Nine Haiku

For your diversion, or perhaps your distraction from evening work: Phizzog Review, led by our own Hart L'Ecuyer, was good enough to publish some haiku I wrote during a haiku frenzy in our writing workshop this spring. And they're alongside (well, below) a series of cicada haikus by Matthew Rohrer, a widely published writer. Check 'em out. 

Note - both sets of haiku are non-traditional: they don't all have 5-7-5 syllable structure. Mine do only when convenient. In this I am following Robert Hass's lead. He translated hundreds of classic haiku and sought dynamic recreations in English rather than literal replications.

"Wasn't it a revelation...?"

Galway Kinnell thought cancer would kill him years ago. After a prognosis gave him only a short while to live, he wrote the poem "Why Regret," which takes the form of a series of questions--to his wife or to the reader. Shortly after, he found he had years more to live. Kinnell's ecstasies in that poem and others like it--"That Silent Evening," "St. Francis and the Sow," and "Rapture"--are all the more intense and believable for the way in which he sucks the marrow of ugliness in much of his other work, such as "The Bear" and "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible." Poems like those won him his critical acclaim, establishing him as the nature poet unafraid of the inhumanity of nature. He told the Los Angeles Times that “I’ve tried to carry my poetry as far as I could, to dwell on the ugly as fully, as far, and as long, as I could stomach it. Probably more than most poets I have included in my work the unpleasant because I think if you are ever going to find any kind of truth to poetry it has to be based on all of experience rather than on a narrow segment of cheerful events.”

But now that Kinnell has finally passed away from leukemia, perhaps it is time to return to the rhapsodic poem he wrote when he believed he was dying--to focus more of our attention on what brought this poet of fingernail-rot and earthworms his deepest joys. 

Mind-Congestion Release-Valve of the Weekend

"All rivers are full of sky.
Waterfalls are in the mind.
We all come from slime.
Even alpacas."

-Dean Young, "Belief in Magic," Poetry magazine (July/August 2014)

The Pony Express

In poetry workshop this semester, our professor told us that the only difference between us and published poets is the "pony express." In other words, the difference is that published writers send their stuff out. It's fitting, then, that the journal in which two poems I wrote for this workshop will appear is named after the saddlebags used by Pony Express mail-carriers: the Mochila Review. (Our teacher encouraged us to submit to this journal, published by Missouri Western, without being aware of the coincidence. Kismet!) Here's the link to the PDF. My poems are on pages 35 and 61. Shout-out to two of my classmates, Lydia Frank (pp. 52 and 78) and Paula Vaught (pp. 25 and 79) , who also are in print in this issue. Here's to the pony express!

We also published the 2014 issue of Windfall, TSU's undergraduate literary magazine, this past Thursday. Let me know if you want a copy (free but limited supply) and I'll try to put one aside for you.

Staring Down the Rat

In this week's Index column, I take a look at two poems from the Seamus Heaney collections I picked up earlier this semester, and use them to try to come to terms with processes of change and decay around Kirksville. The column does not mention it, but the poems are from Death of a Naturalist.

Hard Times for the Elfin Tailor

College students have a way of getting down on themselves about struggles with their subject. If I'm not able to do this, they say, how am I supposed to do something in this field as a job? Or perhaps it's more along the lines of How does what I'm doing here matter at all? Accordingly, sometimes it's nice to remember where we are and what we are working with—or, as Kay Ryan encourages us to do, balance the daily challenges facing the elfin tailor with the rarity of being an elfin tailor, of being trusted to work with enchanted cloth at all.

Bad Day

Kay Ryan

Not every day

is a good day

for the elfin tailor.

Some days

the stolen cloth

reveals what it

was made for:

a handsome weskit

or the jerkin

of an elfin sailor.

Other days

the tailor

sees a jacket

in his mind

and sets about

to find the fabric.

But some days

neither the idea

nor the material

presents itself;

and these are

the hard days

for the tailor elf.

Finding Walden, Continued

This semester of reading has partly been a search for Thoreau's clarity of vision, mainly through the works of writers who have come after and have felt the same desire. I recently finished two collections of poems by Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist and Field Work. Field Work includes the Glanmore Sonnets and other poems from the four years he spent in a country home in Glanmore, Co. Wicklow with his family after leaving Belfast during The Troubles. Death of a Naturalist you will hear more about soon. Or read it before I have time to spoil it for you. Rarely are you able to find an autobiography that could fit on the sides of a paper crane, a crystallized, solid thing. 

