Too much sleep in the morning led to this dream: I’m lying on a recliner in an empty hall. The walls are white. A student with long dark hair approaches me and asks me to read her poem.
The problem is that I can’t keep my eyes open long enough to read the words.
Of course, we usually can’t read in our dreams. If you ever find yourself trying to read in a dream, you might be able to remind yourself that you’re dreaming, and become conscious in the dream.
I tell the girl she’ll have to read the poem aloud if she wants me to give her my response. I keep trying to open my eyes, catching glimpses of a column of typed words running down the middle of a white page.
In the end I force myself awake, without ever knowing what her poem was about.
Dream: I can stop real time with my remote and rewind. When I start real time back again, I’ve missed what happened while I was rewinding. My professor, who is wearing a sari, is talking about a Manila lotion that people put on their nipples, and I tell her “You’re very kinky.” The other students laugh at my cheeky comment. I worry I’ve been disrespectful. And then I wonder why I’m in her class, considering it has nothing to do with poetry. She discusses paranoia versus rhetorical strategies (kind of like poetry, huh?) I can’t type her words fast enough.
The next IASD conference, AKA dream camp, will be in the Netherlands this summer. I want to go to there.
It’s been a while since I’ve shared the state of my writing life online. Teaching freshman composition takes up a good chunk of my energy– I spend a lot of time writing responses to their writing on our class blog. Alright, I admit I also waste time on facebook.
Reading
In my two classes (a workshop and a seminar) we’ve been reading William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Frank O’Hara, Gwendolyn Brooks, and now Frank Stanford. We still have to get to James Wright, Sylvia Plath, Everett Maddox, and Andrew Hudgins.
Writing
This fall Ouroboros Review, the magazine Jo Hemmant and I started, published three of my poems in issue five: “Last Lollipop,” “Between Loads of Laundry,” and “Pain Drives by the Delivery Room at Wayside Hospital,” found on pages 12-13. I wrote these poems in 2009, two of them during a workshop I was in at GSU.
Many thanks to Jo, Carolee Sherwood, and Jill Crammond-Wickham for putting together another great magazine. Sara Hughes, fellow GSU poet has work in this issue. Her lovely poem, “The Secret of Life,” appears on page two.
There’s an interview with poets January Gill O’Neil and Kelli Russell Agodon, in which they discuss the writing life and how to balance creativity with adult responsibilities. Not easy! Their poems after the interview will knock your socks off.
The word on the street is that Ouroboros Review will be changing editorial directorship before the next issue comes out. It’s a gorgeous magazine, one of the few truly international reviews that publishes both online and in print. Ouroboros is available for purchase at Magcloud.
Jo Hemmant has done a wonderful job maintaining the unique tone and style of the art and poetry that appears in each issue. I love discovering poets and artists living in South Africa, France, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, England, Canada, as well as the U.S. Whoever takes over the job will be inheriting a fine showcase of world writers.
In 2010 Jo Hemmant’s independent press, Pindrop, is launching A Suitable Girl by poet Michelle McGrane.
It’s impossible to pigeonhole renaissance man Dave Bonta. Poet, essayist, naturalist, photographer, and editor of qartsilunni are just a few of the hats he wears.
In January 2010, Phoenecia Publishing (Montreal) released his first printed collection of poetry, Odes to Tools. I say first printed collection, because Bonta shares many of his poems online at his long standing blog, Via Negativa, where he also highlights the literary endeavors of his fellow bloggers under the heading “Smorgasblog.” We love it when our work appears on Dave’s column–it calls for a Snoopy dance, or at least a tweet!
Bonta is a web-based curator of literary arts. He collects video poems at his website, Moving Poems, and he manages a related forum where video poem enthusiasts can share their finds on the web.
And now his latest project is up and running, Postal Poetry, an incarnation of a photography and poetry e-zine that he and Dana Guthrie Martin started in 2008.
