What Shall Be Done About Books?

I love books.  I have 13 bookcases in my small apartment, crammed full.  More books piled on the floor, here and there.  I love books. Can't bear to part from those I especially love.  I also have books on my iPad, in iBooks and Kindle. Point is - more of us who love to read are going toward ebooks.  We lack storage space to shelve the books we love, the new ones we discover. Instead, we download them all, title by title, into our mobile devices.  


What is the future, then, of books?  Will they become museum relics?  Will  libraries become museums; will print publishers of books go bankrupt?  Does this matter to us?  If books are important to us, we need to do what we can, now, to preserve their significance. 

Does Spelling Still Need to be Taught?

OK - I set up this next blog to discuss a few Nobel Literature Laureates of Poetry, but something else has come up.  Flexibility serves the better cause.  The following is a post addressed to a ListServe of Creative Writing Teachers I've been a constant respectful reader of, but infrequent contributor to, for at least twenty years.  


Yesterday, a member posted this message:  


Someone told me the other day that a teacher said there no longer is a need to teach spelling because students are using computers to write and word processing programs correct the spelling errors.
Has anyone heard this?

This is my response:


 I've not read that, but can see where it might be assumed.  I'm
dyslexic, or was, and I've been an English teacher for - er, fifty years. Tough career choice but I loved teaching, reading, writing.  That's another story. Until computers and Spellcheck I spent a great deal of my time checking my spelling with a dictionary because I switched letters, spelled "creatively." After Spellcheck, my life improved far more than I imagined
it could.  By continually using Spellcheck, my sense of letter order, of spelling reasoning, improved to such an extent that now, although I always employ Spellcheck by habit - there are never any errors.  A matter of no small pride for me.  The point is - maybe, with Spellcheck, there is no longer a need to teach spelling per se, because students' habitual use of
Spellcheck teaches them to spell better than lessons ever could.
------------------------------------------------------
That is my experience, my thinking.  What are your thoughts about teaching spelling?  

Contemplating the Nobel Prize for Literature in Poetry

From its inception in 1901 until today the Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded exclusively to works of poetry only twenty times.  That's surprisingly victorious for poetry when you consider all forms of narrative writing - fiction, drama - all prose writing as opposed to poetry - by such writers as  Hemingway, Steinbeck, Winston Churchill, William Golding (if my math serves me, ninety prose writers of the highest esteem and reknown).


So, who were our twenty poets awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature?  And why were they particularly chosen?  Contemporary working poets might want to dwell upon this list and its rationale.  My quotes are taken verbatim from The Nobel Prize Internet Archive: http:// nobelprizes.com/literature/ 


2011 - Thomas Transtromer "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality."


1996 - Wislawa Szymborska  "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality."


1995 - Seamus Heaney "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."


1992 - Derek Walcott - "poetic ouevre of great luminosity, historical vision"


1984 - Jaroslav Seifert  -"poetry of rich inventiveness", liberating images of "indomitable spirit and versatility of man."


1979 - Odysseus Elytis - man's struggle for freedom


1977 - Vicente Aleixandre - man's condition in the cosmos and the renewal of Spanish poetry between wars


1975 - Eugenio Montale - "interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions."


1959 - Salvatore Quasimodo - lyric poetry, "classical fire", expresses the "tragic experience of life in our own times."


1958 - Boris Leonidovich Pasternak - lyric poetry in the Russian epic tradition (his country declined the prize)


1956 Juan Ramon Jimenez - lyric poetry of "high spirit and artistic purity."


1948 - Thomas Stearns Eliot - "outstanding pioneer contribution to present-day poetry."


1945 - Gabriela Mistral - lyric poetry "inspired by powerful emotions" making her name a symbol "of the entire Latin American world."


1944 - Johannes Vilhelm Jensen - poetic imagination, bold freshly creative style


1931 - Erik Axel Karlfeldt  - poetry


1923 - William Butler Yeats - "inspired poetry, artistic form, gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation."


1917 - Karl Adolph Gjellerup - "varied and rich poetry, inspired lofty ideals"


1904 - Federic Mistral - "fresh originality" reflects the "natural scenery and native spirit of his people."


1903 - Bjornstjerne Martinus Bjornson  - "noble, magnificent and versatile poetry, fresh and pure of spirit."


That's it - our 20 Nobel Awards for Poetry on planet Earth..  How many are still read widely today?  Enough, probably.  Is there any message here?  


I am re-activating this blog.  I plan to continue reviewing poetry, and discussing other topics.  I appreciate any comments, of course.


.

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.