Notes from the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival

After a 2004 semi train wreck of a Dodge Poetry Festival somewhere in Princeton (redeemed by Edward Hirsch and Philip Levine after the weather, the parking and the trekking between tents tried to ruin what had always been a great experience), the Dodge returned to Waterloo Village. For me, Teacher Day was about dualities, what Tony Hoagland called dialectical poems and what Billy Collins referred to as “two-ness” or “double-ness.” These dualities carry in their kit bags the paradox, ambiguity and ambivalence – all the confused feelings – that belong to the realm of poetry and usually disturb us when we find them elsewhere.

I’ll start from the Main Stage, where Billy Collins did a late morning session. I’ve always liked Billy Collins, ever since I heard Bill McCarthy read “On Turning Ten” at a Connecticut Writing Project session. He’s disarming – Collins, that is – and for whatever reasons, some people can’t get past that, and assume that he’s not taking his craft or his ideas seriously. Hogwash.

In distinguishing between prose and poetry, Collins said that prose is a continuation of noise, while poetry is an interruption of silence. And after a few moments, I realized that whenever I read a Billy Collins poem, I am silent after the last word. At the end of “On Turning Ten,” for example, you are required to have a moment of silence. Maybe it’s the sounds of the poem itself that take you there, or maybe it’s the sympathy you have for the protagonist in the poem, or maybe it’s your own feeling that there’s some truth to the idea that you’re ET for a time and you shine when you’re cut, but at some point you, just like the rest of us, or I, just like the rest of you, bleeds when we’re cut. Whatever it is, the silence isn’t an absence of noise, but an active, noiseless movement of the mind.

Unlike some of the poets at the festival, Collins is very aware that his audience on Friday is teachers. His discussion of double-ness in poetry speaks to the dualities in the audience – people who love to read and perhaps write poetry, who also take upon themselves the responsibility to teach young people to read and perhaps write poetry. He began by giving his audience a number of definitions of poetry, all of which have embedded in them the tension that characterizes poetry. Here they are:

Poetry is:

“things that are true said in words that are beautiful” (Dante)
“musical thought” (Carlyle)
“emotion set to measure” (Hardy)
“the best words in the best order” (Coleridge)
“meaning that moves” (Rukeyser)
“dancing with attitude” (Bird – I have to confess, I don’t know if I got this one right)
“the clear expression of mixed feelings” (Auden)
“the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits” (Macleish)
“an arrangement of words written in lines whose length is determined by some principle other than the width of the page” (Henry Taylor) How ironic that blogger doesn't allow me to determine the length of my own line right now.

And I missed the ending of the Kenneth Koch “No dogs allowed on the beach” definition, but that was where he started to move to distinctions between prose and poetry. The upshot of this definition, which included some discussion of poodles and dachsunds, is that poetry elevates the prose statement into a condition of play.

Even the poetic act is an act of doubleness, he said. Yes, it’s true that both prose writers and poets write sentences; but the poet is writing a sentence and lines at the same time.

Anyway, all of these definitions do demonstrate that double-ness that Collins spoke to throughout his session, the tension that he talked about in a different tent six or eight years ago at the Dodge. While he elaborated expertly on each of these, I’ll spare you my paraphrasing unless it ever comes up naturally in conversation. I’ll leave this topic with a final sentence of his that seems appropriate for a leave-taking: Poetry appears when prose has been exhausted.

Still to come from Notes on the Dodge:
Non-poetic poetic influences
The absurdities of some teaching of poetry
Tony Hoagland’s wit, his observations about poetic “agendas” and dialectical poems, poorly reconstructed by me

Politics in Lord of the Flies

This ought to be fun. Prepare to laugh, to cry, to want to hug someone.

To appreciate the political subtext of Lord of the Flies, it is important to understand the way that the institutions of states reflect the worldview of their citizens. When Hobbes and Locke wrote their competing treatises on the relationships between mand and the state, they operated within an established economic context. Which kind of government – autocratic or democratic – was best suited to the task of maintaining and perhaps improving on the prosperity of England’s upper, middle and lower classes?