Today began my pilgrimage through Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her record of a year in the mountains of Virginia in Walden-like solitude. As energetically as I have seen anyone try, she attempts to see the world as if "just set down here," yet at the same time seeking to synthesize the best of what she has seen, read, and struggled with so far. Strangely, these two intentions, though at first seeming to preclude the other, end up supporting each other, like two halves of an arch. She moves from intensely felt observations of reality to Rilkean wondering and wandering at just the right speed:

"We don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don't know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, "Come down to the water." It was an extravagant gesture, but we can't do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames."

Noli Timere

Seamus Heaney’s last words to his wife, sent in a text message, were the Latin phrase Noli timere: do not be afraid. I hesitate to stamp a meaning on these words, other than their undulating cadence, their peaceful music, their importance in many Bible passages. In some ways it seems almost immoral not to be afraid today, considering the precarious state of the world. But one of our best lights got as close as the living can come to death and had these words for us. Something to carry around and consider every now and then, like his small, solid poems.

It makes me sad that it is Heaney’s death that will be the thing that finally leads me to read more of his work. I had read his chart-toppers like “Digging,” and could probably recognize one of his poems if they were put in front of me (look for bogs, damp, and short, musical lines), but had never read a mass of his poems. However, based on the several obituaries and remembrances of Heaney that I have read (probably the most I’ve read about a recently-deceased person ever), it seems that this irony might just make him chuckle. My personal favorite essay on his death is from his friend Tom Sleigh, which gives a rare glimpse into a relationship between two practicing writers.

Something that makes Heaney’s last words ring even stronger is their harmony with the English poet John Keat’s last words, which were reimagined in this poem I’ve recently discovered:

Keats

Christopher Howell

When Keats, at last beyond the curtain

of love’s distraction, lay dying in his room

on the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the Bernini

Fountain “filling him like flowers,”

he held his breath like a coin, looked out

into the moonlight and thought he saw snow.

He did not suppose it was fever or the body’s

weakness turning the mind. He thought, “England!”

and there he was, secretly, for the rest

of his improvidently short life: up to his neck

in sleigh bells and the impossibly English cries

of street vendors, perfect

and affectionate as his soul.

For days the snow and statuary sang him so far

beyond regret that if now you walk rancorless

and alone there, in the piazza, the white shadow

of his last words to Severn, “Don’t be frightened,”

may enter you.

A Poem a Day

The Poetry Foundation, publishers of Poetry magazine, have a "Poem of the Day" program that sends subscribers one poem every morning around 10 a.m. Like Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project and Billy Collin's Poetry 180 program and books, it's a small but concrete way of circulating poetry to a large audience and exposing new readers to the diversity and energy of contemporary poetry in a way that fits into a busy daily schedule. Having gotten their emails for about a year now, I can tell you that not every poem they send is great; some are delete-able; some are repeats; others you will find challenging (never a bad thing); but many, like the string of winners they have sent out this week, are absolutely worth it and will change your day for the better, if they are given the small moment of consideration they ask for. This morning's poem:

The World Is in Pencil

BY TODD BOSS

—not pen. It’s got

that same silken

dust about it, doesn’t it,

that same sense of

having been roughed

onto paper even  

as it was planned.

It had to be a labor

of love. It must’ve

taken its author some

time, some shove.

I’ll bet it felt good

in the hand—the o

of the ocean, and

the and and the and

of the land.

Source: Poetry (November 2011).

Other good poems from the past week from the Poetry Foundation:

“Knowledge,” by Louise Bogan

"After Work," by John Maloney

"Impromptu," by J. Allyn Rosser

By checking a box at the bottom of the website's page, you can subscribe to the "Poem of the Day" without getting annoying newsletters, et cetera.

Eating an Apple with No Noise at All

Good news! The nice folks over at the Foliate Oak Literary Magazine published my poem in their May issue. Read it here. Check out Foliate Oak's Facebook page here.

