Brown & agile child or What would the poet do?

(More than) a few year's ago, the movie that was ALL THE RAGE with the snotty film set was Il Postino.  & I will grant you, it is a lovely film (the trailer is dreck, just trust me about the movie).  The story revolved around a postman who is hired because a lofty exile has settled in the remote area & needs someone to bring his mail as his communication with the rest of the world is, in a word, VAST.  That exile was better known as Pablo Neruda.  He died 40 years ago & earlier this month, they dug him up.  Because there has long been concern that Pinochet may have had a hand in his death (Neruda was quite ill & planning & going back into exile...again.  Then he died, in hospital).

As with so many stories about poets, that one interesting & odd angle on a life is just a small slice of the pie.  It rather amazes me they have the reputation of being soft, fluffy bits of flotsam with no foothold in the real world.  Every active poet I ever met was manically obsessed with something (or things) & it was rarely socially acceptable.  About the nicest thing I ever heard of a poet doing in the last ten years or so was to get arrested for smoking in a nonsmoking restaurant & it just goes downhill from there (it turns out they only give tickets for smoking in non-smoking restaurants & then the police leave you there to finish your meal...& your cigarette.  It is up to the establishment to evict you).  I am not absolutely certain but I think the-poet-I-know was already mostly done with his meal, so he ditched the check & went to the movies.  I know he went to the movies, because that's where I heard the story (during the opening adverts, poets don't talk through movies). 

But don't take MY word for it (& no poet would want you to either.  Get off your lazy slacker ass & do your own damn research).  A few years ago, & really just a few. Less than ten.  Probably.  SOME years ago, I picked C****** up after school & she told me they were on to poetry in her English unit (I hate how schools talk) & she was quite sure she hated all poetry, ever written.  I almost had a coronary right there, behind the wheel.

We went to the library & I started pulling (she had spent the afternoon with his true love's hair being like wire & was completely sonneted out).  So I yanked every 20th century poet I thought might have something short enough to get in there like a blade & cut this outdated notion from her thoughts.  I don't remember the whole list but I know it included Lucille Clifton, Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke & Wallace Stevens.  It also included the poet that did the job: Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ginsberg was not on my list, nor was Whitman.  I was worried they might have been included in her crash course & already ruined; I should not have been concerned they spent a WEEK on effing sonnets & never touched anything else.  Also not on my list Maya Angelou & Emily Dickinson; I looked but they were checked out YAY.

So they are digging up Pablo Neruda.  I am not sure how I feel about that (& not being Chilean nor a revolutionary, I am not sure anyone should care what I think).  It is interesting that when they buried him, despite a two month delay & Pinochet's refusal to hold a public funeral & general ban on all public gatherings, THOUSANDS showed up.

This past week I took the time to revisit what is probably his best known poem.  & the one I refer to the most:  A Dog Has Died.  & I cannot help but look at the past week, the Boston Marathon & the ricin letters & know that is no way to win a revolution.  No one wins when the only stakes are random undiscriminating death; Neruda lived a life of life & by every measure, including immortality, he won. 

Lefcado revisited

A few months (a year? no, not yet), a few months ago, I wrote a post ostensibly about Saint Maura but really about other things, including how no one had heard of Lefcado Hearn.  I was not expecting much in the way of hue & cry, not because I think Lefcado Hearn is completely off the map, but becasue I know not that many people read this blog for anything other than the quilt patterns & those that do are not-so-much for poetry written in Japanese.  Also, it helped that not many people have heard of Lefcado Hearn.

Imagine my DELIGHT when he made an appearance over in Letters of Note.

I think I am going to leave this post here & let you go over there & read that one.  It is better than what I write anyhow.  I think I especially like the bit about there being no point in editing out the words with no meaning in the language (or a very different meaning than Lefcado Hearn experienced, what with him thinking letters had colors & all).  & of course a bad reason for doing something being better than no reason at all.

What would Wallace do?

Living in a college town (OKay, in a town that is college-town-adjacent), we hear a lot (A LOT) about how impractical artistic intellectual types have no business sense.  Did I mention I live in a farming town?  Have you ever heard of an industry more rife with hard working, below par businessmen than small farming?  Seriously, the hours they put in & what they barely get for that?  I'm not saying I'm not grateful, just that I had a hard time keeping a straight face while I bought my feed before they knew I was laughing at them.

Anyway, farming is neither here nor there because today is Wallace Stevens birthday.  Wallace Steven is almost the first poet I ever heard of, mostly because his stomping ground was my stomping ground, although I was not born until decade after his death.  He won a Pulitzer for his poetry.  He was also at the helm of a major Hartford insurance group for many many years (I have actually seen I-don't-know-how-many live performances in a theater named for him in the gynormous office building that is the home of the same insurance company).  Wallace Stevens was born into a prominent conservative family & was himself a member of the Republican Party & had strong anti-labor union beliefs.  When he married his wife, a woman from a working class background, his parents refused to attend the ceremony; he never spoke to them again.

