Yearly Archives: 2018

120 posts

Insights From a Man Booker Judge

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booker

October 16th. You know what that means. It’s Man Booker Day, the day five judges will meet at a secret location in a not-so-secret city called London to pluck a winner from the shortlist (it should take eight hours or so).

What’s in it for the authors? Most excellent sales, for one thing. Not that being on the shortlist hurts sales any, but being on the shortest list of all is downright painless. Man Booker’s been an up-and-comer, after all, among literary prizes. A win is a ka-ching, not to mention an ego booster rocket.

The shortlisted six-pack of novels, detailed here, come from a list that originally spanned 171 books long. The five judges had all of seven months to plow through those books’ pages, but you’ll be happy to know that some of the books (the amount varied by judge) were left unfinished. As crime writer Val McDermid—one of the 2018 judges—put it, “To be honest, there’s some when you’re not very far into it and you think, ‘This is not going to win the Booker Prize’.”

McDermid was interviewed for The New York Times about her experience as a Man Booker judge, and as a writer who reads reading about a writer who reads for the Booker, I especially appreciated the following insight about the experience:

“It has provoked a restlessness in me. I am thinking about how I can push my own writing in different directions and not do the same things again and again and again. If you’re a writer, everything you read gives you pause: You’re always looking for something you can steal or something you want to avoid. This has really taken me outside the usual tramlines of what I read.

“One other thing I’d say is that if you’re a writer, you’re someone who very quickly becomes a critical reader. It’s not as easy to find unmitigated pleasure in a book. It’s rare I find a book so absorbing I don’t ever think about technique while reading it. That happens about half-a-dozen times a year.”

So true about getting in writing ruts, isn’t it? We hate to admit as much, but sometimes such confessions lead to the tabula rasa a writer needs to get someplace.

Ditto the bit about learning what to “steal” and what to avoid. Reading is the fuel of every writing machine (or, to humanize it, the water of every writing being). You learn by others’ successes and mistakes, and it all trickles down into that messy but colorful pastiche that comprises your own writing canvas.

So read like a Booker judge, why don’t you. Paradoxically, all that reading will generate bursts of unforeseen (and improbably fresh) writing.

Nota bene: If you’re interested in reading the complete interview of McDermid, you can jump through this looking glass. Meanwhile, enjoy tonight’s Booker Award party. These days, there’s a party for everything, seems….

 

Riddle Me This

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riddle

Good news: Poetry continues to work its way back into everyday media. Or every weekend media, anyway, as evidenced by the New York Times Magazine, a Sunday insert that includes a poem selected by Rita Dove each week.

Yesterday, the magazine included an Elizabeth Spires poem. I’m going to hold back on the title to see if you can guess what it’s about. Game? Good. Here we go:

 

A shirt I was born in.
I wear it. Or it wears me.
White, of course.

A loose fit.
Growing as I grow
but slowly going dull.

It must be washed
once, twice, three times,
then hung to dry.

There, can you see it?
Hanging high
on the hill.

Waving its arms
in the wind. Beckoning.
Sun shining through.

 

I don’t know about you, but as I read it yesterday, I thought it sounded like a poem for children. One of those puzzle poems. One of those here-are-the-clues, now-see-if-you-can-guess-what-I-am deals. Sold at Personifications R Us. Aisle 6. Bottom shelf (where wee ones can see riddles rolling among the dust bunnies). Where teachers buy poems without titles and put students on the hunt.

If you haven’t guessed already, it’s about your immortal (thinking the best here) soul and carries the title “Picture of a Soul.”

Nice, but nicer still is the quote Dove alludes to in the short introduction. It’s a Wallace Stevens bit I’d never heard before: “the poet is the priest of the invisible.”

I wonder if someone has stolen that for a book title yet. Or is it too cheeky? Priest of the Invisible: Poems. I’ll check with Dewey, then Decimal, and get back to  you.

Until then, Happy Indigenous Peoples Day!

