Don't Mention the Moon (A Selection from The Edith Wharton Sentences)

Don’t Mention the Moon

The ink-stained desk at which all his poems had been written resented poetry, it disliked ink, and had no use for wineglass rings on the wood, or the caustic splashes of whiskey.  But it was a desk, and so had little to say about poetry or anything else, and lived its wooden life in the hope that someone other than a poet, a premier, for example, or a CEO, would one day sit down and sign a check, or initial an order to invade a country, anything but the love-sick mutterings or impotent phrasings the desk had perforce grown so resigned to house. “Just don’t mention the moon today,” thought the desk. “For once don’t sit here and write about the moon.”

 

Evasion (A Portion Of The Transcripts)

What is it.  What is it with you and spiders? 

Why this
  obsession?

What is it about the ocean, the fish

like needles in the blanket of the ocean?

Why this evasion?

What is it about the mountain, the villages

  of snowdrops

in bloom

  on the mountain?

Beauty.  Rendering.  Love

in all
     its odd-bodied forms.
 
Go on...

I love the spiders because

who else will, and who

has ever loved me

  like I want to be loved.

 

And Now, a Word from Louise Gluck

This struck me from an interview with Gluck. (Apparently she rarely gives interviews) in this month's Poets and Writers magazine:

"For me it's tone--the way the mind moves as it performs its acts of meditation. That's what you're following. It guides you but also mystifies you because you can't turn it into conscious principles or say precisely what its attributes are. The minute you turn tone into conscious principle it goes dead. It has to remain mysterious to you. You have to be surprised by what it is capable of unveiling."

That's what I love about writing poetry. The work itself unveiling to you, the work itself letting you know what it needs to say.

From "The Edith Wharton Sentences"

The First of November

“I shouldn’t have had to ruin this umbrella by using it in the rain. A frying pan, or cookie sheet is never more perfect than when it hangs on a shelf in some kitchen notion shop. An umbrella in its stand is the idea of an umbrella, while the same object, flecked with sleet and turned half inside-out in a rough onslaught of November wind, is that idea put forth and the argument lost. Weather and time together win every debate they have ever staged, even against hearty teams such as steel, concrete, brick walls, and hope.”

 
The shop girl looked at me as if I hadn’t spoken. “Do you want this wrapped as a gift,” she said. So I suppose we understood one another after all. We lived on the borders of the wicked city, it was the first of November, and the weatherman’s promised gale had only just arrived.

About Time: Thunderbird, Little Red Riding Hood, and Edith Wharton, among other things.

It flows, apparently, and runs, and gets away from me like a horse might get away, by swimming into the ocean.  I haven't been blogging, at any rate.  But rather than offer excuses or explanations I think I'll just start again. And say that I have read a lot of things, young adult novels I read for my day job, and novels and nonfiction I read because reading is what I do.  And poetry, always.  The last book of poetry I read that made me want to right away respond by writing my own poems was Dorothea Lasky's Thunderbird.  A couple of weeks ago I sat on a bench at the Chicago lakefront on a beautiful day.  I read a poem from Thunderbird, and then write a poem in my notebook.  Rinse, repeat.  It was a really good morning.

I also recently read an anthology forthcoming from Viking in March 2015, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation.  Dorothea Lasky is represented, and other poets I've long admired, James Allen Hall, Mark Bibbins, Timothy Donnelly, Matthew Zapruder, Melissa Broder, Matthew Dickman, Ocean Voung, and Michael Dickman, among others.  It's the kind of anthology I wish I'd had when I was 20, and all the anthologies seemed to be filled with poets that were either dead, or, to my 20 year old self, yes, unforgivably old, so much older than I that they seemed to already belong to history rather than the now.

Now, of course, I am older than poets who seemed so old to me then. Still and all it's valuable for young people to have an anthology made up of contemporary voices.

In my own work, I'm writing 3-4 new drafts for my Edith Wharton Sentences each week, and also typing already-written pieces into the growing document. Finishing one manuscript this year has whetted my appetite to complete more, and I think I have a very good shot at being done with the project before 2014 is over.  I've also being working on a series of new spider poems, probably prose poems, if they remain in their current form. I did a mash-up of spider imagery combined with exercises from a textbook on the Little Red Riding Hood story that I found in a thrift store. I go back and forth on thinking they are really great to seeing them as just exercises that should not see the light of day.  Lucky for me they can hang out in a notebook and marinate for a while.

