Part I of a two-part conversation with my brother Mark, a professional geographer. It’s become fashionable for writers to use the term “geography” loosely (The Geography of Love, The Geography of Childhood, The Geography of Home, etc.) but what is geography, anyway? Turns out it’s really all about memorizing state capitals and principal imports and exports. Or not. Listen and find out.
This entry is part 6 of 34 in the series Small World
The oaks have
dropped more acorns
this year than anyone
can remember. It’s
like walking on ball
bearings, except
sometimes they pop:
a cap comes off
& one blank face
gains a split. It
must be lonely
having the only
mouth. Do you take
a breath? Do you
invent eating?
Do you look for
another broken soul
& improvise some
kind of minimal
kiss? But wait
a while: soon
everyone will awake
& turn & stick
a yellow tongue
into the earth.
More and more publishers are producing video trailers for new books. Perhaps it’s time to start making them for websites, too. This action-packed trailer, though, is intended less to promote The Morning Porch than simply to introduce it to new readers — something to embed on the About page.
I shot the video yesterday for my one-minute movies project, and I suppose I’ll still class it as such even though it goes five seconds over with the addition of the Paul Eluard quote (which I stole from a friend’s pseudonymous Facebook profile a while back). This one is definitely more documentary than videopoem. I could probably make it more exciting with a few, brief inserts of other images: you know, close-ups of things glimpsed from the porch. But that might clash with the message of the text, I don’t know. Here’s what I wrote for it:
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be a prisoner, condemned to the same round every day, compelled to do things I had little appetite for, surrounded by others in the same situation, all of us desperate with loneliness and the desire to be somewhere, anywhere else. What would I do? I’m a writer, so I suppose I would write. It would be an almost enviable situation: all that free time. I would take note of everything I saw, immerse myself in the moment no matter how bleak, because daydreaming would only lead to despair. I would write small, spare things 140 characters in length that some would call poems, but that I would see as clauses of one long sentence. I’d be in for life.
A flash-fiction videopoem featuring the hands of my niece Elanor and members of her plastic entourage. The depressing subject matter might have something to do with the fact that I had just seen the documentary Gasland (highly recommended, by the way). And in fact, my preferred style of videopoem-making borrows heavily from documentaries, relying as it does on discovery rather than invention (e.g. actors following a script), and using voice-over narration to convey the text of the poem.
The Machinery of Time
The time machine was our only answer to the apocalypse we’d set in motion. Some chose to travel 10 million years into the future, by which time, they figured, new multicellular organisms would’ve evolved. Others of us decided to go back & try to change history. Someone thought she could help Carthage win the Punic Wars. Someone else wanted to insert a fable about hubris into the Homeric epic. But the backwards travel unraveled us, thinned us out & made us ineligible for death. We appeared only in mirrors, or to people with second sight, provoking fresh terror at a haunted world. When after millennia of helplessness we reached our own birthdays, we crumbled like the pages of a burnt book.
*
That’s about the maximum length for the text of a one-minute videopoem, by the way. I had to cut out a few phrases and read more quickly than usual to fit it in. Still, after almost three years of writing for the world’s tiniest daily newspaper, The Morning Porch, one minute seems like more than enough time to get an idea across. The above text would fill five tweets.
This month’s Festival of the Trees blog carnival at Kind of Curious features an unusually large haul of poetry, including poems by Daniela Elza, Nic S., Eric Burke, Dorothee Lang, Walt Franklin and Rob Kloss. I also enjoyed some of the more informational posts on topics ranging from nurse trees to the destruction caused by the recent tornadoes in New York City to the practical and legal implications of tree-hugging in the U.K. I’m not going to link to any of these individually, because John did all the work pulling the link-fest together — he deserves all the traffic. So go visit.
Don’t forget to bookmark or subscribe to the coordinating blog of the Festival of the Trees, and whenever you happen to blog about trees or get a tree-related item published on the web, try to remember to send us the link. Also, we still need a volunteer to host the festival on December 1, so let me know if you’re interested.
One final tree-related note: my mother’s nature column for October is all about last year’s devastating October snowstorm. I think I posted some of my photos here at the time, but Mom goes into much more detail than I did, so go for the photos if you want, but stay for the writing. That storm was about as much excitement as we ever get around here.