To Hobbes, who viewed life as nasty, brutish and short, and who viewed those who lived it as so base in their instincts that they could not subjugate their individual desires to a common good, the only means of maintaining stability was autocracy. If someone tells people what to do, then they’ll do it. And if they don’t want to do it, we’ll make them. Obedience to authority was the only way to save people from themselves. Locke’s view was different, but not opposite. He believed in the notion that people are blank slates (tabulae rasa), that they are created by experience. His view suggests that man is capable of creating and altering the conditions in which he lives, that man has an efficacy missing in Hobbes’ view.

In Lord of the Flies, the boys arrive on the island already familiar with the institutions of democracy. They are choir boys from a Christian school, well aware of their rank within their groups. They are familiar with family authority and civil authority. The institutions they know were created by man and can be altered by man – once another boy can sing C sharp, he can challenge Jack’s position in the choir. While Golding sets up a leadership conflict between the Hobbesian opportunist Jack and the ambivalent parliamentarian Ralph, it is the behavior of the citizens of the state, the worldview of those citizens, that is more important to the politics of the novel than is the leadership of the two main characters.

The boys immediately form a society featuring a separation between political and military power, and a division of labor into specialized tasks related to meeting short-term and long-term (infrastructure) needs. All of the variables that can be controlled are controlled, except the boys lack the means to enforce the rules they create for themselves, and the laziness and short attention span of youth combine with the variables we can’t control (fear, jealousy) to open a window of vulnerability for the exploitative Jack. And here is where the context of the Cold War rears its head.

How can we explain how democratic societies in Germany and Italy turned to embrace fascism, how totalitarianism was able to overtake whatever degree of liberty the people of central and eastern Europe had achieved? Golding suggests that the dissolution of social bonds is the necessary ingredient in the fall of man. Once I fail to realize that it is virtuous to help my brother, or at the very least, it can be in my self-interest to help my brother, I stop helping my brother. Once there are no economic institutions in place to help me see how my self-interest is connected to others’ self-interest, I will begin to care only about my self-preservation.

Witness, for example, the effects of the fall of the Roman Empire. Despite the many times the city of Rome had been sacked in the fifth century, historians assign 476 as the year of the fall, most likely because that is when the government stopped writing checks, so to speak. Once the central treasury stopped writing paychecks to the civil service employees who maintained the roads, once they stopped paying the police and tax collectors, the roads fell into disrepute and disrepair. If your cargo wasn’t hijacked on the way to Marseille, it was quite possibly damaged to the point where the transporting of goods from one place to another was no longer profitable. In a simplified version of cause and effect, the failure of the infrastructure isolates the cities, the institutions of the cities falter. When the cities can’t provide the specialized labor that allows people to pay for their basic needs – food, shelter – there is a migration back to farming and sustenance living. Cities and their outlying areas, located on waterways and roadways, start to fall victim to Moorish invasions in southern Europe and Viking invasions in northern Europe. Instability forces the small farmer to seek protection from a more powerful individual, and deals are struck which create the feudal system; in exchange for protection from violence, you get predictability. What you can predict is that you will pay a tax to me, pay me to use my mills, pay me for this and for that, and immerse your family in debt to mine for generations to come, perhaps for time immemorial.

Jack offers this protection with the irrational pledge that There is no beast, but if there is one, we’ll kill it. But Jack sweetens the pot with the attractions of fun and feasting. And what pre-tween wouldn’t prefer rolling rocks to building shelters? The littluns, blank slates written on by the beast and the pleasures of the flesh (I don’t sexualize their behavior; Golding does), are powerless to resist the twin temptations offered them by Jack, the ritualistic solutions to the mysteries of their world. Their selection of Jack is more reflective of the German people’s post-Versailles election of Hitler than the Russians’ acceptance of Stalin as their leader. In all cases, however, people living in uncertain circumstances endowed their leader with political, military and police powers. And in all cases, these political leaders led their citizens first to genocide and then to the brink of world destruction. Hitler spawns World War II with his aggression, which ultimately results in the development of atomic and nuclear weapons. Stalin’s leadership helps to create the Cold War. Jack’s leadership, made possible only by the littluns need for protection and their desire for fun, results in the destruction of not only the enemy but also themselves, at least until the deus ex machina ending which offers not the promise of salvation from war but a promise of the inevitability of it.

