So this is kind of cool. I have been entering my books into Sente, a really fine bibliography software package if you’re on a Mac, and I came across these two books of poetry that I took from my grandmother’s library, Cups of Illusion and The Upward Pass, both by Henry Bellamann, best known for the novel King’s Row, which he published in 1940 and which was made into a movie in 1942. Anyway, what drew my attention was the fact that Bellamann inscribed the books of poetry to my grandmother, calling her his “dear little friend” in Cups of Illusion and “good friend” in The Upward Pass. My grandmother once hinted to me that there was a storyfrom the time she was a girl about her and a writer – though she never actually told me the story; she tended to be very secretive about her past – and now, of course, I am wondering what that story might be. In 1928, the year Bellamann inscribed The Upward Pass, he also published Crescendo, about a man in love with two women. I somehow doubt that was the story my grandmother never told me, that she was one of the women in the novel, but it is fun to think about.
Not much else to say about this. Just that I think it’s kind of cool. Here is a poem from Cups of Illusion that I opened to at random:
August Gardens
Falling petals and dusty leaves
And drooping flower heads
Beneath unpitying skies
Unpromising of cloud or change–
Yet some faint life still moves
In your pale veins;
Some dumb, unknowing courage
Meets each day’s mocking sun.
How you keep faith with wind and rain!
I watch you in your silence,
Touch your curled tendrils,
While my eyes
Search Heaven for promise
Or for change.
Can you know in your dim nerves
The touch of one who waits like you
And still keeps faith with God
As you keep faith with wind and rain?
And here is one from The Upward Pass:
The Gulf Stream
They say a tropic river threads the seas
Bearing the strangest things to northern lands:
Vermilion fish, like flowers, with silver bands,
And bronze seaweed from scarlet coral keys.
Green birds that mock the moon from tall palm trees
Where ghost-gray monkeys hang by cunning hands,
Follow the thinning blue to northern sands,
And there among the black pines scream and freeze.
The while this ardent current chills and fades,
Splendors of ice drift slowly south, each one
A frozen torch of borealic fire,
Each one a spectral ship with rainbow sails,
Sinking and fading as it nears the sun
In this relentless river of desire.
I am late publicizing the fact that three of my poems, “Like This,” “Free Radicals” and “Empty Rhetoric” were published on Poets for Living Waters. Here is “Free Radicals:”
Rowboats on the pond:
random particles
dancing to laws
they couldn’t name
even if the god
that doesn’t exist
descended this moment
and himself commanded
them to speak
—and our son, sleeping,
nestles further back
in his stroller, animals,
no doubt, tracking with him
through his dreams
the mud of the day
we’ve just lived;
and when he wakes
he’ll read the story
back to us,
the narrative components
bouncing off each other
like these vessels
would do on the water
if all at once their pilots slept
—which, if we’re honest about it,
is how we got here,
bumped and bonded,
released from our rage
into this hope, this boy,
this: his own life.
Submission guidelines asked for, along with three poems and a bio, a statement if you wanted to make one. Here is mine, corrected for the spacing errors that appear on the site:
Tikkun olam, a concept that is central to Jewish spirituality, means, literally, the fixing of the world, and it refers to a religious duty Jews are supposed to consider ourselves obligated to perform. In one strand of Jewish mystical tradition, tikkun olam means the task of gathering the fragments of the shattered divine, the pieces of himself [sic] that the god of the Hebrew Bible gave up in creating the world so that the world could live and grow, and then using them to reconstruct the original godhead. On a more mundane, though no less significant level, tikkun olam is represented by such things as the struggle for social justice. For me, writing poetry is also a form of tikkun olam. As Sam Hamill has written, “The first duty of the writer is the rectification of names,” and he quotes Kung-fu Tze [Confucius], “All wisdom is rooted in learning to call things by the right name.” Finding my way through language to a finished poem is the act of finding that name, whether it is the name of the way things were, the way things are or the way things might be. Poetry’s response to disasters like the BP oil spill, it seems to me, needs to encompass all three of those possibilities.
