Molly Gaudry again

“Anatomy for the Artist”, by Molly Gaudry http://www.blossombones.com/current.html


We don't see our bones - we understand they are there, of course, but we take them for granted. They'll always be there, won't they? Like the assumptions we make about our love relationships, or our solid, lasting marriage.

The poet, Molly Gaudry, puts us through a physical dissection of her body, bone and muscle, as we experience deception and loss in a very visceral way. Her bones and muscles are separated, layer after layer, and we see our bones as she sees hers. This detailed disembodiment intensifies from objective watching to one's subjective experience by her refrain "We take me apart." She names the parts, the actions. By naming them, does she conquer them? I think not. It is a substantial list - and this, and this, and this as well is sliced away. The tone gradually shifts from sensual to angry with each casting of the refrain "We take me apart." Her body, and ours, is rent asunder by loss and deception in a manner that says it is imposssible to understand, except by watching oneself disintegrate.

The gritty juxtapositions of words and sounds hurt. Good - they're supposed to hurt. Gaudry plays with words' meanings and sounds, scraping them against each other. Consider the masterful laying down of words at the very beginning - "not like proximal that but distal this so soft superior so inferior clean superficial warm deep light fragile bulb between my radial two your ulnar two our four palmar hands plantar feet volar roaming dorsal so..." both erotic, and subtly foreshadowing a twist with repeated "s" sounds and unexpected medical terms performing unexpected actions.

The refrain "we take me apart --" is wielded more as a surgeon's knife as the story unfolds, the areas dissected moving up the body, "by muscles of the breast" to "by muscles of the head" "the eye" as reality is encountered, "by the osseous and muscular systems of the human body-- and I should slice you spherical"... turning the dissection to the offender's body.

I was physically drained. I understood everything on my terms. If a poet's innovative craftsmanship with form, word, sound, imagery, metaphor, can show me my own bones, then I want to read more of that poet's work. I see that "Anatomy for the Artist" was Gaudry's early exploration for a novella in verse. That novella is now published and I ordered a copy of "We Take Me Apart." I hope this poet will continue to write as bravely as she has so far.

Sorrow, Laughter: the Stuff of Life

The funeral of my son-in-law's beloved father, the patriarch of his large family, was to take place at a cemetery in Germany, in an area I thought I knew. I was given two sets of conflicting directions, but felt I knew where the cemetery, or Friedhof, was. I drove to the small town along the Neckar River and up its steep main street, and turned right after the town's ancient gateway, as per first set of directions.


I was dismayed to see three roads, one going sharply upwards, two equally appallingly small roads cantered downwards. According to my idea of where the cemetery could be, I chose the center downward road, which quickly curved tightly and lost its paving. I found myself perched on a tiny intersection of two horrifying unpaved choices. One road lead upwards, mine continued steeply down.


A schoolboy passed by, about the age of my grandson. Testing my German, I called out to him, asked the direction to the Friedhof. Politely, he knew of no cemetery. A bad sign. Perhaps he didn't understand my German - the cemetery had to be nearby. It's a place where dead people are, I said desperately, buried underground, with gravestones. Now I surely had frightened him. He knew what a graveyard is, he said, but he had never seen one. OK - I understood. No Friedhof. If I go down this hill on this road can I go forward to a main road - a bigger road? No, the road doesn't get bigger. Umm. Ok, if I go down there, can I turn around and come back? Yes, you can turn around. I thanked him. He remained rooted to the spot as I drove away. I’m certain, seeing an old woman clad in black, talking about dead people and looking for a graveyard, he wondered whether he had seen a witch, or a ghost.


At the bottom, I found a community of houses clinging to the side of the hill with a road no wider than my car, and there was the inevitable garbage truck occupying the entire road, coming my way. The driver shouted - I saw he intended to come forward, and so we inched by each other, move by move, me with my right wheels on someone's garden edging bricks and my left mirror less than an inch from truck appurtenances.