I can't seem to post an original poem without some little bit of commentary. I don't know if this is because I am tacitly apologizing for the poor quality of the poem as a means of protecting my ego (the truth is, I like this one a really lot), or if I'm deluding myself into thinking I'm on an episode of VH-1 Storytellers, the kind of music programming that network did before they started airing "The Flavor of Love." But who can blame them; after all, isn't Flavor-Flav every woman's dream? Isn't he the one for whom the saying, "Woman want him, and men want to be him" was invented?

But I digress. The intro distracts me from the seriousness of the poem.

So anyway, I put this poem in my notebook in the summer of 2001 during a week-long writing institute facilitated by Linda Miller, who is an absolutely fabulous facilitator of writing retreats and week-long writing institutes. She has the certain kind of "it" that can move a writer into places he or she might not think (or want) to go. This poem came from a series of prompts that included a listing of natural phenomena or geographic features. Every experience we have has its own geography, and somehow, Linda's prompting led me to a geyser, my only experience of which is video footage of Old Faithful. Some attention to the details of the video that rolls through my brain took me to that "ambivalent resistance" I mention in the poem. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that a note from my good pal Mary Smith validated something to me about either the poem or myself. I don't know why it's taken me more than five years to transcribe the poem from my notebook to the computer.

Thanks for putting up with my long-windedness.

Old Faithful

Whenever people visit –
family, friends, students –
you know they want the show.

So they surround me –
the iron railings keep them a safe distance –
and they urge, sometimes silently

Be funny
Be clever
Be quick

till my ambivalent resistance melts. Then,
from a place deep in my belly,
beneath the terrain that invites their treading,

I burst skyward, a glorious ephemeral spectacle
they can admire and discuss
as they leave, drizzled by my mist.

My audience satisfied,
I return to my subterranean comfort,
and you never see me where I most exist.

These U2 lyrics pop into my head way too often:

Jesus, Jesus help me
I’m alone in this world
and a fucked-up world it is, too.

Because my mother once game me a print-out of Bono’s speech to the National Council of Bishops, I figure that the bishops don’t disapprove of these lyrics, so neither should you.

Anyway, these words popped into my head once again as I read an incredible college essay by one of my favorite former students – yes, teachers have favorites, but not in some easy to explain way. In her essay she writes about the serious illness of a very close family member. She’s carrying what to me is an unimaginable burden for a 17 year-old, and she writes about it with a grace and insight that astonishes me.

What kills me about being a teacher is how little we actually know about kids, and how deeply affecting it is to learn about them. As an adult, I know that suffering is inevitable (see noble truth #1), and that it has value. The chain that I follow is this:

1. My father died, so we didn’t move to Florida as planned
2. My closest friends are friends from high school, which was in White Plains and not in Florida, which means that my friends would not be my friends if I had lived in Florida
3. I met my wife in White Plains, where I would not have been had I moved to Florida
4. My wife and I had our children, who we would not have had had I not met my wife, which I would not have done had I moved to Florida

Therefore, ergo and thusly, everything happens for a reason. And yet, that song keeps popping into my head.

Rationally, I understand suffering. If it doesn’t kill me, it makes me stronger. I’m a better person for having suffered, a better parent, a better teacher. But I still can’t bear to watch young people suffering, even when they’re strong enough to handle it, even when you know that they have support, that they’ll be able to make sense of what happens to them. It’s a lot easier to deal with your own problems than it is to watch the people you care about deal with theirs.

A fucked-up world it is too. Sometimes.

This is why you have to write thoughts down when you think them. Last night and this morning I knew there were lots of things I wanted to write about. Sitting here tonight with the girls not yet asleep upstairs, I can only think of one of them.

Yesterday’s Times magazine essay on satire, My Satirical Self, had a teaser – How making fun of absolutely everything is defining a generation – that suggested an indictment of satire. I wanted to read it so I could get angry at the narrow-mindedness of the attack and then acknowledge the truth underneath it. But the essay was thoughtfully written, at least until the misplaced critique of POTUS at the end. The author, Wyatt Mason, praises the intelligent satire of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and uses those pieces to contrast the news consuming temperaments of baby boomers and post-boomers.

Before there was Jon Stewart, there was Doonesbury and Not Necessarily the News on HBO. My interest in politics – as a tween, I used to deliver political flyers for state legislature candidates – led me to Doonesbury in the comics section of the paper, and my love of history made me buy the Doonesbury books so I could enjoy Trudeau’s takes on the Vietnam War and Watergate. I remember the snob appeal of Doonesbury, the sense that I understood a joke that a lot of kids my age wouldn’t understand. And when I read Garry Trudeau’s quote about the popularity of his strip, “People who get their politics from the funny pages get what they deserve at the polls,” I felt that maybe I understood the limits of satire.

