Mark Doty

NYC: Do I contradict myself? Very well then...

2012-01-26T14:02:00.000-08:00

Tuesday was the first day of school, and a memorably trying one. I was running late after a morning appointment, missed the train I meant to take to New Brunswick, then hopped onto one scheduled to get me to the train station exactly fifteen minutes before the first meeting of my nonfiction workshop. After a bit of fiddling with the doors, and back-and-forth talk by the conductors over their intercom system -- which for some reason is designed to let everyone hear whatever they have to say to each other -- we pulled out of the station. Slowly. And we didn't get any faster. Then a halt in the tunnel. Start up, speed up, halt before the drawbridge outside of Newark. Start up, speed up, halt: the pattern will be familiar to all riders of New Jersey Transit, where such meltdowns happen at least weekly, to the point where it doesn't seem accurate to call them "meltdowns." They're the order of the day.

I was fifteen minutes late to class, no time to copy syllabus or hand-out, so we just winged it and talked, and the students were (not suprisingly) eager and smart, and happy to be there, so it was all fine.

Later in the day I showed up for my poetry workshop and began to teach a class while the students looked at me with rather bewildered expressions, a collective skepticism I didn't understand until their professor walked in. Pure humiliation. Much later, I sat on an A train -- the express -- while it was parked in Penn Station, watching local train after local train whizz by.

So I arrived home around ten in a thoroughly vile mood, having been out since ten that morning, and Ned and I headed out for a walk around the block. We were strolling on Sixth, under a new, Martian-looking arrangement of scaffolding and brilliant flourescent lights, when Ned decided there was something of paramount interest close to the curb, and ambled over to look. He didn't hurry, and there was no one near us, as far as I knew. But when we got to the curb, a middle-aged woman in tightish black sweats and a stocking cap walked by, and somehow I could feel hostility radiating from her, even though she walked right past and I could only see her back.

I thought, I'm just making this up. Then she turned around and said, with an anger that probably had very little to do with me as an individual, "You acting stupid."

My day had been rough enough to prevent me from thinking before I spoke. With no hesitation I spat back "Fuck you! Be polite."

She muttered something and kept going. It was only when I got around the corner that I started to laugh, realizing that I'd uttered, without thinking, a quintessentially New York statement, the paired contradiction just exactly the everyday sentiment of Metropolis: Fuck you, be polite. Couldn't be more New York, especially if it strikes you as funny thirty seconds after you say it.

An Exemplary Sentence (2)

2012-01-13T06:17:00.001-08:00

This one comes from Robert Hass, from "Consciousness," concerned with the complicated, branching, elusive nature of awareness. It may help to know that the sentence before this one is "My mind went seven places at once." Then there's a space-break, followed by this, which is both a study of awareness and a demonstration of one way thinking moves:

One place was a line of ridge somewhere in a dry Western landscape just after sundown, I saw a pair of coyotes appear suddenly on the ridge edge and come to a loping stop and sniff the air and look down toward a valley in the moonlight, tongues out in a way that looks to us like happiness, though it isn't necessarily; I suppose they were an idea of mammal consciousness come over the event horizon in some pure form, hunter-attention, life-in-the-body attention.

An Exemplary Sentence

2011-12-27T16:28:00.000-08:00

This from Joan Didion's new BLUE NIGHTS:You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors.

New Years Resolution/Messiah on the NewsHour

2011-12-23T19:46:00.001-08:00

One of several resolutions for the new year: blow the dust from this six-month neglected blog, which, after a summer break, I began to miss. There's something appealing about the form, the public notebook/scrapbook/commonplace book. It's been crowded out during a crazy, overwhelming time.

Begin again with this: the people at PBS NewsHour have produced a beautiful bit of video for the holiday. I went down to DC and read my poem "Messiah (Christmas Portions)," with a terrific film crew in attendance, at an Episcopal Church in Tenleytown. I have a longstanding distrust of "illustrating" poems in practically any fashion; usually I'd prefer to let the words do the work they were made for. But what producer Anne Davenport and her fellow PBS staffers made here delights me; the poem seems opened out to a wider audience, and the editing's so intelligently done that I don't even notice the cuts in the text made for time's sake. Four minutes on the evening news? What more could a poet ask for -- at least when it comes to speaking in the social space.

from PBS NewsHour, 12/21/11

Watching this the first time, on television here in the Springs on Wednesday night, I was taken back to the Provincetown church where I heard the town Choral Society give the performance the poem describes. I went, in truth, because there was a guy in the chorus I liked who'd invited me, and I had the impression that he was asking me on a date; in fact, I think he was just beefing up the audience. But in truth my pleasure was not dented by the fact that he wasn't interested. All these years later, the poem has another life, removed from its occasion, which is exactly what ought to happen: the originating scene erodes, vanishes in time, and the poem becomes, if one's lucky, free to belong to anyone.

Summer, screech owls, spiders, and WHAT IS AMAZING

2011-07-28T05:53:00.001-07:00

Summer feels like no time to blog, as the distance in time between the last post and this one will attest. i want to be out in the garden, or under the high loose canopy of leaves out back, where the shadows of branches vein the slope of grass. I love it there; it's a place where the mind wants to drift downward toward the moles in their tunnels, or up toward the new screech owl nesting box I've hung fifteen feet or so off the ground. Still empty, I think, though the other night I heard the underwater ripple of their call, after twilight, from the woods behind my neighbor's house, its piercing quality softened bit by distance. Maybe it'll be next year before they find the box. The little round opening and the pile of cedar shavings for nest-making await.

I've been reading a fine new book of poems by Heather Christle called WHAT IS AMAZING; it will be out from Wesleyan 'ere long. Heather's collection is making me think about poetry as a vessel of subjectivity. Maybe one of the art's functions is to record something of what it feels like to be alive in any particular moment; it's almost accidental, for the poet, that this inscription becomes historical, preserving an aspect of the spirit of the age. Think of Frank O'Hara, and the way those remarkable present-tense poems, dedicating to transcribing the motions of eye, mind and heart in the moment, seem timeless. They're happening right now, as you read them, but they also a moment of consciousness in New York in the 1950s in a crystalline form.

Christle's book feels very particular to the 21st century, but I haven't been able to articulate to myself just how this is so. Because they're notations of awareness, both private and public at once? Because they're tentative, like pages from a secret notebook, and also oddly bold, artfully earning the reader's allegiance and bringing us into alignment with the writer's way of seeing? Because the speaker feels like a kind of psychic seismograph, recording the major and minor tremors that ripple through her awareness?

Well, what you see above is me thinking my way towards a blurb, trying to find my way to some kind of reasonably intelligent formulation about challenging work that I love. Challenging to describe, I mean, which is what a good blurbs does. Praise is easy, but the work of actually articulating what a poet seems to be up to is a whole other task.

Anyway, here's a poem from the book, one I think is just extraordinary.

THE SPIDER

The spider he is confused
b/c I am not killing him
only moving him outdoors
When I die I do not want
to feel confused
Please I would rather feel clarity
like I am a pool
and death a chlorine tablet
I want it to feel
not like I am dying
but am being transferred
to the outside
And I hope I do not drown
as I have seen happen
to hundreds of spiders
b/c I love to swim
and to drown would
wreck swimming
for a long time
But death is like none of this
I know that death is a tower
standing in the middle of the town
And the tower receives
many visits
And there's no one
but spiders inside

Sign of Summer

2011-06-01T06:47:00.001-07:00

The quotes are my favorite part.

The First of June

2011-06-01T06:45:00.000-07:00

My garden in the Springs, looking riotous, 6/1/11.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

2011-05-30T18:02:00.000-07:00

Saturday in Sag Harbor Paul and I saw Werner Herzog's new film about the ancient paintings in the Chauvet Cave, in the south of France. The paintings themselves are riveting and fresh; somehow they seem both haunting and surprisingly stylish-- as if they were sophisticated mid-twentieth century representations of animals instead of 30,000 year old paintings on the walls of a deep, long-sealed cavern. They are the oldest paintings in the world, and they represent only animals -- horses, bison, mammoths, antelope -- with the exception of one partial human female body.

It's too bad the movie isn't better. It feels like Herzog never figured out quite what to do with these images, besides point the camera at them and let us marvel along with him. That's sufficient for a while, but the nature of film is motion, and the nature of ekphrasis is transformation. It's never enough for one work of art to simply present another; what we require from poetry or lyric prose or film based in a work of art is a kind of active engagement which places that work in a new context, gets inside it, turns it inside out, somehow involves us in the process of knowing. We want to be involved with someone else's coming to terms; we want the work of art about the work of art to do something we couldn't do by ourselves.

And that's the trouble, finally, with the movie --you could have just as rich an experience looking at slides of the paintings in a darkened room, and there are a great many questions about the work that Herzog doesn't ask. Why are there only animals here ? What were the paintings for? Were they made to be seen, as a communal experience, or were they made by a solitary artist going down into the dark and working alone? Were they acts of art or acts of magic or of both? Do the grace and wit and power of these paintings have something to say about the notion of progress or development? And should we say that "we" made these, in our earliest history, or are the makers of this art so far from us as not to be part of a "we" at all; are they entirely other?

Of course these questions aren't answerable; it doesn't seem there's very much we can know about these pictures. But they seem endlessly provocative, and they trouble the mind like some lost part of our own memory.

Now that it's been a couple of days, I've mostly forgotten my frustration with the film, and what lingers is the memory of those images, especially the four horses lined up one behind the other, with their open mouths and wide eyes. Paul thinks that some art is made to be satsifying in the moment, and some made to resonate in memory, and that these different modes of making represent different styles and values. I didn't like Cave of Forgotten Dreams, but I won't forget it. You can look up Goggle images of "Chauvet Cave," and you'll see why.

Fame and Notoriety in Little Rock

2011-05-19T15:32:00.000-07:00

Thursday morning, a new experience. First leg of a day's journey to Little Rock, Arkansas. I'd made it, a little groggily, from home to Penn Station to New Jersey Transit to the AirTrain. I checked in at Terminal B and found my way to my concourse. I waited in a short security line holding my boarding pass and my driver's license. When I got to the front of the line, I handed the youngish, open-faced woman with dark red hair the required stuff. She said, "Mark Doty the poet?"

I said, "How did you know that?" and she replied, "I'm a huge fan, it's an honor," and waved me on. Now I've had readers say hello in restaurants and on the street, and occasionally I discover that someone who seems to be cruising me is actually an excited poetry reader. But the TSA? I dislike the entire system of surveillance, and I worry about how easily we've said yes to whatever we're told needs to be done for our protection. Sometimes it seems like the TSA exists simply in order to keep us alarmed, so we'll cede power to the state. But I have to say this did put the whole thing in a brighter light.

Before you think I'm just basking in the light of readership, here's part two of the story. That evening I was welcomed to Little Rock by my warm and lively hosts at the library, who brought me to the nicely-appointed room where i'd be reading. There were a few early audience members already there, and one or two looked up eagerly when we came in. A man asked me to sign a book; as I was walking past the front row to go fetch a pen, a woman greeted me and said she'd seen my face on the current issue of APR. "There was your mug, right on the cover," she said. And then, "I like some of those new poems, and some, of course, I do not."

I didn't question her about this, though I might have if I'd really wanted to have the conversation. It was the "of course" that did it. A couple of the new poems have to do with substance abuse and recovery. There is no explicit reason to assume that the first person speaker in the poems is me; after all one of the poems in this same group of new pieces is spoken by a baby mammoth who's been dead for forty thousand years. But people assume that "I" means "I", and there's a certain degree of truth to it. Whether an experience is literally ours or not, we make it so, finding in it a way for something in ourselves to be spoken that might not otherwise be articulated. There's a poem in Anne Sexton's second book, an elegy for her brother who died in the Korean War. It's not her best poem, but it's a moving one, and the reader who's interested enough to dig for biographical information will discover that Sexton never had a brother. The poem's a fiction, but one that was clearly necessary for getting at some emotional truth.

What difference does it make, the relationship between the poem and the biography of the poet? I'll be the first to say that I'm terrifically interested in poets' lives, but a poem is not a report on an experience. A poem can't really be "about" drug use or recovery; it has to create an experience in language, and then to reach inside that language in the direction of making meaning. If a poem merely tells us a story -- well, is it a poem at all?

In truth I don't care what the reader in Little Rock thinks about my life or what she assumes about me. Are those poems autobiographical? I don't believe in the question. I'm not trying to be coy, it's just that I think that making such assumptions about anyone's work is not a helpful way of reading. What keeps bothering me is that "of course." Is it an automatic response, to dislike a poem that talks about what it's like to experience the unsustainable ecstatic produced by getting high? Or a poem that names the commonality of the pain of people in rehab? That "of course" posits a stable set of middle-class values, shared by readers, that the poet had better be aware of. And is that what we want poetry to do, reinforce our agreed upon standards, shore up the moral principles of enlightened readers? Ugh. If that's the project, I'm not playing.

And so, fame in Newark is balanced by being notorious in Little Rock. I'm okay with it.

In Shakespeare

2011-04-04T09:39:00.001-07:00

Here's a beautiful poem by James Richardson, with his signature mix of apparently casual wit turning effortlessly into something darker and incisive. This is from THE NEW YORKER, back in February 0f 2007, but I ran across it just today and found it so pleasurable and so acute that I wanted to post it here.

IN SHAKESPEARE

In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass
as you would expect. People confuse
their consciences with ghosts and witches.
Old men throw everything away
because they panic and can’t feel their lives.
They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,
cliffs, lightning, and die—yes, finally—in glad pain.

You marry a woman you’ve never talked to,
a woman you thought was a boy.
Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows
once, twice. Your children are lost,
they come back, you don’t remember how.
A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue
comes back to life. Oh God, it’s all so realistic
I can’t stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.

Such a relief, to burst from the theatre
into our cool, imaginary streets
where we know who’s who and what’s what,
and command with Metrocards our destinations.
Where no one with a story struggling in him
convulses as it eats its way out,
and no one in an antiseptic corridor,
or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains,
staggers through an Act that just will not end,
eyes burning with the burning of the dead.

Moonlight, Dog, Bell

2011-03-20T00:30:00.000-07:00

It's three in the morning in the Springs, on the night of March 20, when the moon's at the perigee of its orbit, as close to the earth as it gets. Ned -- who is now nearly eleven months old -- woke me up a little while ago with a paw on my shoulder. I got out of bed and walked to the door to let him out in the garden, and a clutch of perceptions happened all at once. First, the moonlight was wonderfully bright, a foggish glow like theatrical lighting. Second, something was happening just outside the gate, where I'd piled a big stack of euonymous branches from a tall spindly shrub I'd just put out of its misery. Deer think this plant is beyond delicious, something I'd understood better when i cut the branches that had been stripped to the heighta doe could reach. I kept noticing a sweet, lightly spicy scent, like a much watered-down odor of carnations.

Just as I registered that a deer I could hear but not see was just a few feet away, grazing on the leaves, Ned did too, and the deer noticed us; it must have leapt and turned -- I heard the strike of hooves on gravel once and then the faintest sound of hurry, gone almost before it was there. Ned has been in the vicinity of any number of deer and never really paid attention. Until recently he's been absorbed in his puppyish ways, playing with a stick or chasing a leaf while a doe ambled twenty feet away on the path. Not long ago we slowed down in the car, and together watched a mule-ish looking younger one walk across the asphalt. Ned observed but did not comment.

But that changed tonight; he went flying at the gate, barking, and I told him he'd have to stay in -- he has ways of besting the fence, when he really wants to -- and he went wandering off into the garden.

A week ago I bought a bronze bell which is probably about the size of my own heart at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art in Chelsea. Well, probably not bronze, but some cheaper amalgam of metals cooked up in Tibet, where it was cast or hammered into its pleasingly rough shape. It has a wooden tongue, and makes a startlingly clear tone when it's struck. Wake up, it seems to say, every time it's rung just once. I'd planned to hang it on the doorknob so Ned could use it to tell me when he needs to go out; Arden had a string of bells from Pier One, back in the day, and he'd jingle them with his nose when necessary.

When I brought the bell back to the apartment, Ned was clearly enchanted. He heard that tone, raised his head and drew up his spine in that way dogs have of physically demonstrating their complete attention. Then he came bounding to the bell: he wanted it. So I wasn't sure my plan would work. it would work. But the afternoon I went to hang the bell on the door, Ned was already outside. a dozen feet away. I rang the bell accidentally, as I was trying to figure out how to suspend it, and Ned turned and came trotting in.

So now the bell, instead of meaning go out, signals that it's time to come in, and to my astonishment it has worked every single time. He can be off in the far reaches of the garden, but when that cool metallic chime vibrates through the air (and it has a way of cutting through all other sound, of which there's not much out here anyway) he's right there at the door.

I didn't think this could possibly work with a doe in the driveway and serious moonlight drenching the garden, and the spring peepers going like engines across the road. But sure enough, after a few minutes, I rang the bell once and Ned came trotting into the house.

I wanted to write this tonight, just as it's happened, because I was struck by this sudden moment so full of things taking place,
all at once, and how the the moonlight and the deer and the dog trotting happily into the house all seemed to fuse with the sound of that bell. But look, it's taken me eight paragraphs to clumsily narrate something so effortless and brief It wants to be a poem, maybe, the moonlight ringing through the garden and the happy dog attending. Or it already was.

My Bubbles

2011-03-06T06:54:00.000-08:00

It occurs to me that "bubble" is an onomatopoetic word, loosely describing the coming into being of a blown sphere (make the sound "bub" to yourself slowly and you'll see what I mean) and then the popping of said globe. "Ble" happens much faster than "bub," and thus suggests the sudden disappearance of the coming-into-being that first syllable has mimicked. Maybe.

I am certain, though, that "bubble" is a mildly comic word, of little gravity, and that it suggests occasions of pleasure (champagne, soap bubbles, parties, play). Whitman makes "bubble" awful in "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," and certainly the stock and real estate markets don't use the word lightly. Still, both sound and connotation make the word seem inadequate, for me, for the two spheres of gas that have occupied space in my right eye since early December. The first one was pale blue, wide at first, shivery, and its transparency and color made me think of a contact lens. That one diminished in size until Christmas, when it slipped through a tear in my retina and lodged there for a bit. It looked as if a bluish sun were descending behind the horizon, and had just a third or so of the way still to go... except that this setting sun simply lodged itself in the center of my right eye, and stayed there. Though every now and then the disc would move some more, and take a little more retina with it.

Bubble number two has been with me since early January. At first I couldn't see anything, and then when I could make out light again I seemed to be looking a viscous gray field, translucent and rippling. If I moved much it made me feel disoriented and a little sick. This bubble was of a sturdier stuff than the first, so it took until early February for it to become a circle that almost filled my field of vision, and now in early March it's become surprisingly pleasing: it's the size of a perfectly round pea, near the bottom of the right-hand side of the world. It is dark at the rim, a Rothko-ish black-purple, and and then it pales to a light sky color and then in the center is a blotch of a darker gray roughly the shape of Australia. Somehow this conspires to make it look three dimensional, as if beautiful and oddly colored pearl is floating near the base of everything. It has, today, a tiny satellite. Yesterday there were three.