Dave published seven of my postcard poems between 2008 and 2009– I’m grateful to Dave for gathering these poems together again in such a beautiful layout. The poems were fun to create, especially the ones I wrote to quirky photos Dave and Dana chose for the contests they sponsored.
Just reaching Emory from my house was an exercise in patient acceptance, considering we got stuck in a typical Atlanta traffic jam about five miles away from the mall where we had to park. Philosopher tried to calm me down, saying “Oh, it’s not so bad. We’ll get there.” And then after I took a few deep breaths he said, “Man, this really sucks.” Freeboarder tuned everything out by listening to music on his iPod. But after merging onto three different highways and taking a shuttle to the venue, we arrived at the auditorium for the Dalai Lama’s teachings.
His Holiness walked onto the stage with Richard Gere, Alice Walker, his translator, and a few professors from Emory. The audience stood as he glided in his scarlet robes toward an armchair in the center of the stage. He stooped forward, as if his head were permanently lowered from all the years spent meditating, but when he sat down his posture was upright. He spent a few moments adjusting robes to cover his bare arms, and then he put on a red visor. He looked like he was clowning around when he put the visor on, and I wondered if it was a souvenir from Emory.
My main impression from the Dalai Lama is one that many have mentioned about him–he has a child-like exuberance and an infectious laugh. He emanates joy. He made several jokes during the talk, which I didn’t always understand, but it didn’t matter. Just hearing him laugh made me feel the the truth of the prayer Om Mani Padme Hum, which Robert Thurman translates into English as “the jewel is in the lotus flower” or the English saying “God is in his universe, all’s right with the world.”
The room was vast and dark, lit only by a few blue halogen lamps along the reserved seats on the floor. My sons and I sat in the bleachers, up in the nosebleed section, as they used to call seats farthest from the stage when I’d go to Aerosmith concerts as a kid. The Dalai Lama sat in the center, with Alice Walker and Richard Gere to his right, a translator to his left. The speakers were flanked by enormous screens that zeroed in on close-ups of their faces. Most of the time I focused on the screens, because from where we sat the speakers looked like figurines in a doll house.
An art professor from Emory began The Creative Journey discussion with a question: How does art fit into the spiritual path? After huddling with his translator for about twenty seconds, the Dalai Lama’s answer was “I don’t know.” The crowd cracked up and cheered.
Richard Gere and Alice Walker had a lot to say about the subject. Both would chime in when the Dalai Lama was conferring with his translator. The three of them spoke about compassion as the root motivation of art; the role of the ego when creating; the differences between Tibetan art and Western expressive creativity (the Dalai Lama was reluctant to speak about this theme); the need to embrace the joy in the struggle; the struggles of Tibetans, South Africans, African Americans; the spiritual path as a way for Americans to escape the mediocrity that has invaded many aspects of our society.
Alice Walker spoke about her evolution as an artist and how she used to write out of sadness. But she encouraged young artists to persevere, because over the course of her journey she has learned to experience great happiness, even when she’s in tears over a character she has created.
Richard Gere talked about his early acting career and how he was just as troubled and angry as the young men he played in films. He and Alice Walker expressed gratitude for having found meditation, and how the peace they reached through sitting quietly has helped them become more creative and more imaginative.
The best part of the day was getting to look over at my sons during the talk. They listened as best they could to the wisdom and experience of the three speakers. It was hot in the bleachers, and His Holiness was hard to hear at times. His voice is somewhat low, and even though he speaks fluent English he has a strong Tibetan accent.
Richard Gere and Alice Walker didn’t agree about a few points, which provided us with a good discussion at Fellini’s, where we went for pizza afterward. In my next post I’ll write more about the specific points I remember from “The Creative Journey.”
The vet has ordered a month’s course of antibiotics to cure the infection in Red’s mandible. The abscess, which had grown to the size of a toddler’s fist, is now as large as a peach pit.
When I was at the animal hospital I met a woman who runs a mutt rescue operation. She showed me before and after photos of dogs whose previous owners had let the dogs’ diseases run amok.
