Yearly Archives: 2025

60 posts

Unfurling Ferlinghetti’s Finest

If you want to darn another hole in your poetry sock, you might try the once-famous Lawrence Ferlinghetti. You could even cheat by reaching for his “Greatest Poems” — though you could argue that editor Nancy J. Peters’ choices for “greatest” are as suspect as Lee Harvey Oswald. What can I say? On the savanna of literature, Subjectivity is King of the Beasts (and I ain’t lion).

If you cringed at that pun, you might cringe at a few of Ferlinghetti’s, too, because he wasn’t above dropping them into his poems. Not that he loses points with me for using them. I am a fan. Every time the groaners start acting superior about them, I point to the Bard, who was a master of puns himself, only in his case, said puns were labeled “great literature.”

I would say it’s a funny world, but let’s just say it’s a funny savanna.

If this collection of “greatest hits” was a hamburger, I would be a carb guy. Meaning, the early poems and late poems (buns, if you’re still with me) seemed more entertaining than all the middle protein (burger, medium rare). I would even lean toward the earliest as the better.

Some enjoyable turns of phrases I wrote down in my journal from the early stuff (as is my habit) are the following:

loud dark winter
burnt places of that almond world
poet’s plangent dream
algebra of lyricism
leaf in a pool…lay like an eye winking circles
silence hung like a lost idea
groaning with babies and bayonets under cement skies

No, not show stoppers, but still, enough to snag the eye before the stream of lyricism pulls them loose and continues them on their way.

As for the middle of the greatest hits sandwich, I was a bit underwhelmed at times. Not much special in the way of metaphor or imagery. Ferlinghetti’s go-to’s seem to be alliteration and assonance, but he was happy to ignore those, too, once he became popular (popularity being the Get Out of Jail Free card in Poetry World, that most strange and wonderful and insulated world known to man).

Here, for example, is LF riffing casually (it certainly seems) on underwear, a subject every poet should write about:

Underwear
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I didn’t get much sleep last night
thinking about underwear
Have you ever stopped to consider
underwear in the abstract
When you really dig into it
some shocking problems are raised
Underwear is something
we all have to deal with
Everyone wears
some kind of underwear
The Pope wears underwear I hope
The Governor of Louisiana
wears underwear
I saw him on TV
He must have had tight underwear
He squirmed a lot
Underwear can really get you in a bind
You have seen the underwear ads
for men and women
so alike but so different
Women’s underwear holds things up
Men’s underwear holds things down
Underwear is one thing
men and women have in common
Underwear is all we have between us
You have seen the three-color pictures
with crotches encircled
to show the areas of extra strength
and three-way stretch
promising full freedom of action
Don’t be deceived
It’s all based on the two-party system
which doesn’t allow much freedom of choice
the way things are set up
America in its Underwear
struggles thru the night
Underwear controls everything in the end
Take foundation garments for instance
They are really fascist forms
of underground government
making people believe
something but the truth
telling you what you can or can’t do
Did you ever try to get around a girdle
Perhaps Non-Violent Action
is the only answer
Did Gandhi wear a girdle?
Did Lady Macbeth wear a girdle?
Was that why Macbeth murdered sleep?
And that spot she was always rubbing—
Was it really in her underwear?
Modern anglosaxon ladies
must have huge guilt complexes
always washing and washing and washing
Out damned spot
Underwear with spots very suspicious
Underwear with bulges very shocking
Underwear on clothesline a great flag of freedom
Someone has escaped his Underwear
May be naked somewhere
Help!
But don’t worry
Everybody’s still hung up in it
There won’t be no real revolution
And poetry still the underwear of the soul
And underwear still covering
a multitude of faults
in the geological sense—
strange sedimentary stones, inscrutable cracks!
If I were you I’d keep aside
an oversize pair of winter underwear
Do not go naked into that good night
And in the meantime
keep calm and warm and dry
No use stirring ourselves up prematurely
‘over Nothing’
Move forward with dignity
hand in vest
Don’t get emotional
And death shall have no dominion
There’s plenty of time my darling
Are we not still young and easy
Don’t shout

As you can see, Ferlinghetti forgoes periods and commas, though he does employ capitalization, which is more than some modern poets do, and other punctuation marks make cameos, too. Getting edgy, in other words, but not going over the edge.

