Sunday

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. (Matthew 5:9)

I clipped off some of the sign on the left. It's trying to say, "Aids: God's Cure for Sodomites."

Hamlet's Words, Words, Words and "America" by Tony Hoagland

I assume no one would choose to have diarrhea. Is it therefore safe to assume that people (Americans only?) do not choose to suffer from logorrhea—compulsive, excessive talking? So it is some kind of affliction, like the flu, which has come upon us as a culture.

(What follows will make more sense if you take a minute to skim readers’ and my comments following the last post, January 26. Also, please believe me when I say I wrote this before stumbling onto Tony Hoagland’s poem, “America.”  I feel pretty lucky to have found a piece so connected to my own, though Hoagland and I both might be belaboring the obvious.) 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171302).

Why have we become such speechifiers?  If we are a gabbier bunch than we were in the decades up to about 1980 (to paint with a broad brush),  what is it we need to say and why do we need to say it, over and over, breaking the sound barrier, as it were, at the speed of light, as it were? Are we confusing that with better communication? More is more?

 

In the old days, farmers, industrial laborers and housewives were much more solitary creatures, by necessity. They did stuff that had to be done. There was a lot of physical work, and there weren’t many chances to run at the mouth. Even at church and school, the preachers and teachers did most of the talking.

By supper, those workers had more or less forgotten how to speak about things beyond necessities: “Pass the sugar” and “Shut up, boy.”  It was a four-hundred-year period of American grunting, except for ridicule-gathering politicians and snake oil salesmen. 

When you’ve grunted in the fields or the on assembly line all day, you don’t just convert to Shakespearean eloquence or Cartesian reasoning because a bell rings. And sensing your limitations with words, you’re afraid of sounding foolish if you speak—or your thoughts and feelings are more complex than you could ever make clear with your mouth.

In the last three or so decades most work has become sedentary. Much of it—like cold-calls or face-to-face sales or creation of documents that no one can understand—involves some skill with language, and skill begets use. You don’t just turn off the language dildo because it’s 5:00 p.m. You go home and make more talk. Home is where everybody talks or types at once. It’s like the mall, but not as good because there are fewer people and the lights aren’t as bright.

Talking isn’t really doing anything. You don’t grow tomatoes by talking about tomatoes—and talking to tomatoes at the volume and speed of today’s American speech would likely them.

Physical labor must be important stuff if you’re investing that kind of energy in it. You’re making stuff. Of course you’re also just paying the rent, but you’re creating beans or wheat or hubcaps or poems. What’s to talk about? Do the work.

When that making disappears, there’s a void. There’s nothing to show for a day’s work. You haven’t changed the look of the field; you haven’t welded a fender; you haven’t sewn the cloth; you haven’t swept the dust from the sidewalk. All you’ve done all day is make noise with your mouth.

Often as not, no one replies, at least not in the way you desire. You grow desperate and keep talking because you want someone to hear, because you have nothing to do but sit around thinking about what you want, what you don’t have, which is the feel of a person, animal, or thing responding to you—as a pasture does, in slow generosity.

For comfort, you turn to Starbucks. You get all cranked up, which makes you talk more and more and more, louder and faster.

You are too busy making noise to think about content. So things like athletic achievement become meaningless, even though it’s both an art form and a rehearsal for new wars that will arrive and arrive. Who has time for sports? Poor kids. Minorities. Not our kind of people.

But your kid needs recognition.  He isn’t very good, but he shows up for every game and practice, except for the days he doesn’t feel like it, or has piano lessons, or dance lessons, or introductory Mandarin lessons, or Taekwondo lessons, because God knows, the world has become global, the planet has become a globe that’s as global as the economy, a globe that’s now complicated in previously unimaginable ways, and you can’t have too many skills in such a place, which, by the way, is getting pretty close to Utopia, what with all our gadgets and different noises.

   

So you keep caffeinating yourself and taking lessons and making noises. Move and talk, move and talk, and soon enough, please God, someone will talk back, say the things you need to hear, fill the hollow in the middle of you, and life will be a fruity, low-fat cornucopia.

N.B.  I make no claim of practicing what I preach. 

America by Tony Hoagland : The Poetry Foundation

..

A Chair for Clint Eastwood. Curmudgeon Quiz.

Apropos of nothing . . .  except maybe our extreme, possibly terminal narcissism . . .  why do people insist on saying, "She's seven, going on eight"?  What the hell else would she be going on?  Is this evidence of some intrinsic human desire to shoot pointless noise out of our mouths? Is it projectile vocalizing? At the mall, do you hear just a bit of verbal superfluity, speed, and vapidity? Would we rather make noise than have money or sex? Are we so much about excess (obesity, war, spike heels, neon) that we'll say anything for the love of our own voices?

