hiatus

Enjoy a week without my pleas for your attention.

Thanks for checking in though.

Be kind to people.

Be kind to yourselves.

beer foam on terra firma

There was nothing particularly striking about them except they were artists of the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately, almost feverisly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does. -- Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio.

So, let's talk about that.

First of all . . . ouch. Second of all . . . AW-kward. Third of all . . .

I am glad to have these reminders from time to time. Especially since I started this blog which is essentially devoted to my art, such as it is, of writing. As you know, I was wary of starting the blog in the first place--the main (and petulantly disclaimed) reason being the export of my soul to the Philosterous-Nonesucherol (Internet), flung into the Nothinworld (Domain of incorporeal Being) in conversation with your Eminent Diaphanousness (that's you, Ether) as if my difficulties with those snide, chortling crows here on Substantiopetrapopulus (Terra Firma) were not enough.

But there was another reason for my wariness at the outset: Loth am i to write of the arts/ as if some ligature imparts/ wisdom where blank pages but fart/ and spoil the air of artsy-smarts.

Which is to say, less ironically and less reliant on flatulence, that aesthetics, like most other branches of philosophy, very nearly bores me to tears after years of growing hoarse in the extrapolation of its fundamental characteristics and the vituperative defense of its sublime essence.

Which is to say, less blowhardily, art, as with the Tao, is ineffable and, as with God, needs my advocacy like a nudist needs a bra.

Yet, I spend so much of my day thinking on the nature of art and discussing it over the Amorphilacious-Antaginons (Facebook) and with whosoever, in their apparent eagerness to be saturated in the driveling drool of my lifelong obsession with poetry, asks a simple question.

So I ask myself Why? [This is not one of the simple questions. Annoying, yes. Pervasive, yes. Infinitely unanswerable down to a mathematical singularity, it would seem. Simple, no.]

Not only does Poetry not need me to write poems much less explain why I do, it is also, at the end of the day, nothing near so lovely as things in themselves. Not nearly so beautiful as The Great Smokey Mountains adorned in autumn. Not nearly so gorgeous as the moss draped live oak. Not nearly so entertaining as we people in our baseball hats or with our dripping ice-cream cones or at the beach chasing frisbees with our border collies or after a hard day's work with beer foam on our lips.

Yet still I talk of art. Yet still it makes my day. Yet still my un-flung soul feeds on its morsels to fatten up for the sacrifice--knowing full well how snapply and crackly and popply the fire gets--full well how the noisome, black birds will peck its flambéed heart.

Oh art, if we break up can we still be friends? Will you still call now and then? Can we still talk? And talk and and talk and talk . . .

Which is to say . . .

applique drippy ventricles

Here is a new poem. Something of a departure. How so? Well, for starters, the formlessness of it is unusual for me, as is the non-attention paid to meter. Secondly, there is the blatant (and titular) confessionalism from which I tend to distance myself.

It is important to remember the difference between autobiography and the use of the first person pronoun. I use the latter with often annoying abandon. The former strikes me as icky for the most part and even when I do use it, it is only to create an authentic resonance in the poem--not to applique drippy ventricles to my flannel sleeve.

It is also important to remember not to be pedantic, so let's do this:

For Once, a Confession

I confess. For once, let me start with that.
Secondly, there are the gifts of God
Like the promise of death, like the air on which I
Will never fly. And in conclusion,
Autumn.

But wait, remiss if I fail to mention
The months in bed—the soreness, the tears
Loosed from clinging when the room was dark.
I confess. Because now it might be safe.

I hope for more yellow-finches to bend
The furry stalks of the zinnia, playing hummingbird
As they do, keeping time on slower wings.
I hope in the meantime. Between
One magnetic resonance and the next.
Now and again in the spaces left open
By distracted grief.

Fifthly, because I’m on a roll,
There are the pillories of God—
Those AWOL urinations unstaunchable
In the twist of white linens. Head and hands—
A puppet show, the symbol
Of prayerlessness. Of waiting, dumbfounded,
To inherit the earth.