And cue celebratory fiddle tune:

The Pope and the Sow

At my Catholic, all-boys high school, our theology teachers advised us students to be ready for people that would challenge our beliefs once we were turned loose upon the world. Probably the most prevalent reaction to this warning among us, for better or worse, was a sort of confused indifference; some of us armed ourselves with Catholic apologist thought, in preparation for future theological sparring matches; my personal feelings lay somewhere in the muddle between those two. I have little tolerance for some of the ossified social opinions that the Catholic church chooses to cloak in heavy dogmatic robes and impenetrable pseudo-legal prose. On the other hand, I didn’t look forward to the prospect of hearing the church criticized. I felt protective of it in a certain way, like one would feel protective of a relative with some odd habits. The purest dogmatic form of Catholicism is certainly not my spiritual center, but at the same time many of my strongest beliefs do come from the Catholic tradition. More traditionalist Catholics would likely criticize me as a “cafeteria,” or carelessly eclectic, Catholic, picking out beliefs like green beans, pizza, and chocolate milk at the dining hall.

But as Truman State’s Newman Center pastor Father Bill says, it’s hard to be in the middle. My beliefs, which I would never claim as the best or even particularly coherent, are just where conscience and experience has led me. Many of my friends in college are amused to find that I’m Catholic. The church seems to be regarded not so much with suspicion but with cautious interest, perhaps like the kind felt at a zoo when looking at a rare species of iguana. The iguana has little interest in them, but they are interested in its unusual form. “Huh,” they say. “Catholic. Interesting.” I have a tendency to offer fun facts in conversation, and when one of these is related to Catholicism, my friends acknowledge the occurrences by calling, “Catholic Fact!”

The one thing that non-Catholics have actually questioned me about in college is the tradition of saints. Why pray to saints when Jesus is supposed to be our personal savior, our direct link to the divine? I’ve never had a perfect, direct answer for that question, mainly feeling that such spiritual navigation is best left to one’s own working out. The idea of saints as good examples is too simple. Catholics and non-Catholic Christians are not likely to come to an understanding on that issue.

However, I do understand saints as stories. Many of our early saints are, plainly stated, made up. They are some of the countless mythic creations that are a large part of our story-telling species’ lives. That does not have to make the truths they represent less valuable, or that I don’t have great respect for most of the saint stories I’ve heard. Like any of our stories, saint stories begin with a seed of real-world experience. In some cases, it was the verifiable life of the person in question. In other cases, it is a re-working of messy experience into terms that can be communicated through a memorable story. Whether we realize it or not, we own the stories of our saints. They are what we will make of them.

Our new pope, Francis, formerly Arcbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, is the first pope from South America, as well as the first Jesuit pope. As my high school was Jesuit, this connects him to me. We share an important set of beliefs about living in the world. Many religious orders believe that a relationship with God is only possible through removing oneself from the world and living monastically. Jesuits believe that solitude is important, but that one must also find God in all things, particularly in the chaotic world of human society and of nature. The language of the Jesuits uses military metaphors because the founder, Ignatius, saw the new order as on the front lines of carrying out the Gospel, delving into the messiness of reality and doing their best there. Jesuits value connection with the world as it is. One of the first stories that CNN told about Francis is that, as Archbishop Bergoglio, he lived in an apartment and rode the buses of Buenos Aires to work. Anyone on the bus could chat with him if they wanted. That’s the mark of a true Jesuit.

Our new pope has chosen a name that no pope has ever chosen before. And he has taken partial ownership of a very important name and story, that of St. Francis. I’m thinking, as I would imagine the new pope was, mainly of St. Francis of Assisi than the other saints by the name of Francis (though, importantly, Francis Xavier was a co-founder of the Society of Jesus with Ignatius, and Francis Borgia was an early Jesuit.) The story of St. Francis of Assisi is to us very familiar—that animal saint. He is surrounded by happy, anthropomorphized smiling creatures when he is painted. It makes him a fun saint, and much approachable for non-Catholics than some of our bloodied martyrs or anti-Semitic crusader-saints (I’m looking at you, Louis IX, namesake of my hometown.)

