Yearly Archives: 2018

123 posts

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)

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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.

Garrison Keillor Redux

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Good news for the poetry world: Garrison Keillor is back with his daily dose of The Writer’s Almanac, which you can subscribe to for a poem a day in your inbox, just like the good old days.

As you’ll recall, last year Minnesota Public Radio decided to toss baby, bathwater, and everything when they not only shut down Mr. Keillor, but unplugged a vast trove of poems from over the years.

This collection included not only the likes of Yeats, Dickinson, and Frost, but (move over and make a little room, please) someone who looked suspiciously like me.

As this was akin to taking sledgehammers to the statue of David or burning the library at Alexandria, there was much hue and, as required by law, cry.

But now Garrison Keillor has made amends for MPR’s missteps by setting up his own shop in St. Paul.

A new beginning. A new infusion for poets and poetry, contemporary and classic. A new reason to celebrate.

From Chaos, Unexpected Order

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Sometimes chaos seems to have a purpose. Like yesterday morning, when my wife suddenly shouted, “Oh my god, I’m suppose to be at tennis!” and went into a Tasmanian devil whirlwind to outfit herself for the courts where three other ladies were no doubt looking at their watches and wondering about her absence.

Bad to worse: her car was almost out of gas. And mine, being a stick shift, was beyond her driving skills. “Can you drive me?” she asked. Um. Of course.

Ideas for poems come out of chaos. Slowly, you pull strands and fight them into some manner of order. Today I would learn that even something as humble as a book could be born of chaos. After dropping her off, I had an hour to kill. Luckily for me, there was an independent bookstore—that rare beast!—but a mile away.

In the poetry section, I came across American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time selected and introduced by Tracy K. Smith (Poet Laureate of the United States). I read the first paragraph of her introduction:

“This is why I love poems: they invite me to sit down and listen to a voice speaking thoughtfully and passionately about what it feels like to be alive. Usually the someone doing the talking—the poem’s speaker—is a person I’d never get the chance to meet were it not for the poem. Because the distance between us is too great. Or because we are too unlike one another to ever feel this at ease face-to-face. Or maybe because the person talking to me never actually existed as anything other than the figment of a poet’s imagination, a character invented for reasons I may not ever know. Even when that someone is the real-life poet speaking of things that have actually happened, there is something different—some new strength, vulnerability, or authority—that the poem fosters. This is why I love poems: they require me to sit still, listen deeply, and imagine putting myself in someone else’s unfamiliar shoes. The world I return to the the poem is over seems fuller and more comprehensible as a result.”

It’s a pretty good reason to love poems, don’t you think? And, in our fraught political times, it’s nice to think of poetry as a place where people can calmly sit and listen to each other via the arbiter called poetry. I especially like the bit about putting ourselves in another’s shoes. Empathy and vision—a new vision—are essential to a poem’s living spirit.

Later in the introduction, Smith continues:

“Poems call upon sounds and silence to operate like music. They invoke vivid sensory images to make abstract feelings like love or anger or doubt feel solid and unmistakable. Like movies, poems slow time down or speed it up; they cross cut from one viewpoint to another as a way of discerning connections between unlikely things; they use line and stanza breaks to create suspense. Even the visual layout of words on the page is a device to help conduct the reader’s movement through the encounter that is the poem. These and other tools help poems call out attention to moments when the ordinary nature of experience changes—when the things we think we know flare into brighter colors, starker contrasts, strange and intoxicating possibilities.”

As the book contained 50 newer voices in the poetry world, I knew it was for me. I brought it to the register and cashed in. And now I’m looking forward to reading and rereading Smith’s choices slowly. In order. Like focusing on one voice at a time in a choir. All because of chaos.

The tennis ladies forgave my wife and said it happens to all of us. I thanked her and said, because of her, this book happened to me. Fate is funny that way.

The Danger in “Getting It Over With”

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Once, when taking my daily walk, I strode quickly with the goal of getting it over with. I noticed at night, going to bed, I had the same anxious goal: let’s get this over with, because sleep is boring and, when I wake up, treacherous thanks to the threat of wee-hour insomnia. What’s more, I love waking to new days.

Thus, the checklist mentality of crossing a task off the list: walking, sleeping, working in any way unpleasant.

After reading The Pocket Thich Nhat Hanh, however, I’ve reconsidered and repositioned my point of view on “getting it over with.” I began to see that a series of “getting it over withs” will not only ruin the journey but expedite the journey’s end. The ultimate “getting it over with” awaits us all and will be happy to oblige when the day comes, after all.

And so, while walking, I forced myself to enjoy, until I no longer needed to rely on the use of force. I looked up at pine trees, the way they outline sky, which in turn led me to appreciate clouds and their many incarnations of beauty, how they shift color, position and texture, how they bounce slightly with my stride.

