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It’s true, he does. Well, O.K., he actually calls it a log — an artlog. Go visit.
What, you’re still here? Look, if you’ve been reading Via Negativa much at all this year, from the various comments he’s left you must already have some idea of the man’s generosity and way with words, not to mention his stunning artwork, as exemplified by the Tempations of Solitude paintings I wrote about. All three qualities are on display at his brand-new blog, which reproduces the contents of letters he’s been sending out to a few friends over the past eight days chronicling the progress of a major new work.
This ‘Artlog’ has been set up to provide a glimpse into my studio and the way in which I work. I’m kicking off with a day by day photographic diary of the current painting on my easel. (A bit of an experiment as I’ve never done this before, so bear with me.) The subject is Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds. The idea had been long gestating. I had a notion to conjure a more threatening mood than the usual bucolic approaches to the story. The key image that kept niggling at me was a violent maelstrom of birds with the saint at the heart of it. Almost as though he’s being mobbed. (Tippi Hedren comes to mind in Hitchcock’s The Birds.)
I’ve thought for a while that Clive should be blogging, and I’m glad he finally seems to agree. Since he was already an inveterate letter-writer, I didn’t think it would require too big a shift in his patterns, though granted, I am a shameless evangelist for this medium. It will be interesting to see how Clive uses it. Anyway, do go say hi and check out those birds!
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“Cocktail Dress” started out as a simple exercise: a poetry postcard like one of these. I missed the contest deadline by a month and a half, but that’s O.K. It’d be a cool way to link to Read Write Poem, an online community and magazine I deeply believe in. I volunteered to help judge the contest, instead.
I was on the point of uploading the above image to yesterday’s post when I thought maybe I’d change the arrangement of lines, which the constraints of the image played hob with. But then of course the poem no longer fit on the photo. So I said O.K., I’ll just link to the photo at Flickr and post the poem — less confusing anyway for readers who have come to expect that any photo posted here will be one of mine.
So I had the post all ready to go again, and literally had my little arrow on the Publish button when I thought: you know, that ending is kinda lame. I’ve done more variations on that kind of ending than I can count; it feels stale to me. Bringing in the hawk like that — it’s completely unearned. What does a red-tailed hawk really have in common with a large advertisement for a dress, aside from the color red? Well, I suppose pigeons might escape the hawk by roosting on window ledges between the ad and the building, but I couldn’t think of a way to work that in without writing a completely new poem.
Draft #2 didn’t even make it to the finger-on-the-Publish-button stage:
My window is blocked by
an enormous vinyl
advertisement
for a red
cocktail dress.
When the sun strikes it
at 3:00 in the afternoon,
the room fills
with evening& I raise the window
to listen
to its soft flapping
over the sound of traffic.
I think I almost prefer it
to my former view
of stark & naked buildings.
Our lives are better
for these artful lies:
underwire support, pumps,
cleavage in the street.
A red flag
always ennobles hunger,
turning you wild,
O wild thing.
I mean, nice try to work in a reference to the hawk, but… “wild thing”?! The only way I could’ve made that more trite would’ve been to steal the joke from that Michelob beer ad, “Preserve the wild life!” But I liked the stuff about the truth behind the lies of advertising. Why not try for once to make explicit some of the thinking behind my choice of images? Suggesting a sameness between life under capitalism and life under communism had a certain appeal, but many people’s primary association with “red flag” would be a football game. Did I want that? Shouldn’t I go back to spelling out what it was a flag for?
I kept zeroing in on the sound that enormous poster would make, which strikes me as the aesthetic pivot of the poem. I described the ad as “vinyl” without bothering to do any actual research on such ads, but let’s assume I’m right about that. (And let’s completely ignore the likelihood that the building on which the ad appears in the photo is not an apartment building. These sorts of details are covered by poetic license.) What sort of noise would it make, assuming it was very tightly stretched? I tried verb after verb. “Rustling” would suggest a connection with the sound of a dress against the skin, which would be great, but it didn’t seem an apt description of the sound as I imagined it. “Soft crepitations”? “Crackling”? “Pulsing?” It seemed to me that a light breeze would probably yield both creaking, stretching noises and a sort of soft thumping against the building. Maybe “soft pulsing” would do the trick. Still a somewhat erotic overtone there.
My window is blocked by
an enormous vinyl
advertisement
for a red
cocktail dress — a flag
for the country of hunger.
When the sun strikes it
at 3:00 in the afternoon,
the room fills
with evening& I raise the window
to listen
to its soft pulsing
over the sound of traffic.
I think I almost prefer it
to my former view
of stark buildings
& filthy streets.
I’ve seen much too much
of that too little.What lies beyond
the artful lie is barely
worth notice: stretch
marks, sagging breasts,
hair growing where
it shouldn’t. A future
feeding breadcrumbs
to pigeons.
But the red dress says
get ready for
a wild ride.
I decided that this draft was good enough to publish, though at the last minute I decided to change “sagging” to “pendulous” for the assonance with “stretch” and “breasts.”
But then, as is so often the case, saying the lines over and over convinced me that I couldn’t have another -ing word so close after “evening” — and there was no way in hell I’d dispense with the latter, making as it does such a crucial connection between the wrongness of the ad and the sultry evening wear it advertised (at least in the imaginary scene I was working from; I have no idea whether the dress in the photo was in fact a cocktail dress. I know almost nothing about women’s clothing).
