gwg wine #2: Columbia Crest 'Grand Estates' Merlot

This is really an excellent Merlot. I keep coming back to this one after flirtations with other more expensive bottles. What I especially like, besides the backbone this wine brings to the table, something often lacking in an inexpensive Merlot, is the subtle oak flavor.

You can find a good and cheaper Merlot, and, of course, you can always find an excellent expensive bottle, but for 12 bucks (sometimes 10!), this is the best value I have been able to find in my forays with the marvelous Merlot grapez.

OK, let the experts from Wine Spectator describe it with their poetry:

Light in texture and ripe in flavor, 

with a nice package of cherry,

tobacco and cedar flavors 

lasting impressively through

the fine-grained finish. 

Drink now through 2005.

255,000 cases made.

Score: 88  

OK. They say cedar, I say oak. Tobacco? What have these reviewers been drinking?

Poetry games

Ron Silliman presented a silly little poetry game the other day that I was going to simply ignore on these pages for many reasons, most of which centered on the fact that I couldn’t guess who wrote those particular poems and really didn’t care. Well, that’s a bit too flippant.

Silliman says: “We know so much about whether or not we’re going to like a poem or not based entirely on the name we see attached to it. Names flood the text with an overlay of extraneous information that it is not possible to ignore.” Of course. Familiarity breeds understanding as often as contempt. And respect breeds the benefit of the big doubt, as well as the willingness and patience to discover.

But Mike Snider in his blog today presents the best response of all that I’ve read on Silliman’s subject. To Silliman’s premise, as he understands it, that “the experience of a poem is shaped by the name attached to it or by the journal in which it appears or both”, Mike continues, “That may often be true for those of us actively involved in the pobiz, but for almost everyone else it is barking nonsense.” Be sure to read the rest. It rises above the artificial nature of Silliman’s incestuous hypothesis to reach the real world where poets too seldom go.

Tide and Time Served

In Maine, there’s a path that skirts the rockbound coast from Perkins Cove to Ogunquit Beach: the Marginal Way. Beverly and I walked there last Sunday. The weather had cooled from the mid-spring temperatures of the past few days and there was a stiff breeze from the northwest, but still for early March in Maine it was a stunning day. The sky was clear and the sea a brilliant blue. The tide etched the coast with white foam as we walked the shore downeast.

Where the Ogunquit River flows into the Atlantic, waves swelled and the water along the amber sands of Ogunquit Beach turned an inconceivable silvery blue. There were two surfers bobbing in the water, silhouettes in wetsuits. Every now and then, one would rise from the sea and trace the surf with his board, as if discovering a cursive script the gods themselves had written. We watched the words they wrote and trembled at the sentences they told.

A litle bit New England, a little bit country

Tuesday was one of those typical New England March days that come after a pleasant spell of weather just to remind you that it’s still legally winter and you have absolutely no right to trespass into some springtime state of mind. Not that it’s downright cold nor is it snowing up a blizzard, in fact it’s more menacing than that because it mirrors your usual middling mood: neither happy nor sad, optimistic nor pessimistic, fulfilled nor disappointed, but a sketchy combination of all of that and more.

It’s cloudy, cool, and there’s flurries in the air. It’s not a day to look up at the firmament so instead you look down at the pavement and see a film of snow and small puddles that have formed from the previous night's salting of the parking lot. But there in dark water is the bright reflection of the veiled sun, shining behind a deep layer of thin clouds.

Looking up, you see bare trees coated with fresh snow. The scene is so monotonously monochrome that it’s difficult to remember there was ever any color there. And in the distance you notice a weeping willow. But it’s beginning to turn a brighter yellow. Still you turn away and head directly for the dark glass-walled building where you’ve worked too many years at nothing more imperative than a paycheck and the right to enjoy your weekends.

And watch your daughter grow passionately aware and graduate from college with expectation and purpose. Or write a poem that for just ten minutes makes you feel that thrill of creation again until you notice the obvious defects and know the need to patiently revise. Or go out playing with the Lady Beverly and discover places you didn’t know were still inside you.

Until Sunday night arrives, and the latest episode of the Sopranos concludes with whatever mood-filled song they’ve used for that particularly ominous episode, its words wrapping around you like some Johnny Cash lament that sounds like just more work to you. “There's something in a Sunday that makes a body feel alone.” But Tuesday morning flurries coming down is so dispassionate that I couldn’t care any less.

Submitting

Ivy Alvarez has some first-rate comments on journals and rejections yesterday. Speaking of some tricks she has in categorizing journals, Ivy says “I think any trick that makes this caper easier on myself is grand.” I say Amen to that.