I think that what I’m concerned about these days, with so much satire in the media, and so many news shows that may as well be satire – Hannity & Colmes, Greta van Susteren, Rita Cosby, Nancy Grace – is that too many people are getting their politics from lampoon shows. If that’s the case, then people can be more passive about politics; they don’t have to have their own convictions if they can recognize when others’ convictions are being mocked. But my concern might be colored more by my worried perspective as a father and a teacher than any reality about youthful political awareness. After all, Emily Jones is only a few months out of college. So there’s hope for us all.

The Mets are about to clinch the NL East. It’s exciting to watch. Makes me wish I were in Queens right now, or at least in a bar surrounded by other Met fans. Come October, there’s only one NL team capable of beating the American League champ, whoever it may be. And I hope I’m with other Met fans when I watch that game.

Despite the initial attempt at levity, this one isn’t amusing. But here goes.

I often amuse myself by imagining putting one persona in a place where it doesn’t belong. Here’s a for example: back in the day, before I had kids, I could get a little wound up in basketball practice. And I confess that my taste in gym vocabulary tends toward Coach Krzyzewski. So some players and I would laugh about the way I might carpet f-bomb some poor sophomore who continued to use a comma where a semi-colon was necessary. “Didn’t we go over semi-colons? Every f-ing day we talk about semi-colons! And what do you do? You use a f-ing comma here and an f-ing comma there and there isn’t a single g-d-m semi-colon in the entire f-ing paper!” If you don’t know my voice, it’s not that funny, but if you do, I think it’s worth maybe more than a chuckle. Anyway, the diatribe continues, but you get the drift.

Today I imagined myself teaching Emma’s first grade CCD class. I would start by asking the little ragamuffins to draw a picture of evil. They’d most likely be befuddled, not having given much thought to evil, and expecting to sing something like “Jesus loves the little children, all the little children of the world. Red or yellow, black or white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.” But homey don’t play that in my CCD class. Instead, I’d make the assignment a little more concrete. I’d tell them to think of the nice Muslim boy or girl in their public school class, and draw a picture of him or her. And then I’d explain that, according to the Pope (who said something in prepared remarks that required an apology – so much for papal infallibility), the ideas of Islam are evil and inhuman, so too must be those who practice it.

Of course, that’s a facile summary of Pope Benedict’s remarks, but most people, especially those who are looking for a reason to pick a fight with you, like facile summaries. And my little response to the problem is just as disproportionate as my response to the fictional semi-colon abuser. But can’t you deplore jihad without calling the ideas of a religion, one whose Abraham is your Abraham, whose Moses is your Moses, whose Allah is your Yhwh, “evil and inhuman”? Personally, I’m uncomfortable with the Vatican looking back to the Crusades for guidance on modern Christian – Muslim relations. And I wonder if such a view will be advanced the day the College of Cardinals looks beyond Europe for its spiritual leader.

When Cardinal Ratzinger was named Pope, I was nervous about the public face of the Church. In one of my first moments of religious consciousness, back in 1984, I identified Cardinal Ratzinger, then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the Inquisition, I was told), as a person to be feared. At that time, he was calling the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff to the carpet to explain Boff’s positions regarding the application of principles of faith to modern political circumstances. Boff and his kind, priests trying to establish Christian communities and encouraging the spread of literacy as a means of increasing the political power of the Latin American peasantry, were told to stop ministering as they were ministering. Some were excommunicated, because, and here’s another oversimplification, they had mixed politics with theology. The implications of such a mixture are understandably threatening: how can the eternal teachings of the church remain eternal if they are constantly interpreted through the lens of shifting political realities?

But then why would the Cardinal oppose Turkey’s entry into the European Union, on the grounds that such a move – inviting a Muslim country to join forces with the oldest Christian nations – would endanger Europe’s strength? If it’s wrong to oppose the use of Catholic Church resources to protect the political rights of the poor, then why is it right to use Church influence to support the economic interests of the powerful?

It would make my mother happier if I were less conflicted, but I’m not. Sorry, mom.