At about the same time, I got an email from a reader questioning my use of the phrase “pendulous breasts.” “Don’t you think that phrase is a little overused to be used in a poem?” she asked. Well, I dunno — I guess so. But saying the lines over and over, I decided that the short-e assonance is actually a bit too much there, and that for aural reasons alone I should’ve stuck with “sagging.” So I made the change and republished.
But in my email response, I admitted, “I think I ruined that poem by trying to pack too many ideas into it. It started off as a simple one-stanza poem like yesterday’s…” Once I’d admitted that, there was no way I could leave it alone. It was time to go back to the first draft and see how far I could go in the direction of a complete absence of didacticism.
So the bottom two-thirds of the poem were toast. A cocktail dress achieves its effect through elegant abbreviation; shouldn’t the poem do the same? I guess I am still an old-school imagist at heart. If I ever got a tattoo of anything, it wouldn’t say Poet, it would say Show, Don’t Tell. (Maybe “show” on the back of the left hand and “don’t tell” on the back of the right, in a simple serif font…)
I’d known at some level from the beginning that “flag from the country of hunger” had to go: it just doesn’t feel fresh to me. Not only have I probably written that exact line before — that’s the way it feels — but a flag for an imaginary, allegorical country is almost a cliché in contemporary American poetry. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect from a Billy Collins or a James Tate — and good for them if they can make it new. I can’t.
Then I go back and look at the photo again. What about our perspective as outsiders trying to imagine (as I am doing) what lies behind the ad? The putative inhabitant now begins to seem as illicit as the dirty streets and sagging breasts had seemed to him or her in previous drafts. I remember an interview I heard on the radio last month with the New York Times science writer Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex, in which he waxed poetic about the human blood fluke, which has a decades-long lifespan and remains intimately connected with its partner for the whole of that long voyage through our bloodstream. No doubt blood flukes deserve a whole poem of their own, possibly an epic. (There’s also a dalliance with snails earlier in their life-cycle.) But in the meantime, let’s at least slip in a reference. Blood is red, “fluke” is a very suggestive word… it works, I think.
But back to the central question: what’s the right way to describe that sound? Do I really need to keep the traffic-noise mention in there? Surely a long-time city resident would hardly notice such a thing, not compared to the novelty of the creaking, possibly humming sign. Then I think, what about “crackle and hum”? Immediately I realize that this is a semi-plagiarism from the title of a best-selling album by U2, Rattle and Hum. I’ve never been a fan of their music, but I love the sound those two words make together. “Crackle and hum” isn’t quite as mellifluous, but it has the great advantage — for my purposes — of suggesting an old radio, especially a shortwave radio. A-ha! The poem is really about broadcasting, isn’t it?
And that’s good enough to end on, I think. The ending of a poem should always feel like a new door or window on the world has just been thrown open. My first draft tried to do that by suggesting a relationship between dress and redtail and letting the reader ponder that, but it was too pat.
My window is blocked by
an enormous vinyl
advertisement
for a red
cocktail dress.
If you’re looking up
from the street,
I am right behind
the left breast,
shameless as a blood fluke.
When the sun strikes it
at 3:00 in the afternoon,
the room fills
with evening
& I raise the window
to listen to it
crackle & hum.
Thus it was that the fourth major draft moved into the blog post and settled in after I evicted its predecessor. It seems like a responsible, dues-paying tenant, but you never know. I’ve duplicated it here in case I do end up making further adjustments.
“Cocktail Dress” is neither the best nor the worst poem I’ve ever written. There’s a grain or two of authentic insight there, I think, and the language is O.K. The main thing that’s different here is in fact the process behind it, which I have outlined in such excruciating detail partly for my own future reference.
I’ve been writing poems since the age of seven. I’m 43 now, and up until about six years ago I did write almost every poem in just this kind of laborious manner with multiple, often quite different drafts. Learning to use a word processor and slowly weaning myself off pen and paper changed things a bit, as I’ve said before, but not nearly as much as starting this blog did. In general, I think blogging has had a very beneficial effect on my writing by forcing me to write something every day — I’ve always been an exhibitionist, albeit a sometimes shy one, so blogging was a perfect fit.
But whatever happened to revision? I’ve been telling myself that I don’t do it much anymore because I don’t have to: writing in quantity for an online audience has led to a maturation of my technique. But has it really? I’ve also been known to say that the professional poets go overboard in their perfectionism, and that while we don’t have to adopt the sloppy “first draft, best draft” approach of the Beats, obsession with unobtainable perfection seems unhealthy and counterproductive. But maybe that’s just a convenient excuse to cover my natural laziness. The fact is, it’s always more exciting to generate new content than to fuss around with something I wrote last week or last year.
What scares me is that I almost published that first draft and moved on without exploring the images and ideas in any real depth. And then when I dropped the too-easy ending, I flailed about for many hours, and even posted a draft I wasn’t terribly satisfied with. Maybe it’s time I re-think the way I write poems.
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My window is blocked by
an enormous vinyl
advertisement
for a red
cocktail dress.
If you’re looking up
from the street,
I am right behind
the left breast,
shameless as a blood fluke.
When the sun strikes it
at 3:00 in the afternoon,
the room fills
with evening
& I raise the window
to listen to it
crackle & hum.
Prompted by this photo, which was also the image used for Read Write Poem’s first ecard contest.
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That first sacrament’s
cratered snow was already
turning brown
while they marvelled
at its tartness, the luster
& tight fit of its skin,
its curved descent to orifice.