I’ve had some helpful tricks in the past. My greatest one was just not to submit. (Interesting word that: submit.) I went for years without submitting any poems after one series of submissions were all rejected. This was a difficult plan, for I belong to a workshop whose poets have not only published in the best journals but have issued books and won awards, the grand dame of them all whose name I believe can be uttered with the greatest American formalist poets (or just poets, period.)

But I wasn’t ready. I wrote and revised and wrote and revised and even started avoiding the monthly workshops in order to circumvent bouts of jealousy and overwhelming periods of influence from one or another of those brilliant poets. I began hanging around the corner online workshop trying to learn from the unseen, one in particular who tore my English apart time after time and rightfully so.

Last year I sent out about a dozen submissions involving over fifty poems, the first time I had sent something out in over five, maybe as many as seven, years, and vowed if only one acceptance came back I would continue to write. But on the other hand, if all were rejected, I would quit. Luckily, for my own sanity, two submissions were accepted, involving a grand total of two poems.

So I continue to write. And since then four more journals have accepted five poems (not including one poem published on an op-ed page of an Outer Banks newspaper.) It’s probably luck (no way! it's craft! ok, maybe some luck.) And Ivy has me thinking again, reflecting on a Terry Teachout blog I read last month. Two of his Notes on Blogging stick with me:

10. Blogs will be to the 21st century what little magazines were to the 20th century. Their influence will be disproportionate to their circulation.

11. Blogs are what online magazines were supposed to be.

So I’m thinking (I think I'm beginning to sound like Carrie Bradshaw here.) Will submitting poems to small journals become so twentieth-century? Will blogs become the places where we share our work, and will permalinks in fact become the way that poems are published and become read by a small coterie of readers? And the really good poets be linked by many many bloggers (and maybe even register on blogdex?)

I know I started to wonder about these issues after I posted a poem of mine last week, a rough first draft albeit. But now that I’m in this blogosphere, I’m beginning to breathe in the fresh air. And Ivy is Here has me thinking over here. Any thoughts there?


Postscript Cassandra Pages led me to an Evan Maxwell letter on L.A. Observed. In it I think he makes an argument that parallels the 'blogs are the new little magazines': "The Web, with its ability to publish all kinds of opinion at the cost of a few electrons, is ultimately threatening to the institutions and corporations which rely on their monopoly of the means of publishing."

Friends, Romans, countrymen, give me your attention

And you too, Brutus?" is what students read in a new genre of study guides that modernize the Elizabethan English found in "Julius Caesar" and other plays by William Shakespeare.

"Translations can be used as a wonderful tool to get students excited," she said, "but it does not replace Shakespeare's poetry."

"Beware the ides of March."
— Act 1, Scene 2.

"Beware of March 15."
— Same scene, "No Fear Shakespeare" translation.

Shouldn't that be April 15? Oh, wrong ides.

from Atlanta Journal-Constitution

I can see the mountains shining days ahead (Part 4)

In the Bird Sanctuary, in some places, there are groves of tall white pines that shade low thickets of mountain laurel, and there are stands of deciduous trees like maple, oak, and birch in others. This time of year, of course, there are no leaves on these trees, and houses and other buildings nearby can be plainly seen through the chaos of thin branches. But if you look within that open anarchy, you will see an occasional goldfinch. It’s not that plain a bird, although it's not gold just yet. It still wears its winter shade of green, but soon, the feathers of the male will turn bright yellow and all summer long give lie to this brilliant Robert Frost lyrical observation.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Poetry in the News 2

Scoop: Kirsten Dunst told Nylon magazine that Gwyneth Paltrow's portrayal of poet Sylvia Plath was all wrong and said she thought she could have done a much better job than Gwyn. "I think Gwyneth Paltrow is an amazing actress (but) I think that Sylvia was a girl who wanted to hurt. She wanted to feel terrible. I felt like, in the movie, it was more like, 'I'm the victim!'"

Poetry in the News 1

Maureen Dowd on John Kerry:

He not only reads poetry — "I love Keats, Yeats, Shelley and Kipling" — he writes it. "I remember flying once; I was looking out at the desert and I wrote a poem about the barren desolation of the desert," he said. "I wrote a poem once about a great encounter I had with a deer early in the morning that was very moving." (Sometimes he shoots deer, sometimes he elegizes them.)

I can see the mountains shining days ahead (Part 3)

In the Bird Sanctuary, there’s an old concrete foundation set in a stand of red pines. It appears to have been some kind of work shed. The window openings have metal gratings, and there looks to have been a wood or coal-burning stove. Maybe the groundskeeper for the estate did his business there. Nothing remains but the foundation and the metal gratings and part of a stove-pipe. For old New England foundations, it’s a relatively new and utilitarian affair. One doesn’t need to be versed in country things to understand its desolate look though, and hear, if not the phoebes, then maybe the blue jays cry.