The two bubbles have given me a cataract (unavoidable side effect) so that may be contributing to the pearly aspect of the little sphere. Two oddities: at night, light bounces off the bubble into the upper reaches of my eye, so that I can see up high the double of a candle flame, a dashboard, a computer screen. And, if I tilt my head down and look at the floor, the bubble turns a magenta red, as if I'm looking at it through the screen of my own blood.

I realize that all this is probably more interesting to me than to anyone else; don't we find fascination in the very close examination of our own transformations? There's a more-or-less unavoidable self-absorption entailed in being sick. What else would you be paying attention to? But i realized this morning that the bubble has become an odd sort of companion. It's like the way, when you're working on a computer, there's always a little sidebar somewhere, something is monitoring some function or other. Perception isn't like that, but for the past few months it has been; I've had something to refer to, to notice what was happening inside my sight.

Even all night long

2011-01-29T06:34:00.000-08:00

I've just been given permission to read again, after nearly four weeks of that sort of eye movement being off-limits. It feels extraordinary, this permission -- it's as if I've been away somewhere, and have just come home. But there was an odd little daunting feeling, too: what to read first? It had to be exactly right; some quality of magical thinking attached itself to the choice.

So it was a gift to find Jean Valentine's new book, BREAK THE GLASS (Copper Canyon, 2010). And especially this poem, something no one else could have written, and which seems a pure distillation of comfort, of being cared for.

EVEN ALL NIGHT LONG

Even all night long while
the night train

pulls me on in my dream
like a needle

Even then, down in my bed
my hand across the sheet

anyone's hand
my face anyone's face

are held
and kissed

the water
the child

the friend
unlost.

My Right Eye 6

2011-01-22T11:56:00.000-08:00

18.

Not being allowed to lie down for two weeks sounds like the sort of simple but nightmarish torture inflicted on those held at Guantanamo, but in fact it's not been so bad, thanks to a comfortable chair to sleep in, even though the sleep's been on the restless side. But I have been a little surprised at the intensity of the longing; as with any prohibition, suddenly the proscribed thing seems intensely alluring, as if it's just calling to you from across the divide between the permissible and the disallowed.

On Thursday, January 20, I was allowed to lie down again, and it seemed ridiculously luxurious. I took two naps that day; i paid attention to how it felt to lower my body onto the bed, turned to my left side (lying on my back is still verboten, as it would contribute to cataract formation. I watched myself drifting into sleep, that feeling of descending further. Just now I don't think I can get enough of that.

19.

Also on January 20, and an equal pleasure: I'm allowed out once a day, for one errand. I left the apartment at seven on Thursday morning. It had snowed in the night, and was still snowing, but by the time I walked around the block and stopped to talk to Sam's 'father' - Sam is a gorgeous Weimarner pup, and I regret I don't know his human companion's name -- the sky was clearing, and sun beginning to break out across the white sidewalk and the white cars. One eye enough to be dazzled.

I am not yet, however, allowed to read, and that seems, if it goes on much longer, far more dire than the other prohibitions.

20.

January 22: Wally died today seventeen years ago. How can that be, seventeen years? I have a terrible time remembering dates and numbers of any sort; I need a visual or sonic mnemonic to make them stick. For the date of Wally's departure, it's two swans with their necks bent.

21.

Sweet generosities: the kindness of Susan, Angelo, Zach, Adam, Jaime, Guy, John, Alex, Algis, Koshin, Chodo, Paul M, Carolyn, Alison, Terry, and more Facebook well-wishers than I could shake the proverbial stick at. (That's one of my parents' southern regionalisms, as far as know, and where on earth did it come from? "More than you could shake a stick at" was used to describe any uncountable number. Why would you be shaking a stick at things?)

And of course Paul, walking Ned many times a day, shopping, getting the mail, reading Jane Eyre aloud, and only very occasionaly looking like I am driving him crazy. In my own estimation I am a calm and grateful invalid, as far as the species go, but you'd have to ask him.

22.

For two weeks I wore, at home, my perforated metal eye patch with its blue plastic rim, held onto my face with an x of white adhesive tape. Then, when I'd set it on the coffee table while I put in eye drops, Ned got ahold of it and made short work of the thing. Paul was appalled, while I was relieved; I didn't like that thing one bit, and it gave me an excuse to wear instead the classic black piratical kind I got at the drugstore. Well, almost classic: it has a stiff armature that holds it away from the eye in a flattened cone, rather like one of those bustier cups Jean Paul Gaultier made for Madonna, but not quite so pointy. Two different men have asked me if I really need it or it's just a look; they both thought it was hot. Chodo took a careful look at it and said, You like that, don't you? And I do.

23.

So here's the prognosis. On Thursday I go back to the hospital so Dr Reddy can see how I'm healing, Late in February, the grayish bubble of gas in my eye will have been absorbed into my system, and he'll be able to see what kind of shape my retina is in. Maybe a second surgery, maybe not. Vision will be compromised to some degree by the scars on my retina, but I don't know how much. In early summer, I'll have surgery to remove the cataract caused by my treatment. Cataract surgery is remarkable: the clouded lens of my right eye will be dissolve by a laser, and then a tiny plastic lens will be inserted, unfolded, and slipped into place. It will be a prescription lens, of course, and thus to some degree will compensate for my loss of vision. And maybe, who can say, that will be the end of the saga of the eye. Though Dr. Reddy says we are going to be togther for a long time, and I don't want to press too much to learn what he means by that. Enough for the future to unfold, as it does, enough for the eye to open onto the sun on the snowy sidewalk. Or this morning, the marvel of going to the GLBT Center on 13th Street, and walking down the curving stair, holding onto the handrail while the distorted but nonetheless apprehensible stairs flow downward beneath me. Provisionally functional man descending a staircase.

My Right Eye 5: In the Waiting Room

2011-01-13T13:10:00.000-08:00

15.

A week since surgery, and this morning was the first time I've been allowed out of the apartment. Dizzying, the cold air and the piles of fresh snow by the cars on the curb, taxi and school bus horns and engine noises filling the air till it seems almost crystalline, as if you could see the fractured layers of sound. My right eye is dilated all the time now, to reduce pain, so outside is a sharp vague brightness, the snow almost an ache, even though I have a cup taped inelegantly over the eye in question. "Cup" isn't accurate, and in fact Paul (who is kindly taking dictation and typing this, putting up with my corrections and revisions along the way) has given me a writing exercise: write a six line poem about the cup without naming it. i've gotten nowhere with thi. It's a perforated oval of aluminum set in a bezel of blue plastic that holds it half an inch away from the eye, taped on with an x of white medical adhesive. I immediately creates the look of having been slugged in the eye. When we walk through the hospital lobby, or step onto the elevator, I have a juvenile urge to whisper to someone, "Look what he did to me."

Anyway, it's fantastic to be outside, though the cab seems inordinately fast and the air too sharp and the glare of the snow too pressing; all that and I still feel like a child let out into the city to see what he's been missing. What have I been doing inside? The character of my days has been determined by restriction: no lying down, not even to sleep; no exercise; no reading. And in fact at first I truly didn't want to do anything. After all, they'd sucked the vitreous jelly out of my eye, scraped my cornea so they could see in to operate, lasered up the retina in back to re-attach it to the wall of my eye, injected a bubble of opaque gas, and filled the empty space remaining in my eyeball with fluid. I became a little obsessed about this "fluid." What was it? Basic fluid, said Dr Reddy. Do you mean like saline, or water, I said? BSS, I think he answered, and that was that.

16.

I don't need to say that all this hurt. I would like to be able to be precise about hurt but I don't know that anyone can, and I'm sure that Elaine Scarry is right when she asserts that the power of the torturer is in part the ability to make language meaningless. The NYU hospital was welcoming, efficient, and marked by genuine kindness. When I arrived I put my clothes in a locker, and wore the key around my wrist along with my plastic ID band. Once in the area where you get ready for surgery I was greeted by a wonderful nurse -- my age maybe, big red hair, funny and entirely compassionate. She wrapped me up in two blankets straight out of a warmer, a gesture which makes you feel you've gone somewhere between a spa and your grandmother's house. We talked, various anaesthesiologists visited, my doctor visited, and then I'm wheeled into the OR.

The OR was marvelous; it looked like an elaborately conceived set for a movie set on a space station, not a huge space but every bit of it alive with preparatory activity, people in scrubs and gauzy caps engaging with machines. I walked to a table in the middle, shed one of my surgical gowns, and in only moments a tube was introduced into my right arm, and I disappeared. Or everything did, until I began to be sensate again, two or three hours later, in a sort of armchair, with a sweetly concerned guy nurse who readily established that we belonged to a common community. I could not open either of eyes. I don't have any temporal sense for what happened next: the appearance of Paul, of Dr Reddy, or the comic turns of the nurse appearing with percosets; all seemed to move in a swelling and subsiding rhythm, and then each swell would crescendo in a moan coming out of my mouth, and the distinct sensation that a broad, curved knife was being pushed deeply into the socket beneath my right eye. Well, not distinct; I can't quite name it. The oddest thing is that the pain doesn't exactly seem located; I'm in the waiting room, and is that cry coming from my mouth or Aunt Consuelo's in the dentist's chair....? Only in the poem the young Elizabeth Bishop must hold onto her chair for vertigo's sake, whereas I am entirely all right with being in the swing of things, unanchored. Only that swing comes back, each time, to the crescendo point. Now think of a literal swing, the kind on a playground, how in a while the thing has a momentum of its own, you are drawn back, the world receding, and then you're going forward, something exciting about that, but as you go up that awful pressure begins again, pushing harder till the sharpness slips again beneath the socket...

17.

After three percosets, I'm sent home with Tylenol. The first of my restrictions is the strangest: to sleep sitting up. We do have indeed the perfect chair for this purpose, an Eames lounge chair, arguably the classic midcentury form, certainly the most immediately recognizable, with its curved plywood shell and tufted leather, its elegant and vaguely office-y ottoman. I have always liked looking at it, but I have never spent all that much time sitting in it. When do I "lounge"? It's a little slouchy for my taste; I'm more likely to perch and then spring up soon, to my dog's endless signs.

Now I'm in the chair, my boat all night. In the morning, i can open my left eye a little without the right one screaming, I go back to the hospital to be checked out. It all looks good, says Dr Reddy, and my teenage Frankenstein -style bandage is exchanged for the blue plastic cup with its white X of tape. Eye drops four times a day, and each time I'm to put the cup back on. The first time I look in the mirror, I'm shocked at the sight of my naked eye. It looks dead. I have taken the notion of the eyes as the place where one sees the quickness within for granted; it never occurred to me that I would look at one of my own eyes and it would not be me. I thought of that terrifyingly abject moment in "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," the Whitman poem where he's walking on the shore and comes upon his own drowned corpse, and the horror and fascination with which the speaker watches a bubble exude from his own dead lips.

On day three, I don't hurt. On the third or fourth day, I look at the eye again and it's me. The pupil is big, since I'm dilated all the time, and the iris is ringed in a slight corona of blood which widens, at the base, the way the sun sometimes seems to do when it's rising or setting over water. I think the iris is pointed a little more toward the ground than usual, since the whole eye seems a bit swollen, But I can see in it what I couldn't before: the evidence of my own character, the thinking me behind -- inside? -- the unreliable orb.

No City I Know

2010-12-29T13:53:00.001-08:00

Because I'm allowed to hold my head up again, I've been out walking and errand-running while I wait for my eye surgery to be scheduled. I have learned how hard it is to do some things with one eye: walk down a broken escalator, put money in your wallet, swipe a debit card in the slot on the little machine. I walked up to the Whole Body store on 25th St to buy vitamins, and because I couldn't see to fit my card into the slot the cashier became quite solicitous. She had to key in my account number twice, and when I offered to give her another card she demurred. She didn't want anything to be more difficult for me. I was both grateful to her and about to cry; I'd never quite so clearly been seen as disabled. Then I went into Whole Foods to buy something for dinner; the store was busy, i was trying to walk forward, be aware of where my handheld green plastic basket was so I didn't whack anybody, and thread my way through the people and the carts, and suddenly I just wasn't sure I could handle it. I had to stop behind a column and just breathe next to the no-sulfites bacon till the feeling passed. Then, determined not to be defeated, I shopped.

Walking home on Seventh, I stopped and covered my left eye, so I could look at Manhattan through my right. What I saw was a murky gray city, tinged pink with my blood, and the dark shapes of figures moving toward and away from me; the one bright spot was a beautiful ripple of reddish neon, saying what I couldn't tell you. It was apocalyptic and like no city I know, and I thought, This is the adventure my soul is having.

Then I had to jump over one of those big slushy puddles that are the ice-cold perils of city intersections when the snow starts to melt, and just as I came down on the other side a taxi six feet away honked at me and scared me half to death, and I was filled with rage. The furious don't think about the spirit at all.

My Right Eye 4: Gravity is Not Your Friend

2010-12-28T15:25:00.000-08:00

11.

Any further description of recovery from laser -- trying (and not succeeding very well) to stay face down, doing a pretty remarkable amount of sleeping -- has become moot now. Ned and I came into the city for Christmas, got a happy little tree from a British vendor on 6th Ave, and Paul and I wrapped it in blue lights. Christmas night we were walking out to go to dinner at one of the comfortable but vaguely naff gay restaurants on 8th when my right field of vision half-filled with a darkish, greenish spot, an undulant bit of blood or jelly roiling on the bottom half of my vision. It didn't go away over dinner. I knew what it was, and left the restaurant while Paul waited for the check, and took myself in a cab to the ER. The usual drill: one resident peering into my eye, and when she or he saw what was going on, calling the next level of resident, who'd appear in a while, some holiday event or nap disrupted, peer into my eye, and then begin the cycle again. The people at the hospital were kind, and when I was afraid a lovely Asian-American man who was running the front desk actually held my hand.

Over the course of the next five hours or so we determined that my retina was again detached, and -- truly weird -- the little bubble of gas in there had actually slipped through the tear and was now behind my retina, sliding around, Surgery was called for, and it would probably be Monday. Till then, face down. Gravity, one doctor said to me, is not your friend.

I was home and in bed by two in the morning, and woke to snow, and then the snow just simply kept going, the marvelous blizzard of Boxing Day. Marvelous if you were inside looking at it. Outside, buses and trucks stuck and blocking the streets, people actually stuck in cars they couldn't get out of all night, and -- horrors -- an A train full of passengers stuck out in Queens, people in there all night without food or water or a bathroom. Nightmare material. But it was deep, beautiful snow, and the city took on that extraordinary quiet which always reminds you that you aren't aware just how constantly and alarmingly loud it is here until that rare silence comes again.

Which meant that when I arrived at NYU Hospital on Monday morning, no one was there, except the very gracious Dr. Hoang,
waiting for me in the lobby to tell me to come back tomorrow, bless his considerate heart.

12.

Today I did go back, and met Dr. Reddy, who'll be my surgeon. He peered deep into my eye in what are now the familiar ways
(look all the way up, up and left, left, left and down...), held my eyelid down with the pressure of a slim wooden rod while he peered some more. Then he declared that my retina was indeed thoroughly detached, and surgery would take place, but not today. The OR was backed up from the storm, and some of Dr Reddy's team hadn't returned yet from the holidays, and he'd need them all on hand because it was going to be complicated surgery, maybe a long one, maybe more than one. Probably a scleral buckle, a belt of silicone wrapped around the outside of my eyeball to hold the retina in place. Maybe oil inside the eyeball. Strange to think that the vitreous jelly I was born with will no longer be there; apparently it doesn't really do all that much now save pose the possibiity of further retinal detachment. My eye will be full of some other fluid.

Somehow I feel oddly relieved. I'll go back to the hospital later in the week, when they call me, and whatever will happen will.
I'll have less sight in my right eye, but I'll have sight, which I cannot imagine living without, though I know people do. I understand intellectually that we have a phenomenal capacity to tolerate all sorts of losses, but oh I do wish to be spared that one. I will emerge from surgery with a bloody and swollen eye, and a scary (but I imagine sexy) black eye patch, and I'll begin the enforced stillness of recovery,, which sounds, in Dr Reddy's description, not quite as Gothic as I have understood it to be.

If I close my left eye and look through the right, what I see is greasy darkness, through which a few bright spots -- a lamp say -- gleam, I think this must be like what my friend Steven Kuusisto sees; in his book PLANET OF THE BLIND he describes taking a walk with his guide dog through Grand Central, where neither of them had been, and actually enjoying the adventure of getting lost in there. I love that attitude. When Steve came to Houston to read for us there, he wanted to go work out on a treadmill, and we didn't have much time, so we went to the nearest place: the gym connected to the gay bathhouse on the edge of downtown. Steve is straight, so it was another adventure for him; he couldn't see what was going on on the porn screens, and if some guy cruised him in the locker room, he wouldn't be the least bit bothered, He ran happily on the racing conveyor belt of the machine while his dog slept on the rubbery gym floor. I believe she was the first service dog ever to visit the baths!

13.

Ned is being taken to the dog run in Union Square every day by two utterly charming boys from Barcelona, Rob and Geary. They aren't boys, really, but there is something so playful and a bit rogue-ish in their demeanor that we immediately started to refer to them that way. They have beautiful Catalan accents, and Rob has a bright blue mohawk that is sometimes spiked up but mostly not. The first day Ned was a little uncertain; the second day he was thrilled to see them, and today when they appeared -- unexpectedly for him, for a second walk -- he cried aloud in a way he only does when he is so excited about something he can't contain himself. It's clear that he has a crush on them, that he's extra well-behaved when they're around, and that the affection is mutual. Paul and I were just coming home from lunch today, after my return from the hospital, when we saw Geary leading Ned out of the front door of our building. We held back so as not to disturb, and watched; Ned's tail was wagging broadly when they came out the door, and he went prancing down 16th St toward the park with a kind of carriage that could only be expressing delight.

14.

One bright note: my retina's so screwed up that now I have no restrictions, these next few days, Well, I am told to take it easy -- but I can hold my head up, something I've not been allowed to do for a month. My neck has forgotten what this feels like. I took Ned for a one-eyed walk on Seventh Avenue this evening, and we had a happy time losing two tiny squeaking tennis balls in snowdrifts. I am about to walk out to Marshall's and prepare for my convalescence by buying some new underwear, and maybe some flannel pajamas.

My Right Eye 3

2010-12-15T16:56:00.000-08:00

6.

Head down, face parallel to the ground: the position of dejection. Something happens, when the body's put in a particular postion, as every practitioner of yoga knows; the pose begins to shape how you feel. Try it, right now; turn your face down toward your lap or the surface of the table in front of you, and stay there for maybe thirty seconds. Feel it, something beginning to tug your spirits down? Pose of penitence, of shame.

However, I have some wonderful blind readers who've taught me that, when you don't need to look at the person who's speaking, it's often the most natural position to keep your head face down. That way you're looking at the matter at hand, at the conversation between you. I like this idea better, but the first one is the one that won't leave me alone.

7.

Two days later, my new friend Mike drives me to the clinic. He's an actor, and he's playing Albany in an e-book version of Lear, where readers will be able to click back and forth between the text and the scene in action. He's brought the script along, and he sits reading in the waiting room while I'm lead into side chambers, dilated, peered into. How far down into one can they see, when the pupils are open and one of those searing lights comes blaring in? I'm thinking about the blinding of Gloucester, and all the references to seeing in the play; to see is to discern, to comprehend, to judge, to find a way forward, to recognize one's mistakes, to become aware of possibility, to find a solution to a problem. We mean a host of things when we say, "I see."