Then oh the aftertaste —
like wood, like clay.
Click photo for a larger version.
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The Big Idea woke me up after less than six hours’ sleep. Hey, what’s the big idea? I asked. You’re about to find out, it said. Put down your sleep and follow me.
Me: Go away and leave me alone. I need a new project like I need a hole in the head.
B.I.: There’s a hole in everything. That’s how the mutagens get in.
Me: Spare me the bad Leonard Cohen paraphrases. Hell no, I won’t glow!
B.I: Thirty-year-old bumper sticker slogans won’t save the earth, either. But I just might.
Me: Hey, whoa! The track record for ideas saving the earth is really, really poor. Just about every time people have tried that, they’ve ended up providing cover for new systems of oppression instead. Look at Marxism, Fascism, Christianity. We don’t need any more of those kinds of big ideas. Go away.
B.I.: I am not that big! Besides, I am much too whimsical to inspire sociopaths like Stalin or Constantine, and you know it. I would be at best a part — a small part — of any solution. Just one of many things that could help bring about a subtle but significant shift in the global consciousness…
Me: “A shift in the global consciousness”?! Jesus fucking christ. Take your goddamn simplistic New Age babble and get the hell out of my head!
B.I.: So you’re content to go on drifting through life as a tinkerer, a putterer, an intellectual dilettante? You don’t want to contribute to something larger than yourself?
Me: I contribute every time I capture an insight on paper — or in pixels, as the case may be. And it’s not like I’m completely self-centered, either. Well over half my energies these days are already directed toward promoting other people’s work. If I decide to put you into practice yet, that will not only eat into these other commitments, but leave me with hardly any time for my own creative work. Not to mention rob me of sleep on a regular basis, give me ulcers, and lead in all probability to an early grave.
B.I.: But I could make you famous! Then your own words would have an astronomically larger audience. And eventually, once I’m well established, you could pass the baton to someone else and go back to what you’re doing now.
Me: Get thee behind me, Satan.
B.I.: Well, who’s got the messianic complex now? You see — you do want to save the earth.
Me: The very idea that we should aspire to “save the earth” — that any one of us, or even any group of us, could possibly begin to comprehend what the earth needs — it’s total hubris. It’s nothing but the old colonialist, white-man’s-burden bullshit times ten. The earth doesn’t need to be saved, it needs to be left the fuck alone.
B.I.: That’s a very convenient belief for someone who happens to own thousands of dollars worth of stock in evil transnational corporations. Come on. Give up everything you have and follow me.
Me: Don’t try to sweeten the deal. You know what a masochist I am. Look, the fact is I am not the right person — not your Saul, if we want to keep playing with this ridiculous New Testicle analogy. Even the best idea, if brought into the world by the wrong person, will either be still-born or die slowly and painfully after a few, heart-wrenching years of life.
B.I.: But nobody else would love me as well as you do! And you do, admit it. Why else does anyone wake in the middle of the night? What you lack in connections and technical expertise you could more than make up for in passionate commitment.
Me: Tired. I’m so tired.
B.I.: People would literally come out of the woodwork to help. O.K., figuratively. But build it — build me — and they will come.
Me: O.K., that’s it. When an idea depends on clichés from sentimental baseball movies to communicate its importance, it is officially NO LONGER WELCOME IN MY HEAD. Get out! Get out!
To be continued. Or — in all likelihood — not.
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I discovered this wild garden some ten years ago at the edge of one of the talus slopes just over the crest of Sapsucker Ridge. I had been bushwhacking along the northwest side, smashed my way through the last laurel tangle expecting to hit open rocks, and found this instead. I was immediately reminded of the Moss Temple (Kokedera), a World Heritage Site in Kyoto, Japan that I was fortunate enough to visit back in 1986. Despite constant traffic noise — in this case, from the four-lane highway at the base of the ridge — a moss garden is a summons to silent contemplation. Something about that densely packed green crowd maintaining such utter silence can’t help but have a profound effect on the imagination.
As I discovered on that first visit, there’s only one easy way out or in. On subsequent visits, I’ve always approached it thinking I must’ve been mistaken, maybe it’s not that great after all, because the view from above isn’t too promising. You have to pick your way to the bottom of the slope, and even then, I suppose, it might not be everyone’s idea of a scenic spot, especially since the view of the valley and the Allegheny Front beyond is better from an area of open rocks 75 feet away. But the variety of moss and lichen species in such a small space seems extraordinary. One of these years I’ll have to try and photograph them all so I can key them out.
There’s a feeling of deep time, almost timelessness, in the slow-growing moss and lichens. They grow on their own calendars, flourishing at times of the year when nothing else is green. At the end of the last glacial epoch 8000 years ago, this ridgetop, like every other in central Pennsylvania, would’ve been a cracked and broken scree slope — a biological desert. We’re well south of the furthest extension of the ice sheet, but miniature local glaciers still did plenty of damage. Eight millennia later, patches of open talus still remained when these ridges were clearcut for charcoal in the early 19th century, and the subsequent fires and erosion enlarged them again. In the two centuries since, the forest has resumed its glacially slow conquest of the rocks.
I can never go there without doing some damage, no matter how gingerly I step, so I try to limit my visits to just once a year. The moss grows directly on the rocks, which shift unpredictably under my weight, tearing their thick green pelt. If I step on the unmossed rocks, the foliose lichens crumble under my boots. How can something so tough be so fragile? Once, I discovered a neat line of deer hoof prints through the moss — a rarity, since the deer usually avoid the leg-breaking talus.
