Woodrat podcast 18: Clayton Michaels

Posted by Dave Bonta on September 1, 2010

Clayton Michaels

At qarrtsiluni, Beth and I are really excited by this year’s winner of our poetry chapbook contest: Watermark by Clayton T. Michaels, which we just launched on Monday in dual print and online versions. As part of the latter, we put together a audiobook podcast of the author reading his poems, for which he also composed and performed an original guitar theme, but I thought it would be fun in addition to record a conversation with Clayton and find out where all this great poetry is coming from. So I called him up last Saturday, and peppered him with questions about writing poetry and music, teaching, heavy metal, comic books, and more.

Links

Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:49 — 42.1MB)

Posted in Books and Music, Poets and poetry, Woodrat Podcast | Tagged | 1 Comment

Feast time

Posted by Dave Bonta on August 31, 2010
locust borer on goldenrod

locust borer on goldenrod

I’m ready to let summer go. But I’m not sure summer is quite ready to let go of us: the forecast calls for a high of 90 (32°C) tomorrow. By the weekend, they’re saying, it will grow cool again — just in time for Labor Day, our version of the holiday which the entire rest of the world celebrates on May 1 in a kind of merger with pagan rites of spring, but which we Americans use to mark the end of summer with one last vacation. Labor Day, like Memorial Day, must always fall on a Monday to give us a three-day weekend, and therefore qualifies as a kind of moveable feast. As for the feasting part, that’s pretty much an everyday thing this time of year, especially for those of us who refuse to buy fresh corn or tomatoes out of season. This is the time to gorge, to spoil ourselves with sliced tomatoes in every sandwich and fresh peaches a half-dozen times a day.

Here’s a recipe adapted from one of the Moosewood cookbooks which I made for lunch today. It uses fresh chopped tomatoes in a kind of unique way.

North African Cauliflower Soup

In a big ol’ soup kettle, saute a large chopped onion in a couple tablespoons of butter. Peel and dice two medium potatoes. Grind one tablespoon each of fennel and cumin seeds. Add potatoes, spices, and five or six cups water to the pot and bring to a boil.

Meanwhile, chop up two medium heads or one large head of cauliflower (I did the former. One head was pale yellow and the other was orange). Add that to the pot along with salt to taste, plenty of fresh-ground black pepper and an optional bullion cube (vegetable or chicken).

Reduce heat, cover and simmer for half an hour. Meanwhile, get a lemon out of the fridge and go out to the garden and pick some chives, if you have any. Dice one medium fresh tomato for each soup bowl, unless you’re using really small bowls, which I don’t advise for this soup (it’s a main dish, not an appetizer). When the vegetables in the pot are good and soft, puree the soup in a blender along with two or three tablespoons of lemon juice, return to the heat briefly if you’re a hot-soup fanatic, then ladle it over the tomatoes. It should be thick and creamy. Garnish with chopped chives or scallions.

Posted in Food and Drink | 6 Comments

Gibbous

Posted by Dave Bonta on August 29, 2010
This entry is part 16 of 16 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

Shameless procrastinator,
ragged tooth unsullied by the dawn.

Full, you went to bed on time;
a quarter empty & you never act your age.

Hasp with no padlock,
no wonder the night got away!

Old flat tire.
As if my poet’s O were set in gothic.

* * *

Note on the series

I’d been aware that a few of the poems I’ve written this spring and summer seem thematically connected, and was thinking that when I had accumulated a half dozen or so, I should put them into a new series called something like “mid-life crisis poems.” Not that I’m having a true crisis, but the unifying theme of these poems seemed to be a pervasive anxiety about aging and the body. Imagine my surprise when, after finishing the above poem this morning, I went through the archive and discovered I’d written 16 poems that fit the theme since May! It’s already almost the length of a chapbook.

So I guess my middle-agedness has been more on my mind than I realized. But as Charles Simic once told an interviewer (I’m paraphrasing from memory), one of the distinguishing features of the poetic mindset is a continual astonishment at the passage of time.

Posted in Poems & poem-like things | 13 Comments

Black cherry: tree of affliction

Posted by Dave Bonta on August 27, 2010

black cherries

I always think of the wild black cherry (Prunus serotina) as a tree of affliction. Even its fruiting can be a burden to it on years like this, when branches bend low under the weight of the crop and black bears break them in their inexplicable eagerness to feast on the sour, stony fruits. Nor are they alone: as my mother wrote in a column last year,

In addition to cedar waxwings, I saw red-eyed vireos, blue jays, and scarlet tanagers harvesting wild black cherries, but the list of songbirds and other wildlife that feast on them is legion. Thoreau mentioned gray catbirds, brown thrashers, eastern kingbirds, blue jays, red-headed woodpeckers, eastern bluebirds and northern cardinals as the most common birds that eat wild black cherries, in addition to robins and cedar waxwings. Huge piles of bear scat studded with cherry pits on our trails testified to their popularity with bears. And the smaller animals, such as foxes, squirrels, and chipmunks, also ate the fruit.

Continue reading →

Posted in Plummer's Hollow, Trees | Tagged | 4 Comments

Turtle words

Posted by Dave Bonta on August 26, 2010

The box turtle had mistaken a fallen knit cap for a burrow and was busy trying to enlarge it when I found him. I lay down on the lawn beside the small tortoise and informed him that he had made a mistake. He backed out of the hat and fixed his gaze on me. Rather than retreating into his shell, he clawed his way up onto my chest and touched his snout to mine in what seemed like a fairly aggressive gesture, and began to vocalize. What seemed at first a meaningless series of grunts gradually resolved into speech — and English, at that.

I was just beginning to make out the words when the alarm jolted me awake. Later, when I mentioned to my mother, the naturalist, that I’d dreamed about a talking turtle, she said, “I think you need to get out more.”

That evening, I did get out in a matter of speaking when my poem about the loggerhead turtle appeared in Poets for Living Waters. This caught me by surprise, since I’d submitted it a couple months earlier and never heard back, but I gather that the curators, Heidi Lynn Staples and Amy King, have been deluged with submissions. The latest issue of Poets & Writers has an article on the project, “Poets Act on Oil Spill.”

“People talk about poets as a tribe,” Staples says, “and I think [creating the site] was as if we were calling out, saying, ‘This is happening! What can we do? Let’s gather!’ — as if the screen were the fire we’re now all gathered around.” [...]

King and Staples modeled their group after Poets Against War, a popular Web site established in January 2003 that solicits and anthologizes poems protesting war, though Staples and King wanted Poets for Living Waters to be “for” something, rather than “against.” Yet “people are sending in a lot of work reflecting anger and grief about what’s happened,” Staples says. Even so, the two poets believe such emotion is simply part of the process of mobilizing the community. “It’s something we need to do,” King says. “This is why we have ceremonies, this is why we have funerals. If you don’t have that moment when you’re articulating horror and grief and anger, how can you begin to respond?”

Regular readers of this blog will recognize both the poem and the statement on poetics. Publications that consider previously blogged work are unfortunately so rare that I hardly bother sending things out these days, which is a shame: the pressure to spruce up “Loggerhead” for publication elsewhere did improve the poem, I think. Whether it also made me more likely to dream about talking turtles, I’m not sure.

Posted in Poets and poetry | Tagged | 7 Comments
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