Laser, I've always heard, doesn't hurt. Dr. Federici, my dapper and reassuringly at ease opthamologist, says that some people experience it as a toothache in the eye, which doesn't help me to imagine anything except that I'm not going to like it. Some, he says, don't feel a thing. At first simply a blip of green light -- shades of Gatsby! -- a green light that feels softly focused and then seems to land, strangely enough, on the back of my eyeball, and with each suceeding little green burst that landing feels more and more like a punch.

But the small blows, it turns out, are not landing on my retina, but on the blood clouding the back of my eye, which drifts across my vision in an unpleasant grayish scrim. Much as Dr. Federici tries, nothing is accomplished, and we drive back home, where I have two more days, head down, to wait.

8.

There isn't a lot you can do with your head down. I am assured that if I had full-tilt surgery, in the OR, I'd have to remain face down for six to eight weeks, which I am pretty certain would be the end of any claim to sanity on my part. It gives me some comfort to know my penitential spell is shorter, but it's possible I may have to undergo that kind of surgery if the laser doesn't work, so that doesn't help much. You can't really go for a walk with a seven month old golden retriever, or safely drive a car, or shop for groceries. Hard to have a conversation without at least raising my head sometimes. I imagine some kind of state wherein I'd arrive at a meditative calm in response to imposed restriction -- but that's a dim prospect out there somewhere, one that feels like someone else's life.

9.

Back to the doctor. This time my eye's far more clear, so the pummeling little beam hits its target. Four hundred and forty... what, units, shots, bullets? of green light seal the tear in the back of my eye and then ring it three times. Dr. Federici says the combination of the laser and the bubble will, this time, wipe me out and he's right; my eye aches, I want to sleep endlesslessly, and I don't have to come back for a week. In the meantime, face down. But there's hope in the sealing of the rupture; maybe the end is -- sorry -- in sight.

10.

The equipment I've rented online arrives, in a big box, a bewildering bunch of green vinyl pads redolent of an old weight room at the Y, and a lot of black pipes and knobs to turn. I'm really glad Mike can put it together, though when it's assembled the results seem truly disappointing. There's a horseshoe shaped contraption to sleep on, face down, which frames your face the way a hole in a massage table would, but when you lie on it the smell of the vinyl and the previous pentitents who've rested there overwhelms. Well, not an odor exactly, more like an aura, individual weeks of discomfort and defeat, multiplied.

The more elaborate contraption sits on the edge of the table, and two pipes with adjustable knobs support another face-rest. This allows you to sit at the table, lean way over, rest your head on a padded platform parallel to the surface, and stare at -- what else -- a piece of green vinyl between three and six inches from your head. It's awful. I think about Temple Grandin and those devices she made to help cattle feel more at ease on their way to slaughter. I wish that the manufacturer of these items would consult with her; there must be a more cheerful way to be face down, something that doesn't make one feel worse.

(more to come -- apologies, but I'm only able to do a part of this at a time)

My Right Eye 2

2010-12-12T18:21:00.001-08:00

4.

Some experiences are so particular -- sui generis, unlike any other you've known -- that the memory of them is hard to hold onto. Already my first treatment seems like an hallucination: my right eyeball numbed, the prod of a stylus marking a spot on the lower right hand corner -- no pain, just the odd feeling of a bit of pressure on the eye, the surface bouncing back as the point is removed. Then I'm told to look way up to the right, so as not to see the needle approach. What sounds more horrific than a needle in the eye? Though in fact it doesn't hurt at all, just a curious sensation of having been punctured or entered, and then -- seemingly in seconds, a bit of the vitreous gel from within my eye's extracted to lower the pressure, and -- swoosh, though of course there isn't and sound -- a bubble of gas is injected in its place.

There are cloths covering my face, only the right eye open to the right open to the various lights that are coming and going, and with the advent of the bubble follows the most extraordinary lightshow: the bubble, refracting light, goes flying up to the top of my eye, pushing back dark floaters and bits of stray gelatinous matter, all that darkish flotsam receding, and suddenly the view goes simply blank, all white, as though I'm looking at the screen of a crashed computer. Then, as though that train of thought has generated the visuals that come next, appear little squares of color -- hot pink, black, chartreuse, gray, flicking on and off, rearranging patterns, like some kind of animated composition illustrating, what, jazz? It's pleasurable, this show, and then it's gone, and in its place a bright sky half blue and half golden yellow, bits of weather moving through, and it fades to the dark bulk of the opthamologist's head, and the miner's lamp on his forehead.

Bend over, he says, put your face between your legs. And I do. In a while there's a resident on his back, on the floor, looking up into my open eye, and ah-ing, and then there's another. They are so pleased and proud of their work! My eye is indeed far more clear, and floating in the enter of my vision is a round blue bubble, bobbing a little, for all the world like a contact lens on the surface of a swimming pool.

5.

The ten minute procedure took two hours, though indeed most of that time involved dilating, being eyed (so to speak) by many residents, and the overall general happiness about the procedure. Instructions for recovery: keep your head face down for the next two weeks. Ninety per cent of the time. My immediate response is: impossible. More or less impossible. And come back in two days for laser treatment to seal the tear; meanwhile the bubble will be holding my ripped-open retina (which I'm imagining as a frail, iridescent film, something like fish scales but more delicate) in place.

(more to come)

My Right Eye

2010-12-06T15:44:00.000-08:00

1.
Thursday night Paul and I went to dinner at a Belgian restaurant on 17th Street. We were enjoying the warmth of the place and the foxy Antwerp-meets-Chelsea style of the maitre'd, and I was thinking about a slightly uncomfortable matter I wanted to discuss, when an odd thing happened. My right eye filled with a swirls of what looked like dark brown smoke. I thought something was wrong with my contact, excused myself, washed my lens in the mens room, and it seemed better, but then it wasn't. The odd perception seemed to fade away, and after a while we went home and watched an episode of The Wire.

The next day, driving out to Long Island, I kept thinking the windshield look dirty. I squirted the washing fluid a couple of times, but when the wipers stopped moving, it didn't seem much better. Experimentally, I closed my left eye, and whoa: It was snowing, a steady stream of little gray flakes, like the sort of road-dirtied particles of sleet you'd see on a highway in mid-winter. It occurs to me that person with less skill at denial than myself would, at this point, have taken some action. But when it comes to the body -- and I suppose to other matters as well -- I have a long-standing habit of hoping thing will go away, then being forced to rush to respond when they do not. And I was looking forward to the evening, and figured I could call my doctor later if need be.

Saturday, late afternoon, when the mild flurry in my right eye became a storm: what had been curlicues of smoke were now large brown floaters in random shapes, sort of menacing, and there was a green half-circle at the bottom of my field of vision, and if I covered my left eye what I could see through the right looked coated in vaseline. Ned needed a walk, so I took him on his leash down the road to a Jewish cemetery a block away where he can run off-leash when there's no one around -- and i've never seen anyone there yet. That evening the twilight was descending, the leaves were blowing; at least I thought those were leaves, and what were those black and white shapes playing under the trees, and those rushing shadows? I couldn't see Ned anywhere, and suddenly the active dark was a little terrifying, a restless and uneasy forest. We walked home, and I did what anyone accomplished at denial might: took a nap. Then I got up, called my doctor, and at his advice drove myself to the ER at Stonybrook.

2.

Nothing could be further from my expectations about an emergency room. First, there's free valet parking for the patients. Honest. Just inside the door a guard at a desk asked me what I needed, and sent me directly to Triage. I was asked a few questions, made some jokes with the kind and interested woman behind the desk, who seemed happy for a little wit to be injected into what must often be a dire conversation. For some reason, as we spoke the green spot in my eye turned, all at once, an alarming and hostile red. I like red; I'm not used to seeing it look threatening. Was it the light in the room, or was my retina tearing open that fast? I was immediately taken to a private room where I could lie down, rest and await a series of concerned people. I was in this room for about six hours, but in truth never felt neglected; in between the various persons who came to shine lights of increasing intensity into my eye -- so that i was soon seeing, along with everything else in there -- craters and cracked mud in dry desert lakes. I fell asleep in my room in the dark, was examined again; people had to go and get larger and more intricate lamps to shine into my eyes. Once a resident held up an eye chart, and I could see on it absolutely nothing. Then I realized, in a while, that i could make out letters, not because i could focus but because whatever obscured my vision was moving -- a kind of gelatinous matter shifting under the surface of my eye, the thought of which made me feel ill.

In a while a resident concluded my retina was detached; a more advanced resident appeared, rubbing his sleepy face, and eventually concurred; a senior opthamologist was consulted, the poor fellow roused from his bed at four A.M. I was presented with my options, the most attractive of which was the less invasive procedure, something that could be done in an office, with a local anaesthetic: a bubblle of gas would be injected into my eye (good God) to hold the retinal tear in place, and then lasers would seal up the wound. This might work but didn't always. I might still require surgery.

3.

Now it seems to me a bit surreal that I drove home, but that's what I did. In truth, my left eye just seemed to take over, and the road didn't look especially different to me. East Hampton, empty at five-thirty in the morning, the little shops decked in lights, was beautiful, a toy town under a Christmas tree. My dog Ned was thrilled to see me -- he's seven months old and I've never left him alone overnight -- and seemed bewildered by the upside-down schedule: why would I come home in the morning and go to bed? I was convinced (just how tired was I?) that I was to go receive my bubble on Monday morning, but in retrospect that makes no sense at all; it we'd waited that long I could easily have lost my sight in my right eye.

So I didn't understand, two hours later, when the phone began to ring and ring. Who was calling me so insistently?. On about the fifth call I dragged myself out of bed, only to find my doctor wondering where I was. Nothing else to do: I threw on some clothes, Ned hopped in the car, and we drove to Stonybrook. The procedure, they said would take ten minutes.

(That's all the typing my tired eye will allow for the moment. Part two follows shortly.)

If the locomotive... (parts two and three)

2010-10-29T23:30:00.001-07:00

Last night I was so weary after a day of teaching and panel-participating that I ducked out of the evening reading here after the first reader was done: i'd like to have heard my two other colleagues read but I just couldn't attend to another thing. So I started walking up the hill to our room by myself in the dark, and just as my mountain lion fantasy began to assert itself, there in the darkness by the path was a jackrabbit, sitting up, elegantly lunar long ears alert. She was just sitting, and didn't budge till I walked over toward her and she scurried ahead a little. Then I realized why she wasn't darting away: a baby about the size of my hand was wandering around on the pine needles by my feet. This seemed a possible message from the night: you will not be eaten by a mountain lion, Mark, at least not tonight, but you might get to say hello to a mama jackrabbit.

And then tonight, after Terrance Hayes, John D'Agata and I read, Paul and I came walking back and took a different, higher path, so dark that we had to trust the gravel under our shoes to tell us we hadn't wandered astray, and over and behind the sound of some writers talking on the path below, we heard this high pitched concatenation of -- sirens? emergency vehicles? the whoops of cop cars when they want you to move over? Of course -- coyotes, in a grand yipping conclave, a wild-toned Bacchante pack. Wonderful, primal, disruptive, the delicious shiver of otherness in it.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down....

2010-10-28T17:08:00.000-07:00

Paul and I are at the Marconi Center, a coastal conference place just north of Point Reyes, on the incredible coast about an hour from San Francisco. The grounds -- which smell like eucalyptus, conifers, moss and rosemary-- are very dark at night, and we were walking up a steepish dark trail after the reading last night with two women we didn't know, participants in the conference. Somebody mentioned mountain lions, and we cheerfully recounted the story we'd head from a local fellow, who a few years back was walking in the middle of the day in the golden grasses up on the mountain above the dining hall when he saw such a creature stalking through the grass. He talked about how struck he was by the animal's movement, and I thought how much I'd love to see such a thing, even if were in the dark on the way back to our room. The women grew quiet after we told this story, and I admit that I found myself taking boyish pleasure in scaring them just a iittle with the idea of beastly proximity. I am afraid of various things, but mountain lions are not one of then, and I found myself quoting Jack Gibert's brilliant poem "A Brief for the Defense": "if the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should be grateful that our end had magnitude." I know there's a certain bravura jokiness in that sentence, but I also think I would rather be eaten by a cougar than, say, be devoured by an English Department. My companions did not see either the humor in this or the allure of magnitude, at least not at that moment on the dark path. And needless to say I don't really WANT to be eaten by a mountain lion. Not very much.

Good morning Baltimore...

2010-10-05T06:52:00.000-07:00

My hosts here kindly found us a pet-friendly hotel, the Sheraton downtown, so Ned has just spent his first night in a hotel. The best part was the big bed, which allowed for mutual sprawl. We were both worn out from travel and the reading (three hours on a college campus with a lot of people around is little overstimulating for a young fellow) and unwound from the reading with answering e-mails and much rubbing of the blonde belly.

This morning, however, was a little more frantic. The patient and calm Ned, once he saw me putting on my socks, began to wiggle and jump and bark. (Is there anyone in the next room?) Down the hall to the elevator, and when the doors slid open Ned walked in, eyed the smooth travertine of the floor, and started to pee, the spreading puddle distinctly yellow against that bone-colored stone. What to do? I stuck my foot in the door, which alarmed Ned so much he ran out of the elevator back onto the carpet. I thought about running back to the room for a towel, but surely the elevator would be gone by the time we got back. On the bureau across from the elevator door was one copy of USA TODAY -- the perfect use for that paper! I wadded it up and set to work, Ned pulling at his leash and looking at the doors (which kept trying to close) with alarm. Then some kind of buzzer went off, a sign that something -- me -- was stuck between them. If I pulled my arm in, the doors would close on the leash, I'd be going down, and Ned would be left on the third floor wondering what happened. It didn't seem possible to push forward, but I gave it a go and the doors loosed their grip, sending me tumbling toward Ned and the paper sleeve of my coffee cup cup flying down into the bit of pee that remained on the floor. Maybe that would make it look like a bit of spilled coffee?

So we headed to the stairs, me with my big bundle of wet newspaper, Ned excited about walking down the hall. I forgot that he has been afraid of going down flights of stairs; in the city, where we live in a third floor walk-up, he simply sits down at the top of the stairway and expects to be carried down. This morning, no such thing: he went trotting down four flights of stairs into the lobby, where we strolled out to the revolving door and the sidewalk: Baltimore! October! So many thing to attend to: pigeons, passing dogs, children in strollers, anyone wearing a hat. We were promptly thrown out of a corporate plaza across the street, then headed west, into a universe of things to be investigated by nose and mouth: spilled drinks, urine, napkins, chicken bones, pizza crust, kleenex, KFC boxes, more newspaper, and the invitingly distinct scents of the shoes of men sitting at bus stops.

I have been found by Mr. Briggs Arthur of Barclay's Bank

2010-09-21T18:08:00.001-07:00

This e-mail arrived today; it's pretty wonderful, save for Mr. Arthur's assertion of his skin color. I'm not sure how to read that number -- a billion? some unthinkable sum of millions? -- but it sounds good. I like the way the writer seems to have just given up on credibility, as if he's tried more modest proposals and now he might as well just pull out the stops. Anyone want to write and claim the treasure?

My Dear Partner,I am contacting for good.

I have 100.000.000.00 Million Pounds that I want to Transfer to your Bank Account.

Please Reply Immediately to enable me give you more Informations about this Transaction.

I am a white Man and also a British Citizen.

I will send to you a Copy of my International Passport Once I receive Reply Ok.

Please we will deal only through Email for security Reasons.

Email contacts : (barclays_bank62@yahoo.co.uk)

From Yours Partner

Mr.Briggs Arthur

Director Barclays Bank

London-England.

Nantucket, Maggie Conroy's tobacco barn, and Dean Young on the culture of creative writing

2010-08-24T22:39:00.000-07:00

Paul and I got stuck on Nantucket (I know, the limerick possibilities immediately spring to mind) this week. Every boat off the island was cancelled due to the high seas and wild wind, but our friend Maggie Conroy graciously came to our rescue. I'd known Maggie a little in Iowa City, when I was teaching there; we used to go to great parties at her and Frank's house. We hadn't seen her for years, and she appeared as a rescuing angel, loaning us her Ford Explorer and welcoming Paul and Ned the pup and me into her amazing house. It was built, forty years ago or so, by Frank and a carpenter, constructed of cherry-wood beams from an old tobacco barn. They kept the barnlike feel -- a great room in the center, small rooms off to either side. We had a wonderful time; it was a privilege to be in the dreamy, inviting house with Maggie and our friend Joy and Maggie's dog Neville while the rain came down on the salt marsh out the big windows.

I was thinking about these friendships -- all of us brought together by times held in common in various institutions that are part of the culture of creative writing -- as I was reading Dean Young's THE ART OF RECKLESSNESS, one of the new volumes in Graywolf's series of short "handbooks" for writers. I put that term in quotes because of course there isn't any such thing, once you get past manuals or style. These little volumes, a various lot, look into aspects of craft, and their intent isn't so much to explain things as it is to complicate the conversation about craft, providing signposts for exploration.

Early in Dean's book there's a terrific manifesto/rant about graduate education in creative writing. Since MFA-bashing (and now PhD-bashing) is such a perennial activity, I want to post Dean's artful defense here.

"Let us put to rest all those huffy complaints about the proliferation of MFA programs, as if courses of study that offer support and allowance to people for the exploration of their inner lives, for the respected regard of their imaginations, their harmless madnesses and idiosyncratic musics and wild surmises, somehow lead us to a great homogeneity as well as a great dilution of the high principles of art. Some people try to convince you they love poetry by showing you how bad all the poetry they read (more likely don't read) is, just like those who love love so much they've come to the conclusion that nothing and no one deserve to be loved. Some people try to convince you poetry is so important you have no business trying to write it without severe indoctrination. But POETRY CAN'T BE HARMED BY PEOPLE TRYING TO WRITE IT! The billions of MFA programs and community creative writing workshops and summer conferences and readings, all of it is a great sign of health, that the imaginative life is thriving and important, and worthy of time and attention, worthy of conditions in which it is honored and encouraged to wildly grow. It's not a marketplace where the bad forces out the good. We are not a consumer group; we are a tribe. The MFA programs may be booming because our business is to boom. OUR BUSINESS IS BLOOMING. If there is a problem, it is in the professionalization of creative writing. J'accuse, AWP! When Tomaz Salamun was asked by one of my students what was the one thing he would like to tell a young poet, he said, Be artists, not careerists. I do realize that people have real economic concerns, and two or three years of graduate study are traditionally geared toward the establishment of a career. But realistically, all these young writers cannot be English professors, nor do many of them actually want to be. Our creative writing programs would do a better job offering students guidance in other possible employment options, suggesting courses, outside creative writing and literature that could lead them to decent work outside academe. But when I walk into a creative writing class of any kind, I am thrilled with the liberty that all of us in that room have managed to achieve through a faith in and dedication to art, and the profound sense of possibility that something one of us does can become a vibrant part of that art."

I especially love "the liberty that all of us in that room have managed to achieve through a faith in and dedication to art..." But I'd add -- and this surprises me a little -- that in the literature course I taught this spring, a seminar on Whitman and Dickinson, I had that same sense of liberty, of our freedom, dedication, courage and pleasure as readers.

