The writing life and other absurdities

What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Capitalism, which continues to devour the living world that we need as our home and to consume the hours of everyone’s lives for the profit of the very few, setting people against each other for the mere preservation of life and pressurizing gendered and racialized forms of oppression. There’s no writing without time, without air to breathe and potable water, without a body and earth that supports life, without each other.
Ten Questions for Anne Boyer

***

i tire myself out
pretending to have a body.
everyone worships feelings
they don’t have names for
but no one is talking about it.
love is a burning house we built from
scratch.
love keeps us busy while the smoke clears.
Billy-Ray Belcourt, “Ode to Northern Alberta”

***

Randomly missing my long-dead grandparents. OK well three of them. (But also honoring the memory of the one I don’t miss.) Between my ancestor reverence and my Daoist tendencies, I clearly should’ve been a Chinese peasant.

***

Ravens are always trying to bullshit you. One just drifted high overhead without flapping its wings, croaking HAWK…HAWK…HAWK. (2 May)

***

***

How long will earth
hold me in its tender mouth? I count backwards
from 100. An orange cat weasels by. Robins
scrap over a rosehip. I have no idea what I’m counting.
Lance Larsen, “Two Horses in a Field in Mid-December”

***

Perhaps it’s fitting that modern masters of haiku in English are unknown even to most of the already tiny minority of Americans who read poetry. Humility, I’m coming to recognize, is absolutely central to the art. As soon as you think you know more than the haiku, it’s over. You’ve written a senryu at best.

***

The uneven stanzas in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats are simply cata strophic.

Wave

 It begins with the heat.
At last we understand the language

used to describe how it rolls in
across entire regions, how it presses  

itself on whole avenues without shade, 
an ocean of it bearing down with its tonnage

of salt. Before noon, we find flies 
stunned into stillness on the window ledge.

I am afraid to inquire about the hummingbirds,
to ask if a snail might find a foothold

without melting into itself; if parts of dragonflies
have combusted into those tiny unburned

particles we call smoke. 
Men hauling stone or working on a fence 

stop to gasp for breath, wringing out their faces.
Spires glisten as if smeared with oil.

This is the world now, all tar
and trouble, its rivers migrated to the moon. 

Grievance Machine

let me brand myself
he-who-is-different

let me howl around
in lieu of feedback

then unwind
in a hot bath of outrage

feed the twist in my gut
that feels like hunger

we discriminating consumers
who like what we like

we must be sure to bark up
all the right trees

A Palimpsest

16  

(with lines from Ada Limón)


Once, I may have believed it possible to repair 
          the errors, push the cart in a different direction, 

revive a sputtering fire. I too have said Lose 
          my number, sadness. Lose my address, my storm 

door, my skull. But then again, who am I of any
          importance in a world burning with war and famine, 

war and decline? As you slept, I pushed my ear up
          against your back to hear the sloshing of your heart

in its bath water. When asked questions, I didn’t necessarily
        have answers. I was only terrified when reminded

it’s nothing short of cowardly to think what we say 
          might not change the course of history. Let me start

over: once, I may have believed in the virtue of return. Once,
         I may have felt ashamed for not knowing my place.

Weather permitting

I can’t deny the central importance of my phone’s weather app to my daily walking practice. Being able to squeeze in an hour’s fast walk between thunderstorms, yesterday evening on a day otherwise too buggy and humid for a pleasant walk, is something I wouldn’t have been able to pull off in the old days, before up-to-the-minute weather radar data in one’s pocket.

Needless to say, global weirding also makes the weather harder to predict just by watching the sky and knowing what’s expected in each season. “Red at night” could mean anything these days. If it was sweltering yesterday, it’s likely sweater weather today.

***

highway work—
bandanna gone white
from his salt

***

It’s odd, looking back, that I never had much interest in general literary culture aside from poetry. I’ve tried to read journals like the Georgia Review or the Kenyon Review and found them interesting enough, but not so much that I wanted to let high-brow discourse and concerns take over my whole Weltanschauung. I think it’s intellectually limiting. Watching comedy on YouTube, listening to underground metal on Bandcamp, or reading nonfiction strike me as a better use of my non-poetry-related free time.

