Puppy Roadtrip, Tags & Island Bliss

I was gently tagged by Brent to list five books I would like to be stranded with on my imaginary deserted island.

Religion and Nothingness - Keiji Nishitani

The Bow and the Lyre - Paz

Mary Ruefle

Noise Made by Poems – Peter Levi

The Sense of Beauty – George Santayana

I tag anyone who can tell me how many different accepted spellings there are for Shakespeare? Or anyone who just needs to imagine being on an island.

Pupdate:

Count down to dog.

Turns out we are driving to Indianapolis this weekend to pick up the puppy who was supposed to get here via his breeder. There are vague difficulties on her end.

That’s cool. I will be happy to linger in Lafayette (home of my Purdue days) and see the old haunts and especially the places where me and my wife Dolce used to live when we were (fluttering eye lashes) falling in luv.

Come Sunday we will be home with the little potato muffin.

Poetry, it Does a Body Good

Read poetry.

For strong bones, whiter teeth and a healthy lustrous coat. And, according to this study, it broadens the mind. But if Byron lights up the mind, what would Eliot do? Can an MRI show, with its pretty lights and colors, a mind being 'blown'? I read this, in part, as the science behind the buzz I get from certain poems and poets.

"Writing poetry is almost a physical experience as well as mental. Children are rarely worried about extracting too much meaning from poems, but they seem to get a much deeper experience from it."

Jorie-isms

Digging 'round in my old notebooks I found a few nuggets on writing from Jorie Graham that I copied out. The first echoes Stevens, the poem resisting intelligence. The last three all circle around the same idea of positing a listener to guide and shape your voice or voices. I get a lot more mileage out of her thoughts on writing than her writing itself these days.

1. You want to not understand your poem for as long as you can, because as soon as you start understanding it, all you can do is shape it into the simplest form of your understanding. You end up writing a poem that is an interpretation of the original poem.

2. If I am talking specifically to my mother, or to the butcher, or to Emily, I have a complete voice governed by vocabulary, tone and range of references … totally woven into each other by the fact that the listener is constant and imaginable.

3. Too general a sense of audience and the poem wavers between different registers of your own voice.

4. To write differently, posit a different listener, in order to expand the range of experiences that come into the poem. I have to speak to someone I not have spoken to before.


I was torn between which photos of her to use (there are so many). I skipped all the "chin in hand" (too yearbooky) photos and went with these which range from stormy Jorie to blue Jorie to fiery Jorie.

Weather Report - Journal Entry

Morning after New Year's eve.

A cluster of balloons is snagged in the branches above my street. Big blue fruit. This reminds me of Weather Awareness Week in grade schoool when the local weatherman came to our 4th grade class. He etched clouds on the board, made feathered edges with an eraser, translated each cloud into the weather we all knew & explained the difference. Suddenly it sounded like code -- clouds & wind the vowels of weather, & in thirty minutes it became complicated as math. I was happy for rain to stay rain, & clouds, clouds.

Using colored chalk we drew weatherscapes on the board all week. On our test: define stratosphere, atmosphere, Jet Stream, & draw cirrus, cumulus, & cumulonimbus clouds--the one I most remember because it meant rain.Friday, class gathered in the schoolyard, balloons on string in each hand. Tiny messages rolled like scrolls explaining, & asking how far? would you please return it? were tied to the string with an SASE.

We released them on 3, & and all stood pointing, trying to track our own among the slow swarm drifting away. For the next month, Miss Libby charted the responses: Concord, in a cow pasture. Another found floating in Lake Winnewanna by a fisherman. Only one left the state -- Pennsylvania.

Distance was everything. It mattered more than I can say that my balloons go far away and be found. This is not a need in me that's died; always, I am sending up balloons through starving trees.

Poets on Anatomy

Three jobs I would rather have:

A guy who names candle scents.

A guy who names paint colors.

A guy who renames parts of the human body.

Taking up the third in this list, while the names of things as they are didn't stop Stevens (dry cattarhs) I wonder what would happen if we approached the renaming of organs, parts, et al., using say, kennings.
Surely, names like epiglottis, uvula and others which are not descriptive of function (unless maybe you are a medical expert) would be better off. No?

Go ahead, pick a part ... a thingy ... and rename it. Remember, do it in the form of a kenning: Whale road, sail road, etc. for the ocean. You know.

Apple for Texas

For me, it was Cummings' love poems that mattered. Here is a little poem I made (with him in mind I realize) for my friend, Texas. I cannot help myself. She's adorable.

Apple

As you bite
into it I thank
the green apple –
just hard enough
to make the tendons rise,
the way they do
sometimes, in your
slender neck – for showing
how you’re put
so beautifully together.

I am working on the leap between the dashes -