Of waiting in general.

Here’s one too:
The wail of babies makes me glad
But not for ugly reasons. Not for the fact
Of my jealousy, or for the falsity of my cynicism,
But because I know they will soon
Suckle and burp and gleefully
Kick their doll-baby legs.
It’s the same as with the finches,
As with the night-sessions
Of doused pillowcases, as with
Autumn.

As with autumn in general.

someone else for a change

We are wise sometimes, Ether, to exit stage left or right and sit in the wings to witness our mentors. Those to whom we play seconds or, at best, in the splinters of whose limelight we occasionally dabble. Today, I am wise. Today I give you Thomas Hardy. Although known mostly for his novels (I recommend them all and can think of none with which you could go wrong but I am especially fond of "Two on a Tower," "A Pair of Blue Eyes," and "Jude the Obscure."), Hardy considered himself a poet foremost--turning to prose for pecuniary purposes. The poem here, "I am the One," I stumbled on recently in his book Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928) [thanks Denise, for the first edition] and I was charmed to the gills. I think there are both religious and self-comforting themes to be explored; but I will let you make your own way, Ether, because we are wise sometimes to do so. Enjoy.

I am the one whom ringdoves see
Through chinks in boughs
When they do not rouse
In sudden dread,
But stay on cooing, as if they said:
'Oh; it's only he.'

I am the passer when up-eared hares,
Stirred as they eat
The new sprung wheat,
Their munch resume
As if they thought: 'He is one for whom
Nobody cares.'

Wet-eyed mourners glance at me
As in train they pass
Along the grass
To a hallowed spot,
And think: 'No matter; he quizzes not
Our misery.'

I hear above: 'We stars must lend
No fierce regard
To his gaze, so hard
Bent on us thus, --
Must scathe him not, He is one with us
Beginning and end.

a glimpse

Here is an excerpt from my unpublished novel. It involves the main character and his ex-ish girlfriend's mother. The mother has recently recovered from a serious illness and is out of the house for the first time in months.


White Keds hooked on two fingers, Angela walked in front of me through the high grasses, sinking ankle deep into the sand. She whistled staccato notes that matched the rhythm of her march.

The high tide pushed lathered breakers halfway up the shore, not twenty yards beyond the last dune. Without rolling up her pants or slowing down, Angela headed straight for the surf—arms wide like preparing to embrace the entire Gulf of Mexico. The night was warm for February, sixty degrees or so, but the water would be no such thing. An unexpected wave smashed against her shin. She squealed, stumbled back, then pushed forward again.

Oh no, I thought, not so much concerned as exasperated. Must I always be threatened by the possibility of some woman drowning? But that wasn’t the problem, was it? No, it wasn’t the possibility of them drowning, it was the possibility of being called into action. Of my hand being forced. Besides, maybe she wanted to walk clear to the Caribbean, to push with all of her regained strength against the bullying forces of nature, now before it was too late. Who was I to intervene? If anything, I should join her.

But she stopped. The waves pushed her back, sucked her forward, but she stood her ground—now knee-deep, now shin-deep, and so forth. I took my shoes and socks off,just in case, and watched from the brink of the surf. Angela Bramlett was taller than Lily, more statuesque. Especially as painted against the bruised sea and sky.

“Are you coming, Justin?” she asked, barely audible over the waves.

“No, I think I’m good. Maybe you should come back though.”

“No . . . not yet.”

She took another step. Or appeared to. The heaves and lulls played tricks on my eyes. The sky itself moved beneath its illusory dome like an eyeball out of sync with its contact lens. Angela turned and it took several seconds to realize she was walking back towards me; but when she pushed through the last suck of undertow, she seemed to be sprinting. Splat, splat, splat—her feet off the packed, wet sand. Wide as the waning crescent moon in the east—her hilarious smile. Safely in the softer sand, she caught her breath with her hands on her knees.