Three years ago, a large branch fell across the upper portion of the garden, and now it shelters a foot-wide band of fallen leaves and leaf-rot. This, of course, is how the forest spreads. Should I put my finger on the clock-hand and keep this area in a state of arrested development — as the monks at Kokedera have been doing for the last 700 years with their obsessive raking and removal of all organic debris? Should I start picking out the branches and pulling the occasional blueberry, striped maple, and black birch sprouts? Should I, in short, become a gardener, and rob this spot of its wildness? Or should I let nature follow its course, content in the knowledge that plenty of other potential “found gardens” exist, slowly shifting in and out of peak aesthetic condition, all over the mountain?
View the complete slide show or photo set.
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I have a real post coming, honest! But in the meantime, I have to share a couple of the web goodies I’ve come across in the last few days.
I and the Bird #133 is a treasure-trove of extended literary quotes, mostly from poems. You almost don’t have to click the links (though of course you should.) The host this time is Matthew Sarver, a fellow Western Pennsylvanian with serious naturalist chops and a gift for writing and photography. He’s still in his first year of blogging, but he seems to have taken to it like a duck to water. I and the Bird, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, is a hugely successful, bi-weekly blog carnival about birds and birding — our original inspiration at the Festival of the Trees.
Matt’s one of many birdwatchers on Twitter now — the medium seems like a great fit for birders, and not just because of the avian iconography — and it was on Twitter that I caught the news about Matt’s edition of IATB as I was doing a quick check through the five accounts I maintain there. Yes, five, and I neglect than all! But I’m primarily still focused on Twitter (and Identi.ca) as a medium for micropoetry.
Back when I first started tweeting my Morning Porch entries in November 2007, one of the relatively few Twitterers then sharing haiku was @tinywords, the feed for a daily haiku site with quite a few followers. Then it fell silent in July 2008. Well, just last week I noticed a tweet from @tinywords announcing that tiny words the website was going to start back up, and I clicked through to find a brand new site. And this time, the editor has broadened the focus:
tinywords is now accepting submissions for issue #1. This issue will be edited by tinywords publisher d. f. tweney and will be published, one poem per day, starting December 1.
I’m looking for very short or micro poems of no more than 5 lines, and ideally less than 140 characters. This could include haiku, senryu, tanka, cinquains, or other forms.
Longer works (e.g. haibun) will also be considered if they include a very short poem that can be excerpted.
I’m also interested in artwork and/or poem-artwork combinations (e.g. haiga) that could fit with the theme of miniature poetry.
I’ll accept submissions for a 2-week period only, from November 10-24.
It’s great to see new venues for micropoetry popping up. Tiny words joins Fiona Robyn’s A Handful of Stones and the group blog I contribute to, Open Micro. There’s also an entirely Twitter-based microjournal called Seven By Twenty. And there are quite a few individual purveyors of micropoetry on Twitter these days.
Now, it’s easy to dismiss this efflorescence of short-form verse on the web as pandering to the fractured attention spans endemic to a distraction-rich media environment. There may be some truth to that. But my idea with the Morning Porch was always to try to make people stop for a moment and go “Huh,” and to the extent that I’ve succeeded there — and led others to begin using Twitter and Identi.ca for similar purposes — I count it a success. More than that, poets have been writing various forms of micropoetry for centuries, and why? Because it turns out to be an exceptionally good way to focus the attention. What words are really necessary? What dazzling metaphor has to remain implicit if we are to capture the whole mood? I love the way my Twitter-inspired microprose-poetry discipline forces me to grapple with these questions every morning.
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“I kept dead-drifting and slowly jigging my root-beer bugger through the chocolate milk-covered water, hoping for a strike.”
—George Daniel of Lock Haven, PA, gold medal winner in the 2009 United States Fly Fishing Championship, as quoted by Mark Nale in his “Naturally Speaking” column, The Daily Herald, Nov 7, 2009
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It’s funny how the logging of a slope can so alter one’s sense of space as to make an area one had previously thought of as steep seem almost flat. I am just fifty feet from our property line here, on the site of a trail I’ve followed many, many times along Sapsucker Ridge, but I feel lost — literally, as in “Where the hell is this?” The old trail is blocked by piles of slash — forester-speak for the discarded tops of felled trees — as is the new haul road. Saplings lie prostrate; it was evidently too much trouble to drive the skidder around them.
The diameter-limit cutting, also referred to as high grading, does leave at least some cover for the many understory plants and creatures that need it, but it ignores the need for trees with a mix of genetics to supply seeds for regeneration. Often the smaller trees left when a logger takes everything over ten inches in diameter at breast height aren’t any younger than the big trees, they just aren’t as healthy. Planning for the future is obviously not part of the picture here. These are logging practices straight out of the 19th century.
The porcupine tree has just lost its nearest neighbors for — I’m guessing — the second time in its life; forest trees don’t get that wide a crown if they’ve spent their whole life in a crowd. Maybe I’ll start calling it the Job tree, instead — “I alone am left to tell thee.” Like Job, it’s been sorely afflicted, but the constant pruning of its twigs by porcupines living in its hollow heart has yet to kill it, and who knows — all this new light may help it survive another century. These ridgetop chestnut oaks are damn tough trees.