I asked a local person watching this amazing procedure how I could find the Friedhof. He told me, horrors, I would have to turn around and go back. Said he, go to the left, keep going downhill, to the left, down. OK, thank you. And then, when I am left and down, where is the Friedhof? There is a stoplight. It is after the stoplight.


I never imagined I could turn my Honda Accord around in such a tight space, but I did it. Left, left and down. I was on a main highway I recognized. No stoplight. But I recalled the second set of directions, and so drove through the town again, up its humpbacked main street, not turning at the Tor or gateway, and through the next town to reach the main highway, making a right turn to pass below the town again, this time on the highway.


Look for a gravel road was the direction. A small road. I found one. Turned off the highway. But it was a gravelly road leading down into a darkness of foliage. Not again! Across the highway was a bus stop with a mother and her child waiting. I sprinted across. (Didn't know a little old lady could sprint, did you? Neither did I.) I asked the mother where the Friedhof was. It was now ten minutes to two, the funeral service would begin at two. The mother knew of no cemetery in the area. OK, said I, there is a small road across the highway where my car is parked - could that go to the cemetery? And the child said - No, that road does not go to a cemetery. Said the mother - And how do you know where that road goes?


By gesture I conveyed my apologies to the child for getting her into trouble. The second child I had done-in within fifteen minutes. I drove on down the highway, pulled into an area by a construction site and decided, having come so far, I would not be able to attend the funeral. I couldn't find it.


Pulling out from the site, intending to drive away, I saw a sign directly across the highway - grabmale - a gravestone business. I stopped so abruptly I was bumped by the car behind. That driver appeared terrified to see me leap out and run towards her. Did she know where the Friedhof is? Straight across the highway, she said. That little road. Go straight. There is a road to the right, one to the left, but the Friedhof is straight ahead. Best directions I received.


I arrived just as the service began, in time to honor a husband and father who I greatly respected.


Death is no less than life. Life is at best a bumbling procedure, but death with one's loved ones drawn close by sorrow and by age-old ritual, has incomparable dignity.




Unveiling
               Linda Pastan


In the cemetery
a mile away
from where we used to live
my aunts and mother,
my father and uncles lie
in two long rows almost the way
they used to sit around
the long planked table
at family dinners.
And walking beside
the graves today, down
one straight path
and up the next,
I don’t feel sad
for them, just left out a bit
as if they kept
from me the kind
of grown-up secret
they used to share
back then, something
I’m not quite ready yet
to learn.

A Review of January Gill O'Neil's "Underlife"

 CavanKerry Press, Ft. Lee, New Jersey. $16.00

Here we are at the last stop in this book tour. Maybe the last stop of the last book tour ever since ReadWritePoem is closing down. Though many wonderful , deeply insightful comments have been written about January O’Neil’s debut collection by reviewers on the tour so far, there is no lack of further thoughts at this last stop. Indeed, there are so many good things to say – we could go on for many more stops.

As a teacher and a poet with an extensive collection of poetry books, my first question about each new book I encounter is – What is it about this collection of poems that found favor with a publisher? Why was this collection published? So very many submitted, so few published. There are times when the answer is difficult to find, but not so with O’Neil’s collection.

Her poems are open, honest, fresh, and unafraid. Some are the most sensual poetry I’ve ever read. There is no posturing, affectation, pseudo sophistication. These wonderful, welcome poems touch us at the very center of how we experience life in a way that uplifts us and teaches us to find new meaning in our daily existence. Nothing more than that can ever be asked of poetry.

How do we know good poetry when we see it? Emily Dickinson said “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.” Although it’s not coldness that overcomes me when I see good poetry, I understand what she’s saying. We each experience something that tells us – this is a great poem. That shiver of delight that recognizes good poetry? I get it with every poem in O’Neil’s collection.

