No matter how hard you work at your talent or how diligently you look for a job, there’s still a chance that no circus will want you.
—Sabah Karimi, “How to Join a Circus,” eHow.com
What can you do, he asks.
I can recite pi, I tell him,
to one thousand places.
Blindfold me — I can find
& identify flying objects
better than a bat. I don’t
merely eat fire; I excrete it.
I can go for years without sleep.
But he only wants to know
how much I drink — as if
I ran away from my life
& came all this way just
to pound stakes & shovel
elephant dung like some
lousy roustabout. Your loss,
I say to his back, & shuffle
back to the bus stop in
my big clown shoes, blisters
already rising on my tentacles.
*
For the Big Tent Poetry prompt. Other responses are here.
Loggerhead: originally an insult applied to people,
later a kind of cannon shot, the post on a whaleboat
anchoring the harpoon line, a bulbous-headed iron tool
used to heat tar
& the largest sea turtle in the world. Its jaws
can crunch through the thickest armor: queen conch,
giant clam. Like all sea turtles, it can’t retreat
into its shell,
but once grown too big for a grouper’s gullet,
aside from fishing nets & oil spills, it’s nearly
indestructable. When sharks attack, it shows them
the flat side
of its plastron or carapace & their teeth
snap on nothing. It’s built for combat:
even the females spar over feeding grounds,
& during coitus,
which can go on for hours, other males
will batter & bite, sometimes dislodging their rival
and taking his place, or slicing his forelegs
to the bone.
Lexicographers insist that this is not the origin
of the expression at loggerheads, though they
propose no other. Mating takes place in spring
& early summer,
from Greece to the Gulf of Mexico. Males remain
offshore while the females venture in to lay eggs
high on the beach, where most clutches
will be found
by raccoons or gulls, dogs or storms. The hatchlings,
too, run a gauntlet when they cross the night beach,
guided by the glint of lights on the water that are not
the moon or stars.
Then they swim straight out, find the floating
mats called sargasso, circle the ocean.
They may swim for 8000 miles, navigating
by magnetic fields.
Biologists refer to this period in a loggerhead’s life,
before it returns to coastal waters three to seven
years later, as the lost years. Its heart-
shaped carapace
acquires a miniature reef, including algae
& barnacles — up to 100 species from 13 phyla.
The ancients weren’t so crazy when they imagined
the world riding
on its back. It can sleep underwater for hours
without breathing, its heart almost stopped.
It drinks seawater & excretes the salt
from special glands
next to its eyes. Biologists caution us not
to anthropomorphise, this is not what it seems,
this copious weeping has nothing to do
with grief.
I am now officially a sideshow barker for Big Tent Poetry, a new poetry prompt site and the most direct successor to Read Write Poem, which ceased publication and shut down its associated social network on May 1. The Big Tent organizers — Carolee Sherwood, Deb Scott, and Jill Crammond-Wickham — are published poets (each has had work in qarrtsiluni, for example) and long-time bloggers committed to a culture of sharing and mutual support among online poets. As lead organizers at RWP, they helped foster a spirit of playfulness and irreverence which I always thought was one of the best things about that site, and which looks to become a defining feature of Big Tent, as well.
This time, there’s no Facebook-for-poets, which is probably a good idea: the time and effort required to run such a thing proved debilitating at RWP, I gather. And I hate to say it, but Facebook itself does at least as good a job at connecting writers as RWP did, with the added advantage of including tons of other friends, family, and assorted contacts who, while not necessarily as smitten with poetry as some of us are, still might be persuaded to click on a blog link once in a while. I may not care for the centralization, much less for Facebook’s corporate culture, but as with Twitter, I figure it’s there and we might as well take advantage of it. My alternative? A decentralized internet where we all have our own sites (whether blogs proper or sites on Tumblr, StatusNet, etc.), subscribe to each other’s feeds, and link and comment back and forth with the enthusiasm now reserved for Facebook and Twitter.
O.K., that day will probably never come. But Big Tent Poetry’s mode of operation definitely contributes to the dream of a decentralized social web. Carolee, Deb and Jill have made the wise decision not to try to line up a bunch of regular columnists, but instead get a bunch of us to agree to send along links whenever we write something poetry-related, and let them decide whether to feature it on the site. They have dedicated a whole third ring (the circus kind, not the Dantean kind) to collect such contributions, and I’m pleased and honored that they chose my piece about Poetry Reading Month as the second entry there. I like the idea of Via Negativa as sideshow and me as its barker. And I’m in good company — see the complete list of barkers on the site’s About page.