So I think we can all agree it would be hard to predict what Wallace would do, so enough about him now lets talk about my cow.  Wait, one more thing about Wallace Stevens:  his poetry really is marvelous.  None of that black-is-the-color-of-my-true-love's-heart-hair-whatever that has become a cliche.  One of my favorites is Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.  I also like the Peggy Lee's version of Bye Bye Blackbird, which is not relevant except you can hear it here.

Let me present my version titled This Many Ways of Looking at Milking My Cow:

I. Misty or steamy there is
nothing like the smell
of potent lady cow

II.  Her bag pushes her legs further
apart, arched up to her back
her back is bony table

III.  Myself folded & reaching
underneath for the wrinkled
gorilla fingers swelling smooth

IV.  One two one
one two two
one two three
one two four

IV.  Sometimes I dream that someone is
twisting my hands, pulling my fingers straight
folding  them, turning them
slowly like mozzarella

V.  I saw the cord in the mirror
in my arm, when I reached to put away the towels.
These are new muscles.

& finally   VI.  You know those men - it's always men - who like to squeeze your hand until your finger tips turn blue & pretend it is just a friendly handshake?  I can make those men cry.

I think it is safe to say Wallace would be spinning in his grave.  Also, I really need to get some sleep.  Good night.

Today is not Secretary's Day

In April, I think, some people observe Secretary's Day (or if you are still other some people: Secretaries Day, which may or may not be the same thing but more of it), & it turns out what still others may or may not observe is Administrative Professionals Day.  When I worked in an office, Secretary's Day was always a touchy subject.  I have lost track of how many women who answered phones, dealt with correspondence, filed, organized calendars & all other things secretarial got VERY OFFENDED when they were recognized on Secretary's Day.  My feeling was if "secretary" worked for Kissinger, it worked for me: bring on the chocolates.

But none of that matters just now because today is not Secretary's Day.  Today is an older holiday that honors a much older, much more under valued profession:  it's Ratcatcher's Day.  Or not, there seems to be some confusion there, too.  The actual Town of Hamelin celebrates Ratcatcher's Day in June, but the Robert Browning poem puts it on July 22.  Puts what, you ask?  The day that the pied piper is said to have returned to Hamelin & led off the children of the town.

Chances are you know the story:  the people of Hamelin hired a ratcatcher to clear their town of rats (they had quite the problem with rats).  When the job was done, they decided not to pay him.  He said "you will rue the day", disappeared & then came back later & lured all the children of the town away, using the same technique he used to dispose of the rats & the children & the ratcatcher were never seen again.  The moral of this tale varies depending on who tells it, but I have always understood it to be "payback is a bitch".

Let me update this story for modern times.  An individual entered into a verbal contract to perform a one time service.  After the service had been performed, the contractee declined to honor the contract.  Various reasons were given.  While none of these reasons given were satisfactory to the contractor & the work was such that it could not be undone, the contractee had considerable influence over all methods of arbitration & the contractor was left unsatisfied & went away.  The contractee thought everything had wrapped up nicely & went back to business-as-usual...until...the contractee lost something he never thought was even on the table.

Many years ago I worked for an accountant who, for many years before that had worked as a contractor.  A government contractor.  Her job was to review Medicare claims for fraud & she had an EXCELLENT record.  In fact, she found fraud in EVERY CASE she reviewed.  Every single case, 2 or 3 or 10 or 20 a month, depending on how many came in, for YEARS.  Before you take this as given that every doctor is committing Medicare fraud (they aren't), you should understand that all of the referrals she got were as a result of complaints directed to a single individual.  & for years & years & 100s of audits, all of those complaints came from a single source:  disgruntled former employees.  The case that sticks with me best was a very personable, very pleasant older internist.  As I recall, his office manager of say 10 or more years (really it could have been 25 years, they were both old enough) had used all of her allotted vacation when her mother/father/someone became ill & she went to take care of whoever it was.  Because her vacation time was used up, she was doing this without pay, which maybe pissed her off & maybe didn't, I don't know. This went on until finally she was told that she HAD to be back at her desk the following day or she was fired, period.  & so she was fired & even that, while probably not making her super happy, had not yet pushed her over the edge.  The final straw was when she filed for unemployment & her former employer contested it.  According to him, by failing to appear for work she had quit & the judge ruled in his favor.  She left that courtroom & went straight to the Medicare fraud office (in the same building, how convenient) & reported on the duplicate billing system, dead patients, etc. scam her former boss had going.  I remember it NOT because it was the most egregious bad-boss-behavior I saw (it's not even close) but it was the biggest whistle-blower payout the office had ever made at the time.  I am guessing the doctor went to his grave wishing he had just let that unemployment claim ride.


