Poem: Summer labor

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Summer labor

I walked to the house
from the laundry line, the heat
already steamrolling fringes of color out
of the air at nine in the morning.

I was wearing the frumpy
loose dress I fell in love with on the
mannequin but which seemed to olden
on me the first time I wore it.

There I was, shuffling
past the pitiable lavender bed
clutched by weeds and grass,
with here and there pincushion heads

of powdery purple trying
to be charming, reaching out to me,
as if I were the woman
to free them into their full sun

potential. Had they been words
to be weeded into poems, I’d have sat
with them in the latitude of the morning,
yanking away grasses of the outer

world, spreading apart their leggy stems, reaching
in for heads, coaxing them into the bright air
to breathe their wild and dusty breath,
fighting for their very life from within.

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Poem: Ars Poetica

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Ars Poetica

A poem makes the impossible
possible.

The poet becomes
a flying proboscis

extracting nectar
from material and

immaterial things.
Then comes the metamorphosis

of the honey. Or
a fly in the attic

descends onto a dusty old book,
which is really the poet,

and the fly’s nomadic feet feel
at home

on the mellow skin of her pages,
as light and moveable

as glyphs and black letters.
Or three minds

become three blackbirds
of a silhouetted tree

transposing notes
into black flames

breathed onto the musical score
of a telephone line.

We know what becomes
of what is written,

the little curled tongues floating
down

on the current of creaking
and arid

centuries:
They are firebirds

whose truth-wings
burn, dissolving into us

in ash, and then one day
right here in the wet ink

from our pollen-laden pen
get reconstituted

into the dewy surprise
of a just-born flyer.

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National Poetry Month: Prose Poem

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It's National Poetry Month, and suddenly my well has run dry. When I had no particular excuse for writing and posting poems, they popped out, the way babies do sometimes. But just as soon as I tried writing a poem for April 1, the first day of this month devoted to verse, I went into labor of the sort I experienced with my first child: many, many hours of pain and hand wringing and nothing happening.

In fact, not only did the labor last long with little consequence (I finally got a dose of Pitocin after ten hours of labor with dilation to just two out of ten, and that helped speed things up: she was born three hours later), but she was incredibly late. My due date was April 2; she arrived April 30. That would be like the whole of poetry month devoted to expecting her immanent arrival, daily.

She finally did arrive, though I thought she'd never come out. She just took a little more tinkering and tweaking than we expected. And what a masterpiece! Some of my best work yet. This month we celebrate a golden milestone: Lesley turns 30 on the 30th.

This year for National Poetry Month I would like to present poetic forms. I want to try new forms I haven't before, like a cinquain, sestina, triolet, etheree and a rondel. I may write in forms I've already tried, like villanelle, sonnet, tanka and haiku. Besides attempting my own, I'll also post examples by other poets.

Today's form: prose poem. Prose poems are prose pieces that aren't broken into verse lines, but still include other poetic traits, such as metaphor, figures of speech, lyricism, and heightened emotion. One way of writing a prose poem is a letter, which I'm using. It's followed by a sweet prose poem by Amy Lowell.

Here's my prose poem to the baby I waited and waited for in our little house in Pasadena, California, thirty years ago.

To My Unborn Child

Dear Baby ~

I was thinking of you so I thought I’d write.

How are things? I’d love to hear from you.

Your room is ready.

I filled two brown grocery bags with avocados from the trees and the ground out front. I only picked the ones that were heavy and ripe, like my breasts. Dad took them to work to give away.

Did I mention your room is ready? I straightened the picture above the crib last week. I’ll teach you how to do that. See your grandpa taught me. He did it constantly. He couldn’t go through a room without straightening a picture. It’s OK if you don’t get it right at first. You just have to practice. After a while you’ll be straightening things for everybody like Grandpa.

Madeleine, our beagle, keeps misbehaving. When we let her outside, she keeps digging under the fence and getting out. One of these days she’s going to get hit by a car. We should probably tie her up. What a pain. I hate giving her a spanking. I just really have no idea how to train her.

Well, I miss you. Wish you were here.

I love you,
Mommy

She came, and then we had to learn everything;

but the loving came oh so naturally

The baby who finally arrived

And another prose poem:

Bath

by Amy Lowell

The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air.
     The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light. 
     Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots. The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air.

