Baseball (Annotated)

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/k/kinsebo01.shtml

Maybe I wanna talk about class inequality
or mapping the surface of Mercury.
Old Man Poem, here, he can give a flying so and such
about teeth lining the inner cheeks of koalas,
or the 500-percent rise of student loan debt.
He won't turn down Scully,
but he might pause mid-Arnold Palmer
if you tell him telegraph operators once unplugged
their batteries and chatted
for an evening without power
save that from an aurora borealis
so grand Jose Marti saw it.
But my poem tongues a lemon seed
and remembers M.V.Puig,
how a 12th-inning right field substitution
could electrify a stadium.
He gets bored when I try rhyme,
says he prefers Lord Huron to my slanted drone.
Fine, Poem! That’s just fucking fine!
How will I ever cause the change I desire?
How to garner support for universal healthcare
or a living wage, more funding for public schools,
for me the arts, for NASA?
My poem can’t believe I spent four lines complaining,
says he has plenty of time, but less space,
and I better get back to baseball,
how a Chattanooga Lookout once struck out
Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig,
how she made all the papers,
even though it may have been a stunt.
(Not that baseball minds a myth;
he’s told my poem as much
from the Doubleday dugout.)
Facts matter
as much as a lemon seed
in the mouth of a poem
crushed to ashy white.
Ha! I cast Kanye power to help it sprout:
roots reach from my poem’s fundament
through the gray weather porch
and guvment soil
while a trunk busts
from mouth through overhang
branches rip off shingles,
leaves trifurcate the new shade
over my dessicated poem
and we’re both showered
in samaras he’d call helicopters.

Does Math Exist? Does Art? (Never Finished)

So you can watch the video above if you like, but I’ll try and paraphrase what I took from it so you don’t HAVE to watch if you wanna understand what I’m talking about.

Basically, the discussion is, “Does Math really exist or is it a purely human construction?” Since every science is the study of some actual, existing and measurable “thing,” (e.g. biology is life, physics is forces, etc.) where does that leave math? Do we discover math or are we inventing it when a mathematician publishes a paper about some new formula?

Maybe you should just watch the damn video. Subscribe to the channel, ‘cuz they are awesome and enriching.

Does Art Exist?

OK, so here’s where I come in. For artists of any discipline, are you inventing/creating your art, or discovering it? At first you may want to say, “Of course we create art! I’m an original!”

Well, for starters, Michaelangelo famously said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to uncover it.”

I’m certainly not certain of this type of belief, mind you. Michaelangelo was speaking based on a belief in the divine that influenced all his interpretations of the world. Since I don’t have a deified version of the world, the idea that all creation must naturally come from The Creator doesn’t hold mustard.

It does wrap things up nicely, though, to think that all art is a type of Frankenstein’s monster collage of influences and mimicry, rather than the man dreamt into existence by another man from Borges’ “The Circular Ruins.”

He doesn't know it yet, but he can walk through fire.

Poets in workshops often speak of the work in terms of there being an objective or absolute poem within them; the true skill of poetry is then communicating it to the tangible world properly.

“I wanted to go in one direction, but the poem took me in another.”

Sometimes the poem is even portrayed as an antagonistic force.

Apart from the artistic creative process, think about a really complex poetic form like a sestina. Fulfilling all the demands of this form, which you can find detailed here, causes a final product that seems unalterable, a house of cards. One of the most famous contemporary examples of this is Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina.”

Just to give you a further idea of this, here’s a graphical representation of the algorithm of how the end words of each line in a sestina fit together.

Music has all sorts of mathematical attributes, and while I am hardly capable of speaking to all of them, let’s take one example. The chromatic scale divides an instrument like a piano into a perfect set of equally-spaced notes. You can even express it visually like this:

Now, this is not true on every instrument, but that is due, in my understanding, to the specific range of octaves any given instrument is capable of playing, not because the chromatic scale is imperfect. (Let me know if I’m wrong about this, please.)

Is math discovering this scale that exists whether or not math knows about it, or are we creating the numbers and measurements to match reality?

