Yearly Archives: 2019

127 posts

Reading Ulysses: Now I Know How Odysseus Felt

humor poetry

Wait. What page am I on in Ulysses? Only 186 with over 500 to go?

You can never be too old for an Irish door-stopper, I realize, but what about the eyes? Here I have this Oxford paperback of the 1922 version, and my eyes are killing me.

What is the font, anyway? Four? I’ll be blind as Joyce himself by the time this is over!

And really. In the head of first one Bloomin’ protagonist and then another (the inventive young Dedalus)? Stream of consciousness can’t help itself. It’s bound to be penny-ante trivial now and again as it babbles through this thought and that. Almost like Twitter.

#whocares?

But, no. Repeat after me (and my English professors): This is clever stuff.

I know because I am co-reading The New Bloomsday Book, a guide to Bloom’s odyssey, if you will (or even if you won’t). It tells me what I should know before Joyce tells me what I don’t know.

Worst of all for bibliophiles who don’t dedicate 18 hours a day to reading (raises hand)? All the other books mocking me.

I see this 200-pager and that 250-pager, each flashing its wiles, each saying, “Hey there, Big Reader. You could be reading me, and you know it. Why don’t you just put down that there little big book and come over to my place?”

Like the Sirens, they are.

My kingdom for two gobs of bee’s wax! Plugs for the ears! Here, here! (vs. Hear, Hear!). Now, now!

But I can’t let myself get distracted. If I do I”ll never make it to the final page (or, as I call it, “Penelope”).

And I admit it.  I’ve peeked — Joyce signed off on that page, writing “Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921.”

Seven years, he took to write this thing! And probably somewhere in the many inches of pages that remain to be read, I’ll learn that “7” appears 735 times in the Bible, 54 in the Book of Revelation alone (duck!).

I guess this means I soldier on. In honor of Jimmy’s seven years. In honor of God’s seven days. In honor of the seven months it might take out of my reading life!

(As the Jesuits would say: Pray for me.)

When Blog Tanks Near Empty…

poetry

sherpa

If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s being behind the curve.

You have a cellphone and have for years? I still don’t. You been blogging so long that you finally gave it up? I’m still working the mines. You moved on to the next, great thing — podcasting — by launching your dulcet voice over the Internet? I bought a mike last year and it’s still in the box.

Which, when you do the math, leaves me with no cellphone (blessed be!), no podcast (voice still boxed), and a blog becoming root-bound in its pot (it germinated with this inaugural post on April 3, 2016, making it 3 1/2 years old — downright ancient by blogging years).

Why slug on after all this time in a world where blogs have become a tad anachronistic? It’s a question I ask myself often.

The rationale is both sound and suspect. It keeps me writing, and it keeps me reading (so I can write about what I’m reading). All good. But it also detracts from time that might be better spent on “real” writing.

Uh-oh. That old bugaboo. What’s “real” and what’s not when it comes to writing? Some say all writing is real. Others say no — it has to be creativity for the sake of art or, better yet, art you can market.

Not that marketing is the be-all. Royalties are insignificant, especially for poets. But readers? They’re significant, indeed!

That leads to another problem. What if more people are reading your blog (which, to you, is a mere incidental) than your poetry (which you care about because it mixes creativity with craft)?

As a certain Prince of Denmark once said, “That is the question!”

So when I get the occasional compliment about this blog from someone via e-mail or the comments section, saying how much they appreciate the advice or inspiration or sharing of great poetry, I always say the same thing: If you appreciate it and want to show it in real terms (ones that speak to all artists), read my work by clicking the titles of one or both of my poetry books (The Indifferent World and Lost Sherpa of Happiness).  They’re in the righthand column under the words “Available on Amazon.” Then follow through: add to cart and Amazon Prime the book’s tank!

Intimidated by price? That’s three ice coffee lattes (or whatever it is people are drinking — being behind the curve, I’m still quaffing HOT coffee… black, yet).

