Weaving a New Eden
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- An orchard spider lowers itself on a strand of silk from ceiling to sink as I prepare to wash my face. Hygiene is neglected. 2012-04-17
- An abundance of locust blossoms, a hayfield in windrows, a few fresh bales, a flat smiley-face balloon tied to a post, blows in the wind. 2012-04-16
- Sunlight angling over the cistern spotlights a few heads of Johnson grass. They sway in the breeze, silent gospel singers. 2012-04-09
- The day breaks gray and chill. A mourning dove calls once and is quiet. A dead limb hangs in the top of the cedar. 2012-04-08
- The dogwood blares its white purity in a world of primary colors: green grass, blue sky, yellow sun. 2012-04-08
- The moon hangs east like a washed-out Wal-Mart smiley face. Clouds are tinged the faintest pink from the setting sun. 2012-04-06
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Recent Comments
- sherry: Oh Gary, I can get there, like running down to the package store, but I still won’t be there.
- sherry: Thank you, Vada. I almost didn’t put this up, having decided it was really sort of silly. Now I’m glad I did because here you are making a comment. I love it! The story is meant...
- Vada Johnson: Sherry, I enjoyed reading this beginning. The dialogue flows very naturally, in fact much like a movie/TV script. I can see Buck clearly and imagine Odella in her role as a woman...
- Gary Greer: Sherry, Regarding “there,” is that something you can get? As, for example, I am going to get there before long. And if it is, is long, too, something you can get, especially...
- Yousei Hime: Thank you for the mention. I’ve really enjoyed being a part of Couplets. I’ll look around here before I go too.
- sherry: And I will be there who has never been there, Gary. Thanks for knowing my poem.
- Gary Greer: The images of “Evening Song” are surprisingly apt for E. 4th St. between Aves. A and B. two blocks north of what used to be “there” for me. And there was plenty...
My Other Books
Who?
Last week, in a post called Three Ways of Looking at Poetry, I linked to three different blog posts that dealt, more or less, with what each poster thought poetry was for.
To that conversation now, I’d like to add Fleda Brown’s Who I Write For, a “rant” which begins:
I have been reading the recent omnibus book review by my friend Kevin Clark in The Georgia Review. Kevin is always smart, perceptive, and open to many kinds of poetry. Here is what he has to say about one book of poems in which, he acknowledges, it’s difficult to tell what’s happening or even who’s speaking: “We can’t be sure of the details, and therefore we can’t contextualize the speaker’s problem.”
He goes on to generously explain this poet’s work by saying that he realizes that in her poems, the poet wants to “demonstrate pandemic victimization and she wants to personalize such suffering—but she doesn’t want to privilege any one person in such a way that we’ll ignore worldwide troubles.”
In other words, if I hear him right, this poet doesn’t want to make the suffering she depicts in her poems personal, because we might locate suffering in THAT place and not others.
Maybe it’s a good book, maybe not. The poems function like a koan. They mean to disrupt our rational minds. The point of a koan is to open the mind to the truth that both is and isn’t rational. It’s a teaching tool to be used by an awakened teacher.
But the poems in that book are to be read by you and me. The ones I’ve read do not move me. I am not changed by them. I grow tired very quickly of dislocation. I can admire the skill, the variety of expression, the interesting leaps, but honestly, I will never turn back to them.
And I have to steal one more paragraph from Fleda (a great poet, read her stuff!):
My nephew Kevin, who’s written music for Yo-Yo Ma, says that Ma told him he used to think he loved music, but he found it’s people he loves. This is why he’s a great cellist. This is what makes a great poet. In the early stages of writing, there seems to be a need for obliviousness to “effect,” but gradually, we look outward with respect for the other person, the reader.
It goes without saying that Ma is also a great cellist because he has discipline and because he has a deep-seated understanding of the music through which he can speak his love to the people. Love isn’t all. Work is involved. Which I’m sure Fleda Brown takes as a given.
Brown goes on to talk about wisdom, which hits me where I’m vulnerable. I would like somehow to be wise. So I’m tempted to say yes! yes! poetry is distilled wisdom. [Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, right?]
But that statement unfortunately seems to me to speak to the holiness of the poet, and once I start thinking that way, I’m silenced. Because I am no more wise or holy than any other human being. Certainly I’m not deep.
What I am, I hope, is honest. And if I’m honest, I probably have to say I write for myself.
Brown also speaks of being “broken open” [by poetry] so as to feel. By which I infer she means to experience compassion. Yes! I want to say. I love writing that breaks me open. But then, to be honest, I have a deep distrust of writing to the emotions. People’s emotions can be used to manipulate them. Emotional writing can bring people to hatred as quickly as to compassion.
Somewhere there must be a core of ethics.
If the dichotomy is intellect or emotion, well, I sit firmly on the fence.
So why do I write? Who do I write for?
I write because I love the people I write about and want to honor them in all their human complexity — strong and weak.
I write out of vanity. I’m clever and I like to show off.
I write because I love language and love to make something singing out of language that has not been there before.
I write because I have bad hands and can’t play the mandolin.
I write to entertain — and no harm in that.
I write to read — I love to carry an audience with my words. And I believe poetry begins with the breath.
I write because I love names and love to use names in poems.
I write as a sort of spiritual practice. By giving myself over to the language, I can escape ego and, if I’m lucky and good, maybe discover something that will help my spirit to grow.
