Woodcut Prints

I love Mary Azarian. The above print is from her Medieval series. I took a printmaking course once, and loved every aspect of it, from the wide swath of ink laid on the block, to the surprisingly smooth tunneling of wood with the v-shaped mouth of the gouge.

Word of the Week is:

Hardpan: any layer of firm detrital matter, as of clay, underlying soft soil. Hard, unbroken ground. The fundamental or basic aspect of anything; solid foundation; underlying reality.

I like this. Sounds like a parable - something about a wise man building his house upon the rock...?

No Bad Things

When the boys were little (9 and 4), we lived in the Picadilly, a wonderful, art-deco apartment building that was once a hotel and cinema. Everything about it oozed the Charleston, Speakeasies, Prohibition. There was a decrepit ballroom (with gorgeous views of downtown) on the top floor, and there were several, secret, underground floors with rows of "pay-by-the-hour" rooms, clearly used for - well, you know.

We often let the boys run around in the hallway on our floor, but I was worried that the younger one, R., might wander into the stairwell and end up God knows where. So, in a stroke of genius and not-at-all-problematic parenting, I told him there were "rat monsters" in the stairwell. My older son F. played along. Whenever we had to use the stairwell, R. would stick very close to us.

But naturally, it didn't last. One day, when the elevators weren't working, we were racing up the stairs, and R. took his time. When he got to the top and stepped into the hallway, I said to him, "You were lucky the rat monsters didn't get you!" He gave me such a look of reproach and said, "Mama. I know there are no bad things in the world."

I have never forgotten this, nor has my older son, who at that moment gave me such a sad and world-weary glance. It's a precious little gift of innocence I like to take out and ponder every once and a while. No bad things in the world.

Allegro Ma Non Troppo

"Life, you're beautiful (I say)
you just couldn't get more fecund,
more befrogged or nightingaily,
more anthillful or sproutspouting."

Wislawa Szymborska

Oh So Belated Word of the Week

Silver Bromide: a yellowish, water-insoluble powder, AgBr, which darkens on exposure to light, produced by the reaction of silver nitrate with a bromide; used chiefly in the manufacture of photographic emulsions.

Photography is like alchemy. Silver on paper. Miraculous!

Lots of good "silver" words out there:
1. silver bell (Halesia shrub)
2. silverberry (also a shrub)
3. silver doctor (an artificial fly/lure, for catching trout and salmon)
4. silver-eye (white-eye?)
5. silver fizz (alcoholic drink made with gin, lemon juice, sugar, and egg-white)
6. silver foil (silver in foil form; they put this on sweets in South Asia)
7. silver fox
8. silver frost (glaze)
9. silvering (coating with sliver, as in a mirror)
10. silver jenny (silvery mojarra?)
11. silver king (tarpon?)
12. silverlace vine
13. silver lining
14. silver maple
15. silver morning glory
16. silvern (made of, or like, silver; archaic)
17. silver perch
19. silver point (melting point of silver)
20. silver queen (gold dust?!)
21. silver-rag (butterfish)
22. silver rod (weedy herb)
23. silver sage (herb)
24. silver screen
25. silversmith
26. silver spoon
27. silver storm (ice storm)
28. silver thaw (glaze)
29. silver-tongued
30. silver trout
31. silver-trumpet tree
32. silverware
33. silver wattle
34. silverweed
35. silvery

Elaine Equi

I finished reading Elaine Equi's Cloud of Knowable Things, and I enjoyed it. A poet I admire lists her as a favorite, so I guess I expected to be blown away, but I was actually more entertained than floored - charmed than changed. That's not a bad thing. Here are my favorites:
1. Opaque Saints
2. A Quiet Poem
3. The Objects in Japanese Novels
4. Everywhere Today We See a Lack of Commitment (Hilarious)
5. Early Influence
6. Alien Fantasy (Terrific)
7. Four Corners
8. The Movie Version
9. A Sentimental Song
10. Can't Complain
11. Pivotal Gaps
12. For August in April
13. Return of the Sensuous Reader
14. Reset (contains my favorite line of all: "I plant my syllables in light./Let them multiply there." Wow)

Sharon Olds can really

end a poem. I think you could make a poem using the final lines of every poem from The Gold Cell and it would change the world.

That said, I didn't find every poem in the book worthy of its glorious end. But here are the ones that earned it:

1. On the Subway
2. The Abandoned Newborn
3. When
4. The Girl
5. California Swimming Pool
6. Little Things
7. The Latest Injury
8. The Quest
9. Gabriel and the Water Shortage
9. Signs.

The (Often Obscure) Names of Things

I recently read a poem by Elaine Equi entitled "Now that I Know what Feverfew Looks Like." I won't reproduce the poem here, but I can paraphrase: the poet is depressed because she read a book by a fellow poet she admires, and found poem after poem littered with the names of flowers, rather like a catalog or a list, as if the poet wanted to say something but couldn't quite say it so she just kept listing more flowers. The title leads us to believe that we're not talking about roses and daisies here, but maybe saxifrage, foamflower, alumroot, etc. So this got me thinking...