Such actions would make you a truly appreciative reader, both of blog and poetry. And that would be the best gift any behind-the-curve poet slash blogger could ask for.

To Teach Poetry, Get on the Cycle!

poetry teaching poetry

cycle

As a teacher of literature, I was never a big fan of “units.” In teach-speak, a unit is a collection of lessons that feature skills, strategies, and formative assessments leading to a final goal (the summative assessment), which can take many forms (traditionally, however, a paper or a test).

The problem with units is, quite simply, they have a beginning date and an ending date. Or, to be more specific, a hard ending date.

The thunk of hard ending dates is particularly felt when the unit is on topics such as grammar, essays, or poetry. The message to students? We will study grammar, essays, or poetry for these four weeks and then we will move on.

It’s the moving on part that’s a knowledge killer. If a teacher’s focus on something like poetry is compartmentalized by a unit in September, never to be seen again in the course of an academic year, the students will of course commit poetic terms, skills, and practices to short-term memory, spit them out on a summative assessment, and promptly forget everything as they move on to the next “compartment” (the short story unit, say, or the novel unit).

Alas, life doesn’t work that way (though the game of school too often does). In fact, our long-term memory is built on lessons that continually circle back, reminding us of skills and practices we learned in the past. It’s the seemingly inconsequential “Oh, yeah!” a student makes when seeing a poetry term again or experiencing the practice of reading or writing poetry again that makes a difference. Of such small bricks, spread throughout the academic year, are long-term memory walls built!

Bottom line: Thematic units work much better than units by genre. Grammar, vocabulary, poetry, short stories, essays, etc., should never “go away,” disappearing like an obscure Route 66 motel in the rearview mirror. No. Each should continually reappear, the compartmentalized curriculum map be damned.

In a similar vein, the practice of drilling a skill until “mastery” (big time quotation marks!) is achieved is suspect if you never return to that skill again. Students can lose patience if the classroom topic goes on and on like a Charles Dicken paid-by-the-word novel. It’s much better to teach a skill, practice it, move on to another, and keep circling back to it, ensuring that the group of skills you are teaching are related and support each other while at the same time providing some variety.

Such a practice is a microcosm of the thematic over genre unit concept. Big ideas are learned over big stretches of time. This is similar to a carpenter, who employs many resurfacing skills in building a house. Various tools and various strategies are used over and over as challenges and tasks come and go, sometimes in different guises, sometimes requiring a degree of problem-solving.

This interesting and ultimately rewarding practice should be reflected in the learning process as well, as students learn in similar, lifelike, cyclical patterns, bit by bit, hammer to nail, foundation to roof.

Filling Holes in the Reading Résumé

poetry

 

Filling holes. Classical holes, yet. Not just any “dog-just-dug-it-up-in-showers-of-dirt” holes.

Every year or two I take on a behemoth that I haven’t read but should have read because so many better readers than me have and have been the better for it. Accomplishments on this list include The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), Don Quixote (Cervantes), and Moby-Dick (Melville).

In each case, they’re the type of books that people expect to find on your résumé and are surprised when they don’t. You are, after all, “well-read” (or at least rumor has it).

This year, as of yesterday, the intimidator of the moment is James Joyce’s Ulysses. I am not traveling alone, however. Per advice of better-read friends, I am reading a companion book at the same time: Harry Blamires’ The New Bloomsday Book.

The routine is this: Bloomsday Book about chapter you are about to begin, followed by same chapter in Joyce’s book. Kind of like Virgil walking you through Dante’s wine cellars.

Not that I’m any Joyce neophyte. I have read both Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I even see this web site (I would say “blog,” but they are hopelessly out of date) as an ongoing Portrait of the Poet as a Getting-On (I refuse to say “Old”) Man. So there’s that. But neither of those quite measures up to the reindeer games found in Ulysses. 