And, in some way, our pleasure inside the dry barn house while the winds battered the island -- thirty miles out to sea! everyone likes to say -- felt a part of those same communities of writers and readers.

Three splendid announcements at once

2010-08-19T20:22:00.000-07:00

Teachers have no right to pride, really, when it comes to their students' work. All I can claim to have done is ask questions and make some statements about what I saw in the poems before me. I try to be a friendly, interested advocate for what seems most alive in the work at hand. My ideal is for the writer I'm working with to feel thoroughly SEEN -- that someone (me) is looking very closely at what they've made and are trying to make, and attempting to articulate that project with them.

But even though the writer does the work, I can't help but feel this flush of pride when first books find their way into the world. This week brings the news that THREE of my former students have just had books taken, and I am feeling beside myself with delight. Lauren Berry won the National Poetry Series; Terrance Hayes chose her book for Viking Penguin. Glenn Shaheen won the Agnes Starret Lynch Prize and his book will be published by Pittsburgh. And Lacy Johnson, whose dissertation was a formally rambunctious assemblage of text, video, photos and audio recordings, has just had a print version of the work accepted by Iowa. Hot damn. I am, in whatever relation to these books I might claim (even if it is hardly any at all other than cheerleader) inordinately happy.

2010-08-09T18:43:00.000-07:00

In a couple of hours I will be fifty-seven, which is a gigantic relief to me. Fifty-six has been a hard year in general, but it's acquired a particular dark charge because it's the age my mother was when she died, in 1976, of cirrhosis of the liver. At first I thought my aversion to the year was a a kind of magical thinking, but then I learned that if indeed it is I'm not alone with my folly; a number of friends have spoken of their own difficulty in passing through the age of a parent who'd died at her own hand, or perished to some addiction. Perhaps we just don't want to outlive our parents, so to speak -- can we succeed where they did not, is that permitted? Or perhaps it's the fear of a toxic legacy, an inescapable inheritance.

But now I am about to leave fifty-six, alive and breathing, reasonably intact. For the occasion I've been making gestures toward the future. One of them is above: Ned, with whom I am entirely in love, and to my mind quite reasonably so. With good luck we're going to be together now for a a long time to come. And this evening I went over to my neighbor Joanne's and dug up a young catalpa tree, which is going into my garden in the morning. I've always loved them: the big virile leaves, their pungent scent -- does "pungent" really convey anything at all? Think green tomato stems, tannic acid like black tea leaves steeped a little too long. And the word, catalpa, with its Whitmanic echo of Native American speech, something southern in those three vowels, inviting one to extend the a's... In the picture, Ned is resting his head in the hole I'd been digging around the slender trunk, which you can see on the right hand side of the image. After I finished, Joanne and I had some French rose' and listened to the screech owls announcing the twilight. We tried to think why just that moment -- are they waking, is it suddenly dark enough, or cool enough, for the world to begin?

So, a good fifteen years with Ned (knock on the wood of the table where I write), decades of catalpa after I'm gone. Tomorrow Paul's taking me out to celebrate -- presents, lunch, a nursery I like in Montauk? -- and that will be all about the present. But this evening's solitary goodbye to fifty-six has entirely to do with days to come.

Deep Lane

2010-07-28T19:28:00.000-07:00

I took this picture last week, in the late afternoon, in Amagansett, down the road a couple of miles south of our house here. Deep Lane is the most beautiful name for a road I've ever heard, I think: the two monosyllables, the two long vowels, with the higher pitched vibration of the 'e' and the more soothing relaxation of the throat required to produce 'a.' And then there are the suggestions of the words themselves: the road is deep because it dips, just before the patch you see here, but it might also be deep in the country, or deep in memory or in one's regard, or it might carry one deep into -- what? And "lane," doesn't that speak for itself? A lane is modest, it doesn't go anywhere of note, it's unimportant in the larger scheme of things. "Lane" speaks of domesticity and familiarity, a kind of ease. "Lane" is to "road" as "cottage" is to "house."

Those are part of a flock of sixteen or so wild turkeys; the others are off to the left, down in a little clearing. I've never seen so many together at once.

The dark object in the lower right hand corner is the front left fender of my car: I stopped while the turkeys continued, in groups of three or four, joining the flock.

From world to word

2010-06-30T06:30:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to report that my little handbook for writers, THE ART OF DESCRIPTION, has just come out from Graywolf, and here's the first review -- a starred notice in PUBLISHERS' WEEKLY. I know it's immodest to pass along one's own reviews, but hey... this project has been a bit of a labor of love, and a while in the making, so I'm happy to see its first reviewer express pleasure in it, and happy to pass these words along:

The Art of Description: World into Word
Mark Doty, Graywolf, $12 (152p) ISBN 978-1-55597-563-0

"To use words at all is to use them figuratively," says Doty in his writing guide, part of Graywolf's "The Art of…" series. As both a National Book Award-winning poet (Fire to Fire) and accomplished memoirist (Dog Years), Doty is not only qualified but uniquely articulate on the subject. How does a poet create color? Landscape? Context? Saying "blue" or "field" means different things to different people, and also falls short of encompassing any kind of atmosphere or significance. "Poetry's project is to use every aspect of language to its maximum effectiveness, finding within it nuances and powers we otherwise could not hear," he says, and in order to capture the "texture of experience," the poet must be aware of what is actually in front of him or her, both physically and metaphorically. Because the simple act of looking involves interpretation, descriptions are, in a sense, "self portraits"--no two people see the same way, so the poet inevitably puts him or herself into each and every image. For Doty, the art of description is mostly "a balance between terms, saying what you SEE and saying what YOU see." (Aug.)

In the old cemetery, Amherst

2010-06-25T14:29:00.000-07:00

"And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves."

2010-06-14T10:23:00.001-07:00

Yesterday my friend Phil Schultz gave a terrific reading at Guild Hall in East Hampton, a retrospective performance that moved through his new volume of selected poems -- and thus through a career -- offering a piece or two from each book, then concluding with a suite of new poems in which the breadth and spirit of the work that's come before felt both crystallized and amplified. It was really energizing.

Afterwards, dinner at Town Line Barbeque on Route 27 with a host of poets and artists, a sweet-spirited time. I was thinking about the sort of group snapshots that show up in the biographies of artists who've spent time out here over the decades, and these seem ripe for just that sort of thing.The picture on top was taken by yours truly: that's Paul, Phil, Star Black, Carol Muske Dukes, and Monica Banks. The second shot is by Star Black, and from left to right it's Julie Sheehan, yours truly, Phil, and then Phil's son Augie. This picture reminds me of old Chinese poems, scenes where the poets gather in some mountain hut or tavern someplace, a brief respite from the rest of the world, some joyous hour.

While I'm at it, here's a piece I wrote about Phil's new book, THE GOD OF LONELINESS: New and Selected Poems, for the East Hampton Star. There is, of course, a potential ethical issue in reviewing friends' books, but the fact is that if poets don't write these things, who will? And in truth I'd rather call this an appreciation than a "review" anyway -- poets of this stature don't require reviewing, but perhaps something more like a description of the way they've become fully, unmistakably themselves.

Ruthless furnace

2010-05-18T14:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we heard that the first balls of tar had appeared on the shore of Key West, at Fort Zachary Taylor Beach, a place we've often been to swim -- as much as one can swim there, where the waves break steeply after traversing deep water and suddenly hitting a narrow shelf of sand. When Paul told me he'd read this -- that oil had moved into the current that would carry it to the Keys, and probably from thence around the tip of Florida and up the east coast, I had a physical response. A shut-down. A rupture. Entirely silent but something breaking. I've had this feeling, here and on Facebook posts, that people didn't want to read about bad news, and of course who doesn't feel inundated with the horrors of the news -- war and disaster, extinction and corruption and pollution and the endless failure of leadership? We've been hearing it all our lives and it's only gotten worse. But somehow this sense of steeling ourselves against the realities of the world needs to be broken through, or set down for a while, in the face of this moment's gravity. I think Jack Gilbert is right when he says, in an unforgettable poem called "A Brief for the Defense," that

              We must have
       the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
       furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
       measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

It's true, but conversely it is also the case that something as grave as the murder of the Gulf of Mexico -- and how much ocean on beyond it -- is so overwhelming an instance of"ruthless furnace" that we need to lay the private gladness down, the good sense of being a living body. We need to be willing to weep, to be outraged, and to ask every question we can about our endless, characteristically American sense of powerlessness. BP says it's a minor spill, with minor consequences, and the turtles die, and the Gulf churns black, and in how many days or weeks will the coral reef be dead forever?

______

And now, on the evening of the 18th, tar balls on the beach in Big Pine Key, where the endangered key deer live. That means the oil is rounding the tip of the Keys already.

______

Yesterday, May 19, pure crude oil coating the wetlands of southern Louisiana, "as thick as chocolate syrup," sad the CNN reporter. Photos on Huffington Post of a dragonfly and a crab, covered in oil. Everything in the marshes touched by the oil, which include the marshgrass that IS is the marsh, holding the marsh together, will be dead in a week.

2010-05-16T09:38:00.001-07:00

Paul took this picture when I wasn't paying attention yesterday at the Audubon Zoo. We were in the elephant house; outside you can see Jean on the left and Panya on the right. Jean and Panya were wild-captured about forty years ago, when each was around one year old. Jean was a circus performer, Panya a pet; they wound up in the zoo, where they've lived together for more than thirty years. Just after this photo was taken, we fed them a snack -- apples, pears, carrots, and their favorite, corn on the cob, served husk and all. Everything grabbed by the trunk and elegantly stuffed into the mouth, with pleasure -- save that Jean did spit out an apple, which is apparently not her favorite food.

Afterward, Panya grabbed hold of the metal gate with her trunk and rattled it like a small peal of thunder -- something she does, we're told, when she's happy.

From the balcony

2010-05-12T20:08:00.000-07:00

We're in New Orleans for the opening of the poetry project I've been working on for the last two years with the Audubon Zoo, a part of The Language of Conservation Project, which is installing poems as part of the permanent exhibits in five American zoos. Tomorrow evening, we'll take the first trainload of viewers through the zoo, stopping along the way to talk about some of the poems I've chosen -- including work by Dickinson, Whitman, Neruda, Hopkins, Langston Hughes and many more. I haven't even seen the results yet myself. I can't wait for tomorrow, when I'll see what Terry and Mignon, the zoo's design team, have done.

This photo was taken last this afternoon from our hotel room balcony, five floors above Orleans Street big humid Gulf Coast clouds piing up, and the ninety-one degree heat suddenly softened by wind off the water, smelling of moisture and -- oh what have we done-- petroleum.

____________________

Later, in the night, just after Paul had fallen asleep, after we'd drawn the curtains over the balcony doors to muffle the revelry coming up from Bourbon Street, one melancholy and soulful voice, a young man, I thought, singing acapella: I was raised by the river, in a little shack... Like the very ghost of Sam Cooke, right on the corner of Royal and Orleans.

Lush and spilling over

2010-05-03T15:47:00.000-07:00

Readers of this blog will have noticed a good patch of silence of late: end-of-semester (and so of my wonderful Whitman-Dickinson-Twentieth Century Seminar which I wish just went on and on) meets National Poetry Month. I would be relieved, next year, if we instituted something like National Poetry Morning, or maybe National Poetry Tuesday. I understand, of course, that attention is a good problem to have, and also that I could say no a little more often. But the colleges and other venues where I read understandably want to schedule events during poetry month, and so before you know it April's calendar becomes a scribbled and crosshatched road map. And as the month proceeds, I seem to have less and less of an inner life, and must concentrate carefully on reservations, tickets, schedules... lest I do what I did yesterday, and confidently jump on the wrong train, only to find myself heading into the wrong part of New Jersey and not able to get where I need to be at the right hour. Thank goodness for cheerful sponsors and patient audiences!

But last night I got to the Springs, after a pleasant afternoon in South Brunswick, and we had dinner in our favorite welcoming Mexican restaurant in Amagansett, and then drove home into an oddly warm night, the big sky out here between the dark bulks of the trees a streaked jumble of clouds and stars. A good night's sleep, and then, this morning, when I'd planned to spend the day in the burgeoning garden, it poured down rain.

But the rain made the garden glow more deeply, the blue of the ajuga electric against countless shades of green, differentiated by the leaf-shapes and textures that make leaves so inexhaustibly varied: strap foliage of Siberian iris, near-white curl of the tight fern fronds, busy matte-textured curls of the fountaining daylilies. Last year the garden had been such a banquet for the deer that it didn't seem anywhere near as green and full by early May. It's all a bit of a mess since I haven't been here to weed and attend, but because the garden's got a solid structure -- better this year, after lots of moving and fiddling last season -- it looks beautiful even in its neglect. Lush, spilling over -- partly the gift of this spring's wild rains. The woods around us are still full of brackish ponds, and every time it rains again they spill over onto the road.

I wouldn't be noticing much of this if I didn't have this day of shutting out whatever I'm supposed to be doing and simply looking. Exactly what body and soul want, after the surface-gliding of travel. Tomorrow I have to go to a reading, then introduce one, then go to a party in the city -- but I will be bringing the green along with me, invisibly, and it will be with me now for many months to come. No teaching this coming fall. So a long season of tending this place while I'm also tending the book that I've been promising will at last come together this summer and fall. An almost unthinkable luxury: June until December, to make of the pieces and scraps and essays I have of this project, which has been simmering -- oh, two years now, three? Of course I'm going to be traveling too -- Juniper Institute in June, Tomales Bay in October, readings here and there. But the focus, now, shifts toward home, and my body seems a little ahead of the calendar, already settling in.

SEX

2010-04-13T19:21:00.000-07:00

The brilliant editors at GRANTA have just come out with a new issue centered around the provocative title of this post. The writers assembled include Jeannette Winterson, Herta Muller, Dave Eggers, Roberto Bolano, C K Williams, Carl Philips... just to name a few. Remarkable company. And with a really admirable flair, they've commissioned two young British artists (currently showing at the Barbican) to make three micro-films touching upon three of the pieces in the issue. The first film concerns the Bolano; the second, yours truly's essay, "The Unwriteable"; the third, a not-to-be-missed finale, is based on Dave Eggers's "Four Animals Contemplating Sex." Enjoy!

Luxuriating in a break from AWP

2010-04-08T18:01:00.001-07:00

Now and then I feel a twinge, thinking of Paul and a good four-fifths of the people we know gathered in Denver, all trooping down hotel hallways to panels, gathering in hotel bars, piling into overcrowded cars to go to off-site readings, comparing notes on the psychic weirdness of being in a strange city with a good percentage of the writers in America. This is the first AWP conference I've missed in a while. Truly my system just rebelled at the thought of doing it again so soon after last year; Chicago felt like a kind of psychological boot camp, as if we were all slogging together through some difficult period of being in a community so large, vibrating and edgeless that it seemed to swallow all individual life. Everyone's always trying to analyze what's so strange about the experience of the conference: a vast number of fundamentally introverted people in one place, a social situation that makes everyone want to feel known and recognized, and then makes the known and recognized want to run and hide. These are true but not entirely an adequate explanation of the existential peculiarity of it.

One thing that makes it feel like a wild ride for me is that it's like attending many reunions at once. In one hour, I have encountered friends from high school, from grad school, from practically every writing program I ever taught in, and from a great many of the schools I've visited over the years. All streaming toward me in random order, full of good-natured greetings, excited to reconnect. Which excites me, too, until I begin to feel like a large wave that has gathered strength all day and then broken on the shore in one big shatter of foam and bubbles. I feel just like the speaker in Whitman's incredibly desolate poem, As I Ebbd with the Ocean of Life -- which ends with poet looking down to see himself on the shore as nothing more than a scatter of seafoam and straw.

Though of course I have to admit that I miss the elation and exhaustion of it. A little. But not enough to come to Denver. Love to all of you there!

Beloved wolf, beloved bears

2010-03-30T19:40:00.000-07:00

I've hardly had time for reading for pleasure this spring, but I've been slowly nursing a novel, TENDER MORSELS, by Margot Lanagan, and this weekend I took a few lavish hours for myself and finished the book -- in bed, wonderfully, in the Springs, while the rain came pouring down outside on one of the darkest nights out there I've ever known: no streetlights, moon, stars, the neighbors in bed or away, just absolute darkness and rain on the roof and windows. Perfect.

Lanagan's novel is a fairy tale, of a sort, about a woman so harmed in this world she's lifted to a sort of heaven devoid of conflict, where she raises her two daughters -- and of course, no growing person can remain in a world without tensions and edges. The book's billed as a novel for young adults, but there's no reason it shouldn't be for any reader, especially if you're at all susceptible to the artful evocation of magic, to tales of transformation, and of profound encounters between human beings and animals.

Lanagan's prose is so beautiful and exact that she makes extreme experiences of ravishment -- living through rape, or passing between worlds, or becoming a bear -- feel entirely available to her reader. And despite the darkness of the book, what one carries away is a startling sense of enchantment, of the possibilities with which the slippery and uncertain world shimmers at every moment.

Remembering Ai: Tucson, 1970, blue satin dress

2010-03-21T18:45:00.000-07:00

One day in my first poetry workshop -- I was seventeen, and a student in Richard Shelton's poetry workshop at the University of Arizona -- Dick told us that we'd have a special guest for class. Her name was Florence Anthony, and she'd also been a student at the U of A, and now her first book was forthcoming from Houghton-Mifflin, chosen by Galway Kinnell for a poetry series. She had chosen another name for herself, Ai, and when she entered the room I think there must have been a kind of psychic ripple that passed through our collective awareness. She was a slender, poised African-American woman with a decidedly glamorous aspect; she was wearing a tight sky blue satin sheath dress, though it was a Tuesday or Thursday afternoon in Tucson, and the rest of us were wearing -- oh, cut off jeans, Indian-print shirts, beads. She sat on the edge of one of the classroom chairs, both forthright and a bit shy at once, and Dick asked her questions, and then she read some poems from her book, CRUELTY. Harrowing, heart-reading, violent poems, face to face with the brutal struggles of her characters, relentless. I'd still say it was her best book. I can feel the sear and shock of those poems now, the world she opened before us, this calm and elegant young woman -- she was all of 23 at the time -- reading her ferocious lines.

Stress echo

2010-03-16T18:44:00.000-07:00

This morning I wasn't allowed either food or coffee (the latter deprivation a serious one indeed) because I had an early appointment for a "stress echo" test, a phrase I couldn't figure out until I remembered the "echo" in "echocardiogram." My father had two heart attacks, and my doctor reminds me that I'm of the age for vigilance -- so off to the cardiologist's lab I went. Ten sensors were attached to my chest; I lay on a table on my side while another sort of sensor was pressed to my rib cage near my heart. I climbed on a treadmill and began to walk, speed and incline gradually increasing, until I was running, and my heart-rate had reached the level of intensity the technicians wanted.

Then I had to lie down again, quickly, on the table, and the sensor was pressed to my skin again. And then, when they were done, I turned my head and saw, on a video screen, my own heart. It was golden, and pulsing, and resembled a cross between a Georgia O'Keefe flower and a jellyfish. On the left hand side, it was pulsing at its normal rate; on the right, it was contracting furiously -- so strange to think of all my blood pouring through that aperture! During how little of history have people been able to see their own beating heats? I couldn't resist asking the technician how it looked. He said, "Really great."