Short Takes on Two Recent Books

The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Each poem in this book is comprised of three speakers, the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, and each speaker always speaks in this order, although the Dog does not always get the last word, so to speak.  The Old Woman speaks of human concerns, the Tulip is the voice of Beauty, and the Dog speaks for the animal.  Yet they also speak of what they are, woman, flower, dog, just themselves, if those selves could all cogently speak. The trio discuss God, Love, Death, the nature of Man.  I thought I'd had other books by Ostriker on my shelf, but I can't find any now.  I do remember using her book Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America when writing some papers in grad school. This one will remain on my shelf--I love the interplay of the three voices, how their conversations open up the world, and how, when you listen to speakers who are good at arguing their case, your loyalties and opinions shift and change like leaves in the wind.

Here is one of the shorter poems in this collection:

Soften and Melt

The man man made me soften and melt
said the old woman.

The bee made me shiver like a rag
said the dark red tulip.

The bitch made me push
said the dog.



Bay of Angels, by Diane Wakoski


Why do we chew again and again on the bones of old wrongs?  Why are we (are some of us, many of us, most of us?) haunted by old love, love gone wrong, ancient betrayals, decades-old heartbreak?  This can be true, I think, even if our present is relatively happy and drama-free.  Wakoski examines her past with movies and myth as her companions, finding tropes in both that twine and echo in her own life.  In the last section of the book, "The Lady of Light Meets the Shadow Boy," she writes poems that are inspired by a new friendship/mentorship with the poet Matthew Dickman, yet these poems, too, are meditations on the past, and what both poets share from it. I am always in awe of Wakoksi's catalog of imagery: the natural world, the urban environment, jewels, cloth, flowers, cinema, the qualities of light, as well as her ear for prosody and her skill with line-breaks. This collection, along with her previous book, The Diamond Dog, indicate to me another flowering in this poet's career.  Some of the fieceness of her earlier work is not here, but she has replaced anger (which was exciting) with a hard-won wisdom (calmer, but perhaps more beautiful.)  I look forward to her work, always.

Here's the third stanza of "Some Beauty Needs a Dimness." The poet is describing how a winter scene would be different if the sun were out:

                                                Now the 
gold and green and orange snow blowers and shovels
would come out, a reminder of
worldly destruction; the kids in red gloves would
dirty the world with snowballs, the car mufflers
would blow out a column of asserive, lively particles,
some perhaps staining the snow blue. Even the light itself would be
cheerful and lose its sonority.
Edward Weston's pepppers -- wouldn't you shudder
if they were green? Would you ever want to see a Greta Garbo 
film in color?

The World Will Find A Way to Break Your Heart

From an interview with Mark Doty in Tricycle 

http://www.tricycle.com/blog/dont-they-know

Mark Doty: Grief does not seem to me to be a choice. Whether or not you think grief has value, you will lose what matters to you. The world will break your heart. So I think we’d better look at what grief might offer us. It’s like what Rilke says about self-doubt: it is not going to go away, and therefore you need to think about how it might become your ally.

I find that line all the time in my notebooks, "the world will break your heart." Or better, " the world will find a way to break your heart."

The idea of the leap

"I love Robert Bly's idea of the leap and Lorca's duende. For me, these two concepts can supercharge a poem. They are jet fuel. Bly defines a leap as movement from the conscious to the unconscious and back again. For me this is true to the way the human mind works. We are continually moving between the reality and dream, daydream, memory, fantasy. And duende is that acknowledgment of mortality—the shadow of death. So for me these concepts are central to the poetic process: the self or voice, sense images, moving from the conscious to the unconscious, and duende." -- Barbara Hamby, in an interview in Superstition Review

I've really been enjoying her New and Selected Poems

Dear Wrought Iron Fence,

In troubled times I imagine turning you into

a weapon. Tonight in full

moonlight I decide what you might say

if you could speak,

a voice that sounds like Mary Tyler Moore when

she holds a spear.

In December ice is your secret

friend, I can tell

by the ferocious way each glass

knife finds

a way to embrace you.

