Peabody Elementary School, Memphis, Tennessee

In my memoir FIREBIRD I described Peabody Elementary, where I attended first grade back in the middle years of the last century, as "a square building, of gray and somnolent cement." My book's more allegiant to memory than it is interested in historical accuracy, so wouldn't you know I made my school seem as gray and moody as it did to me then. A reader in Memphis, who lives in the neighborhood now and describes it as a liberal enclave where black and white, gay and straight, single people and families all live side by side, writes to send me this great photo of the school. This was taken in the 1930s, but it's definitely my old school, and somehow it seems right for it be represented in black and white, which conveys such a sense of distance in time. And it's intriguing to see what a handsomely detailed edifice it is. There's some sense of civic grandeur implied in making an elementary school look like this, and perhaps a notion that our early educations were part of a tradition, and worthy of architectural ornamentation.

My most vivid memories of this place are smells: the safety patrol's cloakroom, with its fragrant wet yellow slickers hung up; the water and cold porcelain urinals in the boys' bathroom; the paper-and-paste smell of the library; the vague warm fragrance of school lunch. Nickels in my hand for milk. Rain on the asphalt playground.

Gaston Bachelard: "A soul is never deaf to a quality of childhood."

Packing up on Fire Island

You'll have to embiggen the picture and look very hard to see them, but in the photo above there are three deer lying down in the grass in a cranberry bog in Fire Island Pines called Smoky Hollow. You hardly ever see deer resting like this in the sun, but the warmth must have felt welcome after days and days of rain; they must have been drying off. One had an especially sleepy look to her; she perked up a bit when she heard us walking on the boardwalk nearby, but then she couldn't keep her eyes open in the drowsy warmth of the afternoon light.

We'd gone out to the Pines to move lots of stuff out of the house -- books, papers, clothes, the more personal stuff that's accumulated there over three years. The house is on the market, and I'm glad we've moved on. But today did make me think about the things I've liked about it: the ubiquitous deer, the way the ancient-looking snapping turtles put us in a kind of a trance as we watched, they were so energized with sex and spring. Their shells looked blue, just under the surface of the pond, and when they swam into water that wasn't as murky as the rest you could see their tails and their big eagle-like heads. We walked to Cherry Grove for lunch, when we'd finished packing up, and a catbird followed us in the branches beside the path, hurrying from branch to branch a little ahead of us, curious.

And then we hopped on the four o'clock boat, and before you know it the majority of our stuff was back on this side of the Great South Bay. On the other side of all this moving, already apparent, is a new prospect of serenity.

Could it be true we live on earth?

Over the next three years, I'll be working with the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans on a project sponsored by Poets' House. We'll be placing poems in installations around the zoo, as a way of centering attention on the relationship between human beings and the rest of the world. There have been some fascinating studies on how such a project worked at the Central Park Zoo -- subtly changing perceptions, informing the experience people reported there, shaping their time with animals. The research demonstrates that people who encountered poetry as part of their zoo experience left with a feeling that they could do something about the crises facing the earth now. They felt that this wasn't a distant problem, remote from their own experience; rather they seemed to experience a greater sense of themselves as participants in the life of the world. What they did mattered.

Above is a photo of one of the poems installed in the Park, an Aztec text. I haven't seen this on the site yet, but it looks to be printed on glass and placed between the viewer and moving water.

The project's called The Language of Conservation, and five poets will be working with five zoos around the country: Alison Deming in Jacksonville, Pattiann Rogers in Milwaukee, Joe Bruchac in Little Rock, Sandra Alcosser in Brookfield, Illinois, and yours truly in the troubled and dreamy cradle of American music. There's a lot to do but it's pretty exhilarating.

So I've spent the last two days in a planning gathering, and whenever my attention flagged (the inevitable result of the language of meetings, reports, evaluation, and so on) it was restored by poems, and by astonishing images of animals. One of these latter was a video from Jacksonville, which I'll post here; a strange and compelling bit of intimacy. Who'd ever think you'd get to watch the birth of a jaguar?

My other partner in this project is the New Orleans Public Library, in particular the lively and committed people at the Latter Library. We're hoping that people who encounter the poems in the Zoo will want to go deeper, and so the library will be offering readings, displays, posters, who knows what... more to come.

