Monday, January 31, 2005

Playlist Meme from an Older You

From Mark and Catherine: the Playlist Meme

First the rules (from c-lo.net):
1. Open up the music player on your computer.
2. Set it to play your entire music collection.
3. Hit the "shuffle" command.
4. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing.
5. If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or third, or etc.) occurances.

I used my iPod:
Bonnie Prince Billy – Agnes, Queen of Sorrow
Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit
Beatles – Every Little Thing
Waylon Jennings - Theme from the Dukes of Hazard
Joe Henry – Fat
Tom Rush – Mother Earth
Johnny Cash – So Doggone Lonesome
Bob Dylan – Just like a Woman (Boston Live 2001 [I was there!])
Joni Mitchell – Come in from the Cold
Death Cab for Cutie – Transatlanticism
New-fangled bookends around an otherwise classic rock / country setting. Sounds right. But no Van is definitely an anomaly. (PS Emmy, send me yours; I'll post it here.)

Brigid Goes New England

No poetry today. A weather report is all I have in me. That sun is getting higher in the sky and I actually saw a temperature reading of 40 degrees today. After 13 consecutive days below freezing, we broke out this weekend, and the rest of the week looks promising. Tuesday is Imbolc and you know what that means. So despite the fact that the river is frozen white and there’s an expanse of snow wherever you look, things are looking up. I noticed today that the goldfinches are just beginning to show a hint of yellow-green, and in the coming weeks will move towards blazing yellow. By the way, these birds are voracious eaters. While the chickadees will fly by, grab a seed, and fly away to dine, the finches just perch and thistle down for minutes on end. It must take a lot of carbos to turn colors like that. Which leads me to this bird feeder update. The following birds have been sighted to date: goldfinches, chickadees, juncos, tufted titmice, blue jays, cardinals (both sexes), and wood sparrows. And what's this head by the way of the ear to the syllable and the heart by way of the breath to the line stuff, Mr. Olson. Stay tuned. Oh, and the real deal weather forecast is this: 17 days and 12 hours to Spring Training! Makes you catch your breath and grab a syllable, doesn't it?

Saturday, January 29, 2005

Dentistry Transmogrified

While reading Paul Hoover’s introduction in Postmodern American Poetry, I literally had to STOP! Just three pages in because it’s quite obvious that this is alien territory. Now I’ve perused this stuff in the past, but for the first time I can see that something is amiss. This is not some religious denomination. This is a totally different god. “The material of the art is to be judged simply as material.” Of course this goes against every grain of my body. Where else could some one say this in any segment of society and be considered a sane person: “In general, postmodern poetry opposes the centrist values of unity, significance, linearity, expressiveness…” In other words, sanity.

But I promised myself that I would stay open to this world. Because their sentiments are so close to mine in so many ways. “Postmodernism decenters authority and embraces plurality.” I’ll vote for that. But “empty words” over “transcendental signified?” Well, we all have our differences.

Ah what’s that saying? Don’t judge a person until you’ve walked a mile in his or her shoes. So, I’ll try it.
My First Attempt at a Postmodern Poem

Silence selects the lecture. Peanut butter!
Jellyroll souls are saved in no tomorrow.
Understand this and you understand that
you understand this: I have to go
to Radio Shack and buy a Monster Cable
splitter. The manager just told me so.
The refrigerator is humming a tune
from tonsils and appendectomies.
The sounds that midnight fakes look
closer in the mirror than the moon.
Bring in the closer, that silly corkscrew,
to eliminate all lemonade and send
the showers to Iraq and rake the leaves
before the isolation chamber strikes
another chord for low cholesterol.
In other words, I (beat) heart blue.
Oh please forgive me Richard Wilbur.

Friday, January 28, 2005

Marketing 101

Via Michael Gates (Gee, your Twists and Turns smells teriffic) The Advertising Slogan Generator:
Smart. Beautiful. grapez.
or
Just for the Taste of grapez.
and
See the USA in your The Blog Of Henry David Thoreau.