Overall, a fun poet but, like Frank O’Hara, probably not one to imitate (unless you truly understand the meaning of that sign at the edge of a dark wood, “Imitate at Your Own Risk”).

Poets Know Godot!

blathering comma mine humor poetry

Star billing does a lot for a play. As Exhibit A, I give you Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, which is enjoying a renaissance on Broadway thanks to the star power of Bill and Ted (a.k.a. Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter). It’s a play about nothing, in a way. Two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait for someone named Godot (note the Cracker Jacks-like surprise inside, the word “God”), only instead of someone they get no one. Just a lot of waiting. And talking. Thus a play about waiting. And talking.

Circles, anyone? And why does the plot of Waiting for Godot remind me of the life of a poet? Let me make like Barrett Browning and count the ways.

Poets do a lot of waiting. First and foremost, for the inspiration of ideas. Second, for the “time” to write (or so they say, as they check their cell phone and social media for the umpteenth time in the past ten minutes). And third, for the discipline to write and then revise (wait for it) over and over and over and over and over again.

All of this waiting allows the poet to play Vladimir or Estragon all he wants. In lines and stanzas, if he wishes. In a sonnet, if he’s playful. Haiku will even do, if he’s waiting in his briefs.

Then comes more waiting. After due diligence the poems (usually in sets of five, and usually in exchange for a $3 reading fee to keep a poetry journal afloat) are turned loose on a small isle in the reading world. An isle called Random Poetry Journal.

Response time? Surely Godot will know! If it says three months, figure six or more. If it says six, figure a year or more. If it says nine (It’s a boy! No, it’s a girl!), you may never hear back, a result Beckett would fully understand.

Poets may keep records all they want, but they should keep a duster, too, so they can feather off the dates and scratch their waiting heads.

There are other ways poets know Godot, I fear. Sometimes they share their poetry with established poets for criticism. Sometimes these poems are yet unpublished, other times not only published but in book form.

Nevertheless, engaging in such foolishness—especially with a poet who is more “established” and thus in a class or two above you in Poetry World’s caste system-like pecking order—is just asking for more of the Godot treatment. Surely Vladimir and Estragon were familiar with the sound of crickets!

Such is the way of the world, friends. Which means? Beckett nailed it, and I’d love to see the current revival of his play some day. When I do, I’ll go into full solipsist mode, thinking, “Hey! It’s true! This is a play about me!”

Then I’ll look in the poetry mirror. And hear Godot humming “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”

Poems About Death

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We have all heard (at least here in New England) Jonathan Edwards’ words: “Sinners in the hands of an angry God,” but what about “God in the hands of an angry sinner”? Welcome to the poetry of anger, disillusionment, and death.

The poem “I had thought the tumors…” came out in 2008, a year after its author, Grace Paley, died. In it you hear the plaintive voice of a woman with a terminal illness. Death, it is said, is the great theme of all literature down through the ages and will remain so because of its stubborn mystery and our stubborn and childish belief that it is something others do, not us.

The truth, as we logically know but hate to emotionally acknowledge? Death is random, heartless, and ironic, among other things. It has little regard for race, gender, religion, or class. Unlike humans, it lacks prejudice in every way. And it is the great unifier, bringing us together with the vast animal kingdom we are a part of but like to think we are above.

Whether you are healthy or sick, young or old, you will recognize the lament in Paley’s poem-that-knows-better. And though she admits to some shame at the end, she should have felt none. The incentive for this poem was all-too-human, and the reason it draws us in and succeeds is the voice of that humanity. Notice how she shuns punctuation, especially that jeering “endpoint” we know as the period. No, not here, not now, she seems to be saying. Let the reader pause where he or she may.

I had thought the tumors…
Grace Paley

I had thought the tumors
on my spine would kill me but
the tumors on my head seem to be
extraordinarily competitive this week.