So Happy Ratcatcher's Day everyone!

Asleep in the weeds

While I have been for a bit finally home again after most of my travels (& settled in again after the general disruption of my begin gone has finally settled), the ripple effect is only just starting to fade.  Even bookclub was a week late this month, yes, because of me.  This month we read, appropriately, a story about not being home ever again; we read Evangeline.

It seems apropos that our local library has not one copy of this once required reading anywhere in the collection:  Hiawatha like you would not believe, but no Evangeline. There was one really big book about the relocation of the Acadian people (a move you would think I would know about having vacationed as a child in the Acadia islands & sampled as an adult Acadian cuisine in two very distant parts of this country, but somehow those you internalize early are the anomalies you never question), but that was all I found on the subject.  I confess the story did not inspire enough curiosity in me to read same big book, but B******* was interested & took it home with her.

As for having read Evangeline before, I do not believe I ever had, but I certainly knew the story.  More than knowing it, I have long internalized it (again while failing to grasp the whole exile thing as part of my country's history).  When I was in college, my brother brought home a cat he found & because the cat had been asleep in the weeds we named him (yes him) Evangeline.  In my family any cat with the same markings-white with big black blotches, sometimes called a cow cat is known as a Vangy Cat.  More than that, we seem to have a preference for them.  Right this minute, both my sister & I have Vangy cats.  One of my brothers has two cats, but alas they are Siamese & my other brother has a dog.  & his dog has a dog, so you could argue he has two dogs, although he would dispute this.  Neither the dog nor her dog are cat friendly.

Coney Island wood

A long time ago, back in the mists of time, say 2005-ish, C****** announced she hated poetry &  I almost ran the car off the road.  We went straight to the library & I handed her some Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  He really is the best antidote to "my love is like a red red rose" (or as someone who shall remain nameless used to say:  my love is like a dead, dead dog). Don't get me wrong, I like Robbie Burns just fine, but maybe this is an acquired taste.  Like bagpipes.  Or haggis.  & not where a person should begin.  Best to begin with the first thing you put on..ideally.

More recently, I have been helping to put together an exhibit to represent all the herbarium at the Natural History Museum for their big annual fundraiser.  Helping is a slight overstatement, I am putting four maybe five pieces of wood on a table of all kinds of other things, among seven other tables.

The first two woods were more or less assigned.  K*** had an idea about one wood being deceptively heavy & another deceptively light (when in doubt, go tactile).  He had examples, but I thought I could come up with better ones, which had the advantage of being roughly the same dimensions making the whole light versus heavy thing just plain more somehow.

The next two were my choice.   I went with a specimen collected in Japan on September 9, 1940.  No there is nothing oh-so-special about 9/9/1940 except that it is well before 8/6/1945.  The second was a wood I had plain never heard of, never thought of & yet have almost certainly been in contact with.  I am talking about Tabebuia ipe.  See, you have never heard of it either.  Go ahead, google it, I can wait.

There now, you see, colorful flowering tree, family Bignoniaceae, which happens to be right where I am now.  A surprising number of botanists working around me have been mildly surprised how well represented this family is a in a wood collection; it is famous for its vines.  It also has some of the quirkiest cards I have come across thus far.  Still, what does a pretty tree bring to the table, block-of-wood-wise?  It turns out this wood is so dense, it is naturally rot resistant.  It is even naturally flame retardant.  Therefore it is widely used as decking in public areas.  Sooo, if you have ever stepped onto the boardwalk at Coney Island you have stepped on Tabebuia ipe.  Like all schoolchildren back in the day, (I know they don't do this anymore-not on any standardized test), I was taught the history of my own community.  One of the highlights (lowlights) of that is the famous Ringling Brothers Fire.  Maybe this is why I am so interested in Tabebuia ipe.

I don't now what to pick for number five.  I need to come up with something soon, or it will be capped at four.  K*** is leaning towards an attractive wood, but I think attractive wood is all around us.  I would rather choose something interesting.  Alas Cybistax antisyphilitica is too racy for the local gentry.

Lessons at bat

It has been more than 100 years since he first appeared in print, but Casey is still striking out. I realize it is possible (maybe even probable) that some one might not know who Casey is.  Casey is an imaginary baseball player on an imaginary team. The home team (our team!) is behind by two runs & has two outs.  There will be no more innings & there are two batters ahead of him, neither of them worth much.  But each of them player gives his meager all to get the Mighty Casey, the ringer, to bat.  Everyone relaxed, sure it was in the bag.

It seems there have been a lot of ringers in my world lately.  Politically, the Tea Party thought they had (& probably still have) the Republican nomination for the opening Senate seat in the bag.  Florida-Offshore oil drilling was an as-good-as-done deal less than two months ago. 