I write to discover what I think. To quote E. M. Forster: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
If out of this comes some good for you, my reader, then I am delighted and I have served a purpose beyond my own selfish concerns.
But in all honesty, I have to say I don’t write for the purpose of doing good. I think that would kill the wriitng.
I write for myself.
Women, science, poetry
From Mother Earth to Mary Somerville, Mary Alexandra Agner’s The Scientific Method (Parallel Press, 2011) presents the reader with a poetic encyclopedia of the feminine (if not feminist) side of science.
I can’t claim that I’m familiar with most of the women featured: Barbara McClintock, Rosalind Elsie Franklin, Mary Sears, Grace Hopper, Caroline Herschel. Even the one woman I think I know about, Florence Nightingale, is presented not in her familiar form as the pioneering nurse of the Crimean War, but as the statistician who used numbers to argue for more sanitary conditions in health care and hospitals:
Nightingale, sing us the sweet song
of statistics, math made
to improve man’s lot . . .Sing up the ghosts of war
to we who are inured to what remains
after explosives and machine-gun fire.— After Math
These women are oceanographers, computer experts, astronomers — subjects that may seem heavy for poetry. But Agner finds the moment of drama and her way with allusion, alliteration, puns, and received forms makes her verse playful even when it is at it’s most serious — which is the way of poetry.
The dwarves of history don’t come
to carry her casket into canon.
Fairy stories—even scientific ones—
skirt edges, are denied by centers
which cannot hold . . .—Ros’ Final Hike
In between these pioneering women are poems celebrating moss, the short-necked giraffe of the Devonian, and computers:
We squared and we cubed and we plotted
And many lines drew and some dotted
We’ve all developed a complex
Over wine, sex, and f(x)…— The Computers’ Drinking Song
I enjoyed reading these poems, but I really haven’t done the chapbook justice. “What Light I Can Conjure,” the 4-page poem in which Mary Somerville acts as a Virgil-type guide to the world of the dead, one science writer guiding another to a rebirth, is a tour de force of form:
In the tears of my guide and her uneven breath,
I hear pity: this death as my payment. My flesh,
though in pain, still offends by its brightness inmeshed
in this dark. But the shards of my double are fresh
with the spark of her life and they pulse with her breath,the way lave flows flicker and cool. . .
Let me suggest that you read the following reviews, which do the book much more justice than I do. At American Scientist, Sara Glaz Songs of Scientists and at Stone Telling,
Lisa M. Bradley.
Posted in Poets, Reviews
Tagged Florence Nightingale, Mary Alexandra Agner, Mary Somerville, Parallel Press
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My Mother’s Day gifts
Back during National Poetry Month, as part of the Couplets blog tour, I did an interview with Mary Alexandra Agner which she posted as And they were never afraid.
Somehow, to my sorrow and chagrin, I missed the posting of the interview at the time, for which I must apologize to Mary and to my readers. Mary asked some great questions to which I hope I gave some answers worth reading.
And while I’m revisiting National Poetry Month, let me mention again Dave Bonta’s review of Weaving a New Eden. It’s an appreciation, really, and I love it!
Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers. And let me pass on my compassionate sister’s wish:
to the Mothers who have heartaches today may God sustain you and give you strength.
Posted in Poets, Reviews
Tagged Dave Bonta, Mary Alexandra Agner, Publications and Interviews
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Outdated
Once upon a time, defragging was not a program that could be set to run unobtrusively in the background or sometime in the small hours of the night.
The tarradiddle below is a thing I wrote when defragging was like watching paint dry (to coin a phrase):
Jennifer set her computer on defrag
and sat watching the little green squares turn blue
Meanwhile the world traveled thousands of miles through space
Jennifer’s cells died and replaced themselves
Her immune system encapsulated 27 viruses and 250 dust mites
Her subconscious absorbed the constant pulsing noise the computer made
and will feed it back to her next week
as a dream about alien abduction.
Some things to read
Big Changes in Black America?, Darryl Pinckney at the NY Review of Books:
It would seem that although black people are in the mainstream, black history still isn’t, because certain basic things about the history of being black in America—American history—have to be explained again and again. At the end of the Civil War, vast numbers of black men were on the roads looking for work, for sold-off family, for peace. In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, black men who could not prove employment or residence in a town that they happened to be passing through were imprisoned and put to work. Vagrancy laws were a form of social control, much like the war on drugs that Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow (2010)—such an important book—forcefully argues is today’s extension of America’s overseer-style management of black men. Drug laws have always been aimed at minorities.
Two Sassoons [Siegfried & Vidal], Judith Thurman at the New Yorker:
The old Sephardic surname “Sassoon” was shared by two Englishmen who had little in common other than their good looks, their military valor, their love of sport, their glory in separate spheres, and their longevity. For me, however, they had a meaningful relationship.
What I learned about Siegfried from this article is that his family was originally Iraqi.
What I learned about Vidal:
Vidal’s formal education ended at fourteen, in 1942, when he apprenticed himself to a ladies’ hairdresser, in a working-class neighborhood, though in his spare time, he studied elocution, to erase his Cockney accent. Hairdressing was his mother’s idea; she had somehow intuited his talent for it. At seventeen, he joined a militant Jewish underground group that broke up rallies staged by the thuggish followers of Oswald Mosley, the British fascist, earning an epithet from the Telegraph: “the anti-fascist warrior-hairdresser.”
Posted in Feminism, Poets, Politics and Activism, Pop Culture
Tagged racism, Siegfried Sassoon, Vidal Sassoon
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