Crowfall and Catlight

Say a crow lurches into the air
from high in the maple tree;
skids, corners, falls down invisible stairs,
and drops the last yard softly to the eaves --
catlike, stealthy, perfectly controlled. Is the fall
or the landing the act?

---

I gather you in my arms when the light begins,
and hold you through the whole storm.
Am I trying to keep you or to give you away?
You make unearthly sounds, and so do I;
when the thunder comes
the old gods shift beneath us.

---

Quiet places between spatters of rain
when the window no longer flinches;
light, soft light, not quite the sun,
works up from the soil,
pauses in the stillness to lick its fur,
gazes curious at the frightened world.

Mary Oliver, Halfway Through

I'm nearly done with Oliver's New and Selected Poems, Volume One. For me, it's a lot of lyric poetry to read at once. I was impressed, and a little horrified, when Dave Bonta undertook to read and review a poetry book every day this April. A little like someone vowing to eat three cheesecakes at a sitting. But I've gone along reading probably five to fifteen poems per day without bursting my poetry stomach.

I've started memorizing my favorite poem so far, “Some Herons,” but I'm finding it heavy going, with no rhyme and no regular meter to help me. And it makes me a little sad: even if I succeed in nailing this poem, I'll never have much of Oliver in my head, as I have Shakespeare or Blake. She'll always be in her books, indistinct and out of focus unless I have the text in my hands. I don't much miss those tricks of the poetic trade, otherwise, and I understand why modern poets feel that the extra ornamentation is not worth the cost, or even that it's just too frilly and fussy. But to me the consummation of love affairs with poets has always been memorizing their work. With Oliver, with most of the moderns, it's just not going to happen, not much.

Oh, she irritates me occasionally. I get tired of her consternation that animals prey on each other, and also of the “animals are so innocent and egoless and I wish I was like them!” poem, which appears in a variety of forms. The animals I know best -- dogs, cats, and crows -- are not at all free from ego, worry, or social anxiety. I've seen them get their dignity offended, try to impress their peers, harbor resentment. But I'm not surprised that Oliver romanticizes them this way, because if she has a weakness, it's that she stands on her dignity and innocence. She's not willing to do much clowning, and when she does confess, she confesses to things such as not giving as much money to a beggar as maybe she should have. C'mon, Mary. Do you never eat too much ice cream, covet pretty undies, watch trash television? Maybe not: but taking on the sins and absurdities of your people is actually part of the job description of a poet. It's not a part she does very well.

But. Her sense of beauty is intense. The herons' swamp:

The water
was the kind of dark silk

that has silver lines
shot through it
when it is touched by the wind

or is splashed upward
in a small, quick flower
by the life beneath it.

And even if she's unwilling to clown, she's by no means humorless. The first heron in the swamp is

an old Chinese poet,
hunched in the white gown of his wings

And the second to arrive is a “a blue preacher”:

The preacher
made his difficult landing,
his skirts up around his knees

If you know herons, their solemnity and stiffness, their odd combination of grace and gawkiness, you have to laugh at this accuracy. Oliver's eye is perfect. She misses nothing, glosses nothing over.

She's most famous, I guess, for her sententious poems, such as “Some Questions You Might Ask,” in which she fails to understand why only human beings are supposed to have souls -- the face of the moose is as sad / as the face of Jesus, she says, and why should I have it and not the anteater / who loves her children? I like those, but the ones I've enjoyed most have been pure description, or ones where the lesson, if any, is oblique – say “Rice,” in which she implores the reader, for reasons obscure but to me compelling, to go far away from the white tablecloth and lift a handful of wet mud; or “Crows”:

wherever you arrive
they'll be there first,

glossy and rowdy
and indistinguishable.
The deep muscle of the world.

Of course, I have twenty more years of her poetry to read, and I will not be surprised if she surprises me. But I'm not sure if I'm going to go straight on to that, or hop over to another poet for a bit. Probably hop. Maybe Elizabeth Bishop is next?

What They Said

It's a sorry excuse, one said, but I can't stop my heart from opening
and I can't keep my legs from opening and that's just how it is.
And one said the morning light is so bright white on the wall that I can't see
what I was building in the night, a white thread from a black,
good work from bad, but I just keep building with each little death
like coral. We must build and we must fuck and I hope we aren't
breaking the world to bits because it is a fragile place but
we come from it and we return to it
and we come in it and come out of it.
And one wondered why the serpent wanted Eve to eat,
and decided that the smooth globe was too much for him
he needed someone to bite through the peel so his little mouth
could nibble at the flesh. And one said the sky opens too wide
like a broken backed book, so much sky that your heart arches
to try to hold it all and it's a sorry excuse but
love is like that, don't you think?

Okay, Not Useless

I promise you, if I ever undertake seriously to argue that massage has no medical value, my paper will have footnotes and close argumentation and takedowns of several studies, and it will be longer than 500 words. I promise also that I will try to refrain from tweaking people with inflammatory and outrageous titles, although that will be a harder promise to keep. It's been part of my rhetorical strategy so long that it persists even when the ideology which formed it (essentially, that dull people are improved by being poked) has long since withered away. Habits die hard. I was given Strunk & White at a tender age, and encouraged to think that forcefulness was the prime virtue -- what all writing should aspire to all the time. I now have a middle-aged respect for accuracy and caveat, even when dull; but I still find myself fluttering the cape sometimes.

And anyway, I would never want to make that argument: it's untrue. When my essay was linked to for a group of people who work hard to do medical massage (and justify its use), they were understandably miffed. It was a nice lesson for me in how contexts can shift, on the internets. I can ordinarily assume that my audience here knows that I'm passionate about massage, that my much of my practice is what is called “relaxation massage,” rather than treatment-oriented massage (though I'm doing much more treatment nowadays.) So the “medical benefits of massage” that I was poking fun at are the ones that routinely show up on the web pages of practitioners like me -- not the pain relief, lymph drainage, and trigger point, and all the techniques that shade into physical therapy, but rather the stock list that you learn in Massage I – relieves stress, promotes circulation, lowers blood pressure -- all true, all verifiable, all temporary and trivial.

If massage were as effective as many of its practitioners claim, it would blow other therapies out of the water in comparative studies. In fact it comes out lackluster, most of the time. If some therapists have the extraordinary success rates they claim, that only makes the general picture worse: for every therapist two sigmas out on the right, there have to be a dozen or two whose work is completely worthless, to get the kind of distributions we see. Massage came out tops in treating low back pain, in a study a while back, but that was more because the other therapies were so ineffective, than because massage worked so well.

I started reading studies of massage back before I was in massage school, but I gave up pretty soon. What I saw then was mostly very small studies with inadequate controls documenting that massage could have a significant effect on this, that or the next thing. Which, if you're not a science person, might sound impressive. But “significant” doesn't mean “important,” in statistics: it just means “very unlikely to be a random result.” Aspirin significantly reduces low back pain, but we can be excused for not jumping up and down with delight about that fact, especially if we can't get out of bed. These studies were a start, and I'm not mocking the people who did them, who had next to no resources. They established that there's something to study, that the idea of treating various conditions with massage is not absurd. But they didn't take us much further than that.

I know. I have anecdotal evidence too. I have clients who swear that I fixed their necks, backs, hips, knees. I am confident that I've reduced a lot of pain. I even have people I think I really rehabilitated, got back on their feet again. Someone who couldn't go up and downstairs, who now runs up and down like a goat. Another who couldn't hold a pencil, whom I enabled to write again. Someone who thought it was only my work that allowed her still to stand upright, at the end of her pregnancy. That feels good, and I like believing in it, but I can hardly be classed as an unbiased observer. A scientific person has to ask: how many people were just going to get better anyway? Eighty percent of my appointments are with clients who think I'm terrific, but how much of that is because the people who didn't get any relief just didn't come back? How much of it is just because of the rapport and affection that any loving touch conveys? I like to think – be real, I do think – I'm a good therapist. I study and I think and I pay attention. If something doesn't seem to be working, I try something else. But I don't think the comparative studies are lying, and I don't think the majority of massage therapists are incompetent.

Having said that much – and possibly gotten myself in trouble again – I will also say: we don't know a damn thing. The study of massage is in its infancy. Chronic myofascial pain is very mysterious, and much of what we thought we knew about it is being daily disproven.

God, think what we could find out if we had the kind of money that gets spent researching drugs! Everything remains to be discovered. There may come a time when we can confidently tell someone with chronic back pain, “I'll have you on your feet again in a week, and after that you'll never need to come see me again.”

We are not there now, and claiming that we are only makes us look ridiculous. We want solutions that a workaday, non-brilliant, not particularly gifted therapist can execute and get reliable outcomes. The traditional lores are not going to get us there, not on their own, although they are full of hints. We need science. We need to understand how it really works. We need results that are verifiable and repeatable.