For the past twenty or thirty years
I have eaten the freshest most
organic and colorful fruits and
vegetables I did not drink I
did drink one small glass of red
wine with dinner nearly every day
as suggested by The New York Times
I should have taken longer walks but
obviously I have done something wrong

I don’t mean morally or ethically or
geographically I did not live near
a nuclear graveyard or under a coal
stack nor did I allow my children
to do so I lived in a city no worse
than any other great and famous city I
lived one story above a street that led
cabs and ambulances to the local hospital
that didn’t seem so bad and was
often convenient

In any event I am
already old and therefore a little ashamed
to have written this poem full
of complaints against mortality which
biological fact I have been constructed for
to hand on to my children and grand—
children as I received it from my
dear mother and father and beloved
grandmother who all
ah if I remember it
were in great pain at leaving
and were furiously saying goodbye

The Poetry of Magic Numbers

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Milestones. Not so much the obvious ones, like births, graduations, marriages, and deaths, but birthdays.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: Not all birthdays are created equal. Logically, we know they are, but humans are anything but logical. Thus the magic of numbers like 12, 16, 21, followed by all birthdays ending in zero (bigger flips of the page, in our illogically logical minds).

Going back in time, we see that many cultures started with or around age 12 for special ceremonies, as this was the age when children became adults. Elaborate rituals, such as Native Americans’ vision quests, were observed to honor the importance of the moment.

In modern day, age 12 seems much too young to be coined an “adult,” especially when you consider the extension of “childhood” to envelop “kids” in their 20s, 30s, and even 40s still living at home with their parents. But tell that to people in Renaissance times as a for instance. Juliet weds Romeo at age 13, after all, and it wasn’t unusual for girls that age to marry and have children, given the brevity of life spans in earlier eras.

But back to the magic of number 12. Today’s poem, Dorianne Laux’s “Girl in the Doorway,” focuses on how a 12-year-old daughter is not the same as an 11-year-old one. Reading it, note how Laux uses imagery, metaphor, hyperbole, alliteration, and symbolism (among other devices) to note subtle and not-so-subtle changes.

Girl in the Doorway
Dorianne Laux

She is twelve now, the door to her room
closed, telephone cord trailing the hallway
in tight curls. I stand at the dryer, listening
through the thin wall between us, her voice
rising and falling as she describes her new life.
Static flies in brief blue stars from her socks,
her hairbrush in the morning. Her silver braces
shine inside the velvet case of her mouth.
Her grades rise and fall, her friends call
or they don’t, her dog chews her new shoes
to a canvas pulp. Some days she opens her door
and musk rises from the long crease in her bed,
fills the dim hall. She grabs a denim coat
and drags the floor. Dust swirls in gold eddies
behind her. She walks through the house, a goddess,
each window pulsing with summer. Outside,
the boys wait for her teeth to straighten.
They have a vibrant patience.
When she steps onto the front porch, sun shimmies
through the tips of her hair, the V of her legs,
fans out like wings under her arms
as she raises them and waves. Goodbye, Goodbye.
Then she turns to go, folds up
all that light in her arms like a blanket
and takes it with her.

"Girl in the Doorway" Dorianne Laux

Poems That Date Themselves

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football

When you say a literary work “dates itself,” you might mean it is old-fashioned or representative of another era, as in a classic work by John Donne or John Milton. It’s possible, however, for a more recent work to date itself, too, in that society’s norms change, sometimes more swiftly than we expect.

If you want to know if a poem has dated itself in this manner, there is no better laboratory than a younger generation of readers. Reading Gary Gildner’s “First Practice” to young sports lovers may lead to some surprises, for instance. Some of these “mysteries” would be easily interpreted by their parents and grandparents, but the youngsters might be left scratching their heads.

As Exhibit A, let’s look at the aforementioned poem. It details a first football practice (though the sport is not mentioned, it is easily inferred) led by an old-school coach and war veteran.

“First Practice” by Gary Gildner

After the doctor checked to see
we weren’t ruptured,
the man with the short cigar took us
under the grade school,
where we went in case of attack
or storm, and said
he was Clifford Hill, he was
a man who believed dogs
ate dogs, he had once killed
for his country, and if
there were any girls present
for them to leave now.
No one left. OK, he said, he said I take
that to mean you are hungry
men who hate to lose as much
as I do. OK. Then
he made two lines of us
facing each other,
and across the way, he said,
is the man you hate most
in the world,
and if we are to win
that title I want to see how.
But I don’t want to see
any marks when you’re dressed,
he said. He said, Now.