Random Thoughts for October: Scary Times

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  • These days, there is nothing United about the States of America. No surprise, given ours is a god of irony.
  • It is dangerous reading the newspapers, indeed. If you believe in freedom of the press (the First and Foremost Amendment), you put your money where your mouth is and subscribe to a newspaper or two. Then, for the sake of your health, you try not to read it.
  • Innocent until proven guilty. I’ll grant Judge Kavanaugh that. Repeat after me: It’s an important precept.
  • That said, the question of sexual assault aside, putting rabid partisans on the Supreme Court makes it anything-but. Supreme, I mean. First the presidency, then the Congress, and now the highest court in the land. The Baron de Montesquieu and his lovely separation of powers (complete with checks and balances) is rolling in his grave as, above ground, it all goes unchecked and unbalanced. Just. Like. That.
  • If you look up “hypocrisy” in the dictionary, you’ll likely see a picture of that lizard, Mitch McConnell, the man who led the dereliction of duties to advise and consent when President Obama sent Merrick Garland’s name to the Senate for SCOTUS.
  • Oh, those foolhardy Founding Fathers! They never guessed that they would have to include a time line for Senators doing their jobs. They just assumed they’d do it.
  • Think again, Madison.
  • Merriam-Webster’s word-of-the-day today is “gloaming” (twilight, dusk). Great word. Just don’t use it in a poem, where it’s greatness, like Britain’s, has been established.
  • What a delight, having to wait for an interlibrary loan of a new poetry book. Elbowing over the big boys on the wait list? Ada Limón’s  The Carrying.
  • Is there a better poster child for the wealth of minority voices enjoying success in poetry than Danez Smith’s battle cry in the wilderness of America, Don’t Call Us Dead?
  • I am no fan of Halloween, so sue me. Little kids at the door, proud parents watching as they say, “Trick or treat!”? All well and good. But 14-year-olds grubbing for sugar? God spare us. And deliver us November 1st sooner rather than later.
  • Susan Collins of Maine is not a swing vote is not an independent voice is not a senator of interest. She is merely another rank-and-file Trump Party vote, knee and jerk.
  • All hail Lisa Murkowski who Alaska, who nailed it: “…in my view [Judge Brett Kavanaugh] is not the right man for the court at this time.” Not a party hack, but a conscience considering each case as it comes up — just as you’d like to see on the court.
  • Maybe Ms. Murkowski should be the one donning robes, then?
  • The proverbial “they” say it might flirt with 80 degrees Fahrenheit in New England this coming week. “O hushed October morning mild,” as Robert Frost would say (and did, in his poem “October”).
  • These are salad days for many poetry journals. Don’t credit chicory or chives, however. Credit reading fees, more and more the salad dressing of choice in the impoverished world of poetry.
  • (“Impoverished” referring to the poets, not the poetry journals, of course.)
  • More from the God of Irony: People pay $13 a month (even months where they don’t shop) to amazon.com for “free shipping.” P. T. and Barnum would be proud.
  • What’s more, if you try to get 2-day free shipping for a food item on amazon, you have a surprise coming: shipping. Unless you join “Prime Pantry” for another $13 a month.
  • Oh, that clever Jeff Bezos. Small wonder he invokes the envy (and petty hatred) of the Electoral College President!
  • I finally did it: I purchased a big collection of Philip Larkin’s poetry. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
  • Just started Richard Powers’ The Overstory, a tree-hugger’s book if ever there was one. Hope I’m not barking up the wrong tree.
  • Being a fan of both the Boston Red Sox and Ben Franklin’s, I earlied-to-bed while the bedding was good last night, Sox up on the  Yankees 5-0. Turns out, I saved a few fingernails. The final score: 5-4. Just like an upcoming Supreme Court I know.
  • Happy October, people. If you’re in a spot where leaves turn instead of Senators, enjoy the colors!

Fridays Are for Funerals

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Transcribing Swedish? I’m just glad I can create an umlaut. Only 6 a.m. and that alone feels like a day’s work.

Dear Diary: Today I typed an umlaut. And went to a funeral where dead men make like gypsies reading minds. Tarots from the beyond. Or is it the mind’s heightened awareness when tuned to the frequency of death (aluminum foil coiled ’round a rabbit ear)?