In the meantime, I'll do my best to help with the pain presented to me. But I don't have the confidence in the value of that part of my practice that I have in the supposedly vaguer, touchy-feely, cloth-mom-for-the-rhesus part of it. People need to be touched with love and understanding, and I know how to do it. The bottom is not going to drop out of that market if Methylene Blue turns out to fix discogenic back pain, or if someone builds a cool nerve-feedback acupuncture machine that fixes pseudosciatica every time. All that will do is take away one of the pretexts people have been depending on to get the touch they need. They'll find another.

On the Medical Uselessness of Massage

Let's be honest. I am in no doubt as to the therapeutic value of massage, but most of it is more spiritual or psychological than medical. The medical benefits solemnly listed by massage therapists are real enough, but they're mostly trivial. Yes, an hour of massage relieves stress and lowers blood pressure -- but not more than a ten-minute nap. It improves the circulation of blood and lymph -- but not more than a stroll around the block. It triggers an endorphin release – but not more than eating a bar of chocolate. It relieves muscle tension -- but not more than a hot bath. All these effects are real and measurable; they're just not very important, medically speaking, and they are not – quite obviously to me – why people really get massage. People get massage because they ache for the touch, for the physical communication, for the sensation of being physically cared for, physically attended to, physically heard. We dress it up as a medical intervention because that makes it respectable. It's justifiable to spend money on it, if it's medical. But it's no more medical really than a momma cat licking her kittens' tummies. Perhaps that does aid the kitten's digestion, but you and I and every cat knows that's not really the point.

The point is that we must love and be loved; we must touch and be touched. It's fundamental to our well-being. My favorite massage myth is that it “releases toxins.” This has been studied, and there's not a shred of evidence for it, but the myth marches on regardless, because it feels right. It feels like you're getting rid of something poisonous when you get a good massage, when you give your body over to someone and they treat it with interest and love and respect. But the poison isn't metabolic waste: the poison is the anxiety of loneliness, the ache for acceptance, the doubt whether we really belong to the tribe. Those are the toxins massage flushes from the system.

(Okay. An exception, here, is trigger point, which has serious therapeutic value for relieving chronic myofascial pain – what's commonly perceived as joint pain. But the most common “dosages” of massage – one hour once a month, or one hour once a week – are all but useless for trigger point, which typically needs ten minutes three or four times a day to be effective. I do trigger point on myself all the time, and so should you: but save your money. See a good trigger point therapist once or twice, get them to teach you how to work the points causing your pain, and do it yourself till the points resolve. That would be my advice, for all but the gnarliest and most entrenched trigger point systems.)

The thing about the pyschological benefit of massage is that it falls roughly under the rubric of placebo treatment, and from what we know about placebo, the more ritual and mystery surrounding it, and the more sense of its preciousness, the better it works. If I could talk a good line about releasing toxins or balancing energy, my massage would be more therapeutic. And if I charged more for it, it would be more effective. There's a serious case to be made for the therapeutic value of driveling, especially if you believe in the nonsense yourself. But I can't do it.

I can say this, in recompense: the love I feel for my clients is intense, and quite as real as any other kind of love. I'll stumble upon pockets of grief, I'll open up veins of lifelong loneliness, that will stagger me. Doing massage is no more soothing, ordinarily, than participating in a meditation retreat is relaxing. On the contrary, like a meditation retreat, it's most often, for me, a wild roller-coaster ride of emotions, waves of joy and sadness in quick succession, glimpses of rare colors and strange countries. The connection can be downright unnerving. You need either a thick skin or a certain amount of contemplative stability to ride it out. The end result may be – usually is – a profound sense of gratitude and well being: but it doesn't come cheap.

I suspect that if you studied people with a life history of getting regular massage, you'd find longevity benefits similar to – and as difficult to analyze as – those of marriage. But a study definitively establishing cause would be, under present funding conditions, prohibitively expensive. After all, people who get regular massage tend to be prosperous, tend to look after themselves, tend to be willing to expend resources on their own well-being, tend to be comfortable with touch and hence likely to be in healthy love relationships: you'd need to randomize your clientele, and track them over years, to avoid all that skew and get real results. A study like that is not going to happen while Big Pharma rules the medical roost.

The trouble is that if we keep making claims for short term medical effectiveness that we can't actually back up, sooner or later we're going to be discredited. Massage could go into another eclipse like that of the middle 20th Century, when it almost disappeared in America as a respectable profession. I'd hate to see that happen, because I do think we help people, profoundly and lastingly, and I do think we are the keepers of a traditional lore – of several traditional lores – that ought to be preserved. But I don't think we can compete with Big Pharma on its own ground of quick fixes and magical pain relief, and I don't think we should try.

In Memoriam

for Ernie West

You don't know before you start, he muttered, and then it's too late.
Forehead smeared with blue mud, lovingly cordwound spearhead
drooping like an overflowered iris. You thought you'd mark the world,
my father, but it marked you instead.

Cup your hands and I'll pour them full of sunlit honey,
I'll pour them full of pitchfire. Sandalwood oil to drench your hair.
I'll rub strong fingers between your toes; I'll fold back your soul
like a monk's cowl till it lies flat over your shoulders. Did you really think

Your body would not be coming with you on this last round?
Think again: loose skin, braided muscles, twined nerve:
at the very end it's all, again, about loosened sphincters
and learning to suck. All the mumbo jumbo intubations,

the injections, the magic oxygen
running in plastic veins from a bottle of life
brought from the other world by priests of drug and knife,
will not keep a little life in.

The reward of a long life is to outlive all your feckless friends
and be surrounded at the end by small and grasping strangers
who know well the value of money and go in dread of death;
to be celebrated by the relatives of step-children themselves grown old

waiting for a small inheritance; to be wrapped in a flag
by fussy young men who care for it because they choose to,
not because they must. Put the last American in his grave:
it's time for the prodigals to go home and pretend to be men.

Drift

We paddle through reeds on the black water
where the redwings whistle and sway.
A cold still sky receding.

We lift our paddles and we can hear the drip from the blades:
our boat is the center of slowly expanding circles
running away.

---

It took the astronomers by surprise when they found
by the red shifts
that galaxy after galaxy was moving away from ours,
as if ours were uniquely repulsive, a cosmic pariah.

But it turns out
or they think
or it may well be
that everything is moving apart. It's not just us.

---

Gravity, we're told, is the weakest of forces:
the whole vast Earth, with its nickel-and-iron core,
straining with all its might, pulls me with only
a couple hundred pounds of force. I can push
it away with my two human legs;
I can push against it so hard that a space
opens between us. We call this jumping.
It's such a weak force that it can't stop
the expansion, can't even slow it.
We gather what is closest
little islands
solar systems
but the islands are drifting away, each from each.

---

Picture leaves on the expanding circles: each one
moving away from all the rest. That, they say,
is what the galaxies are doing.

---

Well. They were not such good company, after all.
Never spoke to us. We can do without them.
There's no need to draw comparisons
and say that people drift away through life
and wink out at the extremity of vision,
little clusters of thoughts that are drawn to each other
but that have no force to reach a foreign mind.
There is no need to regret our birth as the beginning
of progressive separations, of widening distances.
Hush.

---

Back water. Easy all. There is this too: we step
from the wobbling canoe to the rough wood planks,
and all the drifting drifts away:
we sway, but we know it's our inner ear
playing us tricks. This is how solidity feels
after being long adrift: like drift.

The Ohio Voice

Around the upper Great Lakes – Minnesota, Michigan – the rural people speak in a quick clipped flat deadpan, precise and quiet: Norwegian with the sing-song erased. But you get as far as Ohio, and a trace of the South creeps in, at odd moments: sometimes a syllable will hang, and change tone. There's a little ferocity and a little languor in it.

Sometime in the late 1970s Oliver finds her Ohio voice. She drops the Yeats, around the same time that she drops the capitals at the start of her lines:

. . . the rain, everybody's brother,
won't help. And the wind all these days
flying like ten crazy sisters everywhere
can't seem to do a thing. No one but me,
and my hands like fire, . . .

It's exciting to watch, to see someone settle into their native idiom. You have to go sit at the masters' feet, but you also at some point have to say, “screw the masters: this is how we talked at home.”

---

Patching my life back together, doing things I should have done a while ago. Catching up. The intensity of my love just grows. Nothing contains it or dampens it. Maybe it will burn up my whole life, and leave nothing behind. I hope so.

---

Thanks for the new suggestions, here, by mail, on facebook! I'll update the report post in a day or two with the new arrivals.