I went out in mid-morning while it was snowing heavily again. The forest was a palette of white, gold, and green. Black birch and witch hazel trees were bent over and a few black gum trees had broken in the woods both inside and outside the deer exclosure.
Large branches littered the Far Field Road along with occasional whole trees — red maple, sugar maple, hickory, chestnut oak, and a split black cherry. Once again snow piled up on the leaves and branches of standing trees, and after I had walked over to the Sapsucker Ridge Trail and across the black-locust-bowed Far Field, I heard the smash of a tree or large branch on the Far Field Road. Nervous about my safety, I tried to hasten along the ridgetop trail…
Snow on autumn leaves is a beautiful sight. But an excess of beauty can be a terrible thing.
This is the first in a planned series of one-minute movies made in less than a day with text written in response to the film images. I include the text below for the benefit of those on dial-up, but I’m not sure it makes too much sense on its own.
Bread & Water
I cast my bread on
the water, but
it didn’t come back. Did you call?
I wrote. I made tea
from every leaf in
the garden. Would you know it if
you saw it again?
I would.
I would know it slowly.
I would know it as
a failed boat. Wasn’t it full
of air pockets, like
a lung? No, those
were just open
dates on a calendar.
It was fresh.
It had skin for a skin. What will you do when
you tire of waiting?
I’ll whistle back to
the old steam grate.
I’ll lick the lenses
of my glasses until
the street looks clean. What will you do
if the bread
comes back?
I’ll teach it to sink.
photo credits, l-r: Sarah Tribuzio, Margareta Vranicar, Mary Beth Meyer
Julia Martin has been a witty and erudite presence in my corner of the blogosphere for several years now, first simply as a commenter on other people’s blogs and eventually at a site of her own, Clumps and Voids. But I wanted to talk to her about her day job as executive director of Bread for the Head, whose mission is to provide books to low-income children in the Chicago area and try to convert them into life-long readers. This is Banned Books Week in the United States as well as National Literacy Month, but outright banning isn’t the only thing keeping books out of the hands of children, and all too often literacy programs fail to inculcate a love of reading. Bread for the Head, which Julia founded five years ago, takes the radical position that, as their mission states, “pleasure reading is no indulgence, but a necessity.”
If you don’t have time to listen to the podcast right away, at the end of it, Julia asks listeners to share the titles of their own favorite books for children (which don’t have to be children’s books per se). Please use the comments below, or contact Julia directly: juliaannmartin at gmail dot com. And of course if you live in the Chicago area, Bread for the Head can always use more volunteers.
Fall is a time of strange promptings, even for those of us who never succumb to vagabondage. If I happen to spot decades-old spiderwebs like wings of dust in a corner of the basement, I glance quickly away & reach for the jar of screws. And when the green is gone, when it has leached from the last of the leaves & the ground is ankle-deep in gloria mundi, I want to know the trees as Indians once did: from the flavor of their ashes. I want to learn restlessness from the natives, stand still enough to become a landmark for a mob of lekking gnats in Indian summer. I want the little brown bat in my portico to find a hibernaculum no other bat knows about, where he can hang all winter like a stilled pendulum, safe from the killer fungus the color of snow. I want my bootprints to collect the November rain & freeze: windows for whatever Argus might still be with us, insomniac, going over & over the dwindling flocks.
The Amtrak’s
quick double blast—
then cricket cricket.
This entry is part 27 of 31 in the series Odes to Tools
My chapbook just received a great review at Verse Wisconsin Online — check it out. By “great,” I don’t mean unremittingly positive, but critical in a good way. In fact, the author, whom I don’t know, has singled out some things about my poetry that bother me as well, while also happening to praise some of my own favorite lines and poems in the book, so overall it was very reassuring. I’m not saying I agree with every one of his remarks, but I really appreciate the level of critical engagement they reflect.
The same issue includes an Editors’ Note on Book Reviews in which they explain their philosophy about reviewing; evidently some poets have been belly-aching about “reviews that are less than wholly positive.” It is illustrated by a wonderful painting, unfortunately too small to make out in very great detail: “Marco Polo Forced to Eat Moths.”
Incidentally, Phoenicia Publishing is holding a fall sale: 15% off on all titles through October 1. See the site for details.