“Not so bad once you get used to it,” she said.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Lily never told me you were a wuss.” She fake-punched my arm. I had never thought of my disinclination to confront fear head-on as wussiness, but now that she mentioned it . . .

“No? Well, she should have. It’s the most important thing to know about me.”

She laughed. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was mostly being serious. Didn’t have the heart. Bingo. I headed back to the car and got to the splintered wooden walkway before realizing she wasn’t following me. In fact, she had disappeared.

“Mrs. Bramlett.” The noisy gulf swallowed my voice. “Mrs. Bramlett!”

Long, white fingers sprouted from a grassy dune and fluttered. “Right here.”

“You OK?” I asked, approaching slowly like one might sneak up on a wounded badger.

“I’m fine,” she said, “just not ready to go back yet.”

“It’s getting kind of late, don’t you think . . .”

“So, call Lily and tell her what’s up. Tell her we’ll be home soon.”

Dreading the interchange, I called Lily. Sorry, me and your old lady are kickin’ back at the beach and whatnot. See ya when we see ya. Wouldn’t wanna be ya.
She didn’t answer.

“Phone might be off,” I told Angela.

“Leave a message. Tell her everything’s OK.”

I hate leaving messages—the pressure and the dithering. Never mind the heebie-jeebies encounter with futurity, the cause whose effect dangles in the ether. At any rate, I followed the robot’s commands and left a cryptic message to do with oceans and convalescence. Hopefully, she’d catch the drift.

Angela patted the sand beside her. I sat down. A miniature avalanche of grit poured into the crack of my butt. What a life. I brushed my feet with a sock and put on my shoes. Angela’s feet were still bare. She wiggled her toes and one of them popped. Even her toes were long. Except for the little ones which were half nail, half stub. Lily’s little toes did the same thing.


As we looked out on the gulf, the tide slowly receded. Five minutes passed. Meanwhile, the beach lost its residual warmth and the temperature dropped ten degrees. Angela hugged her knees and gently rocked side to side. Five more minutes passed. Only the thinnest rim of the western horizon still clung to the purpling daylight. The rest of the sky darkened to near-black-gray, occasionally pricked by stars.

“Do you love her?” Angela broke the silence. In a way, I knew the question was coming. Not sure how but when it came it did not take me off guard. Not that I knew how to respond which was a wholly different matter. The easy answer was Yes. But it wouldn’t come out of my mouth. It sat on my tongue like horseradish, bitter and burning.

“Should I take that as a no?” she asked of my reticence.

“No, no, no . . . not a no . . .” I wasn’t sure what to say and I needed to be sure. Regarding the apprehension of love, inaccuracy is the most certain reality. And the most unforgivable, nonetheless. What was I supposed to say? What was the truth? Yes . . . I loved her and every other broad-hipped and mammaried homo erectus gracious enough to acknowledge my existence. Or was the answer No, after all. No . . . because love bandies us about willy-nilly, because it’s the heavy-weight champion of the world, because its sucker-punches are second-to-none.

“It doesn’t matter. If you’re supposed to, you will. If not, you won’t.”

“I guess that makes sense but how are you, I mean anyone, supposed to know? Seems to me it’s a dangerous guessing game,” I said.

“That sounds about right.”

“As in unfortunately correct or as in worth the risk?”

“As in how should I know?” She scooped a palm-full of sand and dropped it on her right foot. She scooped another load and dropped it on her left foot. “Help me,” she said, “help me bury my feet."

or suffer sucky poems

In the interest of partial disclosure, I have decided to give you a taste of my revision process. Call it a mini-workshop performed upon myself--an annoying necessity since graduating from a writing program and, to be honest, one not nearly stringent enough to produce the sort of quality I am aiming for. Nonetheless, here is an example. I will be using the poem from my last post, so if you have yet to read it, do so now. (Unless, of course, there are rats' asses elsewhere more worthy of your attention, then by all means . . . and don't let the browser hit you on your way out.) I will wait here . . .

still waiting so you might as well go read the silly thing . . .