He Starts To Read

So I indulged myself and bought it, Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems, Volume One. And opening it I was perplexed, as I have been before. I don't know the conventions of modern poetry books. But there is no introduction, by her or anyone else. The blurbs on the back are the only markers. No side door into this book. No shady walk where you could perch a while, study the house, watch how other people go in and out. You have to walk straight up to the front door. There's nothing to do but walk in and read the poems.

But at once, there's trouble. The book is backwards. The first section is called New Poems, though of course this is – by the standards of this queer unfamiliar world – an old book; the new poems are from (1991-1992). All right. The fans who had been following wanted her new poems right away; I'll just skip to the next section, and come back to the new poems at the end. I want to read her as I read Shakespeare or Shelley, from beginning to end.

But no, it's not set up that way. The whole book runs backwards, so that the oldest poems are at the back. Stubbornly, I go to the last section and read the poems from the 1960s, then back up to the poems from the 1970s. But I'm aware that the publisher and I – and maybe the poet and I? -- are at odds. They want me to read the poems from newest to oldest; I want to read from oldest to newest. I want front matter (where did she grow up? Where did she go to school? Who did she take as mentors?) and they don't think I should have it. I'm reminded of why I don't ordinarily like reading modern novels: I find it tiresome now to pretend that the author doesn't exist and that I don't have an ordinary human curiosity about her. I don't want to gaze at a well-wrought urn: I want to have a conversation. Or at least read a diary. I've been spoiled, maybe, by blogging. Or humanized.

---

She whispers. She's a very quiet poet: she stands there a long time beside you before she starts, and you have to attend, because she's not going to seize your attention. She's not going to frighten you, or entice you, or tease you. Just that quiet voice. In those early days, I see, she had been reading her Shakespeare and her Yeats. She has a lovely controlled iambic pentameter, the most unforced feeling American blank verse that I've ever read, maybe. I count out “Going to Walden” because I'm not quite sure: I think it's regular, but it's so idiomatic I have a hard time believing it.

Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

Sure enough. No more metrical liberties than Shakespeare takes. I could memorize this. And I see that the lines all begin with capital letters. Does she abandon that later? I skip backwards (forwards) a little, and sure enough, she changes over to the new style late in the 1970s. I have mixed feelings about the abandonment of capital letters at the beginning of lines. Sometimes I think it's caving in to prosification: the sentence rules the poem now, instead of the line. But other times I think it's simply sensible. After all, the line is already there, in front of your nose: you don't need another marker for it. The little hope that fluttered – that Oliver would prove a rebel to fashion in this matter – vanishes. She's not the sort to make a fuss about that kind of thing. Once again, I have the feeling that I'm childish, unruly, out of order, gauche, in the world of modern poetry.

But she has me. She has me at the second stanza of the very first poem I read. She's obviously drunk on Yeats, which is right and proper for a young poet in the 1960s:

Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them
Did not board ship with grief among their maps?--
Till it seemed men never go somewhere, they only leave
Wherever they are, when the dying begins.

I love this poem, I love all these poems, in fact, and I can see already why she would have recurred so often as a favorite poet among people in my circle. She's the quintessential second-wave feminist. She doesn't want entry into the masculine world of conquest and glory. She doesn't want to ditch Ariadne on the beach and go questing: she wants to pay the costs of sitting still in one place, and finding out what home might be.

Waiting for Adam

Bars of light reach across the floor:

From them diagonal sheets of radiance rise
Through the air, igniting dust worlds as they go
Back to the sun.

When I turn on a lamp the walls flower
And send their desire into the wormy filament
Hovering in the glass:

Thoughts stand up from my inmost self
To walk in the garden in the cool of the evening,
And wait for an Adam to greet.

Your Favorite Poets II

Wow. This is already fascinating. There's a clear frontrunner, Mary Oliver, who garnered 9 mentions – a quarter of you picked her. Next come William Stafford and Naomi Shihab Nye, with 5 and 4 mentions. But it's a very flat curve: of the 108 poets mentioned, only 21 get more than one mention. Which means, probably, there's plenty more where these came from. Another striking thing is the high incidence of poets whose native language is Spanish: eight mentions for them, including three of the more-than-one mention poets. The only other non-English-language poets (that I know of: judging just by names there may be a couple more) were Czeslaw Milosz and Jacques Prevert. Even from a sample as small and skewed as this, that's pretty strong evidence that the largest outside influence on modern English poetry has been Spanish.

Anyway, here's the data:

Mary Oliver ix

William Stafford v

Naomi Shihab Nye iv

Denise Levertov iii
Antonio Machado iii

Ellen Bass ii
Elizabeth Bishop ii
Robert Bly ii
Raymond Carver ii
Billy Collins ii
T.S. Eliot ii
Donald Hall ii
Joy Harjo ii
Jane Kenyon ii
Maxine Kumin ii
Federico Garcia Lorca ii
Czeslaw Milosz ii
Pablo Neruda ii
Anne Sexton ii

Kelli Russell Agodon
Sherman Alexie
John Allman
Yehuda Amichai
John Ashberry
W.H. Auden
James K. Baxter
Wendell Berry
John Betjeman
Edmund Blunden
Louise Bogan
Dionne Brand
Richard Brautigan
Rupert Brooke
Anne Carson
Amy Clampitt
Lucille Clifton
Imtiaz Dharker
Deborah Digges
Mark Doty
Carol Ann Duffy
Denise Duhamel
Stephen Dunne
Kate Durbin
Loren Eiseley
Elaine Feinstein
Carolyn Forche
Jeannine Hall Gailey
Amy Gerstler
Jack Gilbert
Louise Gluck
Jorie Graham
Robert Graves
Robert Haas
John Haines
Forrest Hamer
Matthea Harvey
Seamus Heaney
Adrian Henri
Michael Hettich
Jane Hirshfield
Tony Hoaglund
Marie Howe
Ted Hughes
Donald Justice
Terrance Keenan
Cate Kennedy
Robert Lax
Li-Young Lee
Jeffrey McDaniel
Roger McGough
Louis MacNeice
Louise McNeill
John McCrae
Ian McMillan
Rethabile Masilo
James Merrill
W.S. Merwin
Dubay Mikus
Leslie Norris
Frank O'Hara
Sharon Olds
January O'Neil
Wilfrid Owen
Brian Patten
Lucia Perillo
Sylvia Plath
Jacques Prevert
Kenneth Rexroth
Adrienne Rich
Theodore Roethke
Edna St Vincent Millay
Richard Siken
Anne Simpson
Colin Smith
Gary Snyder
Ruth Stone
Cole Swenson
Wislawa Szymborska
James Tate
Monica de la Torre
Michael Trussler
Michael Van Walleghen
David Whyte
C.D. Wright
Charles Wright
Dean Young

Look Well

upon what ye shall never see again. Dale wearing a tie.

This Period

Thanks so much for your suggestions! I also got some by mail. I'll post a list, ordered by the most frequently appearing names, in a day or so.

Deb Scott asked what got me interested in this period. Well, for one thing, it's the only one left, the only one I don't know much about. I left it for last, when I undertook to read western literature, for three reasons: 1) it was last, chronologically, and I like to do things in order, and get people's allusions, 2) these were my rivals, and I didn't want my creativity soiled by contact with them, and 3) I didn't like them much.

I've been reading the western classics for nearly forty years, now. (Oh, you know? There's another reason I put it off. This is the period when “western” really breaks down. A 20th Century or contemporary poet could have been reading virtually anything from anyplace in any language. There's no way you can “master the sources.” The rules of the game change, here.) -- anyway, I've been reading for forty years, and it's been feeling very queer to me, not to have a couple books that are part of a reading project in my pack. So partly I'm driven to this by force of habit.

It's been decades since I took either the idea of literary success or the idea that purity was good for creativity seriously. Dead hands, there.

It's reason number 3) that really been changing, though. I've been softening towards modern poetry for several years. Dave Bonta started it. Then other blogger-friends who dropped inexplicably into verse from time to time: Rachel Barenblat and Dick Jones. I read their poems at first as I used to read essays students submitted to me, deliberately and conscientiously. They read my stuff, after all, however bad: I would read theirs, even if it was in unrhymed and unmetrical verse.

Who knows when it changed, when it first happened that I opened Velveteen Rabbi, saw a narrow column and ragged right margin, and thought “oh, a poem!” with pleasure, instead of disappointment? But it did change. I marched through Dave Bonta's epic Cibola with increasing fascination in the metrics of modern poems. He insisted he paid no conscious attention to it, but he did things with it nevertheless. And Dick Jones turned out to write perfectly metrical verse, by classic standards, quite often. I began to feel, not that I was superior to modern poetry, but that I had missed a boat.