Prepare to Embiggen

This kind of argument seems to be veering into a grander discussion: Artistic creation/expression requires humanity, discovery does not.

It’s not too far off from whether we are victims of fate or not. Do we make decisions or are we simply a random occurrence caused by other random occurrences (the kind of fate possible in the absence of a greater power)?

OK, using “random” kind of makes you think that it couldn't possibly be fate if it’s unpredictable.

There’s that bit in Futurama where they’re at the horse track and they have a quantum finish instead of a photo finish. Since the professor loses based on the final result, the joke is his protest that, “You changed the results by observing them!” It’s a comment on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

This is also what Schrodinger’s Cat speaks to: Before we observe the cat, is it both alive AND dead? No, the example is simply a joke on the idea of probabilities. The cat is EITHER alive or dead, but we can’t say for sure unless we observe it, thereby forcing only one result into existence.



How does this involve fate? OK, let’s get real small and talk about some quantum electrodynamics: A photon will always go through either this hole or that hole, but we only know exactly where it’s gone when we look. However, it won’t always do the same thing. One time you check and it’s gone through Hole A and maybe the next 20 times it’s gone through Hole B. You can’t reliably predict the movement, only the probability of that movement.

You have to calculate probabilities. In this way, there are always predictable probabilities, which is where fate comes in. We aren’t trapped in a box made by God, more like we have an invisible electric fence. We can do anything in the front yard of probabilities, but we never stray into the street. Isn’t that a type of fate? I feel like any kind of restraint on my future is a type of fate.

Whether or not we are able to calculate events to this degree is perhaps only a matter of time and the progression of math “uncovering” the perfect way. I don’t know, maybe the future will create a nice Hegel-style “synthesis” of the two opposing viewpoints.



Back to basics for me, am I discovering a poem when I write one? Am I inventing it? Of course, everything I’ve ever read, heard, experienced and so on influences what I write and how I write it. Even the language I write in creates certain probabilities (pentameter lends itself particularly well to the English language, sexameter to French).

Am I just stretching probabilities out so much that they contain everything? Is that just the delusion I need to carry on?

The Princess Who Saved Herself, Iron Man 3, and My Struggle Not to Be an Asshole (as often)

Confession: I have a default feminist-enraging mental point of view. I think most people do. I mean that in many ways, the reason why feminists can come across as so annoying (more than vegans sometimes!) is because, at least for me, I know they are totally right, but it seems like being told to change behavior without a compromise. It's a one-sided switch, isn't it?

I mean, if I have to suddenly stop and think about all the bullshit sexism in video games (don't even get me STARTED on anime), I generally let slide, I should at least get a cookie, right? No? Well, it's tough to admit you're wrong, it's harder to admit you are not only culpable, but part of the problem. Especially when your remarks are paved with good intentions.

Anime ain't the only one.

The backlash, for example, to the Damsel in Distress video posted by FeministFrequency, is certainly in part to a lot of people being told something they don't want to hear. Not to say that the video isn't open for debate, and there are plenty of thoughtful responses and critiques out there.

There are, however, plenty of people on Xbox Live and in the comments ready to call her a *cockstomping, dyke chick whom doesn't even play games (the last bit is actually the worst criticism for any woman in the video game industry, or the worst thing a gamer can think to say about a woman talking about games. It basically means that nothing she can say will be taken seriously, discrediting her opinion entirely.) If you have a bit of time, I think this is a very important video.

With that in mind, it's a gradual process. Changing one's behavior is especially difficult when you had thought you were socially and morally acceptable to begin with. Id est, it's not like I was taking drugs that made me imagine rescuing a helpless damsel and fucking her only whilst I'm on top or from behind, none of this "side-to-side as equals" Lilith-loving mess. That being said, any position is a good position if both parties enjoy it, **right? Being empowered means being able to choose.

Also, especially with gamers, anime enthusiasts, and comic book fans (groups that often overlap), the group, especially those around my age, grew up being geeks, misunderstood and often barred from the most popular circles growing up. We GOT it more than those jerks what called us fags for fucking LOVING some Spider-Man.

He can maintain his shit talking while he takes out ALL the X-Men.  