Reading Railroad

There are times when I think life is like a flashlight shone at noon and poetry the shadow that it casts. Tonight is such a night.

Or maybe life is like the hoopla of Super Bowl week and poetry only the game itself.

Or life is monopoly and poetry Go.

Or life if poetry isn’t.

Or if...

Thursday, January 27, 2005

10. A compelling subject

The Reaper finishes: "The way any story is told will determine whether or not it is compelling to readers that know how to read narrative in poems. Subjects resist authors lacking the experience, knowledge, and staying power to tell them. This alone explains the inability of many poets to write narrative. It also explains their releuctance to try, their frar of the form, and their fearful denigration of it."

The experience and knowledge I’ll leave others to judge, but I know I would not have had the staying power to finish my attempt at narrative if I had not been serializing it here on the wing. There were more than a couple of times I thought I had reached a wall. But it also felt like tight-rope walking too. At any moment I knew I could fall. Fail. But I felt committed to finishing it, because it was such a public act. And the Reaper did indeed help. I heartily recommend its checklist.

But I would add an eleventh item to the checklist.
11. Remember the Metaphor.
For me, I feel there should be overriding metaphors that tie the characters, action, time, and setting together. Otherwise, you risk that the poem will be merely biography, drama, history, or geography. It’s the interplay of the four that kept my interest and I hope keeps the readers interest.
(Thanks to Dave for picking up on this. Check out his serialization of his book-length poem at Via Negativa.)

Lastly, like Ernie Banks would say, let’s play two. Maybe an attempt at postmodern narrative. (Now that would be something else.) I just picked up the Norton anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. That Charles Olson: what a nut!

UPDATE: And check out Mike Snider's Shortish Piece Of a Longish Story.

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

It's Getting Better Every Day

Really. At this longitude and latitude, our shortest day was 21-Dec with 9 hours and 1 minute of daylight. The sun rose at 7:16 and set at 4:17.

On this Saturday, 29-Jan, the sun will rise at 7:05 and set at 4:57 for 9:52 of daylight or a whopping plus 51 minutes. Whoo-hoo!

But, even better, because high noon isn't exactly noon, we gained more daylight in the afternoon. The earliest sunsets were from 2-Dec to 15-Dec at 4:14, which means the sun sets 53 minutes later on Saturday. (Conversely the sun rose at its latest from 31-Dec to 6-Jan at 7:19. So we've only gained 14 minutes there, but who cares at that early hour.)

And on January 31, next Monday, the sun will set at 5:00PM. Watch out spring!

9. Memorable Characters

The Reaper: "Any character is potentially memorable. One might tell us something about ourselves we did not know (or own up to) before we met him or her. But our fascination with character is also a desire to connect with someone who is not ourselves, not even like us, as far as we can tell. Obviously, we have always read stories in order to find out what happens to others and to see how they act and why."

Calvin is a name I've been using in poems now for too many years. On the other hand, the ferryman is a character I've toyed with for maybe five. I thought it was time to figure out his history. Bringing the two together as the same character just seemed natural. (As for his French nom de guerre, Jules Chauvin, well that was just hard work.) But Jack just showed up and won the audition. Poor Anne, we hardly knew you.

And so, live from Hollywood, it's time for the concluding episode (quatrains 25 & 26) of "Jules Chauvin, Ferryman in Exile."
While inside, Jack and Calvin downed their cups
of whiskey mulling over eminent
domain and Noah’s apple orchard placed
to sell. The window facing east was lit

with gritty hints of daylight. Jack arose,
raising his spirits high. “A toast,” he aimed
—they sight the river and the woods combined—
“it’s outside time you set these traps behind.”

THE END

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

8. Location

Our neighbor, the Reaper, says: "Memorable literature is the history of authors who have successfully presented their intimate involvement with an identifiable region."