I should add that I’m not one of those jerks who submits to journals I rarely read. But I do have to wonder how many of these publications would even exist without tenure and review requirements that academic writers publish regularly in prestigious places. As the tenure system goes away, how many of these journals will survive? Those few that do will probably be quite a bit less arid and more edgy, designed solely for an audience of urbane intellectuals.

Simply having Poetry Daily, which reprints poems from journals and other publications, as my laptop’s homepage for the last 18 years, plus following a bunch of poetry bloggers, is enough to a) keep me apprised of interesting new collections and translations I might want to pick up, and b) prevent me from feeling completely out of the loop. Social media helps fill in the gaps with more ephemeral poetry-world news.

Reading poets’ personal blogs, to the extent they still exist, offers in some ways an opposite experience to reading a journal: largely un-copy-edited, raw, unfiltered, full of quirk and charm and way more ideological diversity than you’d find in any one organ with a unifying editorial vision. I follow poets from nearly every conceivable background and persuasion, socialists, centrists, libertarians, scientists, school teachers, beat poets, experimental poets, etc. If they write or simply appreciate good poetry, I’ll add them to my feed reader.

It’s a shame that feed readers never really caught on. It’s like the bizarre reluctance of online literary magazines to serialize content using blogs, a technology designed specifically for serializing content. But all too often, as the founders of Substack realized, it’s not enough to have tech solutions out there if they require too much sustained attention to technical details that most people, even editors unfortunately, don’t want to wrestle with.

The resistance of our literary elite to anything requiring technical know-how does get tiresome, though. I suppose that’s why I find the poetry film crowd so congenial—they’re not afraid to wade in and play around with some of the amazing tools and toys currently at our disposal. (For how much longer, who knows.)

***

One of the unexpected adjustments I’ve made as I’ve gotten older is I’m OK with not knowing the answer to, or even having an opinion on, every goddamn thing. It’s very liberating. I recommend it.

rat mummy—
a rictus of agony
in old leather

***

Songbirds harrying a cuckoo. I didn’t realize they did that, but it makes sense. They may not notice the difference in their eggs, but they would sure as hell notice someone trying to sneak into their nest.

And now I have a Clarence Ashley earworm—a quality problem!

***

The topic of personal identity tires me after a while, with the rather literal spin that most people put on it in a desperate effort to assert some thereness for this nebulous mental placeholder, the self. I want to know more about shadow identities, for example: one-time or persistent mistaken identities ascribed to one by others. Let’s also consider any and all fantasy identities one might assume, whether in imagination alone or in role-playing games. Persistent dream identities, if any. Characters in favorite novels, comic books, movies etc. with whom one deeply identifies. And of course the way they all intersect. Let us not through dissection diminish what is in a sense larger than life.

***

Deep in the woods, a small sun-starved blueberry bush is having its best year ever: it produced a flower for the first time—a perfect yellow bell!—and a forest bumblebee with pollen on her feet found its nectar. Now the green berry swells.

What bird will find it when it assumes the color of the sky? How far might its seeds travel? That’s how suddenly the future can change on you.

forest floor
striped with shadows
swallowtail

A Palimpsest

15  

My mother, who is only a few years younger than the widow
of the former dictator, can only shuffle around the nursing home
with a nurse by her side, holding her up and helping push the walker.
Her soft bones bend her over. Her fingers can’t stop fluttering. 
Whereas the wife of the former dictator, now in her early nineties,
can still walk with a certain kind of aplomb though there are folds 
under her chin. She is fleshy all over and made up, fingers winking 
with rings, tugging at her red butterfly sleeves and tight bodice. 
Whereas my mother has never ridden a private limousine 
through the city, dispensing bundles of cash to the poor 
running alongside. The only thing they possibly have 
in common is their love for that song and its saccharine 
refrain: Because of you I want to live; because of you until 
I die. My late father would have said: Look 
what money can buy. Or cannot buy.  