And then of course I started writing the stuff myself. I've never been a passive reader. Whenever I read, I start itching to see what I can do with the same sort of thing. I fully expected my readers to give up on me, or at least to ignore my poems and stick to the good stuff. To my astonishment, they read them and responded to them. This wasn't just a game, it was a form of communication. You could write poems that people you cared about would actually read.

At that point I was hooked. I started reading blogs that were only, or primarily, poetry: Jo Hemmant (who alas, has not been blogging lately! but who edits the Ouroborus Review and runs Pindrop Press), Carolee Sherwood, Sage Cohen, and others. Whole worlds of poetry were opening up. And so now, even though I don't think “canonical” really applies to modern poetry – I've written before and will probably write again about this: I think that English Literature is mature, its canon is essentially full, and that demographics and technology have made writing poetry in English an entirely different undertaking – even so, I want to read the poets who stirred up the poets that I have been reading. That's my reading project now.

I like some of my poetry. I think that my best writing is still mostly prose, mostly the riffing, wandering journal entries like “A Glaring Spot,” below. But I'm not sure that my poems and my journaling won't converge, at some point. And anyway, I'm having fun.

Your Favorite Poets

The lilac blossom has gone a rich, royal color that has no name in English, since the names for browns and tans have all been coopted to denote dullness: they glow, clotted with rain, and the lilac leaves are a brilliant dark green, the twin leaflets springing energetically away from each other, pointing emphatically in opposite directions. I suppose technically the blossom has withered, but I don't see it that way. The tree is in its exuberant prime, reveling in Spring: its hair is spiky and tousled. Someone's been showing it a very good time.

---

I have request. If you're a poetry person, I'd like you to list, in the comments, three to five modern poets. And please do it without first looking at the names anyone else has put down.

What do I mean by modern? Well, since WWI, certainly, and clear up to the present. I'm looking for your touchstone poets, the poets you go back to. I don't care what the literary establishment thinks of them. I'm not looking for the canon: I can browse the syllabuses of Ivy League colleges for that. I'm looking for the poetry that stopped you in your tracks, that made you feel less alone, that delighted you and touched you and made you itch to write the stuff yourselves. Your favorites. I intend to spend the next year or two reading modern poets, and I don't want to miss the ones that you hold closest to your hearts.

Skeptical


"So what you are telling me, Monsieur le Computer, is that you have had a tiny camera pointed at my face the entire time I have had the honor of your acquaintance?"

M. Favier was skeptical, but the evidence was hard to refute.

A Glaring Spot

A glaring spot in the eastern clouds, as if someone had taken out a handkerchief and tried to scrub them away. A weary Sunday morning takes shape. I yawn and my neck muscles complain. My eyes hurt. Do I have a cold, or am I just short on sleep?

My body feels mutinous, old, irrascible. I need to buy shoes for my father-in-law's funeral. Other than that, I should be able to make do with my old blazer and slacks. I'd like to be reasonably formal and presentable, but I don't want to invest much in dress clothes: I don't expect to have to dress up many more times in my life. But theirs was a generation that took formal dressing seriously, as a duty and as an expression of respect. My nephew's been dispatched to purchase an old-fashioned white shirt, so that Ernie can be buried properly, wearing cufflinks. The least I can do is wear sober shoes.

Yearning to be away, off on the road, headed for the high desert of New Mexico, or maybe the mountains of Montana. Someplace where the sky goes on whether your eyes do or not. I grudge every second spent pleasing people, these days. Everything short of delight seems like a waste of time.

The urgency is greater all the time: there's an angel at my shoulder muttering “no time for that either!” This isn't anxiety. I'm not afraid of running out of anything – not of energy, not of creativity, and certainly not of time. This is an urgency of plenitude, not of lack. The urgency of a momma cat searching for a good place to kitten.

I begin to be afraid of losing the proprieties. I feel answers such as, “I don't know, have you asked God?” or, “if I were you, I'd fall down flat on my face and beg forgiveness” rising to my lips in casual conversation. I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to be fit for ordinary society.

---

But I don't mind, being used for this or that. People have to fit you into their stories somehow. How long would we last, if we looked at each other and saw straight to the divinity? You don't try to land a ship on the beach: you anchor offshore and send in boats.

---

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.”

---

Walk again with me. This isn't new: it's old, old stuff. Sappho strolled idly on the beach, trying out various lines to express her longing, and wondering what to have for supper.

The heft of something in our hands – stone, shell, wet sand – and a glaring spot in the western sky: the day leaving without a sunset, and the waves breaking. Not much changes.

Blakean?

All right, help me here. In Jan Marsh's biography of Christina Rossetti we find, pleasingly enough, that in 1890 Rossetti was given Emily Dickinson's Poems, and admired them, writing that Dickinson “had a wonderfully Blakean gift, but therewithal a startling recklessness of poetic ways and means.”

Now, Christina Rossetti was nothing if not exact. I mean, case in point, could you say anything apter about Dickinson than that she had “a startling recklessness of poetic ways and means?”

But – but – Blakean? Rossetti knew Blake's poetry: she was part of the circle that revived him from obscurity. But Blake was still an odd, little-read poet in 1890 – by no means a byword. So presumably she meant something specific by calling Dickinson “Blakean,” but I've been pondering ten minutes without getting even a glimmer of what. I can hardly conceive of two poets more different in temper, style, approach, and subject matter. What can Rossetti have meant?

Trying

Just try, says a patient voice. Daddy?
My eyes won't open. Maybe I'm too young.
I root in a mysterious world of warmth,
sweet milk; I dangle in the air on giant hands.

the sky runs rapidly over my head;
pizza-dough clouds twist, stretch, vanish:
I want your skin. I reach, and miss.

---

Tracts arise, fully formed, to spring from my forehead
like contemptuous daughters, full of wisdom, full
of spite: painfully counting on my fingers I compare
their numbers to the points of leaves,

can't make it come to five. I am broken,
a half-smashed creature too primitive
to understand it's dead; the legs on my right keep working,
but I only spin in place, circling my ruin;

I have become the hand of a clock,
the measure of my minutes.

---

There is no try, said that miserable green thing,
and I tended to agree, but in that case
What is this? Melville knew a different trying;
maybe that's what we have here.

Cut the skin in careful strips; boil the fat
until the milk-oil rises, opalescent, full of grace --
curded sperm, light bearer, Lucifer: the whiteness
of the whale.

---

Or of course
you can by tried for treason,
you can be tried for fun,
you can be tried by fire,
you can be tried and true.

---

Everyone stops – pedestrian, car,
bike, truck, bus: the bridge is opening.
We wait. We look for the vessel. Straight down
through the steel grating we can see the water
gray ruffled by the wind, laced white.
The center of the bridge lifts high: we all float
suspended on abandoned outthrust tongues.
A bridge no longer: an impediment. Below us
something huge, unseen, urgently
needs passage. Just try.

---

Big Tent Poetry

Planning for the Apocalypse

Plan for the apocalypse, or attempt to avert it? Play for a soft peak-oil landing, or assume the worst? I am not haunted or even very interested by this kind of question any more, and I have been trying to pinpoint why.

Partly I think because I stagger every day under the weight of the present suffering of the world -- here, in one of its most comfortable corners. As Barry Lopez said, every single person you see on the street could tell you a story about his or her life that would break your heart. When you spend considerable time, as I do, backstage, in the dressing rooms of people's lives, you get a better sense for the enormity and ubiquity of pain. If you're not comfortably sequestered from the sick and the dying, you get a better understanding of just how close we all are to breaking, and how many of us do. So you tell me there's going to be more pain than I can imagine, and I just shrug. What else is new?

I also labor under the curse of having written down my predictions of disaster when I was in my twenties. Many horrible things have happened since then, but none of them were ones that I predicted, except for the inexorable extinction of species. And good things have happened which, if anybody had predicted them, I would have dismissed with contempt as the worst self-indulgent pipe dreams. The Soviet Empire collapsing peacefully? Not a single hostile nuclear explosion in sixty-five years of bristling proliferation? The skies of Los Angeles and Portland clearer and healthier to breathe than thirty years ago? Still being able to publish, unmolested, anything I like to say, despite the continual expansion of surveillance and secret police agencies in my Secure Homeland? Ridiculous notions, all of them. Impossible.

So I have come to the conclusion, that, although my concerns were all perfectly valid and well-founded, I'm a rotten prophet. The most horrible events took me completely by surprise. The Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, were not even on my radar. AIDS came out of left field. Horrible environmental disasters have happened, and are happening, and I don't see how we are to avoid turning much of the planet into uninhabitable waste land – but it hasn't happened exactly – or even, let me admit, even approximately -- as I expected it to.