The chainsaws leave marks as regular as the grooves of a harrow on a fresh-tilled field. To a forester, for whom every logging operation is a timber harvest, this must be a beautiful sight. And if the deer don’t become too ravenous at any point in the next four to five years (a big if), each of these chestnut oak stumps may acquire a ring of saplings. Quercus prinus excels at stump-sprouting.
So like the old man thrown into a cart for dead bodies in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, despite appearances this tree is not dead yet! Though forestry convention has us age trees by the oldest above-ground trunk, the root system here could be several centuries old.
The physical and ecological effects of logging extend hundreds of feet into the adjacent forest. But of course neighboring landowners like us would have a very difficult time getting a judge to issue an injunction on that basis — we know this from bitter experience. The ridgetop was the only place level enough to put a logging road, but it was also the property line, so the ephemeral ponds at the top of the Plummer’s Hollow watershed, less than 50 feet on our side of the line, will be affected by runoff as well as increased levels of light and wind and exposure to invasive plants, among many other effects.
This had been the sole remaining section of woods surrounding ours not to have been logged in the last 40 years; a couple of neighboring properties have been logged twice in that period. Plummer’s Hollow has become an island of older forest habitat, simply because we have done our best to leave it alone. But we realize that’s a luxury some people can’t afford, and we can only speculate what kind of pressures must drive someone to have their cherished hunting ground lumbered right when the hardwood market is at its lowest point in decades.
They say a depressed economy is good for the environment, but here in Pennsylvania, with virtually unregulated hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in the Marcellus shale formation about to kick into high gear, I don’t think that will turn out to be true. Bad as this little logging job looks, our forest got off lucky.
For more on high grading, see also my earlier post on the subject from 2006.
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Don’t forget to post something about trees this month and send me the link so you can be included in the next edition of the Festival of the Trees. See my call for submissions on the coordinating blog for details.
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Some people still swear by witch hazel extract as a balm for cuts and bruises, acne and mosquito bites. But to me, the shrub’s greatest healing power lies in the visual relief and color its flowers provide — among the few splashes of color still remaining in the gray and brown woods of late autumn.
The next issue of qarrtsiluni, the literary magazine I help curate, will be all about health, broadly defined. I’ve been remiss in not linking to the call for submissions, which we published on November 1. The editors this time are Susan Elbe and Kelly Madigan Erlandson, and the deadline for submissions is November 30. Susan and Kelly have chosen a theme that should resonate far beyond the current health care debate in the United States:
We are interested in creative interpretations of health, which will of course include the health (or lack thereof) of the human body, but also of the mind and spirit, the environment, or the culture. How systems stay in balance, how one attains wellness, how we relate or respond to our own state of health and the health of others, and the extent of an individual’s physical, emotional, mental, and social ability to cope with his/her environment would all be fair game. Unusual health-related practices also intrigue us (serpents? psychic surgery?) as well as tales of spontaneous recovery. How much control do we have over our own health? Explore superstitions, regale us with symptoms, or simply make a well-written toast to our health — we’ll consider it. Keep in mind too that the etymological roots of health include “whole” and “hale,” but also “holy.”
Read the complete description if you’re interested in submitting.
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If the above is news to you, then you might’ve also missed the fact that we’re doing daily podcasts at qarrtsiluni now (subscribe in iTunes here, or listen via the audio players on the site). For many of the image posts this issue, Beth and I have been indulging ourselves a little and engaging in extended discussions, prompted by the images but often going off on tangents related to other aspects of the current theme, “words of power.” I think some of them have turned out pretty well. It’s fun.
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There was an interesting, brief interview with Pamela Johnson Parker, the winner of qarrtsiluni’s 2009 chapbook contest, today at Read Write Poem. Her answer to the last question, “Can Poetry Save the World?” was intriguing, I thought:
I can’t speak for the world, but it’s saved me. I had an illness this summer that affected my speech, coordination and memory. My neuropsychologist was amazed that I could immediately recall poems, whole stanzas of them. I made one of the quickest full recoveries he’s ever witnessed. I give credit to Shakespeare, Bishop, Keats, Frost, Browning, Cummings — and also to Mrs. P., the 7th-grade teacher who made me memorize poems as a penalty for talking in class.
So there you have it: poetry can heal. I prescribe one dose of qarrtsiluni a day.
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I will miss the incandescent light bulb, its hairless, faceless, chinless head as if from a gelded angel. I will miss that single, glowing synapse. That one bright idea appearing above our heads in the comics, quintessence of the thought balloon. I wouldn’t mind if light bulb jokes died along with it, but I’m sure they’ll persist in some form as long as the obtuseness of other people seems worth a laugh.
There’s no denying the compact fluorescent bulb’s comparative sobriety, though — it’s as blandly utilitarian as a radiator coil or a wastebasket. I’m sure there are those who will miss the radiator coil if electric cars take over, and wastebaskets probably already have their aficionados, but neither comes close to the incandescent light bulb’s fungal charisma. Flea market booths that today specialize in antique glass insulators will someday do a brisk business in burnt-out bulbs. Little girls will stop for a closer look: Daddy, what sort of doll did this come from?
And Daddy will say, its body was hidden from us, we didn’t think about it much. Its limbs were long seams of a greasy midnight that used to be trees, and had been buried halfway to forever in the hearts of mountains. And when we moved the mountains to disinter them, streams and rivers died, the lungs of miners turned black, deadly mercury spread across the earth. This was the dangerous kind of doll. We were happy not to have it around the house.