The trouble with reading a “filling-a-hole” book? It pretty much clears the deck on your reading schedule for huge swaths of calendar. That’s because you’re scratching your chin and going, “Hmn” so much. Or rereading a curious paragraph or three. Or making a notation for future reference (that will never be referred to).

But that’s OK. Keep your eyes on the prize, because, when you reach Chapter the Last, it’s always worth it. You feel like you do coming out of church or donating blood. You know: that certain nobility of spirit. As if to say, “Yep. Uh-huh. That was me over there, chatting up Joyce like we were old pals.” (It helped that Jimmy couldn’t see who he was talking to, but….)

So cheer me on, why don’t you. And if you’re not filling any holes in your own reading résumé, ask yourself why not. Then pick a doorstop — any doorstop — and get reading! You don’t need Penelope to tell you that you’ll be the richer for it.

 

“Fiction Isn’t Machinery, It’s Alchemy.”

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Before I say a reluctant goodbye to Peter Orner’s book, Am I Alone Here?, that has been such good company these past three days, I thought I’d share a few final quotes I marked in the book.

Six are from Orner himself, and three are ones he fished from Frank O’Connor’s book, The Lonely Voice (and boy, the writer’s voice is a lonely one, all right — especially if readers won’t buy and read his book).

“For a long time I thought reading would somehow make me a better writer. So I’d read in order to write. I’d justify the hours I spent with my feet up and call reading “my work.” Now I see how ludicrous this is. All the Chekhov in thirteen volumes won’t help me write a sentence that breathes. That comes from somewhere else, somewhere out in the world, where mothers die in car accidents accidents and daughters hide in pain. And yet I have come to the conclusion that reading keeps me alive, period. I wake to read and sleep so I can get up in the morning and read some more.”

“One thing I’m sure of, though, is that I’m drawn to certain stories because of their defiant refusal to do what I just tried to do, that is, explain themselves. Fiction isn’t machinery, it’s alchemy. Anybody who claims to shed complete light on the mechanisms by which fiction operates is peddling snake oil. A piece of fiction can have all the so-called essential elements, setting, character, plot, tension, conflict, and still be dead on the page that no amount of resuscitation would ever do any good.”

“Tolstoy, who (generally) adored Chekhov, once inferred that he might have been an even better writer if he had not been so dedicated a doctor. With all respect, Count, that’s bullshit. Chekhov’s being a doctor may well have been the key to how well he understood the connection between our ailing bodies and our ailing minds. To concern yourself with the hidden lives of others, including the long dead, especially at a time when you are trying to endure your own pain—is there a more generous act in life, in literature?”

“Stories fail if you read them only once. You’ve got to meet a story again and again, in different moods, in different eras of your life.”

“I once read that a reader is a person who lacks a critic’s complacency. I’ve always strived to be an uncomplacent reader, to retain a sense of wonder, even for stories I’ve read a dozen times. Sometimes I read a story and I think about it for hours, days, or, if I’m lucky, years. The thinking is the thing. The most I can give back to any story is a silence born of awe. But there are times, like these, when you want to say something, anything, if only to yourself and the wind in the trees.”

“It gets me every time. The way a story about characters, nonexistent people, pushes us back to our own, the people who do exist, who do walk the earth.”

And three quotes Peter Orner shares from Frank O’Connor’s book, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story:

“For the short-story writer there is no such thing as essential form. Because his frame of reference can never be the totality of a human life, he must be forever selecting the point at which he can approach it, and each selection he makes contains the possibility of a new form as well as the possibility of a complete fiasco.”

“The saddest thing about the short story is the eagerness with which those who write it best try to escape it.”

“There is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not find in the novel—an intense awareness of human loneliness.”

 

The Humbling Beauty in Reading-About-Reading Books

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Every writer is a reader, and every reader indulges himself now and then in a good “reading about reading” book.

This is where I’m at now as I amble through Peter Orner’s Am I Alone Here? (The answer is, Clearly not, P.O.!)