 Amy Lowell

1874-1925

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Disaster, and why we write

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When the economy tanked two and a half years ago, the magnitude of it didn’t hit me for a couple of weeks, until the Chair of my English department gathered us for the first faculty meeting of fall term. He told us the university had changed forever. Not just our university. He meant that The University as an entity had changed and might never be the same again. He proceeded to describe how the bottom had fallen out of our graduate program, how state funds that had already thinned dramatically, would shrink even more. Some graduate programs across the country would disappear. The question of how to prevent that happening to our own program sat in the room like a cannon ball. For most academic departments, the graduate research program is the driving reason for existence, which is true of ours.

The air was knocked out of me for a couple of days. I couldn’t recall when my outlook on life had ever shifted as dramatically as I felt it at that moment. I continued to advise undergraduate students, but as fear took hold of me, I felt little enthusiasm for the future state of their education. Some students had to drop out of school mid-term as parents lost jobs and their own personal funds disappeared.

After numbly getting through a couple of days advising students, my conversations with them began to shift. I could hear the words coming out of my mouth: “You must write through this.” Like light through the Venetian blinds of my 100-year-old ten-foot office window, something hopeful striped the room as the prospect of writing stories about the suffering and loss that lay ahead of us began to dawn. No matter how dire things would get, we could turn it into a thing of beauty by writing essays, short stories, poems, or screenplays. Even pain can be beautiful.

When cataclysmic events happen in the world, I don’t know how to be. In his "Love Song" Rilke wrote that he would “gladly lodge” his soul “with lost objects in the dark, / in some far still place / that does not tremble when you tremble.” I would gladly protect my soul like that too, but how is it possible to live isolated from tragedy when it happens?

When the earth trembled itself ten inches off its axis, water swept over the lip of Japan’s coast, and the nuclear power plant exploded in Sendai, Inge and I were at the lake cottage on a two-day writing retreat, discussing among other things, the question: Why do we write?

Over the hours some answers came:

• to remember
• to think
• to feel
• to claim an experience as my own
• to meditate and connect with my soul

Ray Bradbury said that you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Catherine Drinker Bowen said Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

John K. Hutchens said, A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Truman Capote said, To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make. 


The second stanza of Rilke’s "Love Song":

. . . all that touches us, you and me,
plays us together, like the bow of a violin
that from two strings draws forth one voice.
On what instrument are we strung?
What musician is playing us?
Oh sweet song.

Why do I write? To find the points of light in my experience. When we write, those points of light are notes of inner music our words make. When layered with voices of other writers and artists across the terrain of the world, it becomes a fugue, a galaxy of points of light. Have a listen to Robert Tiso play Bach's Toccato and Fugue in D minor on his glass harp. The four-voice fugue written for organ, played on this remarkable "instrument", is but one individual's expression of his own light, and of Bach's. Can you also hear layers of other voices streaming in their light?

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Little One

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Little One

my own thoughted crumb,

what will you be?

seated, windowed, bound and papered
here

like me?

or full-sailed, wind-carried, faraway and

wild

like the constant, bumping sea?

light in my window, ink

on my page, you are mine,

but remember

as I say this

I set you free

~ Ruth M.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

I was going to leave it there, this post. But I just read something by Robert Frost that echoes this small poem of mine. "Little One" could be about a poem, or a future grandchild. Which? Who knows, and that is the surprise of it. Which brings me to Frost.

I've had Robert Frost on my mind. The reason? Because this week marks the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy (November 22, 1963), an event I always think of as Thanksgiving approaches. I often associate JFK with the image of 86-year-old Robert Frost in black and white at the JFK inaugural lectern January 20, 1961 (I was four), that bitterly cold day when he couldn't read the words of the poem he'd hand written for the inauguration, so instead he recited another from memory. (Read both the dedication poem he intended to read, but couldn't because of poor eyesight, and the poem he actually recited that cold day, "The Gift Outright," here.)

In 1939, Frost wrote an essay about writing poems titled The Figure a Poem Makes. I hadn't read it before today, after finishing my small poem, above. I agree completely with his claim, that a poem must reveal itself, that you can't know at the outset of writing what it will become. You can read the entire essay The Figure a Poem Makes here. Below I will quote passages that resonated for me today:

quotes from The Figure a Poem Makes, by Robert Frost

~ If it is a wild tune, it is a poem. Our problem then is, as modern abstractionists, to have the wildness pure; to be wild with nothing to be wild about. 

