The Best American Poetry

Terence Winch, Guest Blogger July 5-11

 This week we welcome Terence Winch as our guest blogger.  Terence is the author, most recently, of a collection of poems entitled Boy Drinkers (Hanging Loose Press); in 2007, he released a CD of his musical works called When New York Was Irish: Songs and Tunes by Terence Winch (Trade Root Music).  Welcome, Terry. 
(photo by Star Black)

In other News . . .
We're pleased to welcome back Eleanor Goodman, who will post over the next few weeks from London.  Eleanor writes fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and translates from Chinese. She has lived in Shanghai and Beijing, and now resides in Boston. Find out more about Eleanor Goodman here.

Pitch your movie plot.  More here.

"Urban Myth" [by Jamey Dunham]

Paul Muldoon selected Jamey Dunham's prose poem "Urban Myth" for The Best American Poetry 2005.

Urban Myth

            A couple awaiting the arrival of their first born delivers instead a ring-tailed lemur.  They are beside themselves.  The father beats the obstetrician with clenched fists.  He curses the nurses and flings himself to the floor bawling.  The mother stands up on the table and denounces God.  The next day they go home.  The lemur eats all of the houseplants and defecates in the sink.  It refuses to come down from the refrigerator and keeps them up all night chasing flies along the window screens.  The parents are mortified, but being optimistic people they remain patient.  They dress the lemur as a boy and name it Colin.  They send it to the finest schools and indulge it with every extravagance.  Finally their hard work pays off.  One morning upon entering the nursery they find a neat stack of money in the lemur’s place.

-- Jamey Dunham

Jamey Dunham has a new book of prose poems: The Bible of Lost Pets. Watch for it!

Rob Casper Presents a Poem by Paige Ackerson-Kiely

One cannot blog this weekend without referring to Independence Day. I thought of honoring the holiday by writing about patriotism, and how liberal thinkers should reclaim the term as a way to strive for the great ideals our nation was founded upon. And I thought of saying how such ideals always come face-to-face with the messiness, the ambiguity of reality -- and, how poems are ideally equipped to showcase the latter in service of the former. I even started searching for a good poem from jubilat's pages that deals with politics and identity in the complex ways I think they ought to be dealt with -- with an understanding that we, and the world, never operate in an either/or manner (or, in terms of metaphor, never operate according to tenor or vehicle), but by holding both at once, and then some.

But something funny happened: I found a poem that went in a different direction in relation to our annual celebration of nationhood. Which is the point: any point I was going to make about the above, in a polemical way, is far less interesting than what I can discover by looking for what a given poem can tell me. The poem below, by Paige Ackerson-Kiely from issue 11, made me think of fireworks -- not their pyrotechnical specs, but the great rapturous spectacle of them, and the cultural event (with crowded streets of onlookers) that takes place around their going off. If I weren't looking for a poem to write about on this holiday, I'm sure I never would've made such an associate leap with Paige's poem -- even now, I know it's a stretch. But that's one of the wonderful ways poems work: by suggesting more than they seem to mean on the surface, and being open to larger possibilities -- allowing a reader to read into its images, its epiphanies. I love to imagine that when Page's poem begins "I locked up all / of the beautiful things / that might move me" it could refer to those big large colorful explosions in the sky, and that by time it arrives at "Lay / down your sweet head / for now // to know as we do know / to know. To know / one damn thing" it could be saying something essential about who we are -- alone and together -- at this moment, when we celebrate how our country began and dream of what it can become.

-- Rob Casper

THE POTENTIAL OF RAPTURE

I locked up all
of the beautiful things
that might move me.

The bell around a dark ankle
turning and turning.

A stranger smiles.
Her face is no curling-up
in bed.

If I knew the world was going
to end, I’d just run out into
the street and fuck the first
chick I saw, says a
teenage virgin.

Where you go when you are scared

that we might have the verdant
and the humid. Friendly air.
People meaning their handwaves.
An answer is the way you can jump
from a ledge equal to your height
without getting hurt.
Your home.
Every pane of glass
someone laid on their precious
breath. There.
Or there.

Boy I am
leaving too many rooms
for the crowded street. Lay
down your sweet head
for now

to know as we do know
to know. To know
one damn thing.

-– Paige Ackerson-Kiely

Ted Berrigan in Irish America (by Terence Winch)

I’ve played Irish music and written poetry for most of my life, but have generally kept these two worlds separate.  A major exception to this practice took place at St. Mark’s Church in lower Manhattan on November 10, 1982, when an Irish-American night at the Poetry Project (organized by my friend Bob Callahan, who passed away last year) took place. Bob asked me and a number of other poets to read, and also invited my band, Celtic Thunder, to play a concert set after the reading. In addition to Bob and me, the line-up included Maureen Owen, Robert Kelly, Susan Howe, Eileen Myles, and Ted Berrigan. It was a historic night — I’m not sure Irish America has seen anything like it before or since.

A friend of Bob’s, whose name I’ve forgotten, took some photos that night, and for reasons I don’t recall, Bob gave me a contact sheet. The photo above is from that contact sheet and shows, left to right, Ted Berrigan, Maureen Owen, Robert Kelly, me, Bob Callahan, and Eileen Myles. (Susan Howe, for whatever reason, is not in the photo.)  At that point in our history, Celtic Thunder included Dominick Murray (guitar, vocals), Linda Hickman (flute, vocals), Tony DeMarco (fiddle), Jesse Winch (bodhran, bouzouki), and me (button accordion).  Tony was sick the night of the reading, but the photo below (taken by the late Pat Cady) shows Celtic Thunder's 1982 line-up at a ceili in, I think, Baltimore.

