THE OSPREY AND THE CORNETFISH, WITH STEPHEN CRANE

Here is an osprey lunching on a long, skinny blue fish with a ridiculously long nose and bulging eyes. It’s a blue cornetfish. He’s usually a brownish-grey color with bright turquoise spots, but like the chameleon, he changes colors to blend with his environment. So I’ve decided this guy is imitating the sky because he knows he’s going to cornetfish heaven when the osprey gets full or takes the one bite that finishes everything. The osprey himself is a gorgeous animal. I think of him as a swamp eagle—maybe I heard that or maybe I made it up. In any case, he’s a great soaring bird, a fisher. The blue of the cornet fish is also beautiful, but he’s otherwise one of those ocean oddballs. He’s interesting because he’s odd, yet how seriously can we cheer for those alligator eyes and snout? Also, he feeds on other fish, not plants. Once again I offer Stephen Crane’s odd and chilling little poem, a poem that encourages modesty: A Man Said to the Universe by Stephen Crane : The Poetry Foundation And speaking of eating flesh, here again is Crane again with “In the desert”: In the Desert by  Stephen  Crane  : The Poetry Foundation *

Zapruder, Day Two. Windbag Alert. Teacher Instruction. Bed and Breakfasts, continued.

The Prelude by Matthew Zapruder : Poetry Magazine

From time to time, visitors’ comments get me all wound up, because they open new windows onto a poem, and I use those comments and my responses as a post unto themselves. This is such a day.  Lucky you.

I just said to a friend that sometimes I weary of blogging, but I realize that it leads me to new poems and poets, and it usually makes me like the poems better as I look at them more carefully. Zapruder’s “The Prelude” is a case in point.

Add to that the comments I get from readers—whole new humans opening up aspects of the poem that I hadn’t considered, and sometimes aspects of themselves—I tell you, it’s better than NASCAR, and I bet it’s better than crack.

Sidebar:           

Speaking of a need for artificial stimulation . . .

So many, many times I’ve heard teachers, parents and other putatively caring adults who need to tone down their advice-giving to young people who have stalled, or gotten into real trouble. Instead simply asking, then asking again, searching for specifics, “What do you like? What would you rather be doing? How can we work that into a course of study and, with some luck, a career? I don’t care if Mommy’s a CEO. If you like woodworking, let’s look into that.” 

But in a sad miracle, the talk—it’s not a conversation—stops at, “You have to do better . . .  because I said so.”

I predict the geezer will toss out 20 times as many words as the teen. What are the teen’s options, beyond being overwhelmed and probably resentful and maybe enraged? Oh, he may obey, but look it up:  obedience is not a synonym for cure.  

End of Sidebar.  Beginning of Comments, Yours and Mine.

 Brenda's Arizona said...

"...should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way.” 
So did Wordsworth follow his desire whereas Coleridge couldn't? 

I have been told by B&B owners that the reason they have the business is to fulfill the need to follow a desire. You have come full circle, Banjo!
And I'd love to see more photos of the B&B where you stayed. These are inviting, but please - more coffee.

February 8, 2013 at 11:19 AM

 

 altadenahiker said...

Filled with self-deprecating humor, isn't it. And comparing himself, as a poet I think, with Wordsworth the nature boy and Coleridge the tortured soul, he comes up short in his own estimation. 

I find B&B's creepy, too. Especially when they've filled your room with stuffed animals. But maybe that's a Northern Calif thing.

B and AH, about the poem, what you say is the way I see it. I seem to remember that Wordsworth’s hikes were considerable. I followed one of his routes in the Lake District, and it was much more than a stroll in those almost-mountains. Maybe he really was more adventurous than Coleridge—or Zapruder.

I was at first curious that Coleridge’s “love of friends” wasn’t more comfort than it was, but Zapruder, ever the poet, adds more threatening stuff:  “love of friends and the wind.” Oh, that wind.

And there’s more. The wind is “taking his arrow away.”  Is it a phallic arrow? Whether or not, it’s his edge, and most of us would say, I think, that we want our edge (as well as our “ease”—face it, we want it all).

Do you think the last two lines hint at suicide? If so, is that too “big” for a  poem that opens with Diet Coke?

The more I read this thing, the more I like it. I’ve said umpteen times here (not that it’s original) that poems almost always need to offer surprises (sometimes “gifts”) along the way. In that context, compare the tone and mood of the first two lines with the last two lines. Talk about a journey! 

And that thorough analysis of chocolate, leading into vapor (“nothing”), then back to a field and finally to “ham and rustic chambered cheese”—I hear a dialectic between airy nothing and richly sensuous items, items of appetite and delight, culminating in chocolate.