~ It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood-and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad-the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.

~ No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. 

~ The line will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick. Modern instruments of precision are being used to make things crooked as if by eye and hand in the old days.

~ I tell how there may be a better wildness of logic than of inconsequence. But the logic is backward, in retrospect, after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader. 

~ Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. 

~ For myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

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Painting: Clouds and Water, by Arthur Dove

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a birthday

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"She sat there filled with champagne.
She talked about hashish and its effects.
I said, 'I have known such effects without hashish.
I do not need drugs.
I carry all that within myself.'
At this she was a little angry.
She did not realize that I achieved those states
without destroying my mind.
My mind must not die, because I am a writer.
I am the poet who must see."

- Anaïs Nin, talking to June Mansfield,
wife of Henry Miller, in Henry and June

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Anaïs Nin was born in Neuilly, France,
February 21, 1903 (died January 14, 1977).
Her diary was her closest friend.

Power to diaries. Power to blogs.
Power to the word, to the poem,
and to a clear mind.
Observe, feel, tell the details.

See in · · · out · · · through · · · across · · · beyond · ·
· · along · · · around · · · within · · · underneath · ·
· · outside · · · past · · · into · · · behind · · · ahead · ·
· · onto · · · toward · · · until · · · upon · · · among · · · at · ·
· · over · · · on top of · · · inside · ·

No one else sees the way you see.

window on
rue des Barres, Paris
May 2006

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New Yorker magazines

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i was going to lug them all to work
let the students take them
or professors
whoever
from the help yourself book table
because they appear in our mailbox at home
every week
and get stacked
in the hopeful piles
waiting to be read
and this morning i remembered being in high school
i used to go to the library at lunch
take the new yorker off the shelf
just leaf thru
look at the ads and the photos
images
cartoons
read the poems
and that was all
and so this morning
i thought
what if the main value to me is that -
get back to what i did as a child
just the images
and so i opened the new issue
and they just touched me
immediately
those photographs
poems illustrations
paintings drawings
even ads
just like then
it was a revelation
i have to get back to who i am -
you know?
have to keep reminding myself
whenever it was a couple of years ago when i was worried about
how i wasn't writing poems
i was obsessed with taking pictures
and in my mind they were separate
and suddenly
it dawned on me
they need not be separate things
they could connect
and that's when i started beginning with just
some visual
and letting it go inside
inspire
and then i could write from it
we all have to find what it is that excites
it might not be the same as anyone else
and some people it will be ten things
all seemingly unrelated
but in that one person
they are mixed and fused
in such imaginative beauty!
and we just stare
and wonder
how we didn't think of it
oh it just makes me weep
for beauty

sometimes a window opens
and it will be like we just

danced
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All photos shot near Holland, Michigan, May 2008
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a book report, I mean review: Henry James' The Ambassadors

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The date stamp on the library book tells me I checked out The Ambassadors around the First of December, 2008, which was the very day I listened to an inspiring NPR radio essay by Ann Patchett about it. (I do some things quickly, immediately.) I renewed the book twice, six months each. Henry James himself said this novel is his finest work of art, but it is well down his own list of the order in which you should read his novels. He knew it was opaque (Patchett's word). Portrait of a Lady, for example, is farther up his read in this order list.*

I am no book reviewer. I will leave that art to my friends DS at third-storey window, Arti at Ripple Effects, and others. But after leaving foreshadowing comments here and there about my long slow progress through this book for the past year, starting here, I sort of feel I owe you at least my own version of a review. Plus, posting its completion here is a celebration. Warning: There will be mixing of metaphors.

The fact that I stuck with this book tells you something. My friends know how averse I am to reading novels, even though I was an English major. I tell myself I am quite a literary person for someone who reads so little. If Jane Austen were still writing, I would be the first to read her latest.

I'm not going to tell you much about the tale itself, which James published in 1903 as a serial in the North American Review. The plot is tame, no murders or espionage. No deadly collisions - though there are human collisions. It's the human part that kept me with it. It's about an American named Lambert Strether who goes on a mission to Paris to retrieve the son of his fiancée, a widow we never really meet in a scene. Her son Chad should be home learning to run the family business in Woollett, Massachusetts, but instead he is off doing who knows what in that worldly City of Light. What James manages to show in this wonderful book is how even a fifty-something man like Strether can learn profoundly enlightening things about himself and others, and the assumptions he makes about both.