OK, so you've either read it now or had read it before or, most likely, I'm sure, you have exercised your right to simply read on because you are not to be bullied by a sniveling poet who is obviously just cross-referencing his blogs to increase exposure. Whatevs or whichevs . . . here we go.

First in its entirety:

At the Mirror Each Time

Thia Grace made out like a bandit

Selling quarter lemonade to uncles

With only paper bills. Jesse lit three-

Foot rods from the sputtering

Citronella candle and twirled

In a spangle of sparks. We all swatted

Gnats and suffered the bough-sieved

Rain to watch the amateur display

Of rockets and mortars.

But earlier, before the burgers

And gumbo, while kids splatted

Water-balloons and pranced in the blow-

Up princess pool, Annalyn and I—

My newest niece, her wretched uncle—

Trolled the house on doldrums.

And at the mirror each time, we paused

To gurgle and grin—our reflections

So grotesque and magnificent.

And this thought . . .

What should I tell her now? Now that Earth

Is as good as flat? Now in the moments

Before she naps? Maybe—

We have done a great thing,

You and I, tight-roping the gamut,

You poised, me palled, we gnarled

In this two-hearted body.

Or just nothing. Just sway, whistle

Through teeth a tinny lullaby.

Swallow the words and hum.

Guard against explosions.

Gurgle and grin.

***

Now with commentary:

At the Mirror Each Time

[here you'll notice I omitted the word "and" from the title. for some reason, I like the conjunction without precedent--the propulsion and amidst-ness of it, but here it just did nothing for the poem.]

Thia Grace made out like a bandit

Selling quarter lemonade to uncles

With only paper bills. Jesse lit three-

Foot rods from the sputtering

Citronella candle and twirled

In a spangle of sparks. We all swatted

Gnats and suffered the bough-sieved

Rain to watch the amateur display

Of rockets and mortars.

[ when I decided to divvy the stanzas to be more consistent with narrative structure, it became necessary to jettison some phrases. The last one in this first stanza, you'll notice, is gone. It was an actual occurrence--the mosquito discussion--and therefore not entirely worthless; but it was the heaviest/ prosiest part of the stanza, so it was a likely candidate. I am happy with the result. I should note here that it is always difficult to get rid of lines--it's like a slap in the face to an earlier self that thought it was lovely in the first place. But you get over it or suffer sucky poems--and sucky poems suck so that's no good. Get over it, then.]

But earlier, before the burgers

And gumbo, while kids splatted

Water-balloons and pranced in the blow-

Up princess pool, Annalyn and I—

My newest niece, her wretched uncle—

Trolled the house on doldrums.

And at the mirror each time, we paused

To gurgle and grin—our reflections

So grotesque and magnificent.

[ here, again, I have lopped off the last line. So it seems I have a tendency to be extraneous towards the end of thoughts and phrases. It's like I just have shove those two or three more words in to prove my vocabulary is such to suggest that I could go on and on if need be only let this much be a lesson to ye. It's a bad habit--one that I am especially addicted to in my prose fiction. Never fear, I am exorcising the demon now as I mention it--it doesn't stand a chance in the open air! So the last two adjectives were less tuneful than the first two, therefore they had to go.]

[this stanza break was added to signal a change in voice and style. The poem is about to leave the concrete world where the images are of real stuff and of actual events and enter an abstract realm of rhetoric and wonderment. It calls for its own space in this poem. Which is not to say that every such shift requires its own stanza because often the effect is more effective as physically juxtaposed to the original tone. In this case, though, the speaker (only coincidentally me and of little significance at that) , on one of his pauses at the mirror, has a vision of his connection to the child that differs from his sensational experiences up to that point. It is a shift into sentiment and reverie that I have chosen to distinguish in an obvious fashion--not as an insult to the intelligence of the audience but as device to render the poem more simple and sensible. I am not one for incomprehensibility in my poetry--I am far less modern than that!]