Mixed signals and grave matters

Mixed Signals

fireflies seen from inside
a dark house

wander like the spirits
of lost children

or thoughts flickering
between synapses

but it’s wedding season
and courtship can be perilous:

an evolutionary arms race
between related species

each with a signature pattern
of light and darkness

the females get hungry
waiting in the long grass

so switch to mimic
other species’ flash patterns

indulge in a romantic
dinner for one

as inside the dark house
I toss and turn

ah for a midsummer
night’s dream

***

When I got to the spruce grove last night a half-hour after sunset, there was still rainwater pooled on top of the small slab of Juniata sandstone that we just moved to his gravesite from down the ridge. I sat on the bench our neighbours donated so that I could see a small patch of sky reflected in Dad’s rock and sat until it got so dark, that was nearly all I could see: a bit of sky where we planted his ashes. Peaceful. Reflective. Steadfast.

Dad always enjoyed the company of children, so I’m hoping this will seem like an inviting thing to play or sit on. It’s a rock I’ve known for years. It will hold just a half-inch of water for a day or two, so shouldn’t breed mosquitoes or the wrong sort of algae for a bird bath.

I miss you, Dad.

A Palimpsest

14 


Home was an altar: meaning

plaster statues of saints, laminated 

prayer books, change and crumpled

receipts emptied out of trouser pockets

at the end of each day. Carved idols 

of guava wood guarded the rice bin, 

sacks of potatoes, braids of garlic. 

In summer, river water curled

cold against shale. In winter, 

frost on the fingers; but never enough 

to learn as children do in other lands, 

the price of a ripped tongue 

from kissing the cold 

full on the mouth. 

Around a lagoon ringed by willows, 

horses cantered all day for tourists. 

When we are all done with our short

careers, where do we think we’ll go?

Starting with a thunderclap

morning thunder
a fawn dancing
with deer flies

***

Alaskan poet Erin Coughlin Hollowell posted a Joanna Klink poem to Instagram and I immediately went and dug out my copy of Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy, whence it came. The bookmark was only a third of the way in, but in my defense it had been my second Klink book in a row, and she is not a poet to read quickly.

But my impression from April is soon reaffirmed: she is a poet of unquestionable genius, one of our best. Terrance Hayes uses the term “Rilkean elegies” in his blurb and that’s not hyperbole. In fact Rilke does rather well by the comparison, I think. Here for example is a section of the poem “Novenary”, where my bookmark was parked:

***

roses
between the doe’s teeth
thorns and all

*

dark clouds
the robin revisits
his dawn repertoire

*

downpour
so many memories
smell like the earth

***

If I am only hull to what happens,
let me at least feel more deeply that flitting,
the dead light of stars over my hands,

into my throat. Oar of my body.
Things that were sensed but not known.
Joanna Klink

That’s how “Novenary” ends. And I am reminded that typing out another’s poem prompts a deep reading when you type as painstakingly as I do, with one clumsy finger, on my phone, as if with “the dead light of stars” indeed.

***

They’re still forecasting a high of 90 this afternoon—32C—but at the moment it’s 56F/13C and I am fighting the urge to put long johns on. “Rain stopping in 19 minutes.” That’s global weirding for you.

***

This morning’s earworm is from Blackwater Park, a masterpiece of an album by the progressive metal band Opeth, which I had on in the car last Tuesday. So much great music about serial killers! Bartok’s Lord Bluebeard’s Castle comes to mind.

A cheerful thing to hum while fixing breakfast.

***

One of the great climbing trees of my childhood finally gave up the ghost this spring. Red maples don’t live long but they also don’t die easily.

Enjoy the climb, Virginia creeper! You can’t help that your name makes you sound like a sex offender and an outsider. Hell, I was born in Virginia myself.

***

Stopping to write down a thought, I see that I left another thought unfinished and expand on that instead, forgetting what I had intended to write. As so often in life one redirects energy from one thing to another. Would I have been a more productive poet if I’d had a career, related or otherwise? Undoubtedly. But I always prioritized happiness in the moment.

lucky day
the coins I keep forgetting
in my pocket

***

blowing my nose
a maple leaf’s dry
underside

***

Half-way down the hollow, the sun comes out. And so, I’m afraid, do the midges. Black flies, I suppose we should call him, a call-back to the North Woods of my early childhood. But the white supremacy embedded in that common name makes me more than a little uncomfortable. As does this cloud of midges. Global weirding—what can you do? My nose begins to itch, a psychosomatic reaction as old as my earliest memories of being engulfed by small biting insects.