Henry James' style both daunted me and kept me going. Not the easiest of books to read, I couldn't take many pages in one sitting. But I didn't shelve it for good, as I often do when a book doesn't arrest me.

James writes a paragraph with more words, clauses, commas and longer more compounded sentences and descriptions than you might think necessary or possible and still keep a thought alive. But when you're finished with that paragraph, you recognize that had he described the same event or thought in one succinct straightforward statement, you may have known what transpired, but you would not have arrived at the same point of human discovery. Not that he doesn't leave you constantly asking, "what the heck did that mean?" and a re-read of the same sentence three or more times to see if you can figure it out. But, if you just let the question babble on temporarily unanswered, you will eventually find what you need. His idea has to travel down the page through elaborate channels and locks for the river to deposit it into your ocean of understanding so satisfyingly.

He lays out words of detail in the tiniest attentions spread out on the bed, as if the elements of each paragraph will be packed into a travel trunk for a long extensive journey, and you must be prepared for every contingency. Or, each paragraph is a journey itself, magnifying the terrain of miniscule human flutterings deep down in their psychological interior. And at the end of one, or a collection of many, you do not feel that you traveled far for nothing. Rather, you wonder how you could have lived this long and only through this trunkful of words arrived at this destination, this understanding of a human emotion, as if you had yourself experienced all that led to it. Over and over I found myself relating to Strether - in his lack of confidence and sense of being an outsider looking in.

This craft seems to me a symbol of what James himself pointed out as the crux of the book on page one hundred and thirty-two:

"Live! . . . Don't . . . miss things out of stupidity."

Later, on page one hundred and sixty-five, little Bilham, the addressee in the dialogue I shortened with ellipses above, continues the thought in this scene:

Strether was silent a little. "Ah but he doesn't care for her--not, I mean, it appears, after all, in the sense I'm speaking of. He's not in love with her."

"No--but he's her best friend; after her mother. He's very fond of her. He has his ideas about what can be done for her."

"Well, it's very strange!" Strether presently remarked with a sighing sense of fulness.

"Very strange indeed. That's just the beauty of it. Isn't it very much the kind of beauty you had in mind," little Bilham went on, "when you were so wonderful and so inspiring to me the other day? Didn't you adjure me, in accents I shall never forget, to see, while I've a chance, everything I can?--and really to see, for it must have been that only you meant. Well, you did me no end of good, and I'm doing my best."

Quite literally, James' writing slows you down in real time, so that you don't miss things. You have looked so closely, it is as if you revolved things on a digital screen, rising and falling like a telescoping robotic camera, hovering slowly and methodically over each grain of texture. This slow time allows his meanings to sink in like a long deliberate marinade - tenderizing and flavoring the final bite to perfection, which means our dear Strether gets just exactly where I myself have gotten by reading: a transformation. To write so well that a work leaves the reader feeling herself to be Strether embodied whenever an "ahh aha" comes on a page is an everlasting treasure. What multiplied the emotional impact of the book on me was the fact that I had felt a similar opening into freedom upon my own visit to Paris after my mother's death in 1997.

That voice, he had to note failed audibly to sound; which he took as the proof of all the change in himself. He had heard, of old, only what he could then hear; what he could do now was to think of three months ago as a point in the far past. All voices had grown thicker and meant more things; they crowded on him as he moved about--it was the way they sounded together that wouldn't let him be still. He felt, strangely, as sad as if he had come for some wrong, and yet as excited as if he had come for some freedom. But the freedom was what was most in the place and the hour; it was the freedom that most brought him round again to the youth of his own that he had long ago missed.

I warned you I would mix metaphors. You humored me and pretended you were traveling in a trunk, floating down a river, eating tasty food inside and filming the whole thing with expensive film equipment. Thank you for that.

I'm glad it took more than a year to read The Ambassadors. It stretched my brain's close reading capacity, and the pace suited the penetrating writing of Henry James. Maybe I'll renew it for another six months and read it again. I think I could finish it in half the time this go 'round. Or maybe I should read Portrait of a Lady next, which is #2 on his read in this order list in a letter he wrote. (Or, if I'm really adventurous, I'll read a different author, like maybe Ann Patchett, whose Bel Canto has been on my reading list for about, oh, eight years.)