There were many great moments that night at St. Mark’s. I especially remember Eileen Myles striding to the microphone dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl, much to the delight and enthusiasm of the audience, and then delivering a terrific reading. Everyone, really, was at his or her best. But the highlight for me was Ted Berrigan’s uproarious and masterful performance.

Ted had a huge number of friends, fans, and followers, attracted by his charisma and humor, but most of all by his deep love and commitment to poetry and his inventive, expansive, inspiring work. Michael Lally (who, if he hadn't moved to L.A. back then, would certainly have been part of the St. Mark's reading) turned me on to Ted’s book The Sonnets in 1971, right after I moved to D.C. from New York, and I was hooked. Besides the night of the reading, I think I met Ted only one other time, in October of 1977, when Doug Lang invited him to D.C. to read at Folio Books, the site of Doug’s legendary reading series. Ted hung out for a couple of days and we got to know each other a bit. He even signed my copy of Red Wagon  with “For Terry, whose poetry I like very much, best, Ted Berrigan.” That was a compliment I was happy to get.    

About four years ago I bought a CD recorder so I could start digitizing some of my old LPs, which I never got rid of, as well as hundreds of cassette tapes, mostly from the ’70s and ’80s, stuffed into empty tissue boxes.  Last week I digitized the 1982 reading.  I’ll include Ted’s segment (in two parts that overlap: Download Ted Berrigan 1, with intro by Bob Callahan; Download Ted Berrigan 2). Ted once said, in an interview: “My poetry is mostly talk, and sometimes it’s heightened speech.  It’s not the words of rhetoric so much as the tone of rhetoric; it’s an Irish kind of speech—sometimes I’m making speeches, other times I’m talking—like I’m talking a walk to the store to buy the paper and back.”  You'll see what he means when you listen to his reading.

On July 4th, 1983, just eight months after the Irish-American event, Ted died, at age 48. What a tremendous loss this was. There was a memorial reading at St. Mark’s four days later in which a number of his friends (including Kenneth Koch, who concludes his remarks with a reading of the last two pages of Ted's "Tambourine Life": Download Kenneth Koch remarks)  paid tribute to him. I digitized that tape yesterday, and was halfway through the process before it dawned on me that yesterday was the 26th anniversary of Ted Berrigan's death.

-- Terence Winch

Today in History

Lionel Mordechai Trilling was born on July 4, 1905.  He was, for several reasons, the greatest professor I ever had, and the competition was stiff.

Everyone who knew Trilling, from the time he was an undergraduate at Columbia in the 1920s, uses the same adjective to characterize his intelligence: subtle. You will recognize his subtlety of mind, reflected in a nuanced prose style, that informs his superb essays in criticism, which raised that field of endeavor to an importance that it has forfeited in the years since Trilling's Liberal Imagination interpreted not only specific works (Huckleberry Finn) and phenomena (the Kinsey Report) but the way literary events and tendencies intersected with the larger movements of thought and action in society. To an essay on, say, Wordsworth or Jane Austen (two of his lasting literary loves), Trilling brought an understanding of the cultural and historical context in which they wrote and sought to convey an understanding of them in the history of ideas. If today his essays and his pedagogical approach seem old-fashioned, that bespeaks our impoverishment. It is true that Trilling's late prose can come close to that of the late Henry James in shades of distinction drawn with the most elaborate courtesy of which rhetoric is capable. Delmore Schwartz once said mockingly that Trilling could talk about having a cold with the gravity of a man who had discovered a cure for cancer. Well, maybe. But read Trilling's "Manners, Morals, and the Novel," or the concluding chapter of Sincerity and Authenticity, and you find yourself being taught -- and persuaded, but not to the point that terminates the discussion. Rather you are stimulated to continue it.

In the classroom Trilling paced back and forth in front of the lecture hall, worrying what appeared to be a rhetorical question but turned out to be one that he was asking sincerely, in the hope of eliciting not a single right answer but a resonant one. He smoked unfiltered Camels until ordered by his physician to cease. He loved them. When I worked as his research assistant, I brought my mother, recently widowed, and my younger sister to visit Mr. Trilling. He treated my mother without the slightest condescension or embarrassment. My mother was an uneducated woman and spoke authentically and artlessly, and he treated her with respect. I learned as much from Trilling's example as from anything he said to me.

If you asked Trilling a question he would bat it back at you like a shrewd rabbi versed in Kant and Nietzsche. It was always a dialogue. He confirmed that the zealous ex-Communist in his novel The Middle of the Journey -- published before the Alger Hiss scandal ruined some reputations and elevated others -- was his former Columbia classmate Whitaker Chambers, the man whose testimony was instrumental in bringing down Hiss, the State Department official with the impeccable pedigree. In Trilling's best short story, "Of This Time, Of This Place," the mad character named Tertan was based not on Allen Ginsberg (as many readers have erroneously assumed, because they know that Ginsberg was one of Trilling's more memorable students) but on a student Trilling taught many years earlier, when he was a young professor, and that student (like Tertan in the story) was clinically mad, and beyond the reach of medicine or therapy to manage -- quite unlike Ginsberg. The other Trilling story that everyone should read is "The Other Margaret" about a well-to-do urban "liberal" family who discover that their maid is a thief. Both the maid and the young daughter on whom the news has a devastating effect are named Margaret. Behind the story stands this couplet from Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Spring and Fall": "It is the plight man was born for; / It is Margaret you mourn for."