Man-made music, knowing its place, plays here in a Key of Better-Not-Said, leaving the field to birds. The same hungry field with its open mouth, ready for bodies and umlauts and anything else you might feed it.

The earth. Does its hunger know any bounds? Rhetorical. And yet it is so patient. Seemingly indifferent. I can’t read it: kindly or quietly creepy?

In stanza two, I wonder about Tomas Tranströmer’s friend: “My friend’s voice lingered / in the minutes’ farthest side.” Was his friend a speaker graveside? Or the voice within, the mind reader from stanza one?

Of course, of course.

Today being Friday, you will no doubt drive home from work like T-Squared at the end of this poem: a summer day’s brilliance (despite its being fall — or spring, in the Southern hemisphere), rain, stillness. All shepherded by the moon.

Of course.

 

From July ’90
by Tomas Tranströmer

It was a funeral
and I sensed the dead man
was reading my thoughts
better than I could.

The organ kept quiet, birds sang.
The hole out in the blazing sun.
My friend’s voice lingered
in the minutes’ farthest side.

I drove home seen through
by the summer day’s brilliance
by rain and stillness
seen through by the moon.

Why Do Some Poems Inspire You To Write While Others Don’t?

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After Roman Coliseum-like spectacles like yesterday’s special Senate hearing on the pending Supreme Court nomination, one can’t help but curl up in a ball of despair or read poetry.

I chose poetry. It took my mind off ugly things and reminded me of what can be beautiful in life. For succor, I chose my copy of Charles Simic’s That Little Something, flipping open to pick-a-page, any-page. Turns out, the page was 21 — older than most Senators acted yesterday — and the poem was “To Laziness.”

I don’t know about you, but for me, there are poets and there are poets who inspire one to write. Simic belongs in the latter category. His free verse, his often short lines, his conviction that the ordinary is worth exploration, they all drive me to blacken a blank screen and revise.

This poem, in true wu-wei fashion, does a whole lot of nothing elegantly. Stanza one muses on big topics, like eternity, but stanza two dives into that simplest of difficult techniques to pull off well — the list — finishing with the poem’s strongest lines, a metaphoric sail “made of cigarette smoke.”

In the final stanza, simply enough, Simic does a little “meta-” wondering. Where am I? Why am I here? Until even the clouds (echoing the cigarette smoke’s infectious listlessness a stanza earlier) are described as not being sure “which way to go.”

Did laziness ever look so good? Especially when it cleanses your mind of pompous partisans and drives you to write yourself? Rhetorical questions, all!

Here, then, is Simic’s poem:

 

To Laziness
by Charles Simic

Only you understood
How little time we are given,
Not enough to lift a finger.
The voices on the stairs,
Thoughts too quick to pursue,
What do they all matter?
When eternity beckons.

The heavy curtains drawn,
The newspapers unread.
The keys collecting dust.
The flies either sluggish or dead.
The bed like a slow boat,
With its one listless sail
Made of cigarette smoke.

When I did move at last,
The stores were closed.
Was it already Sunday?
The weddings and funerals were over.
The one or two white clouds left
Above the dark rooftops,
Not sure which way to go.

A Hazy (Blue) Shade of Winter

poetry

Though not an artist, I love to wrestle with the use of color in poetry. Like the Internet, it giveth (in professional hands) and taketh away (in amateurs’).

For a pep talk on the matter, I often refer to Mark Doty’s The Art of Description, where he considers the value of color — when used lightly and effectively (and ah, there’s the rub!). Let’s audit the course and listen in to his lecture:

 

“A beautiful use of ‘oppositional color’ appears in an early poem of A. R. Ammons’s:

 Winter Scene

There is now not a single
leaf on the cherry tree:

except when the jay
plummets in, lights, and,

in pure clarity, squalls:
then every branch

quivers and
breaks out in blue leaves.

 

“There are no cherries here, but we can’t help but see a small burst of color when we hear the word, and then how rich that final blue becomes when it ‘breaks out’ in the space where only a little potential red and green have been. It seems fair to say the poem’s ‘about’ the blue of winter—blue light on snow, blue winter twilights, that wintry shade in the western sky after sundown.