*Here are both lists James himself recommended as the order for reading his novels:

1. Roderick Hudson.
2. The Portrait of a Lady.
3. The Princess Casamassima.
4. The Wings of the Dove.
5. The Golden Bowl.

The second, more "advanced" list, includes two from the first:

1. The American.
2. The Tragic Muse.
3. The Wings of the Dove.
   
4. The Ambassadors.
5. The Golden Bowl.
   

Cover illustration for Oxford World's Classics edition of The Ambassadors; I wish I knew who the artist was. Maybe Childe Hassam?

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the power of our rhetoric

y-

1
A blogger wrote what you
couldn't say -
do you know how it feels
to be empty
that way?

2
A photo at flickr shines light
on brown water
a silhouette of men in a boat -
fishing lines crisscross the
knob of the sun
do you know what it means
to be full
in that fun?

3
Across campus a stranger
talks venom and danger
about things
she does not know
and you - are you swallowed
by telephone and email
inside the hollow of her blow?

4
Around the world a friend
sends a photo
a fuchsia flower bent low
like a woman in veil
do you feel what she feels -
her essence inside
being fully
regaled?


Together we enter
the questions and answers
on our bridge
over ocean and reef -
our words art and photographs
publish the meanings
in the ongoing book of our life.

*- epigraph quote from Rumi's poem A Voice Through the Door

early bird

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5:30am

It's Monday, and you slept in an hour because you have no student appointments today. The only thing calling you to the university is answering emails. You shower so your hair can start air drying and in your long heavy gray winter robe you pour your first cup of coffee, add vanilla soy and a blip of half and half. Stir with a long thin sturdy plastic spoon from Ireland because plastic is quieter than steel against the ceramic, important when someone else is sleeping.

You add a log to the wood stove and open the vent. It will take a few minutes for the orange embers to burst into flame and be visible through the creosote dimmed door. You hear a tick-tick-ticking just before the log ignites. It won't be light outside for another hour and a half, you see two or three stars shimmering between clouds. There is just one dim table lamp on. You wonder when you first began to like getting up so early, feeling robbed if it is already light when you awake. Your mother who got up early too would by now have already prayed on her knees for every world country's leader by name in her morning routine. With the smell of coffee and wood fire in your nostrils, you plop into your chilly red leather chair, covering your lap with a fleece blanket, and your laptop.

6:30am

You pour your second cup of coffee, and a cup for Don who is now up. Where did that hour go? Oh yes - besides gmail, a little quiet music, Facebook and blog comments, you also read some news stories, especially the one about hating Obama - that if you do you are likely to be white. Thank goodness your mother and father taught you not to hate blacks. The family room is toasty.

7:30am

Don has left for school, and it's light now - though gray and wintry, a light breeze bobbing the yellow tipped bamboo. This makes you think of President Obama again, because he's in China today (or is it tomorrow? he was just in Japan, when does he sleep?), where there is apparently deep cultural prejudice against blacks. After an essay by Ann Claycomb* about feeling like a terrible mother, you open the latest digital New Yorker - more palatable than the hard copy sitting on the kitchen table because you can read it without holding anything but your coffee cup. (You would not be able to read it online if you didn't have that subscribed copy on the table though. Ironic.) You used to think that people who got up early were the ultimate non-lazy people - industrious and worm-catching. You've changed your mind, and you realize your mother has flown up somewhere into the stratosphere of your esteem.

You read the article on the Michelin restaurant rating system from start to finish as hungrily as if you were eating a meal at a 3-star restaurant in Paris, which you've done thrice, unbelievably. The Michelin restaurant inspectors are anonymous and work long days, not paid too well, but wouldn't that be a great job, except for those long forms you have to complete after each meal, taking an hour. You know you are nowhere close to high society, you live on a farm with rustic outbuildings and chickens running in the yard, you and your husband have modest salaries in your thank-goodness jobs, and yet you have been served the food of the gods - once at Taillevent and twice at Le Grand Véfour. You contemplate blogging about those experiences and think better of it. Too much work to fire up the Paris blog again with old photos to process, and so many beggars in Mumbai and mine victims in Kabul with one leg or arm lurking in the vestibule. That would take more energy, better writing and less conscience than you feel capable of today.