Region is a hazy word, like mist rising from a river. Or white-outs in a blizzard. Regions can be in the mind or heart as well. Poe lived somewhere down of Baltimore. But I catch the drift. Frost’s New England. Robinson’s Tilbury Town. Even Ginsberg’s American Vortex Sutra.

The Merrimack River is mine for better or worse, not that I do it even a fluid ounce of justice. But I’ve lived in its valley for my lifetime. There is so much history in its stream and nature on its banks that I keep on coming back to it as my source of inspiration, be it my history thesis or this first attempt at a long(ish) narrative (somewhat) poem.

Around Dodge City and in the territory out west, there's just one way to handle the killers and the spoilers... And that's with a U.S. Marshal, and the smell of...Gunsmoke! Around the Merrimack, there was only one man who could get you to the other side, and that’s the Ferryman. Quatrains 23 & 24 of Jules Chauvin, Ferryman in Exile:.
Outside, the river surged upstream, an utmost
Atlantic forcing meadows, foothills, peaks
and all their distant runoff back to join
its source. Ice was lifting, fracturing,

collapsing over other slabs of ice
as history unfolded. Soon a bridge
would realize what the ice could never give:
firm footing over long disturbing currents.

Monday, January 24, 2005

Small Giant Squid Poem

Giant Squids on Southern Californian Surf

They’re washing up on beaches
like extraterrestrials
ascending into hell.

Call for Suggested Reading

Just a question for any out there that identify themselves as 'avant-garde,' and who may be perchance be reading this post. I've read much the past months, opinion and counterpoint. And much of it revolves around the ignorance of others concerning the subject. I don't wish to argue the point, but I certainly can profess to such an ignorance. So, if there was one book that you would suggest as a starting point to understand the subject in as clear and concise a manner for the uninitiated, like myself, I'd appreciate if you'd leave the title in comments. I'd like to do some research on the matter. Please remember, we're talking beginner's level. Thanks.

And how about that blizzard! (We just got belted with thirty inches of snow!)


Saturday, January 22, 2005

Why I Returned to Walden

In many ways “Walden” saved my life. It was 1985 and I remember leaving work for lunch and driving to Harold Parker State Forest, setting up a chair on the top of a hill, in the woods, overlooking a lake, and reading “Walden.” I had read it before, maybe thirteen or some odd years before, and felt a certain kinship with it, like how many people before. But as the years passed, and I moved into an adulthood with the ignorance that Dylan once sang to (“I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”), I began to think Thoreau an adolescent, not adult enough, not having much common sense. And so me and Henry parted ways.

But something closely resembling a nervous breakdown can make things awfully clear. For whatever reason, I could not be that adult I thought I should be. Not that I wanted to shirk responsibilities. Actually, I relished them. Another pop song that made all the difference in my life was Van Morrison’s “St. Dominic’s Preview” and his simple observation: “No one's making no commitments / To anybody but themselves.” Well, I was determined not to be like that.

But there’s only so much of yourself that you can sublimate. And so I went to Thoreau because I wanted to live deliberately again. And in so doing I discovered not an adolescent, but a visionary. And my life has never been the same. Not that I’m living some revolutionary existence, but I am living my life, and not some grand American middle class ideal of one. And I thank Henry for that. And maybe that’s why I blog Henry every day. Payback. I owe him. My great-grandfather was a clairvoyant. I have the pictures to prove it. So maybe this is the 21st century way of channeling. No maybe. I believe it is.

And in reading his Journals daily, and I scan each entry for that day through the years, I’ve discovered something important about Henry. Yes, there are great visionary passages that will stop time itself. But there are also passages that reveal Henry the human. And tonight I read such a one. Concerning why he left Walden Pond. Say what you will about the man, but he definitely was not an adolescent. He was realistic. But just not to a fault.