The thing about reading-about-reading books is how expensive they can be. No, I don’t mean the price on the book itself (this one is a $16.95 paperback), I mean the books the author tempts you with.

Think of it this way. You = addict. Author = dealer. Recommended books = the goods.

And so easy, the way this book is set up! Each chapter begins with a picture of the book Orner is lauding at great length. All oxymoronic, considering the long praise is for short story collections, for the most part. Orner, a practitioner himself, frowns on the novel-love of the publishing industry and says, six ways to Sunday night, “What about the short story, that little shining city on a hill?”

Thus he adds to my list such must-see collections as Chekhov’s Selected Stories (but of course, when talking stories, one starts at Mecca), The Stories of Breece DJ Pancake, All Stories Are True (John Edgar Wideman), The Lonely Voice (Frank O’Connor), The Bride of the Innisfallen (Eudora Welty), Selected Stories (Robert Walser), The Burning Plain and Other Stories (Juan Rulfo), All the Days and Nights (William Maxwell), Cheating at Canasta (William Trevor), Collected Stories (Wright Morris), Dusk and Other Stories (James Salter), and Spirits and Others Stories (Richard Bausch).

This is an incomplete list, but if you count the pennies in your cart on Barnes & Noble, you’ll see you’re about 1,267 poem sales away from breaking even.

What’s even more daunting is how well-read authors of reading-about-reading books make you feel as a supposedly seasoned reader. On the list above, for instance, I’ve only read the Chekhov and the Pancake and I’ve never even heard of (until I listened now) Juan Rulfo.

Where have I been, one wonders? What have I been doing with my wastrel reading life, one cries? And how is it that I haven’t fully appreciated these short story masters as much as Orner has?

All good questions, but that’s the point. That’s why you buy a reading-about-reading book in the first place. When you’re done, you select a few of the recommended books that seem most intriguing to you by weighing the excerpts provided by the author and the commentary he adds. Then you buy them to see exactly what’s been going on here, right under your negligent nose all of these years.

And you can’t stop there, either. When writing about Pancake, Orner says, “Stories fail if you read them only once. You’ve got to meet a story again and again, in different moods, in different eras of your life.” Can’t you just feel your reading to-do list growing, like that 10-year-old kid of yours who, just yesterday, was accepted to a college?

Meanwhile, there’s pitiful me, the suddenly chastened “well-read” guy who hasn’t read much anything as described in Am I Alone Here?

Guilty as charged. But even though I haven’t read all of these authors, now I’ve at least read about all of these authors. Doesn’t that count for something? At least until I buy two or three of the collections Orner waxes rhapsodic about?

Yes, it does. And it must in a world where we can’t be too hard on ourselves, even as readers and especially as writers who read and realize that reading more begets writing more and writing better.

Besides, you have to console yourself, has it ever occurred to you that you’ve read a couple hundred books the author of this reading-about-reading book hasn’t?

Ah. Breathe in, breathe out. Reading is not a competition, thank God.

“Pepper Trees Brushing the Roof Like Rain”

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Charles Bukowski is one of those enviable poets known even to people who think poetry is a joke. Although I had never read much of his work (until this week, thanks to The Pleasures of the Damned, which collects his poems from 1951-1993), I knew enough to consider him one of those characters who carefully cultivates a persona. You know, like Hemingway did: writer as womanizer, hard drinker, eloquent cusser.

As it turns out, yes and no. (And how often in life does it turn out “yes and no”?) Bukowski’s poems are, indeed, rife with booze and sex and select profanity, but like Hemingway, his toughness is similar to the turtle’s: hard on the outside, soup on the inside.

There’s frequent reference to symphonic music, for instance. Bukowski was an aficionado, a fan of both Wagner’s and Mahler’s, among others.

And there’s a tender side that keeps surfacing, a capital-R Romantic side. No poem shows it better than the memory piece, “for they had things to say,” a paean to his grandmother and her house with the canaries and the lemon tree.

Let’s listen in to Mr. Tough Guy, shall we?