I’m sure the main attraction at Big Tent Poetry will be its weekly writing prompts, which will appear every Monday. I don’t know how often I’ll join them under the main tent of the circus, but I’m glad they’re providing a venue for blogging poets to come together and share their work. Since so many literary magazines, including online ones, actively discourage writers from posting original work on their own blogs by refusing to consider blogged work for publication, it’s really helpful to have prompt sites like Big Tent, Writer’s Island, and the new We Write Poems to help build alternative audiences — which can often be larger and more diverse than the audience for a literary magazine. (I can tell you, for example, that Via Negativa has two to three times as many readers as qarrtsiluni. I wish it were otherwise.)
The challenge with any kind of online poetry community, I think, is keeping the cultural version of Gresham’s law from driving out those who take craft seriously, because of course the downside of a self-publishing landscape where anyone can post their stuff, and build an audience without the interference of gatekeepers, is that a horde of people who just want to share their feelings and call it poetry risk giving poetry blogging as a whole a bad name, kind of like the way zealots, anger addicts and purveyors of snark have come to define the political blogosphere. RWP did an amazingly good job of attracting serious writers to its prompts. Here’s hoping Big Tent Poetry enjoys similar success.
Alison Kent self-portrait (click to see larger)
I called up my long-time blogging friend Alison Kent out in Davis, California yesterday. After some reminiscing about the late, lamented Ecotone Wiki, we got into a conversation about nature blogging, sketching and birdwatching, “green” birding, caring for oiled wildlife and balancing wildlife rehabilitation with conservation needs, Alison’s assessment of preparations for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and where the blame for the spill lies, among other things.
The gray squirrel stands in the middle of the driveway, apparently spellbound by the spectacle of two tom turkeys gobbling and displaying for a small flock of hens. I stand fifty feet away, thinking, it’s not everyday you get to watch wildlife watching wildlife.
Last dream before waking: I wield a blowgun in the middle of a target-rich environment. I fire at a small figure. I thought it was small because it was far away, but it turns out to be right beside me. The dart thunks into it, a steel wedge into the top of a log. I pry the log open and there’s a person inside — someone’s missing child, I’m told. Except she’s made of luck and spunk wood and her face is a crudely carved piece of banana. Large beetles start to emerge from her body cavity. I brush them off, and she breaks in half. You killed her! I start to panic, wondering how she ever managed to live in the first place with such a perishable face.
I wake and shower and have an unusually productive day.
My poetry library (click through to the full-sized image to read the titles)
My exercise in close reading is over: I read a poetry book every day of the month except for two of the days when I was putting podcast episodes together (typically a six- to nine-hour job). I’ve retroactively tagged all the posts Poetry Reading Month 2010, in case you missed some.
I enjoyed it tremendously, even when my blog posts in response to the books weren’t as creative as I would’ve liked. I found that if I’d read the book with the slowness and attention it deserved, then the response post practically wrote itself. It was actually kind of refreshing not to have to wonder what to blog about for an entire month, even though the focus on reading meant I had little time for anything else, such as writing poetry of my own.
Not all were first-time reads. A book of poetry isn’t something you just read once, like some trashy novel. The best books only reveal their mysteries slowly, after repeated readings, and I didn’t see any point in depriving myself of that pleasure this month. So twelve of the books — nearly half — were ones I’d read before. This saved me time only in the sense that it meant I didn’t have to worry about stopping half-way through a book and having to start another because the first wasn’t to my liking (I’m not interested in posting negative reviews of poetry). Otherwise, it’s no less demanding to read a book the second time than the first, I think.
Only nine of the 28 books were chapbooks, which is surprising to me: I had assumed limits on time and quality of attention would prevent me from reading more than a handful of full-length collections. But thankfully I’m unemployed. The longest book I read was the David Young translation of Du Fu, at 229 pages, which took me most of the day.
The plan had been to read each book in one sitting, adding it to my daily morning porch ritual. But many times I was only able to read half or a third of the book at that time, and had to finish up in mid to late afternoon. I often then put off writing the response post for several hours in order to give my thoughts time to gestate.