 

(One of the 69 Letters poems)

Hidden From Me in Veils of Cloud

I was in Seattle for much of this past week at Winter Institute, a conference for booksellers. It's always such a buzz to be with 500 other slightly insane bookstore types and writers, discussing business, authors, reading, and the like. Not to mention hauling away a metric ton of free books. The sad part was that I didn't actually get to experience much of Seattle. The conference business starts in the early morning and goes on through the day, with publisher sponsored dinners at fancy venues in the evening. On the last day I took a walk with my coworker Sarah and we went to the Pike Place fish market.  And on the first night there was an opening party at Elliot Bay Book Company, where I could not resist buying the new Mary Ruefle collection and Frank Stanford's book-length poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. They were right there on the staff recommends shelf, looking at me.

After a breakfast with New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, among others, It was off to the airport, where we discovered a nerve-wracking wait to see if our 11 am flight would actually ever leave.  Two things make the wait worth it. I was daydreaming, looking out at the trees-- it was a sunny warm day-- and I realized suddenly that the huge bird that had just landed on a telephone pole about 200 feet from me was a bald eagle.   All winter long I've been wanting to see a snowy owl, but this was just as good; it was the first bald eagle I've ever seen that close with my own eyes. The eagle was only there for two minutes before two crows swooped down and drove it away.

About the same time I saw the eagle, I noticed Mt. Rainier in the distance. Since there was not much chance of crows casing the mountain away, I got to see it over a period of several hours, mist-shrouded, clear but distant, and suddenly sharply clear, as if it had moved closer when I wasn't looking. I suddenly remembered the poet Denise Levertov wrote several poems about the Mountain when she moved to Seattle at the end of her life.

Witness

Sometimes the mountain

Is hidden from me in veils

Of cloud, sometimes

I am hidden from the mountain 

In veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,

When I forget or refuse to go

Down to the shore or a few yards

Up the road, on a clear day,

To reconfirm

That witnessing presence.

-- Denise Levertov, in  Evening Train

One of the Ancient Spirits of the World.

Just before Christmas I went to the lakefront, hoping to see one of the snowy owls who have landed here in Chicago for a while. I drove past a group of people who were all staring up into the black branches of an apple tree, some of them pointing, some of them aiming cameras. By the time I parked the car and reached that slushy point on the lawn, the group was disbanding. One woman walked away yelling" who- wee, who- wee" over and over, like she was calling a pig in at slop time.  I hoped a snowy owl would not respond to that sort of thing. I went walking on a sliding cold trail, through the slush, out into the prairie field at Montrose Point.  I saw a squirrel, and a man with binoculars looking at finches, and breathed in the scent of dry grass and winter. But I didn't see a snowy owl.

I thought of the first poetry workshop I ever attended, led by Diane Wakoski. For the first session, she just read us recent poems she'd written, and one of them was the poem "Removed from Natural Habitiat," about the speaker viewing snowy owls in a zoo:

...Part of their beauty is
In their stillness, the unblinking eyes like money that is hoarded,
The head cocked a little, the body stationary, and seemingly
Unjointed."

I wanted to see a snowy owl at the lakefront, in the snow fields on the beach, or in a low tree, or out on the cold pier.  I wanted to see one snowy owl, even though I'd seen videos and photos of many of these recent city visitors online.  you can't google " snowy owl chicago" without plenty of information. And images appearing. I found for example, that these owls descending from the north are called an irruption, not a migration, and that more than likely it comes of there being an overabundance of owls in the north, so that the younger ones are driven away by the elders, and come to us looking for food.

I thought I might see one of the ancient spirits of the world.

I wanted to see a snowy owl, with my own eyes, but did not, and so had to cast around for other forms of ferocity, and beauty.

Pretending to be Morpheus: An Short Interview with Dave Awl

I've known writer/performer Dave Awl since the late 1990s, when I used to see him as part of the famed Neo-Futurist ensemble and their long-running Two Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind evening of 30 plays in 60 minutes. I have always appreciated his work, both the plays, monologues, songs, and skits from TMLMTBGB, and printed work from journals and his collection of poetry and prose, What the Sea Means, and was reminded of that fact when I saw he'd been featured recently in the on-line journal Escape Into Life. Dave was kind enough to respond to some questions that occurred to me after reading this lovely batch of work.  (I originally typed "lovely bath" of work, which also seems apt--one bathes in his work and emerges warm, refreshed, and clean, ready for the day or the night to startle and begin.)