Has anybody out there got more examples of what I'm talking about?  Or am I the weirdo alone in the corner? Again. Over there by the empty chair.

Pouncey's Restaurant and Stephen Dobyns' "Tenderly"

Pouncey’s is a Mom & Pop in Perry, a fairly remote town in northwest Florida.  We chose it because the parking lot was full, and 80% of the vehicles were pickups. I tried fried ribs, which I’d never heard of. They were pretty tough, and ribs have enough flavor prepared the traditional ways. I’ll stick to chicken hereafter. The cabbage casserole and black-eyed peas were only OK, but the ambience was a solid A—all locals, it seemed, greeting each other and saying a fair amount of not much, as we all do when we’re locals.

I wondered about the 100% Caucasian clientele when 40% of Perry’s population is black and 2% Hispanic. Are southern Mom & Pops, like our churches, America’s most segregated places? Maybe it has nothing to do with the South.

From the next table, an elderly-but-not-ancient couple struck up a conversation. They’ve retired from Perry to 160 acres with three fish ponds in 35 miles north. He speaks with pride of his children’s outcomes (his son runs a business in Perry). 

The Mrs. is trim, with short, slightly wavy, senior citizen hair, and a classic church lady manner. Her smile seems genuine, but I’d swear there was a hint of ferocity below her surface. 

Only when they’re about to leave does it become clear that he’s on a walker. She takes it from the wall where it was leaning and pulls it over to their table. Then she positions herself behind him, grabs his pants and belt in the middle of his lower back, and with one hand, hoists him into the walker, as a mother might do with a misbehaving four-year-old. 

 

I’m not sure you'll see a tight connection between that little sketch and Stephen Dobyns’ poem, “Tenderly,” but here goes.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100323194210AANvxFD

I’d also like to know how much you like and respect the poem. At first I gave it less than a grade of  A  because it seemed to be so completely a story in prose—broken arbitrarily into lines of wannabe poetry.

However, the thing has stuck with me for a few days now, and I’m beginning to reevaluate. Like many of the best poems of the “School of Accessibility,” there’s a powerful whole here that might overcome rather ordinary language.  I will not soon forget the central image of the man on the table, plus some of the details about the other diners and Dobyns’ implied theme(s).  What is it that does or does not draw us together? What are the best images of despair? Is it ever acceptable for us to know only the final result, the despair, without knowing the events that led up to it? Sometimes the answers are bizarre. Maybe.

I also wonder about the way we respond to explicit sexuality in poetry—it’s not all that common, after all. Is Dobyns playing unfairly by appealing to our baser interests—not just sexuality, but a weird take on it? Or are the rest of us too reluctant to accept sexuality as an important human experience and therefore very much the property of poetry? 

"Elegance" by Linda Gregg

Here is “Elegance,” another Linda Gregg poem. At first I liked it more than “Winter Love” (last post), thought it had more to say; now I’m not so sure.

Elegance by Linda Gregg : The Poetry Foundation

The whole issue of elegance interests me—what is it and who or what has it?  Also, I like Gregg’s finding it in nature and in things worn down by natural processes. “All that is uncared for,” that’s what’s elegant. Having a thesis sentence in a poem might seem odd or simply wrong; ditto for arriving at a conclusion about elegance in the first line. But I like the way the immediacy and challenge of the line give us something to bounce off of right away.

I hope the comparison between manmade art and natural beauty never goes away as a topic for discussion; there can be no winner, but we’ll understand both art and nature better by seeing them in the light of each other—as foils, I suppose.

Gregg narrows all this even further to the question of what’s elegant, and her choice of nature, which decays and causes decay, creates a compelling strategy. I’m also fascinated by her choice of accuracy as a factor in perceiving what’s beautiful, especially as a companion to “unexpected,” which might seem too spontaneous to go with the exactness of accuracy. It helps that she follows up with “rattling/and singing.”  “Rattling” is a bit raggedy and out of control, like “unexpected,” while "singing" conjures the mathematical precision of music and seems a natural partner to “Accurate.”  Then again, it also calls to mind the song of wild birds.

We are having our first significant snow in southern Michigan today. The photos show a cardinal whom the wind and snow might turn into “a door off its hinges” or a thing “Raw where/the tin roof rusted through.”  But is he elegant nevertheless? I wouldn’t argue against it, especially if the alternative is my probably comic arrangement of fruit for an asymmetrical still life.  