Nothing has surprised me more, and confounded my historical understanding, than the nuclear peace. I simply don't comprehend it. There has never been anything like it in the history of the world. It's been sixty-five years – two generations – and nobody has yet pulled the trigger. I don't know what to make of it. I still find myself bemused when people bother to worry about disasters a few generations down the road. “You really expect that we'll get that far without the Big War, the Last War, breaking out?” I think. What really frightens me about the Peak Oil scenarios is that someone, at some point, will decide to fix things by nuking the bad guys. (I don't know who the bad guys will be, but whenever something goes wrong, it's always the bad guys' fault, and you can fix it by pulling out all the stops to punish them. Everybody knows that.)

So I find myself, oddly, less gloomy than most of my thoughtful friends. I'm already confounded. I have no idea what happens next. I don't believe in progress saving the day, and human reason triumphing over prejudice, but I also don't believe in my own power to predict the end. I'm in the position of a man who was given six months to live ten years ago: all bets are off, and all I know is that the leaves are incredibly beautiful in the sunlight, and that a five-year-old holding a new puppy in her arms at Christmas is not happier than I am, holding you.

Where We Could Stay

Give us the end of time,
the swish of fringe at the end of a belt
which disappears over lips of basalt:
each thread catching a sun, the whole lost
before gathered into the eye.

Give us permission to think
that someday the apple's bruises will heal,
that hands will stop trembling, that
this music will come plain to the ear.
Give us a sprig of thyme to break

and to remember the first day
we came into this land, the way
your hair fell over your fingers
when you turned to ask
if this was where we could stay.

Ermine

Big Tent Poetry: Persona

"The glory of it stings," she says, and I picture her, fifty years younger, on a motorcycle, helmetless, that wonderful hair lashing her face, her arms wrapped around some Frenchman.

"God comes like that" -- her arthritic fingers won't snap, but she can make the gesture of snapping them -- "and then he goes away again. Easy for you to say he's coming back. But what if he doesn't?"

She taps my chest with her fingertips, all ten of them. "You don't say what you think, do you?" She nods. "You want to be taken for a nice man, that's right, that's the right thing to do. You go home and tell your wife I'm crazy with God, tell some jokes about me, about old maids and spaces under the bed. But to me you nod just like I'm making sense. Is it time for my medicine yet?

She drifts across the kitchen, a tiny pink wisp, and fills a glass with water. Her hair floats around her, white laced with black: a mink turning to ermine. "But you're not the medical one, are you. I was forgetting. You're the masseur. What Linda calls the 'masseuse.'" She chuckles, her voice low and raspy. "You look manlike enough to me. Of all the times, they get a man to touch me when I'm too sick to appreciate it. Isn't that just like the world, isn't it though? That's why the crazy with God stuff.

"Oh, God," she adds, "he knows that. No secrets between us. He says he doesn't mind, he's got worse things to worry about."

She climbs onto the table and shrugs out of her robe, snuggles under the blankets, and blinks at me. "So touch me already."

At It Again

The beginning of the Declaration of Independence (as I remember it, anyway), in yet another alphabet suggested to me by playing with broad-nibbed pens:

Mouse

She grows, a baby mouse, in my hand:
rosy, naked, questing, nosing for nipple,

wondering at free air,
dubiously following conceits
of blouses falling open, pupils widening.

Plumdrop head and veined trunk, skin
balloon-stretched now and shiny,
slicked with saliva;

I ask her Where are we going? And she says,
You tell me.

Little Suns

The flowers are yellow and orange. They burn like little suns: so much brighter than any room they're in. The people in the elevator notice them. They almost speak. I avoid their eyes.

I wait for you on the street. You pull the little Ford over, roll down the window. I hand you the flowers – she brought them for you. You exclaim over them, place them carefully on the floor of the passenger seat. A quick awkward kiss through the windowspace, and you drive away again. I go back to work.

The afterimage of the flowers in my retina. If I had looked at them too long I would have gone blind. You would think I could, but I can't say if the petals are orange with yellow edges or yellow with orange edges.

You wondered why love gets all the songs and poems: friendship, you said, was far more difficult than love.

---

This is my seventh blogday: imagine that! Seven years ago I set sail, determined to find the wealth of the Indies. Instead I have discovered America after America. I'm still guessing that the world is round, but it's much bigger than I thought.

The Mountains of Ulkor

I've just finished Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, which has been dismissively summarized as “the book that argues that video games make you smarter.” It's actually a very thoughtful book, and if he enjoys thumbing his nose at the people who are always moaning about the decay of civilization, so much the better.

Johnson follows a couple interesting lines, about the evolution of television, and the skills needed for dealing with computers, and pairs them up with a persistently bafflingly fact: that the IQ of the general public has been consistently and impressively increasing, pretty much any way you attempt to measure it.

The measurement of intelligence is hugely controversial, for many reasons, some good and some bad. But leave all that aside for the moment. Whether it measures only a few kinds of problem-solving skills or all problem-solving skill, whether it favors certain subcultures over others, whether what it measures is inborn or acquired – no matter what we think about any of these things – it's still true that if you test a bunch of white kids at preppy schools in the year 1980, and then test a bunch of white kids at preppy schools in the year 2000, you would expect to get more or less the same results. You don't. You consistently get higher scores. And the same is true of black kids at poor schools. Almost every year, to make the average score 100, you have to say something like, “okay, 102 is the new 100.” This is intensely interesting. Johnson, reasonably enough, asks, what's changed? And what's changed most is the media technology. Televison narrative has become more rapid and complex (yes, it's still mostly horrible, but that's not the point. It moves faster and is more complicated.) Video games, even the most mindless shooters, are basically puzzles: moreover, they're puzzles in which the rules are implicit. Part of the puzzle is figuring out how the puzzle works. So Johnson concludes, fairly enough: these things are making us smarter. The argument is quite close and well-substantiated.

Still, while Johnson is a refreshing read, I'm not as encouraged as he is. What he's describing – and what IQ tests measure – is the ability to problem-solve in artificial settings. The ability to guess what the person who made up a test had in mind. To guess how things would work in a made-up world. Your average 12 year old of the year 2010 will leave a 12 year old of 1910 in the dust, levelling up in World of Warcraft. These are real skills, and important ones in the modern world, and I don't want to minimize their importance. We live in an increasingly artificial world, and being able to understand and manipulate artificial systems is crucial to surviving in it.

Nevertheless, I wonder what's happening to people's ability to problem-solve in natural environments. If you took these kids out into the woods and said, “find a way to stay dry when it rains tonight, you have two hours, go!” -- I have a suspicion the 1910 kids would ace it, even the 1910 city kids. Tinkering with physical objects is something people used to do all the time; now it's a restricted subset of workers and hobbyists who have much idea of the properties of soil, wood, water, rock, leaf. And the natural world does not play by the same rules. You get nowhere by guessing at the intentions of a forest, by figuring out what a boulder wants you to do.

Everyone knows that the trickiest and most frustrating machine in an office is the printer. But I don't think most people understand why. It's because the printer does something genuinely difficult: it interacts with the physical world. Most software never has to do that. It simply interacts with people via other software. People, and their systems, try to understand you. It may be irritating when an aggressive spellchecker turns “estimable” into “estimate,” but at least it knows that you're trying to create a word, and that it's made of letters. But the paper and ink and trays and rollers, the levers and shifters of a printer, couldn't care less. If your instructions make the word wander off the page, what do they care? A printer has to change digital instructions into real-world results. It has to deal with real paper, and real ink, with dust, with people who carelessly stuff paper into places not meant for it, with people who pry things open or force them closed, with envelopes whose flaps won't lie flat. This is much, much harder than a simple project such as, for instance, writing a program to gather input and produce a digital tax return. A computer program can imperturbably refuse to honor input it doesn't like. “Not a valid password. Passwords must be 8 characters long and include at least this or that. Please try again,” your program says, and that's that. Until you do something it likes, it won't play. And in the worst case, all it will get (from its point of view) is a sequence of 1's and 0's that it doesn't recognize. But if you feed the wrapper from a cheeseburger into a printer, the poor thing simply has to do its best.

I worry that something fundamental is being lost, when we lose the experience of the intractability of the physical world. Perceiving and responding to people's intentions are valuable skills, but there are many things that have no intentions, and must be dealt with in other ways.

The problems presented in video games and intelligence tests have one common property: they all have solutions. If your quest is to retrieve an enchanted amulet from the Mountains of Ulkor, there's a way, be it ever so tortuous, to do so. If you're supposed to arrange the IQ test blocks as a red diamond on a white field, there's a way to do that. But most real problems don't have that quality. Suppose, just for instance, you want a polity that has low taxes, health care for everyone, full employment, and a military that can assert its dominance anywhere on the globe.

