Poem: Blue star highway

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Blue star highway

For a few weeks of summer I drive
or ride my bike between blue chicory flowers,
like lookouts by the wayside. Two redwing
blackbirds chase a crow from the field
across the road. They guard
their own world, unlocked as it is.

What kingdom is this
I ride through, fenced with blue sentinels,
thin and frail, who keep nothing in, nothing
out, common blue stitches in a common cloth
of earth, their roots harvested for poor
prisoners’ coffee, the brew of everyman,
everywoman. What love

like a crossroads
is here where the human with
nature and spirit meet, what crucibles
forged these stars, glaze of tiles,
calm blue flames lighting the path
into Beauty, into the star of self,

the kingdom where the commoner
is royal, and the redwing blackbird
is farmer-king who scoffs his wing at me
incredulously as I snap their picture,
kneeling, as if for knighthood,
when he has work to do.

Note: "Blue flower" is a symbol in Romanticism of inspiration, desire, longing for beauty, and the thinking and feeling self, as first introduced by Novalis in his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen. For more information about blue flower, including what it represented for C.S. Lewis, read the wiki article here.

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Seamus Heaney: "Digging" in Ireland

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Portrait of Seamus Heaney (b. 1939), by Peter Edwards

National Portrait Gallery, London;
I have a postcard of this painting
taped to my file cabinet at work.

For St. Patrick's Day stores are sprouting plastic shamrocks, a paltry substitute for the island rock of green that grows deep down in many of us, even if we're not Irish: green and purple hills, icy lakes, soft woolen caps, pocked stone fences and crosses, rain on the roof, a fiddle, a fire on the hearth, a glass of stout, a never-ending talker on the other side of the table, an old history of pain and struggle, faith, and writing. A smile, a song and a lament.

Poet Seamus Heaney is a lighthouse in an island country cultivated with literary lighthouses. He was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland, and many of his poems are rooted there in the rural countryside of his childhood. I just love this one, one of his most famous, about his father the digger. See how he alludes to a gun, which was a familiar and ugly character in the Northern Ireland of his youth. In the YouTube video is a montage of clips in which he recites "Digging" in many different venues, at different ages, with different timbres in his voice. Think of that. One life, one family, one man, one poet, who harvests and feeds us riches like this, in and out of just one poem. Oh my dear friends, the world in one person! See the spade and hear it slide into the wet dirt. Smell the iron, the wet steel, the potato mold. Feel the hands of father and son, one with a shovel and one with a pen. Hear the pen, Heaney's shovel, that digs for sustenance, and replants it too, to come up for us again and again, like Swift, Wilde, Beckett, Lewis, Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, and a lot of other pen-diggers. (There are no women in my list, for I have not studied Irish women writers, but here is a list to explore; no doubt you could help me too.)

After the video, I've lined up my own St. Patrick's Day parade of photos taken over two summers, 2006 and 2007, while I helped students traipse around Dublin, Killarney and Cork. I have not been to Northern Ireland, or I would share scenes from those counties. Six out of thirty-two Irish counties are in Northern Ireland. As you probably already know, Southern Ireland became the Irish Free State in 1922, now known as the Republic of Ireland, and is no longer part of the United Kingdom. I knew Ireland as the Celtic Tiger in the mid 2000s high-tech boom, but now, Ireland has the highest ratio of household debt relative to income of any developed country in the world. I really feel for those young families who thought prosperity would last forever. As Roger Cohen recently said, maybe it's time for "emotional prosperity" since the financial kind is becoming a thing of the past for many of us.

Digging

   by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.