It’s a disservice to quote only a snippet of O’Neil’s poetry. You should read the entire poem, all of them. But I want you to see what I mean by fresh and unafraid. From the third of four sections, “The Ripe Time”: In “Sugar”, the poet spreads a tablespoon of sugar on the table, and sees in each grain

“ ...a moment,
a seed resting on tilled earth
the words forming in my husband’s mouth as he says
kiss me, and I am reminded again and again
of the first, the beginning, the newness of his mouth,
his plump lips deciphering the arc
of my teeth; his tongue a new species born
in my vast ocean. I myself a creature,
made of sugar and water,
capable of dissolving right out of existence,
salvation and destruction in one sweet instant...”

These are much-needed poems about love, marriage, motherhood, race: topics rarely approached with such honesty. O'Neil's use of  imagery is as sharp and surprising as the truths revealed. It’s a poetry collection I have added to my favorite three that remain beside my bed, to be read frequently with the pleasant expectation of discovering something wonderfully surprising with each reading.

Harbingers

Is this endless winter not a moibus loop after all?  Will spring be allowed to enter?  The autobahns are awash with melting snow from the center divides; my front lawn still sleeps under its white sheet, now obscenely ragged at the edges for such a neat neighborhood.  I have never been more ready for spring.

This pictured house, abandoned, purged, inert, is about to be hidden in blossoming bushes and green foliage once again. I, too, am ready for my renewal anytime now - I have survuved another winter and I deserve daffodils!

I see my neighbor in the right panel, Nathalie of Avignon, is also questioning if spring is really here.  The artistry of her photography never fails to pull me in. She is a poet who uses a camera.

I was wary of using the term "harbingers" in this blog title, because the word has snatched up political connotations as of late, a perfectly good word now bleeding like my black wool coat from wearing that fuzzy red scarf.  This is, after all, a poetry-based blog. 

I know there are those who say politics and poetry can lie down together.  Archibald MacLiesh says "Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world,"  and implies they should keep to their own sides of the house. Carolyn Forché's poetry says that personal is political. Though I agree with Forché, I hover in my wimp-mobile, twittering back and forth, never quite landing.

I did write a poem personifying departuring glaciers as old, unloved parents, no one paying heed to their leaving, but was told by several poets I could not do that.  There are those who told Robert Frost he could not write a poem about a stone wall. Well, I no longer feel sorry for myself, but I still feel sorry for the aspect of melting glaciers. I'll troop out the global warming poem again. We must write what we feel strongly about.

Robert Frost wrote about what he cherished, the fields and farms of his surroundings, the details of rural life.  He spurned religious mysticism, or the obstreperous vocabulary and allusion to mythology of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.  Yet Pound said he had read all of Frost's poems and learned about farming and life. Did you know Frost was still teaching at Bread Loaf, Middlebury College, when he was in his nineties? He was thought of as an unofficial poet laureate of the US. He philosophy was of the earth,  "I never take my side in a quarrel", or "I'm never serious except when I'm fooling."


Here is his poem on harbingers of spring - lucid, lastingly universal.

Spring Pools by Robert Frost

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect

The total sky almost without defect,

And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,

Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,

And yet not out by any brook or river,

But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds

To darken nature and be summer woods --

Let them think twice before they use their powers

To blot out and drink up and sweep away

These flowery waters and these watery flowers

 From snow that melted only yesterday.

Plagiarism, Millenials, and PR, oh my!

When a  high school student plagiarizes, it would be expected her/his teacher would catch it and fail the student's sullied paper.  In college, plagiarism might mean failing the entire course.  Indeed, I knew a fellow graduate student who failed his dissertation and lost his PhD - forever, at any university - because he copied a single passage from another's dissertation without citation. 


Helene Hegemann, 17 years old, wrote a novel about a 16 year-old girl involved in the drug and club scene in Berlin. Hegemann copied many, many passages from the published Blog of a person writing about drug life in Berlin who used a pseudonym to protect his job and his family.   When confronted she admitted she had copied from the Blog.  She claims her generation sees things differently.  They can take what they need,  mix and match to make new things.