A small hole in the middle of the gravel driveway which I always thought was the entrance to a chipmunk bureau has filled with water. What an unexpected thing! (The dictation app heard burrow as bureau, and it’s just too perfect to change.)

I decide to head straight up the mountainside to escape the midges. I forget just how many spring wildflowers hide out on the steep slopes where no one ever goes. They’re past blooming now, of course, but it’s good to know they’re here. And I say no one, but in fact I did meet another climber on the way:

red eft

the hollow
between twin oaks
collecting leaves

midsummer—
rain-soaked ghost pipes
steaming

*

This crook-handled umbrella is the best: a cane when I need it climbing a hillside, or a stick to shake rain off vegetation before I walk through it. I was pleased to see, walking with my mother recently, that she uses her folded umbrella to deftly toss fallen sticks off the road just as I do.

*

ghost pipes
sweating through the longest
day of the year


via Woodrat Photohaiku

*

I’m seeing lots of evidence that this year’s much smaller cohort of spongy moth caterpillars has almost entirely succumbed to its main natural control, a fungus. Fingers crossed that oaks won’t be as stressed again as they were in 2020 for a long time—I’m convinced that’s what allowed the caterpillars to build up in sufficient numbers to cause last year’s widespread defoliation, because trees busy fighting drought, after a late hard frost had required them to re-leaf, would’ve had very little energy left over to produce their usual insecticides. Two years later, there are as many dead trees from that frost as there are from last year’s outbreak, though they’re not concentrated on the ridgetops like the latter, but here and there throughout the woods. In either case, just the sort of small openings that are great for overall biodiversity, as long as they don’t presage a new disturbance regime that will turn forest to savanna, as seems to be happening on Plummer’s Hollow’s southeast-facing slopes without oak-hickory cover, where things are kept at a weedy stage of succession—a kind of arrested development—by increasingly harsh ice storms in the winter and thunderstorms in the summer.

If/when sudden oak death aka Phytophthora ramorum arrives here, I may need to be put on suicide watch.

However, it has not escaped my attention that Disturbance Regime would be a great title for something. Or as we GenXers invariably like to joke: if you were ever in need of a rockin’ name for a garage band…

***

At 12:42 the midges find me on top of the ridge. It’s getting hot. The lucky coins are still in my pocket. My feet are damp but the rest of me feels pretty damn good.

The world is always ending somewhere. Today, so far, it’s not ending here and for that I am grateful. North America as a whole might get through the current economic state-change relatively ok, given our economic, natural and demographic advantages. But I fear for friends in other parts of the world. And for wildness and biodiversity dwindling everywhere.

A shadow of a red-tailed hawk passed over me as I was writing that.

(I love augury right up to the point where it stops being about the birds and starts being about us. How dull.)

When I got home, I found a stowaway on my sleeve:

An immature northern true katydid, if I’m not mistaken.

***

For the second day in a row I actually manage a mid-afternoon nap, which is great this time of year when the nights are so short but also so enchanting—and keep in mind that Shakespeare etc. never saw fireflies, which are such a feature of June nights here.

After supper, sitting on the porch to begin editing this post, a fringe of grasses at the edge of my weedy front yard, illuminated by the low sun, caught my eye:

Watch on Vimeo

When I knelt to shoot the video, I looked around to make sure there wasn’t any poison ivy. Instead, I was delighted to discover a baby tulip tree! I had been looking all over for seedlings to transplant a couple weeks ago, because they’re such excellent yard trees—grow straight and tall, are lovely in bloom, and can live for hundreds of years—but couldn’t find a one. So when I’m not looking, one appears. And in a very good spot, too.

I lost no time making a deer cage for it. Blog posts can wait!

A Palimpsest

13

When did the dictator’s son

start combing his hair 

into that small, 

slicked-back, one-length 

pompadour in the same style 

as his father?

His mother and sisters

can talk of nothing 

but how happy they are

to be restored to power.

There is no canvas 

or mural on which 

their likenesses could be 

restored to anything 

but their own imagined 

glory. No length of fabric

to bandage the smell of goat 

piss out of the air, or lighten

the color of blood money, 

blood diamonds.