Spring taking place

2010-03-15T13:49:00.000-07:00

Last night, after days of torrential rain out here on the far east end of Long Island, I opened our side door to go down to the basement to start some laundry, and there was a sound last heard so long ago, an entire year, and in between then and now this long and grueling winter... the spring peepers, on their very first night, in the swampy woods across the road! Every year I'm shocked by that chorus, and somehow this year especially so, that after all that deep snow and endless cold, here's this life suddenly awake and chorusing. They are actually part of a group called "chorus frogs" by naturalists, and in their brief season they chime at each other (with each other?) like there's no tomorrow. If you don't know them, you can listen to an audio recording here. And if you do know them, you're likely to find the sound even more pleasurable. (It's a good thing there's a recording readily available, because something about their ringing, interwoven shouting-out, with its slightly metallic tone, seems to completely elude description's grasp. Who could ever get it right?)

Crooning from under the mud

2010-03-01T18:19:00.001-08:00

In the current issue of THE GAY & LESBIAN REVIEW, there's a remarkable poem by Patrick Donnelly. Here it is:

IN LOW, UNWORTHY ROOMS HE MADE CARELESS LOVE AND NOW

guesses he's killed some man or men. Can't imagine
how long a pilgrimage could in iron shoes atone.
If all were ignorant, do all bear the blame?

How dared
his indigent seed
lodge a bullet upside anyone's sweet puppy head?

Whose faces? Whose shade
rises, swears he's the feckless fuckhead who molested my blood.
His mischief keeps crooning from under the mud

little milk caught the kitty, made off my heart,
little love in the ditch, little lord that I hurt,
little bug, little bat, broken as dirt.

That title nods directly to Cavafy, but in his work it would lead to a restrained, aching elegy for gone days of sexual pleasure. But Donnelly's erotic memory has, of course, been re-colored by the advent of HIV, and these remembered boys, who were touched with such pleasure -- did the man who so ardently enjoyed them also infect them?

The poem took me back to a discussion, years ago now, at the final OutWrite conference in Boston. Sarah Schulman was sitting on a panel talking about AIDS, activism and writing, and she asked the panelists "What have you noticed about the epidemic that hasn't been represented yet?" The first thought that came into my mind, as an audience member, was Everything. It was as if, when the horrific crisis years came to an end, we were all so exhausted and shell-shocked that it didn't seem possible to write another word. How to talk about the new dizzying fact that people we thought would die soon now might live a long time? How to talk about a transformed relationship to medicine? A culture where the artifice of chemical intervention becomes an ordinary, daily reality -- even, to some degree, no big deal. And then there's the matter of our recent history: years of grief, years of injury, just behind us, and how to find any terms for all that?

That conversation was years ago, but I still feel that the situation of HIV is weirdly under-visible in our poetry. That's one reason I find Donnelly's poem just thrilling. It looks headlong into the awful prospect of guilt in the transmission of disease, and though it speaks to those perhaps-lost men with tenderness, it also doesn't let the speaker off the hook. He reaches towards those ghosts tenderly, but he doesn't dodge the fact that he may be the one who "molested" their blood. "Milk caught the kitty" is utterly chilling, both childlike and sinister.

Finally, the poem's virtues don't just reside in its content. It's an artful little song, these four three-line stanzas with their deft loose end-rhymes, and then that aching, scary song-within-the-song at the end, spoken by the "mischief" of the speaker -- imagining himself as unknowing murderer -- singing up from beneath
the ground, in lines that feel charged with pity and sorrow, guilt and tenderness and threat.

Paean: Mussels

2010-02-16T09:33:00.000-08:00

Here's a poem from a terrific book, torch song tango choir by Julie Sophia Paegle, soon to be published by the University of Arizona Press. I love (no surprise!) the descriptive richness of this poem, with its very exact attention to the look and shape and behavior of mussels. But I'm also delighted by the poem's daring in ventriquizing these creatures: of course they'd speak, if they could, in the first person plural. I like Paegle's formal acuity, too; somehow these syllabic stanzas feel themselves like bunched tight mussels. And it's a delight the way the last stanza's surprising image takes us to the winglike form of a hinged mollusc shell -- wings made blue-black, here, by their distance from the heat of the divine, or by the darkening smoke of hellfire.

PAEAN: MUSSELS

Blue inside
obsidian, blue of compression,
blue of the fleck

and of flash-
cooled glass. We anchor
volcanic, and fast.

We embrace
and make changeful our
beach. We bury.

Between, we
breach -- our numbers our
read -- but do

not be fooled
by the forfeit of blue,
that sad shadow mim-

icry shift-
ing on waves, or within.
Not slate, nor

azure, we
are devotion to tidal
recession,

we turn to the
backing away of the ocean
as cicadas

turn to their
seventeenth year, as delphinia
gravely follow

the sun, not
unlike some seraphim long
after faltering.

That suspense of punctuation...

2010-02-09T14:43:00.000-08:00

In light of my Dickinson post of the other day, I thought I'd add here a remarkable, useful passage from an essay by Heather McHugh called "What Dickinson Makes a Dash For," from her book BROKEN ENGLISH. I'm not sure anyone ever said this better.

"Eudora Welty says the writer's work is to detect the pattern beneath the given, a shape at once lyrical and mysterious and felt, which 'is the form of the work...underway as you write and as your read.' (Writer and reader both do it, intuit the shape in the act, and their acts are by no means opposed.) The mysteries of meaning (at-once-still-and-moving, at-once-part-and-whole, at-once-read-and-written) obtain in literary as in spiritual realms. They resist logical codification because they sense, inside all diction, contradiction.

It is not the definable (delimiitable) finally, that interests Dickinson; she is drawn precisely to that uneasier thing, what can't be said. The relative exhaustibility of a literary construction is one measure of its inadequacy to this truth; and Dickinson's sentences and lines often seem designed (in judicious ellipses, elisions, contractions, puns and dashes) to afford the greatest number of simultaneous and yet mutually resistant readings. Where a lesser writer might try to comprehend the world by adding more and more words to his portrait of it, Dickinson allows for it, by framing in opposites or absents, directing us to what is irresoluble or unsaid, Where the addition of a word would subtract even one of the cohabitant readings in a text, she leaves the sense unsteady and the word unadded, What critics sometimes lament as cryptic or obscure in her work proceeds, I think from this characteristic reticence - a luxurious reticence, a reticence which sprouts and branches meaning in many directions, the way more exhaustive (less ambiguous) texts cannnot... Her richest work is precisely what critics since Higginson have called 'elusive,' and its signature is the sign of the dash -- that suspense of punctuation, that undecidabiity, which is not an indecision."

A little elegy for J.D., spotted on W 16th St on 2/5/2010

2010-02-06T08:49:00.001-08:00

2010-02-05T14:52:00.000-08:00

As you might be able to tell from the dearth of posts here of late, I've been absorbed in the new semester -- as well as having my attention turned to a couple of writing projects whose deadlines seemed to come looming up out nowhere, though of course I'd only been pretending that I still had time to work on them. Those are finished now, but I find myself more deeply drawn into the seminar I'm team-teaching with my colleague Meredith McGill. Because we're reading Dickinson, I've been thinking about the remarkable powers of wrenched or unexpected syntax, and the ways in which meaning is disrupted, complicated, and made multiple by the sheer power of ordering sentences.

This is poem 285:

The Love a Life can show Below
Is but a filament, I know,
Of that diviner thing
That faints upon the face of Noon
And smites the Tinder in the Sun --
And hinders Gabriel's Wing --

'Tis this -- in Music -- hints and sways --
And far abroad on Summer days --
Distills uncertain pain --
'Tis this enamors in the East
And tints the Transit in the West
With harrowing Iodine

'Tis this -- invites -- appalls -- endows --
Flits -- glimmers -- proves -- dissolves --
Returns -- suggests -- convicts -- enchants
Then -- flings in Paradise --

The first three lines of the poem might open many a piece of Victorian verse, with their comfortable assertion that earthly evidence manifests some portion of divine love. But the examples Dickinson chooses to show use the power of that over-arching spirit are peculiar ones indeed, if love darkens noon, smites the sun's own fuel, or halts the wing of an archangel, it's a powerful and disruptive force indeed.

The stanza that follows grows even more emotionally ambiguous. That filament of the divine is what provokes us in music, and what may, in the middle of a summer day, bring an unnameable pain; that filament of love may be what troubles and frightens in the medicinal color of a sunset. Divine love seems here to do anything but comfort;
the promise of the larger life discomfits, unsettles, wounds.

And this leads to the remarkable final stanza. Could there be another nineteenth century poem in which 12 verbs appear in 4 lines? How wildly modern this stanza seems, these verbs flung upon the page, each set out by attendant dashes, making a list full of opposites, a list that "hints and sways" as Dickinson says music does. What's above us, what the world larger than the visible one is as appalling as it is enchanting, as condemning of us (it "convicts") as it is endowing. Has anyone ever written such a bristling, contradictory, gorgeous list of verbs? The poem seems to explode, syntactically, in this final stanza, as if what Dickinson has to say about the world behind the world is so overwhelming, has placed such pressure on her speaking voice that she's become a stammering speaker, seized by this multiplicity of verbs.

And what to make of that final gesture? "Flings in Paradise" refuses any singular sense. If we take "flings" as another in that chain of verbs, then "fling" is an action performed by that filament of divine love that we csn apprehend on earth. Does it toss Paradise into our awareness, into the mix of actions that the other verbs have set in motion? Or do we take "flings" as a way the filament is moving, swaying as it does in music, a glimmering thread of the other world? Or is to "fling in" a gesture of relinquishment; like flinging one's sword to the ground, so that here Paradise is being tossed away, abandoned? The phrase seems to exist just beyond the edge of sense, forever floating in a zone of ambiguity the poem's created through the agency of Dickinson's daring construction of the sentence. If they should even be called sentences anymore, these deceptive and shimmering constructions of speech moving down the page.

My city

2010-01-20T19:51:00.000-08:00

After some time on Long Island and in Mexico, I'm back in NYC, and tomorrow's the first day of my class for the new semester, a graduate seminar on Whitman, Dickinson and their twentieth century heirs. Because my books are scattered in three different places, I went to work at Poets House yesterday, using their superb library to find the right range of poems for my syllabus. The first photo was taken yesterday morning, looking out from Battery Park, just outside of Poets House, out toward Liberty and what Hart Crane called "the chained bay waters." The second one is from early this evening, the moon over 7th Avenue, the sky a perfect, glowing winter blue. That jiggly white apparition is the moon.

Tangled lines of lost possessions

2010-01-12T10:52:00.000-08:00

The cab driver at JFK told me he knew just where I was going, in order to catch my bus out to the South Fork, and so I sat back -- weary from the day-long journey from the Yucatan to Queens -- and watched the expressway lights, and called Paul and talked on the phone a while, and so didn't notice till the driver made a u-turn, then tentatively eyed some dark-looking intersections, that he didn't know where we were. I had to fire up my computer and look up the directions, and by the time we arrived the fare was about a third higher than in should have been, and my bus was already idling at the stop, with clouds of frozen exhaust billowing up from the tailpipe. So I hurried to charge the fare, pack away the laptop, get my bags together -- the two masks I bought in Merida, packed in the special Anne Waldman/Kiki Smith tote bag Anne gave me, where were they? I got it all together, raced to the bus, only to discover it wasn't my bus after all. And there I was in the aching cold, right next to the galactic rush of the L.I.E., and I realized that inside the departing cab was my hat. My favorite winter hat, with two layers of knit wool, and ear flaps -- decorated with blue pigeons! -- that folded down perfectly over my ears. Gone.

Thus the hat becomes indelible, at least for a while, as it moves to the front of the line in the great chain of my lost hats. I imagine this line snaking behind me, moving as I do, curving off toward the horizon: Kangol caps, baseball caps, watch caps, longshoremen's caps, stocking hats... I begin to imagine this line intersecting with lines of my other lost things. The longest must be the line of pens, a half century's worth of writing implements. Shorter lines of jackets, shirts, shoes. An enormous line of single socks, how is it possible?

Then it's easy to imagine my trails of lost things intersecting with the trails of others. I move inside the lobby of the Fresh Meadows Cinema to warm up (at least some)before my bus comes; it's packed with people lining up to see Avatar. They're all trailing cordons of things they couldn't manage to hold onto, shorter lines for the children, longer and more elaborate ones for the adults holding their hands. The room's so thick with tangled lines it's a wonder anyone can find their way to the ticket counter, where the seven PM show in 3D is already sold out.

Poets awakened by wild festivity...

2010-01-06T13:41:00.000-08:00

I write from The Italian Coffee Company, on Calle 62 in Merida, in the Yucatan. This place, which is smack in the centro historico, has the best coffee I've found here so far. The centro seems to be thronged with people all the time -- some of them tourists, but the majority are local, at least just now when this part of town's all athrum with doings for Three Kings Day. Last night I was just falling asleep when a very grave male chorus began in the street outside my room, their volume swelling. I'm used to lots of street music outside, but this was something else, as if the Stalingrad men's choir had come marching down Calle 60 outside my hotel. Then there was a huge explosion, as if some part of the hotel had just blown up, the walls and rafters literally ringing. Through the high bathroom window, I could see a streak of gold in the sky, over the Plaza Central. By the time I threw some clothes on and got out onto the terrace, Anne Waldman was already there in her glamorous black bathrobe, and Tim Siebles came stumbling out, and the three of us watched the sky light up over the square, to the wild roars of applause greeting the Feast of the Epiphany. Thousands of grackles were winging their way out of there, in shock over the explosions -- so the birds were streaking east and the fireworks flying up and the wind blowing big billows of smoke after the birds.

In memory of Rachel Wetzsteon

2010-01-01T14:10:00.000-08:00

From the Times obituary:

Ms. Wetzsteon’s work was often rooted in her Morningside Heights neighborhood. In the title poem of “Sakura Park,” here in its entirety, she wrote of the small park near Riverside Church, known for its cherry trees:

The park admits the wind,
the petals lift and scatter
like versions of myself I was on the verge
of becoming; and ten years on
and ten blocks down I still can’t tell
whether this dispersal resembles
a fist unclenching or waving goodbye.
But the petals scatter faster,
seeking the rose, the cigarette vendor,
and at least I’ve got by pumping heart
some rules of conduct: refuse to choose
between turning pages and turning heads
though the stubborn dine alone. Get over
“getting over”: dark clouds don’t fade
but drift with ever deeper colors.
Give up on rooted happiness
(the stolid trees on fire!) and sweet reprieve
(a poor park but my own) will follow.
There is still a chance the empty gazebo
will draw crowds from the greater world.
And meanwhile, meanwhile’s far from nothing:
the humming moment, the rustle of cherry trees.

Molt. Rest. Molt.

2009-12-24T15:40:00.000-08:00

Here's a poem from Amy Gerstler's terrific new book DEAREST CREATURE, a total pleasure for Christmas Eve. Not exactly in the holiday spirit, but, like this whole book, adventurous, funny, and completely unexpected. The long poem called "Mrs. Monster Pens Her Memoirs" is brilliant.

ADVICE FROM A CATERPILLAR

Chew your way into a new world.
Munch leaves. Molt. Rest. Molt
again. Self-reinvention is everything.
Spin many nests. Cultivate stinging
bristles. Don't get sentimental
about your discarded skins. Grow
quickly. Develop a yen for nettles.
Alternate crumpling and climbing. Rely
on your antennae. Sequester poisons
in your body for use at a later date.
When threatened, emit foul odors
in self-defense. Behave cryptically
to confuse predators: change colors, spit,
or feign death. If all else fails, taste terrible.

Sleeping underwater with the maple leaves

2009-12-20T17:44:00.000-08:00

See Paul's blog for photos of the fantastic snow here in the Springs today. It started yesterday, later than we'd expected it after the big drum-beats of the weather forecasters so excited to have a "major snow event" to talk about. First some stray swirling flakes, their density gradually increasing, and before I knew it the ice covering the fish pond was covered itself. I thought about the fish down there in the growing dark; just an hour before I'd seen one, sleepless, wandering slowly around under the skim of ice. I wonder if the darkness settling over them -- like a very early nightfall -- sent them all into their winter state of suspended animation at the bottom?

More snow as night fell for us, and we left the outdoor lights on so we could look, and kept poking our heads out to take the measure of it, but truly it didn't seem that much when we went to bed. By morning though -- extravaganza of ornament! Sheer white stretching on through the back garden, everything silent, nothing moving but bluejays, cardinals and woodpeckers. You couldn't tell just how deep it really was until you got outside in it -- which proved to be a daunting project, getting the doors open, stepping out, and immediately sinking in to our knees. Two feet, thirty inches? Now the fish are far down under the thick white that makes their kingdom dark, sleeping there among all those maples leaves I didn't have time to get out of the water.

Thus a snowbound day: reading, writing a little, messing around online. cooking, a nap, and -- just when it seemed that torpor would overcome us both -- bouts of snow shoveling. The body wants to slow down, like the goldfish settling themselves in -- and good thing the body then refuses, and wants to kick up its heels. Or is that the head?

Death and the Zebras

2009-12-05T19:28:00.001-08:00

This remarkable poem by the Basque poet Bernardo Atxaga, translated by Amaia Gabantxo, appears in the current issue of the Canadian literary journal BRICK.

DEATH AND THE ZEBRAS

We were 157 zebras
galloping down the parched plain,
I ran behind zebra 24,
25, and 26,
ahead of 61 and 62
and suddenly we were overtaken with a jump
by 118 and 119,
both of them shouting river, river,
and 25, very happy, repeated river, river,
and suddenly 130 reached us
running, shouting, very happy, river, river,
and 25 took a left turn
ahead of 24 and 26
and suddenly I saw the sun on the river
sparkling full of sparkly splashes
and 8 and 9 passed me
running in the opposite direction
with their mouths full of water
and wet legs and white chests
very happy, shouting go,go,go
and I stumbled suddenly with 5 and 7
who were also running in the opposite directions
but shouting crocodiles, crocodiles,
and then 6 and 30 and 14 ran past us
very frightened, shouting crocodiles, crocodiles, go, go, go
and I drank water, I drank sparkling water
full of sparky splashes and sun;
crocodile, crocodile, shouted 25, very frightened,
crocodile, I repeated, rearing back
and running very frightened in the opposite direction
I suddenly collided with 149
and 150 and 151,
running, shouting very happy river,river,
crocodiles, crocodiles, I shouted back, very frightened
with my mouth full of water
and wet legs and wet chest
I kept galloping down the parched plain
behind 24 and 26
ahead of 61 and 62 and 63
and suddenly I saw, I saw a gap
between 24 and 26, a gap
and I kept galloping down the parched plain
and I saw the gap again, the gap again,
between 24 and 26
and I jumped and filled the gap.

We were 149 zebras
galloping down the parched plain,
and head of me were 12, 13
and 14, and behind me
43 and 44.

Serious moonlight

2009-11-29T07:52:00.001-08:00

Last night the moonlight in the Springs was an astonishment. It seemed to transform the atmosphere into a kind of vague, milky solid. Warm late November night, and over the mostly gone garden, this almost tangible suspension. In honor, here's Dorianne Laux reading her wonderful poem, "Facts About the Moon," with a video accompaniment.