Trilling was the first Jew to win tenure at Columbia -- in the English department and maybe in the university as a whole -- though it required the personal involvement of the university's redoubtable president, Nicholas Murray Butler, to make that happen. Nicholas Murray Butler! The very name is a reminder of what kind of power and prestige once adhered to the position of university president whereas today the job generates more gelt but also a lot more tsuris.

Trilling was the Jackie Robinson of the Columbia English department. I can think of a second baseball analogy inspired by the professor whose intellectual hero, Freud, on his deathbed, "forbade his physician to administer any anodyne stronger than aspirin." Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, insisted on every organism's "wish to die in its own way." I believe that Trilling himself refused mood-altering medication when he died of pancreatic cancer in 1975. The pain was a part of reality not to be denied and not merely to be endured but somehow even to be enjoyed.

On July 4, 1939, when Columbia man Lou Gehrig made his famous farewell speech at Yankee Stadium, this is what he said:

<<
Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and I have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn't consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure I'm lucky. Who wouldn't have considered it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball's greatest empire, Ed Barrows? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I'm lucky. When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat and vice versa, sends you a gift, that's something. When everybody down to the groundskeeper and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies, that's something. When you have a father and mother work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body, it's a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed, that's the finest I know. So I close in saying that I might have had a bad break, but I have an awful lot to live for.
>>>

Gary Cooper plays Lou Gehrig and Teresa Wright his wife in the movie based on the "iron horse," who held the record for the most consecutive games played. The background music, appropriately for Mr. Consistency, is Irving Betrlin's "Always."

-- DL

"Big Tool" [by Allison Contey]

Big Tool

Oh the frustration of the big tool.
To have, or to have not a big tool,
to be equipped to deal with the big
tool, to become a big tool when dealing
with it in a big toolish way,
like having a big St. Bernard
in a tiny apartment, or luxurious
hair at the supermarket, either way
how problematic the big tool can be
if one does not know how to position
the big tool so that it does not become
a big inconvenience, a crowbar
when a drill is necessary, a wall anchor
when a claw would do. To exploit
the big tool is to give thanks to big G
and it is probably what he had in mind
when he gave the Apostles (and Pentecostals)
the power to speak in tongues, or made Jesus
an uncanny bartender at Cana. So I cross myself
and point heavenward, K-Rod-like,
when I remember to take out the garbage out
or avoid a late fee, because clearly I’ve been missing the big tool
for far too long, or, perhaps missed it altogether
and fear that life is just a series of regretful sighs
in one long lonesome moment of years
in which your big tool becomes circumscribed
by distractions, or lost, like opening
the take-out bag and seeing that the special sauce
has been omitted, which renders the entire order
tasteless, useless, an extravagant waste.

-- Allison Contey

Thinking of Taking Fido to the Fireworks? (by Tess Callahan)

Because life is not hectic enough with two kids, three birds, four fish tanks, a teaching job and writing deadlines, I cajoled my poor husband one year ago into adopting a second dog. It started out innocently enough. Since adopting a golden retriever mix four years ago, we occasionally helped out the rescue group by “fostering” dogs that needed temporary homes. We managed to foster nine dogs before encountering one we (or rather, I) could not part with. A big, hairy collie with a healthy bark, he is not the easiest dog I could have chosen, but sweet, sweet, sweet.

Has this pooch put me over the edge? Absolutely. Do I regret it? Nah. I rationalized my excess by bringing him to basic and then high level obedience training, (he’s in graduate school now), and having both dogs tested and certified as therapy dogs. Originally, I thought this would be a great way to have my kids do volunteer work in our community, but it turns out they are still too young, so I am the one bringing the dogs to nursing homes, hospitals and schools for therapy visits. (Here is our collie at “Read to a Dog” night at the library).  Do I have time for this? My bulging laundry basket says no. Yet, these simple visits that bring such delight to patients, kids and old folks, have become a fulfilling part of my month.

All this is a longwinded way to say that through my association with the shelter and training school, a fabulous place in Madison, NJ, called Saint Hubert’s (http://www.sthuberts.org/) I have learned that the day after the 4th of July is one of their highest intake days for strays. It is also a time when many dogs are struck by cars.

It may seem like a fun idea to bring our furry pals to the fireworks show, or even let them stroll around the yard during a barbeque, but many dogs are terrified by fireworks and take the opportunity to bolt. Cats, too, can be stealthy escape artists. Pets have been known to jump through screens or out car windows. Many shelters and rescue groups have the same basic advice:

 ·        KEEP YOUR PET INSIDE: Try a safe, enclosed room, such as the padded cell you use when you're feeling on edge. If you don’t have one of those, simply turn on the lights and close the windows and blinds. Make sure your pal has chew toys and plenty of water because nervous dogs pant and gnaw, just like we do.

·        TURN ON THE RADIO: This will help tune out the patriotic, machine gun-like sounds outside. Some suggest classical music, but my pups like talk radio. Terry Gross is their favorite, especially the recent Michael Schaffer interview about America going to the dogs.