 

for they had things to say
Charle Bukowski

the canaries were there, and the lemon tree
and the old woman with warts;
and I was there, a child
and I touched the piano keys
as they talked —
but not too loudly
for they had things to say,
the three of them;
and I watched them cover the canaries at night
with flour sacks:
“so they can sleep, my dear.”

I played the piano quietly
one note at a time,
the canaries under their sacks,
and there were pepper trees,
pepper trees brushing the roof like rain
and hanging outside the windows
like green rain,
and they talked, the three of them
sitting in a warm night’s semicircle,
and the keys were black and white
and responded to my fingers
like the locked-in magic
of a waiting, grown-up world;
and now they’re gone, the three of them
and I am old:
pirate feet have trod
the clean-thatched floors
of my soul,
and the canaries sing no more.

 

It was one of those poems where I stop and read it again. And again. Such nice sounds and sentiments. Such nice memories, so much so that it gets you thinking about your own past and how the past plays tricks, coming across like a storybook cherished in childhood.

Was the world really ever that gentle and lovely and perfect? Of course the answer is no, but the driving force in writing about childhood like this is yes.

Yes and no again! Rearing its lovely head.

Bukowski’s Cat

poetry poetry books reading poetry

We’ve all heard of Schrödinger’s cat. He’s sealed in a box, poor thing, with radioactive material and something called quantum superposition. That’s geek speak for an experiment centered on being “simultaneously alive and dead,” which is a tricky business, even for 9-lived felines who ain’t feeling so fine.

Less famous is Bukowski’s Cat, apparently quantum-free. This week I picked up over 500 pages of Charles Bukowski poetry in the form of the book, The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993.

The lead-off batter? Bukowski’s cat! Very much alive, which is more than you can say for the mockingbird in its mouth — simultaneously alive and dead — and no box needed!

If you’ve ever had an outdoor cat (politically incorrect as they are nowadays), you know the drill. Still, let’s see how deeds Darwinesque become poetry for writers like Bukowski:

 

The Mockingbird
Charles Bukowski

the mockingbird had been following the cat
all summer
mocking mocking mocking
teasing and cocksure;
the cat crawled under rockers on porches
tail flashing
and said something angry to the mockingbird
which I didn’t understand.

yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway
with the mockingbird alive in its mouth,
wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping,
feathers parted like a woman’s legs,
and the bird was no longer mocking,
it was asking, it was praying
but the cat
striding down through centuries
would not listen.

I saw it crawl under a yellow car
with the bird
to bargain it to another place.

summer was over.

 

It’s no coincidence that Bukowski chooses a mockingbird. Doing so gives the poem an almost Aesopian feel. There’s a moral to this fable, you see, only the bird won’t be around long enough to learn from it. Maybe the reader, then?

And, as I am 100 pages in, I note two stylistic quirks Bukowski loves: lowercase letters and single-lined stanzas at the finish. If you’re not famous and try this at home, expect your reader-friends to call you on it. Single lined finishes are gimmicky, they’ll say. A sure way to sink any poem.

But really, if there’s one thing I’ve learned as I ‘ve read, read, read (my poetic schooling in lieu of the pricey letters M, F, and A), it’s that rules by their nature are suspect. You know. Like John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald.

 

In Our Time: The Poetry of Resistance

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the tradition

In the past week, I’ve been reading a telling triptych of materials. As readers of this page know, I have Terrance Hayes’ book, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. But I’m also slowly wending my way through Jericho Brown’s The Tradition.

To complete the trio, there’s the bad habit I have of reading front page news, where (alas!) the newspapers are addicted to tweets from He Who Must Not Be Named For Fear of Getting Cheetos Dust on the Furniture.

What a combo. And Hayes’ and Browns’ poems are better understood in this light. Or lack of light.

