Elder child experiments with short form

I think he meant these as a joke, but I was utterly charmed:

Bubbling snot blobs
oozing, spreading, destroying
out of broken nose.

If gopher break fridge,
skin a big banana slug.
Feed it to boxers.

Super Mario
eat the chimpanzee of life
bacon baby butt.

Don't keep your eyes peeled
they will become mushy.
Barney is a fish.

Money is like cheese.
The evil frappuchinos
need to find a face.

No tag-backs, and the tree is base

Okay, Sarah tagged me. This is fun:

How to play:
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

As it would happen, I keep all my current library books on a shelf on my computer desk, and the nearest one is Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. I haven't started reading it yet, but here are the requisite lines:

"That afternoon I decide to go into the woods. Oshima said that going too far into the forest is dangerous. Always keep the cabin in sight, he warned me."

Ooh, that sounds good. I may have to read this book next.

Slight problem: I've got no one to tag! That is so sad.

the poems themselves perform feats of derring-do*

I am love, love, loving Richard Garcia's collection The Persistence of Objects. I have a mad urge to quote each and every one of his poems just to show you (dear reader) how extraordinary they are. Since I can't do that, check out the first stanza of this sestina, entitled "Not Bad for a Hermaphrodite":

"The poem was scrambled during transmission.
Previously, it had been tied to a gate and disemboweled.
Some said it was a hermaphrodite
whose secret name was suspected of being an anagram
of a supernatural being, a quadriplegic
God, fond of anyone who dressed Goth."

Transmission, disemboweled, hermaphrodite, anagram, quadriplegic, Goth. Sounds like a dare, doesn't it? And yet, he pulls it off. Hooray for his poetic feats of derring do!
I love this book.

*Pulled from John Mcguire's pull-quote on the back of the book

"How about Barbizon, I said.

How about a tall, yellow
butterscotch coop
at the Balmoral Hotel
in Edinburgh? Now
that's something you could
dive into and come up
with a mouthful of feathers
all aflutter. No, she said, Ashes
of Roses, you know
the clinking of a tea set
on a Mexican veranda?"

Richard Garcia, Ashes of Roses

You can read the whole poem here.
(Art by Dan Amell).

"At dawn, when the first buses leave,

...their great wipers arc
like women bending through smoke

to burdens, singing terror, singing pity."

Lynda Hull, Love Song during Riot with Many Voices

White City: Poems by Mark Irwin

I have mixed feelings about this work. Some of the poems are real gems; others have me scratching my head and wondering, "Is this the same person?" I think I'm just more moved by certain forms and topics than others, and while I love much "nature" poetry, it's fatiguing to read one after the other. It's more than this, though. Irwin seems to approach the natural world through the lens of loss - ruin, development, civilization as devastating, etc. I understand. I spent the first 18 years of my life living on a hill farm in Vermont. But I look at cities and see hope and possibility. I have deep affection for the built environment, for technologies and kitschy things, pop culture and public spaces and the everything-all-the-time of cities. So while Irwin is probably best known for his nature laments, I like him best when he's writing about freeways and hotels and imagined cities. Here are my favorites:

White City; Two Panels; Autumnal; I Hesitated; Ruins; Sparrow; Someone.

Verloren

This is my favorite German word. It means lost. It feels more lost-like, to me, than lost itself. Maybe this is because it sounds like "forlorn," which makes verloren the felicitous carrier of this other, more targeted meaning. After all, lost can refer both to an existential crisis and a sock, but forlorn has a more limited range of reference. It is dark; wretched and wrenching. Verloren, for an English speaker, gets freighted with multivalence. In actual German usage, though, (naturally), verloren has to make room for socks.

Reading Celan

I want to express how much I love this collection. I have been reading it for a long time, which is unusual for me. I am impatient. I want to stand at the end of something so I can look back and tell myself about it. But with Celan's work, I have resisted this impulse.

At times, in some of his poems, there is a simplicity that is deceptive. You could race through them and elude their impact. They are intense. The "simplest" pieces I've read six, seven times before the wind gets knocked out of me.

So much of what he writes takes up language - the naming of things, speech, the written word, silence, illegibility. He approaches it alternately with longing, resignation, and aplomb. Much is "unrepeatable," words are "lost," "Unwritten things, hardened/into Language, lay bare/a sky." Writing is an audacious act, maybe God-challenging. It is hopeful and hopeless, triumph and failure. But it feels as if language is more all-encompassing than this, as if, for Celan, language is a metaphor for humanity - the universality of it, and its contingency or particularity. Scripts, letters, mother tongues, Babel. I have just begun to unpack this. It is so rich.

I love the often chant-like quality of his poems, the turning back on itself, the "you, you"s, the "we, we"s, the refrains - all of it like playing with the materials before building. Or perhaps like dismantling the scaffold as you climb.

I have so much more thinking to do about this, but for now, I list my very favorites (the master list of loved ones is just too long):

The Secret of the Ferns; The Last Flag; Nocturnally Pouting; Speak, You Also; Argumentum e Silentio; Low Water; The Straitening; Psalm; The bright/stones; Anabasis; Everything's different; In the air; On the white prayer-thong; The Juggler's Dream; Give the Word; Well-digger; Wolf's-bean.