I've heard other poets/readers complain that they want to be led more directly through a poem - that they want to be fed the sounds, scents, flavors of a thing, that its name doesn't suffice (especially if they're unfamiliar with its referent). Although I think packing a poem with unfamiliar terms can be offputting (I did this very thing in a workshop exercise on "gardens" to see where it would take me), I have always been moved by the (often obscure) names of things. Words - especially unmodified nouns - have so much power. They are in themselves small encyclopedias of time and place; they encode social relationships, to use some anthro-speak.

I picked up a used copy of Seamus Heaney's Collected Poems, 1965-1975 about a week ago. I wasn't planning on buying anything when I went into Powell's, but I came across this book and opened it to a random page. Next came the proverbial "blew the top of my head off" moment. Over the next few days, I read the whole book cover to cover. When I read words like peat, gorget, loam, demesne, maw, turf-face, fledge, coomb, I am absolutely transported. I don't know exactly what each of these words means, but they exude rural Ireland, and perhaps more important, they carry, convincingly, the voice of the narrator. If your poem's narrator is a hooker in the city trying to score smack, having her describe her syringe falling in a patch of feverfew is unconvincing. But if you have a farmer or a gardener spying a sprig of tansy growing in the loam that borders the bog, that's a different story.

I have read many poems that employ a nautical metaphor for struggles with relationships and identity, and the nautical terms they use go right over my head - bowsprit, boom, spanker, spar. And yet, I somehow get the point; in fact, I may be more moved than those readers who happen to be sailors, because the fuzzy edges allow room for multiple interpretations. (See, for example, Olena Kalytiak Davis's poem "The Unhoused Heart" from her stunning collection And her Soul Out of Nothing).

When I was doing research in Karachi, a Sindhi friend told me that people in her village enjoy reciting the poetry of Shah Abdul Latif, the brilliant poet-mystic from the middle ages who is considered the "Shakespeare" of the Sindhi language. The thing is, the language of his poetry is archaic in the same way that Shakespearean English is today - it reflects a dialect no longer spoken by the majority of Sindhi-speakers. According to my friend, her fellow villagers greatly enjoy reciting verses from Latif's "Risalo" and debating the meaning of obscure words.

So...I am not taking some stand against the movement for clarity and accessibility in poetry; I'm just saying that there is pleasure to be had in ambiguity.

Coordinates

It is rare that I know exactly where I am. For one brief moment on Saturday, I could fix my location with uncommon precision. Unfortunately, according to quantum physics, I could not simultaneously measure my velocity, and therefore had no idea when I would reach my ultimate destination, metaphorical or otherwise. Usually, it's the opposite: I'm going nowhere fast. This was a welcome change.

Word of the Week is:

Penny Wheep: a short glass of beer; from the Scottish whip: to drink fast. Barkeep, give me a penny wheep. Ah, what the heck; penny wheeps all around.

Headline Woes

"Mutilated bodies litter bomb site." Courtesy of CNN.com.

Headlines like these astonish and infuriate me. When S. spent a year back home in Karachi before we got married, I read a similar headline reporting on the Bohri Bazaar bomb blast - something about body parts being scattered over the streets and buildings. I remember thinking, No, not parts, not limbs, nails, bones, organs. That could be my love on the street, my whole life, my youth, my old age. He could have stopped off at a paan and juice shop for bhel puri, or accompanied his mother or sister to the cloth market.

How easy it is to be frank and graphic when you don't care, when you don't love what's been lost.

On Second Thought...

Naumachia is not a good word. It's not so much a "mock sea fight," which sounds like a lovely evening of theatrical entertainment, as it is a hideous, sadistic bloodbath: an enormous battle to the death staged for the benefit of Caesar, Claudius, the usual suspects. Thousands of slaves and condemned prisoners were involved. Well, I guess I shouldn't blame the word, but I'm sorry, naumachia, I no longer love you.

Belated Word of the Week is:

Naumachia: a mock sea fight, given as a spectacle among the ancient Romans.

This is a very good word.

Soundtrack of my life

Once I expected a lowing --
the solid footstep presence of a French horn.
Now I only hear bells:
the silver charms of an anklet a-jangle;
a sudden, joyous lift
of the heels.

Far-fetched

Have you ever had this experience? You say a common word or phrase, and suddenly it seems foreign and strange. You repeat it several times; it makes absolutely no sense.

This happened to me yesterday with far-fetched. Far-fetched; fetched from afar, like a crate of spices from Madagascar. Or pearls from the Great Barrier Reef. Or some rogue ganglion plucked from the highways of my bone-hinged mind.

Far-fetched
That you love me.
That I found socks that match.
That ants communicate with their mandibles.
That cows do not rebel against the system.
Fjords.
Bunjee-jumping.
That eggs and flour and sugar make cake.
Lupines.
Hopping on one foot. For fun.
Animated porn.
Parthenogenesis.
The luge.
Jogging.
Roman purge pits.
Honey.
Spongebob Squarepants in German.

Word of the Week is:

Foss: a ditch or moat. "After that he threw their bodies into the foss or great ditch that surrounded the palace." - 1001 Arabian Nights

This word has a lovely sound - far superior to "ditch" or "moat." It is also spelled fosse, like Bob Fosse, but I prefer it e-less. Foss. Foss. Reminds me of sluice; another great word.

Between the lips and the voice...

something goes dying.
Something with the wings of a bird, something of anguish and oblivion.
The way nets cannot hold water.

-- Pablo Neruda, Poem XIII from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair