A whistling old man

Something I discovered while looking at the poetry shelves at the bookstore where I work: Richard Wright, the famed author of Native Son, turned to haiku during the last 18 months of his life, and wrote over 4,000 of them. In the introduction to Haiku: The Last Poems of an American Icon, his daughter recalls, "I remember how he would hang pages and pages of them up, as if to dry, on long metal rods strung across the narrow office area of his tiny sunless studio in Paris, like the abstract still-life photographs he used to compose and develop himself at the beginning of his Paris exile."

Here are three of the 817 haiku in the current collection:

     A long winter rain:
A whistling old man whittles
     A dream on a stick.

      In the summer lake,
The moon gives a long shiver,
    Then swells round again.

     A spring sky so clear
That you feel you are seeing
     Into tomorrow.

This Week in Soap Opera Summaries

 

Days of Gertrude Stein

Alice was distressed to find out that she isn't pregnant, and a cyst is a cyst is a cyst is a cyst that needs to be removed to rule out cancer. In Gertrude’s hospital room, Alice and Gertrude agreed to a truce, which they acknowledged would be up to them to maintain. Later, rejected by a girl, Alice blamed Gertrude and vowed to get back at her. Alice and Gertrude forgave each other and made cake. Gertrude blackmailed Alice into protecting her while doing her new job at the police station. Someone stole Alice’s needle-pointed chair designed by Picasso, and returned it with R.I.P. carved into the arm. Gertrude and Alice had second thoughts about being together after they made love. Coming: Alice has a long-held secret to keep covered up.

The Cauliflower's Last Known Whereabouts

General Vegetables

Following the turnip’s visit, the kohlrabi left a mysterious message in the soup, which the radish found and gave to the head lettuce. The rutabaga came up with a shocking explanation for the chard’s recipe and what needed to be done. Chard agreed to the trimming, but the procedure did not go well, leaving his stem on the line. Spinach returned to himself for a moment when the melon took him to the compost pile. The cucumber concealed the cauliflower’s whereabouts from everyone. The cucumber found the cabbage trying to cover her tracks with string beans and had a chat with the pumpkin, when the onion entered and overheard them.  The beets were stricken when arugula decided to side with watercress. Coming up: Goat cheese offers the beets the support they need.

Reading at The Book Cellar

This will be the fourth or maybe even fifth year that Suzy, the owner of The Book Cellar, has invited me to read at the store during National Poetry Month.  Each time there's been a variety of poets on the bill, but always I am delighted to share the stage with my good friend, the amazing writer Richard Fox.  This is one of the readings I look forward to from year to year, and I'd love to see folks there.  I'm busy reading kid's books for a committee I am on for the American Bookselling Association, so I've not been composing a lot of new things, but in the fairly short time I'll have I promise to read at least one brand-spankin' new poem along with some oldies.

I walked in Rosehill Cemetery today. Well over 80 degrees in mid-March, and the robins were delighted, the crows were calling, two hawks circled, and the lion stoically looked off into the distance.

Notes on a Reading by Jeanette Winterson

                                                                                         (photo from the Guardian)

I saw Jeanette Winterson read from her memoir tonight. She was jet-lagged, witty, intense, and could answer a question like "Where do you get your ideas," with a three paragraph spoken essay that was cogent, entertaining, and meaningful.  Here is what I wrote in my little notebook as I listened to her speak. Much of the longer phrases are direct quotations, the individual words are all ones she used:

I was like a flare. Disaster. Phone booth.

  Copper--plate handwriting.  Loomed up. Uncarried

child.

  Shut yourself up in your grief.  Duffel-coat.

I was selling my story against hers--part fact, part fiction is what life is.

When you are a solitary child you find an imaginary friend. I thought

the measure of love was loss. Gap. Opening.

Version. Silence, burden, grave. Wait

until the dead were gone. Promise

  box. Words become clues. Both of us endlessly

ransacking

     the house.  The night bus. Coarseness

for my own sake.  Secrecy. Brilliance--unravel

     it. The words are there. How

do we make sure we are people worth knowing?  To say

that art is a luxury is to say that being human

   is a luxury. Begin

with a sentence and go on.

Orpheus

from the stairwell of the Hyde Park Art Center:

 

Orpheus, Descending

The Vault of the Sky Exactly the Color of the Knitting Woman's Yarn

I need to get back to writing again, not only because when I go for too long without writing my legs ache ad I start feeling like there's something missing in my life, a sense of unease, a dissatisfaction unnameable until the moment I say, "Oh, I haven't been writing," and I know exactly why I am unsettled.  I also need to get back to writing because I'll be reading soon with Richard Fox and Brandon Will and they are both very good writers so I want to have something new to read and impress them.

This is just a post to say that I found this in my notebook, dated Feb. 11th and it proves that I am still writing, even if I did not very clearly remember writing it. Sometimes that's why I like keeping a notebook, to discover how immediate a moment was for me a day or year or decade ago, and briefly inhabit that moment again.

The woman one seat ahead of me on the train has hair made of equal parts silver strands and black; she is knitting; a ball of pale blue yarn is in her black backpack. I cannot see her face; I wonder if her expression is placid as she knits with thick and wrinkled hands. I was going to say that the yarn was the color of the sky but then I thought, no, that's just the poet talking, and I looked out the window at the snow, the bare trees, the ice on the river. I looked up at the sky, clear after yesterday's modest bit of snow, and indeed the vault of the sky was exactly the color of the knitting woman's yarn, exactly like that.  Now I'll probably feel compelled to say something like, "the woman on the train, the woman seated in front of me has yarn in her black backpack she is knitting the sky."