Looking forward to steroid psychosis

Remember that elephant that was sitting on my chest? He stood up.

Post in which I am Frustrated about Airways

Air in, CO2 out.
Gas up the cells.
Keep liquid at a minimum.
Stay within the frame of the body.
Color scheme: translucent.
Muscle engagement: minor.
Autonomic process. Write that down!
Fresh scent optional
but appreciated.
N.B.: Never twitchy
or inflamed.
One job:
air in, CO2 out. I know
you can do better than this.

Ah, the Lure of Dead Languages

If you've a yen for dead languages, but aren't in the mood for Virgil and co., you can read all your old childhood favorites in Latin. Here's a sampling:

Winnie ille Pu (Alexander Lenard, 1960)
Fabula de Petro Cuniculo (E. Peroto Walker, 1962)
Alicia in Terra Mirabili (Clive Harcourt Carruthers, 1964)
Domus Anguli Puensis (Brian Staples, 1980)
Ursus nomine Paddington (Peter Needham, 1999)
Quomodo Invidiosulus nomine Grinchus Christi natalem abrogaverit (Tunbergs 1999)
Regulus (Augustus Haury, 2001)
Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis (Peter Needham, 2003)(also available in ancient Greek!)

and my personal favorite, Cattus Petasatus (Tunbergs 2000):

Cur sedetis?? inquit ille,
Ludos vobis dabo mille!
Cattus, etsi sol non lucet,
Ludos vobis huc adducet!

"For all we know

that's how a God is reached, in whose
bright synaesthesias of sympathy a blood
need not be red, if spilled as speech..."

Heather McHugh, Spilled

Montivagant

This is a "lost" word from the 1600s that means vagabond -- or to be precise, a wanderer of the hills and mountains. I like it. It reminds me of my favorite Urdu word: avaragardi, which means vagabondage; roaming and rambling. I don't know why, but it makes me happy to say it.

Ainadamar

On Thursday night, S, K and I went to see the opening of Ainadamar at CSO. Wow, what a production. Of course Dawn Upshaw was incredible; she always is. But it was really Kelly O'Connor, in the pants role, who blew me away. She plays the part of Federico Garcia Lorca, and you wouldn't think that would work, but it does. I don't think I've ever heard a woman sing that beautifully in such a low register. And to look at her - this slim, dark-haired, slightly "fey" young woman - you'd never expect such depth and resonance.

Jessica Rivera as Nuria was spectacular, too, as was Jesus Montaya, the arresting officer whose calls of "entreguenlo" from offstage right were absolutely chilling.

And now, thanks to some freakish cold virus that came out of nowhere, I've completely lost my voice. Oh, well, it gives me an excuse to seclude myself for the weekend and do nothing but read and write.

Run, run, run, run, Runaway

Sadly, I am going to have to stop reading Runaway - short stories by Alice Munro. I hate it when an author that I love becomes famous, and everyone starts saying, "Oh, I read her stuff; she's not that good." Yes, she is that good. But this is not her best collection. Perhaps I'm also not in the right frame of mind for it; I'm sort of punchy and revved up. Maybe I need something mean and sarcastic.

Well, I just checked Peter Carey's Theft out of the library.

That might work.

New England Baked Beans

I am making baked beans. It is very late in the day to be making baked beans, but who cares? The oven does all the work.

I am very picky about the beans I use. I really only like Jacob's Cattle Beans, and you simply can't find them here in Chicago. In my Vermont hometown, a neighbor down the road grows them - has for as long as I can remember.

Every summer, my parents send me a big box of Jacob's Cattle Beans, divided into quart-sized zip-lock bags. I am down to my last two. I can buy them off the internet if I get desperate, but that just feels wrong. Where I come from they're just beans - a dollar a bag. According to Amazon, they're an heirloom bean -- "gourmet." That makes me smile. How, exactly, do you make baked beans gourmet? Cassoulet, you say? Well, sorry, but that's farm food. And if the French can't make it fancy, who can?

"We're lost

in Burroughs' loveless Soft Machine
with tongues alack
for love."

~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Holiday Inn Blues

Ambages

Winding ways, indirect proceedings; dark or obscure language; ambiguities.

CHAUCER Troylus v. 897 (c.1374) If Calkas lede us with ambages, That is to seyn, with dowble wordes slye.

WHITTINTON Vulgaria (1527) 2 Tendre wyttes with suche derke ambage be made dull.

SCOTT Wav. xxiv (1814) Partaking of what scholars call the periphrastic and ambagitory, and the vulgar the circumbendibus.

"And vanished in the emptiness of a bell."*

I just finished reading Hands Behind My Back: Selected Poems by Marin Sorescu. I really hate having to return this to the library.

Here are my favorites (VERY favorites in bold):

Hide and Seek
And Everything Slips Easily Away
Apparition
The House
Burglars
Glimmer
Spiral
Orbit
I Can't Pass Onto Anyone
Signs
Passport
Fire and Water
Laurel
Pure Conversation with a Chinese Character
*Fossil Hittite
Cognition
Good Advice
Laocoon
Used Bookseller
Poisoned
Minus the Sea
The Mountains
With their Fingertips
The Match