In full Thich Nhat Hanh corny mode, I even smiled at them, thanked them for sharing themselves with me. Uh, silently, of course. You never know when people in a rush (those still “getting things over with”) might be eavesdropping.

This morning, for instance, I took in the poetry of nuthatches scratching treebark in their circumambulations. Chickadees in their eponymous speech from the branches above. The lonely horn of the Ashland train heading to Boston. Like a symphony going rallentando. All together and at once, for me, as a reward for slowing down.

I took in the smell of cut grass on the lawns of suburbia, the wet smell of earth from the edges of a small pond, the long cool storyline of Canadian air coming down from the distant north.

Isn’t this how writers are more likely to find poetry? A rushed mind is of little use to the muses standing by, checking their fingernails, waiting patiently. But a relaxed one—a mind liberated from its monkey—is another story. A story directed by all five senses and nine muses, a story fed in equal portions by wonder, imagination, and possibility.

Buddhism aside, slowing down offers great benefits to the writer. A man can come back from meditative walks where’s he’s completely open to the elements and get to work. Why? Because he’s actually living, wise to the dangers to past and future, embracing instead both here and now.

“The Moment”: Readers Meeting the Just-Right Book

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In the introduction to his and Hannah Liebmann’s translation of selected Rilke poems, The Essential Rilke, the late Vermont poet Galway Kinnell shares a “moment.” You know, one of those moments when reader first meets some wonderful writing.

He writes, “The wish to translate Rilke’s poetry first came to me in 1948, when I read all the way through J.B Leishman and Stephen Spender’s exuberant translation of the Duino Elegies while standing in the poetry section of the old Eighth Street Bookstore in New York. Even in that first spellbound encounter, I thought I sensed under the words of the translation another, truer Rilke struggling to speak.”

We all carry with us such moments. Moments married with certain books. I remember, for instance, being holed up in a warm farmhouse on a mountain in Maine during a November blizzard. I sat by a Franklin stove crackling with firewood, reading Ivan Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album. Forever, that book will be associated with that place. That moment in time.

And once, on vacation in the Bahamas. Outside the hotel poolside. It was the opening section of Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream—the part where the painter Thomas Hudson and his sons are staying in a house “shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind and on the ocean side you could walk out of the door and down the bluff across the white sand and into the Gulf Stream…. It was a safe and fine place to bathe in the day but it was no place to swim at night.” Sharks, of course, which will figure in a dramatic moment with one of Hudson’s sons further down the book.

And once, on a beach chair in Scarborough, Maine. It was the Charterhouse of Parma, of all books, following the adventures of Fabrizio del Dongo during the Napoleonic Wars. I heard cannon and gunfire instead of gulls and ocean surf.

And once, feverish and sick with flu for five days as a grown man, when I decided to reread a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, a dusty copy that had sat on various bookshelves for decades as I moved from house to house through the itinerary of my life. Particularly appropriate? “The Land of Counterpane”:

When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my my head,
And all my toys beside me lay
To keep me happy all the day.

And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down amount the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.

I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.

I discovered that being sick makes “going back” all the easier when it comes to children’s literature. The “moment” showed me that sickness has a way of encouraging the child in us all, coaxing back that moment when creativity first worked at a feverish heat in our imaginations.

And so it was, reading this introduction, preparing to read Rilke’s Duino Elegies for the first time, that I first enjoyed the moment of picturing Galway Kinnell enjoying his moment.

I saw it all: Kinnell in 1948 at the tender age of 21, reading, reading, and unable to stop reading. Rilke’s prisoner. Caught in the moment.

Finding Your Own Way Up Cold Mountain…

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cold mtn

Reading Kazuaki Tanahashi & Peter Levitt’s new translation of The Complete Poems of Cold Mountain while also being subjected to news of the Supreme Court nomination hearings of Brett Kavanaugh is a telling study in contrasts. One is pointless, the other enduring. One is noise, the other sound.

Where would you be if you didn’t listen to or read a word of this tribal news from Washington, this much ado about nothing? On your way up Cold Mountain, that’s what.

As the first poem demonstrates, “the way” is not so much a path as a state of mind—one that is pure and protected from the clanging cymbals we call power and greed and hate.

Cold Mountain, Poem #1
by the Hermit Hanshan

You ask the way to Cold Mountain,
but the road does not go through.
In summer, the ice is not yet melted,
the morning sun remains hidden in mist.
How can you get here, like I did?
Our minds are not the same.
When your mind becomes like mine,
you will get here, too.

Deep breath in, slowly out….

Walking the Thin Line: Nostalgia vs. Sentimentality

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No matter how long it has been since you sat behind a school desk, you carry that school desk with you throughout life. For better or worse. With memories good and bad.

For teachers, the bittersweet memories consist of two pasts harmonizing fitfully: a student past first and a teacher past second. Perhaps no poems nails the teacher past as nicely as one of Edward Hirsch’s appearing in the September / October issue of The American Poetry Review.