Lives of the Spiders: Can you talk a bit about your process with the Night Diary poems? Do you compose drafts late at night while you are already (still) up, or do these writings stem from those middle of the night "oh crap I woke up and can't get back to sleep" times?

Dave Awl:  I do often find myself writing poems at two or three a.m -- it's a natural writing time for me, when my inhibitions and my guard are down and things flow a little more freely. But it's not a requirement, and I write by day sometimes, too ... I'm pretty sure I scribbled some of my first Night Diaries poems down in my spiral notebook while riding the bus in broad daylight.

The main idea behind the Night Diaries poems was that I wanted to try writing poems that followed the strange logic and surreal thought processes of dreams -- kind of like dreaming out loud into my notebook or keyboard while fully awake. I had been studying Jung for years, taking classes at the Jung Institute in Evanston, and keeping a dream journal for a while before I wrote the first Night Diaries poems. But rather than turning my dreams themselves into poems, I wanted to try to consciously write like the part of my brain that makes up my dreams. Pretending to be Morpheus, for a few minutes at a time.

LOTS: Do you consider yourself to be a "night person?" What associations or tendencies do you have with writing at night that might not be true of writing in the brazen light of day?

DA: Yes, I'm very much a nocturnal person. I've always found nighttime peaceful and relaxing, and it's when a lot of the most fun things happen. Night is when all the fabulous monsters come out. I like that nighttime is less crowded ... my literary hero and eventual friend Russell Hoban used to say that as an artist you need empty spaces in which to create, and I think at night there are more empty spaces to write into. It's easier to be imaginative at night, too. To steal a line from a performance piece I once did on this subject, non sequiturs and useful twists of expression breed in the moonlight.

And I think of this lovely line from Russell Hoban's novel The Medusa Frequency: "At three o’clock in the morning the moments patter like rain on the roof of night; the silence is a road to anywhere."

LOTS:  The titles of these works in Escape Into Life indicate more material--of there's a "Night Diary 82" one would assume there's a "Night Diary 1" and a "Night Diary 81."  Other poems found on-line, such as "Film Loop #12" for example, would lead one to consider the existence of other Film Loop poems. Do you have an archive of Night Diary entries?  And if so, can you quote from another of those entries for the readers of Lives of the Spiders?  (Dave's answer, after the break.)

Introduction to the Best Words from the Short Biographies of Poets in "The Best American Poetry 2013"

These best words, taken from the biographies of poets in this year's Best American Poetry volume, were selected by a panel of linguists and crossword puzzle dignitaries from across the nation, and in two cases, (Senegal and Norway) overseas. Meetings, taking place over a contentious three days in Iowa City, only nearly avoided violence--the verb advocates were adamant in their ongoing quest for better representation, while the noun contingent, as usual, argued for the primacy of persons, places, and things. Thankfully, the question of whether or not any one biographical note may contribute more than one word to our annual list seems to at last be laid to rest. A rare majority opinion of the delegates decided once and for all that one word and one word only may be selected from any contributor's biography, no matter how worthy and attention-getting accompanying words in the note might be.

Any such list, is, at its heart, a tad arbitrary. Nonetheless, the panelists feel we've been able to latch on to an acre of the  national poetic landscape, reflecting the varied and various responses of poets who have been asked to describe their own works. Interestingly enough, this is the first year that two words beginning with the prefix "un" have made the list, and they happen to appear side by side. This is also the fourth year in the past five that the word grandmother has been so honored.

The editors wish to thank the National Endowment for Noun Appreciation, the Smitherton and Aptly Adverb Coalition, and the Society of Thesauri Development for their on-going and much-needed support. Special thanks and recognition are due to Thaddeus (last name Jones?) the bartender at the Deadwood Tavern, for his fortitude and patience as we work out some form of payment plan that does not involve the authorities. The check is not yet in the mail, but we expect to hear back from the fine folks at the Guggenheim Foundation any day now, at which time a final settling of accounts can be made.