Elegance by Linda Gregg : The Poetry Foundation

"Winter Love" by Linda Gregg

Winter Love by Linda Gregg : The Poetry Foundation

 Because of the season, I wanted to post a poem that was pleasant but not mindlessly dripping sugar, the way so much of the holiday oozes syrup and celebrates noise and stuff-gathering .

I came across Linda Gregg’s “Winter Love,” a quiet and modestly affirmative poem that calls us to experience and cherish small things, like chimes stirred over a heating vent. I also like the opening implication that decorating silence might be a natural human urge, but something essential in the speaker (or all humans?) leads to simplification rather than decoration. Does that process boil down to entropy, or is it a maturing awareness of what is beautiful because it is fundamental and plain?

Christmas nest-featherers and pile-builders—we’ve heard it before:  listen up and pare down. We should savor what’s left of our tea. We can look at the gifts already in the room and just outside the window, even if they’re not the perfect strength or temperature. That’s the way to pad the odds for Happy Holidays.

Red-Tile Roof

Little Birch Tree

Winter Love by Linda Gregg : The Poetry Foundation

Robert Frost's "The Wood-Pile": Karma, Monuments, Warmth and Decay

The Wood-Pile by Robert Frost : The Poetry Foundation

Yesterday on my walk in the woods, I tried to get a glimpse, and maybe a photo, of a noisy woodpecker high up in a birch. She wasn’t shy, yet she kept the tree between herself and me. 

female Downy

Just yesterday I wondered who first told me that birds hide that way. Did I believe him? Even yesterday I wondered how much of it might be an old wives’ tale, though it makes sense that an animal, even a jackhammer like a woodpecker, would have that much strategy for survival—plus plain old, inglorious fear, or at least wariness, of some inelegant, leaf-stomping Other.

With our absence of snow in Michigan this year, and daytime temps in the 40s, I’ve also decided to stop protesting the bareness of stripped winter and to start noticing more the rich variety of wood and the patterns of branches, plus the few colors that do remain, muted but present.

So I go to Poetry Foundation, again, and “google” wood. They offer Frost’s “The Wood-Pile,” which I haven’t read for several years. In spite of its quiet understatements, one after another, I like it all over again. But when I get to the small bird (around Line 10), “careful/To put a tree between us when he lighted,” I remember the woodpecker, and there’s a whiff of my old suspicions about destiny, or some such thing, though the two atheists among my Sunday breakfast buddies chide me for such musing.

I’m pretty sure the dark-eyed juncos are staying around longer this year—I suppose because it’s warm. So I’ve had more time to appreciate how unexpectedly, humbly gorgeous they are. They’re almost a simple black and white, but their topsides are a kind of slate color, with a trace of blue in certain light, rather than simple chickadee black. And the white on the juncos’ bellies is creamy, not chickadee white. The division of color between their dark backs and off-white bellies is strangely precise, but it's also a soft, forgiving, subtle boundary. Juncoes make me think of some miraculous, downy version of porcelain. 

Except for the tails when they fly!  There are some crazy white feathers in the bottoms of those tails, but they appear only in flight, and the flash of them still surprises me every time.

Then comes Frost’s bird, with “a feather— / The white one in his tail.”  How many events do I have to chalk up to mere synchronicity or banal coincidence before I can start trumpeting Karma, Karma, Karma—and tell my more empirical friends to go sit on a log?

Or make it a wood-pile. Abandoned. A monument, discovered quite by accident, which causes a pretty wise, articulate old New Englander to wonder about it. Then wonder some more.

The wood-pile is peculiar; it seems to be all about decay—or the preposterous proposition of its warming the frozen swamp. With what? No fire is lit; the wood’s been idle for at least two years. 

 Maybe it’s a human warmth—which is implied in the monument’s very existence, plus the human labor that went into building it. Maybe it’s a ridiculous, futile, yet affirming act; maybe warming a frozen swamp is a gesture of defiance. I will die; this wood will die. But I have made something here, whether or not I get back to it, or anybody sees it, or thinks it’s fine. I’m a maker, and that’s better than decaying without creating and thereby protesting mortality. 

And finally, another human, a stranger, has discovered the monument,  stumbled onto it, pure dumb luck.

Or is it destiny? Or Karma, Karma, Karma? Whether or not that’s the right word, the music of it wins the day.   

The Wood-Pile by Robert Frost : The Poetry Foundation