·        KEEP THE ID TAGS ON: Just in case Houdini succeeds…

Aside from pets getting lost, there are other weird mishaps that veterinarians report on or around the 4^th of July. These include dogs getting sick or dying from alcohol intake, (ever placed a beer under your seat during a barbeque?) lighter fluid, insect repellent, glow jewelry, and of course, firecrackers. Make sure Fluffy can’t reach the chicken bones and corn cobs you’ve tossed into the trash. Last year a friend of mine paid $5,000 for emergency surgery to remove a corn cob from her Bernese Mountain Dog’s intestines, with no guarantee he would survive. He did.

In conclusion, take good care of your dog on Independence Day, lest he feel about you the way this one feels about his owner:

 

The Revenant by Billy Collins

I am the dog you put to sleep,
as you like to call the needle of oblivion,
come back to tell you this simple thing:
I never liked you--not one bit.

When I licked your face,
I thought of biting off your nose.
When I watched you toweling yourself dry,
I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap.

I resented the way you moved,
your lack of animal grace,
the way you would sit in a chair and eat,
a napkin on your lap, knife in your hand.

I would have run away,
but I was too weak, a trick you taught me
while I was learning to sit and heel,
and--greatest of insults--shake hands without a hand.

I admit the sight of the leash
would excite me
but only because it meant I was about
to smell things you had never touched.

You do not want to believe this,
but I have no reason to lie.
I hated the car, the rubber toys,
disliked your friends and, worse, your relatives.

The jingling of my tags drove me mad.
You always scratched me in the wrong place.
All I ever wanted from you
was food and fresh water in my metal bowls.

While you slept, I watched you breathe
as the moon rose in the sky.
It took all my strength
not to raise my head and howl.

Now I am free of the collar,
the yellow raincoat, monogrammed sweater,
the absurdity of your lawn,
and that is all you need to know about this place

except what you already supposed
and are glad it did not happen sooner--
that everyone here can read and write,
the dogs in poetry, the cats and the others in prose.

 

Thank you for this wonderful opportunity to blog for Best American Poetry.
`See you at the dog park.

Tess

The Creative Process: Painting, Writing, and the Case for Ruthlessness (by Tess Callahan)

Even before I began writing, I loved to draw and paint. Although I enjoyed it, I never considered it as a profession. Maybe I was afraid of the impracticality, or like my character, Oliver, (in my novel April & Oliver), I was simply afraid. Accessing one’s own creative power can be terrifying. Disowning it, on the other hand, opens the door to catastrophe, as poor Oliver finds out.

To keep me sane, and in an effort to understand the world, I’ve lived and traveled in a variety of continents. It hasn’t helped on either score, by the way. I now have more questions and less sanity. Nevertheless, traveling has added a thick, rich texture to my life. Throughout these journeys, my journal and sketchbook have been my navigation tools. For me, the two are complimentary, and over the years, visual art has taught me to be a better writer.  

Painter Roy Kinzer (shown left) who formerly taught at the Montclair Art Museum, unwittingly taught me as much about writing as any writing teacher. He pushed his students to see large, abstract forms, positive and negative space, and nuances of color – such as flecks of green in a skin tone or reds in a swatch of grass. By forcing myself to yield my preconceived ideas to the reality of what was actually in front of me, I slowly began to give that same courtesy to my characters. My stock assessments of them fell away as they revealed their true and surprising selves. Also, Kinzer’s insistence that we work on all parts of the canvas at once, rather than get bogged down in minutia too soon, trained me to stay fluid with the overall arc of my storyline.

Years ago I saw a film about the creative process that has stayed with me ever since. French director Henri-Georges Clouzot persuaded his friend Pablo Picasso in 1956 to make a documentary of his painting process. The film, called The Mystery of Picasso, shows the artist creating more than a dozen paintings, and illustrates the relationship between creation and destruction.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHlTvE-AI3Q (2 minute trailer)

As with Kinzer, Picasso starts with broad geometric shapes that immediately take possession of the entire page. Then come shading, color and depth. The most striking thing about the film is Picasso’s spontaneity, the dexterity with which he changes course. In one breath he has drawn an intricate fish. Just when you think it is perfect, he dives back in and transfigures it into a rooster. His changes are ruthless. He has no hesitation about obliterating what he has just done in order to transform it into something else. Just when you want to scream out, “Stop! You are destroying a Picasso!” he leaps in again to vaporize the rooster into a demon’s head. As an artist, it’s hard to watch this film without gasping. Many of us know the anguish of realizing we have to cut the very line we thought was brilliant. With Picasso, there is no anguish. His mercilessness is stunning. He may have been an arrogant SOB in life, but in art he was without egoic attachment. The film illustrates his total surrender to form. By prior agreement, when Clouzot finished shooting The Mystery of Picasso, all of the paintings were destroyed. 

The Hindu goddess Kali is the deity of creation and destruction. Robert Bly writes about her as an example of a “Death Mother” in Sleepers Joining Hands, and elsewhere. Generally, she is depicted with four arms that carry a sword, a trident, a severed head dripping blood, and a skull cup catching the blood. Her necklace is made of the skulls of her victims, (our inner demons and egoic attachments). She symbolizes the link between destruction and restoration in nature, and is feared for her extreme methods of initiating change - the forest fire followed by new growth, flooded plains followed by alluvial soil. Despite her ferocity, or rather because of it, she is the embodiment of divine energy, or Shakti.