Back to our epic poem:  Casey makes his leisurely way to the plate.  The first pitch sings right by him.  The crowd goes crazy.  They are quite quite sure Casey was robbed.

As for me, here in real time, I somehow missed Rush Limbaugh's claim that eco-terrorists maybe were behind the oil spill.  I did not miss the far right leaning Florida legislature, either embracing this new Tea Party ideology or the old Let's Get Re-elected ideology, forwarding ever more bizarre legislation to the governor's desk.

Meanwhile in Mudville, Casey conceded that first pitch was just not his style.  The second pitch also, somehow failed to meet his criteria.  It did not fail to meet the umpire's:  strike two.

As for the rest of the poem:  Casey finally decides to get down to the real business of a batter, swings & strikes out.  Conservative Florida Democrats are coming out in droves for the newly independent, formerly Republican, current Governor/potential future Senator.  In the interest of courting those to the left, the center & even just a modicum to the right, much of the weirdness landing on Crist's desk is stalling  there.   As for the off-shore drilling, the former party poster boy is nixing that, too.

//You can watch the familiar version here or a better one here.  Happy Anniversary Casey!

What would Paul do?

I cannot remember when I first heard of Paul Laurence Dunbar. He was not unknown to me when he came up in a college poetry class. Each student was asked to select any poem from within the MASSIVE volume we were working & diagram/outline/do that breakdown thing.

I did not choose We Wear the Mask although I am reliably informed someone always does. In those days before GOOGLE it was possible to get intimate with this or any piece of any writing & reasonably not know the color of the writer's skin. The student who had chosen this poem was stunned by this new level to her choice. Especially on learning that this son of freed slaves made his literary bones while also pandering to the post-war South with works like The Deserted Plantation. A man has to pay the bills, after all.

Dunbar found other ways to pay his bills, too. He started work as an elevator operator, selling his first book to people who rode in same elevator. After his second book was published, he was able to devote himself to his writing, although he still did a stint at the Library of Congress. In all he published twelve books of poetry, five novels, four books of short stories & a play. He died today in 1906, before his 34th birthday.

But the last time I saw Dunbar was somewhere else entirely. A was in Washington, DC doing a presentation for the NSF & I tagged along because it was cherry blossom time. That Saturday we went to the Smithsonian, picking & choosing which buildings to go into. A very much wanted to see the National Air & Space Museum & while he joined the school tours through the space capsules, etc. I wandered over to a less-trafficked exhibit. There was Dunbar, staring back at me from a life size photograph of him in front of the shop owned by his childhood schoolmates, Orville & Wilbur Wright. The Wright brothers are credited with giving him access to their printing press & helping to finance his African -American newspaper, the Dayton Tattler.

If you are looking for an easy way to begin understanding what Dunbar would do, let me suggest Jump Back, Honey. Yes, it is a children's book but you can never start learning too soon. Or too late.  As for what would Paul do?  As usual I do not know, I just think he might be the most famous person you never heard of.

//for the curious I choose Theodore Roethke's I Knew A Woman & I am still enchanted by the line The shapes a bright container can contain.

Judging books by their covers & whatever else

I was catching up on one of my favorite blogs-Awful Library Books when in the comments on a book not about clowns but with clowns skiing on the cover I came across a reference to a publishing house that piqued my interest: Tutis Publishing.

If you went ahead & hit the ALB link, you know that Tutis uses public domain art on their digital cover art, in many a random way.  My first visit to the site revealed this gem front & center:

I am not familiar with the translation of Homer that ties into bi-polar disorder, epilepsy, Ménière's disease or whatever-the-hell Van Gogh had, but I highly recommend every high school in the americas get their hands on a copy; bored students everywhere are ready to hear this version of the death of Achilles.  Also, I would imagine there is no more trying to tell the Ajax apart because they are probably the same guy with a split personality.

Just for fun I did a search on Jane Eyre.  & the second item to come up (the first was indeed Jane Eyre) was Persuasion.  You know - by Jane Austen.  Because Charlotte Bronte & Jane Austen are both...? Listed 3rd was another book by Jane Austen; 4th - Persuasion again.  With a different cover.  Did I mention the first cover?  It featured a couple in renaissance dress on a garden bench, the man appearing to plead with the woman.  Why would anyone want to top that?  Even if they did lay their hands on a different translation?  Am I the only one who did not know Jane Austen had to be translated into english? Or that Persuasion was about one of the three musketeers, if he were a ships captain?

There was no place left to go but the self-help section, where I found four books:

The Art of Public Speaking by Dale Carnegie with a microphone on the cover
Quit Your Worrying! by George Wharton James with a pea flower on the cover
Talks on Talking by Grenville Kleiser with foldling chairs in an open-air amphitheatre/lawn type place on the cover & last but not least
How to Succeed by Orison Swett Marden with an eagle tearing apart a snake.  Or is it a two-different-headed dragon?

Success is overrated.