Without further ado, the list:

magpies.  soldier.  echo.  enlightenment.  collections.  nagging.  violence.  faceless.  risk.  

accumulation.  enemies.  leaven.  numbered.  grace.  compost.  confusion.  skipped.  prissy.  born.

loneliness.  dopplegangers.  tonic.  pagan.  numerous.  hiding.  residencies.  puberty.  dire.

flight.  laugh.  sisters.  elopement.  secret.  voyage.  bedrooms.  luck.  impossible.  glamour.

ladder.  hurt.  proximity.  horse.  code.  craving.  crime.  decipher.  birdbath.  baffles.  rapidly.

sheep.  doorframe.  sacrament.  speaker.  therefore.  absence.  suitor.  meander.  castaway.

taverns.  openness.  choose.  grandmother.  road.  everywhere.  seduction.  bedtime.  suffering.  

mortal.  concrete.  unfolding.  uncomfortable.  betrothal.   grateful.

The things one comes across in the dark wooded internet

Lynn Emmanuel's work, for example.  I have liked her prose poetry work, it has such an affinity and response to Gertrude Stein. Here she's in a more lyric mode, and she does it oh so well.

I also found our recently that my mentor and friend Diane Wakoski has a new book just out from Anhinga Press. I've ordered my copy, and hope it is en route.

Meanwhile, in Germany, poet Sarah Sloat discovers that she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. For the second poem, if you follow the link.

Contemporary surrealist Eric Baus has a new book coming soon.  I think these might be in it.


Dorothea Lasky curates a poetry reading series in Brooklyn.  I'm not excited enough by this news to simply take off to Brooklyn, but you'd better believe the next time that work or friendship brings me to NYC I'll be eager to see if the trip coincides with a night when this takes place.


In a final and mostly self-serving entry, I'll say that I have some prose poems in New World Writing.  Did I say that already here?  That's OK, repetition is a form of music.  And I just re-read these and I'm still fond of them.

The Woman Who Some­times Sits Invis­i­bly at the Foot of Your Bed

I've been so crazed and busy with work, and worried about parental health and such that I forgot to crow about this--but I have prose poems in the newest issue of New World Writing.  I submitted five prose bits, and editor Frederick Barthelme accepted all five, and lo, there was much rejoicing, much popping of corks and hooray the lad's still got it kind of exclamations among the voices in my head.  Expect more regular updates for a while, as it appears I'll be back to a normal 40 hour week throughout this holiday season, leaving me no excuses for not at least saying hello to the keyboard now and then, just to be friendly.

When the dish ran away with the spoon, while the knife and fork went about their daily routine and tried not to speak of such matters.

This just in over the transom

I have a poem up in the latest issue of Transom, and I feel very lucky to have work there among such good company.

Street Ponies

I went with Darren to a street festival that focuses on reuse and recycling, as well as local resources.  So the beer sold was Chicago-brewed, and the food was all from small independent Chicago vendors. We saw artists who were selling jewelry made from Victorian era buttons, and lamps made from old appliance parts.  I assume the camel in the upper corner was either born in Chicago or perhaps was once a citizen, and transformed by a lover's curse.

Who Needs a Deck of Collage Poems Cards? Me.

And you probably do, too.  My friend Jen Besemer's project is now available to Joe and Jan Public, and the rest of us.  And I think it's very cool.  Check it out here. And find out more about Jen and her always provocative and startling work on her website.  Ok. Go forth and read, and write, and order most excellent card collections, some of them blank so you can add your own two cents and a blue jay feather's worth.

Dear Overcoat,

In you I become an old man,

a raven, someone’s

uncertain doom; in you I could carry

the Prince of November’s

one dozen pockets, home

to a pebble, a pen

and a knife,

you stretch me

taller,

you catch the wind,

you are a plowed field

for the first snow to fall,

you the fashion

I’d been

wanting

to hide myself within,

oh overcoat,

realm

of moths and mantle

of fog, the means

to mask my unsculpted

body—I found you in

a secondhand store,

I lost you

in a pile of coats

at a stranger’s

party, or did you melt

into some midnight

closet, where unexplained

breezes

or unseen hands

swing you

on a stern

and clanging

metal hanger?

Dear Family Chronicle of a Flock of Pigeons,

There are so few pigeon

heroes, or dastards,

and also, I think,

so few affairs, since

each and every character

mates

for life—the history

of pigeons

is a chronicle

without wars—sure, a falcon

grabs a sacrifice now

and again,

but on the whole this

is the tale of how you rose,

a chorus on

a January morning,

wings nearly

white against a bank

of darker cloud, and I

read that chapter,

thankful to see

the fog of my breath

while I waited

on the train, nearly

able in that moment

to love my lifetime the way

a flock of pigeons loves

to be silver in a flash

of sky, dark

then silver.