So let’s skim a few stones across the surface of Lake Blog:

Honestly, I did not watch any of “Rock Star: Supernova” except for ten minutes of the Grand Finale last night. So don’t think that my observation here reflects dedicated hours of attention to reality television. Here’s what I learned:

To be cool, you have to say bitch a lot. As in, “Yo, I need to rock this bitch now.” You also have to say that everything kicks ass. I don’t mind saying that something is kick-ass every now and again, but if you’re on a television show that will make you a rock star, then you have to say “That kicks ass, bitch” over and over again. And you have to do it in prime time on network television. And then your network news department has to run pieces that lament the decline of American culture.

Even Comedy Central keeps Dave Chappelle in a box until later in prime time. And it’s kind of disappointing hearing the rock stars say bitch over and over again after you’ve heard Dave Chappelle use the word with such mastery. In fact, they ought to retire the word bitch and leave only a sound clip of Dave Chappelle’s voice as a reminder of the beauty and power of the term.

That was an active stone.

So yes, I’m rockin’ some product in the salt-and-pepa today. After Jimmy Z activated a man crush at Roman and Reka’s wedding with his new approach to male grooming, I felt that I might try a little product in my own hair. Got something to say? Ya betta check yaself.

Of course, I stood in the rain for ten minutes, possibly to express some buyer’s remorse over said product application.

Aren’t I versatile in use of language?

Why Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker essay bugs me, but first, a few things worth mentioning but not developing:

How sad is it that my work email returns any missive that contains profanity? No f-bombs thanks to the profanity filter, not even in essay drafts where the word might serve a purpose. No wonder I never get any of my mother’s emails.

Do major league baseball stadiums keep pitch counts on the scoreboard so the fans can all pretend they’re managers?

At what point will America tire of “To Catch a Predator?”

And now, your feature presentation.

So let me get this straight, Malcolm Gladwell: You get the Hendrik Hertzberg essay in the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker, and you waste it with the most ill-informed, ill-conceived essay ever to occupy that section of the magazine. And this only weeks after you wrote that great article about the Irish economic miracle and dependency ratios.

For those of you who didn’t read the piece, Mr. Gladwell seems to be addressing the case of Rhett Bomar, the former University of Oklahoma who got paid tens of thousands of dollars for a no-show job. Nobody in sports thinks that any D-I athlete is a naïf, ignorant of the corrupt boosters and crooked programs that have turned the NCAA into the asinine, overreactive and plodding organization it is. But Mr. Gladwell seems to have missed the last thirty years of college sports. Good thing he writes about it. According to the essay, Bomar’s dismissal from Oklahoma’s football team is too strong a punishment, as if compliance with NCAA rules, especially at a university currently feeling NCAA sanctions because of violations in its basketball programs, had never come up in any conversations between Bomar and his coaches. Bomar sold himself to a booster for a few thousand dollars, and in doing so, jeopardized the careers of every player on his team, and threatened the number of scholarships available to future students. And Oklahoma released him as a pre-emptive strike before the NCAA investigation. But Gladwell treats him as a rube from Hicktown who couldn’t possibly know the difference between right and wrong, and so shouldn’t be held responsible for his actions.

I used the word “seems” in the preceding paragraph because he may be using the Bomar story to advance a “boys will be boys, so why hold them accountable for bad behavior” thesis. He uses the story of Robert Oppenheimer’s attempt to poison a teacher who hadn’t given him enough attention as a way of warning us against punishing gifted people for their misdoings. I suppose Gladwell felt that OJ’s Heisman Trophy and NFL rushing records justified his acquittal from killing Nicole and Ron.

It seems crazy as we witness the deterioration of civility in American society to suggest that we should approve of excessive drinking and fighting, but Gladwell does just that. I don’t really object to the idea that he can make that argument, but when he makes it in the space where Hendrik Hertzberg advances eloquent arguments relative to the big political events of the week. (I don’t necessarily have the same politics as Hertzberg – or Frank Rich for that matter – but you can count on both to write well-informed, well-reasoned columns, whether you agree with them or not.) Hopefully, the New Yorker will keep Gladwell’s personal observations in the more trivial places toward the tail of the Talk.

This is my surrender.

I think I need to officially give up on the idea that I might write this blog as an independent person; the blogger is mostly Mr. McAteer and only partly Mike, liberal sprinkler of sarcasm and profanity.