Poets for Living Waters is a poetry action in response to the BP Gulf oil disaster of April 20, 2010, one of the most profound man-made ecological catastrophes in history. Former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky describes the popularity of poetry after 9/11 as a turn away from the disaster’s overwhelming enormity to a more manageable individual scale. As we confront the magnitude of this recent tragedy, such a return may well aid us.
The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to everything else. An appreciation of this systemic connectivity suggests a wide range of poetry will offer a meaningful response to the current crisis, including work that harkens back to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing regional effects.
This online periodical is the first in a planned series of actions. Further actions will include a print anthology and a public reading in Washington DC.
The discussion in this Nice Guy™ thread over at Alas reminded me of someone I had not thought about in a very long time, a woman – I’ll call her Kim – with whom I was close friends in college, whom I lost as a friend after she decided to marry a man I was convinced was no good for her, not because I dropped her as a friend, but because she dropped me. We’d been classmates, but not more than that, in sixth grade and had not seen each other until we met again as English majors during our sophomore year in college. I have no memory of how we became close friends, but we did, quickly, and, eventually, I wanted very much to turn that friendship into something more.
I don’t remember if I ever told Kim how I felt. I do remember, however, very clearly when she told me how she felt about me. We were at a beach not far from campus and she had just come out of the water and plopped down on her stomach. We started talking, most probably about something we were reading for class, when suddenly Kim sat up and faced me. “You know, Richard,” she said, “you’re like a brother to me.” I don’t remember what, if anything, I said in response, though it was certainly not what I wanted to hear. Still, our friendship was far more important to me than the possibility of a sexual relationship which might end up not working out, so I swallowed my disappointment and accepted her, and loved her, as the intimate friend I assumed she was saying was the only thing she ever wanted to be to me.
Before Kim met the man she married, she had one boyfriend that I remember, a guy I thought was a jerk long before they became a couple, not so much because he was arrogant, though he was, but because he epitomized that arrogance, at least this is how I remember feeling about it back then, by braiding and beading his hair in imitation of Bo Derek’s hairstyle in the movie 10. The semester Kim went out with him, she also moved to a dorm across campus nearer to where he lived. In fact, she might have done that to be closer to him, but I am not sure. Once – and this is what confirmed him in my mind not just as a jerk but as a true asshole – he came back with her to her old dorm room to pick up some things. I walked by the open door on my way to leave a note on another friend’s door down the hall, saw them out of the corner of my eye as I passed and figured I would pop in to say hello on my way back. At first, I didn’t think they’d seen me, but then, when I was still just a couple of doors down from where they were, I heard him say, “See, I told you that once you moved across campus, he’d forget about you.” I put the note on my other friend’s door and hurried back, but by the time I got there, Kim and her boyfriend were gone.
I know she eventually broke up with that guy – it’s funny, I remember his name, first and last – and that she, too, decided he was a jerk; and I have memories of going to at least one classical music concert with her during our senior year (if I remember correctly, she played the violin) and of there being that night what I thought might have been some sexual tension between us, though nothing came of it. Indeed, I didn’t even realize it might have been sexual tension until the following day, and then it confused me because it was so at odds with the substance of our friendship; and I remember how ambitious she was as an aspiring journalist and how much I respected the integrity of her politics and her belief that she could make a real difference in the world. Mostly, though, I remember how much I liked being with her. Just being with her. She laughed a lot, and I don’t think there was anything we could not talk about. Her friendship enriched my life, plain and simple. It made me happy, and I was deeply grateful for that.
Then, in our senior year, a speaker came to campus, a man who’d written a tremendously popular book on “how to woo and win a woman.” The school newspaper assigned Kim to cover his talk, and when she did – at least this is my memory of the story she told me the next day – she asked him during the Q&A about something that, if true, would call into question the validity of his claim to be the kind of man who could write the kind of book he’d written and be taken seriously. His response, in front of the entire audience, was to invite her out to dinner that night with the rest of the press, where he promised he would answer her question. At the dinner, he offered to give her an exclusive, private interview back in his hotel room. She went with him. At some point, if I remember correctly what she told me, I guess it became clear to her that he was interested in giving her a good deal more than an interview and she asked him to take her home, or to call a taxi. He refused and she ended up having sex with him that night.