- from Death of a Naturalist (1966)

 Students on study abroad program, Cork

Graveyard on the Hill of Slane, site of St. Patrick's Paschal Fire

County Meath, Ireland

Killarney National Park

County Kerry

 Residential neighborhood
Kinsale, County Cork

 Cork, County Cork

Kinsale, County Cork

 Trinity College, Dublin, County Dublin

 Killarney National Park
County Cork
The sheeps' heads are red, not because they are Irish redheads, 
or because they are bleeding, but they are marked by their owners

 Killarney National Park
County Cork

 Street in Cobh, County Cork

Window in Cork, County Cork

 Blarney Castle, County Cork

Ha'penny Bridge, Dublin

 My dear friend of the mind-heart, Inge,
at Four Knocks, the 5000 year-old passage tomb
in County Meath; Inge taught on the study abroad program

Me, photographed by Inge, who taught in the program in 2007,
looking at abstract art in the 5000 year-old passage tomb
at Four Knocks, County Meath

Beech tree in the church yard at Tara
County Meath

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Dickens' Christmas Spirit

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Not having taken part in any of the true miseries known to man, I only know about them through words and images shared by others. The plight of the poor throughout history, and now on the very planet I inhabit, is beyond the comprehension of someone like me who lives in the best of comfort and health. As I prepared this post, I read about the Poor Laws in Britain’s history, fascinating and horrifying. (You can read a good wiki article about Britain’s Poor Laws here.) The New Poor Law of 1834, enacted a decade before Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, was a huge legislation to ensure that no one would receive relief from poverty outside the parish workhouses, which were intentionally kept miserable so that a person wouldn’t be tempted to rely on them out of indolence. Dickens himself had to work at a factory as a child, and the anguish he experienced remained with him his whole life, infusing it in his novels that are so poignantly sympathetic to the poor.

Earlier the same year that he published A Christmas Carol . . .

Dickens was keenly touched by the lot of poor children . . . In early 1843, he toured the Cornish tin mines where he saw children working in appalling conditions. The suffering he witnessed there was reinforced by a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several London schools set up for the education of the capital's half-starved, illiterate street children. Inspired by the February 1843 parliamentary report exposing the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon poor children called Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission, Dickens planned in May 1843 to publish an inexpensive political pamphlet tentatively titled, "An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child" but changed his mind, deferring the pamphlet's production until the end of the year. He wrote to Dr. Southwood Smith, one of four commissioners responsible for the Second Report, about his change in plans: "[Y]ou will certainly feel that a Sledge hammer has come down with twenty times the force – twenty thousand times the force – I could exert by following out my first idea." The pamphlet would become A Christmas Carol. (Copied from this wiki article)

After re-watching the 1938 film "A Christmas Carol" with Reginald Owen on the weekend, I was reminded what the magic and mystery of Christmas is. We have the Christmas energy inside us all the time, all the love we have ever encountered with family, friends and even strangers. The joy of human connection, even in the most dire of circumstances, even when we are surrounded by greed. The possibility that with the right outlook, joy is always possible, and can always be spread to another. At Christmas, we pull out our lifetime of stored love when we re-open Christmas boxes. White lights remind us of stars that have shone on every man and woman in history – the same stars. Imagine. We are all one human organism. The magic we share is available outside of Christmas! For some, it seems especially hidden at Christmas. What a shame, if we forget it after Christmas, or miss it during Christmas when it is eclipsed by commercialism.

For me, old decorations and illustrations bring out a special nostalgic feeling that makes Christmas special. I am a big fan of Arthur Rackham (good bio here), the British illustrator who was hugely successful at the turn of the 20th century known for his "depictions of gnomes, goblins, witches, and fairies, as well as his anthropomorphized trees," so I am posting five of his illustrations for the 1915 edition of A Christmas Carol, along with a few quotes from Dickens’ classic novel. Can you imagine a world without this story? Apparently the greeting “Merry Christmas” was first used after this novel. 

Bob Cratchit went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, 
twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve.

Nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing-gown,

which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude against the wall

"If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"

"How now?" said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever

"What do you want with me?"

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all out kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us."

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in

restless haste and moaning as they went

Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea -- on, on -- until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in their several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another on that day than on any day in the year; and had shared to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those he cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted to remember him.

Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig

The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.


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"It's Christmas Day!" said Scrooge to himself. "I haven't missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can."


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"A merry Christmas, Bob!" said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. "A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year! I'll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit."
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Thirteen ways

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The Jungfrau in Switzerland is one of dozens of primary peaks of the Bernese Alps,

where I am standing in 1975 during my college study trip mentioned in the last post.