9:30 am

You are still on your arse, with a warm machine bringing heat and information from around the globe onto your lap. Half-way through the Michelin article you have seven additional Internet tabs open: one on force feeding ducks for foie gras, the second the Michelin site Famously Anonymous, the third a list of 138 of Jean-Georges Vongerichten's recipes (if you were industrious you could attack those the way Julie did in "Julia & Julie"), the fourth - wikipedia.org open to the word Kairos after Montag mentioned it at his blog (the man must read incessantly) - meaning among other things "the time when God acts," the fifth - Facebook where you had to post the salon.com article you read about Obama hatred from the rightwingnuts (not that anyone will read it), the sixth a Huffington Post piece about the irony of Sarah Palin's new book title Going Rogue, and the seventh is your work email because you just decided you're going to stay home by the fire and answer emails here today. This is after you already spent two perfectly good weekend days at home with nowhere to go.

You convince yourself that because you want to write about what you take in, and this morning's worms were too plump, tasty and plentiful to leave for another morning, you need a whole day just to digest them. And that deserves 3 stars.

* This post was inspired by the form Ann Claycomb used in her piece at brevity titled WQED, Channel 13: Programming Guide. I was so taken with her form, that I imitated it. Thanks to Montag whose comment triggered the conviction that I should rightfully link it here - not that he was guilting me!
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No Hope But Home

I met Matthew walking through Penn Station last week. He has several tattoos, and shared this one with me:


On his right arm, this traditional nautical star has been embellished with several design elements that personalize the tattoo.

The banner "No Hope but Home" refers to lyrics from a song by a New Jersey band called Scream Hello.

The nautical star is accompanied by a knitting needle and a fountain pen. These two objects refer to his parents. The knitting needle speaks to his mother who is a homemaker and also knits as a hobby. The fountain pen alludes to his father, who is a writer professionally, and also
writes for pleasure.

The nautical star, traditionally worn by sailors to serve as a talisman to find a way home, serves a figurative purpose here, pointing toward, while also emphasizing the hopefulness of home, but also the importance of Matthew's parents in his life.

This cool tattoo was inked by John Reardon at Saved Tattoo, in Brooklyn. Work from Saved has appeared previously on Tattoosday here.

Thanks to Matthew for sharing this amazing tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

"suddenly thrill you"

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Do you know who said it, what's written on the page in my journal? No. Stop, don't you dare Google it. I know you might have Googled, if so, then you already knew before I added his signature below.

If you don't know, what would you guess is her or his profession? Did you think it was a visual artist? Think about that while I tell you what I've been doing.

In the evening after supper I am reading my way through a collection of short stories I picked up on the free book table in the hall at work, starting with Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown and ending with Louise Erdrich's The Red Convertible. Close together this week I read Nikolai Gogol's The Overcoat and Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener - both tales about scribes early in the 19th century who live poor and plain, the first in Russia and the second in America. Can there be anything more mundane and boring than copying text scrupulously and painstakingly by hand, all day, every day, six days a week? Then having to read it through with another copyist to be certain there are no errors? The writing they copy would most likely be tedious "legalize" too. Next time you curse your computer, think about the alternative. Well, my friend Inge might prefer it.

But put these ordinary characters Akakievich and Bartleby, whose lives are as achingly banal as anyone can imagine, into the hand held pens of Gogol and Melville, and their circumstances become rich alleyways you can't resist following around the next corner.

Unless you're Paris Hilton, life is pretty mundane most of the time, with blips of interest, joy, surprise or disappointment now and then. Writing, photographing, drawing, painting, exploring, teaching, counseling, parenting, cooking, designing, cleaning, laundering, organizing -- or whatever way of knowing you bring to the world -- you can be blown away by the essence of something inside your ordinary routine once in a while. I dare you.

Ok, who said it: "You need to let little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you." If you know, please let others guess first. Is there anything more ordinary than a Campbell's soup can?
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Answer:

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a different light

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Sky lover Violet Sky commented on the special warm glow of the morning and evening sun in October in my last post. I agree with her. Sometimes, though, as she no doubt could attest in Toronto, the glow of October's light is rather cool, if that makes sense, and sends you inside for a warmer radiance in a brick fireplace. As another friend says, it's starting to be "candle time."

Inge and I drove an hour and a half to my family's cottage (home of the Wild Things swing) for a writing retreat. It was dark and chilly - except for some brief moments such as this one when Inge was crowned with cool light on a stage of diamonds backed by milky drapes - and when it wasn't raining, light fingers of wind tipped the oak leaves spilling their rain reserves down onto the ferns, moss and tin roof. It was just the right atmosphere for nesting in the couch cushions behind a stack of books and a slow dancing fire.