Right out of the gate, we have the first two lines, which reference a rather routine medical routine done by doctors to prospective football players before any season began — physicals, often quickly done in a building near the football field. This would perplex today’s youth, who more likely would visit a doctor’s office after their parents made an appointment for them. More perplexing still might be these words:

the man with the short cigar took us
under the grade school,
where we went in case of attack
or storm

Readers might be mightily challenged by the words “under the grade school” and “in case of attack,” even in this era when nuclear arsenals are much bigger than they were during the Cuban Missile Crisis of the early 60s. But who can blame them? Who can conceive that people of an age familiar to me were once told (ridiculously enough) to crouch under school desks in the event of an atomic bombing?

Younger readers might be given pause by the lines “if / there were any girls present / for them to leave now” if they take it literally. The thought of boys being called girls as an insult by an adult? Dated, for sure. So politically incorrect in this day and age that it just doesn’t happen (and if it does, it’ll “goes viral” in a hurry… you know, like kitty videos).

You might even find young readers who are convinced this poem is about war, not sports, unless you wisely point out the words “if we are to win / that title I want to see how.” Unfortunately, the final lines might muddy the waters anew: “But I don’t want to see / any marks when you’re dressed.”

Marks? On clothes?

You see the problem. Read in the 1960s — the decade Gildner is no doubt recalling — “First Practice” is a simple and charming take on authority abused and innocence bewildered, so much so that the poet recalls it all these years later. But without the benefit of 60 years, the poem’s assumptions about its readers hits some turbulence. Kids might be intrigued by the poem, yes, but they’re just as likely to be perplexed.

Time does funny things, after all, and not just to truly ancient poems, but one purpose of poetry is to offer snapshots in time, historical records, remembrances—if Proust will forgive me—of things past, such as a first football practice under a gruff, old-school coach.

One that leaves a lasting impression. And a very good poem.

The Art of Writing a Poem’s First Lines

poetry revising poetry writing poetry

In his book The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Ted Kooser writes, “The titles and first few lines of your poem represent the hand you extend in friendship toward your reader. They’re the first exposure he or she has, and you want to make a good impression. You also want to swiftly and gracefully draw your reader in.

“Too often it seems as if, in the poet’s first few lines, he or she is writing toward the poem, including information that is really not essential but is there because it was a part of the event that triggered the poem. It’s the background story, and it may not be necessary for us to know it to appreciate the poem.”

Taking Ted at his word, you can spend days working on your opening lines alone. That’s the good news. The bad news is, you may still have a problem. Ted adds, “One caution, though: We can spend so much effort on our opening lines that sometimes they turn out to be the best part of the poem. We polish and polish and polish them until the rest of the poem feels weak by contrast.”

Beginnings and endings. It doesn’t matter the genre, they tend to bedevil writers more than any middle ground. How do we get the reader’s attention? How do we quickly establish a voice? As for the ending, there has to be something about it–some exclamation point, some brilliant turn of phrase, something unexpectedly delightful.

Is that asking too much?

To put opening lines to the Kooser-standards test, I randomly pulled ten poetry books from my shelf, then randomly opened to a page. Here are ten openings (first four lines). Which ones would YOU say best follow the Kooser rules?