To be told you were part of an oppressive majority all along is a bit trying on the ol' self-image. I wonder if it's harder to admit being wrong about something when you yourself feel unjustly wronged already. Is that a crazy opinion? Anyway, it speaks to me, but doesn't entirely apply across the board.

But I digress. The point is, it's difficult to stop habits, especially when they are ones with which you may have been nurtured. And especially, when you are suddenly ostracized (it can feel like) for something you might not have even known was insensitive. We are used to a little give-and-take, a bit of negotiation, rather than being ignorant.

I'd say, the problem may be more that folks like me are trying to solve individual instances rather than reworking their perspective/mental default reference point. Enabling yourself to view your actions and those of others in a manner you might not have even thought to try previously. I hope I'm getting better.

For example, I'm mad that the only way women in Iron Man 3 (SPOILERS) are useful is through deceit or superpowers. Because, unlike the theme of the movie (and Tony Stark/Jon Favreau's character), women aren't capable of heroism alone, they aren't "more than a suit of armor."

The one lady that tries her hand at usefulness and redemption without superpowers is immediately shot. Then Tony escapes on his own. Another woman is helpful, but only because she was fooled for years and accidentally helps Tony uncover the cover-up. In this movie, Pepper Potts is easily fooled, often manipulated by men, and only capable of defending herself and others when she has the Iron Man armor or accidental superpowers (that Tony immediately devotes his energy to "curing.") END SPOILERS

Admittedly, I still really enjoyed the movie. I was happy to see most of Tony's entrepreneurial, Libertarian bullshit toned down. It's kind of mindless fun. But that's the problem: when you see a movie like this, you turn your brain off to the reinforcing of socially oppressing viewpoints. They slip in so that when you don't actively think about what you are doing "means," it can be easy to carry on an antiquated tradition.

In many ways worse than movies, the amount of sexist mess still thrown around the gaming world is appalling, perhaps because the criticism of it is often not out there, or the innately racist double-standard of "well it's from Japan, what can you expect" argument is given. (Pardon my run-on)

It (Gradually) Gets Better

But there are strides being made. Perhaps as a response to FeministFrequency, though not really since it actually came out first, a song is out there entitled  "The Princess Who Saved Herself." While this isn't a video game, since making the fantastic closing song for Portal, anything Jonathon Coulton does is related in my mind. You may not appreciate that link until you actually play Portal, in which case, play Portal! Anyway, I'm ready for this video to be a game. They should use the illustrations from the first graders as the direction for the art design.

 

Anyway, it's not like I'm perfect, I've achieved balance, or you should buy my self-help cassette tape series, I'm just saying. Oh, and there are other promising stories out there. Like the guy who re-coded Donkey Kong to make his daughter the hero not the damsel.

And with that this post is over, but not finished. (Literally AND figuratively!)

*Does empowerment also mean reclaiming the hateful language of the past? I'm just saying that our sensitivity may be coming at the cost of a rich lexicon of blue language that will take a long time to rebuild. Seriously, there was a study of all the insults old people in the country can remember, and they are some of the most xenophobic, racist, original terms you've ever heard. But that's another post.

**I'm using a lot of tag questions to show that my current opinions are still evolving. Stagnation and complacence are as dangerous as nostalgia.

April 30 - The Perfect Poetic Experience

What is the ideal experience for a reader of poetry?

I pose this question to myself a fair bit. It seems to me that I would most often prefer to be sitting under a mulberry tree on a calm spring day in the English countryside. Of course, that's hardly something that you an do very often (I don't even know what a mulberry tree looks like, I just know that it's under one that Keats wrote Ode to a Nightingale, which everyone should read).

There isn't any kind of ideal setting really. Who's to say I wouldn't be more enriched by a poem if I read it instead on a bus, in a bar, or waiting in line at Ralph's? For the record, I most often read on public transit. All the distractions have a way of helping me focus (bars are good too, because booze).

So, if I can't dictate the experience of a poem, I can at least exert control over its delivery. All I've done this month has been in text, but there's really no reason why I can't include audio or video. Plenty of it exists. In fact, today is the finals for the National Recitation Contest of Poetry Out Loud.