When she told me this, I was, for obvious reasons, horrified, and I told her so, and I pleaded with her not to see him again. Even if she did not think that what he did was date rape, I said – because she didn’t – a man who behaved like that was not someone she ought to trust; but she did not listen to me, and she started going out with him. This inevitably meant that she and I saw less of each other, though we still talked on the phone pretty frequently, and then, after what seems in my recollection to have been a very short while, and I mean a very short while, she told me he’d proposed marriage and that she was thinking of accepting. I asked her if she loved him, and while she did not say no, she very pointedly did not say yes. I don’t know how much time passed before she agreed to be his wife, but she did finally do so, and that was the end of our friendship. I remember trying to call her, to write her, but she did not respond at all. I was not surprised not to be invited to the wedding. Several years after we graduated, I was talking with someone who had also been her friend when we were in college, and he said that she’d told him she wanted to cut out of her life completely anyone she’d known during her college years. She didn’t, or wouldn’t, tell him why.
I googled Kim’s name today and was surprised to discover, given her one-time desire to be a writer, that she has almost no online presence. There are a couple of references to her and her husband, recent enough that I assume they are still married, and a couple of scanned articles she wrote for our college newspaper back when we were undergraduates. I read them wistfully, remembering the strength of her voice and of her character. I hope – despite everything that what I have written here implies about the man she married, because I would wish her nothing less – that her marriage has been a good one, happy and challenging in all the right ways, and most of all loving; and I hope that she has found ways of making her life as meaningful as she once thought being a journalist would make it; mostly, though, I wish there was a way I could find out if those hopes are true, because I never had the chance to say goodbye to her, to grieve the loss of her as a friend, and I guess I would also like the opportunity to tell her that a part of me still misses her.
All writers face the problem of writing about what scares them. It might be frightening because it is embarrassing or shameful, because it feels too personal, because it might offend loved ones. It might be frightening because it violates religious or other moral/ethical taboos, because it humanizes or makes comprehensible that which many believe should remain beyond comprehension, because it gives voice to people or ideas that have been silenced. Whatever the source of the fear, we should not allow it to dictate what we can and cannot write. In this workshop, we will practice some strategies for dealing with material that frightens us.
When
Sat Jun 19 3pm – 6pm
Where
The Renaissance Charter School , 35 – 59 81st St., Jackson Heights, NY 11372 — map
I am very pleased that my poem, “Not Silenced, But Needing,” is in the new issue of diode. It’s a really good looking issue and it’s the first poem I have published that is not a translation in a long time. I am hoping it’s the beginning of a trend, since one of my summer projects is to work on the poems I have in my files and start submitting them. I have enough poems to make a book; I just don’t know if the poems I have make a book, if you know what I mean.
In the dream, my life was smoke: I couldn’t breathe.
So I ran, unwrapping myself down the beach
till your skin, the ocean, lapped at my knees.
I dove in. Your voice was a current,
a melody gathering words to itself
for us to sing, and we sang them,
and they swirled around us, iridescent fish
bringing light to the world you were for me;
and then I was water, a river
washing the night from your flesh,
and I cradled your body rising in me
till you were clean, glowing,
and when you surfaced, glistening,
there was not an inch of you I didn’t cling to.
Ethics Of The Fathers
Moses received the Torah from Sinai
and passed it on to Joshua, who gave
it in his turn to The Elders, and love
or duty, or maybe both, explain why
we still hand it down, even if we die
doing so. The Church burned us alive,
the Romans did worse…but you who give
yourselves to goyishe women, you lie
with their gods as well, and so we cast you out.
The rabbi paused, whispered Come back, and left
the stage. No applause. Behind me, a man laughed.
Beside me, a woman squirmed in her seat.
In love, my love, I’ve given myself to you,
neither god nor goddess, and not a Jew.
