A Wild Eloquence
There's an interesting visiting editorial in this month's Queue from the
Association of Computing Machinery. The author reviews the decades-old
fight among proponents of different programming languages, and in particular,
the devotees of literate programming. I'm old enough to have
programmed in dozens of languages, before C/C++, Java and VB dominated the
landscape. 30 years ago, there were still raucous arguments about the
relative merits of Ada, LISP, Pascal, Modula and dozens of other dialects.
Luminaries such as Edsger Dijkstra would claim that COBOL "crippled the mind"
and that BASIC created "mentally mutilated programmers".
There are certainly parallels between programs and poems. One of the
reasons that I write clear, commented code is that I may have to go back and
understand it some day. No less my poetry which, on re-reading after a
year or two, I wonder what in the hell I was talking about.
~~~
I was laying out pages of my manuscript all over the kitchen table, trying to
get Emily to lounge somewhere else and preparing to impose some serious
narrative arc on the sucker, when it dawned on me that I didn't know how many
pages I should include. The guidelines to the Emily Dickinson Award says
something typical like "48 to 90", but I tend to write shortish poems, so I'm
expecting to have about as many poems as pages. The last time I entered
the good folks at the Poetry Foundation dictated that all poems should be
double-spaced. I assumed this was because, not only were the applicants
limited to those over 50, the manuscript readers would be members of the same
(farsighted) demographic.
But, I digress. Figuring I could go back to single spacing, I was going to
have 4 sections with 15-16 poems each. I ambled over to my poetry shelf
and picked the first recognizable contest winner at hand: GC Waldrep's
Goldbeater's Skin.
Boy, was that a mistake. I noted the number of poems and page count,
and started reading it again. I was humbled within the first 5 pages.
It's not only erudite and footnoted and end-paged and allusional. It's
intelligent and unashamed of its vocabulary and outstanding writing, with
inventive titles and great closes, and so
clearly poetry. I once read the book cover to cover, taking notes,
which I eventually sent to GC. This time, all the poems that I thought
were great I am now awed by. All the poems I thought were good, I now find
exceptional. Most of the poems that I didn't care for as much, I now
believe are really, really good. It was a Twain
moment, where my old dad got smarter as I aged. My thought for you tonight
is, if you want to write better poetry, read better poetry and this will cost
you less than a meal at Red Robin's.
There are some many great poems in this book, and such a wealth of great lines,
that I can only give you a sample. I've actually stolen two phrases
already as titles to my own poems. Here a small sampling:
Against the Madness of Crowd: "Reckon the haste of one wall
burning. / There is no thickness there is no terror there is"
Blink: "This bird's too big for the drawer you've opened, / talons deep
in the wood like winter sap ..."
Varieties of Religious Experience: "I want to lie down in a room of
blue sand."
Heave-Ho: "if I could lift the cold from the dress form of this present
yes"
Confessions of the Mouse King: "... Our lady of lithography, /
each sewn signature, the cutting and the paste / applied in hopes of some
organic connection, / as thigh to hip. In the meantime I pledge my small
furnace."
Confessions of the Mouse King: "The thing is, every child's a
walking reliquary ..."
Apocatastasis: " Perhaps this cold will pass. Perhaps / that bridge
was not a harp at all."
Canticle for the Second Sunday in Lent: "To be the son of a poet is to
lust in a great circle."
What Begins Bitterly Becomes Another Love Poem: "What we call
patience is only fire again, compressed."
Vendible Aesthetic: "A wild eloquence. Faint taste of salt on
love's split tongue."
It's no wonder that Dean Young, whom I admire immensely, called the work "a
fiercely intelligent and fiecely playful interiority that is astonishing".
And another poet whom I respect, Arthur Sze, added "reading these poems renews
our recognition of the world's precarious splendor." From other poets, and
for other books, these words would cause eye-rolls as most blurbs do. Get
this book and read it and you'll be a believer.
~~~
The latest news from Derek is he and his buddy Max, the Film Studies student,
are in Nice. They love the hostel, which has an abundance of attractive
young women and high-speed Internet. Their report on Paris, whence they
came, was that Everything Was A Fabulous Blur, as they ... well, I'll let
Der say it, probably typing on a keyboard that has a bunch of weird vowels with
diacritical marks: "showed up on the first day at 10am (3 am our time) after
having been
awake since 9am the previous morning and having only gotten about two hours of
interrupted sleep on the plane. Determined to stay up until night time so as
to establish a good sleep schedule we walked around for about 9 hours until it
started to rain, at which point we sat inside a cafe and stared like zombies out
at the people with umbrellas. The next day we walked about two and a half times
the distance that me and diego walked on our most ambitious day... we saw the
eiffel tower, the arch de triumph, sacre cour, and the louvre before walking
the 3 miles back south to our hotel....". As I mentioned, Der & Max
are now on the
Côte d'Azur and Max is dying to take in the last day of Cannes, where they
are hoping to bump into small film makers ordering similar
café au lait's and strike up a conversation. There are no
accommodations in Cannes, so they will be taking the train back and forth from
Nice, and then moving on to Italy. Ah, the glories of traveling with a
backpack, a yen for adventure, and a parent's emergency-only credit card.