“It’s surprising how strongly the naming of particulars brings color into a poem’s perceptual web. This stanza by Robert Has arose across the continent from Ammons’s poem, and uses only ‘silver’ and ‘golden’ as signposts to render a lushly austere summer landscape:

 

The creek’s silver in the sun of almost August,
And bright dry air, and last runnels of snowmelt,
Percolating through the roots of mountain grasses
Vinegar wee, golden smoke, or meadow rust…

(“That Music”)

 

“Roots and grasses, vinegar and smoke and rust: perhaps this stanza comes as close to a painting (impossible, longed-for accomplishment) as a poem can get.”

 

As you can see, this brief foray into color gives pause. It gives reason, too — reason to revise your existing poems with color in mind. Subtle yet powerful color. The kind that implies as much as it paints.

A Certain, Lovely Ghostliness

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lake

There is more poetry in autumn than summer, it would seem. Traveling from the congested highways of an overcrowded Commonwealth to the quiet shorelines of a Maine lake proves as much.

Last night we arrived to high winds and whitecaps. This morning I arise to clear, Canadian air, sun, calm. That coupled with the possibility and hope that comprises every dawn if you wake and look for it.

Maine lakes in autumn are a different animal than their summer counterparts. For one, the vacationers have returned home to their jobs and their schools. The buzz of boats and jet skis has gone, as have the screams of swimming children, the voices from up shore and down.

Today, traffic on the lake, this early on, consists of the sun’s reflection and a pair of loons.

It’s human nature to say the loons’ appearance is personal. A postcard for me. As is the soft wind high in the pine tops. And the chickadees’ back-and-forth. All an antidote for any blues coloring the spirit.

The neighboring camps on either side? Empty. Though they are not closed and shuttered for the season, they seem circumspect, lips sealed out of deference to me.

I expected some leaves to be in the early stages of fall color, but no. Still green, celebrating their false summer born of our recent warmth and humidity.

Thoreau would like this, I think. The lake in autumn, after all, looks much like it would in his century. Or any younger, more innocent century, for that matter. Any time you find a vista that can make that claim, you’re in a good spot. Far from the madding media.

But Thoreau was not one to stay in one place, either. He was a restless spirit, a walking botanist, a bridegroom to changing trails, hills, and outlooks.

That’s OK, though. Details like this never get in the way of capital-R Romantic delusions. Those are like deep breaths of cool air, those metaphors for a life lighthearted. They can even be found here in the cabin, in rooms still crowded with the ghosts of loved ones from the summer months.

I once wrote in a poem about such loud silences — how they’re like a school playground in early summer, empty yet still reverberating with the echoes of their youthful essence.

Yes. Like so. A certain, lovely ghostliness. Something both spiritual and reflective like a poem. A poem like all unwritten poems. The laughing and elusive one, waiting to be captured and translated, forged from ethereal to real.

The Good-Reading Prince Discovers Royalties

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ophelia

HAMLET: To-read or not to-read? That is the question.

OPHELIA: Don’t tell me. Goodreads member, right?

HAMLET: How did you know? Art thou a mind reader?

OPHELIA: A profile reader, you great, fool Dane. 87 books “read” and 8,777 books “to-read,” I see.

HAMLET: Uh, what are you doing here, anyway? Do you not understand the “sol” in “soliloquy”?

OPHELIA: Yea, verily. And the “dia” in “dialogue,” too.

HAMLET: Perhaps you should exit, stage left, instead of hectoring a man?

OPHELIA: Perhaps you should stop clicking “to-read” on books instead of teasing their authors most obscenely?

HAMLET: But I really want to read this 8,777th  book!

OPHELIA: Don’t tell me. Some day.

HAMLET: OK, I won’t tell you the day then.

OPHELIA: Why haven’t you read Numbers 1 through 8,776, pray tell? Didn’t you want to read them, too? Or is this like a New Year’s resolution ha-ha? Good until January 5th, ha-ha.