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

~ from the poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" written in thirteen haiku-ish stanzas and published in 1917, was one of the first poems Diane Wakoski taught in my poetry class (in East Lansing, not Lauterbrunnen, alas). Thirteen Ways is an imagistic poem, a Modern (as in, the period) way of writing poems with clear, sharp language, unlike the focus on lyricism of the previous so-called Romantic period. Another famous Modern imagistic poem is Ezra Pound's short two-lines "In a Station of the Metro," written four years earlier after Pound was touched by a visual moment coming out of a Paris metro train:

    

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

It's so zen. William Carlos Williams, another Modernist, suggested that when writing good poems there are no ideas but in things. In other words, paint images with things instead of descriptions. Show, don't tell.

Back to Thirteen Ways. Marvel-ous as our eyes are, we can't see twenty snowy mountains all at once. Our eyes have to scan gradually. We can't see the eye of the blackbird either, in a scene like that. Our brains are censoring what we perceive every second. I suppose most often our eye catches what is moving, like that blackbird's eye, if the moving thing is big enough to be perceived. But we can imagine the scene painted by Stevens in that stanza. It's one of the thirteen ways he paid attention to a blackbird. I've posted the whole poem below. I hear you sigh, either out of bliss, or out of poetry fatigue. Is it long? you ask. See, about the different ways?

Feel the mystery in each way he looks. In some of his lines I don't know what he means. What is Haddam, without looking it up? But it doesn't really matter, when he writes:

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

Because he's not just writing about looking at a blackbird. Bien sur. We live in days of change and mayhem and people knowing about it like we've never known before, more than the terrible decade of WWI when these poems were written. There are "thirteen" ways of looking at anything. I kind of like how that slows things down.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

by Wallace Stevens

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

Terresa's sensual womanly-writerly post Random Marigolds and Yosemites reminded me of this poem this week, which led to the post. 

Read more Wallace Stevens poems here. My favorite is The Snow Man, because I have a mind of winter too.

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cross cultural rhubarb & my peeps

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I had been picking rhubarb and strawberries, making pie and photographing the process (hahaha, only a blogger) during Memorial Day weekend, nagging myself: If you post at sync about making a beautiful pie you might mislead people into thinking you are like Nigella Lawson (the British food maven who showed me that food is sensual). You are not like her, except that you love food.

I'm not going to show you all my "warts", but I also don't want to misrepresent the facts.

So I was happy for something to synchronize with strawberry-rhubarb pie and divert from oh-aren't-I-a-food-goddess fantasies when I read something about Samuel Pepys in the Writer's Almanac on Memorial Day. Thanks to Lorenzo, I resubscribed to the Writer's Almanac. I like reading the poems Keillor picks, and also the literary birthdays and histories. The May 31st post said it was the last day Samuel Pepys wrote in his famous diary, in 1669.

This jiggled loose two 1975 London eating memories, one with my peeps, I mean Pepys, and the other with rhubarb.

When I was little, our neighbor had rhubarb growing in the back yard. Jimmie and I used to go out in May and pick and munch a stalk right there, its sourness making our faces twist up like this just born punk rhubarb head in Don's garden this spring, below.

Raw rhubarb is an adventure, but I love rhubarb best in pie with strawberries. Rhubarb feels gritty on your teeth, especially raw. Even in a pie by itself, it has a texture that makes your teeth feel like the enamel just dissolved. But when it's paired with strawberries, the grittiness goes away.

At the end of the summer that I turned 14, I sat on the cabbage rose carpeted floor of my parents' house (which by the way had been Jimmie's, the one with the rhubarb, whose grand-in-a-soul-sense house we bought when I turned 12) while my brother Bennett showed slides on a big screen of his tour through Europe on a history study program with his college. I vowed sitting there under the snow-covered Jungfrau that I would go on that same trip when I was in college. The summer I turned 19, after one year of college in Illinois, I hopped on a plane with twenty-some students from Boston and fulfilled my vow getting my brand new passport stamped in 10 countries over an eight week period. Those were the days of eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of the backs of vans, sleeping in campgrounds outside Paris and Amsterdam, crawling out of the sleeping bag and tent and stepping in a cow pie, with Elsie the cow chewing grass ten feet from my face.