“But why I changed? why I left the woods? I do not think that I can tell. I have often wished myself back. I do not know any better how I ever came to go there. Perhaps it is none of my business, even if it is yours. Perhaps I wanted a change. There was a little stagnation, it may be. About 2 o’clock in the afternoon the world’s axle creaked as if it needed greasing, as if the oxen labored with the wain and could hardly get their load over the ridge of the day. Perhaps if I lived there much longer, I might live there forever. One would think twice before he accepted heaven on such terms.”

Amen Henry. After all, he was “just a human, a victim of the insane. Isolation.”

Friday, January 21, 2005

Attempting a Small Soliloquy

I think that's confession enough. Quatrains 19,20,21,22 of Jules Chauvin, Ferryman in Exile:
At first Jack’s words traversed impassive air
like Calvin’s ferrying the Merrimack—
the other shore stays distant, unfamiliar,
until that heartbeat when you understand

the far-flung shore is now your terra firma.
“A bridge?” he asked himself, forgetting Jack
to be the source of all particulars.
“And why a bridge? The ferry isn’t forfeit

enough? My services aren’t sacrifice
enough for sins? The river isn’t blood
one needs to wash his body in each day
but just impediment or waterway

to voyage above, some anonymous
abyss between inconsequential worlds
one travels over, disregarded and
forgotten, just another groundless void?”
Update: in S1-L4, changed "the" to "that" and "that" to "when"

On Watching Grass Grow

Frank O'Hara in "Statement for Paterson Society"
If you cover someone with earth and grass grows, you don't know what they looked like any more. Critical prose makes too much grass grow, and I don't want to help hide my own poems, much less kill them.
What he said.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

7. Humor

The Reaper laughs: “Humor is an exploitation of intimacy. The most frequent form of this, in poetry anyway, is irony. But humor in a narrative poem might display more tenderness than irony allows. Humor may also change the pace subtly, allowing the reader to reflect on what has been read and prepare for what is to come.”

There’s nothing funny about inauguration day this year. So let’s have a moment of silence, and pray we get through the next four years with as little damage to the national fabric as possible. Meanwhile I got birds to feed and news to keep ignoring.

And here in the living room at 79 Wistful Vista, we find quatrains 17 & 18 from Jules Chauvin, Ferryman in Exile:
“Wake up, you whiskey-addled devil,” Calvin
heard Jack’s invective-friendly voice as if
a foghorn on the river. “I’ve got news
that’s sure to make you want a double-shot

of something triple-worse than day-old snake
oil you call liquor, make you want to see
quadruple, speak in tongues, and listen up:
they’re building us chawbacons here a bridge.”

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Bouts-rimés Redux

Via Shanna Compton, from Court Green, an ecounter with bouts-rimés.
As Ron Padgett says in his Handbook of Poetic Forms, "A bouts-rimés poem is created by one person's making up a list of rhymed words and giving it to another person, who in turn writes the lines that end with those rhymes, in the same order in which they were given."
So I guess I had to give it a try too:
Song of Myself Redux

I carry on as if each day was June.
Nothing concerns me all that greatly. Stress
is just some force in nature, like the moon
enticing tides with gravity. Why obsess
about whose grass is greener, where’s that snake,
or how worms procreate? The world is moot
when nothing matters. It’s a piece of cake
I tell you. Look at myself. What a beaut
and what a piece of work I am. Like Garbo,
I’m mystery in motion. I’m the play—
the world is all my stage. I’ll act the hobo
who hops a different freight train every day,
who yields a diamond from some old rhinestone,
who makes this dump smell sweet with cheap cologne.

6. Understatement

The Reaper strikes again: “This device sustains and contributes to the development of drama. Without drama there is no tension; without tension the story sags.”

Of course one man’s understatement is another man’s overhead. That’s one of the great things about poetry. It’s not a science and everyone can state their beliefs as if they were written in concrete. No one has to run the experiment. No one needs to examine the results. Theories fly as fact. The only science is the whims of the future. And everyone is playing to that piper.