A poem I would have read had I been there

2009-11-24T15:50:00.000-08:00

At tonight's Harvard reading to accompany the "ACT UP New York" exhibit, I'd planned to read this poem by Rynn Williams, from her book ADONIS GARAGE. Rynn died this year, too soon, but she left behind this superb collection, the evidence of a life deeply lived into.

The Forest at the Edge of the World

Today I left groceries by the playground on Hudson
and tried to haul, up toward my block,
a cross section of maple grown too large,
chainsawed into manhole covers. Alphonso,
Super for All Buildings east of the projects,
stopped sweeping. He leaned his bald broom
against the stoop, nudged the wood with his toe.
"Nothing to do but roll it," he said, hands
deep in his pockets. I nodded,
barely believing my luck in the midst of asphalt,
transistor radios, and the wet smell of dogs
as he squatted eye level with the log, heaved it
against his shoulder like a man who bears
a handmade cross for miles on his penitent back.
I saw a kind of glory in his eyes, he understood
the heft of the trunk, nicks in the damp bark.
I stood on the side and righted the thing
and together we rolled this boulder of tree
past the Indian deli, the Russian shoe repair,
the Caribbean bakery. "You can smell the forest,"
he said, as we reached my stoop, wood
in the crook of his neck, sawdust and humus and sweat.
And we hoisted the thing, one step at a time, stopping
only to breathe the scent of sap and after a good half hour
it was filling the whole of my apartment--
the shade, the damp smell, that enormous presence--
light brown rings so perfect my whole life
fell right down inside them, concentric circles,
tree within tree, the single slab a world within itself--
suddenly it was thirty-five years ago:
I stood on the edge of a forest, someplace upstate,
and looked up into the branches of my first
true and majestic tree, in the first real forest--trees
instead of buildings. Oh the breadth of those limbs--
after the taut geometry of elevator, fire escape, lobby,
to see the world through branches to the sun--I believed
the world was mine, there was sap in my veins,
the tree was limitless, the scent of the tree,
the bark and the branch and the six-year-old sightline,
which goes on to the edge of the known world.

I'm not at Harvard

2009-11-24T14:44:00.000-08:00

I'd expected to be reading tonight with the wonderfully live-wire Eileen Myles in Cambridge, and I was looking forward to it. The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts has mounted a show called "ACT UP New York," centering on posters and other activist art from the crisis years of the epidemic. I'd planned to read poems by Tim Dlugos, James Merrill and the late Rynn Williams, as well as some work of my own.

But I don't know that anyone had quite considered the exigencies of travel on Thanksgiving week. Penn Station was packed, and when the track number was posted on the board for the Acela to Boston there was a mad race toward the escalator. In the Age of Terrorism, you have to get your ticket checked before you can go down to the platform, which means that the cone of travelers has to funnel down to a narrow line, like cars entering the Holland Tunnel. Lots of big wheeled bags, as much must be carried back to the family gathering. As we get closer, more and more of them wheel over my shoes. Once I'm down the escalator a conductor points to the quiet car, which turns out to be full save for a seat at the back, one of those where a narrow table separates two facings seats. There's a woman already sitting on one side; I ask if the other side is available and she says yes, so I stash my stuff above. But as soon as I try to sit another woman sits down beside the first, and I realize my long frame will not fit: my knees will be in the lap of one of the other passengers. So I scoop up my stuff (not noticing I'm leaving behind my sandwich and bottle of water), but it turns out the doors behind me are shut; there's no way out except back through the crowded car, and the aisle's completely choked by travelers and big rolling bags.

Eventually, I'm back through the crowd, duck out of the train, hurry down toward the other end, head in again -- not a seat in sight, unless I make a famiy with a crowd of kids move their pile of coats and toys and bags. The aisles are still full of the unseated, and suddenly I just can't deal. I turn and walk off the train.

There's another in half an hour, the cheaper "regional" train, running a little late. Once it's called I get back into the funnel again, only to be stopped at the head of the stairs by the Amtrak person who's protecting us from Al Qaeda because I have a ticket for the earlier train. He won't let me on unless I go change it, which would mean waiting through the huge line at the counter. So I'm sunk. I turn back, make my way through the wedge of bodies and luggage, over to the security counter where the handsome bomb-sniffing dogs hang out, and find myself beginning to weep. It's the big wave of all this fall's work and travel and responsibly showing up for all I needed to do breaking over my head. It's Thanksgiving, enough! In my head I am already apologizing: I would love to read for you, I'd like to be there, but I am going HOME, I am NOT going to Harvard.

Perhaps, given that many thousands of people travel via Amtrak at Penn Station every week, and that Thanksgiving week is a predictable crush, maybe they could do a little planning to get people onto the train in a humane fashion? Or add some cars?

Apologies to anyone who's come out to the museum this evening, but I hope the reading's wonderful.

By owl-light

2009-11-16T06:10:00.001-08:00

Last night in the Springs I was just getting ready to leave the house, putting some things away, hanging a coat in the closet, when I heard a sound I'd never heard before outside the bedroom window. Over the summer a pair of screech owls woke us up a few nights with their unearthly call -- they sound like a very distressed raccoon, some careening warble of trouble -- but nothing like this. I went outside to listen, and there were the soft notes of the call again. I did a quick web search, listening to owl calls, and found this. If you click on "Typical Male" you'll hear exactly what I heard.

A short-eared owl in our maples! I left feeling sort of aglow with the experience. I drove to the train station, opened the car door, and there it was again, another owl calling over the parking lot. Then, on my fifteen minute walk to the jitney stop, beside the fire station, another owl; on the other side of it, another. Then, by the farmer's market, the next one: Amagansett was full of owls! And they were calling to each other from tree to tree in the warm November evening.

The web page says they glide low over open fields at night, looking for prey. Right behind the trees where I heard them calling there are big open fields -- corn in the summer, and the new organic farm behind the market. I love thinking of the dark shapes of the owls, silhouetted against the stars, flying there a few feet above the earth.

Twilight at the zoo

2009-11-13T07:30:00.000-08:00

A great night at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans last night. Two hundred visitors rode the little zoo train through the dark (think squabbling flamingoes and scrambling nutria) back to the swamp, where a cantilvered series of boardwalks carry you above the alligators in their green kingdom, back to a big wooden house like a Cajun dancehall. There they enjoyed wine and good, a jazz trio, and then readings of some of the great poems that will be installed next year around the zoo: Whitman, Dickinson, Roethke, Hopkins, Andrew Marvell, Kay Ryan and many more. Joining me in reading the texts was the luminous Nevada Barr, a mystery writer known for her series of books set in National Parks, who turned out to be a poetry reader of fierce presence. It's always a pleasure to see how much people enjoy hearing great poems aloud; it takes me back to the Favorite Poem Project events, and it's a reminder that perhaps we err in having so many event where poets read their own work. Of course that can be a huge pleasure too -- but something else happens when readings center on the art of poetry, on great work NOT written by the reader. It's a whole different sort of energy, and something about it seems an intrinsic pleasure, even for people who don't know they like poetry.

But I have to say that the truly memorable part for me was getting to the zoo just at twilight, when it was already closed. Not finding anyone to meet me, I slipped through a side gate that the education people use, and walked through the gloaming back to the swamp area. The zoo is well over fifty acres, and the trails and boardwalks loop all around. I was alone with the flamingoes, the big tapirs lumbering across their low plain, the shy alpacas, some haughty cranes, a huge and hurrying flock of -- um, ibis? Squawking, rustling, how many eyes in the shadowy depths of the leaves? Fantastic, to wander alone through those paths toward the welcoming lights shining above the green surface of the swamp.

Five AM, Ronkonkoma train

2009-11-12T03:25:00.000-08:00

Taking Long Island Railroad out of the city at five in the morning turns out to be an oddly differently experience than riding the train any other time, as it's full of people who've been out all night and are on their wobbly way home. This morning there were two women talking in the seat just across and one ahead of me. They were bleary, and in a confiding mood. "One man," one said, "all it takes is loving one wrong man, and your whole life is fucked." The other agreed. And in a while she added, "But he's not the one that matters. It's your little girl. A mother is..." Long pause. "How does that saying go? A mother is..." long pause "...a necessity." Concurrence, nods, silence.

A young man, quite drunk, enters the train, speaks to the women, who let him know they're talking to each other and don't want to be flirted with, and then they soften and proceed to flirt with him. He says he's going to Jamaica and he's afraid he's going to fall asleep. They say they'll wake him up and he lies down on the seat in front of me --- immediately out.

At Jamaica, he's still sleeping, and the two women are talking among themselves. I start to head on for the airport, thinking about who's responsible here -- the boy, the two who said they'd wake him, me who overheard? -- and how the guy's going to wake up in Ronkonkoma in an hour and wonder where he is. Another man waiting for the doors to open has heard all this too; he looks at me and says, "Those girls said they'd wake him up."

I think about this and decide it's easy enough to do a good deed. I tap the sleeping man on the shoulder, nothing, tap him again, he opens his eyes. I say, "You wanted to get off at Jamaica, right? This is Jamaica." He looks at me as if I might be an alien abductor. The women, who are talking to each other, pay no attention at all. I leave the train, look back to see the two of them strolling away, but I never see the fellow leave the train. Did the women know all the time he was going to be sleeping a good long while? And did he wake up in the middle of Long Island? The conductors on the early shift must be experts in this.

Outsiders

2009-11-04T09:47:00.001-08:00

OUT Magazine has just published this anthology of essays they've printed over the years, including a profile of Provincetown by yours truly. The cover makes me think of the discussion of the commercial uses of Walt Whitman's work below -- here are some boys together clinging. Well, actually they look like they have just finished clinging, and both do and no not want you to know about it. Do they know whom they souse with spray?

Morning on Sunset Boulvevard, night near the airport...

2009-11-02T10:17:00.000-08:00

I've mostly been enjoying the diurnal pleasures of L.A. -- the dry sunwashed greenery of Sunset Blvd to the west of the 405, just beneath the Getty. A benefit for the industrious and excellent Red Hen Press, which celebrated their fifteenth anniversary yesterday at a glittery afternoon reading/lunch/champagne reception, with a room full of wonderful writers; Jamaica Kincaid, Wanda Coleman, Alicia Ostriker, Chris Abani. Today I'm off to read at Claremont College with Alicia and with the charming and very witty Matthea Harvey -- pleasure all around, and Los Angeles is co-operating with suprisingly clear skies, so that all the details of the mountains are visible. Not the way I'm used to seeing this place. And during a Northeastern November, southern California is fantastically inviting.

Daylight beauty aside, I'm posting a noirish photo, an iconic donut stand near LAX. I like how crushingly enormous that vast pastry is.

Salvatore Scibona's THE END

2009-10-28T18:06:00.000-07:00

I'm en route to Ashland, Oregon, and it's been a pretty hellacious travel day: a missed flight, serious turbulence, a "wind shear warning," and four hours of sitting around in LAX. The one good thing I can say about today is that I finished the novel I've been reading, THE END, by Salvatore Scibona, which was a National Book Award Finalist last year. Just at the moment any sort of architecture of praise I might attempt to build for it feels inadequate -- the book has that sort of largeness of spirit about it, as well as a remarkable sense of cadence, as well as portraits of people so ferociously drawn they feel indelible. I thought I'd just quote one paragraph here, rather more discursive than most of the book, but a passage which reveals an intimate sense of the space of childhood and the scale of memory.

"Night, for children, was more a place than a time. For a child, to wake in the night and race downstairs toward the bed of parents was to plunge into a forest from which he might never emerge. A man could never hope to fully feel again the deep night in childhood; he could at best recall the fact of it faintly. For a man of his age, nothing could be as vast as the nighttime of childhood except the extension of thought toward his distant past, where flickered, flickered, and evanesced -- My brother and I were on our knees picking the favas when a snake shot up and bit my chin; my father held me under my arms and dangled me over a well -- and the distinctness and the isolation of the flickers, the utter obscurity of what must have happened before and after, imparted to the imagined world in which they had to have taken place dimensions infinitely wider than those of the world in which he now found himself recollecting them."

Walt Whitman for Levis (2)

2009-10-28T15:43:00.000-07:00

A while ago I did a post here about the new Levis campaign that makes use of Whitman, sometimes directly and sometimes in spirit, to promote blue jeans. Denim, with its democratic character and iconic associations with America, would be just fine with Whitman, who'd doubtless be wearing Carhartt were he walking the streets of Brooklyn today. A thoughtful reader, though, sent me a link to this commentary on the campaign from another blogger, and it's certainly worth a look. This link also includes a TV spot where you hear in the background the Edison wax cylinder recording of a voice that's probably Whitman reading a bit of verse. I don't agree that this is the most offensive commercial ever produced -- actually I think it's pretty beautiful, taken sheerly as a piece of videography on American themes -- but Webster's points about the folks who bring you Levis are crucial ones. I personally reserve that "most offensive ad" tag for those oil company commercials that show you a shining natural world, or suggest that big energy companies are out to make the planet a marvelous, clean and safe place.

Anyway, the contradictions inherent in the Levis ad (America is noble and cracked, jeans belong to everyone but somebody very rich owns the company, work clothing is the language of the people but you look really hot and sexy in them) all seem present for Whitman, too. How can he be a booster for development and forest-clearing (see "Song of the Broad-Axe") and talk about the nobility of Native Americans"? How can he be at once a spiritual visionary and a tireless self-promoter? How be a sexual radical and an avuncular sage? Do I contradict myself, very well then...

Madea's Family Reunion

2009-10-18T14:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I saw my first Tyler Perry movie, and took great pleasure in this completely whacked-out hybrid of a thing. Madea's Family Reunion ends with a wedding in which a Christian couple is united while Maya Angelou reads a poem,people dressed as angels hang from the rafters, a guy who beats up women gets a pot of hot grits thrown in his face, and a black drag queen celebrates the church, Jesus, revenge, discipline and matrimony. HOW Perry manages to throw all those elements into the pot is beyond me; the wildly varying tones ought to wrench the whole thing into incoherence, but somehow it just remains so delicious. And all those mesmerizingly beautiful guys! It's as if Perry puts everything he enjoys (suffering but brave women, muscular and soulful men, righteous old church ladies, uplifting messages about the family, and drag comedy) all in one place, and therefore accomplishes an impossible reconciliation: the upright black family, with its emphasis on unity and moral uplift, is on the same stage with the camp comedy of a wild drag queen and a whole lot of sexiness. And I haven't even talked about the playful reclamation of stereotype! I'm in awe.

The only thing is, I also watched an interview with the writer/director/filmmaker/performer, and it was a little alarming to see how deeply he professes his Christianity, and how much pressure he seems to feel as a public figure.He talked about his own abusive father, which brings into focus the fact that the film both makes abuse a criminal reality (with the hot grits man) and a source of comedy (Madea is always grabbing some miscreant kid and wailing away). Like the relationship between Perry viewing the world in terms of the "saved" and the fallen while still dancing onscreen in huge false breasts and butt under a huge purple dress, this feels bizarrely incoherent. And yet he has this area of safety, in the films: a chaotic, contradictory, multitude-containing stage that I bet Shakespeare would have loved. Go figure.

Cinema re-mix

2009-10-18T12:38:00.000-07:00

This is the marquee of the moviehouse in East Hampton on this rainy Sunday. I like how the titles run together. CAPITALISM WILD THINGS pretty accurately describes some of the local bandit citizens with their mansions fueled by Wall Street dollars, and I am sure there's more than one CHANEL INFORMANT around here, too. NEW YORK MEATBALLS are sandwiched between the other options. There seems to be an invitation here to re-edit the movies into new juxtaposed versions, in which one text would comment on the other.

My Diva

2009-10-16T19:34:00.000-07:00

It was a total pleasure this afternoon to be part of a reading at the CUNY Graduate Center to celebrate Michael Montlack's anthology MY DIVA, a collection of essays by gay male writers about female figures who've possessed their imaginations. Wayne Koestenbaum read an essay on Anna Moffo, Michael himself a piece on Stevie Nicks, Jason Schniederman read a kind of cautionary meditation on Liza Minelli, and Richard Tayson celebrated an early infatuation with Helen Reddy (who, it turns out, is now a hypnotherapist in Australia). Alfred Corn read a poem in which Billie Holiday figured, and yours truly read a piece about Grace Paley. I'd been feeling that the diva as glamorous and glittery figure had been pretty well explored, in her role as a mirror of gay men's longings for beauty, power and authority. What about other kinds of female figures who might embody different aspects of our interiority? So I decided to see if I could tap into my inner grandmotherly upper West Side Jewish anti-nuke activist. Anyway, the reading and conversation after were welcoming and lively.

One aspect of the conversation I liked was the acknowledgement of the big range of ways in which men think about "divas" -- as "role models," as objects of curatorial interest, as obsessive touchstones, as icons of eros, as emblems of courage, or mirrors of vulnerability and shame.

Produced by void and fire

2009-10-11T16:14:00.000-07:00

I've just read a fine new book by Maggie Nelson called BLUETS, just published by Wave Books. It's an essay (though the term fits only loosely, as this is a passionate, lyirca meditation) on the color blue, in short numbered sections the speaker calls "propositions." Here, as a preview, are two consecutive sections:

156. 'Why is the sky blue?' -- A fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several ties. Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.

157. The part I do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal puts it, 'The color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue.' In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.

Lost at Sea (continued)

2009-10-09T17:18:00.001-07:00

When I left off on the Hart Crane post below I was in a hotel room in Cleveland, and running off to lead a workshop for grad students there. Now that I've been back a few days, I've found myself turning to the materials on Crane that my good hosts in Garrettsville provided: some of his letters, and some interesting essays on the poet's life and work in a back issue of THE HIRAM POETRY REVIEW, which is published at the college in Garrettsville. (Where, by the way, a sandstone statue of James Garfield, a Garrettsville citizen, was recently cleanly beheaded; his incompletely body stands beside a chapel, looking quite lost.) I also re-read Richard Howard's poem on Crane -- with its compelling moments in a cruising area down under the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge. And I've been thinking of "Voyages" -- Crane's masterwork -- in relation to a terrific chapbook I'm introducing for the PSA by a young St. Louis poet named Haines Eason. The speaker is "Voyages" takes the greatest ecstatic pleasure in being "lost at sea" -- rocked in the ocean of passion, where "sleep, death, desire close round one instant in one floating flower" -- as good a description of orgasm as any I can think of.

Now I think I have to add to what I've said below only a note about the poignancy of Crane's grave. The cemetery in Garrettsville is hilly and sloping. The leaves were turning, and I brought home a few mottled maple leaves fallen near the gravestone. One of our hosts' parents were buried just down the hill, which made it seem like we'd entered into a community. And because Hart's body wasn't there, and because he had no stone of his own but was forever inscribed under his father's shadow, he seemed permanently fixed on the margin: regarded from a distance, and yet still somehow one of their own, forever an Ohio boy yet never entirely claimed.