Of memory, the unhappy man’s home. / How to guess time of night by listening to one’s own heartbeat. / Why we can’t see the end of our nose. / On the obscurity of words and clarity of things.
Brooklyn’s too cold tonight / & all my friends are three years away. / My mother said I could be anything / I wanted–but I chose to live.
Here is a coast; here is a harbor; / here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery: / impractically shaped and–who knows?–self-pitying mountains, / sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery
Stress of his anger set me back / To musing over time and space. / The apple branches dripping black / Divided light across his face.
Our talk, our books / riled the shore like bullheads / at the roots of the luscious / large water lily
He climbed to the top / of one of those million white pines / set out across the emptying pastures / of the fifties — some program to enrich the rich
Into the mute and blue- / green marble mailbox my dust deserves to go, / though not for that which I’m going. / I deserve to go, and not alone,
In those days you could buy a pagan baby for five dollars, / the whole class saved up. And when you bought it / you could name it Joseph, Mary, or Theresa, the class took a vote. / But on the day I brought in the five dollars”
Then my mind goes back to the summer rental, / the stairs down into the earth — I descend them / and turn, and pass the washing machine, and go / into the bedroom, one wall the solid
Jaspar, feldspar, quartzite, agate, granite, sandstone, slate. / Some can be rounded, some not. / Some can be flaked, some not. / A person, too, holds her lines of possible fracture.

Granted, I did not seek out the best of these books, I just opened them and planted a finger on a poem. It so happens, of the 10 I picked in this manner, I could only recall one.

So, which is your favorite? Which did you prefer? If you’re looking for titles and authors, they are below. Any surprises?

“Late-Night Chat” by Charles Simic
“Thanksgiving 2006” by Ocean Vuong
“Arrival at Santos” by Elizabeth Bishop
“The Revelation” by James Wright
“Club 26” by Lorine Niedecker
“Fergus Falling” by Galway Kinnell
“Ode While Awaiting Execution” by Thomas Lux
“Buying the Baby” by Marie Howe
“Sea-Level Elegy” by Sharon Olds
“Jaspar, Feldspar, Quartzite” by Jane Hirshfield

The Poetry Home Repair Manual Ted Kooser

Annotations from a Chapter on Revision

poetry

Sometimes I’ll read a book, annotate it, and ultimately copy some quotes (I call them “nuggets”) into a journal or, God save us, a Word doc file. This is especially true of nonfiction pieces that purport to have wisdom or advice. I say “purport” not because these books are a fraud, but because you just never know when it comes to wisdom. For one person, it may prove worthless. For another, it may lead to a “Eureka!” (Greek for “Hot damn!”) moment.

Anyway, here are some nuggets of poetic wisdom from Stephen Dobyns’ Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry. I annotated the margins as a means of talking back to Dobyns (not that he was listening), but I’ll leave that part out and let Dobyns have the floor.

“…the first axiom for being a writer is to forgive yourself for writing badly, I learned that no matter how badly I had written, I could make it better.”
“…the poem exists not in that first burst of creativity, but in revision.”
“The shift between composition and revision is the shift from the imaginative to the analytic, the nondiscursive to the discursive, the expansive to the controlled, from freedom to restraint, license to judgment.”
“In letters Rilke condemned his early poetry, meaning poetry he wrote before 1900, saying the poems didn’t have enough patience in them.”
“Rilke’s impatience sprang from a worry about how the poem would end. Most of us do the same. I’ve got it rolling, I think, but where is it going? This is where Rilke said he didn’t wait long enough. He would force an ending that sounded good, but it didn’t resolve the poem. Many poets do this.”
“A common revision tool is to rewrite the poem using that last line as the first line to see what might happen.”
“Don’t let the critical mind interfere with the creative; make it wait.”
“After the poet has spent a fair amount of time with the poem, things begin to seem obvious that perhaps would not be obvious to the reader, or things may seem strident that are really only in the middle range of emotion.”
“All poets hate to be called ‘too obvious,’ and so they may erase necessary material. The poet may also begin to mute his or her voice. This is usually destructive. Try to read from the reader’s point of view to see whether you are muting your voice or you’ve cut out necessary bits and pieces.”
“A wide variety of interior forces also affect one’s writings, such as emotions, physical well-being or the lack of it, and the complicated effects of the unconscious. All can diminish free will.”
“If there is a discrepancy between what one wants and what is on the page, it can be helpful to write out a prose description of one’s intention and then compare the results to the draft of the poem.”
“…a reader comes to understand a poem by asking questions of it, and one question is: ‘Why does this poem have this shape rather than another?'”
“Stanzas of equal length can create a sense of orderliness; stanzas of unequal length can create a sense of an organic development; one long unbroken stanza can create a sense of unrelenting thought and/or narrative. The shape of the poem creates certain expectations that are useful to its understanding. The poet needs to make use of this, or at least give the poem a shape that doesn’t distract.”
“…for instance, if the title is several words drawn from an important part of the poem, then when the reader reaches that part of the poem, those words take on special emphasis.”
“Labels are often the weakest titles because they don’t do enough work.”
“But if, after a number of readings, nothing is clarified by the title, then the reader will be frustrated, not to say irritated.”
“…in looking at the beginning of one’s poem, one has to ask why it starts where it starts. What if it began with the third line, or the tenth, or the last? Sometimes the first few lines serve as a runway into the important part of the poem. They were useful once, but are useful no more.”
“You need to question your use of chronological sequence. Start with the action, start with something that takes the reader’s attention. Editors are swamped with submissions, and when they read, they mostly are looking for a reason to stop reading.”