After Drought
Knees rooted in the bed on either side
of your belly, my body’s a stalk of wheat
bent in summer wind, a bamboo shoot
rising, an orchid, and then all at once a cloud
swelling, a swallow sculpting air, a freed
white dove. You pull me down, but you are hot
beneath me, and the gust that is my own heat
lifts me away: I’m not ready. Outside,
footsteps, voices. Two men. Giggling, we pull
the sheet around us till they pass, but if someone
does see, what will they have seen? A couple
making love. No. More than that: They will
have seen the coming of the rain; they will
have seen us bathe in it, and they will say Amen.
Some things I’ve been reading when I should’ve been grading papers or doing other work:
A Tough Patron and an Old Ideology Give Women a Lift in Bulgarian Politics, by Dan Bilefsky, The New York Times: What’s most interesting in this article about how Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko M. Borisov has been appointing women to political offices are the explanations people give for why he is doing so and why women are needed in politics. Boiko says, for example, “Women are more diligent than men, and they don’t take long lunches or got to the bar,” and also, “Women have stronger characters than men because when they say no they mean no, and they are less corruptible.” Others suggest that women are less corruptible because they have more to lose, and others talk about the fact that while Bulgaria “never had a feminist movement” but that during “Communism women in Bulgaria were represented in almost every walk of life, from plant managers to medicine.”
An interesting piece in The Lede about the politics behind Iran’s capture and the televised confession of Abdolmalek Rigi, leader of Jundallah, a militant group that claims to be defending Sunni Muslims in Iran’s southeast and has killed hundreds of Iranian soldiers and civilians since 2003. For some related articles in the news try here, here and here.
Before I became a translator, I was working on what might have become a book exploring male heterosexuality and pornography, of course, was one of the things I was researching. At the time, I was very disappointed at the narrowness and often impoverished nature of the discourse I found not only about the representation of men in heterosexual video pornography (which was what I was looking at) but also in pornography that was touted as progressive and even feminist. Perhaps one day I will return to that project, but in the mean time I have been enjoying Male Submission Art, the mission of which is to “showcase beautiful imagery where men and other male-identified people are submissive subjects. We aim to challenge stereotypes of the ‘pathetic’ submissive man.” The images are often very cool, and what I like about the analysis is that its core tenet seems to be that for a man to “submit” (whatever that word might mean in any given context) is not, by definition, for him to unman himself or to be unmanned by the one he is submitting to (whatever to “unman” might mean in any given context). Leaving aside the question of whether the particular sexuality expressed by the site is one’s cup of tea or not, it is – for me, anyway – a new, interesting and interestingly subversive way of trying to transform what we mean when we say the words “manhood” or “masculinity.”
It’s odd, and maybe a bit arrogant sounding, to include something that I’ve written in this list, but I’ve recently been putting together my application for promotion to full professor, which involved going through the two books of translations that I’ve published. As I did so, I was reminded of how wonderful a poet Saadi was. (One of these days I have to add my work to the Wikipdedia entry on him.) So these words may be mine, but they are someone else’s work. It’s from Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan:
The best thing for an ignorant man is to be silent, and if he understands that, and practices it, he will no longer be ignorant.
If the learning you possess is less than perfect,
keep your tongue tucked safely in your mouth.
Empty words disgrace the one who speaks them,
like serving a walnut shell without a nut.
A fool was trying hard to teach his ass
to talk. A wise man watching him observed,
“Aren’t you afraid of what they’ll say
when they find out what you’re doing? This beast
will never learn the trick of human speech.
Better you should learn the gift of silence.“
A man who does not think before he speaks
will almost always use the words foolishly.
If you will not take the time a wise man takes
to speak wisely, practice an animal’s silence.
The Year of the Drone: A blog with an interactive map and analysis of US drone attacks in Pakistan.
Laid up with gout today, and for the past four days – the most serious attack I’ve had in a while; I could barely walk on Thursday and Friday – but today is the first day my head feels clear enough that I can get some work done. I’ve been watching TV and reading to distract myself, and so this seemed like a perfect time to start a “What I’m Reading” series of posts, which I’ve been wanting to do for a while.
Also from Critical Mass, this take on Louise Gluck’s new book, A Village Life. I have always liked Gluck’s work.