So I believe a lyrical interruption in midstream is dramatic in its own right. As dramatic as the Merrimack freezing today, just like that. A single day can make all the difference in anybody’s world.

Quiet, please. Quatrains 14, 15, & 16 of Jules Chauvin, Ferryman in Exile
They gamboled underneath its rainbow spray.
Later while Calvin slumbered, Anne propelled
the craft alone too close to turbulent
surges of influential energies,

shocking her out of her canoe. She dropped
and struck her head upon a rounded boulder
and dreamt of eons washing over her
existence, wearing down her flesh to bone.

Her blood infused the river with an early
autumn despite the springtime all around.
But it’s forever fall in Calvin’s eyes.
And he’s five hundred miles from wakening.

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

5. Illumination of private gestures

Thus spake the Reaper: “A character’s gestures define that character. They also bind that character to other characters. A poet who makes a character’s private gestures accessible in engaged in the act of definition not by proclamation but by presentation.

What is the private gesture of being under the weather and experiencing writer’s block for the night. Head in hand? Rubbing forehead. Resigning to lie on the couch and listen to my new gift certificated download from iTunes, the American Music Club's “Love Songs for Patriots.”

The Ferryman returns tomorrow, I hope.

Monday, January 17, 2005

Winter River Update

The Merrimack still runs free although some treacherously cold weather is forecasted for tonight and tomorrow. So ice could develop a surface meaning. But with warmer weather forecasted for Wednesday and the sun climbing higher in the sky every day, we may not ice over this winter at all. That blue streak running through the wintry white landscape may last all season. But colder weather is forecasted again for next weekend. So the elements will certainly be deadlocked still in a struggle for control of the river. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, Ezra Pound has something to say:
Ancient Music

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm.
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.

Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.

Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,
So 'gainst the winter's balm.

Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm.
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

Sunday, January 16, 2005

Pleasant Valley Bird Update

Yesterday there was a squirrel on the birdfeeder. So now there's a baffle on the pole to prevent such invasions. There is also a new Thistle Feeder and this morning a finch was dining. Besides the chicadees and juncos, tufted titmice, blue jays, and female cardinals (still waiting for the bright red male) have been spotted. That's it for for the Pleasant Valley bird feeder update. Have a good Sunday.

Saturday, January 15, 2005

4. Containment

The Reaper approaches: "No character and no action may violate the essence of that character or act. A character must be consistent; an act must logically follow acts preceding it. Even illogical acts must be logically connected."

I know that football is more than illogical. I am not a big fan of the sport. But how can one not follow the New England Patriots these past few years. Watching them play is like watching an intricate Swiss watch click. Of course that watch would have gears that fly down field and a spring that unleashes a football with speed and accuracy while a running lever every now and then plows ahead for another first down. One follows the other. It’s been a busy week at the Foxboro ranch. So this Sunday. Go Pats!

Certainly Red Ryder, like all ranchers, has a full week's work most every week on the Painted Valley Ranch. Yet, with the sniff of spring just around the corner, it's hard for America's Famous Fighting Cowboy not to start roaming -- just a little -- with Buckskin and faithful Little Beaver close by his side. . . Thus, as we join them now, we find them on the trail high above Roaring River, on the bend that sweeps between Sombrero and Sundown .

Wrong intro again. I think. The latest quatrains 12 & 13 of Jules Chauvin, Ferryman in Exile:
Calvin had laced a small canoe for Anne,
his wife, from birch bark, rawhide, cedar, and
the cucumber magnolia flowering
in spring. They picnicked on the tributaries

of Saint-Maurice that May. But she desired
to see the great falls at Shawinigan
despite the twenty-seven miles of blue
demanding paddling up the river, north.