I was somewhat prepared for Europe to be different than the U.S., where English was not the native language. But I didn't expect England to feel as different as it did, which resulted in my having more culture shock there than in other places. How could we speak the same language but have so many different words for things, like lorry for truck and jumper for cardigan sweater?

London came in the second of eight weeks, and I was already feeling a tad homesick. My friend and I found an inexpensive restaurant on a London street, and when I saw rhubarb pie on the menu, I felt like my parents' back yard was behind me, and I asked for some. "They have rhubarb in England!" I declared. Little did I know that Europeans had it first and took it to America with them back in the day. (When I say "first," I mean before us Americans. The Chinese had rhubarb thousands of years before any of us.) The rhubarb tart was warm and served with warm custard in a small white pitcher on the side to pour over it. I had never in my life had warm custard on anything, and it was fabulous. Boxed instant vanilla pudding does not translate into this experience. There was something in that moment that morphed home and foreign into something new inside me.

It's funny, the things that educate you about life. I first heard of Samuel Pepys and his diary at a restaurant with his name. When you're 19 and trying to make your pocket money last for eight weeks, visiting shops and museums and falling in love with things that have price tags, you eat a lot of street food, like white cheese, tomato and butter sandwiches on baguettes. I had never eaten or seen a tomato and cheese sandwich, had I even had cheese other than plastic cheese known as American? Nor had I ever eaten tomato, butter and bread in one bite. I liked it. I liked it more than Miracle Whip, and at least as much as mayonnaise. But one evening some of us decided to splurge and make reservations at the Samuel Pepys restaurant overlooking the Thames River after a play in the theater district. I felt sophisticated eating a prime piece of British cow with my new Boston friends, dressed up in the one dress I'd packed in the suitcase between one pair of cut-off jeans, one pair of straight-leg red-tab Levi's, three t-shirts and a sweater for the summer, as we dined by candle light with flickering London lights reflected in the river outside. I remember John-of-the-khaki-pants, the bearded student who never wore blue jeans because he wanted to be different, pontificating about Samuel Peeps when we entered the restaurant and saw pages of the diary under glass. I saw how Peeps was spelled, and I silently learned that even English names can sound nothing like they appear.

And that weird spelling of that other word with a silent letter, the "h" in rhubarb? The Online Etymology Dictionary says:

rhubarb - c.1390, from O.Fr. rubarbe, from M.L. rheubarbarum, from Gk. rha barbaron "foreign rhubarb," from rha "rhubarb" (associated with Rha, ancient Scythian name of the River Volga) + barbaron, neut. of barbaros "foreign." Grown in China and Tibet, it was imported into ancient Europe by way of Russia. Spelling altered in M.L. by association with rheum. European native species so called from 1650. Baseball slang meaning "loud squabble on the field" is from 1938, of unknown origin, said to have been first used by broadcaster Garry Schumacher. Perhaps connected with use of rhubarb as a word repeated by stage actors to give the impression of hubbub or conversation (attested from 1934).

Rhubarb is a great world traveler, starting in China at least 2,000 years BC. You can read more about the history of rhubarb, including Marco Polo's excitement about finding it in China, because Europeans were crazy for Chinese rhubarb's medicinal qualities, here. 

I leave you with the recipe for rhubarb pie. The version with strawberries is toward the bottom. Oh, and you know how you can find anything on the Internet? Here is a site with daily readings from Samuel Pepys' diary.

-Betty Crocker

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cold winter nights

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In January Michigan is cold. This week the whole U.S. has had a cold snap, with even the Orange Bowl football game being played in Miami in forty-something degrees fahrenheit (around 10°C). But that's far from normal, whereas here in The North, 0°F (-17°C) is not uncommon this month and next. When Mr. North Wind bottoms it out with some wind chill, staying warm is an art. Out in the country we have a propane gas tank that feeds our forced air furnace ducts that web into the walls of the house, but we try to keep the front half of the house where we live warm with heat from the wood stove, allowing us to turn down the thermostat and save propane. This means the rest of the house is chilly.