Her novel, Axolotl Roadkill, is now number two in Germany.  The teen-aged author copied from another, and admits it.  She says her generation sets a new standard of using whatever they need to create change, with no apology.   Indeed, her novel is proclaimed in Germany as being "definitive" of her generation. 


Seated opposite me in the physical therapy clinic waiting room this afternoon was a distinguished looking elderly gentleman.  Maybe eighty. I  noticed his reading material.  "Axolotl! "  I said.  "Yes, yes, it's interesting",   he responded.  "There's hope yet." 


So, what have we learned here?  A gifted teenager writes a novel.  She copies what she needs, with no annotation and no apology.  Her writing is current, and crazy. Where she got it makes no difference to readers of all ages.  Her book is # 2, risen from # 5  last week.  She has achieved a position authors of greater novels have not achieved in their lifetimes.    


Tomorrow I'll buy a copy of Axolotl Roadkill, in spite of not wanting to contribute to blatant plagiarism.  I want to find out why this novel means "there's hope yet" to a person my age.  Thus I am drawn in.

Mixing. Not Plagiarism!

Comes now Helene Hegemann, 17 years old, and within the last few weeks, a controversial best-selling author. Her novel, Axolotl Roadkill, is about a 16 year-old girl involved in Berlin’s under belly of clubs and drugs. The book is a hit in Germany, fifth on Der Spiegel’s hardcover best-seller list.

Amazing, not because Hegemann is only seventeen, but because of another surprising factor. A blogger accused her of taking whole passages from another’s blog and novel. Others discovered many other passages she had taken. Accused of plagiarism, she readily admitted her novel contains unacknowledged material from others’ works, but said she was just “mixing.” She said she is part of a new generation who mixes and matches to create new things. She said, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”

A knowledgeable statement. Powerful. Which, incidentally, she failed to attribute to Airen, who wrote it, and also wrote the blog she took things to "mix", and who also wrote the novel Strobo from which passages were taken for “mixing.”

OK.  We’re still not at the surprising part. The shock is , Helene Hegemann’s novel Axolotl Roadkill, is a finalist for the $20,000 Leibzig Book Fair Award for fiction. A member of the jury said they were aware of the plagiarism charges before they chose her novel. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said mixer Hegemann.

Wow! If you try to check the originality of that statement you’ll find it’s quoted for two Google pages only in connection with the Hegemann plagiarism debacle. If you look at Amazon in Germany you’ll see those who bought Axolotl Roadkill are most likely to also buy Airen’s Strobo. New generation of mix and match DJs in writing, and learned contest juries agreeing? Hype rules. Help! Teachers, writers, circling the drain here.


Here is the New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/world/europe/12germany.html


Here is the blog showing what was taken. Doesn’t matter if you don’t read German – it’s all quite clear.  http://www.gefuehlskonserve.de/axolotl-roadkill-alles-nur-geklaut-05022010.html

This is a departure from what I normally write - but this truly frightens me for the sake of copy-righted protection of one's creative works.

Thinking of Legacy Takes Courage

But then, almost everything takes courage as we grow older. Today a colleague told me a story  of her relative who left a legacy of nothing but alienation and disaffection.  In a vast family, only four people attended her funeral. I was both enthralled and dismayed by the story and couldn't help wondering what legacy I'm leaving.  And how many will attend my funeral?  Will they bring flowers?

Slogging out of that swamp, I'd like to point out we've been sculpting our legacy since we were five, and it's doubtful we can leap up in our latter years and alter what we leave our descendents, either in material possessions, which is the least important, or in worldly knowledge and understanding of the love we give them in memories of us. Do we always realize what is most important, too late?  Probably. And will our descendents appreciate the legacy of our lives?  Certainly not fully - at least not until they are themselves are as old as we are.  And so it goes. 