I’d never heard of the poet Eleanor Ross Taylor, till I read this – yet one more from Critical Mass–appreciation of Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960 – 2008. She sounds like someone I could learn something from, not to mention I enjoyed the poems quoted in the piece. Now all I need is a semester with the time to do nothing but read.
New York Times writer Katherine Bouton reviews two books about Mary Anning, The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World, by Shelley Emling and Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier. The first is a biography, the second is a novel. Here is Bouton’s lead: “Mary Anning was one of the few women to make a success in paleontology and one of the fewer still whose success was not linked to that of a paleontologist spouse (or any spouse: she was single). She made five major fossil discoveries from 1811 to her death in 1847 and many lesser ones. Why then is she best known as the inspiration for the tongue twister “She sells seashells by the seashore?”
In the same issue of the Times, Denise Grady writes about the ethical issues that arise when doctors take cells from patients and then use those cells in research and, sometimes, in commercial ventures that make a whole lot of money. “A Lasting Gift to Medicine That Wasn’t Really a Gift” is a response to The Immortal Life of Henriette Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer in the 1950s, and Skloot’s book is an attempt to come to terms with both sides of an issue mired in questions of race, class, medical ethics and more: Lacks’ cancer cells, which were taken for analysis, went on to become a mainstay of modern medical research, being used in developing the first polio vaccine and in the development of drugs for diseases including Parkinson’s leukemia and the flu, and they not incidentally have made some people in the medical field very, very rich. Lacks’ family, who can’t even afford their own health insurance, has never seen a dime of that money. The story is not as simple a one of exploitation as that outline would suggest, which is why Skloot’s book sounds like it is worth reading, but so is Grady’s opinion piece.
Due in 2013, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, will contain some significant revisions that could result, according to Times reporter, Benedict Carey, in “fewer children [getting] a diagnosis of bipolar disorder[,] ‘[b]inge eating disorder’ and ‘hypersexuality’ [becoming] part of everyday language” and a significant change in the way many mental disorders are diagnosed and treated. This book is used to define the line between the so-called normal and the so-called abnormal; changes in it could have a profound impact, therefore, on society. It is, therefore, worth paying attention to.
If any of you, like me, have gout, you want to know about GoutPal, the only informational site about gout that I have found – and it’s got a ton of information – that is not also trying to sell you something. I have glanced through it a couple of times, and I am beginning to realize that I need to read it. If you have gout, you probably should too.
An opinion piece on Tehran Bureau that’s worth reading about how to understand what happened in terms of the Green Movement in Iran on February 11th: Were the Greens Defeated?
Also from Tehran Bureau: Why North Tehranis Don’t Revolt: Why some people who clearly see the régime as “them,” don’t see the opposition as “us,” or at least not enough of an “us” that they are willing to risk joining the protests.
If you’re an Asian American poet, you should consider applying for this retreat. Kundiman does great work. Here’s a basic description:
In order to help mentor the next generation of Asian-American poets, Kundiman is sponsoring an annual Poetry Retreat at Fordham University. During the Retreat, nationally renowned Asian American poets will conduct workshops with fellows. Readings, writing circles and informal social gatherings will also be scheduled. Through this Retreat, Kundiman hopes to provide a safe and instructive environment that identifies and addresses the unique challenges faced by emerging Asian American poets. This 6-day Retreat will take place from Tuesday to Sunday. Workshops will not exceed eight students.
Writing in the January issue of Harper’s Magazine,Joshua Cohen wrote this at the end of his review of Laor’s book:
It often seems that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just […] a textual problem. If so, then the muddle of meaning that must be analyzed lies in parsing not Palestinian from Israeli, but “Israeli” from “Jew.” Only once those epithets have been dissevered can some sort of dialogue begin, between two political entities and not between two (or three) religions or Peoples. Until then, “Israel” will continue to be vilified as a word that means something other than what it should, while all critics of Israel will be accused of anti-Semitism.
It is not clear to me from the review how much of this is Cohen, how much of this is Laor and how much of it is Cohen putting into his own words what he agrees with in Laor’s book, but any book that leads to this kind of thinking, to asking these kinds of questions, whether I ultimately agree with the book or not, is a book worth reading. Now, if there were only 36 hours or more in a day. Sigh.