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I was three and a half when my mom went off to the hospital to give birth to my younger brother. Dad was left in charge. Five days later, my maternal grandmother arrived to help out, and was astonished to discover that I was wearing five pairs of underpants, one overtop the other. Every morning my dad had reminded me to put on clean underwear, and I had.
This story is sometimes still re-told at large family gatherings to general merriment. Yes, kids can be literal. This afternoon when I walked into my parents’ house, Mom said to her four-year-old granddaughter, “Here comes trouble!” “What do you mean?” Elanor said. “That’s not trouble! It’s just Uncle Dave.” Thanks. I think.
Two weeks ago, I caught a whiff of body odor from my underarms. As long as I change shirts regularly, I never get B.O. I decided it must be time to do laundry. The next morning, when I went to pull out the T-shirt from inside the usual layers of turtleneck, sweatshirt, and quilted flannel shirt (I keep a cool house), I discovered not one but two T-shirts, the newer one underneath the old. It gave me a funny kind of deja vu.
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I’ve written before about the dreams I used to have in which I’d walk over the ridge and discover another hollow, parallel to this one, often with very similar buildings and inhabitants, “where the orchard was never bulldozed out in the 1950s and the old farmhouse was spared its extreme makeover into a faux plantation home. Everything is twice as big and twice as far.” Last night I had a version of this dream, but the previously unknown, Land-of-Faerie Plummer’s Hollow I found myself staring down into this time was a hellscape of strip-mine terraces and settling ponds: Lost Mountain.
Or rather, it was Lost Mountain crossed with a very local instance of mountaintop removal northeast along this same ridge, where an area known as Skytop was carved out to make room for a controversial highway cut a few years back, and a smaller geographic analogue to Plummer’s Hollow was almost completely buried in what turned out to be toxic pyritic fill. I shudder every time we drive over it on our way to Penn State. It’s like we’re driving over our own grave.
*
When I was a teenager, I used to day-dream about finding a small clearing in the woods where tree branches touched overhead, water dripped in a hidden spring, and you couldn’t hear a sound that wasn’t natural. Sometimes it had a small hut in the middle of it, but most of the time it didn’t. When I went to Japan in my sophomore year of college, I think I was still searching for that clearing — it had acquired Zen and Shinto overtones. I visited hundreds of rural shrines and temples that year, and would often take a bus or train to the end of the line and wander around in the hills. I was a bit of a romantic, it’s fair to say. Then I’d come back into the city and get back-slappingly drunk with friendly strangers. Somewhere along the line I stopped looking for that magic clearing and just stuck with the drinking.
Last week, for no particular reason, that old day-dream sprung to mind again. Maybe I’d still been inhabiting it all this time without realizing it. I took a walk up to the ridgetop, and instead of a second hollow, found myself looking into a sunlit clearing that stretched along the far side of our property line for half a mile where a small-scale logging operation has been underway since August. I’d been avoiding it for weeks. As my mother said resignedly the other day, at least we have a better view of the migrating hawks and eagles now. I stared across the valley at the Allegheny Front and saw another recently logged patch, marked with the raw Z of a steep haul road.
Today was crystal-clear, so I went back with my camera to take some pictures for documentary purposes. Every disturbed patch of forest recovers differently, based on chance factors as well as features intrinsic to the site, so I like to observe what I can. This was a diameter-limit cut, with everything under ten inches in diameter still standing except for the collateral damage of saplings run over by the skidder, so aesthetically it wasn’t as harsh as it could have been. But the freshly cut stumps were still hard to look at, especially those from trees I remembered well. I snapped more pictures of stumps than anything else. I studied the patterns left by the chainsaw’s teeth, the way they made a crosshatch with the concentric layers of what had once been xylem, the bark that would never be stretched over another new layer of life.
One pair of stumps from a double-trunked oak had small hollows at their center — a surprise to the loggers, I imagine. They must’ve found solid wood not too much farther up the tree, though, because I didn’t see any discarded logs lying about. I brought my face down close to avoid the glare on the top surface of the stumps, peered into the closest hollow and saw another face staring back. Hello sky. Hello water.
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In response to a three-dimensional etching by Aine Scannell.
In the house of night, a blue bear
pores over the screenplay for your dreams.
Somebody’s bad heart wrinkles
like a sack of cheese tied to the rafters.
I dreamed that I was lucid-dreaming,
and then I was.
In the house of night, neither ink
nor midnight oil ever run low.
Bed-time prayers flutter out
through a cross-shaped window,
anachronistic as bats on a winter day.
The mild poison from a house spider bite
spreads a dark delta down one thigh.
In the house of night, every time
a clock stops, some unloved language
or species dies in its sleep.
A nightjar blows its lid
& the bogeyman jumps, an obvious fraud,
under the parchment eaves.
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White-nose Syndrome from Gerrit Vyn on Vimeo.
A biologist friend sent me the link to this slide presentation on white-nose syndrome last night, but it took me until this afternoon to muster the strength to watch it. I think the fact that it’s still images — and very fine photos at that — actually makes it harder-hitting than if it were a true video. While I’ve never agreed with the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, pictures plus spoken words make for a very potent combination. It’s not the information per se, most of which I’d already known, but had been managing to keep on a somewhat abstract level.
Bats play a pivotal role in eastern forest ecosystems because they consume a very large quantity of insects. What effect will their disappearance have on forest trees — or on crops, for that matter? But more than that, it’s terrible to be losing these creatures which are wondrous and beautiful and important for their own sake. I hate to always talk about extirpation or extinction in terms of the effects on us and other species, as if that’s the main reason why it matters, though it’s an ecological truism that, as John Muir put it, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” And bats on summer evenings are woven inextricably into some of my fondest memories of childhood.