Picasso did not fear his own Kali energy. On the contrary, he slept with her and made babies with her, lots of them. Painting and drawing have introduced me to Kali, too. She is the goddess of change; in other words, the goddess of Now. When I am tempted to save a favorite cut line in a scrap file for possible use later on, Kali tells me, “Baby, just hit delete.”

"25 Painters Under 35," with an Intro by John Yau (by David Yezzi)

It's been a while since I've been on the BAP blog. (BAP!: it's like one of those legends that fills the screen when Batman kicks someone in the kisser.) To be honest, Craig Arnold dying kind of took it out of me a bit, and blogging about poetry just seemed strange for a while. At any rate, I hope to write a blog about one of Craig's poems soon, and I also have a copy of Jill Essbaum's Necropolis that I'm keen to report on.

But first: here's a dynamite show of young painters if you are in, or passing through, New York. It's at the Painting Center, 52 Greene Street, 2nd Floor, and it runs through July 19. A friend and a first-rate painter, Gabbe Grodin, who works with me at The New Criterion, has these paintings in the show:

As John Yau writes in the catalog: “Painting is a slow art, no matter how quickly viewers might believe they see and absorb a painting’s visual data. It takes time to make a painting, and it takes time to see it, in some cases far longer than it took for the artist to make it. And along the way, any number of things can happen. At a time when there isn’t any discourse telling painters what they should be doing, the situation is wide open and even scary. There is no dominant style, subject matter, or relationship to paint’s materiality or immateriality. You can work from direct observation, make everything up, or be conceptual in your decisions. There is no safety net; nothing that says this is the right or wrong way to go. Abstraction and figuration are two options among many. Some may regard such confusion (or anarchy) as unhealthy, but I am not one of them. The pot is simmering, and out of it many unexpected delights have been emerging, even if they have flown under the radar.”

Here's an installation shot of a few more pieces. Check out the show, if you can!

RIP Karl Malden (at 97!)

There were many great priests in Hollywood films (Bing Crosby, Spencer Tracy) but none, to my mind, as affecting as Karl Malden in On the Waterfront. He had the ferocious zeal of true faith in his eyes; if you were ex-boxer Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), who could have been a contender, you'd sooner take on Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) and ten of his mob cronies than think of messing with Malden.

Left: Malden, Brando, and Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront

Malden was nothing if not versatile. In 1962, he played opposite Roz Russell in the musical "Gypsy"; a mere year earlier, he played the gunfighter who betrays comrade Brando in "One-Eyed Jacks" (1961), the western Brando directed. Malden was a great foil -- as, for example, the reasonable general Omar Bradley trying his hardest to restrain the headstrong George C. Scott as General George "Old Blood and Guts" Patton in that eponymous movie.

Click here for Robert Berkvist's obituary in the New York Times.
-- DL

Greg Santos presents a Poem by Jason Camlot

Born and raised in the town of Mont Royal, a suburb just north of Montreal, Jason Camlot grew up in the Montreal Anglo-Jewish community, where his father was a furrier manufacturer.  Jason started playing music when he was young. He received an MA from Boston University, a PhD from Stanford, and is chair of English at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the poetry editor of the Punchy Writers Series. -- Greg Santos

Mouse Memorial

I live with mice inside a monument of mice.
They have lived here since before the First Crusade.
I have been here since I learned to talk.
The mice are proud
and one day I will be a mouse, too –
small, blind and unimportant.
I admire their irreverent creeping, timid squeaks, tiny
ebony nests where the young lie like peanuts.
I admire their precious breath
and fast-beating hearts.
The monument itself is in the fragile bones
of those mice who are still alive.
As human castles lose their walls,
as tinted towers rise and fall,
this scuttling monument endures below,
passed on from mouse parent to mouse child.
My big, awkward bones
are my impediment to being memorial.
Still, already I am unimportant, and I am blind.
Is it hubris to hope one day I will be small?

-- Jason Camlot [from The Debaucher, 2008]

Independent Booksellers Support Fledgling Authors (by Tess Callahan)

Most of the events on my book tour so far have or will take place at independent bookstores. The people behind these stores, wave makers in the industry, are feverishly devoted to books.

Originally, I was supposed to have no book tour at all. After all, if you are a first time novelist without name recognition, who will attend your readings? The new trend in book publicity is the virtual book tour via the blogosphere. Indeed, I have been doing a healthy share of Q&A for literary websites I had no idea existed. But this is not the same as meeting people face to face, hearing their reactions to your work, and signing books for them and their loved ones.

It was my good fortune, therefore, that independent bookstore owners with the wherewithal to read endless advance copies, stepped up to request readings. Terry Gilman, owner of Mysterious Galaxy Books in San Diego, is a powerhouse of book promotion on the West Coast. (Standing, third from right). She organizes the LA-based “Ladies, Lunch & Literacy” series which brings debut authors to the South Bay to read, give a talk, and enjoy lunch with readers, many of whom participate in local book groups. In addition to the LA reading, Terry invited me to her San Diego bookstore for a delicious event called, “Wine, Women, Books & Chocolate,” which offers readers the opportunity to discuss books, and their lives, in a relaxed, informal setting. The desserts were rapturous.
http://mysteriousgalaxy.booksense.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp;jsessionid=abc76K9ebWcLsefIF8Fhs?s=localinterest&page=338901