What has driven me to this conclusion? My reluctance to offend, I suppose. I’m a registered Independent, possibly so I can criticize both aisles in the Capitol without betraying my party, yet I hold my tongue, so to speak, when it comes to printing my political points of view. The only explanation I can come up with is that I don’t want to offend any of my students, don’t want to drive a wedge, however subtle, between them and the work we do, don’t want them to confuse what I think with what I teach.

Yet at the same time, I don’t want the blog to be a teaching tool. I know that I plan to sneak classroom content here because that is much of what I think about. Maybe this means that I see a lot of personal relevance in the content of the classroom, or maybe it’s just inevitable that I would write, as one former student put it, the “geekiest blog I’ve ever seen.” The blog is the apple, and I am the tree, I think she is implying.

If I were a true blogger, I’d be commenting right now on the President’s speech, spouting some opinion about his laying claim to the legacies of FDR and Truman, his comparison of the war in Iraq to WWII. But I’m not. I’m only masquerading as a blogger. Still, I’ll figure out how to keep it interesting from time to time. But let me be bugged by something here. It is impossible to watch ABC’s “The Path to 9/11,” not because I’m an angry Clintonista, or because it just seems wrong to fictionalize the actions and words of real people and claim some kind of narrative license. It’s just that the directing sucks. Maybe the cameramen shouldn’t have been overloaded with Red Bull and Jolt cola; they might have been able to stop shaking and we might have been able to actually follow the story. Please, hold one shot for more than five seconds. Between the mega close-ups, the ridiculous camera angles, the artful and obscuring colors that represent violence and suffering and the efforts of every actor to be Jack Bauer, the whole thing seems like parody, which wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t trying to create true history for the many Americans who get their history from TV shows and movies.

I’m looking forward to it not being September 11 for another 365 days. It’s too much to think about.

Sayonara, Summer

‘Tis true that summer doesn’t end for almost two weeks, but this evening we bid summer an official adieu after our final afternoon at the pool. By we, I’m referring to Emma, Kate and I, who spent our last moments on the diving board, the water slide and the three-foot steps before we again broach the crystal depths in May ’07.

So what should the feeling be as we move our minds into fall? Should there even be a feeling or should we just do the next thing that comes up? I’m not sure I want to create a photo album of the summer, or pitch a marker to officially celebrate Kate’s graduation to the big pool from the kiddie pool, or the throwing off of Emma’s training wheels. We’re not really photo or video people here, and I don’t know if it means we’re unsentimental or not. Our failure to take full advantage of image capture technology is long-lasting: we went on our honeymoon in August and didn’t finish the roll of film in the camera until Christmas.

In Annie Dillard’s essay, “Seeing,” which I had not read until it was required of me this summer, she wrote of the dispensability of the camera, its tendency to distort experience into something it’s not. I’ve always shared that sentiment in some way. I’ve never felt, “Oh, the girls look so cute today, all dressed up for the beach. I need to take a picture to show Grandma.” In fact, I’ve thought just the opposite, no offense to Grandma. I have felt, “This moment is a very nice moment to behold, and I’d like to store it myself for what it is, and I won’t take a picture to try to resuscitate what I’m feeling right now.”

But maybe that’s just my generation, or even just my crowd. It can’t really be my generation, because of the number of parents who have the digital camera or video camera as fixtures around their necks at first days of school, soccer games and brises. And if webshots and photobucket and such didn’t belong to the other generation, then I’m sure lots of parents would post those pictures all over the place so that everyone could share the joy in their moments. Perhaps I’m just selfish.

If anyone asks you what freewriting is, tell them this is. I meant to write about the pool and the ends of eras, and I ended up where I ended up. Go figure.

Five, No, Three Things I Hate About Me

The list keeps getting shorter. First, I was going to follow the movie title, but that seems like too much work, so I halved it. Five seemed like a fair number, not too self-loathing, but complete enough for a self-inflicted ass-whipping. But then I thought, who am I kidding? I just don’t hate myself that much, or at least most of the parts I hate never left high school or my underclass dorm.

Nevertheless, a commitment is a commitment, no matter how attenuated it may be.

#1 (I realize this ruins the suspense, but if you were in a countdown sort of suspense mode, then you need to go for a walk and think about things.)

