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?

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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!)

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.”

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.