While Terry Gilman is a pillar of support for debut authors on the West Coast, Jaime Clark and Mary Cotton, owners of Newtonville Books in Newton, MA, hold up the sky in the East. Newtonville Books is a modestly sized bookstore with a dynamite reading series. In addition to hosting an average of two readings per week, the little-store-that- could has readers’ clubs, writing workshops, and a community blog. On the night I was there, I was lucky to present with Josh Weil, (shown here signing books with me), who read from his novella collection, The New Valley. Extraordinary, by the way! Both Mysterious Galaxy and Newtonville Books have impressive collections of signed first editions by a wide gamut of authors.
http://www.newtonvillebooks.com/

The family owned Book Revue in Huntington, New York, where I’ll be reading on July 9, has evolved into a Long Island community and cultural center which offers workshops, book groups and children’s programs.  Despite its long history of hosting celebrity readings by the likes of Bill Clinton and Caroline Kennedy, the store is just as happy to support local unknowns like me. My siblings who live on Long Island can attest to the loyal support this store receives from its customers.
http://www.bookrevue.com/index.html

Talking Leaves Books in Buffalo, New York, co-founded by Jonathon Welch, has a contagious passion for books that are idiosyncratic, unusual, original, and stem from inquiring, free-spirited and independent minds. They feel that as our culture becomes more uniform, the voices and visions outside the mainstream become more significant. The store is an icon on the Buffalo landscape, and it will be an honor for me to read there on July 16.
http://www.tleavesbooks.com/

These have been lean years for indie booksellers competing against big chains in a precarious economy, but those who survived have unique personality, and make vital contributions to the communities they serve.

Here are a few more stores that generously support and promote new and local authors. These are just a few I happen to know about. If you have a bookstore you love, please share it in the comments section. Independent booksellers need us, and we need them.

Anderson Bookshop, Naperville, IL: http://www.andersonsbookshop.com/

Northshire Books, Manchester, VT: http://www.northshire.com/

Warwick’s Books, La Jolla, CA: http://www.warwicks.com/

Watchung Booksellers, Montclair, NJ: http://www.watchungbooksellers.com/

hardy garden hardening [with full deniability, the furious Jennifer Michael Hecht]

This young cuke has a wrong idea about how to hold on in life, but the old flower is enjoying the attention.  Those soft tendrils.

oh bleaders, i grow weary.  do you grow weary?  i know that you do.  let's see what else we can find in nature today.

this cuke has got hold the heirloom tomato plant.  tomato is thinking, thank sod for the fence.

Why is spam in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprise?  

Want to see how funny the faces of the sharks are at the Coney Island Aquarium?

What if this shark was a genius human shark and you fell in love?  It would be hard to kiss, but you'd find a way.  Especially if you were this cucumber plant, if you know what I mean.  Bleaders who are sometimes needers and sometimes the sturdy reed, and which is worse?  Well, if equal affection there can not be.  (let the more loving one be me) as the man says.  butum, umbut, let's look again.

at a certain point it touches itself and thinks it has touched something else and begins to start the long climb up some imaginary tree, a vine entwined

in its own mind.

yes, yes, i know:

fine.  you win again.

seeyanex,

Jennifer

The Marble Debate by Eleanor Goodman

Last week Heinrich, who as a resident of London has seen virtually none of the tourist attractions around town, accompanied me to the British Museum.  It’s an amazing building chock full of artifacts from all over the world and various time periods.  I have my doubts about whether it’s really okay to raid ancient Egyptian tombs and steal their burial goods, thus depriving the dead of essentials like bowls, combs, and protective amulets.  But there are more pressing present day controversies.  (Although if I were stuck in the afterlife without a bowl, I might think it was fairly pressing.)  For many years, Greece has been asking the British Museum to return the “Elgin marbles” that were taken from Athens during the Ottoman Empire some two hundred years ago.  Recently, the issue has made it into the news again with a book written about the topic by Christopher Hitchens, and the construction of an impressive new museum in Athens in which to safely display the marbles.  Britain argues that the marbles were legally removed, and that to return them is a slippery slope leading to the disintegration of major art collections in museums around the world.

I was first drawn to the controversy because it struck me as amusingly arrogant to rename the Parthenon after some British ambassador who happened to be a grabby art enthusiast, as though through the renaming alone the appropriation would become legitimate.  Which is not to say that Elgin didn’t save the marbles from an uncertain fate.  The Parthenon was already partially destroyed after being used by the Ottomans to store ammunition, not the best use for a spectacular ancient Greek temple.  To paint Elgin as motivated by purely altruistic urges of preservation and the public good, however, is contradicted by the fact that he first hoped to keep the marbles in his private collection before being forced to sell them to the British Museum when he ran out of money. 

My opinion wasn’t formed, however, until I saw the marbles in situ at the museum. 

Not exactly mind-blowing.  It looks like a bunch of carved rocks stuck to a wall.  Passing by without reading anything, you wouldn’t necessarily know the marbles came from a building at all, let alone a temple.  And then there’s this display:

Bits and pieces, without a hint of the narrative that made them meaningful.  One of the placards below reads, “Poseidon, god of the sea, was placed just right of centre as Athena’s opponent.  A fragment of his powerful torso is in Athens.”

There is an aspect to this argument that reminds me of the expression my mother used to use when she thought I was being stupid.  “You’re just biting off your tongue to spite your face,” she’d say with great verve.  As a kid, I never got it.  Now I know just what she meant.