Next word best word Stephen Dobyns

Poems About Sickness

my poems poetry The Indifferent World

In the northeast, summer’s approaching its landing strip and everyone seems to be sneezing and coughing. Mostly colds. Some early-bird flus. And the occasional, will-it-never-end occurrence of Covid. Luckily, I’m only dealing with a minor oh-so-common cold, but it’s slowed me down with its favored weapon, the sinus headache.

So instead of some deep, thoughtful, controversial, mind-provoking (all right, enough with the thesaurus) post, today I offer up a poem from my first collection, The Indifferent World.

It’s about the brothers common and cold when they stay too long, and you know what Mark Twain (or was it Ben Franklin?) once said about guests: Like fish, they begin to stink in three days.

Head Cold
by Ken Craft

The head stands amazed,
harboring labyrinths of lead,

Minotaur of mucus
struggling to ford rivers

that forgot their flow.
Mythical horns scratch

glyphs across the sinal
Lascaux, itching,

yearning for escape
through impassable passages:

eyes branched in red
lightning, nose non-negotiable,

mouth agog and dug dry
with rhythmic rushes of air.

Whew. I am impressed with my allusions (Lascaux? Really?) and especially with my vocabulary (I’m looking up “glyphs” again even as I type). But I get the idea. The head is occupied by some virus, and the virus is making itself feel at home, like some squatter acting with impunity (think of an Orange Cheeto in the White House).

The question is, does writing about sickness make you feel better? It forces you to think about your malady, and all the evidence is at hand (or in the head) for material to write about, so I say it’s a definite maybe. And no, it’s not a cure, but it’s a mighty distraction, and distraction is a popular thing these days (usually as compensation for the daily authoritarian news).

Conclusion: If you’re feeling ill, write about it. Then sanitize the keyboard, won’t you? It’s only polite.

“I Chose To Stay”

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Watching televised coverage of Hell on Earth—a.k.a. the Effects of Global Warming as seen in a wildfire, hurricane, or floating ice shelf near you—I am always struck by those who make like Bartleby the Scrivener and “choose not to.” Leave, in this case.

Stubborn? Stupid? Principled? We can agree to disagree, but we can also agree that it makes interesting fodder to chew on.

And what about us? Put in similar straights, watching the majority around us act one way, would we go against the grain or fall in? Somehow, we’re not sure until we get there (and, in many ways, hope we never get there).

The poet Marge Piercy found choosing to stay notable enough to write about. She starts with robins and whales, then moves on to people to show that such behaviors are part of nature and not particular to humans.

Remnants Still Visible
Marge Piercy

Robins migrate, all schoolchildren
learn but here on the Cape, every
winter a flock forms and stays,
long frigid months after their
compatriots have flown south.

They live deep in the woods on
hips and berries wizened by cold.
Sometimes they appear here
among the feeder birds, one
or two almost outcasts.

Off Alaska when humpback whales
leave in fall as the waters freeze
and the world turns white, heading
for mating grounds off Hawaii
and Mexico, certain whales remain.

What makes a creature stay when
almost all of its kind have moved on?
In burned-out areas of Detroit,
you’ll notice one house still wears
curtains, a bike locked to the porch.