#1: Cowardice, aka, my need to be “cool”
I put cool in quotes because this despicable part of myself is based on my irrational interpretation of what others would think is cool. You could translate cool as “just clever enough,” “just cynical enough,” or if you want to go back to those dorm years, “drinks a lot, dude.” It’s not that I’ve ever gone around acting as if I were always being watched; it’s just that whenever one of my frailties might have been exposed – my self-consciousness about appearance, my self-consciousness about money, the possibility that my peers might think I was capable of introspection, or that I had access to a full range of emotions – I started the song-and-dance routine that might distract the audience from the thing that was right in front of them.

Some details to support the point: I’ve told people the story of my experience at the Connecticut Writing Project, but I’ll tell you again anyway. It was 1998, I was 32, married, and ostensibly grown up. During one week of the institute, I worked on a poem about my father’s sudden death in 1977. I had never written about it, and I don’t know why. I just know that when the opportunities arose – for example, during an undergraduate Creative Writing class – I chose to write witty repartee about Budweiser instead of pursuing anything that might have helped me solve the mystery of death and dying and the aftermath. So I committed to two things I’d avoided in my past: writing a poem and writing about my father. The writing of the poem was a great experience (as was pretty much everything associated with CWP), and I have pages and pages and pages of words and lines that ended up in a 16-line poem. You can read it below.

But then I was ambushed by my cowardice. On my way to the printer to pick up the poem I’d sweated over day and night for a week, I glanced at someone’s computer screen and saw a few lines of a pastoral kind of poetry. Not that I have anything against nature or against her admirers, but two lines immediately popped into my head: “Fields, fields, I want to spit./How can poets write this shit?” Inspired as I was by my use of profanity (so rare for me), I sat back down at my computer and in fifteen minutes dashed off sixteen lines that contained the kind of social commentary that demonstrated that I was just clever enough, just cynical enough (I guess I’d grown out of the need for drinks a lot, dude, so that’s at least some progress).

About an hour later, we were meeting as a group to share our work. Guess which piece I shared: the personal poem I’d labored over for a week, in whose completion I felt immeasurable personal satisfaction, or the witty little ditty I slapped together in a trice.

Time’s a tickin’. Guess.

You probably got it right. But fortunately, a couple of friends from my writing group didn’t let me get off that easily. They, who had been patient and helpful with regard to my missteps and confusions during the course of the writing of the poem, asked me to read the first poem. So I did. It’s nice to know that it’s possible, with a little help, to overcome one’s cowardice.

Herewith the poems, if you have the patience.


Last Night

Hey Dad you wanna have a catch?
Sorry, son, I’m tired.
I never knew just what it was
About him I admired.

I love you, son, he said to me
As I headed up the stairs.
I didn’t think to plead for him
As I said my bedtime prayers.

That night I slept and so did he,
Just one of us awoke.
I searched for answers everywhere
But God, he never spoke.

On rainy days I think about
The path I’ve tried to follow,
A road on which he’s guided me
To look hopefully tomorrow.


Value of the Century

Trees, schmees! I want to spit.
How can poets write this shit
about nature, grass and lovely things,
about does and fawns, a bird who sings?

Why can’t poets feel what’s real,
like a merger or investment deal?
Why obsess ‘bout God’s green earth,
not cars or clothes or my net worth?

Get thee to the Wharton School!
Make sense of your life, you fool!
There you’ll hear what really matters,
not baby’s cries and pitter-patters.

And when they’re done you’ll surely know
the value of my portfolio
the evidence of my success,
the character that it reflects.


Later, I tried to make this poem more worthwhile. In a poetry class at Wesleyan, I tried to add something resembling a refrain to the poem so that it was less smart-ass and perhaps more reflective of the tension between childhood innocence and the experience of our culture.


Value of the Century

See the children play in the trees.
Boys with bruised shins, girls with skinned knees.

Trees, schmees! I want to spit.
How can poets write this shit
about nature, grass and lovely things,
about does and fawns, a bird who sings?

See the children lined up by rows,
Boys wearing caps, girls wearing bows.

Why can’t poets feel what’s real,
like a merger or investment deal?
Why obsess ‘bout God’s green earth,
not cars or clothes or my net worth?

See the children lined up by height,
Boys to the left, girls to the right.

Get thee to the Wharton School!
Make sense of your life, you fool!
They’ll teach you there what really matters,
not baby’s breath and pitter-patters.