I can see the mountains shining days ahead (Part 2)

In the Bird Sanctuary, trees are the true refugees given asylum. All around a suburban badlands grow. But here eastern white pines can reach their climax. Sugar maples can rest assured their stand will not be slashed for yet another showcase home. One’s mind can wander with the cardinals: "The ancient Greeks called the world {kosmos}, beauty...that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, ....give us a delight in and for themselves."

I can see the mountains shining days ahead

Beverly and I went walking in the Bird Sanctuary in Andover Saturday. She’s been walking daily for the past week and I certainly need to regain my hiking legs. I am not a winter person and for all intents and purposes hibernate the colder months away. I’m not a young person any longer either, so such hibernation along with a desk job combined with an aversion to rote exercise makes for an out-of-shape boy.

This month I will need to walk as much as possible so the coming months may be enjoyed. Life is short and nature too breathtaking. I’m reminded of this Mary Oliver poem:


Walking To Oak-Head Pond, And Thinking Of The Ponds
I Will Visit In The Next Days And Weeks

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of a stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I'm fooled--
I'm wading along

in the sunlight--
and I'm sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead--
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week's trees,
and I plan to be there soon--
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don't know where
such certainty comes from--
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind--

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage--
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way

Doc, my friend’s crazy. He thinks he's a goose.

A Saturday diversion: There’s a diminutive park by the river in Amesbury that I like to visit this time of year. I’ll sip a cup of coffee while sitting on a bench and watch the mini-bergs of ice flow towards the ocean from ice-outs upriver. I bring my binoculars because there’s always an excellent chance an eagle will soar by.

But one needs to be single-minded when entering that park, because there are two snow geese that will try their best to drive you away. Beverly has named them Ben and Jen because of a little incident last year. We had visited the park one spring day and saw them there for the very first time. I tried being a comic and began shouting “Affleck Affleck” at them. The male lowered his long neck like a battering ram, commenced to honk up a storm, and started running towards me with criminal intent to gnaw. I ran.

So now I do my best to disregard them. The male will crane his neck and start to honk out a warning, but will not threaten in any other fashion. I walk straight to my bench. We accommodate each other now, though I’ve not apologized for calling him Affleck. But I never referred to his significant other as Lopez. And he’s never called Beverly Annie Hall either. I guess we both need the eggs.

Yvor Winters 302

On Rereading a Passage from John Muir

Seeking in vain to find the heroic brow,
The subject fitting for a native ode,
I turn from thinking, for there haunts me now
A wrinkled figure on a dusty road:
Climbing from path to path, from path to rock,
From rock to live oak, thence to mountain bay,
Through unmoved twilight, where the rifle’s shock
Was half absorbed by leaves and drawn away,
Through mountain lilac, where the brown deer lay.

This was my childhood’s revery: to be
Not one who seeks in nature his release,
But one forever by the dripping tree,
Paradisaic in his pristine peace.
I might have been this man: a knowing eye
Moving on leaf and bark, a quiet gauge
Of growing timber and of climbing fly,
A quiet hand to fix them on the page—
A gentle figure from a simpler age.


What a grand first stanza. In one sentence we turn from the the bookish to a shot deer in nine masterful lines (of coures I love that final couplet), turned by that suggestive fourth: “A wrinkled figure on a dusty road”. The 5th and 6th look almost prosaic except for their use of repetition (path) and sound (rock, rock, oak); they never slacken the journey to that sixth line where out of the “unmoved twilight” a rifle shocks. Then it echoes softly to the spot where the “deer lay”. I could read this stanza all night.

The next stanza speaks paragraphs about Winters: “to be / Not one who seeks in nature his release.” The irony of his paradisaic peace reverberates into an elegiac tone that plays with the violence preceding it back to the written page using such invocative language: “knowing eye”, “quiet gauge”, “quiet hand”, “fix them”. To end with “a gentler figure” would be prize enough, but to turn it upside-down with “a simpler age” is a master stroke.

For me Winters is best when treating the natural with his classical touch, and here he does that and more. It’s a confessional poem of the best breeding. There’s psychological depth, formal distancing, and ironic understanding. Not to mention its circular integrity. There's an honesty that uses the setting and the form in more ways than one can understand in one reading. I've come back to this one among all the ones in the American Poets Project selected poems not just to understand the poem, but to understand the poet.

previous Yvor Winters posts:
Yvor Winters 301
Yvor Winters 202
Yvor Winters 201
Yvor Winters 102
Yvor Winters 101