Friday, January 14, 2005

3. Compression of time

I listen to the Reaper: “Whether a narrative poem is 4600 or 46 lines long, the poet must handle the passage of time in far less space than prose would require. This restriction demands the poet’s restraint in choice of language. A rhythm is necessary, too, one that arises out of the story. No matter how the poet captures it, in meter or typography, rhythm is movement, movement is time, and time must be compressed."

I’m loving these radio introductions. Television is visual, but radio is words. Although, I’ve been watching the Seinfeld DVDs, and that show I think is both. Of course there’s the physical comedy of Kramer, a genius of that particular kind of body language, but the dialog between George and Jerry comes straight out of vaudeville, via radio, past Abbot and Costello, to Monk’s Diner.

HHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYYYYYYY AABBBBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTTTT!! Here’s quatrains 10 & 11 from the serialization of "Jules Chauvin, Ferryman in Exile."
But that’s enough. If there was any force
he saw as friend, then this sun-weathered will
was one. Of all New England, only Jack
grasped anything of Calvin, Canada,

and why such distance circumscribed the two.
Too many whiskeys one extended night
enlightened Jack to Calvin’s narrative
of love and desolation, woods and blood.

Thursday, January 13, 2005

2. Observation.

Then the Reaper said "The poet whose senses are attuned to all of the elements of the story can create the impression of participation. In a good narrative poem the narrator is a witness."

Sometimes action is witnessed when something missing is noticed too. This evening I saw that the bird feeder was less than half full. For the past two days while I’ve been at work much commotion has obviously been taking place. And taking seed. So I trudged through the snow this evening and filled their tall glass to the brim. Enjoy.

Listen! What is that sound? (Trilling sound.) That sound, ladies and gentlemen, is the call of Doc Savage and the signal for another thrill-charged fifteen minutes of drama. Wrong intro again, it’s actually quatrains 8 & 9 of “Jules Chauvin, Ferryman in Exile.”
He rushes in; the room becomes alive
with dancing boots and fingers playing fast
unbuttoning coat buttons. Then his hat
goes flying through unwelcoming despair

alighting on a barren tabletop
creating something like a still life where
an active emptiness had darkly reigned.
And all that Calvin can sort out is Jack.
Update: revised S8 (coat for his)

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

The iPod Shuffle Marketing Poem

Making iLemonade

The iPod Shuffle has no LCD
display to choose which song you’d like to play
next. No sweat. Marketing will have to see
a way to make that shortcoming OK:

Life is random. Boy, ain’t that the truth.
Let’s market everything in life like that.
Take death for instance. Sell that one to youth
like: Buying time without the caveat.

1. A beginning, a middle, and an end.

The Reaper says, “Just as it is hard to get the whole story, it is hard to allow a story to tell itself. Poets become enamored of a segment, an anecdote, and are content with nothing more. When this occurs, like the detached tail of a lizard, the story just wriggles and dies.”

So rather than tell you the Merrimack River is still unfrozen, I should let you know this river begins at the confluence of the Pemigewasset (flowing from the White Mountains) and the Winnipesaukee (flowing from the lake of the same name) in Franklin, New Hampshire. It flows southward through Concord and Manchester (the ancient home of the Pennacook Indians), past the Budweiser plant in Merrimack (home of the Clydesdales), through the once-great mill cities of Lowell and Lawrence (and setting for my MA thesis), and then past Amesbury (home) and Newburyport (stomping grounds) out to the vast Atlantic Ocean. Now I’m sure it’s frozen somewhere up north. But not here. Not today.

But before this post wriggles and dies, return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear! From out of the past come the thundering hoof-beats of the great horse Silver! (oh, wrong intro) Anyways, quatrains 7 & 8 of “Jules Chauvin, Ferryman in Exile”
“Who’s there?” he asks the night. Another knock.
“The ferry doesn’t run past autumn. Off!”
Another knock, but this time louder than
the god of winter’s awful cataclysm,

or that’s what Calvin mutters to himself
rising to lift the frozen dead bolt lock.
“Who goes there on this friendless night,” he shouts
into the limits. “Me, you wild Canuck!”