Lost at Sea: Garrettsville, Ohio, October 2, 2009

2009-10-03T20:06:00.000-07:00

The picture above was taken on a bright gray Friday afternoon in Garrettsville, Ohio -- thus the harsh light. You can't see that on top of that same stone is inscribed the name and dates of Clarence Crane, Hart's father, a businessman and candy manufacturer, inventor of Life Savers candy and the proprietor of a shop and restaurant in nearby Chagrin Falls called Crane's Canary Cottage. Hart, of course, leapt from a ship called the Orizaba in the Gulf of Mexico in 1932; his body was never found. Exactly why his name is carved on the side of his father's headstone is mysterious to me; I don't know whether to ascribe it to lean times or family shame about the fate of their notorious ne'er-do-well son.

We had an extraordinarily moving day in Garrettsville. A number of friendly and helpful residents met us for lunch and proceeded to show us around. We'd parked on Main Street, right in front of the tavern that nows occupies the space where Crane's grandfather's maple syrup business stood. He used the roiling waters of the river coursing behind the storefronts to cool his product. Just down the block Arthur Crane's house still stands, a distinguished and solid-looking white frame residence from the 1890s. Next door he built a house for his son Clarence and Clarence's wife Grace, near the beginning of a spectacularly unhappy marriage. Hart was born in the house, in 1899, probably in a small room beside the kitchen. The current owners of the house, Dave and Kym Kirk, are proud of its history, and they welcomed us in and very kindly allowed a whole troop of visiting poets and scholars to wander through.

Garrettsville's position toward Crane seems a somewhat mixed one. There's the plaque in front of the house, but then there's another monument too, on a sidestreet near Main. It's an undersized boulder of very pink quartz, with a bronze plaque affixed to it, and it has a bit of a random look to it, as if it were a well-meaning gesture that has been set off to one side so it won't be too noticeable.

One of Crane's cousins, I'm told, gave quite a bit of money to a local academic institution, after her death, stipulating that the library that would be built with the money would be called the Hart Crane Library. They took the cash and gave the building no such name; apparently some college administrator didn't want the library to be known as "fairyland."

This puts me in mind of William Logan's absurd recent review of Library of America's newly issued edition of Crane; the critic asserted that the poet's life (and thus his work) had been damaged by "too many sailors." Presumably Logan knows the proper number of sexual encounters for good health, but I hope he never fills me in. I joke, but in truth the whole thing just makes me sad; the homophobia that did so much to swallow and erase Crane during his life continued long after his death, but who'd expect it to continue now? Logan has joined the company of Yvor Winters, who thought that Crane's poetry was permanently deformed because it lacked a "great subject" -- i.e., heterosexual love and reproduction. I suspect both critics may wind up being remembered more for these sad revelations of shoddy thinking than for anything else.

(And now I must go teach. More to come on this post later.)

Traveling Life

2009-10-01T05:09:00.000-07:00

At Penn Station yesterday morning, I went to board my train to New Brunswick, but a huge crowd of people with suitcases blocked the entrance to the escalator. They'd called an Amtrak train on the same track, and when you board Amtrak you have to show your ticket to demonstrate that you are not a terrorist. I had two minutes to make the train. When I made it to the front of the line, the Amtrak official said, "Sir, this is not New Jersey Transit." I protested, she fulminated, I spoke in a fashion which indicated I might become temperamental, she let me go down to the track. I was annoyed at nearly missing my train, but it also struck me that it would have been pretty easy to get past Amtrak security. Does it actually have anything to do with safety at all?

Then I taught my wonderful undergrad class at Rutgers -- a twice-a-week joy -- and jumped back on the train to go to Newark Airport. The rails were rocking and the car warm, my thinking slowed, and the next thing I knew I came back to conciousness past my train stop. Off the train I leap, through Penn Station Newark, which has the aura of a grand civic past fallen into the new century; it could be an old Soviet station in eastern Europe someplace. Onto another train, which slowly rumbles its way to the airport.

Once I get to the station, I'm headed for the turnstiles when some young soldier/cop (who knows?) shouts "Sir!" He's standing behind a folding table and announces he's searching my bags. I say, "For what?" and he replies "Whatever." I want to say, well, in a police state I have no choice, but I don't, since I do plan to get to Cleveland today. He gropes around in my bag for thirty seconds and then says, "I tried not to make too much of a mess" as if by way of apology, as if when I said "For what?" I'd somehow called him on his pretense of purpose.

On to the Air Train. It's not functioning and you have to get on the wrong side, go one stop, get off, then get on the same train again. Don't ask. It's packed. We get over the highway, and it slides to a halt. We sit. The recorded voice says "The TRAIN is not in the station," which is so self-evident that I'd laugh had I not already lost my sense of humor.

Once we arrive, I check my bag, get to security, and set off the metal detector, for no known reason. When I walk through again I'm clear, declared to be no threat: I can go to Cleveland, teach a workshop, give a poetry reading.

My old student/friend Michael Dumanis picks me up at the airport, funny and voluble and full of tales, and I am immediately cheered up and glad I came. Cleveland is unfamiliar and intriguing; Paul arrives later today and we'll read together this evening. Friday we're going to Hart Crane's house, which I didn't know was possible. Saturday Michael, Joanna Klink and Kazim Ali are reading in a botanical garden. I don't have to see another airport till Sunday; I am not suspect till then, or if I am I don't have to know about it.

Introducing Adrienne

2009-09-24T09:23:00.000-07:00

Last night Adrienne Rich read at Rutgers. We had a superb day, with my lucky undergrads meeting with her in the afternoon, and then a relaxed and convivial dinner with a number of Rutgers poets and with Adrienne's old colleagues at Douglas College, which is the residential women's college of Rutgers, and a long-established center of feminist studies and literature. Adrienne has a warm, unguarded character; the time with her was a delight to everyone around. Here's the introduction I gave, in a very crowded hall, just before her reading:

Some artists, it seems, can’t help but be pathmakers; they open possibilities for other makers, and possibilities for their culture. Muriel Ruykeser, who opened new directions for American poetry that Adrienne Rich would further explore, wrote the following description of the situation of our poetry in 1949:

"American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict. ... We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; at another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare."

Sixty years later, those words seem more true than ever, and it seems no accident that those same sixty years mark the career – thus far – of the remarkable poet who reads for us tonight, one of contemporary American literature’s essential voices. Across 19 books of poems and four volumes of essays, Adrienne Rich has given body to a restless intellect motivated by an unshakeable compassion; she is out to get to the root of inequity, of the abuse of power; she is out, as Ruykeser suggested, to make American democracy a real thing, and to dismantle, in her own language, the sources of perpetual war.

So much has been said about Adrienne’s work, and I know that many of you have been reading and thinking about her poetry and her essays in preparation for this evening. So I want to say just two things about Adrienne. First, that she is a former professor of English here at Douglas College, and it is a delight to welcome her back; as a new professor here, her presence here reminds me that I stand in a serious tradition indeed. Second, I want to tell you what I perhaps what I admire most about Adrienne: her profound restlessness. I mean this in two ways. She has never been satisfied, as far as I can tell, in her quest for justice; she has never stopped asking further, looking deeper. As W. S. Merwin put it, “All her life she has been in love with the hope of telling utter truth…” That love, and her empathy with those in this country and in the world who are not in positions of power have not, I believe, allowed her respite; she has never set down that work. And that moral restlessness has been matched by an aesthetic one, as Rich has continued to reinvent her forms. Listen to this stanza from her much-anthologized classic, Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers:

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.

That poem was published in 1951, in the poet’s first book. And this stanza is from a new poem, “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve,” just published in the Best American Poetry 2008. It’s a poem that wants to think about extraordinary rendition, how syntax is broken apart as the torturer and the prison guard remove meaning from the world:

Verb force-feeds noun
Submerges the subject
Noun is choking
Verb disgraced goes on doing

I love knowing that these two stanzas came from the same hand. They represent points along on a long arc of invention, form constantly seeking the words that might serve her work of witness and of change – a work that continues to engage and to enlarge our time. Please welcome Adrienne Rich.

A Gate at the Stairs

2009-09-23T20:32:00.000-07:00

Two days ago I finished Lorrie Moore's astonishing new novel A GATE AT THE STAIRS, a book that somehow manages to be both funny, excoriating, and utterly wrenching. I feel like I've been on a deeply consuming, unpredictable ride, one that's still resonating with me. Here's one passage, a marvelous lyric flight in which the speaker, Tassie Keltjin, describes her erotic relationship -- her first -- with her boyfriend Reynaldo:

"Often we didn't talk at all. His arms were soft and strong. His penis was as small and satiny as a trumpet mushroom in Easter basket grass. His mouth slurped carefully as if every part of me were an oyster, his, which made me feel I loved him. He would pull away and look at me happily from above. 'You have the long, pettable nose of a horse,' he said, 'and a horse's dark, sweet eyes.' And I thought of all the horses I had seen and how they always seemed to be trying to get their eyes to focus and work together. Their eyes were beautiful but shy and lost, and since they were on opposite sides of their heads like a fish's, one of them would sometimes rear up in skepticism and fear and just take a hard look at you. I felt nothing like a horse, whose instincts I knew were to run and run. I had mostly in life tried to stand still like a glob of coral so as not to be spotted by sharks. But now I had crawled out onto land and was somehow already a horse."

from the Crescent City

2009-09-18T17:26:00.001-07:00

In the window of a pharmacy museum in the French Quarter, these medicines: what would happen if you took a dose?

And then, in the sky early this evening after the lightest of rain, other medicine:

Madoo

2009-09-12T16:50:00.001-07:00

Today we made our first visit to Madoo, the remarkable Sagaponack garden of the painter Robert Dash. He's been working on it since 1967, and its has the quality of a self-made paradise that I love best in made spaces -- that sense of one person eccentrically re-inventing tradition, making a private world. Though this dreamed spaec also opens out into history, and into the social space, since Dash is quite happy to welcome people in, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, from May to October.

The garden feels enormous, because it's a space of forking and divergent paths, because there are wide and open rooms and tiny and enclosed ones, and because you can never see it all at once. It's a green labyrinth, and it echoes the Garden of the Moon in Tucson (a kind of outdoor outsider art folly I described in FIREBIRD), and the Orange Show in Houston (there's a photo album of that on my Facebook page). But it also draws upon ancient gardens with its quincunx beds, and Rennaissance perspective, and Victorian Orientalism and love of the tropic and rare. It's a grand, unlikely, seamless synthesis, and somehow it doesn't look like anything else.

It's such a gift, to walk out of the daily world and into the alternate space of the enclosed garden, the visible, apprehensible artifact of a singular forty-year dream. I don't think it can be captured in photographs -- it's too much a surround for all the senses -- but you can get a little sense of it here.

The wind of the new

2009-09-10T16:49:00.000-07:00

I've felt a bit overwhelmed by the start of school, so no post here for a few days. In a household with two teachers, both starting new jobs, there's a definite mood of disruption swirling around in early September, and it's matched tonight by the wind in the Springs, which is tossing the garden wildly. Paul's still in the city, teaching tonight in Newark, and I've come out here by myself to sit still, for what seems the first time in two weeks, and listen to the wind. I'm thinking about how I love the new, and seek it out, to keep things moving, and yet the new -- especially this much new -- is a source of stress too. Even when it's good. The body isn't really pleased with the process of finding its way in a new space, not knowing where the stairways lead. The spirit's excited by the looks on the students' face when they're thinking about a poem,
or how their shy surfaces fall away as they get excited. The body really wants to sleep, these two weeks. The spirit wants to plan and anticipate. The wind outside feels like a wind inside. Tomorrow the forecast is for rain, and I hope it does: a day to stay in,
sort, and attend would be just the ticket.

Big Chief

2009-09-04T15:22:00.000-07:00

First week of school, and I've been thinking how, for more-or-less fifty years, the school calendar's provided a structure to my year, that first week of September (give or take a bit) marking a new start, a re-energizing, a setting out. I took a few years off, in my twenties, doing other things, but for nearly all my life September's been the time of fresh beginnings. By now it feels like the academic calendar inheres in the structure of time itself; first shift in the weather, I want some new shoes, a new bag to carry my books and papers to school. As a kid in Memphis and Tucson, I bought big fat-lined pads of paper; I liked that they were called "tablets" because it echoed the slabs of Babylonian clay in my favorite archaeology book. This semester I have a new laptop, courtesy of Rutgers, but the pleasure is essentially the same: something fresh and pretty much empty to write on.

Risk and ruin in the fields

2009-08-29T07:15:00.000-07:00

The rainy fringes of the big loose jellyfish of a storm that was Danny descended on the Springs yesterday. It hadn't rained since August began, so the soaking felt welcome, exactly the right kind of rain for the garden: steady, not too driving, going on for hours. (And what does that sound like? Well, you can't talk about gardens without talking about sex, although the rather starched tone of gardening books on the whole would seem to suggest the opposite. Sex, death, time and regeneration are the gardener's great subjects. Also food.)

That last word has me thinking about this difficult summer, and the strapped circumstances of our CSA, Quail Hill Farm. June and July were very cool and wet, and then the heat burst out. If those climactic stresses weren't enough, the deer fence around the hill where many crops are grown -- a double row of stretched white string, following the theory that deer don't like double barriers that prevent clear jumping, and will work to avoid them -- failed. They made a feast. But the saddest of all was the blight, the virus that seems to have taken most of the tomatoes on the East Coast this season.

The vines looked incredible at first, sprawling and heavy with fruit, with a haze of that pungent green tomato-vine smell around them that seems just indescribable; it smells like nothing else. And then came the blight, the stems turning to mush, the fruit tumbling in a heap to the ground, and the ones that weren't already rotten at the bottom didn't have the lush, complex flavor of high summer tomatoes; they were more tentative, not full-bodied, disappointing.

A sadness, the rows of collapsed plants, the treasure all decaying at their feet. They seem to stand for the failures of human aspirations. All that tending, nurture of the seed, water, sun, cultivation, intention, vision of harvest. Heap of ruin. Of course every garden has failure in it (another thing to add to the list of the gardener's themes above), but in my garden failure doesn't loom so large. Some chard destroyed by voles, a mallow turned to ethereal skeleton by beetles: small disasters. At the farm, you can't just cover up the spot or turn away from the rows of voided hopes.

So I am working on remembering that it's a good thing to be face to face with this, the risk that growing anything is. It comes with the deal, part of the contract with earth. And though you might go buy tomatoes grown someplace else, or chemically protected from the blight, that doesn't erase the fact that, on the local level where we all live, ruin abides, waiting to happen. It's strange to think this is the same virus that drove my ancestors out of County Cork, in the 1850s; I'm not sure if my great grandmother Nancy O'Cochran was born here or in Ireland, but I know that she rode in the back of a covered wagon from Georgia to Tennessee, when her parents heard that General Sherman had turned around, and was marching back from the sea, and now they'd have to hide from that terror all over again. They turned their back on one kind of blight, and of course later they'd face others in the millet fields they'd cultivate in their new home.

Meanwhile, here in the East End, there are beets with beautiful concentric spirals inside, squash, peppers and cabbage, big-headed sunflowers from the field on Town Lane, every sort of herb, and garlic with a fierce, untamed, nearly metallic tang.

the hummingbird principle

2009-08-23T08:12:00.001-07:00

I have been seeing an ochre and green hummingbird in the garden since midsummer -- at least I think it's the same one, always solitary, hovering around the bee balm, dipping into the butterfly bush. Sometimes I hear him before I see him, that quick startling vibration somewhere near my ear. Dickinson called one a "route of evanescence" and that seems exactly right -- here and gone, a path of sudden iridescent appearance and quick, gone again. The day before yesterday I spent a good deal of the day working outside, and he seemed to be everywhere, and I started to think of him as a very small and very energetic muse. That night, I bought a hummingbird feeder at KMart, the least offensive one on display -- no huge plastic flower shape, no "art glass," just a clear tube with small red plastic flowers on the bottom to dispense the nectar.

Since hanging it up first thing yesterday, no hummingbird. When I'm watering or weeding, I keep looking; inside, I keep checking the kitchen window. No sign of one. I know it's magical thinking, but I feel I've expressed my desire for the hummingbird, and that did it: whatever we say we want loves to go buzzing spectacularly away. I am waiting for the one-inch wonder to refute this observation.

If life gives you lemons, paint that shit gold

2009-08-20T10:32:00.000-07:00

That headline is from the best t-shirt I saw on sun-hammered 14th Street today, that and (on a short, older man with a dashing white beard) I AM A LOVER OF ALL WOMEN.

Below, NYC scenes: immense Heidi Klumm on the side of the tour bus, corner of 7th Avenue, and just down 14th, the biggest, loneliest fish, in a lighting store. He's about a foot long, though you wouldn't know from this picture. He has two long trailing whiskers which don't show here either. His only companion in his tank is a small white eel; they seem to live in different worlds, though.

The burial ground at Orient, continued

2009-08-19T08:40:00.000-07:00

A little while back I posted a photo and a bit of text about a moving burial ground at Orient, at the tip of the North Fork of Long Island, where many slaves who'd worked the oyster ponds there where buried, in graves marked with un-inscribed stones. The white couple who owned the oysterworks, as well as the slaves, were buried there, too.

So I was startled, just today, to come across this poem of Amy Clampitt's. It's one of those vast single sentences of hers, the poem held together through a single, forward-rolling, accumulating act of attention, She uses the Native American name for Long Island as a title -- Whitman's word for the place of his birth, too.

PAUMANOK

The humped, half-subterranean
    potato barns, the tubers
like grown stones, wet meat
    from underground a bused-in
moved-on proletariat once
    stooped for, where Paumonok's
outwash plain, debris of glaciers,
    frays to a fishtail,

now give place to grapevines,
    their tendency to ramble
and run on, to run to foliage
    curbed, pruned, trained
into another monoculture -- row
    after profitable row
on acre after acre, whole landscapes
    strung like a ither

where juniper and honeysuckle,
    bayberry, Virginia creeper,
goldenrod and poison ivy would
    have rioted, the wetlands
glistening at the margin, the reed-
    bed plumes, the groudsel's
tideline windrows a patina of
    perpetual motion

washed bh the prevailing airs,
    where driven human
diligence alone could, now or ever,
    undo the uninstructed
thicketing of what keeps happening
    for no human reason,
one comes upon this leeward, mowed
    and tended pocket,

last resting place of slaves, each
    grave marked by a boulder
hardly more than a potato's size,
    unnamed but as dependents of
Seth Tuthill and his wife Maria,
    who chose finally to lie here
    with their sometime chattels,
    and whose memory too is now
        worn down to stone.

A descriptive felicity

2009-08-16T07:59:00.000-07:00

The garden writer and plant collector Reginald Farrer had a profound effect on English gardening by popularizing plants that thrived in high places. Now Nicola Shulman has published a short biography of him which includes this very pleasurable evocation of his character. Farrer, she writes, was "touchy, reproachful, extremely demanding, painfully solipsistic, disposed to view the rest of the world as a deficient source of comfort. This made him wretched most of the time, but it also allowed him to sympathize to an unusual degree with the exigent requirements of alpine plants."