This problem has no solution. It will never have a solution. Yet politicians of every stripe keep asserting that it does, that we can have our cake and eat it too; and people keep voting for those politicians. Our government borrows utterly fantastic sums of money every year just to stay in the game, because we just know that amulet is out there.* We only have to find it. Every year we send fresh-faced teenagers off into the Mountains of Ulkor. Some come back with all their limbs. Some don't come back at all.

The fact is, we have to give up on some things to get other things. Until we have accepted that, and are willing to vote for people who say they'd rather have this and do without that, our political discourse is going to remain bizarre, phantasmagorical. I'd love to see presidential debates in which one candidate argued that having a military as powerful as the next six national militaries combined is more important than all Americans having enough to eat, and the other argued that to have universal free health care, it would be worth it to let a Taliban somewhere keep training terrorists unmolested. But this will never happen in the America I know. Whatever a politician may intend to do, he has to say that he's going to make the country more prosperous and stronger, both at once, all the time.

Clever as we are, I don't our shelter is going to keep out the rain. And as someone observed when I was younger, it's a hard rain's a gonna fall.

*I have no objection to governments borrowing money. I think we should have borrowed a great deal more recently, and pumped an even more massive stimulus into the economy. But I also think – this is the other half of the Keynes strategy, which everyone conveniently forgets about – you have to pay off your debts in good times. Our problem is not that we have entered the second Great Depression: that was bound to happen, sooner or later. It's that we have entered the second Great Depression, after years of high times, already deeply in debt.

Re The Sudden Disappearance of My Talent

My writing has become really stupid: for weeks I've been driveling, writing parodies of the stuff I used to write when I really could write. It's ghastly, I can't stand to look at the stuff. Once I was able to write. Wasn't I?

In this anxiety I go back to my archives, six months ago or so, and start reading. With relief, I find that as recently as that, I could still write. There's plenty to dislike: infelicities, repetitions, stupidities. But they could be fixed. My writing didn't become awful until the last few weeks. It really used to be pretty good. I wonder what happened? How did it go so horribly wrong?

---

This first couple times this happened to me, I believed in it. Now I know that nothing has happened to my writing, and that six months from now I'll be reassured by the goodness of the very stuff that horrifies me today. It's simply a mental disease, a recurrent fever, a malarial infection of my confidence. That the question arises at all is a signal that an outbreak is underway. C.S. Lewis somewhere or other noted that how good we are is not usually our business. We're very seldom called upon to evaluate the general worth of our work. Whether this particular sentence is right, whether this paragraph fits properly, whether that word is quite accurate – that's my business. Whether I'm a good writer is somebody else's business, if it's anybody's. I'm the last person to make a good objective decision about it, and anyway, what good would such a judgment do anyone? I'm not going to stop, even if it's awful.

So ho hum, and who cares? Caveat lector. Today's blog post is the work of a pseudo-writer. You'll have to defend yourselves as best you can from its bottomless triteness, its unfathomable awfulness. I'm not going to do it for you.

Scattered Showers

Each sparse drop of the rain gathers itself up high,
fattens, and begins to slip --
no longer air, not yet earth --
soars for a time, catches updrafts, is bumped sideways
by ripples of wind, and finally --
the last terrifying fall --
kisses my flushed face and lingers a moment
before becoming air again.

Another aeronaut finds cool green grass to land in
goes to earth like
a glistening transparent fox;
loses himself in the soil, waiting for the fine grassroots
to pull his children upward
in the slow cold tender
circulation of the soil: a foreign paratrooper
gone native, forgetful of the war.

And a third, in those last moments sees below
something waver and gleam
like his natal air,
but more, more like, like what? -- no time to think.
Bubbles spin away;
but his landing kicks
a brother drop inch-high, and vanishing, he knows --
more like himself.

Where I Stand

I absolutely refuse to consider myself disqualified for anything, because I supposedly favor one hemisphere of my brain or the other: because I keep a keen sense of wonder and beauty, or because I have some facility with mathematics. I will not leave any science or art alone. I intend to be a human being. The attorneys of modern society have been at my elbow often enough, urging me to sign away my rights of inheritance in one realm or another, in order to lay indisputable claim to the rest. I'm damned if I will. Everything that has ever kindled excitement in a human being is my birthright. Calculus is beautiful and so is Coleridge.

I will never know a thousandth of what I want to know, of what I need desperately to know, but at least I will never commit the egregious stupidity of concluding that, since I don't know these things, they aren't worth knowing. Everything we have found, discovered, and made, has been at huge human cost. I want to honor all of that. And I want to honor all the mute unrecorded labor that made it all that creation possible, and which still makes it possible. Human life strikes me, fundamentally, as heroic.

I understand feeling that humankind is blight on the Earth, a suffocating algae-bloom, a disaster. I feel that way too sometimes: and I soberly think that we're in for a horrific die-off in the next generation or two. But I don't stand with that feeling. My loyalty remains with humanity, with the life of the mind and the work of the hands.

Making

Sometimes I think, as the headless snuffling crake would have me think, that splitting my attention four ways means that I will never get anything done. “Specialize, specialize!” it croaks. But when I think soberly I know it's wrong. For better and worse, I will never settle to one thing.

Of my four occupations, I give my writing the least respect. I would never refer to myself as a poet or a writer, unless jibingly, and I seldom hear someone else refer to me that way without wincing. I respond to other people's attempts to publicize me gingerly. And yet I know that the days of a neat divide between writers and publicizers is nearly over. In the early days of the American republic it was considered unseemly for presidential candidates to campaign in their own behalf: other people campaigned for them. Those days seem quaint, now, and soon writers of any name who don't tirelessly popularize their own stuff will seem just as quaint. No one is less suited than me, by temperament or talent, for self-promotion. So probably I have reached the pinnacle of my fame, here: twenty or thirty regular readers, including many writers that I admire very much. I could go farther and do worse.

Partly, as I've said before, I don't believe the old literary models can stand. I don't believe there is a scarcity of great writing any more, and publishing is dirt cheap – I have published all my work on Mole , for six years, for a total outlay (mostly on peripheral software of dubious value) of maybe $20. I could have done it free. There are tens of millions of educated literate people who are writing and publishing for free; and the machinery of “Literature” does not, as we say in software, scale very well. A system that worked reasonably well when there were a few hundred or a few thousand potential writers – although everyone involved, so far as I can tell, has always complained about it bitterly – breaks down completely in the face of a thousand or ten thousand times that. It's overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

(There is, on the other hand, a real scarcity of journalism, carefully researched writing. There are very few of these for-free writers who check their sources and investigate backgrounds and examine competing claims impartially. There are some kinds of writing that are better done by people who have no dogs in the fight; and people will only do that if they're paid for it. We're going to have to do something to support that kind of writing. But that's another subject. I'm talking about literature.)

When I was young I wanted to be a Great Writer. I haunted used bookstores and read introduction after introduction to classic works. I read the classics, too, but I have to admit that I read nothing with greater attention than those introductions. I wanted to be the subject of them. I yearned to have people think I was so important that they would write biographical sketches of me and argue about the profundities of my message. I wanted to have a single name that meant me, only me, and one so common that it developed an adjectival form. (It irked me that my name didn't lend itself to that. Favierian? Favieresque? Not likely.) I longed for my life to be attended to, examined, as a thing of great importance. Somehow being at loose ends and dithering and worrying was transmuted, in these introductions, into something glorious. So hard and huge a task it was, to birth a literary greatness.

Well, naturally, when I reluctantly began to be an adult (sometime late in my thirties), I began to find all this fuss about my thoroughly implicit, unexpressed greatness comical. And when I had spent some years with a regular meditation practice, my attitude of genial self-contempt shifted to one of compassion, as I began to walk this yen for greatness back to its origins, and realize that it was not harmless at all, but a poison at the heart of my life. No real-scale respect or liking, of the sort that might content ordinary people, would do for me. I needed devotion. I needed the whole world, or anyway the part of the literary world I admired, to adore me. And the reason I needed so much filler was that the hole was so huge. I was desperate to be seen, acknowledged, attended to: and I had at the same time a baleful conviction that only a few people in the world deserved this. The Great people. If I wasn't one of them, I was nothing. The conviction of my worthlessness and unloveability gnawed at me constantly.

As I unwound all this, I understood finally that the hole could never be filled. Nobody ever got so great that their greatness was beyond question. I was playing a sucker's game. There was no way anyone ever won it. I overheard half a phone conversation once, at Yale. An acknowledged Great Poet – you probably know his name -- talking to a friend, and talking just like I always talked to myself: he had done nothing, accomplished nothing, everything was hollow, his work was no good. He was close to tears. Even at the top – maybe even especially at the top, because then all your eggs are in that one teetering basket -- you lose the game.