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Jules Chauvin, Ferryman in Exile (serial quatrains)

In the dead of winter Calvin mends
his craft while waiting for the ice to crack
from January’s cold. Outside he hears
the whisper of a sleigh, or was it wind?

No matter, no one wants a ferry boat
tonight. He'd like a pint of whiskey though,
Canadian would sure be nice, remind
him of the life back home—Trois Rivieres.

There, they're living like they did in June,
but with sub-zero zest. But here he stays
at home refurbishing his block and tackle,
too many lengths of rope, and threadbare wear.


Canoes were more straightforward. Even traps
demanded less confinement than this river
living. But separation makes the heart
forget its suffering, its loss of blood

and country. Now the evergreens are braced
with oak. And now that whispering is knocking
on his door as if the northwest wind
returns to lay his secret on this land.

(to be continued)

Don't Fear the Reaper

Help!
The Reaper’s checklist for narrative poetry:

A beginning, a middle, an end.
Observation.
Compression of time.
Containment.
Illumination of private gestures.
Understatement.
Humor.
Location.
Memorable characters.
A compelling subject.
OK, further...
Only a Quatrain Part Deux

There, they're living like they did in June,
but with sub-zero zest. But here he stays
at home refurbishing his block and tackle,
too many lengths of rope, and threadbare wear.

Monday, January 10, 2005

Let the Ferry

Cross:
1695 September 24: The Court of General Sessions ordered that the town of Newbury "have liberty to keep a ferry over Merrimack river near ye house of John Kelly where they are to keep a suitable boat afloat with a hand ready to transport passengers, horses and cattle as need may require, and ye fare of said ferry is hereby appointed to be a penny for a man and five pence for a horse and so proportionable for other creatures allwaies provided that ye town of Newbury do at their own cost and charge make and maintain a sufficient highway from ye river up to ye country road way, and ye town of Amesbury do ye like on their side of ye river." [Salem Court Records, 1692-1709]
Let Kelly be Calvin.
Serial Sonnet, Untitled, Part One, An Octave

In the dead of winter Calvin mends
his craft while waiting for the ice to crack
from January’s cold. Outside he hears
the whisper of a sleigh, or was it wind?
No matter, no one wants a ferry boat
tonight. He'd like a pint of whiskey though,
Canadian would sure be nice, remind
him of the life back home—Trois Rivieres.
(to be continued?)

Saturday, January 08, 2005

Pleasant Valley Bird Report

Yes, Boston, we have birds! Black-capped Chickadees and Dark-eyed Juncos (Slate-colored variety) have been spotted this morning at the new bird-feeder. Their power-packed bodies are flitting this way and that way through evergreen and bare birch branches. The backyard is alive once again with flight.

Friday, January 07, 2005

Tsunami Relief, Sri Lanka, Sarvodaya

I have been doing some research on disaster relief for tsunami victims. My wish was to support a grass roots effort, yet be certain that it was honest and efficient. I also wanted to personalize it as much as one can half a world away. In that effort, I have contributed to the Sarvodaya organization, a Buddhist relief agency in Sri Lanka, a country devastated by the tsunami.

In doing the web research I came across this letter from Sir Arthur Clarke (of 2001 A Space Odyssey fame) who has lived in Sri Lanka the past fifty years. Of them he suggests: “considering supporting Sarvodaya, the largest development charity in Sri Lanka, which has a 45-year track record in reaching out and helping the poorest of the poor. Sarvodaya has mounted a well organised, countrywide relief effort using their countrywide network of offices and volunteers who work in all parts of the country, well above ethnic and other divisions.”

There is further information here and here.