HAMLET: “The road to not-reading is paved with good intentions.” Shakespeare, I’ll wager!

OPHELIA: Impossible. Pavement isn’t even invented yet.

HAMLET: Is Goodreads?

OPHELIA: Don’t mess with me, or I’ll twist you like an underbaked Danish.

HAMLET: What’s your deal, anyway? Aren’t women supposed to be seen but not heard?

OPHELIA: Children, Ham. Children. My advice is to clear it out. All of it. Make like Marie Kondo and spark some joy by blowing up your “to-read” shelf completely. Here’s the fuse.

HAMLET: But… it took so long to build! And all those pretty spines for my friends and followers to see! They look so… Goodreads!

OPHELIA: Replace it. Tabula rasa. No more clicking “to-read.”

HAMLET: Will (sic) I suffer withdrawal symptoms?

OPHELIA: No. Instead of clicking “to-read,” click “Amazon,” then “Add to Cart,” then “Place Order.” Be a Dane of conviction. Then get plenty of rest and see me in the morning.

HAMLET: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Dost thou not realize that placing an order would actually mean reading my “to-reads”?

OPHELIA: And supporting your “to-reads” authors who have spent a year or more crafting a product every bit as worthy as that fine coat you’re wearing and that distinguished artisanal goblet you’re drinking from. Have you not heard of royalties? Now make like QE I and produce some! After all, what do you think is supporting this Globe Theater stage we’re standing on?

HAMLET: Atlas?

OPHELIA:

HAMLET: Timber, maybe?

OPHELIA: Royalties, you fool Dane! Queen Elizabeth’s sizable assets, to start! And a percentage of the groundlings’ gate, to gild some lily. Where there’s a Will, there’s some pay!

HAMLET: Lower your voice before you raise the dead! I just coaxed my father off the ramparts last week! Now let me think on this. (Shuts eyes.) OK, I’m thinking like so: Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

OPHELIA: Right church, wrong play.

HAMLET: Can I buy a few hours, then, with a, “Hey nonny, nonny?”

OPHELIA: Stop it and grow up. I’m serious. Back to zero with this “to-read” stuff. Using it only inflates all these authors’ “to-read” stocks. Hundreds upon hundreds of non-promissory notes. Much Ado About Nothing. Empty as the wind. Is that who you really are?

HAMLET: I need extra time for such questions! I’m still on “to be or not to be”! Don’t you have a nunnery to get thee to or something?

OPHELIA: (Eyes looking like grenades — which are not invented yet) You tax my patience like an exchequer, British for the tax man. Is my point made? Can we move on to Act V already?

HAMLET: OK, OK. But first, you doing anything tonight?

OPHELIA: Reading. Books from my cart. Delivered in two days thanks to Hippolyta Prime. Now let’s exeunt while the exeunting is good….

 

“Ophelia’s Poetry Tip-of-the-Day” Jar (Artisanal, Hand-Crafted Poems)

tips

Random Thoughts: September Edition

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  • Humidity has made New England its home these past few weeks. The eviction notices don’t appear to be working.
  • According to translators Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt, the famous Cold Mountain poems appear to have been written by more than one person over time.
  • Is that as shocking as Shakespeare wasn’t written by Shakespeare? Not quite, but I’m sure a few Hermit Hanshan fans might think so.
  • (Oh, and if you’re wondering, I’m on Team Shakespeare.)
  • Has anyone noticed how many women are running for political office this election cycle? What a wonderful “actions speak louder than words” follow-up to the Women’s Marches that occupied Washington in the days after the Electoral College Presidency took root.
  • Weeding. It’s a wonderful thing (once it’s done, I mean).
  • Baroque music, as exemplified by good old Johann Sebastian Bach, is a neat metaphor for the beauty of effective repetition and refrains in poetry.
  • Submittable has a cool filter button when looking over available markets. First you can click “poetry,” for instance, and then you can click “no fees.”
  • Now if only you could click “reading periods” and set up special columns for hand-picked periodicals.
  • Frustration #1: Journals that do not allow simultaneous submissions, but then take their time about reading your poems, effectively freezing them from consideration for whole swaths of time elsewhere.
  • Frustration #2: The Poetry World. Once you jump through the looking glass from the real world, you find yourself in a comforting, gut-reaction-from-Trump world where old white males are not the norm. All good*…
  • Asterisk*… except that old white male poets (motto: “I’m not dead yet!”) would be wise not to advertise their ages or give any hint of it in their poetry, as the Poetry World seems to like best elder poets of note (read: ones already famous). Beyond that, the journals are awash with Millennial poets.
  • Meaning: In the Poetry World, some would do their math just so: old + white + male = the new minority. Paying for the sins of their fathers, amen.
  • Bottom line of frustrations: If only race, gender, sexual orientation, culture, etc., didn’t matter. If only humanity and this brief license to life, as common denominators, mattered most. If only we’d drop the labels entirely and judge poetry on its merits as poetry alone, leaving differences at the publishing door.
  • Cold Mountain Poem #99, Dedicated to The Donald:

Greedy people are good at accumulating wealth,
like owls who love their young,
though when the children grow large, they devour their mothers.
Possessions are just like this.
When you give them away, you grow happy,
when you hoard them, it brings misfortune.
Owning nothing causes no harm,
like a bird flapping its wings in the great blue sky.

  • How’re the sales going, people? What? Not, so, and hot? Think the Little Engine That Could. It’s a great rallying image for every writer, no? I think I can, I think I can, I think I can….
  • I bring good tidings from the education world: Another reaction to what’s gone (way) down in Washington is the phoenix-like return of Civics in education. We have ordered Bill of Rights posters for every history classroom because we don’t want our rights to become history.
  • And how many Americans can actually name their rights as granted by the First Amendment?
  • Frightening answer: not as many as can name the Kardashian sisters and brothers and fathers and mothers.
  • Not wanting to end on a sour note, and in an attempt to encourage the cold snap of an early fall in New England, I leave you this reminder:

October
by Robert Frost

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if the were all,
Whose elaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the all.

Guilt as the Root of All Poetry

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Emotions and feelings. They are like the gasoline and oil of that engine we call creativity. Take guilt, for instance. A powerful motivator. A source of bitter reflection. And not the type of thing a fugitive from conscience wants chasing after him.

Below are two war-related poems with guilt as their tap root. It’s the contrast of life in a peaceful, affluent society (say, America’s) juxtaposed with wars raging in other parts of the world.

Especially wars where America (or maybe your country?) holds “interests.” Especially wars where your tax dollars helped birth bombs that drop on innocent civilians. You as the midwife of misery.

The easiest solution in such situations? Put on blinders and make like Old Dobbs the Horse plodding through a field of daisies and bee buzz. What you don’t see or hear or experience won’t kill you, after all. And what power do you have to stop it, anyway?

Pose that question to Gandhi.

In the mean time, for your Sunday consideration, I offer these two cool poems as evidence, both tracing the same fissure of guilt — the first by a Ukrainian-born American citizen, the second by a Canadian.

 

We Lived Happily During the War
by Ilya Kaminsky

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

 

It Is Dangerous To Read Newspapers
by Margaret Atwood

While I was building neat
castles in the sandbox,
the hasty pits were
filling with bulldozed corpses

and as I walked to the school
washed and combed, my feet
stepping on the cracks in the cement
detonated red bombs.

Now I am grownup
and literate, and I sit in my chair
as quietly as a fuse

and the jungles are flaming, the under-
brush is charged with soldiers,
the names on the difficult
maps go up in smoke.

I am the cause, I am a stockpile of chemical
toys, my body
is a deadly gadget,
I reach out in love, my hands are guns,
my good intentions are completely lethal.

Even my
passive eyes transmute
everything I look at to the pocked
black and white of a war photo,
how
can I stop myself.

It is dangerous to read newspapers.

Each time I hit a key
on my electric typewriter,
speaking of peaceful trees

another village explodes.

 

Reading these prove once again the power of poetry. And of emotions — the way they can cause detonations to happen not only on the ground, but in the conscience.