“Days of 1975” treads on tricky territory. We’ve been here before. Some call it sentimentality (negative connotation) and some nostalgia (positive). Totally avoiding the former and going lightly on the latter is one of the tougher tasks a poet can undertake. Take a look at how Hirsch handles it here:

Days of 1975
by Edward Hirsch

It started with the tattered blue secret
of Bashō, that windswept spirit,
riding my back pocket for luck.
It started with a walk
through the woods at dawn,
mud on my new shoes,
high humming in the trees.
I was not prepared for the scent
of freshly turned soil
to pervade the empty classroom
or the morning to commence
with a bell that did not stop
ringing in my head.
So many expectations filed
noisily into the room–
I was ready to begin.
From the tall windows
I could see a storefront church
opening on the other side
of the polluted river.
I remember walking past the rows
and rows of bent heads,
scarred desks,
and gazing up
at the Endless Mountains.
In those hopeful days of 1975
I drove the country roads
in honor of radiance.
O spirit of poetry,
souls of those I have loved,
come back to teach me again.

Starting with an invocation to one of the greatest masters of haiku gives Hirsch immediate leeway. Both the Japanese and the Chinese poets were masters of brevity, imagery, nature, the senses. More still, they were masters of the unstated, which plays no small role in Hirsch’s poem.

Thus, the luck of Bashō in the back pocket of this (probably young) teacher beginning his journey; thus, the walk through the woods before school and the smell of mud under new shoes in the classroom. The spirit has entered!

For teachers, the sad beauty of the poem lies in phrases like “So many expectations filed / noisily into the room” and “I remember walking past the rows / and rows of bent heads, / scarred desks….” Perhaps others don’t know how difficult it is to fulfill the hopes of so many who are at such different levels of skills and who bring into the room so many different metaphorical crosses and satchels from home. But the good teacher must and the good teacher does his best.

The poem’s timelessness is evident when the teacher views the “Endless Mountains” outside those “tall windows” of what no doubt is a huge old brick structure with giant windows of the old style. The endlessness could be interpreted in many ways, whether it is one dealing with nature’s profusion and constant cyclical growth (from Bashō’s time to ours) or with the regenerative nature of students—each year the teacher ages but his students do not. They reappear each September, always in the same grade and always at the same age.

In the end, Hirsch goes where only the ancients and the confident dare tread by using the word (letter?) “O”: “O spirit of poetry, / souls of those I have loved, / come back to teach me again.”

Now the scarred desk is turned. Now the teacher, apparently aged and looking back many years, is pleading for the return of innocence and beauty — the “radiance” — that once filled his being, something he tried to share with his students.

I like how “souls of those I loved” is used as an appositive for “spirit of poetry” here. In that sense, observing beauty and capturing its transient essence in a poem is love. It is also the reason we write.

Writing Is a Solitary Pursuit, But…

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Writing is a solitary pursuit, yes, as well it should be. And it seems best suited for the early morning hours.

But first things first. If you have a dog, you have a perfect excuse to walk it in pre-dawn darkness. Only this morning there was the full moon, making the headlamp unnecessary, and that white brushstroke of clouds around it, lining itself up for you and you alone. On mornings like this, only the brightest stars still have their say, and you say in kind, “Good morning,” with a humble nod of the head.

Back inside, dog fed, you make coffee like a Buddhist, listening as the water boils, enjoying the steam as it rises from the wet grounds, sniffing those warm echoes of distant Guatemala’s beans.

Waiting for the water to settle through the cone, I typically read a poem. This morning, opening Hayden Carruth’s Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991, it was “Of Brook and Stone” on p. 245:

Bo, may you someday,
as I now you,
here by our brook in a yellow
August afternoon,

bless your son in his absence
from you, you then
standing as I stand, alone
on our big stone.

And may, though many changes
will have transmuted many
things, this rock still
hold you, and this old brook’s

water still flow then
as now, murmuring
beneath your feet of why
and how and when.

Kind of sad and beautiful, that, reminding me of my own absent son, of how we have things that are “ours” too, things as simple and lovely as a big stone. The first sip of coffee couldn’t help but taste better after that.

As a youngster, I was a writer of letters. Thus, the daily arrival of mail in the summer was an event. Approaching the mailbox. Hearing the rusty hinge upon opening. Hoping the hollow would be filled with envelopes, at least one of which was addressed by a friend responding in kind.

Nowadays, as a writer, there is some of that in checking morning e-mail. Writing is a solitary pursuit, yes, as well it should be. But one always anticipates the arrival of a stranger’s e-mail. A stranger / editor accepting one or more of your poems.

This is one thing writers live for, no? For their work to speak in some way to a stranger. A stranger eager to share it with even more strangers through publication. That way the poem can become a big stone, too, words flowing below it like a brook.

You stand on the stone. You think of others who now hold it in common with you. The “why and how and when.”