You can contribute through Sarvodaya USA with a PayPal contribution. On their site, they state “Unless you designate otherwise, all donations for Tsunami relief will be forwarded to the Sarvodaya account in Sri Lanka. No U.S. administrative fees will be taken from your donation.” Also, for those who care about such things: "Contributions to Sarvodaya USA, a tax-exempt, non-profit organization under section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code, are fully tax deductible according to the IRS regulations."

Again, please consider contributing to Sarvodaya (tax-free) through PayPal here.

Godspeed.

Rave On Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell

“No more emotion without narrative. Emotion is inconsequential unless it is the result of a story. The story is communal; it is for others. The inconsequential emotion is the one felt only by the poet himself.” (from "The Reaper's Nongotiable Demands" in the Reaper Essays.

There is something here that I think I too often forget, but remembered by chance in writing a recent poem. Like all, I have been horrified by the tragedy in South Asia. But until Monday, I could find no words. Beverly sent me some pictures of people watching the tidal wave from what they thought was a safe vantage point. But the pictures relate a story of horror.

I could relate to this on a personal level. I have been such a local sightseer, and all but for the grace of the universe, that could have been me. And that was their story to tell in a poem. That was my attempt to comprehend a tragedy that is overwhelming in its scope.

So I believe Messrs. Jarman and McDowell are onto something here. I’ve been reading of the heart that resides in old folk ballads, and these gentlemen are speaking to that same old beat. It needn’t be everyone’s poetic core, as they may have us believe. But I must remember that it needs to be mine. Thanks Reaper.

Thursday, January 06, 2005

The Reaper Demands

I just want to get these down here. I’ve been looking at The Reaper Essays by Mark Jarman & Robert McDowell. I find their Non-negotiable Demands of interest.

1. Take prosody off the hit list.
2. Stop calling formless writing poetry.
3. Accuracy at all costs.
4. No emotion without narrative.
5. No more meditating on the meditation.
6. No more poems about poetry.
7. No more irresponsibility of expression.
8. Raze the House of Fashion.
9. Dismantle the Office of Translation.
10. Spring open the Jail of the Self.

It’s a fundamentalist doctrine from the narrative metrical party, and I tend these days towards that side of the hall. But it is doctrinaire, and more like a set of demands from a conquering empire rather than a striving democratic city-state. But I will grant them their sixth demand today at once without any further argument. No more poems about poetry. That shall be written in the preamble in fact.

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

My New Year's Blue Ablution

There’s nothing like a seagull in a snowstorm. Maybe it’s the white on white, or maybe it’s the sense of disorientation that comes when looking up through falling snowflakes and your vertigo is saved on the wings of a white bird. Whatever, I find myself coasting over that dark thread of river again, not quite frozen. It steals me away from home and towards some other occupation, towards that ocean of interstate and my half-hour commute to another continent of consciousness called work. It’s been a long strange trip I’ve taken for way too many years now. And so this year I will whistle another tune: sometimes I toil for a living, sometimes I dream that I’m free, sometimes I get a great notion to jump in the river and flee.

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

My Tsunami Poem

On Seeing the Tsunami
for all in its way and its wake

I’ve watched waves crash like that before.
I’ve stood on safer ground like them
and photographed the curvature
of surge—an ocean’s requiem
to evident infinity.
But never had the breaking sea

continued on like that before;
I never had to turn and run
to steer clear of the nevermore
while unwavering water sealed the sun
and everything surrounding me.
I never saw that higher sea.

Monday, January 03, 2005

The Country of January

I listened to some Toby Keith today. His duet with Willie Nelson reminds me of organic farming and its anti-historical approach to tomatoes. Heraclitus would have said it best but he changed his mind midstream. That would still be possible today considering the Merrimack River is still open, although rogue ice floes prove that Plato knew a thing or two about January. Lastly, the bird-feeder I bought today is lonely in the backyard awaiting the Greek choir. Their stunning use of whistles mixed with flights of existential sentences has been sorely missed. Even a blue jay and its silly rhyme scheme would be appreciated for a minute or two although a cardinal…. Now that would be something.