I visited the Dalí exhibit again, this time with a poet friend who hosts the radio show melodically challenged on WRAS. Her program broadcasts on Sundays from 2:00-4:00 in the afternoon, and features poets reading their own works, along with music that enhances the show’s theme. One of the more recent playlists highlighted poems about birds, or poems that include birds. I intend to tune in this Sunday.
It was fun to walk through the exhibit a second time. At my friend’s suggestion, we used the audio tour as we progressed through the halls, and we ended up finding out a lot that would have gone unnoticed had we merely meandered along on our own. One interesting aspect the curators brought out was how Dalí experimented with how he applied his medium to the surface–he used a loaf of bread, his mustache, a rhinoceros horn (which he equated with the unicorn, a symbol of virginity), and an octopus. He also shot paint pellets out of a gun, a technique he dubbed “bulletism.”
I also found out why he was kicked out of the Surrealist movement: with Marcel Duchamp’s blessing he included a painting with religious iconography in a Surrealist exhibit, a theme the surrealists rejected. So he was ousted. The title of this exhibit is Dalí, The Later Works, a time period that until recently has not been admired by art critics, maybe because of the religious nature of the pieces. I did read, however, that Dalí declared himself a “Catholic without faith,” and that he did not believe in miracles.
I’ve already written two drafts of poems in response to his paintings. This summer has been very contemplative for me. I’ve been reading After by Jane Hirschfield and studying Buddhism, meditation, yoga. All the mind work, plus lap swimming, to calm my inner waters.
Even though I want to be at peace, I’m very drawn to the zany world of Da Da, Surrealism, and dreams. I keep thinking that if I remember my dreams and explore the images the meaning of everything will fall into place. A pretty illusion.
We have a new puppy at our house named Red. My sons brought him home from the animal shelter a week and a half ago, and we’re still working on finding a suitable routine. It’s summertime for me, which meant, until Red came, that I could read poetry, practice yoga, and meditate, in addition to housework and cooking meals, but all that free time has evaporated in my efforts to train the pup.
The boys said he was six months old, but I’m not so sure. He chews on anything made of plastic, rubber, paper, or wood. One night he started chewing my toes under the blanket, not understanding the lumps were a part of me!
Freeboarder has started back to school already–they’re moving to a year-round school year where we live–so today I walked Red and Duffy for two miles after he left for school. Red rolled in the creek to cool off, so now we’re on the back porch with the ceiling fans blowing until he dries off. It’s cool out here now, perfect for my morning reading and writing practices.
I’ve been reading about dog behavior, a first for me. When I was a kid my dad paper trained our puppy, and scolded him for bad behavior with a rolled up newspaper he would slap on his hand behind our beagle’s back. But training techniques have changed in the last forty years. Dogs, like people, thrive from constant praise. When I taught school one of our adages was to “catch the children being good.” The same holds true for animals. There’s a lot to be said for B.F. Skinner and positive reinforcement.
Positive reinforcement requires lots of attention and patience. I have to look Red in the eye and praise him when he’s behaving the way I want him to, like when he chews on his toys and not on the furniture. All this attention has shortened the time I can spend meditating, so I’m trying to think about my moments with him as my practice.
I’m mindful of him, I praise him, and I give him affection. When he pees in the wrong spot, I clean it up and take him outside. Rather than getting angry, I practice patient acceptance. There’s a remedy to the situation–a gate, a crate, lots of trips to the backyard, and a few long walks a day.
Emily Elizabeth Schulten read from her collection Rest in Black Haw (2009, Summerfield Press) for the Solar Anus Reading Series at Beep Beep Gallery in Atlanta. Many of the poems from her book, rich with imagery of domestic life and the natural world, point to her Kentucky roots. She also read a few pieces from her current work, which were written after her travels to Barcelona and Rome.
One of the poems from her collection, “Labor Day Weekend,” was featured on Verse Daily. You can also read the blurbs on the back cover here.
Before reading her later work, Schulten, who has traveled widely, remarked that her more recent poems reflect her thoughts about how we create the concept of home as we move through the world.