The solution was plain: walk away from it. Stop playing. So I did.

But when I walked away from it, I walked away from something else, as I am gradually recognizing: I walked away from the fact that I am a maker. I delight in crafting things. I need to make beautiful things, and to show them to people, not because the beautiful things are in me, but precisely because they are not. The reason I could not make beautiful things in all that time I was trying to be great, was that I was looking for them in the one place they were not to be found: in myself. In my little-self, as Buddhists would call it: that haphazard collection of favierian or favieresque bric-a-brac that for one reason or another I identify as Me.

Turn it all inside out. Make an art of service, make a service of art. The paradox of losing to find, so familiar in both Christianity and Buddhism, began to operate at once. Making things in this way actually did begin to fill that hole.

The tricky thing, which I am still negotiating, is to treat the making seriously without slipping back into the habit of drinking poison with my morning coffee: without slipping into thinking that maybe I will make an end run and become famous despite myself. I post carelessly, and spend too little time rewriting, because of my dread that taking my work seriously will kill it. It's a sensible fear, but one that I want to get past, eventually. Maybe I want to spend only a quarter of my life on this, but I want to spend it well. I want to make the best stuff I can for you. I want to be able to share this wonder, this delight, this leap and buck of awareness. I want to make perfect paper boats, and send them down the stream.

A Dangerous Age

I curl up to sleep under the table
at staff meetings, and no one dares to wake me:
they don't know where the buzzing
rattle comes from, when they step too near,
but they damn well know what it means.

Nothing of me is safe.
My heart beats like a son of a bitch;
my blood foams, boils over. Never
have I been so ferocious, so glad to live.
I climb the sky with the Sun. Where I bite
I leave marks. I sharpen my claws on mountains
and tear them to shreds.

It is a dangerous age, they say.
Hah. They have no idea.

The Elements

You used to find them with your fingers in the electric blanket. The elements, some adult said, preposterously. You knew what the elements were. They lived in the cup of the periodic table, sloshed up on either side. Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen, Carbon. They were very important, and if you were very good and learned their names you could hold them in your mind's hand, like plus or minus, times or divide, and pre-empt the physical world, and everyone would admire you, would smile at each other over your head, would be amazed at your precocity. The elements. They were the letters the world was written with. You knew them.

But these, these forbidden lines of warmth, these were something else again. You found them with your fingers. They were in the physical world, in the world itself, and they were nameless.

And later you would find them again. They might run from the nipples to the hollows where shoulder, pec, and collarbone converge. They might run down the inner arm from armpit to elbow crease, and on down to the wrist, where they would multiply and blossom, running every which way in the hands. They might run from the tenderest flesh of the genitals, deep under the inguinal ligament, and surface again where the pevic bones give way to the softness of the belly. Different on everyone. Running fast or slow, loud or quiet, warm or cool, following different courses. And colors might spark and flicker, depending on how your own encountered them.

Something analogous to Heisenberg's uncertainty applied to them, you thought. You eyed the meridian charts of Chinese medicine skeptically: it seemed to you that you could either chart them, or feel where they were, but you couldn't do both.

It's easy to get lost. It's always easy to get lost. In the forest paths seem to appear and then vanish. It's like that. But you can always come back to the hands and the feet and pick up the trail. The trail, or another one: it doesn't matter. And if your heart gets lost, as it does, you just hold still a bit until the anxiety, and the wish to prove something, bubbles up and away. You come back -- like coming back to the breath, in shamatha – you come back to the touch, to your hands on their skin. It's always there. You just forget to attend.

Only The Sun Makes Sense

Nothing that they told us was true.
You can't even begin to add up
the sidelong looks, the gestures of eye and hand,
the sudden intakes of breath. And why?
We worried and worried but in the end
The light was so intense
that none of us could have seen the others,
even if we had been thinking of anything but light.

The buttery taste of saffron, the yellowness
compounding --
The shadows of leaves,
the shapes incised on the wall --
a listening --
Still this longing,
Still this longing.

Lets get naked you said, and we got naked
because naked is what we do, it's the language
we spoke in the old country.
Listen, we try to listen, and the train whistles
red-shift into the distance. All those galaxies
fleeing from us.

I wanted to write manuscripts
illuminated, interlaced, fretted and twined
with letters ornamented so intricately that
you couldn't help but read them beautifully;

And as a ten year old I carved with a ballpoint pen
“remember me” into the soft wood of my bunk bed
imagining the dislocated floaty feeling of the person
assigned to getting rid of the words. Somebody,
somewhere, sometime, would have
to erase me intentionally.
Not a large victory, but I took what I could get.

And again. Nipples like gumdrops
or like new flowers,
warm flesh, eyes
bright with tears:
Where can we think to, that we have not already been?
None of us makes sense
None of us makes sense
Only the sun makes sense.

The Age of Wonder


I am reading with delight and admiration Richard Holmes' Age of Wonder, subtitled “How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.”

I am thinking that he discovered how to write this kind of book by a happy accident. He made his name as a biographer: he wrote wonderful biographies of Shelley and Coleridge, which is how I come to know of him. These are full set-piece biographies, massive books that are both narratives and reference works for literary scholars. Need to know what Coleridge was reading, who was in his social circle, and where he was living at age 34? Look it up in Holmes.

Having read these vast tomes – excellent of their kind – I went on to pick up whatever I could find by Holmes. This is basically how I read: I find someone I think is worth reading, and then I just read everything they've written, no matter what it's about. I fashioned my undergraduate education in precisely the same way – found teachers I admired and then just took all their classes – and I've never regretted the method. What I found next was a very odd book. It was called Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. You might think it was simply the scraps of writing he couldn't make into books, a hodge-podge of short biographical narratives stitched together by his own experience of biographical writing. He's quite clear that some of the research and writing in it is gleaned from failed book projects. But something wonderful and exciting is happening, which will culminate eventually in The Age of Wonder. He liberates biography from the plodding year by year sort of Anglo-Saxon chronicle. These are and aren't biographies. They're good-parts biographies.

If you read a lot of biographies, as I do, you'll know that there's almost always a lot of dull plodding reading in them, along with some dazzling nuggets of information and insight. What Holmes began to do is simply drop the plodding parts, and string the stories together according to a theme. The result is uncommonly rich and illuminating.

So The Age of Wonder is a set of biographies: in it is everything you would remember after reading full biographies of Joseph Banks (the pioneering ethnographer of Tahiti), William and Caroline Herschell (the brother and sister team that gave us “deep space,” and the realization that at night we see the light of stars that burned out thousands of years ago), and Humphry Davy (the brilliant young chemist and poet), along with fascinating accounts of the early “aeronauts” of ballooning, Mungo Parks' exploration of Africa, the controversy about Vitalism and how Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was written as a response to it and an exploration of it, and a number of other fascinating byways. It is a strangely constructed book. Banks weaves through it – as President of the Royal Society, he is pivotal at several points in all these narratives – and Holmes' love of the Romantic poets, and sympathy for their aims, weaves through it all as well. The result is illuminating in both directions. The scientists emerge as wonderfully engaging people – themselves very much contributors to Romantic literature and ideas – and the Romantic poets come off as considerably more complex and nuanced in their responses to science than a parroting of Wordsworth's “we murder to dissect” would lead you to believe. What Holmes finally does, brilliantly, is demonstrate that this the scientists and poets of this generation were at work on the same project, had the same appetite for exploration and the same faith in experiment.

Tintagel



On the clifftop, The Western Sea
sings softly like a girl working
home alone, folding laundry;

the pools of last night's rain
are brilliant in this morning's sun.
They've drowned the green

green grass; my shoes
are soaked; glassy water
flames around my feet.

I am a morsel for the world's maw.
What business does an old and fat man have
to talk of the love at the world's end?

Still cradled by the halo
of the unseen growing sun
the song comes again,

the drops burn on my fingertips,
old stories turn young, and
The blades of greening cut the light

in splinters, spinning
in the rush of clear water. Below me
the sea goes on,

folding waves to put away
on shelves of level sand,
humming gently to itself.

Once upon a morning, bright as this
before the stones had fallen, the
sea wilder maybe, he came

gleaming in his armor,
His hair as yellow in the wind as
grass is green, his smile

young and wondering;
and the old king foolishly, foolishly
opened the gates and let him in.

Shove

This is bogus too: this poetry, this
posturing. And so is love, and so is
holding love at bay; and so
is that violent hammering,
the inquiry of science.

Break it to bits
and get to the smallest bit. Look far enough
and look to the beginning of time.
Nonsense. There is no smallest bit, and
there is no beginning. Superstition. Poor
giddy lovesick trembling ape. The truth is
you have vanished already in the effulgence of doubt.