I’m also drawn to the almost confessional mode of his wishing to be “at least a little more than intermittently/at ease with being loved. I am never at ease.”  That has a peculiar power for me.  Is it just me?

Even in terms of grammar and syntax, how does Zapruder get away with the gangly “at least a little more than intermittently”?  But the speaker is something of a brainiac, and brainiacs say stuff like that. Or at least they think it.

Did anyone see baseball on the horizon?  But it fits. It’s the more common pleasure to accompany his more “poetic” and neurotic items like the hallway and time?  What’s bigger than time? What’s more ordinary than baseball? How do we get them into the same poem? Zapruder does, and for me that’s a happy surprise, a gift. 

The Prelude by Matthew Zapruder : Poetry Magazine

Matthew Zapruder's "The Prelude" : Bed, Breakfast, Cupfulls of Darkness

The Prelude by Matthew Zapruder : Poetry Magazine

Blogger is disallowing paragraphs and photo captions (I thought, for example, about "Baby in the Fireplace"). So I apologize, but I'm also sick of messing with Blogger, so here we go. I recently spent a night at a Bed & Breakfast after years or decades of avoiding the forced intimacy I’ve felt at those places. I do not want conversation until my third coffee, and with strangers you never know whether you want chat at all until you’re in the middle of it. Even if it’s going well, you have to gauge whether the other party has had enough of you. Are your questions a bit invasive? Are you not sufficiently enthusiastic about their grandbaby or the golf game? Of course the upside of good B&Bs is the lack of predictability, the potential uniqueness of buildings, hosts, and other guests, the change of pace from chain motels, which are rectangles of stone on stone in the midst of asphalt parking lots beside interstate highways. So I did what anyone would do—went to Poetry Foundation and typed into the search bar “bed and breakfasts,” expecting to find little or nothing, for surely real poets don't do tea and crumpets Bed and Breakfasts. At first I didn’t trust what I found, Matthew Zapruder’s “The Prelude,” the title of which is an allusion to Wordsworth's major poem. Zapruder opens with the jaunty, sarcastic, “Oh this Diet Coke is really good.” Are we headed for a puerile satire on bourgeois superficiality and tastelessness? That deserves satire, but haven’t we had enough? Isn’t it too easy for anyone over 25? http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/239964 However, in Zapruder’s third line, he got my interest. Diet Coke, it turns out, "tastes / like nothing plus the idea of chocolate, or an acquaintance of chocolate" He’s looking for a specificity about, and shades of meaning in, Diet Coke that I find both absurd and intriguing. And here are two passages in the poem that make it well worth our consideration: "All I follow is my own desire,/ sometimes to feel, sometimes to be/ at least a little more than intermittently/ at ease with being loved. I am never/ at ease. Not with hours I can read or walk/ and look at the brightly colored/ houses filled with lives . . ." And his ending: Come to the edge/ the edge beckoned softly. Take/ this cup full of darkness and stay as long/ as you want and maybe a little longer.

I don’t trust bold, defiant, heroic, hippie claims such as, “All I follow is my own desire.” I’m skeptical about his having “Come to the edge,” and I’m not at all sure I want “this cup full of darkness.” They smack of daredevil bravado. Also, if you have to tell us about the great danger, loneliness, and isolation you’ve experienced and still seek—you the loner, adventurer, outcast, rebel—I wonder what’s inside you. Fear of others? Intolerance of others because others get in the way of your Me, Me, Me. Your death wish or misery wish—because those who aren’t miserable aren’t deep?

But of course I’ve engaged in those very thoughts, however briefly and foolishly. My edges are probably pretty rounded, even padded, and I might have thimbles where Zapruder finds cupfulls of darkness.

So Zapruder’s lines would be bogus if I spoke them in earnest about myself, but maybe he’s earned them. After all, he started with his confession that he’s anxious and rarely “at ease with being loved.” He likes books and walks that include snooping just a little into other people’s lives. Maybe he’s not going for a Kerouac-James Dean-counter culture hero status. Maybe he’s just inviting us to take in some more of the color and the darkness that might make our lives fuller if we’ll stand up and notice them. Once again, I don’t mean to force a false connection between the poem and a Bed & Breakfast, which after all gets only a brief mention in Zapruder’s “The Prelude.” And was that B&B an edge? Or a cup full of darkness? No, but at that quirky old house I did find still more ways to wonder about and enjoy what’s quirky enough to keep myself a little off balance about things. The Prelude by Matthew Zapruder : Poetry Magazine

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?