Jim Goar, whom I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time at the reading, read a few pieces from his most recent book of poetry, Seoul Bus Poems. Goar told the audience that all the poems in the collection were written on the bus while he was working in Seoul. Great economy of words and meaning in the title, I’d say.
Most of the work he read came from his latest project, a book-length serial poem based on his immersion in the Holy Grail legend, the focus of his studies as a PhD. student in Norwich, England. I look forward to reading the collection. I’d also like to learn more about his method of writing the serial poems.
You can read more about Jim Goar at his blog, Can of Corn. Discover how he named his blog by reading his book, Seoul Bus Poems.
I’ll be honest, I’m not much interested in literary theory. When I read a poem I look up words I don’t understand or references that I’ve never heard of, but in general I prefer to figure out the gist on my own. That’s what’s fun about reading, isn’t it?
I offer that statement as an apology for my musings about poems, because probably all of it has been said much better by someone else. So you could say I’m writing these musings for myself, or for some future reader who comes along, surfing the web the way some people still troll through microfiche.
The Epigraph
I took a course on modern British poetry many years ago, and I’ve read T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”several times over the decades, but I never bothered to look up the Italian epigraph until now, and I guess I should have, because it does inform the poem. Or it could be that I forgot the meaning after so many years.
William Blake: "Dante's Inferno, Whirlwind of Lovers."
The epigraph comes from a section of Dante’s Inferno, and is the speech of a man who apparently committed some heinous misdeeds, because he’s consigned to one of the lower circles of hell. Roughly, the stanza says the man would not tell the story of his sins if he thought the listener could return to the world to relate the man’s crimes, but since he has never heard of anyone escaping from the fiery pit, he will go ahead and spill the beans, or wag his flaming tongue. He has been so terrible that he has lost his human form, and has become only a tongue of fire.
The Poem
When J. Alfred invites the reader to go on a walk with him through the city streets, he believes we are with him in hell, never to return. If he tells us what’s really on his mind, it’s because he thinks we’re stuck in this place with him.
Prufrock admits he has tried to create a persona to win favors from the world. He admits he’s getting old, and reveals his paltry efforts to conceal his aging. He shows us his hurt when a woman he has either seduced, or tried to seduce, tells him, “That is not what I meant at all./That is not it, at all.”
Yet he thinks he really does have something to say. He wants to come back from the dead like Lazarus to tell everyone about the “mermaids singing, each to each.” But he doubts himself. He doesn’t think he’s a prophet. He doubts the mermaids will sing to him.
But what he has to say is that at night we dream we are mermaids riding the waves out to sea, and it’s only when we wake up that we drown.
Prufrock is like the rest of us ridiculous humans, caught up in our gains and losses, always thinking we have time to make our “visions and revisions/Before the taking of toast and tea.”
Lately I’ve been reading about Buddhism and the need to follow the Dharma right now. We might die at any moment. It could be in an hour, when we drive to the market, or later on, while walking the dog. And so the need to die with a peaceful mind is of the greatest importance. Catholics might say something about needing to be in a state of grace during the moment of death.
Prufrock obsesses about our having time for all the things we haven’t done yet. But really there is no time left for that. He knows his time is up, yet he clings to the idea of himself: parting his hair down the back, rolling his pants legs up, walking the beach in white flannel, all the images of himself as a lady’s man or an urbane gentleman amid the sordid yellow smoke of the city.
The collection Prufrock (1917) is dedicated to Eliot’s friend Jean Verdenal who, according to the inscription, died at the age of 26 during WWI at Dardanelles. Maybe this character of Prufrock is a satire of Eliot himself and others. Through revealing the character’s weaknesses he exposes our frivolities and our vanities, which at our death amount to nothing.
My favorite lines from the poem are these:
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
and
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
Those lines make me believe Prufrock might not be a bad sort at all. Because he has told us about the mermaids, after all. If he’s in hell, maybe he’ll have a chance to climb out of the pit.
Balanced On the Edge 