You might be surprised to hear that St. Francis’s story was not always told this way—far from it. The original St. Francis had little patience for animals on their own, and much less for flawed humanity’s connections to the natural world that animals usually represent in our stories. One of the original, canonical tales of St. Francis was his interaction with a sow. The sow had killed a lamb with its muzzle, and Francis, linking the lamb to the metaphor of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb of God, vengefully cursed the sow and proclaimed that no man or beast would eat from its dead body. This curse led to its death just days later. This sow is our fallen nature, our inclination to destroy innocence. The historical St. Francis—and even the St. Francis of many legends—had no particular kindness for most animals. Though he believed in the communion of all creation in praise of the Creator, he did not believe that all creation was anything near equal, holding to the medieval Christian conception of nature, in which humans were the privileged stewards of creation. In the Victorian period, however, St. Francis began to be pictured as associating in a friendly way with animals, based on the “Canticle of the Creatures” attributed to him. In the 1960s and ’70s, during the environmental movement, ecologists, environmentalists, and theologians began re-popularizing these images of St. Francis emphasized caring for animals that were created long after his death. In 1967, historian Lynn White argued that St. Francis should become the patron saint of ecologists, for he saw St. Francis as a radical that brought about a new, more humble conception of the relationship between humans and nature. White viewed St. Francis as what is known as a deep ecologist, claiming that the “key to an understanding of Francis is his belief in the virtue of humility—not merely for the individual but for man as a species.” Though White’s goal was essentially to create a “new religion” of ecology, whose patron saint was St. Francis, the part of his paper that suggested a reconsideration of St. Francis as a medieval Christian ecological activist was accepted by the religious establishment. Pope John Paul II followed White’s suggestion and canonized St. Francis as patron of ecologists in 1979.

A year later, one of my favorite poets, Galway Kinnell, published a piece called “Saint Francis and the Sow.” (Yes, short and worth a read. I wrote a paper on it last year, which is why I’ve got all these fun facts about St. Francis ready to go. Catholic Fact!) In his poetry, Kinnell tries not to personify animals but to animalize humanity, and to seek out the natures of animals as valuable in their own right. In this poem, the reverse of the original story, St. Francis is depicted awakening the sow to its own powers of self-blessing, playing a surprisingly humble role for a saint. He “reteaches” the sow “its loveliness,” and the sow “flowers, from within, of self-blessing.” Kinnell’s St. Francis empowers animals. He does not presume to lift them above their animal-ness but rather affirms it, and in so doing affirms the cast-off, looked-down upon parts of ourselves.

Pope Francis the First reminded me of this humbler incarnation of St. Francis today when he asked the assembled crowds at St. Peters’s, as well as the millions tuned in around the world, to pray for him. The applause and hum on our TV gave way suddenly to a few moments of meditative silence as he and everyone else bowed their heads. It is a small sign, but it is a sign of a humble vision of the pope’s role, and a sign that perhaps this pope is participating in the continued creation of St. Francis’s story like Galway Kinnell and others. It gives me hope that I’ll be better able to explain why I am still a Catholic, and that the stories that we tell about this Francis just might have value for future generations. But we’ll have to see.

"Quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain"

It's been a while since I've put something up here. Don't think I haven't been working, though. I've been focusing on poetry lately, as well as looking into publishing in literary journals. It could be quite a while before the fruits of those efforts appear, though. For now, here's an essay I wrote for the Truman Writing Center's blog about choosing good verbs. I doubt that you folks need or want advice on the fundamentals of writing, but in this essay we get the chance to destroy a perfectly good poem, as well as explore the ways in which the original poem works.

On Verbs: Sink or Swim—Or Walk?

Trust your verbs. Always—and if you find that you can’t trust them, fire them and get new ones. You can’t have a sentence without a verb. Verbs are not always the showiest part of a sentence, not always the part of your writing that the reader walks away remembering, but they are the hub around which all the other parts of the sentence turn. To make a comparison to music, verbs are like the chords in a song, the essential foundation that gives just the right tension and shading to the ear-catching melody of nouns and adjectives.

The fundamental importance of verb choice is sometimes hard to see clearly unless you compare the disastrous effects of the wrong verb to the strong but flexible structure given by the right verbs. To see some verbs in action, let’s look at a poem by Billy Collins. He’s one of my favorite poets—the clarity and accessibility of his word choice often stands in sharp contrast to the surprising journeys his images take the reader on.

Walking Across the Atlantic

Billy Collins

I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach

before stepping onto the first wave.

Soon I am walking across the Atlantic

thinking about Spain,

checking for whales, waterspouts.