If you are truly of The North and love it as I do, this is perfect for bedtime, because where I sleep must be chilled - in fairy tale proportions. So for instance if Hansel and Grethel were sleeping in a cold room, a Grimm might have written something like -

The fire had gone out, and the air became colder every hour that the hands on the clock moved around the face's numbers. The brother and sister huddled together under their shared thin blanket, hoping to catch some heat from each other and fall asleep before morning. But there was one good thing about being too cold to sleep. They were alert to plan their escape.

But that isn't how it was in the wicked witch's cottage. She had fed them and was plumping them up to be eaten. After a supper of pancakes with sugar, milk, apples and nuts they were tucked into a warm bed for a cozy sleep, unaware of their impending doom. See? If they were cold they might have been more wary.



100% wool blankets made by the Orr felt and blanket company of Piqua, Ohio (pronounced pick-wah) could have been a blanket fairy tale children would cover themselves with. When I pull out this old blanket I feel like a child of an old time. Wool has been the warm weave for centuries, unlike microfibers in comforters nowadays, which are very nice and warm but just don't have the same aesthetic. However one blanket is never enough, and I don't put a wool blanket directly on top of the sheet, because it is too itchy and scratchy, even through a sheet. It's better at the foot of the bed in case I wake up freezing and need an extra layer against the frost.



On dark winter nights it is nice to turn pages of Grimm's Household Fairy Tales, illustrated by R ANDRÉ under a warm fleece blanket by the wood stove. Snow-White and Rose-Red welcome a big black bear in out of the cold to warm up by their fire. Evil dwarves and wicked Queens are always stealing or selling, and usually plotting to kill somebody, sometimes to eat them - all pretty scary and grimm.


When it's time for bed there are those uncomfortably Siberian minutes getting undressed, washing my face, brushing teeth, thinking about how cold the sheets will be. This makes me remember sleeping in a three hundred year old stone cottage in the Scottish Highlands outside a village called Lairg on Loch Shin in November 1980. They kept each room's door closed and only heated them as needed. So our bedroom was freezing - more than even I could stand - but there was a heated mattress pad in the bed waiting for us after painfully undressing in the Frigidaire - I mean frigid air.

When one of you goes to bed before the other, or sleeps alone, there must be some strategy for warmth. I don't care for electrically heated pads or blankets. I like a heavy pile of three or four blankets that doesn't move when I do - first the sheet, which needs to be dense weave cotton, no polyester, then a soft cushy fleece, then a heavy cotton quilt, then a flannel blanket and maybe the Orr wool, and if it's any warmer than 60-63°F (15-17°C), I get too hot. Perfect is having your body toasty and your face cool. The heavy blankets feel protective when you've just read grim and scary stories too, I think, but I don't want the story too scary to stick out my foot in case I get too warm.

The Orr felt and blanket company and Pendleton started making blankets in the 19th century, and during World War II both made hundreds of thousands of drab green army blankets for soldiers. I picture them not being able to get quite warm enough under one thin wool army blanket on cold winter nights, and that's no fairy tale.



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Carol Ann Duffy: first female Poet Laureate of Britain

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Not that I was paying any attention to who were British poets laureate up till now (don't mean to sound proud of that), but for the first time in 341 years the Brits have honored a woman as poet laureate. John Dryden 1631-1700, below, was the first. (Others were Tennyson, Wordsworth, Ted Hughes. It is a surprisingly short list - 19 - considering the span of time, but since appointments were for life, some served decades after their appointments.) The New York Times piece about Duffy's ten-year appointment is here. The news has been out a while, but I had stopped reading newspapers online when my job got stressful in March. Do you do that? Stop reading the news when you're blinded with stress? Then I got happily distracted by the upcoming wedding. Anyway, I started writing this back in May, and it kept getting pushed to the back burner. So it's old news by now, but maybe you missed it.

A Scottish playwright, poet and children's story writer (including adaptations of stories by the Brothers Grimm), as well as Creative Director of the Manchester Metropolitan University's Writing School, Duffy calls herself “a poet and a mother — that’s all” and is both popular and brilliant. Apparently she took the job only because she would be the first woman in the role.

Meager book reader that I am - so no reflection on her or her popularity - I had neither heard of Duffy nor read any of her poems. If I lived in the UK I would have known her as the most popular poet for the past decade. I see that she has written some wonderful, edgy story poems, some of them about imagined wives of famous men.