The Perfect Day: An Experiment (by Tess Callahan)

So, I’m trying an experiment. Bear with me.

Stacey, creative mastermind of this website, commented on my post yesterday, (Cracks in Everything: Parenthood and the Writing Life), that she often has a perfect blueprint for her day that somehow eludes her. That applies to me, as well, not only in terms of days, but weeks, summers, my whole life, for that matter.

Several years ago I sent my novel out too soon. I had a big name agent who was high on the manuscript, and wanted to auction it to five publishing houses with the idea of starting a bidding war. When one-by-one all five praised the book but declined to make an offer, the surprised agent, who once told me we would grow old and grey together, dropped me like a burning ember. I don't blame him; it wasn't an efficient use of his time to wait around for me to develop. All this coincided with a move to Argentina that turned out to be a difficult year for me. Suffice it to say, I was in sorry shape.

The book sat in a box for eons until a friend from my writing group pushed me to take it out again. When I did, so much time had elapsed that I knew exactly what to do. I could treat the manuscript like someone else’s material. In retrospect, I am so grateful that the earlier version did not sell; it simply wasn’t done. Yesterday, Laura Orem noted the Buddhist notion that there are no true mistakes, just opportunities. My nightmare, in this case, turned out to be a blessing. Of course, the opposite can also occur. We’ve all had those. In short, expectations appear to be completely useless.

OK, the experiment. This morning I am jotting down five expected highlights of the day ahead of me, the intersections through which I predict the hours will turn and flow. Tonight, I will note down the five actual moments that resonate as the day draws to a close. Here goes:

10 AM - Expected pivots, in anticipation:
 

1. Drive daughter to and from riding stable.
2. Email publicist regarding this afternoon’s interview, and NPR producer regarding line edits.
3. BlogTalkRadio live call-in interview. (Argh! Nervous!)
4. Catch 2:25 bus with kids to meet husband at Jacob Javits Center and join friends for dinner.
5. Sign stock at Barnes & Noble and Borders.

 
10 PM - Actual pivots, in retrospect:
 

1. Two words floating up from a dream upon waking, “oasis” and “diasporas.” No images attached, just the luscious, open sound of the vowels drifting on my consciousness.
2. Reaching through Charming’s stall door to touch his neck, warm and moist with the day’s burgeoning heat. His soft muzzle nudging my shoulder.
3. During the interview, when asked about the dead brother in my novel, remembering all at once my cousin Annemarie, my age, dead at twenty in a car crash. Her long, thick braids and quiet self-possession.
4. A downpour bowing the umbrella we huddle beneath. Feeling the knobby, wet cobblestones of Gansevoort Street beneath the soles of my shoes.
5. Just now, checking on the kids in their darkened rooms. The sound of their breath. Distant traffic. The dog’s sigh.

I love the line from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “The roses had the look of roses that are looked at.”

So attached was I to my preconceived picture of my day that I almost didn’t see the one that actually transpired.

 

"Tremor of Intent"

Anthony Burgess's Tremor of Intent (1966), his satire of espionage novels, bears a double epigraph. The first is from W. H. Auden:

<<
But between the day and night
The choice is free to all, and light
Falls equally on black and white.
>>

The second is from T. S. Eliot:

<<
The worst that can be said of most of our malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned. >>

"Last Will and Testament" [by Kimberly Steele]

Last Will and Testament

Life is a molehill of unreadable documents and death
is a stapler. If you live long enough, your footsteps
will trace out a giant Rorschach test. You can give
this to posterity. But, really, let’s face it: perception
is secondary—sight, merely a pair of training wheels,
taste, an open clamshell robbed of its meat. Don’t look
toward smell or sound—a powerless rotting carcass,
a broken carburetor. As for touch? Well, everything
touches, but only a few things I’ve heard of can feel.
Just once, I would like to grasp onto a peppermint
red and tell someone about its loud edges. Or savor
a harmonious physics equation, trace the pattern
of its oblique angles. I want to resurrect Saint Paul
and give him a vagina, then sit back and watch him
react. If you live long enough, you’ll have fixed
opinions about these sentiments, and, of course,
chaos theory. The overwhelming pity is that your
ink blots will seem just like everyone else’s, scattered
by the will of the breeze, and if you ever end up
knowing anything at all, it will certainly turn out
to be something you never wanted to know, at all.
Your children will still stop at the crosswalk and look
both ways for speeding cars. On second thought, let Paul
keep his testicles—why waste another good twat?

-- Kimberly Steele

--

The head of the Office of the Independent Counsel was just about to go insane, because he wanted so badly to possess a copy of a certain satirical quarterly publication.  

Indeed, you might even say he was Starr craving MAD.  

Mannequins

These photos, taken in Ithaca by Richard Rand, seemed so suggestive to us, and so evocative of certain noir films of the 1950s, that we thought we would base an informal challenge on them. To wit: write a brief plot summary of a movie from which these are stills; preferably under 125 words, in the form of a comment. The winner as judged by one of our heroic fellow window-shoppers will earn bragging rights and a toast at Cafe Loup.

"Shearing Day" (by Laura Orem)

Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full.
One for the master, one for the dame,
And one for the little boy who lives down the lane.