Consider it a variation of “through a glass darkly.” The days of being inspired to write a poem by trees or the moon are finished. For writers of color, at least, the drumbeat of degrading tweets and rally rants before ravenous crowds is enough. It’s like rich manure yielding bumper crops of literature.

I’m not sure I can call this situation a silver lining, but it makes for poetry that’s worth rereading, both for the empathy and for the talent. And I’m sure the Regrettable Muse doesn’t call only to people of color. The Accent-on-White House is inspiring a lot of political (and humanitarian and satirical and outraged) response from all quarters.

Hemingway’s first short story collection was called In Our Time, and some of the material (e.g. “Big Two-Hearted River”) was the result of his time — one of world wars created, as all wars are, by old politicians (presidents, premiers, dictators, fascists, Communists, and other stripes) for young men to die in.

As I read these poems, I can’t help but reflect on how much “our time” feeds our poetry and literature as well. Where there’s blood, there are roots that feed on it. And where there’s racism, there is soil that soaks it up and bears bitter fruit.

And so it goes, both sadly and beautifully, in our own time. One that we must not only own, but respond to and resist as writers always have—with the pen.

The Ever-Evolving Sonnet

poetry poetry books reading poetry

Sonnets. You remember them from school, right? In this corner we have the Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet, and in that corner we have the Shakespearean (or English) sonnet. Sonnets loved rules: Fourteen lines. Ten beats per line. A rhyme scheme.

But that was your great-great-etc. grandfather’s sonnet. The new sonnet has only one rule (and even that one is suspect), namely the 14 lines. Some say the lines should be about the same length to form a box-like construction, but some say pay no attention to that martinet behind the curtain.

As proof on how far the sonnet has come, I give you Terrance Hayes, who recently wrote a book of them called American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Catchy title, that. But not a book for rules. Instead, all 14-liners that care way more about voice than rules.

All are title-less, unless you count the first line as a title. Here is the lead-off batter of the entire collection:

 

The black poet would love to say his century began
With Hughes or, God forbid, Wheatley, but actually
It began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors,
Poetry whiners & winos falling from ship bows, sunset
Bridges & windows. In a second I’ll tell you how little
Writing rescues. My hunch is that Sylvia Plath was not
Especially fun company. A drama queen, thin-skinned,
And skittery, she thought her poems were ordinary.
What do you call a visionary who does not recognize
Her vision? Orpheus was alone when he invented writing.
His manic drawing became a kind of writing when he sent
His beloved a sketch of an eye with an X struck through it.
He meant I am blind without you. She thought he meant
I never want to see you again. It is possible he meant that, too.

 

 

ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG? Dream on, Mr. Bard. You need not worry about rhyming. As you read the book, you’ll find that lovely Rita, Meter Maid, need not don her uniform, either.

What’s interesting is how the modern sonnet has made nice with free verse. Old school poets would have called them diametrical opposites, but old school poets have given up the tower and fled, porridge still steaming.

To see how close this sonnet comes to prose, you need only read it AS prose, then reconstruct it so Mr. Hayes doesn’t suspect Goldilocks at play. Here’s how it will look:

 

The black poet would love to say his century began with Hughes or, God forbid, Wheatley, but actually it began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors, poetry whiners & winos falling from ship bows, sunset bridges & windows. In a second I’ll tell you how little writing rescues. My hunch is that Sylvia Plath was not especially fun company. A drama queen, thin-skinned, and skittery, she thought her poems were ordinary. What do you call a visionary who does not recognize her vision? Orpheus was alone when he invented writing. His manic drawing became a kind of writing when he sent his beloved a sketch of an eye with an X struck through it. He meant I am blind without you. She thought he meant I never want to see you again. It is possible he meant that, too.

 

Prose and free verse are a bit like Romulus and Remus. Very good friends weaned off the wolf of rules.

Overall, good news for poets allergic to form poems. You, too, can write the new sonnet! Take 14 lines, drink plenty of liquids, and see me in the morning! Meanwhile, I’ll be enjoying the rest of Hayes’s book.