Six of the chapbooks were from this month’s featured publisher, Seven Kitchens Press, all but one (Christina Pacosz’ Red Zone) from their Keystone series of Pennsylvania authors. (See all six posts here.) If I do this again next year, I’ll continue to make an effort to focus on Pennsylvania poets, as my friend Sherry Chandler did with Kentucky poets on her blog this month. In his book Slow Reading, John Miedema suggests that readers should consider taking a page out of the Slow Food movement’s book and read locally whenever possible, and I agree. His description of “slow books” also fits with the hand-made aesthetic of literary chapbooks like those from Seven Kitchens:
Fast books are those produced for the broadest possible appeal, stamped out in assembly lines and distributed at points of maximum exposure such as Amazon or warehouse-sized bookstores. Fast books may be associated with movie deals and celebrity endorsements. … Slow books, on the other hand, may be characterized by local events which may be of great interest to residents and visitors seeking to learn more about a particular region, but too limited in market appeal for mass production. Slow books are not written for profit so much as for pleasure, developing a local tradition in writing and micro-publishing. As with Slow Food, there is a much closer connection between readers and their information.
I suppose nearly all poetry books in our culture might be considered slow books in terms of their limited popular appeal and the effort required to read them. A strong regional focus often presents a bit of a dilemma for literary publishers, though, because “regional” is typically taken to mean “provincial,” and reviewers for national publications tend to ignore such titles, because we all know that only that which is universal — i.e. written by sophisticated city-dwellers, or by those in approved regions such as New England — can be great. This prejudice ignores the fact that the American poetry scene itself is fairly provincial, with far fewer books in translation published each year than in any other industrialized nation — this despite the fact that poetry in translation from Spain, Latin America and East Asia has been a crucial influence on almost every major U.S. poet from the 1960s on.
Personally, I think poets and poetry readers need to become simultaneously more aware of diverse traditions from abroad and more rooted in our local and regional geographies if we want to stay engaged with the larger world, and want to have a chance at reaching those who don’t currently read poetry, and “die miserably every day/ for lack /of what is found there,” as William Carlos Williams put it (thanks to Howie for reminding me of the quote). Six of the authors I read this month were from different cultures, and eight from Pennsylvania (counting Liberian poet Patricia Jabbeh Wesley in both categories: she’s been teaching at Penn State Altoona for five or six years now). If I do this again next year, I’d like to increase the number of international poets to at least ten.
Fifteen of the 28 authors (ignoring translators) were female. I did make an effort at gender balance as I went along and tried to include as many male authors as possible, but somehow the women poets still came out ahead. Actually, if I wanted to more accurately represent the proportions of published female versus male poets in the U.S. today, it would probably be closer to a 60%/40% split.
When I announced the plan on March 31, I speculated on the effect of reading this much poetry in a month: “Will it be mind-altering? Almost certainly. Will it change the way I read poetry? Maybe. Will it prove to be an overdose, and send me rushing naked and screaming into the streets? Well, let’s hope not.” I’m pleased to announce that there were no episodes of indecent exposure, frenzied or otherwise. But exposing myself to all that poetry did leave me feeling a little sun-burnt and raw. It was almost too much of a good thing. My usual pattern is to read four to six poems first thing in the morning, and this often leaves me energized to write. But extend that to 20 or more poems, and the creative energy dissipates, or more accurately gets transformed into reading energy.
Did it change the way I read poetry? I think so. In the past, I’ve only been able to sustain this level of attention sporadically, but now I think I can conjure it up almost at will, and if nothing else it does make me feel that the kind of quickie reading I was doing before, while fun and inspirational, isn’t quite as rewarding as this slower, more tantric kind of textuality. So I think you can expect to see a lot more book blogging here from now on.
Could this be a model for other bloggers, a fun challenge for those who perhaps are tired of doing the poem-a-day thing for NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) — or even for those who don’t write poetry at all, and would simply like to focus on reading poetry for a month? I’m thinking there might be some real benefit to formalizing this next year as InPoReMo, International Poetry Reading Month, and launching a coordinating site sometime in January, especially if I can talk some chapbook publishers into offering special deals for bloggers: ten chaps for $50, that kind of thing. Because I do imagine that most people with full-time jobs aren’t going to be able to read a full-length book of poetry a day, but would be open to reading chapbooks, most of which take less than an hour to read. And what better way to advance the cause of poetry than to support poets and small publishers?