And this thought . . .

What should I tell her now? Now that Earth

Is as good as flat? Now in the moments

Before she naps? Maybe—

We have done a great thing,

You and I, tight-roping the gamut,

You poised, me palled, we gnarled

In this two-hearted body.

Or just nothing. Just sway, whistle

Through teeth a tinny lullaby.

Swallow the words and hum.

Guard against explosions.

Gurgle and grin.

[This last stanza has been tightened. Most of the "nothing"s and all of the "except"s have been removed. The "nothing"s for their repetitiveness, the "except"s for their plain old ugliness as words. I believe the result is much better--lighter on the eyes, easier on the ears.]

Well, now, there you go. A transformation made known. A poem made less sucky. A poet made less mysterious. And if you made this far, you are either a gracious reader, a writer at least moderately interested in craft and process, or a skipper-to-the-end-to-see-where-he's-going-with-this-er-er.

Whatevs or whichevs. Thanks for stopping by. Ignore the hysterical crows on your way out. They love to see me all confessional and erroneous.

been a'visiting

Ether, it's been a while. What have I been up to? Largely none of your business but a legitimate question. Actually, there are no illegitimate questions, only illegitimate people. So, I suppose you are safe on both counts. Though how your Eminent Diaphanousness is even such a thing as to qualify for safety from corporeal matters, I will never know. Perhaps, by insinuating your embodiment in this blog, this dead scroll of ones and zeros and hypertext mark-up, I have solidified your otherwise Zero-Status. I take the blame and in doing so, honor your question and legitimize your Being.

I have been a'visiting family in Mobile, Alabama, celebrating the Fourth of July. Why the Fourth of July? Well, here on earth (Substantiopetrapopulus to you, I believe) and in these United States of America we commemorate our independence as a nation on the day in which our written declaration of such was signed by our whitest and brightest. Typically events surrounding the occasion involve grilled meats and fireworks--variations are acceptable though rare. Even the unpatriotic, snide, and cynical generally take part in the festivities, unwilling as they usually are to pass up a party to prove a point.

(Ether, I confess to being all of those things at odd and slightly shameful times, but for the most part I try to curb my lack of enthusiasm for the sake of the gathering. Besides, at the end of the day, after the guilt of trespass, after the sorrow of spoils, after the tail-chasing polemics, I am glad to be an American--plenty happy, plenty free, and plenty fortunate.)

But I was saying . . . Mobile . . . family . . . my absence from Philosterous-Nonesucherol . . . well, here is a poem in progress to help you get a feel . . .


And At the Mirror Each Time

Thia Grace made out like a bandit

Selling quarter lemonade to uncles

With only paper bills. Jesse lit three-

Foot rods from the sputtering

Citronella candle and twirled

In a spangle of sparks. We all swatted

Gnats and suffered the bough-sieved

Rain to watch the amateur display

Of rockets and mortars, to comment

On how the smoke should keep

The mosquitoes at bay.

But earlier, before the burgers

And gumbo, while kids splatted

Water-balloons and pranced in the blow-

Up princess pool, Annalyn and I—

My newest niece, her wretched uncle—

Trolled the house on doldrums.

And at the mirror each time, we paused

To gurgle and grin—our reflections

So grotesque and magnificent, so full

Of promise and repulsion.

And this thought . . .

What should I tell her now? Now that Earth

Is as good as flat? Now in the moments

Before she naps? Nothing.

Nothing except this is freedom. Nothing

Except we have done a great thing,

You and I, tight-roping the gamut,

You poised, me palled, we gnarled

In this two-hearted body.

Or just nothing. Just sway, whistle

Through teeth a tinny lullaby.

Swallow the words and hum.

Guard against explosions.

Gurgle and grin.