Conversations with Inge are about stories. Of authors she reads and the very few I read too, such as Orhan Pamuk (click here for my encounter with him). Oh - his beloved İstanbul is also my beloved İstanbul. Or is it? He steps out one way, and I step in another. It is his story, it is my story. Or we talk about her mother's scattered leaves of stories collected and piled in attic letter boxes before Inge and her sister arrived, a world apart. Or Inge's own story, which she wants to write down for her fourteen year old son, with her places, favorite things, her poetry, sketches and photographs. We talk about truth versus fiction. What is the Truth? How does Memory serve? How can I fill in the vast gaps of knowledge about daughter of Swedish immigrants Grandma Olive? I don't remember her at all though she must have held me before her death when I was four. What can I piece together of her from what I have heard from stories told by Mom: taping wallpaper designs around the walls to match patterns as she drew them; sisters Susan, Bootsie and Nancy: falling into the goldfish pool and being terrified of breaking something valuable in the not-too-child-friendly house; and brother Nelson: Saltine cracker & peanut butter sandwiches she made for his snack - each unique and colored by their own separate memories? And what truth of her can I corral from her china, or the "bastard" cabinet she painted, or her sewing box, and the vases she collected?

Just as there is a different light in October, and there is a different light inside, there is also a different light within each of us. This light is more powerful than we are sometimes willing to acknowledge, and it slants this way and that and glows uniquely from each individual. As Eric Maise wrote in one of the weekend's fireplace books (one Inge gave me on some Christmas or birthday), A Writer's Paris, from the chapter "Hemingway Slept Here":

I don't care where Hemingway slept. . . What writers write interests me. . . . If Hemingway is important, it is because what he had to say still touches us. But is it important that on this exact spot, now smack in the middle of a fancy mall, he had onion soup after a night of debauchery? Hardly. The past is no substitute for the present. Love the 1440s, love the 1680s, love the 1920s--love any epoch that touches your soul. But start each day focused on your writing and not on your literary maps.

Bring along the stories of others that have touched you. You can't help it. But write your story, as only you can.

Where the wild things are swinging

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If I had to choose only one book to save from our children's shelves when they grew up, it would be Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. (No doubt a whole lot of other people feel the same.) Sendak wrote and illustrated the 48 page, ten sentence book in 1963, and I discovered it the next decade during bookstore "squats" in the children's section when I was in college. Maybe I wished I had written it and drawn those illustrations. A few years ago I did copy one of his pictures onto the new seat Don sawed for our 60-year-old swingset my siblings and I grew up with, which now sits on the hill behind our family cottage. This was the first time that old swing seat had been replaced. I used to fly so high on it that I wondered what would happen if I looped all the way up and over the top of the A frame. What I imagined didn't happen, thank goodness, but Sendak's vision did, as I copied and painted his swinging characters right onto the new wooden seat. I even bought a copy of the book to leave in the cottage's red reading room so kids would be sure to have the book handy for a read after swinging.




So you'd think I would have been ecstatic at the movie theater recently when I saw a trailer for Spike Jonze's upcoming feature movie version of Sendak's book. But my immediate reaction was horror. NO! You can't make this book into a movie! I closed my eyes to shut out the images and saw only those from the book in my memory.

In the book you have ten glorious run-on sentences (for example: "Almost over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of my own room where he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hot."). You have a boy's dream after he has been sent to bed without his supper, illustrated in some of the most evocative images ever. You have a nightmare transformed into a love story, the mysterious dilemmas of parenting with mercy and grace, and conversely of being a child who has to grow up into a responsible person, but not quite yet. You have delicious and cuddly monsters painted in warm earthy tones. You have cute small Max in a white wolf suit and crown. The way he dishevels that crown when he's sleepy is so charming! As a lover of children's illustrations, I got lost in them. I wanted little text. Making it into a movie would fill in the gaps of imagination in unwanted ways, changing it forever.

It is the dilemma of all books-to-film. How do you take Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and make it into the film "The English Patient"? In that case, the book is spare and wonderful, and the movie is lush and wonderful. Both succeeded. But often the film is a disappointment after a rich book. Of course the opposite can often be said too.