I thought it would be appropriate to finish out this month of intensive reading with a book of poems that are each creative responses to a text. I read each poem several times, but a few still remained above my head — hard to believe I was once a Comparative Literature major! Fortunately, I don’t mind getting out of my depth if there’s a pay-off, and most of the time there was: the language was interesting, and some of the composition techniques were impressive. One poem had lines arranged in a palindrome-like manner, for example, so it read almost the same backwards as forwards. Another was “completely composed of phrases from Cordelia’s speeches in Act I, scene i” of King Lear.
Some of the poems that I felt I got a firm grasp on I really liked, such as “The Eden Express (1978),” about an American Jew making Aliyah and attempting to reconcile her liberal beliefs in civil rights with the reality of anti-Arab prejudice and persecution and the invasion of Lebanon. Of the IDF soldiers she was romantically involved with, she wondered
Four years later
which ones blocked the exits at Sabra and Chatila
firing flares that lit the camps up
like a football stadium and claimed
“We know, it’s not to our liking, and don’t
interfere” as you continued to let hormones
crush the odor and burning, the cranky sound
of tanks and unended future of returning.
In “Little House in the Big Woods (1968),” the narrator envies what appears to have been a more grounded and authentic upbringing than her own modern, strip-mall surroundings.
O semi-circular drive and window seat
tract dining-room living and kitchens
of three-bedroom half-acre homes
in my own pan of cubed ice not snow
no sugared maple leaf hardened toward delight.
A poem about the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans takes as its text Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. As in other poems in the chapbook, the lines in italics are taken directly from the text:
…but in the air above the Superdome
where pigeons fly, it was a desperate SOS
the low stifled sound that arises
from the soul when overcharged with awe
from the lost yards and fumbles
the interceptions that added nothing to our gain.
To my way of thinking the book could stand to be a little less cerebral; there’s a certain desolation at work that I’d like to encounter a bit more directly. And this is the only Seven Kitchens book I’ve seen where the design was a little off: the font, Nicolas Cochin, actually impedes easy reading. But I liked the concept, and would love to see more poems in this vein — might even try writing some myself. An image in the final poem, “a Personal Matter (1978),” captures for me the essence of this book about stories and how we receive them:
Months later in the movie theater of refuge and refusal
with the once known and reliable in shambles
and a story nothing like hers unfolding rapidly in light
and shadow’s indivisible progress across the screen
the low unmentionable chord returns
or climbs from the murky depths, a drowned bell
striking and deepening in rings.
Click on the book cover to go to its page in Open Library. I’ve been trying to read a book a day for National Poetry Month, with a special focus on Seven Kitchens Press, a Pennsylvania-based publisher of limited-edition chapbooks. Though the month is now up, I hope to continue blogging books in this fashion on a regular basis.
“We just extended our daylight hours,” Liberian poet Patricia Jabbeh Wesley explains in “A Letter to My Brother Coming to America.”
Our houses stand in silent rows here in Kalamazoo.
When I can almost hear the breeze pass, I wonder,
did a neighbor die, move away? Get a divorce?
Get married? Do they have children?
Do they not have children? Is my neighbor
white or black? Would my neighbors like me
if they knew my name? Do I have a neighbor?
These are in-between poems, poems of exile from a war-torn but still longed-for homeland. Driving the winding roads through the Alleghenies of upstate New York with her friend Sandy, she notes, “we’re in a maze.”
Sandy says when the trees
come out, this place is a paradise, but this year
the snow was forever falling. When the trees
come out, tell the trees, Sandy, to make the flowers
white and purple; to mourn the life, lost, the laughter
in Morovia’s streets, of people in the market places
and on the long beaches…
Wesley and her family endured privations and were witnesses to their share of horrors before they got out of Liberia. The refugee camp was right next to a killing field, and was suffused with the stench of rotting bodies.
We ate leaves we did not know we could eat;
we ate anyway, and lived through eating. We tried this
or that to see if we would die eating this or that.
We made laughter we did not know we had.
But I found the poems about her childhood before the civil war the most affecting of all. In “Requiem for Auntie,” she describes a household stricken by grief. It’s twilight, and the tidal river’s “tireless going and coming// leaves one empty of words.” Her aunt’s body is laid out in the parlor.
I watched my father’s fruitless making
of the bed, laying his youngest sister down, though
wide-eyed, she stared. What is she looking at, I
wanted to ask someone. What is it that the dead see,
that the living cannot know? My father stood there like
a wet bird standing in the stillness of shallow water.