There’s no obvious, conclusive lesson here, not yet, though I’ve heard suggestions that the white nose fungus might be native to Europe, and might have been brought here accidentally by cavers. There doesn’t seem to be much we can do about it, though obviously biologists are rushing to learn all they can in hopes of preventing its spread, or at least helping to save remnant populations of the affected species. Congress recently approved $1.9 million to study white-nose syndrome, and you can keep up with other developments in this story at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service website. There’s a form there that you can use to report unusual bat behavior or deaths if you live in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Hampshire or Vermont. You could also join Bat Conservation International, the world’s leading scientific advocacy organization for bats.
I am keeping my fingers crossed that the epidemic won’t effect some of the more solitary, forest-dwelling species, and will be limited to those who spend the winter in large hibernacula, but that’s probably wishful thinking. I’m not really sure why I’m sharing all this. You’re either going to shrug, if you’re not much of a nature lover, or, like me, become uselessly distraught. I don’t have the words to express how this makes me feel. After watching the above presentation, I proceeded to burn dinner — something I haven’t done in years, if ever — and break a favorite casserole lid. “This is not my day,” I said by way of lame explanation. But for the bats, this is evidently not their century.
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by Nathan Moore and Dana Guthrie Martin
When sharing poems on the internet,
it is important not to consider an audience
of square dancers and nudists but to focus instead
on less “mainstream” readers: the tracing-paper
addicts and chronic organ grinders.
The latter are especially unreasonable and will offer
poetry critique at inappropriate times, such as when
they want to feel better about their own shoddy
attempts at plastic surgery.
Password protection of poems offers a sense of security,
although a misguided emphasis on the sanctity
of toadstools and juke boxes prevents poets
from enjoying steady employment.
Everyone knows the point of sharing poems
on the internet is to keep them hidden away
like secret regrets. Yet we find that the more
we behave like flashers, the more we have to spend
on trench coats.
Likewise, our public invitations to square dances
and raves, though almost universally rejected,
are still our only chance at being rubbed all over
other people’s hair, causing it to stand on end.
This brings us to copyright issues. The ownership
of a poem, like the ownership of a washing machine
or cat, is pretty simple: Just slap an ID tag on it
and you’re good to go — or so we thought.
As it turns out, in the murky world of the internet,
your “cat,” however “cat-like” it may appear,
might yet turn out to be a washing machine.
How will you know what to do with it?
Do you open its mouth and fill it with Tide,
or do you take another route and stop washing
your clothes altogether? Soiled shirts
will definitely make you look like a poet.
The phenomenon of poetic recognition is crucial
to a sense of online community. Waking up one day
and realizing three or four people know your name
is akin spotting a UFO: You know it’s real, but you
can’t lay your hands on the evidence.
This is why poet-bloggers turn to their oracles,
Statcounter and Google Alert, neither of which
need be consulted more than 400 times a day.
Every page view produces a sensation similar
to sliding along a Slip-n-Slide covered in baby oil.
Toxicologists fret about enthusiastic bloggers’ tendency
to lick their monitors until the words smear. The aftermath
can be measured in parts per million: How many
poets’ nouns must bleed into the verbs of casual readers
before this behavior is seen as a public health risk?
*
Dana Guthrie Martin and Nathan Moore between them have more experience blogging poetry than anyone I know. In addition to their personal blogs, My Gorgeous Somewhere and Exhaust Fumes and French Fries, they are founder/publisher/director and community and membership director, respectively, of Read Write Poem, and founders and inaugural curators of an innovative new online journal called Mutating the Signature, a WordPress-ennabled “space where issues are produced by two curators working together to write for, with and to each other over the course of the issue.” MTS is an outgrowth of a previous collaborative blog of the same name that the two of them had at the same URL, which was an outgrowth of an issue of qarrtsiluni, also called Mutating the Signature, which they co-edited, as well as an earlier, collaborative poetry blog for a larger group that they were both active in.
Earlier in this series, British writer Dick Jones also tackled the subject of blogging and poetry, in case you missed it: “Poetry in the Ether.”
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The last of the quaking aspen leaves have fallen in the night, I notice with a pang. Their naked trunks shine pale in the morning sun where they stand, the four of them, at the edge of the marshy corner of the field. It’s like losing a shortwave radio: how now will I eavesdrop on the murmur and agitation of the larger world? Then this morning I hear that the emerald ash borer is now just two counties away, and I am stricken again.
But what a fossil I am, speaking of shortwave radios in the age of the World-Wide Web! The latest edition of the Festival of the Trees at the Brazilian Blog do Árvores Vivas (Living Trees Blog) reminds us of the possiblities for communication across human language barriers — it’s a fully bilingual edition — as well as, potentially, between humans and trees, if we pay careful enough attention. Go visit.
Also, note that the next edition of the festival one month from now will appear right here at Via Negativa. Send tree-related links to bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line — see here for how to participate.
We seem to have run out of willing hosts for future editions, however, and not too many people send in links anymore, either, so perhaps this will be the last edition. No sense in beating a dead horse (or a live one, for that matter, but I digress). The trouble with blog carnivals, it seems, is that everyone wants to be linked to, but few remember to return the favor, and as the carnival ages, it loses that shiny newness essential to arousing murmurs and agitation on the Web. First people stop linking to it, and then they stop participating altogether.