In a fantastic article Loring sent me by Wendell Berry (he whose beloved poem resides on my sidebar) about our country's warped economics, in which he criticizes the entertainment addiction we're in (The Progressive, Sept. 2009, p. 24), Berry wrote:

If you can read
and have more imagination than a doorknob,
what need do you have
for a "movie version" of a novel?

To agree with Berry, you could argue that a novel is different from an illustrated children's book. Without illustrations, a novel relies on the reader's vision of each scene and interpretations of characters. If you're a good reader, this terrain can be fertile indeed. If a movie gets made, and if you had any attachment to the book, you wish they would consult with you about the cast, set, direction and costumes! It's your story now after all, for the scenes and characters have evolved into your inventions too. Especially vile is when a film is made of a classic tale, such as "The Scarlet Letter" or "Last of the Mohicans," and the story is changed unrecognizably and unforgivably into a more palatable (sell-able) Hollywood adaptation. Why not just write a new story-script in the period and context?

To argue against my original mortification, a children's illustrated book is different, no matter how sacred, especially if the author was also the illustrator. Apparently Maurice Sendak has been working on a movie version of Where the Wild Things Are since the 1990s, and he pursued Spike Jonze as the one to make it. How do you argue with a book's author, if he had a vision for it as a film? It makes perfect sense that a visual artist would cross over into film. And from the enticing film sets and costumes I've seen so far, I myself can feel the pull. Can he help it that so many of us own this entity called Where the Wild Things Are and might object to his decision? Such controversy in my head over his imagination's expression!

In the video below you can hear Sendak and Jonze describe their collaboration in the movie. As Sendak says, Jonze took the peculiarness of the book and made it into his own Where the Wild Things Are with Jonze peculiarness. The glimpses of the monsters in the misty forest and silhouetted by the crashing sea, and of the fabulous Max, who happens also to be a "Max" in real life, have seduced me. Guess where I'll be October 16? In the presence of a newly inspired and evolved expression of what Maurice Sendak made possible: a wild seat to ride up and up as high as the next visionary could take it.

But please, no movie version of Goodnight Moon. I can live with the sweet animation narrated by Susan Sarandon, but I will not allow my future grandchildren to watch it on TV when I'm around. They must look at the pictures from my lap and hear "Good night comb and good night brush" from my voice box, feeling my heartbeat against their temples. And then I will close the finger-softened pages of the book and tell them for the 100th time how their mother said "Dat Doh" for "Goodnight Moon." Then I will eat them up, I love them so.




Here are my siblings' grandchildren helping me put the new swing on that old swingset.

Not getting to Woodstock

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In August 1969, a couple days after Woodstock ended, I turned 13. I would have my first real kiss the next summer. I was a straight kid, didn't carouse in high school and only went to one drinking party in a farmer's field one hot summer night where I took a couple of nasty sips of beer from a flimsy plastic cup. My older and wilder brother had taken me to the party, but he watched over me. That Michigan meadow party was about as close as I got to Woodstock, and the girl in this photo is about as far from my experience as she can be. For years I bemoaned my protected life, being a preacher's kid. But any secret grains of recklessness never took root.

For different and very annoying reasons, Joni Mitchell never made it to Woodstock, yet she wrote the song about it, which David Crosby said captured the gathering better than anyone who had been there. She said herself that the deprivation she felt not being there, watching it on television, provided an "intense angle" for writing it.

In writing classes, my mentor Diane Wakoski always said it is hard to write a good, happy poem. It's difficult to avoid cliches. Truly, I found it easier to write poem after poem venting angst about growing up in a churchy life. She also said the best art and writing comes from those who have had to overcome obstacles. Think of your favorite artists and writers and see if that isn't true.

One month after Woodstock, at the Big Sur Celebration, Joni sang her new song for the first time publicly. I wonder if she isn't partly glad now that she didn't get to Woodstock, so she could write such a song as this. Below is that Big Sur performance.

And no, I'm not sorry I was protected. I've gotten over the regret of being a goody two shoes. I also recognize the oddity of seeing the thoroughly good life of a pastor's family as an "obstacle." Another funny thing is that I looked the part of a hippie in my tattered blue jeans and long wavy, wildish hair, and many people - including the staff at the church camp where I worked one summer - were convinced I smoked pot with the best of 'em.

By the way, did you know that Joni Mitchell considers herself "a painter first, and a musician second"? See her paintings.