See the children lined up by pair,
Boys flexing muscles, girls brushing hair.

And when they’re done you’ll surely know
the value of my portfolio
the evidence of my success,
the character that it reflects.

See the children lined up by rank,
Passing by trees on the way to the bank.



At some point in the future, I’ll get to thing #2: My need to always be right (which, no irony intended, really bothers me).

Reuse and Recycle

It’s been a long time since I’ve experienced a consistent burst of creative writing activity. Part of what I’m going to do in this blog is recycle pieces from old notebooks to, if nothing else, get them out of my notebooks. But more importantly, I think I want to see if the publishing of those pieces inspires new thought about them. I hope you’ll bear with me as I reflect on the circumstances which lead me to the pieces posted here.

So here’s one that I found. I wrote it during a class on September 15 last year (that’s why we put dates on things, I suppose) when we scrapped whatever plan we had for the beginning of class and went outside to experience the immediate sensory aftermath of a soft rainshower.

It’s not just the smell
of rain
that makes me want to stop time.
I love the grayness of the smell,
the way it tastes like metal,
how if you hold the smell
to your forehead
it would cool you
and relieve the dizziness
wrought by the nighttime’s humidity.
But the sound of the rain is time
in all its forms.
In its falling it’s participial,
part of the sound you can hear
when you close your ears
to blot out the sounds of the present
tense active voice.
No, it’s not just the smell of rain
that makes me want to stop time.
It’s the smell of fresh cut grass,
the perfect orb of orange sun
in the foglifting eastern sky,
the laying down of the same sun
on a bed of clouds in the west,
the caress of the air in the summer dusk
when I’m seventeen
and nothing, not even the wind,
can touch me.

To tell you the truth, this is one of the relatively few pieces I've written that I like in an early draft. My most urgent priority is to improve the line "wrought by the nighttime's humidity," which has at least two problems as far as I'm concerned.

Not that I’m trawling for gifts here, but the best present I have received as a teacher came from Helena Clauss back in 2000 when she gave me a book of Borges’ Collected Fictions. I found the word choice – fictions – intriguing, because I’m used to untrue brief narratives being referred to as short stories. But the imagination that characterizes Borges’ writing defies such easy characterization. I immediately fell in love with his character sketches – The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan, The Uncivil Teacher of Etiquette Kotsuke na Suke – and then the one-page ruminations such as In Memoriam JFK; Borges and I; and Inferno, V, 32.

Then, the same way that you start to notice something you’ve never seen before after you find out what it’s called, I started to see Borges’ poems in anthologies. Pretty soon, I had bought his Collected Poems, Collected Non-fictions, his lecture series This Craft of Verse and a book of Conversations.

Originally, I was drawn to the way Borges asks me to reconsider notions of time and space. So many of his stories deviate from the normal rules of linear time that you can’t possibly believe them to be true, but you then – okay, maybe not you, but I then – think, maybe things can work that way. So much that we chalk up to coincidence may be caused by something we don’t understand, so many times we refer to the idea of déjà vu when we are possibly talking about actual experience that defies the physical rules of time. Read the passage through the worlds of Tlon, Uqbar and Urbis Terris, or about the Kings and their Labyrinths, and you’ll rethink the nature of causation. Read The Encounter (or The Meeting, depending on the translation) and you’ll rethink the old saying, Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.

A few years ago, I picked up This Craft of Verse, and it was so damn…satisfying. Maybe comforting. This man, who I (for what it’s worth) would consider one of the true geniuses of the twentieth century, talks about poetry, about himself, about writing, with such humility and grace that I don’t even want to question what he says. He doesn’t take the mystery out of poetry; instead, he makes you want to embrace it. Rather than asking you to figure out the poems you like and then express your figuring in a way that might make another person understand their meaning or their beauty, he asks you to experience a poem, to feel it… no, to know it in a way that maybe you can’t explain, but in a way that is uniquely yours. I’ll give the first lecture, The Riddle of Poetry, to my seniors, but you have to know Borges’ work to have a true appreciation for the precision and, here’s that word again, grace of his words.

At the end of each year, my seniors have done an author study project, and each year, those who choose Borges (and Wislawa Szymborska, for that matter) develop a felt sense for the possibilities of the imagination and the written word.

Read your Borges.