Around midnight, Frenchman Street, Faubourg Marigny

I came upon this band playing on a streetcorner tonight. An accordion, a violin, a gleaming white bass played by a tall boy with a voluptuous beard, and a guitar; a mix of gypsy, Klezmer, Stephane Grapelli and maybe a little rockabilly thrown in. It was heavenly. They were playing beside a Honduran taco stand, a trailer that served up a mean vegetarian burrito with a green sauce hot as the music; there was a lot of people gathered around, both eating pork-and-pineapple tacos and taking in the music. It seemed like an occasion of delight all around. New Orleans is one of the holy cities of the imagination, and somehow no amount of disaster, tourism, and governmental ineptitude seems to have been able to destroy that. Water, maybe, in a while, but I think there have to be some fiercely protective spirits here too.

The Audubon Zoo, National Poetry Month, the Tunnel of Attention, and Bad News

I've been on the road too much this month. Because I wanted to spend the first months of 2009 in California, I pushed readings back to April, and that combined with National Poetry Month has turned me into something of a blur. But there have also been more good parts of April than I can list. Here are two: last night at the Hopkins School in New Haven, CT, the audience of students and parents and teachers were amazing. Standing at the front of the room, I felt I was facing into a kind of tunnel of silence, a deeply focused attention in which nothing was missed. It was a remarkable feeling, different than the stillness of the zendo I described a few posts back; this was a hungry, energetic, eager silence.

And tonight I write from New Orleans, where I've spent the day with people from the library here and from the Audubon Zoo -- in the very room on Dauphine Street were Audubon painted while he lived in New Orleans -- cooking up some plans for a poetry-in-the-zoo project like the one that Sandra Alcosser's spearheaded in Central Park.
The zoo here has two Asian elephants who seem the spirits of the place, and the thought of actually going and spending time with them fills me with delight.

But this evening brings hard news too, that Craig Arnold is missing, on a small volcanic island in Japan. Craig's a brilliant poet; his first book, SHELLS, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, and his second, MADE FLESH, was just recently published. I met Craig in 1996, when I went to interview for a job at the University of Utah, and had to teach a little demonstration workshop. Craig was one of the students, and he brought to the group a poem called "Hot," a remarkable narrative, in rhyming couplets, about two men whose friendship is worked out over their competitive mutual addiction to and obsession with unbearably over-seasoned foods. It's the sort of complete, bravura poem that, appearing in a workshop, simply leaves everyone breathless, as if it were now up to us to "workshop" something operatic, artfully elaborated, and thoroughly achieved. Yeah, right. We did our best. The poem's in SHELLS, and it's one of Craig's signature poems. I'm thinking too of Craig reading at Brazos Books in Houston, turning away from the audience between poems, then wheeling around and dramatically reciting each piece. He read like a performance poet, though his poems were anything but spontaneous; they were elegantly wrought monologues, the product of an exactingly formal intelligence. But how alive they sounded!

Information about the ongoing search for Craig, and about the effort to pressure the Japanese police to continue the search is at findcraigarnold.blogspot.com.

in the new garden, April 26, 2009

In search of lost time

I'm in Houston this evening, here for my final round of thesis and dissertation defenses by grad students -- my last working day at the University of Houston. A very odd feeling, after a decade. I won't be walking into that familiar building any more,a 30's hall of offices and classrooms, the first air-conditioned college building in Ameria, I'm told, built of limestone blocks all marbled and speckled with fossils, the caught lives of ancient seas.

My ten years in Texas feel like an intricate, layered expanse of time, during which the program where I've taught has had several different sorts of atmospheres. And during which my relationship with Houston has shifted several times, too. I wrote an essay about the city for Smithsonian Magazine that tries to think about the odd ways it got under my skin, and made me start to feel at home in a place that isn't, on the surface of things, a place I thought I'd like.

And now I'm done, and wondering a little what I will miss. A certain chatty good-naturedness, exemplified by the people at Baby Barnaby's, my favorite breakfast place. Huge Gulf Coast clouds. My gym. Splendid conversations with graduate poetry students so intent on seeing into the workings of poems. The vegetarian tamales at Berryhill's. Knowing there's a small-but-immense brooding temple of Rothkos down the street. Sitting out by a swimming pool on a warm night in April.

I'm not sure why I have the urge to juxtapose this with the news story I read today about the discovery of a very well-preserved baby mammoth. A month old, more-or-less pickled by the muddy clay in which she drowned, and her mother's milk still in her stomach, after forty thousand years. Her photo's lovely and moving, I think.

Surely one of the pleasures of blogging is curatorial, placing things side by side.