In another poem, she recounts “The day I discovered Marie Antoinette” at the age of fourteen, “a hard-willed African girl,” and felt outraged on her behalf. “I wept — it was not fair.” She concluded,
How fortunate to be a concubine, to be the other
woman who didn’t have to carry the world’s guilt to
the gallows. The look on their faces, those pretty French
girls, their half smiles and grins, their tearless cheeks,
and how lucky to be left outside history like this.
But how fortunate we are to have a poet like Wesley, who, though she was not left completely outside history, still managed to escape with her life, her sense of humor, and these poems so full of both.
I’m reading a book a day for National Poetry Month. Click on the book cover to go to its page in Open Library.
Instructions to the Double is as mute on the subject of the soul as the oldest books of the Bible are about the afterlife. In contrast to a poet like Charles Wright, Gallagher makes little use of other people’s metaphysics; she invents her own. The double of the title is a shape-shifter: in one poem it is poet’s translated body of work, “smuggled back to you by a woman/ looking very much like yourself.” In another, it is a Platonic ideal of home:
But always,
above the town, above
the harbor, there is the town,
the harbor, the caves and hollows
when the cargo of lights
is gone.
A grandmother walking on her husband’s arm talks “into his silence/ as into some idea of yourself/ grown to his side.” “This flesh is your halo,” the narrator tells her shadow in another poem. In “Two Stories,” the author confronts a fictional version of herself in another author’s short story, based on her uncle’s murder by thieves.
Now there is the story of me
reading your story and the one
of you saying it
doesn’t deserve such care.
I say it matters
that the dog stays by the chimney
for months, and a rain
soft as the sleep of cats
enters the land, emptied
of its cows, its wire gates pulled down
by hands that never dug
the single well, this whitened field.
“Whitened field” refers I suppose to the page, but I think too of the poet’s face, round and pale and full of humor the one time I saw her read. (Years later I wrote a poem about it, Time Lapse with Tess Gallagher, the title derived from one of the poems in this book, “Time Lapse with Tulips.”)
Gallagher’s metaphysics of the double has an ethical dimension. In “the Absence,” for example, vengeance is
a hurt given to the self
in the name of another. It has to do
with becoming a purpose
which is an absence not unlike
a gun.
In “Strategy,” the narrator offers to take another’s place, placing his head on her shoulders, so she can deliver an apology he’s unable to give by himself. This kind of magic is a sleight-of-hand, “an attitude of sight/ that amounts to seeing,” she suggests in “Zero.” It allows mundane objects to acquire luminosity and become doorways to the infinite, and thereby the magician “multiplies/ himself like the doves in his hat.”
Such fruitful multiplying is fully shamanic, requiring no Abrahamic covenant with a deity. And in lieu of a Song of Songs, Instructions to the Double features an 11-part “Song of the Runaway Bride.”
Together and together —
the exact coffin of pleasure
crookedly in the blood.
[…]
Husband, all night I slept on your neck
and a man went through my dreams
and was not you. With a knife
I sliced the yellow dress
he mistook for me…
The title poem, when we finally get to it in Part IV, begins in an evangelical vein:
So now it’s your turn,
little mother of silences, little
father of half-belief. Take up
this face, these daily rounds
with a cabbage under each arm
convincing the multitudes
that a well-made anything
could save them.
She goes on to detail the poet’s mission, but I don’t want to spoil the effect of encountering the poem in context, as part of this brilliant and multifaceted collection. If you’ve never read it, you’re in for a treat. If your local library doesn’t have it, there seems to be no shortage of used copies available around the web.
I don’t know how many times I’ve re-read it now, but it reminds me why I collect poetry in the first place: not just for the convenience of having favorite poems at hand, but also for the company. Who needs a double when there are so many other selves to try on?
I’m reading a book a day for National Poetry Month (except, I’m afraid, on days when I’m putting a podcast together). Click on the book cover to go to its page in Open Library.
A conversation with poet and professor of journalism Howie Good. Topics and poems include: “Could Be Worse,” real life as a seedbed for poems, “Schoolyard Blues,” “Loops,” and “Pedagogy of the Possessed” (all included in Lovesick), the decline of newspapers, blogging as journalism, professionalism and ethics among citizen journalists, how to get the truth out and whether knowledge of the truth is enough to catalyze action, surrealism as a more accurate reflection of contemporary life, compiling and submitting poetry chapbooks, submitting to online versus paper journals, the value of books, “There’s No Money in Poetry, Someone Said,” and Dying Words.
Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)