Four things I found out about Carol Ann Duffy that interest me:

• She's 53, close to my age.
• She was considered for the job of poet laureate ten years ago, but they didn't choose her because she is a Lesbian. (Wow, first female and first openly gay person in the role.) But she says the media have been making too much of this, and she's tired of the imagined controversy. (Andrew Motion was picked that round.)
  
• She's a mom - to 13-year-old, Ella. (Ella's father is the writer, Peter Benson, which indicates she is actually bi-sexual. NOTE: thank you for the correction in your comment, Ginnie. This does not necessarily indicate that.)
  
• Besides her annual salary of 5,700 pounds, she will get a traditional reward of a "butt of sack" — about 600 bottles of sherry, donated by the Sherry Institute of Spain (Ten Star Tapas is their online guide for cooking with sherry). Back when Dryden received his butt of sack, dark libraries with roaring fires were full of men mumbling in flat British dialogue, fingers pinching sherry glasses. I wonder what she'll do with it. Maybe she'd share some with me after the wedding when it's time to relax. I would want a fino, dry and light, none of that sweet Jerez Dulce. Remember Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado"? Amontillado is a bit darker than fino, because it is exposed to oxygen. I digress.
  

Her most famous collection of poems - it does sound intriguing - is the 1999 The World's Wife, a skeptical view of "great men" from the view of their wives, like Queen Herod, or Pope Joan, Mrs Lazarus and Mrs Foust. Mrs Darwin's words: "Seventh of April 1952, Went to the zoo. I said to him, 'Something about that chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.'"

Duffy's popularity with even teenagers in Britain, and now the attention she's garnering for being the first woman poet laureate (and the first openly gay one), seem to set her up nicely to educate the masses that poetry matters - as her predecessor Andrew Motion put it, poetry isn't a "weird addition to life but a primitive thing at the centre of life." In these days of Twitter poetry (hey, President Obama digs Urdu poetry; when did he have time to learn Urdu? I think it shouldn't be read in translation; I digress again) Duffy can remind us that poems should be NEW, kick us in the pants, shake up our brain synapses and leave us wondering why we never saw the world like that before - and yet as if you always knew it. But I'm not going to toss out my 17th Century Prose & Poetry anthology from college, which contains Dryden's essays, and also one of my favorite poems: "Upon Julia's Clothes" by Robert Herrick. Pretty sexy for 17th century (though Herrick died a bachelor). Oh wait. Shakespeare already showed us the 17th century was sexy.

UPON JULIA'S CLOTHES

by Robert Herrick

WHENAS in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free ;
O how that glittering taketh me !

If you don't like or usually read poems, why not give it a go? This is history, my dear. Well, and that's the name of one of Duffy's poems - rather heavy. Read it and feel something shift.

History

She woke up old at last, alone,
bones in a bed, not a tooth
in her head, half dead, shuffled
and limped downstairs
in the rag of her nightdress,
smelling of pee.

Slurped tea, stared
at her hand--twigs, stained gloves--
wheezed and coughed, pulled on
the coat that hung from a hook
on the door, lay on the sofa,
dozed, snored.

She was History.
She'd seen them ease him down
from the Cross, his mother gasping
for breath, as though his death
was a difficult birth, the soldiers spitting,
spears in the earth;

been there
when the fisherman swore he was back
from the dead; seen the basilicas rise
in Jerusalem, Constantinople, Sicily; watched
for a hundred years as the air of Rome
turned into stone;

witnessed the wars,
the bloody crusades, knew them by date
and by name, Bannockburn, Passchendaele,
Babi Yar, Vietnam. She'd heard the last words
of the martyrs burnt at the stake, the murderers
hung by the neck,

seen up-close
how the saint whistled and spat in the flames,
how the dictator strutting and stuttering film
blew out his brains, how the children waved
their little hands from the trains. She woke again,
cold, in the dark,

in the empty house.
Bricks through the window now, thieves
in the night. When they rang on her bell
there was nobody there; fresh graffiti sprayed
on her door, shit wrapped in a newspaper posted
onto the floor.