I only hope to  be remembered as the person I know myself to be. 
 
William Butler Yeats said :
I pray -- for word is out

And prayer comes round again --
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.

It is believed that one's true poetry emerges in old age.  If this is even remotely true for poets - why not for all?  Artists, musicians, physicians - we all know older people who continue to accomplish remarkable works.  Some poets who produced great creative works well into their eighties and nineties were Alfred Tennyson, George B. Shaw, Marianne Moore,  Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost,  Robert Graves, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman. Contemporary poets Richard Wilbur, Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelou are writing and publishing in  their 80s.  


"Stanley Kunitz became the tenth Poet Laureate of the United States in the autumn of 2000. Kunitz was ninety-five years old at the time, still actively publishing and promoting poetry to new generations of readers." From  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=3869

"One of Stanley Kunitz's greatest loves was gardening. 'It's the way things are,' he once said, 'death and life inextricably bound to each other. One of my feelings about working the land is that I am celebrating a ritual of death and resurrection. Every spring I feel that. I am never closer to the miraculous than when I am grubbing in the soil.' Kunitz was 99 years old when he published his last book in 2005. He died the following year."   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nihqt3Ct2KU.  from Poetry Everywhere – Garrison Keillor. See Stanley Kunitz reading "Touch Me," the final poem in his final collection.  It is a meditation on the passage of time, beautiful and honest. 



Touch Me


Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

T. S. Eliot, Hugh Kenner, and Star Trek

                       
                       human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

        T.S. Eliot    "Burnt Norton"  Four Quartets

Reading Eric's story about his miraculous find of Four Quartets, (comments of the last entry - read for yourselves, Eric tells it better) recalled a time when T.S. Eliot and especially "Burnt Norton" were the center of discovery for me.  1963, UC Santa Barbara, graduate course in Eliot with Hugh Kenner, leading Eliot scholar.  He loved Eliot's "Burnt Norton" and he handed this poem to us as the gift it was - one that always surprises me with yet more to give.

"Burnt Norton" diddles the mind: time past and time future are always in time present.  But, to be conscious is not to be in time, because time constantly flows and consciousness implies a fixed center around which time must move.  Fool around with that idea for awhile and you become a writer for Star Trek, a quantum physicist, or at the very least - appreciative of a poem written in 1943 by a poet known for his astute aesthetic, not scientific, understanding. 

"Burnt Norton" arose from a war-torn England, from a poet questioning the place of religion - God's presence among the burning buldings and the dying.  If he turned to the abstraction of indefinable time as evasion, or as hope, or merely for survival, we understand, and are grateful.  What we learn is how  prevailing the reach of poetry.  How persistent. It brings new ideas forth in the worst of times, and these ideas can transform us many, many years later when there is no longer any connection to the times that precipitated them. 

Is this what Hugh Kenner taught me about T.S. Eliot?  Yes, one tiny aspect, perhaps.  Because of his teaching, reading Eliot is part of my life.   "Ash Wednesday" is a reading I place above ritual each Lent.  I seem to pick up "Prufrock" at the end of summer, before the new term begins.  I read Eliot.

As I grow older, certain poets become more meaningful to me; I am grateful for their continued presence.  Interesting that they may have written those poems I now love when they were in their twenties.  How could they have been so wise?

Bucket Lists and Other Thoughts

A friend sent me this:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
                     T.S. Eliot “Little Gidding” Four Quartets.

T.S. Eliot has long been a favorite poet of mine - I find much truth in his poetry and essays - made my students struggle through some of it for their own sakes. Remember "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"?
Eliot's "Little Gidding" passage is a profound statement about the meaning of life and how it ought to develop: more powerful than most concepts such as the bucket list. Of course, it would depend if that bucket list changes as we change.