I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.

Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface.

But for now I try to imagine what

this must look like to the fish below,

the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing.

(from Sailing Alone Around the Room)

Lovely little poem, don’t you think? So that we can contrast the firm, flexible structure made by good verbs with the chaos, or inflexible, impenetrable wordiness, caused by bad and unhelpful ones, let’s ruin this poem by just changing some of the verbs to similar, but much less effective, ones. With apologies to Collins:

Strolling Across the Atlantic

I stand waiting for the holiday crowd to vacate the beach

before hopping onto the first wave.

Soon I am strolling across the Atlantic

dreaming about Spain,

watching for whales, waterspouts.

I feel the water keeping up my shifting weight.

Tonight I will snooze on its rocking surface.

But for now I try to visualize what

this must look like to the fish below,

the bottoms of my feet showing up suddenly and vanishing.

Well, yuck, right? It’s not meaningless, but it’s not poetry any more. Everything’s either gone flat, or gone silly. See how “stand waiting” adds an unnecessary word and changes the simple, deft stroke of “wait” to a two-word phrase with a clunky –ing ending? See how “strolling,” which might appeal to us at first as a more interesting action than “walking,” just made things far too silly and egotistical, in contrast to the determined but everyday tone that the original poem had with “walking”? See how “watching” in the second stanza gave the narrator an over-anxious Captain Ahab attitude, in addition to adding a third word beginning with ‘w’ to that line, overwhelming the subtle, wispy alliteration Collins intended with “whales, waterspouts”? See how “to visualize” in the third stanza is so much more wordy and businesslike and less dreamy than “to imagine”?

I could have changed the verbs much more subtly and still spoiled the poem. On the other hand, it could have been worse: I didn’t throw in any nasty passive-voice constructions like “I felt my weight as it was held by the water” that invert the usual clearer order of doer of the action followed by receiver of the action: “I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.” Picking ineffective verbs—too wordy or too extreme—can keep your writing tied to the ground. Or, to stay in the world of this poem, the surface tension created by the verbs that keeps you on top of the water collapses, and you sink into the waves like the rest of humanity, splashing about in a sea of unhelpful language.

Our choices with verbs are more limited than other word choices in English. When choosing a noun or an adjective, we often have dozens of alluring options. But finding the right verb for a situation has a pleasure all its own. While they are sometimes less flashy than the adjectives or the nouns—I’m more likely to remember the “whales” and “waterspouts” than that the narrator was “checking” for them—they set the tone in a way that nouns and adjectives simply cannot. “Checking” is the same thing we do when crossing the street—it’s casual, almost thoughtless. In our mind’s eye, we see the narrator turning his head every now and then to look right and left for a whale’s back or a spout of water, as if for an oncoming car at a crosswalk—just in case. We get the sense that the narrator has done this before. He has walked across the Atlantic so many times that it’s as habitual as crossing a street with light traffic. He has dealt with the fantastic so many times that to him, it’s just an everyday occurrence. This is the essential tension of the poem—the contrast between the supernatural journey taken and the simple, confident word choice of the narrator. It allows this poem to retain its mystery and offer up new pleasures even after many explorations. Verbs can take you across the Atlantic—as long as they’re the right ones.

Tuesday

has a perfection that haunts me,

like the oracular whine in the cabin of an airliner

sailing over Ohio.

Something transient, the lack of judgment

gifted to time neither end

nor beginning, nor yet even middle:

some minor point in the development,

often missed by fast readers, where

the characters are quietly putting on

their humanity like early spring jackets:

a favorite word, a particular thoughtful expression

that comes over one’s face

when listening to music

or writing out French homework,

trouble falling asleep, trouble waking,

an inclination towards cloud architecture,

a mild hatred of cats, a violent affection

for a certain sitcom.

The events of Wednesday will swallow these things.

On that absurd and turbulent day,

someone new will hate us,

we’ll make Grandma angry for the first time

in twenty years,

we’ll be falling in love, we’ll get chased

by a nasty neighbor’s poodle,

we’ll save someone’s life,

we’ll run over a pregnant opossum

and feel evil for days.

But for now,

the sky as yet dim and bland,

the waking dog

raising its nose to the fading moon

and the Pop-Tarts hot in our hands,

let us drink up the perfection of Tuesday.