Fifty-six years on the face of the earth

2009-08-10T19:40:00.000-07:00

My birthday, a steamy day, the hottest of the whole summer. I worked in the garden, picked up my taxes in East Hampton (extension, delay, etc.), bought a new sprinkler and an elaborate blue wand for watering, sprinkled and watered, worked on an essay about Whitman's tomb I've been pursuing and thought about his deep fascination with death -- it never dawned on me before that, for a soul with so few borders, restlessly pouring into everything, death must have seemed the deepest respite. If you're everyone and everywhere, what would you lack except being no one and no place? Then, presents from Paul: a cookbook from our local organic farm, a handsome new black and white plaid summer shirt, and a lavish gift certificate from a beautiful nursery in Bridgehampton. Ah! Then we were on the way to the beach when the oddest thing happened -- much shouting and commotion across the street, and I wound up stepping into an assault, one neighbor attacking another. I won't narrate the scene here, as it led to an arrest, and I guess we'll all wind up in court. But it was the strangest outbreak, in our peaceful neighborhood where it's so quiet that, if you walk outside at night, you can hear another neighbor's clock chime as if it were a cathedral. A long process: waiting, talking to the police, giving a statement, waiting some more, signing the statement, feeling shaken by this unexpected eruption. We never made it to the beach. We went out for my birthday dinner, where we had to work a bit to shake off the afternoon. But we were helped by a deftly run and quite delicious Mediterranean restaurant reviewed in the Times yesterday. I had bacalau with the most delicious lentils I've ever tasted. I asked the waiter what was in them; he said, butter sauce. I think there was a little more to it than that, but it remains one of the day's better mysteries.

Visitors number three, four, five and a returning guest

2009-08-09T08:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday our friend Marie arrived at the train station mid-day with her daughter Inan and Inan's friend FeiFei; the house and garden have been filled with eight- and nine-year-old energy. At one point the head of a neighbor girl appeared over the fence; she was standing on her mother's shoulders to peer over because they'd heard the two little girls far in the back of the garden crying Help, help! It was no emergency; they needed a broom or something to sweep spiderwebs out of the playhouse. It was nice to know that, if you screamed, someone would indeed hear you.

All day and evening, the vibrating dyad made me remember aspects of childhood I'd forgotten: very precise needs when it comes to food (clear glass from which to drink milk, no mixing of different sorts of foods, a certain number of ice cubes per glass of water, etc etc), much exchange of dominance, concern with who's copying who, an all-day-long working out of friendship's alternating pleasures and struggles. Tears laughter pleasure frustration all moving freely from one to another. At the bay beach, much concern with sand in the bathing suit, crabs, the possibility of being nibbled on the toes by fish. By ten o'clock I could barely keep my eyes open.

This morning, when we were just waking up Paul looked out the bedroom window and called, There's a deer in the garden! It was the first time we've actually seen one inside the fence. I went running out, and she startled and ran up toward the back, under the big oak. Big liquid dark eyes,a good-sized doe, maybe pregnant? She ran forward again, jumped a stone wall, and then squeezed herself under the gate through a space the size of, well, two shoeboxes, then took off down the lane toward the woods.

She ate the rest of the daylilies, some apparently really delicious black-eyed susans. Impossible to be annoyed.

Visitor number two

2009-08-08T08:39:00.001-07:00

Early August and the garden's been filled with very hot color: a tall deep orange daylily with gold centers, beautiful deep raspberry bee balm, bright helianthus and more daylilies in various yellows. I've mostly been an afficionado of paler colors in the garden, but these are inherited plantings, mostly, from the fellow who gardened here last. An interior painter/finisher by trade, he has a really nice color sense, and so I've been liking the carnival energy of these shades even if I wouldn't have chosen them myself.

This morning in my first-cup-of-coffee fog I went out to feed the fish, and was sitting on a bench contemplating the garden when I found myself noticing how calm it looked; maybe we'd moved on past the torrid colors of July and early August? That could be nice, just now, just a complex tapestry of green. But then I woke up enough to realize that two thirds of the daylilies were missing, or their heads snapped over, and it didn't take long to discover the hoofprints in the garden. Eaten in the night: the tender leaves of a Constance Spry rose, some raspberry vines, a prize new daylily whose flowers are nearly white. Early this spring, we built an eight-foot fence in the front of the garden, where deer used to walk in and browse. But a gate, out back, has a two-foot opening beneath it we hadn't deal with yet -- and sure enough, at its base there were hoofprints and indentations. Was it one doe, or several? The degree of damage seems to suggest one hungry culprit -- well, not all that hungry, as she chose only her the things she really relished. We slept through the whole bandit operation, even though that new rose is right beneath the open bedroom window. I admit I like the image, her out there dining surrepititously in the dawn light, while we slept away.

2009-08-07T18:31:00.000-07:00

Graywolf is just about to publish EDWARD HOPPER, a book of poems by the contemporary Catalan poet Ernest Farres (imagine an accent over that e, which my keyboard doesn't want to provide you). Farres has written an entire volume of poems based upon Hopper's paintings, and Lawrence Venuti's translation of them has been chosen by Richard Howard (himself a superb translator) as winner of the Robert Fagles Translation Prize.

The brilliant strategy of Farres' poems is to spend very little time describing the image which has triggered the poem; he wants to enter into the inner life of the painting. In this moving, deeply disconsolate poem he does what no painting can do: move in time. The result is a kind of spiritual x-ray of the picture in hand, one that sees deep into Hopper's darkness.

HOTEL ROOM, 1931

At the hotel a woman in her underwear
pores over a train timetable. An hour later,
in low spirits and bone-tired,
she'll start to pace around the room
leaving a fruity fragrance in the air
that reeks of mustiness.
A week later there'll be no
tangible results. A year later
she'll be the object of caresses.
Another four and no lullabies.
Another ten and the delicate balance
between youth and age will be gone.
Another twenty and she'll cling
to an expansive ethics of listlessness
and Triumph of the Will.
Another century and nobody's
going to remember a thing about her.
In two centuries there'll be
no polar ice caps. When five
billion years go by,
there won't even be a sun.

Visitor

2009-08-05T17:50:00.001-07:00

I was doing something or other in the house today when Paul came rushing in from his study and said, You've got to come outside, there's a turtle in the pond! To my astonishment, there was a very young box turtle in there, about the size of a red delicious apple, swimming around. A few weeks ago I stopped and rescued one from the middle of Old Stone Highway, and a bit later Paul found a large one way back in our garden, at the base of a large oak tree -- but I had never seen one in the water. I thought maybe he'd slipped in and couldn't get out, so after some discussion I bent down and picked him up. He was completely unfazed, and didn't even withdraw his head and legs into his shell. I set him down on the grass; he turned around back toward the pond,
and jumped in! Very clear what he wanted. He spent the morning swimming, yellow and tobacco-brown shell poking up above the water, his small head held high, then hiding under a shady lip of rock at the edge, dog-paddling a little in place. I built a stairway of stones on the water's edge, as there's no simple way out for a creature that small. This afternoon, when we came back from the gym, he was gone. I would like to have seen him climb the stairs.

After five PM, deposit brains in this slot

2009-08-05T07:29:00.001-07:00

Readers of the previous post might be interested in knowing that Whitman's brain is the only part of his body not in the Camden tomb. Since it was "abnormally large" and of obvious interest, it was removed for study by the American Anthropometric Society, an institution that would have interested Whitman, with his interest in phrenology; the Society's intent was to study brains of the finest sort. There it's said to have been dropped and destroyed by a clumsy lab assistant. (Thus sparing Whitman the fate of Walt Disney, whose frozen head, I understand, awaits a technologically-enabled resurrection.)

Do I contradict myself? Very well then...

2009-08-03T16:40:00.000-07:00

What a strange place, Walt Whitman's tomb. It's massive. Big granite plinths set into a shady (well, gloomy) hillside, with a huge stone door set ajar through which you can see a group of crypts, six of the Whitmans to be exact, though only Walt's name is chiseled on the stone outside for the world to see. Sometime, thirty or forty years ago, to judge by the style of the stone and the already-worn engraving, somebody placed another stone in front of the tomb, carved with some of the final lines of "Song of Myself":

I depart as air . . . . I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

This had to be an attempt to resist the monumentality and finality the tomb seems to suggest. But it's a little disquieting, to think that the poem of the 35-year-old Walt sits so uncomfortably beside the tomb the 72-year-old poet commissioned. No grass is drawing nourishment from that chilly chamber, unless it has mighty tenacious and powerful roots indeed!

He is more under our bootsoles, sure enough, than he is in that stony vault, but I might make a temple of granite, too, if I were afraid of disappearing, afraid of my work vanishing with me. Maybe. It's hard to imagine wanting to memorialize oneself in this way. He knew better, the Whitman of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," but how could the man in Camden, stroke-shattered and tired and never-quite-recovered from the War, how could he know that, too?

late July morning report

2009-07-25T06:58:00.001-07:00

-- First monarch of the summer, feeding on oregano blossoms at Quail Hill Farm.

-- Boy in the field with his mother and grandmother, utterly terrified of a wooden pole wrapped in blue plastic which his grandmother identified for him as a scarecrow. He became paralyzed with fear and had to be carried, and was reluctant to be persuaded that the object wasn't a scarecrow.

-- On the way home seven wild turkeys crossed Town Lane in the woods. I stopped; four proceeded, three turned back. (Who says turkeys are dumb?) One of the ones who'd crossed over turned and made a little gobble-call to the stragglers. Keeping the troop together?

summer in Orient, the grave-markers of slaves

2009-07-24T20:17:00.000-07:00

Today I drove Paul to Orient Point, so he could catch the ferry to Bridgeport; he's off to teach for a few days at a low residency program at Fairfield University. The day was amazing, since after last night's demi-hurricane the air was clear, and the greens of the leaves seemed all aglow. We had a little extra time, so we drove around Orient, which might be the most beautiful little Long Island village of them all -- pristine rows of clapboard houses along very green lanes, and only a realtor, a post office, a general store and an ice cream shop for retail life. We drove down the main street, followed the curve of the land along a small harbor or bay through moist-looking fields, then along a small patched road to a town beach spotted a placard beside the road. It turned out to mark the grassy path to a small, stone-walled cemetery just where solid ground ended. Here a group of slaves who worked the oyster ponds nearby until the 1830s were buried. A white couple, the owners of this particular oystering operation, had chosen to be buried with them, and their graves were marked by a pair of carved headstone. But beyond those were simply rows of stones -- no carving, no names -- indicating the graves of the the unrecorded ones. The most achingly beautiful spot, and in it these un-inscribed markers.

July evening, out behind the Mexican restaurant, Amagansett, NY

2009-07-20T20:09:00.000-07:00

And below, a sign of summer: greenery from the train window becomes linear abstraction:

An unfinished nightmare

2009-07-20T16:22:00.001-07:00

On the way back from Seattle, and then again this morning on the train from the city out to the South Fork, I read Dave Eggers' new nonfiction book, ZEITOUN. It's a riveting book, and I can't imagine reading it without absolute outrage; there were a few times I had to shut the book in a fury -- and in fact I wished I'd finished it on the plane, since we didn't get back till well after midnight and I was so stirred by the book it was hard to sleep.

ZEITOUN is a straightforward, reporterly narrative of one family's experience of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. I don't want to say a lot about their nightmare here, since I think it's the sort of book best experienced with little knowledge of what's to come. Suffice to say that American racism and xenophobia are on chilling display, and that the sweetness of the central character only makes that bias and stupidity all the more appalling. It seems a particularly necessary book to read in light of the fact that Guantanamo isn't closed, and the administration actually says they might detain people indefinitely who've been cleared of charges. Where are we? Didn't we just elect a president who campaigned on a platform of restoring American justice and humanity? Better than Bush; not good enough yet. You can click here to read about the administration's waffling Gitmo delay.

Goodbye to the west coast

2009-07-18T21:45:00.001-07:00

This photo's from our outing to Sequim, WA, which turns out to be the lavender capital of the nation. You wouldn't expect there'd be enough sun on the Washington coast to allow big fields of lavender to thrive, but there they were, glowing in the sun -- for whose appearance we were very grateful. This photo was taken at the head of the Dungeness Spit, looking back toward the Olympic Range.

Tonight we're in Seattle, on the way home from the writers conference. After the spartan lodgings in the old fort on the bluff, this hotel room feels pretty well heavenly: a big firm bed, wireless access, even the cheery banality of the TV, all good. We've been for a walk on Capitol Hill, visited the excellent Bailey-Coy Books, had some Japanese noodles, and now a little rest before heading out into the city evening, a world away from the scene above.

Report from Port Townsend

2009-07-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

This is a detail of a beautiful madrone that sits on a up slope of land heading toward the bluff at Fort Worden in Port Townsend. It has incredibly smooth and lustrous bark; "bark" seems the wrong word, more like peel. It's phenomenally pleasurable to run your hands over. The tree grows next to a small, atmospheric castle/tower, built in the late 19th century in recollection of Scotland -- and this could be a Scots landscape, the wide cold water below the bluff, where last night a seal floated with both head and tail raised up, then spied us and suspiciously ducked under. We're here for a writers conference; I'm teaching a manuscript workshop with a serious and articulate group. Paul gave a spectacular reading here. We had superb Japanese food in town. There's a sweet back-to-the-land culture here, and the local food co-op has the most beautiful crooked purple radishes I've ever seen, along with small turnips and orange beets that glow from the inside with radiant well-being. We've been watching a doe who comes every morning to browse the grass in the field outside our window. Our house is a little military family place: a rectangle with two bedrooms (terrible beds) and a kitchen with stenciled cupboards and yellow formica counters. Every time I'm in there I start imagining being a young military wife, 1954, making a pot roast or lemon sugar cookies, trying to imagine the life ahead of me.

Below, the field outside our window, in thin morning fog. The madrone's the big dome of a tree on the right.

Appearances in Manhattan

2009-07-08T18:28:00.000-07:00

In the city today for appointments, I stopped for lunch at Chipotle on Sixth Ave and 14th Street. I sat at the counter in the window, an odd place where your knees are basically at a level with the heads of passersby outside. There were two women beside me talking. The younger one said, "I do what they tell me. If they tell me to drive, I drive, if they tell me to kill, I kill. They treat me like I'm their dog."

Her companion said, "Do you think the law doesn't apply to you?" And on they went, talking about murder.

I couldn't help but look. They were reading from a script. Sigh of relief.

For some reason this made me think of the subway car I'd been in on the S earlier. The exterior was completely wrapped in plastic, made to resemble a brick building, maybe an abandoned warehouse bristling with the possibility of dangerous activity. (When did this mode of advertising start? Suddenly buses, cars, vans wrapped up in photo-printed plastic...) What startled me was that the INSIDE of the subway car was wrapped too. The benches had become wooden-slatted seats, the walls were old brick, the windows barred. We rode to Grand Central in a speeding movie set.

Bright boroughs, circle-citadels...

2009-07-05T16:41:00.000-07:00

I'm finishing THE ART OF DESCRIPTION, a short book that Graywolf will bring out next year as part of a series of books titled THE ART OF..., each addressing some aspect of the writer's work. I more-or-less finished the book last year, but wanted to go through one more time and polish and fiddle and amend. In one chapter, called "Remembered Stars," I've gathered a group of poems that demonstrate description as an active process, a thinking-through of a problem or question accomplished through a descriptive process. So far, the group includes poems by Henry Vaughn, George Herbert, and Hart Crane. But while I was working on it today I remembered that the Paul Mariani biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins I've been reading referred to a poem of Hopkins' I didn't know, so I went and found it, and good lord, what a dazzle of figuration, what a strange and brilliant sonnet.

THE STARLIGHT NIGHT

LOOK at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
    O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
    The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
    Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
    Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!—
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs! 10
    Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
    Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

What an amazing performance of excess and exactitude. A "May-mess, like on orchard boughs"! "Flake-doves sent floating forth at a barnyard scare"! And you can see Hopkins thinking, as he moves from his figure of the stars as something he'd doubtless seen -- startled doves scattering in a barnyard -- to think of all of the physical world as a barn, housing the real spectacle, to which all else is simply gorgeous clothes.

And who else would ever imagine referring to the divine housed within its barn of stars as "the shocks"?

Walt Whitman for Levi's

2009-07-01T07:42:00.001-07:00

Cory Ericson's garden

2009-06-28T18:57:00.000-07:00

This cairn is a work-in-progress by Cory Ericson, who lives in Wendell, MA, up toward the New Hampshire border in high deep woods above the Connecticut River Valley. This last week Cory invited us to come out and see his place, after we admired this tower he's building in our friend Dara Wier's front yard out of flagstone and pieces of quartz he pulls out of the woods. There's a light inside, powered by a solar panel, and at night the quartz will glow with a soft, stone-filtered light.

The first thing I thought about at Cory's house and garden was his love for his materials, all found things, especially stones of great character and individuality. He has a profound connection to the mineral world, as Auden did, and he finds garnets, black tourmaline crystals, mica, beryl, schist. Those outbreaks of crystals seem like the thoughts of stones somehow, like outbreaks of energy. He also likes gnarled branches, old bottles, and pieces of metal from the ubiquitous old woodland dumps. He has a heap of rusty iron templates used to make shoes in many sizes; once this pile of scrap stamped out soles and heels, tongues and side-panels. Something strangely elegaic about that pile -- all that old metal meant to makes shelters for human feet.

In the garden Cory's stone walls rise to regular peaks, reminiscent of that famous French house the Surrealists loved by the Postman Chevalier, and more cairns with lights inside. He works unexpected transformations on trees: there are slim maples lashed together into arches, of various sizes. On some trees the slender branches are woven horizontally, sometimes making an arc from one tree to the next. The most amazing of these works is a solitary apple tree whose branches have all been woven horizontally and back in toward the trunk, making the tree into a kind of big complex upswept basket with leaves. It's gnarly and beautiful, and might be something from the garden of a baroque Italian villa.

All Cory's work has a meditative quality about it, the natural and the discarded shaped into objects that are painstakingly assembled, more than a little obsessive, probably impermanent, memorable things with a little loneliness and ache about them, but also with an exuberant flourish, like those crystals in their plain rocks.

Pink changes everything

2009-06-26T04:56:00.000-07:00

In Frank Lloyd Wright's plans for the Guggenheim Museum, he tried out a number of colors, including "Cherokee Red" and this lavish flamingo-by-night. Would Fifth Avenue be a different place with a pink Guggenheim?

Vertigo in Amherst

2009-06-23T07:28:00.001-07:00

We're in Amherst for a week of teaching at the Juniper Institute. I woke up yesterday morning early, to get ready for the first day of workshop, and when I stood up I felt strangely lightheaded. A few minutes later the room was starting to swim. I lay back down and the room kept moving, especially when I moved my head. I thought this would pass in a moment, but every time I'd muster the strength to sit up again, I'd feel the world start a sickening slide. It wasn't long before I felt the responsibilities of the day just fall away; who could do anything without balance, with a head that felt nauseatingly liquid?

Lisa Olstein was kind enough to take over my class; Paul fetched necessities; by late afternoon I made it to the Health Center to have my worst fantasies (Lyme disease?) allayed. I have an ear infection, related to a sinus infection -- maybe something to do with the summer's wild wave of pollen, or maybe all those books I've been sorting from storage, with their accumulation of dust and molds? I'm medicated and much better, albeit not well. Dara Wier's second floor guestroom feels like such a haven: blue window frames, up in the treetops, outside a slow-eddying tide of green. Inviting books, a pierced tin ceiling lamp, a Scottie dog with an infinite interest in giving and receiving calm affection. Something appealing about recuperating there; I'd like to just lie up in that room all day and read, say, George Eliot. But I'm going to teach poetry workshop instead; send me strength.