Seems like a lot of wool for one sheep, but you'd be surprised. This week, Nathan, our shearer, came to give Ike and Izzy their annual haircuts. It's amazing to watch him - he flips them onto their butts, pulls out the electric clippers, and in about fifteen minutes releases a very relieved sheep with about half the volume of when he started. There's a specific technique to shearing: the idea is that the fleece should come off essentially in one piece. Then, the wool is gently washed to remove the lanolin, carded (this means combing the tangles out), and spun. Washed but uncarded wool is called "locks"; carded but unspun wool is "roving"; and spun roving is "yarn."  At the York County Fair each summer, there is a contest called "From Sheep to Shawl," in which teams of four or five members shear, wash, card, spin, and knit wool into shawls in a given time frame, usually about four hours. It's one of the most popular events at the fair.

Shearing day is fun. Everyone has a good time, and the sheep, although a bit astonished, feel much better afterward. Ike and Izzy are Babydoll Southdowns, which is considered a small breed (they weigh about 175-200lbs), and their fleeces fill up a king-sized bed sheet each. So "three bags full" isn't an exaggeration. I thought I'd share some before and after shots with you.

The "before" shot - Dinner before Nathan arrives


Once on their butts, the sheep freeze
and let Nathan go to work.




Almost done - the fleece is coming off in one piece


Voila! A complete fleece and a relieved sheep.


The "after" shot - until next June

Cracks in Everything: Parenthood and the Writing Life (by Tess Callahan)

"Ring the bells that still can ring,/ Forget your perfect offering./ There's a crack in everything./ That's how the light gets in." – from Anthem by Leonard Cohen.

In her comment on yesterday’s post, Poem as Fissure: Geophysics and the Value of Frailty, poet and artist Laura Orem wrote that she keeps these lyrics in her art studio as a reminder. A reminder of what, I wonder? To avoid sealing up the cracks, as if that were possible? Perhaps even to embrace them? And what are the cracks, anyway?

Cohen’s Anthem speaks on many levels – globally, politically, and environmentally – yet it hits me in a personal way. Everyday I wake up with an idealized version of how my day will go, the perfect offering. I see myself having a nice conversation with my kids over breakfast. We hear the wren singing outside, and see - far below the house - the rush of the river, flush from rain. We aim to do our tasks in the morning, then head to the lake after lunch. This morning’s plan is for me to write this post, and for them to play piano, do some summer reading, and practice their online math program. I’ve been up here in my office for about an hour now, (granted, most of that was spent listening to various renditions of Anthem on YouTube), and have yet to hear any notes from the piano. Hm…

Just as I am about to go down to investigate, I hear my son’s footsteps trudging up the stairs. His sister has been on Webkinz all morning, he reports, and has not let him do his math. This, from the boy who claims to be allergic to algebra. Boo hoo. Nevertheless, I am required to make the trip downstairs to say the obvious: No computer games until the other stuff is done. 
 
On the way down, I hear the fan running in the empty bathroom. The shower door is ajar, lights on, wet towel and pajamas on the floor. Am I surprised?  Then, I peek into the bedrooms. Every so often a bed is actually made without my asking; today isn’t one of those days. I make my way down to the kitchen. Cereal bowls half filled with milk adorn the table. I make my usual lame announcement that the maid is off duty today. My kids only groan. Has anyone thought to brush teeth? I don’t bother asking. I give them a new set of orders. Forget piano and math for the moment. For now, I tell them to take care of their rooms, their clothes, and their teeth. I tell them I will check back in a few minutes, and throw in some warnings about deductions from their allowance.

Then, back upstairs to this blog post. Where was I? Ah, yes, cracks. My perfect vision of a productive morning and relaxing afternoon is already splintering. What gets me most is the bickering: She took a book off my shelf without asking! He hit me with the dog’s chew toy!  A lifelong conflict-avoider, I am turned inside out by these run-of-the-mill quarrels. I try not to show it. I tell them it’s normal for siblings to fight sometimes, and they know how to work it out. They have plenty of practice.

Finally, I hear my daughter’s notes on the piano, and before long, my son’s footsteps as he stomps up the stairs again. He has forgotten the password to the online math program. “Can’t you just hit remember?” I say. It’s another trip down the stairs because I, too, have forgotten, and must look it up. “We’re not going to make it to the lake, are we?” he says. “And it’s all her fault.”

I imagine the Anthem lyrics refer to bigger cracks than my petty grumbles; true fractures in the realm of death, divorce, illness, and war. But these distractions and disruptions are the little splinters that make up my day as a parent. Okay, Leonard, where’s the light? By my calculation, I should be sunburned by now, except that we are still in the house, not at the lake, and our prospects of getting there are dwindling.

Maybe my perfect offering was too contrived. Maybe my kids won’t make big leaps in math this summer. Maybe my blog posts won’t be brilliant. Maybe it will take awhile longer before my children load the dishwasher without being asked, (I’m not giving up on that one, though!) Maybe the cracks are the spaces where we actually encounter each other in the most raw and honest ways. Idealized pictures, with their soft, faded edges, are never as engaging as the real thing.  Any image I may form of who my daughter and son might become, and how they will relate to each other, will surely be wrong, so I try not to speculate. We only have the moment at hand, this sunny afternoon and the desire to be out in it after so many weeks of rain. Enough of math, piano, and blogging. Let’s ring the bells that still can ring. We’re off to the lake to enjoy this singular day, cracks and all.

But before we leave, put away your snacks!