Sometimes in the suburbs among
tract houses with carpets of grass
one farmhouse lurks, maybe even
with a barn. I imagine its owner
grey and stubborn, still growing

the best tomatoes for miles, refusing
to plant inedible grass, fighting
neighbors about her chickens,
a rooster who crows at four,
her clothesline a flag of defiance.

Note how stanza four starts with the central question, the catalyst for creativity in the first place: “What makes creatures stay when / almost all of its kind have moved on?”

I remember reading Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust book, Night. His family and fellow Jews had all kinds of warnings about the approach of the Nazis and consequences that might follow when they marched into his hometown, yet his family and the vast majority of the rest chose to stay. It’s hardwired.

As for Piercy, the much simpler example is the farmer who refuses to yield to suburban sprawl and its silly neighborhood covenants (e.g. Thou shalt not have a clothes line where public eyes can see the horror of it all).

In this case, you almost want to cheer for her rooster and that “flag of defiance” known as wind-flapping underwear and brassieres.

Now pass the tomatoes.

"Remnants Still Visible" Marge Piercy

“Catching Grain Through Spread Fingers”

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You may think it strange that I annotate magazines, but sometimes, thumbing through them afterwards, I enjoy revisiting certain lines. The sentences and paragraphs I choose are not necessarily pithy like an adage or purposeful like a sage. Sometimes they just strike me and the reason is, as the French say, je ne sais quoi.

For example, I saved the September/October 2019 issue of Poets & Writers because I had annotated these lines from a piece called “The New Nonfiction 2019”:

“I could not know then that it would take me nearly two decades to figure out what, exactly, I meant and that some of those ideas would compose my first book. Writing now about the experience of making this book feels like catching grain through spread fingers—almost but not quite like magic, since we know the best writing work is the hardest labor. It is still painful to remember much of it. To note all of the things that no one told me before I plunged: the tarrying loneliness of making a book; the confidence that waxes and wanes (mostly wanes); and the urgent matter of finding one’s tribe, so that when you realize the vast distance between starting and finishing and threaten to quit they can remind you that James Baldwin said, ‘Deep water and drowning are not the same thing.'” — Sarah M. Broom, author of The Yellow House (Grove Press, August)

“Before I wrote essays, I used to string together pretty sentences I’d call stories and then wait around for the world’s admiration. It was kind of like riding my bike through a parade in sunny weather but with a creeping sense that something wasn’t right. After college I discovered the essay and found a way into the real work—the hard work—I’d always wanted to do. I loved the scrappy elasticity of the essay, loved spending time in this place where you bring everything along, where you can fashion your own complicated misfit from some combination of a first-person perspective and the bizarre raw materials of the world. I even liked how, for a while there at least, the essay was not really capital-L literature, or not quite pure. My position was: ‘If you need me, I’ll be in the shadows working on my bastard art.’ Even now, writing essays gives me permission—to drag strange things home without explanation, to bring together disparate worlds, to live offline with my secrets.” –Krista Eastman, author of The Painted Forest (West Virginia University Press, October)

And from an interview of Ben George, senior editor at Little, Brown, in a piece called “Agents & Editor,” I noted this:

“Sadly, it’s a primary part of the job—falling in love with a book and getting your heart broken because someone else acquires it yet managing to keep your heart open for the next great book.”

(Nota bene: I loved the idea of an editor getting his heart broken instead of a writer. That happens? I asked. Of course it does. And every writer, for inspiration, should imagine a big-time editor losing out on his or her manuscript because some other publisher scooped it up first. This image is a long way from the more concrete one of boilerplate rejection emails.)

“I also don’t think a writer should ever make a change to a book that doesn’t in her gut feel like the right change to make. In an editorial letter from the novelist and New Yorker editor William Maxwell to Eudora Welty, Maxwell once said, simply, ‘I trust you to be firm about the unhelpful suggestions.’ I’ve always remembered that.”

(Nota bene: Note my attraction to quotes that empower writers who, by their very nature, are used to rejection.”)

“Look, every day we hope to read an amazing novel. Editors are first and foremost just readers who are moved and delighted by books. And the editor’s greatest desire is to bring an exquisite book to readers.”

(Nota bene: Amen, Mr. Just Reader. Amen! May I someday write a book that delights not only you, but both Little and Brown!)