I know this - very few items I had on my forty-year-old's list remain there today. Most of them were still there at sixty, but in my heart I knew I might possibly be fooling myself  to think I still wanted to learn Mandarin,  climb Mt Fuji, or marry again.

Wanting to achieve my PhD, and see my collection of poetry published, and my novel - oh, and my memoir as well, why not?, still lurk on my list while a scoffer I choose not to confront sits on my shoulder and laughs loudly, "What, are you - nuts?"

What's on your lists? The concept seems to vary with language. Spanish speakers call the bucket list either Ahora o Nunca, or Antes de Partir, that is "now or never" or "before leaving." Germans say Das Beste Kommt zum Schluss - "the best comes at the end."  The French concept appeals to me most - San plus attendre - "without further waiting." Because I didn't heed that imperative, items had to be dropped off. Incidentally - my list is mental, always has been. If you've written yours down - maybe you'll do better with it - actually checking off items.

Written or not, everyone needs a list. It helps you prioritize the events in your life even thinking about it. 

Fire Alarm Box

1936, Queens, NY.  I was five years old and spending the early morning in the bakery shop where my daddy was the baker.  I loved those mornings.  My mommy, a nurse, had to be at the hospital and I got to play around the bakery. Such good yeasty smells and wonderous stuff to eat. 


But I wandered out on the street. No one around - really early.  And there was that curious red pole I adored on the corner. I wanted to climb up and sit on top of it.  And so I tried. I pulled a lever thing to boost me up, and it moved down.  Instantly the red pole made a loud ringing noise and I understood I had disturbed the universe.


Even as I was running back to the bakery I could hear fire engine sirens coming, and I knew I was the cause of it all.  I can remember being so frightened and telling my dad, sweaty-faced, sliding trays of rolls out of the oven, that I had done a terrible thing.  He told me to stay in the shop, told me it would be all right, even as fire engines were arriving with great bluster.


My dad stood in the doorway of the bakery, me cowering behind him, and told the disgruntled firemen searching the neighborhood for signs of a fire and complaining of hoodlums who set off false alarms that he had not seen anyone pull the handle. 


It was only later I learned about the intricately layered morality of telling lies, the illegality of  bearing false testimony to public officials, and the fines imposed for sending false fire alarms.  A five-year-old, I was grateful my parent saved me - and that intrinsic value remains with me.


As an older person I've learned to consider the fractures that may have occured in persons' lives with whom I'm dealing.  But we experienced ones are often not so humanely dealt with by those less experienced  humans.  A pity for us.

Are there Fire Alarm Boxes on corners of Queens anymore?


This blog is about piping the plenty we have, no matter how "old" we might be! I would welcome any comments, examples, suggestions

Awake!

To Awaken an Old Lady
                   William Carlos Williams


Old age is
a flight of small birds
skimming bare trees
above a snow glaze.
Gaining and failing
they are buffeted
by a dark wind –
But what?
On harsh weedstalks
the flock has rested,
the snow
is covered with broken
seedhusks
and the wind tempered
by a shrill
piping of plenty.


If I should ever be asked to name my favorite poet it would be William Carlos Williams.  Certainly, no one will ever name me, and I finally accept that although I have loved poetry all my life - but only latently written it. What did I expect?  I accept the rich rewards of loving poetry without standing on the stage with those poets who enriched my life.  Actually, I am there, all of us who love poetry are there. Millions of us.  Blessed by poetry, but invisible.


Life is poetry (poetry is life), and its layered priorities might make us invisible.  I never thought about being an old person when I was young. I could die young, of course, or just go on being young in spirit forever.  Fortunately, I could choose the latter.


And it worked fine well into my seventies.   But lately I've noticed I seem to be deconstructing into invisibility in the grand scheme of things: at my job (yes, still working, loving it), in church, in family. Nope - invisibility is not gonna be for me.  I'm not going gently into that dark night.


This blog is about piping the plenty we have, no matter how "old" we might be!  I would welcome any comments, examples, suggestions.