starting to miss some gimme's myself
and not liking it, and beginning to sweat
and fret and wonder why we're here.

But we can't quit, though we know mother
is waiting, we hope, and Trigger is waiting to close up, and
we're going to hurt in some
important places in a few hours.

My father, as handsome as he's ever going to be, and as
fine, leans over as I line up a money shot and says to me,
"Look here, Danny,

how you doing, son?" What we both want from this life won't
come clear for some time.
At that moment, he will be dead and I will be
contemplating a not dissimilar plot ending. We walk out
back to his '57 Oldsmobile and try
to decide who'll drive
as well as the where and why of it.

Shaky Sunday at the Autumn Equinox

When in doubt, thrown in a sunset shot

Oh, lord, am I the only one who noticed Henry Paulson's left hand shaking as he was being fruitlessly grilled by George Stephanopolos? That crooked little finger, the hoarse voice, the slight shake (ominously, on the left side of his body) -- it's foreboding. My Friday giddiness has worn off along with the burnishing pleasures of the Verget du Sud, and today, vestigial remains of my Ohio Protestant childhood sweating out of my pores, I'm, like, PRAYING.

And what, exactly, WILL happen? Nobody -- Paulson, white coiffed Chris Dodd, scarily blue-eyed John Boehner -- nobody seems to know what, exactly, was said in that meeting where "all the oxygen left the room," as Dodd keeps saying. All the oxygen left the room? What does this mean?

Meanwhile, George W. Bush, who has essentially taken Rome down in the worst presidency of my lifetime, looks like a drowned rat, a whipped dog, in his brief pathetic appearances, limply whimpering, "it's gonna work." My interpretation of W's affect is: deeply depressed. Exhausted. Joi de vivre kaput. Hooverish, as others have said. Will he make it to Jan. 21 when he'll get to clear brush once again?

I take a long deep breath. Still oxygen in this room, at least for the time being. What could I live without? Is it time to buy a gun and a generator? What will happen to the birds? Will there still be poetry?

Perhaps elegy, cried out from the fetid ruins of Galveston, from the smoky remains of the Marriott in Islamabad, from the graves of the 62 U.S. military who have committed suicide so far this year.

I breathe again, grateful in the moment for whatever grace this Sunday morning affords: finding an old poem in a dusty folder, sipping a cup of strong English breakfast tea, a hot shower and a clean black teeshirt that says "art" in 40 languages.

Here's the poem I found, at least 15 years old:

In Autumn

This is a difficult season, dense
with hue. Is it true we have just
so many heartbeats? Profligate old
bootmaker, my heart pumps on,
ragged with hope and regret,
while the earth tries to settle,
all that rot a smile toward spring
all that sweet cessation and giving up.

Hey Flint! Save Sept. 29 for Gary Gildner

Flint-bred novelist, memoirist and poet Gary Gildner will return to his hometown Monday, Sept. 29. for two classroom visits and a community reading, at 7 p.m. in the Tuscola Rooms of UMF's White Building. He's the author of 20 books, but the one front and center in these visits is The Warsaw Sparks, his 1990 account of coaching a Polish baseball team when he was in Warsaw on a Fulbright Scholarship. Save the date! It would be great if we had a robust local crowd for the reading.

More info:

Gildner’s works include My Grandfather's Book, Blue Like the Heavens, and The Bunker in the Parsley Fields, which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. In his long career he also has received the National Magazine Award for Fiction, Pushcart Prizes in fiction and nonfiction, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams and Theodore Roethke poetry prizes, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Of his latest book of poetry, Cleaning a Rainbow, critic Paul Zimmer wrote,

"Here he comes again with a new book of poems—Gildner, the kid from Flint, the jaunty pitcher/shortstop, the quarterback from Holy Redeemer, a genuine American article, still in love with the 1950s and being young, still showing us the fancy moves and surprising turns that inevitably swerve his poems toward the reader’s affections. He still has the briskness and inventiveness, but these poems are wiser, more practiced, embracing a new kind of resolution.”

Gildner’s mother and a number of other relatives and many friends still live in the area. He said when contemplating his reading tour for the reissued memoir, his stop in Flint is the one he is most eagerly anticipating.

Bad Boy Poet

On the other hand, the Times featured "Bad Boy" San Francisco poet August Kleinzahler, crusty author of the collection Sleeping It Off in Rapid City in a "Column One" page one feature jumping to a long feature on A12 Link to Kleinzahler.

If you're tired of the academic establishment or academic poetry, the belligerent Kleinzahler's acerbic attitude will please you. As the article notes, he once called University writing programs "multi-million-dollar Ponzi schemes" in which, reporter John Glionna says, "Volvo driving poet-professors are too fearful of risking prizes or promotions to make waves."

Well, I don't know how to break it to Kleinzahler, but I've got an 11-year-old Honda and no tenure and I decided long ago that the joy of my sinecure, such as it is, is that there's not much to lose. I am grateful to the academy for being one of the few places that respects and values poetry. It's not perfect, but it's one place where I can find somebody to talk to about, say, the sweet satisfaction of a well-chosen line break, or a poem that grabs me by the neck.

Kleinzahler's chosen hangouts -- the dives of San Francisco and elsewhere -- are indeed rich mines for the pen -- they have been and probably always will be. I began my own performance career not in the academy but in the bar -- a beloved dump in downtown Flint that was long ago replaced by a parking lot. It was a good, rough, rowdy school and I cherish my memories of that time and that practical apprenticeship. But drunks aren't the only ones with insights about this world.

I like my sacramental quaffs of Irish and the occasional excesses of good red wine. But as my students will tell you, I have little patience for those who come to writing thinking it requires alcoholism and drugs as fuel. Writing takes a clear head and physical energy. So, in short, sitting on a hillside this morning not far from where Bukowski raged from barstool to barstool, I'm not convinced I need to read another misanthropic poem about a hangover. Nonetheless I'm glad he's prospering, even in light of his vitriol, because I think lots of poetry -- and lots of voices -- are good for the world. I bought the book and have it in front of me. Once I've put in my own hours of labor over the language, in whatever semblance of right mind I possess, I'll give him a chance to move me.

"A Hunger in Himself to Be More Serious"

A post by Gillian Swart about churches getting co-opted by modernists prompted me to look this old Philip Larkin poem up, one that I've always loved -- especially the wry "once I am sure there's nothing going on," and "I take off my cycle-clips in awkward reverence."

Searching for a good image of Larkin to post, I see some Irish blogger describes the late bad boy as "a miserible effing sod, useful as a bag of arses."
I rather like that. Could a poet hope for more?

Church Going

Philip Larkin

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
"Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation ?marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these ?for whom was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Philip Larkin
(1922-1985)

Amusing shot from Photobucket.com: the same bike he used for churchgoing, perhaps?

That Dream Again: New Pome

I know when I'm settling down in LA -- when the new stuff starts pushing out. Here's a baby, for a day or two before I pull a Rappleye ("poof!")

THAT DREAM AGAIN

*poof*

Long Day, New Poem

Ted and I have a ritual of ringing my mother's Chinatown dinner bell when we think the longest day of the year is over. The wait proved to be a muse. Read it fast. I'll pull a Rappleye and "poof" it after a day.



*poof*

Okay, readers, here's a new draft. It, too, will go poof in a day.

*poof #2*

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.

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.

"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.