All you want is not to die; not knowing
that you're already dead. You dread nothing more
than losing what you never had. But suppose I die?
asks the rotting corpse. What if I get old?
frets the mummy. Let us whisper in their ears:
listen, dear, you're swarming with maggots already.
Your wrinkles are so old they've turned to paper dust.
What do you think you have to worry about?
What more do you imagine will happen?

This already is the disaster. The worst
has come to the worst, push has come to shove;
You are death dreaming from the coffin:
you are suspended in dissolution.

The clouds rise and topple, breaking slowly
over vanishing shores of air. This is it. This
is what being buried alive feels like:
like the green savannahs opening up
when we shivered at the edge of the trees.

In Between

His nightcap is baby blue, sitting a little crooked on his head, and his jaw hangs open. He's perfectly still. I check, just in case. Yes, his thin chest rises a little, and falls. Still with us.

I squeeze between the back of the chair and the stair-rail, and gently rub his shoulders. The little muscle left pools in the crannies of the bone like a soft enameling; my fingertips move gently, gently into it. Whether he's really aware of me, with the topmost layer of consciousness, I couldn't say. Martha said later that his face changed, while I was massaging him. His body knew I was there, anyway. You can tell. That topmost layer hardly ever engages now, anyway, and just as well: it would be awkward for him, being massaged by his son in law, if he knew it was happening.

I do the thin sheeting of the pecs, laid over the tines of the ribs. Reach behind to the lower back. All very slow, and very tender. It's hard for some people to understand how little pressure is needed or wanted for someone this old and this close to death. It's more a laying on of hands than anything like kneading. You always need to let go of the urge to do something, in massage, but never more than with the very old. You don't press; you don't rub. You just let your hands settle and sink.

His wife fusses. Such a favor I'm doing! It's not a favor, of course. I'm far happier doing this than “visiting.” I'm good at this. Touching people is what I do. Making conversation, that I do as a favor.

In any case, I owe him. I took his favorite daughter away, when she was 19, and didn't even marry her, for six long years. He never said anything, but it made him unhappy. At the wedding, my own father tells me, when he said something about being glad Martha and I were marrying, Ernie muttered “Well, it's about time.”

That was nearly thirty years ago. We used to go out on the river on his little motorboat: down the Columbia to the Willamette or upriver to Tomahawk Island. Very gentle and unambitious. Picknicking, really. Very unlike my own father's expeditions, where the first order of business was to get entirely away from any trace of humankind, into the wilderness, and then to scale some particular peak, find some particular cave. Ernie liked humankind, and all its works. He loved watching the ships and barges move slowly on the river. The odd riverbank detritus: bits of wreckage, odd-shaped bolts. We didn't try to get anywhere or do anything, in particular. Just pottered about. The point was just to be uncrowded, out in the open, in the free air.

Now he mostly sits in the dim room, watching the television at whiles, but most of the time sleeping, or gliding like this in the in-between spaces of consciousness, not in this world and not in the next. Hovering.

Martha opens the curtains and the sliding glass door. Cool air and light comes into the dim, overheated room. Ernie finally wakes a little, reaches for her hand, and she sits quiet with him a while.

When we go, we close the door and the curtain again. He doesn't like the light and outside air, now. Not for very long at a time.

Sonnet: Mr Banks Grieves for his Lady.

I took my Lady to the coral sand,
beloved of all. The oiled bodies nesting --
the bloody-headed grief -- we understand
nothing now. If we try to explain the testing
and the dalliance in English words
it goes astray: it was neither love nor whoring
but something in between. The brilliant birds'
feathers in the young men's hair, girls snoring
at noon and waking to stretch like tabby cats;
the brisk trade, a shining nail for a fuck;
the easy unrolling of the tapa mats:
all gone. We turned for home and lost our luck:
Our crew halved by fever; my good hound
Lady dead, in sight of English ground.

Uncials


I have loved uncial letters from the moment I saw them. Clear, easy to write and to read, each one beautiful in itself and nestling beautifully with each other. To me one of the great mysteries of history is how such a lovely alphabet gave way to ugly, clotted, gothic lettering, which is tedious to write and even more tedious to read: who can have thought that this was an improvement? It's like the mystery of American domestic architecture. In 1913, when my house was built, they knew how to make beautiful houses. But a generation later, they had stopped, and were building hideous things, everywhere, all the time, even though people had become much more prosperous, and could better have afforded beautiful houses. A demon of ugliness seems to have possessed the whole nation. What causes such mass lapses of taste?

I think beauty is universal, and that when one person thinks a thing is beautiful, and another thinks the same thing ugly, one of them is wrong. The tail-sting here is that people are almost never looking at the same thing. I don't know what framed the vision of the people who loved gothic lettering, but whatever it was, it made that script beautiful. Likewise, there was something that made a 1960's split-level ranch house beautiful to people, which I never learned to see, even though I was alive then. There was some context, some sequence of images, that made up for the blank spaces and awkward proportions, the bare cold corners and unframed windows. I think, as I must, that my vision is truer, but I also must bear in mind that I am missing something. It's difficult, when it's something I care this much about. I am tempted to sink into the contemptuous attitude of James Howard Kunstler. But that attitude is a deeper mistake than the mistakes it responds to: it forgets that beauty derives its power and importance from love, and not the other way around.

Easter, 2010

This morning the son of God opened his eyes,
stiff and sore, his eyes gummed with clotted tears,
and stumbled to the door of the queer low room,
where the stone was rolled away.

Morning, sun washing roof and garden.
He looked a while, the horror fading,
listening to the birdsong. “I never get used to it,”
he thought, and ruefully smiled at the grave-wrappings
dangling from his wrists. The air was fresh.

He thought of you and grinned, at some
quick secret joke. “It's worth it, after all,” he thought.
“Now I wonder where a son of man gets coffee,
and this a holiday? And where shall I wash up?”

Gabriel and Christina



Across the way a blue umbrella fishes in and out of the new green leaves.

Three girls run in out of the rain, awkwardly, thighs turned in and heels flying out; but happy for all that, laughing at each other.

I think of Christina, the other Rossetti, turning her thighs in, tending her father, curbing her temper.

She should have been the best of the Victorian poets. Perhaps she was anyway: but broken by the stupidities that also, backwards, broke her brother.

Gabriel buried his poems with his young wife, when he was going to be a great painter. The grief was real enough: but later, when he decided he was going to be a great poet instead, he had her dug up, the sheaf of poems exhumed. The poems were soaked through with something. But he thought he could restore the poems, maybe; and he wandered through chloral nightmares ever after. And not a great poet anyway, after all that. He was a painter if he was anything. He might have been saved by what broke his sister: a sense of proportion, of duty, of unimportance. But he had to be a great something. A great artist, a great poet, a great lover. Hence his titanic love affair with Mrs Morris, which dwindled gradually away to something even he felt to be ridiculous.

We have paid some attention, if not enough, to women being ruined by the expectation of service; but we have not paid nearly enough attention to men being ruined by the expectation of greatness.

I've done my damnedest to raise ordinary children, neither servants nor leaders, who will take their turns serving or leading as occasion demands.

Human beings, like cats, are incorrigibly but flexibly hierarchical. Dogs establish hierarchies once and for all, and are happiest being alphas or betas ever after, whichever it may be. We're not like that. We're never quite happy in our places. Never secure in power, never happy in service. Laying rigid gender roles on top of that makes it worse. We need above all to be able to renegotiate, according to the stresses and demands of our lives, if we are to work, or love, fruitfully and happily.

I have said before that I don't have a liberal bone in my body. I don't believe in equality, not for a moment: I think one of the deepest urges of human beings is to place themselves in hierarchies, to find their place, to have heros and mentors, disciples and adorers. What makes me look and behave rather like a Liberal is my conviction that these places have to be lightly held and easily abandoned. The yen for power and the yen to serve easily become pathological, when they become formalized. To me an equilibrium of equality is not something to be aimed at in human relationships, social, political, or erotic: what's healthy is precisely the seesaw of power, the alternation of roles. There's nothing wrong with being a master or a servant. What's wrong is being stuck as the master or the servant.

April WTLP Zine

April's WTLP Zine, an all-poems edition, is out. My poem "Indigo" is in it. (Also not to be missed is Sage's puff of my massage skills, at the very bottom.)

The World's Cursor

I am followed by trails of light:
Every motion cuts lines in the air.

Even a cursory glance discovers
the divine waitress pouring

slack-jawed while our cup
runs over with trouble.

I am a cursive script. Every
maddening letter of my life

must join with the next: and though
I solemnly swear or affirm

that I will not tell the whole truth,
after years of coursing

they still have not found
a cure for candor.