But maybe I’m wrong, and we’re just in a temporary lull. If you’d like to keep the Festival of the Trees going, please consider volunteering to host, or even easier — and just as important — spreading the word in the most obvious ways possible: by linking to it, blogging about it, Twittering about it, or posting the link to the latest edition on Facebook (things I don’t always remember to do myself). Nothing lasts forever, but if in fact you’d like this unique, tree- and forest-centered blog carnival to continue, you’ll have to start showing it some love. Do it for the trees! Because I am not the Lorax, I am the old Once-ler. And like the Once-ler, I say,
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
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I got some half-decent footage of crows mobbing what turned out to be a red-tailed hawk this afternoon. I wasn’t quick enough to get the hawk, so it didn’t make for much of a nature video even by my low standards, so I decided I’d mess around with it and try to make a videopoem instead. Here’s the text:
If the dead can’t rest,
it’s because we won’t let them.
We storm,
we harry,
we decry,
we implore.
We make them star
in our horror shows
for that surge of adrenalin
that lets us know
we’re alive —
as if they our dear departed
were the ones out for blood.
Jamendo.com was down, so I went to the Internet Archive’s Open Source Audio collection instead and quickly found some suitable music. The main advantage of searching on Jamendo is that you can filter out Creative Commons licenses that specify “no derivatives.” But I think from now on I’ll probably try the Internet Archive first, because it seems to have much more of the kind of music I’m looking for.
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For what it’s worth, this is my 3,000th post at Via Negativa. Granted, 466 of those are just quote-and-link posts in the Smorgasblog category. And this figure does not include the 719 Morning Porch posts, which are in a separate blog. I mention them because, in my first several years of blogging, I almost certainly would’ve included them as part of the Via Negativa stream — and someday when I stop keeping the Morning Porch record, I will probably import all those posts into the VN archives.
As luck would have it, we just passed another milestone a week ago: the 12,000th approved comment, which was left by Dana Guthrie Martin. That excludes the several thousand comments that were lost when Via Negativa moved to WordPress on April Fool’s Day, 2006. And just to keep things in perspective: I’ve logged 1,118,233 spam comments during that same period.
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Through gestures, the house painter indicates that the goddess appeared to him in a dream and asked for a sacrifice. He points to a small piece of flesh lying in front of her stone toe, a flattened pink slug trailing a red carpet: his tongue. That explains the blood all down his shirt and chin. He opens his mouth and blood pours out instead of speech. As the word spreads, other devotees rush into the temple to annoint him with garlands. There’s even a small procession, the newspaper reports, though it doesn’t give any details. The tongue still lies untouched before the goddess, whose name is Amba Mata. She is said to reward spontaneity and naturalness. Once each year, a group of 50-100 women gathers in her honor, dancing in circles for nine nights. They bend, they turn, they clap. Their husbands maintain a respectful distance.
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the holes were made in a living person
whose prosthetic left leg was hidden
wounded men who returned to Iraq
women in elaborate headdress
weapons at their side
crush skulls flat as pancakes
a more grisly interpretation
driven into their heads
to help achieve psychological closure
they all walked under their own power
bodies were arranged neatly
five amputees and one blinded soldier
their night terrors stopped after they went
by blunt-force trauma
the amount of developmental growth and closure was phenomenal
two round holes in the soldier’s cranium
as if they were old friends
it was a trade-off
elite burials
where they were maimed
to honor fallen comrades
soldiers have often returned to old battlefields
treated with a compound of mercury
brittle bones of a person long dead would shatter like glass
some victims had been heated, baked not burned
clapped on their backs and welcomed
to exorcise persistent demons
Ur is protected within the perimeter of an air base
places many of them left while unconscious or in agony
the biggest thing in the world is the silence
we’re getting ready to turn off the lights
wear your wounds like badges
not dosed with poison
a war is still in progress
it’s almost like mass murder and hard for us to understand
the overburden of earth
*
All lines above, including the title, were taken verbatim from the following two news stories:
- John Noble Wilford, “At Ur, Ritual Deaths That Were Anything but Serene,” New York Times, October 26, 2009
- Rod Nordland, “Wounded Soldiers Return to Iraq, Seeking Solace,” New York Times, October 14, 2009
Feel free to suggest alternate arrangements of lines in the comments.
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I’m very pleased to announce that my “Temptations of Solitude” poems now appear side-by-side with the paintings that inspired them on the artist’s own website. Though we’ve become regular email corespondents, I barely knew Clive Hicks-Jenkins when I started writing this series last spring, and was blown away by his enthusiasm for the poems. After all, he’s a fairly major figure in British painting, and it’s not as if I was the first to write poems in response to his works. In fact, I’ve joined a small online exhibit which includes five other poets (click on their names to view their pages on the site). I am particularly pleased to be published alongside my friend Marly Youmans and the wonderful Callum James.
I put these poems into the proverbial (and wholly suppositional) bottom drawer for many months, but didn’t end up making more than a few, minor changes when I finally took another look at them. This should probably worry me more than it does. I used to be such a perfectionist! Then I discovered blogging, and realized I was only as good a writer as my next post. Some of the poems in the Temptations series are stronger than others, and I’m O.K. with that. You can’t hit a home run every time, you know? I’ve decided there’s value in unevenness, and that if you attempt to reach the same peak each time, you end up with a featureless plateau.
At any rate, thanks to Clive for the inclusion — and for creating such damn fine paintings in the first place.
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