Poetry Out Loud is designed to help further students' poetry comprehension through memorization and performance (something a lot of poets need to do more of, including me). Can you imagine if this had been a club at your high school? Well, it sounds badass to me.

Of course, the live performance of poetry has its own drawbacks. If the language is difficult, a speedy delivery doesn't allow you to re-read a line for better understanding. Conversely, if you have a program and are reading along, you aren't watching the visual aspect of the performance.

There are a lot of audio recordings of poetry. Some are pretty amazing. Alec Guinness, for example, has an album on Spotify in which he is reading different poems.

You can do a voice-over to a video with some poetry. That's got the potential for some really great moments far beyond your standard, "Look at a painting while I read Wordsworth" bits.

(Actually, that video is pretty good. If the Romantics seem cheesy now, it's only because of how much their style has influenced and been aped, kind of like some Mel Brooks and Francois Truffaut films.)

I suppose the difference is primarily context. When a person is listening, their eyes can wander, they can wander. If you're watching a video, reading, or viewing a performance, you pretty much have to stay put. Your framing of the poem is controlled to an extent. Of course, particularly with text, you can choose where to read it. Video as well if you're using a smartphone or laptop.

So to return to the initial question, what would be the ideal experience? I suppose a lot of writers would say it is up to the reader. The audience has final say and that is what makes each experience unique. Is there a wrong way to experience a poem? What if I were reading Holocaust poetry in my undies while eating a tub of ice cream and listening to a Cubs game?

I've never been very comfortable with the idea that the poet has to just write stuff down and fling it out in the world. This leads me to wonder how I might control the audience experience.

Which brings this post to a close. If you're wondering about what my answer to this question really is, I'll let you know once my next project is finished. In the meantime, I'm going to try and continue doing a couple posts each week on poetry and such. Hopefully, this is only the beginning.

"Caminante, no hay camino
Se hace camino al andar.

-Antonio Machado

April 26 - Song Lyrics Suck

Why Song Lyrics Suck

But not really, I'm just sick of reading memes saying that people write/wrote better lyrics now than before, or comparing one artist to another. This isn't because it's an apples to oranges comparison, but also because they way a single image is forced to convey this is by simply writing out two sets of lyrics from two different songs; e.g.,

Whatever your thoughts are on these two songs, it is unfair to present them as such. They are taken out of their musical context. In a lot of cases, I feel people are impressed by song lyrics that can stand alone. Also, I'm currently listening to Run the World, and the image itself is only listing the chorus. There are many more words in that song. Also, it's incredibly well produced, which, in terms of pop music (yeah, it's a generalization), seems to me where the real skill/artistry lies.

The Real Point

If I were in a poetry workshop and someone slid a sheet of paper with the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody to me (assuming the song did not previously exist in this sad, sad hypothetical reality), I'd read through it and think it was somewhat interesting. Then I'd likely complain about the line breaks being too predictable and I'd hate how confessional it is. Unless you're Robert Lowell, that shit's for a diary, yo.

I think a good musical example would be "Around the World" by Daft Punk. I like that song, but actually reading the lyrics by themselves would be sort of missing the point, certainly the experience, of that song.

Also, on the page, song lyrics don't always have an obvious, or even intrinsic, rhythm, making for an odd read.

Anyway, it's like Roger Ebert said, "A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it."

That applies to pretty much all art, with some exceptions. I think that's why I feel a small affront when people want to present lyrics as poetry; it's like wanting me to taste apple pie without the crust. It's kind of a mess.

But I still NEED it.

The same can apply to poetry set to music. Whoa. Full Disclosure: When searching on Spotify for poetry set to music. The album Poe Goes Jazz would be a good example...if it weren't from Deutschland. Hearing Poe in German with smooth jazz interludes makes for a weird morning. However, it works as an example: in this format, the music is secondary, more ambient, creating a frame for the words, rather than at an equal footing with creepy-ass Germoe Poe.

Oh die Glocken, Glocken, Glocken!

Generalizations, Generalizations Everywhere!

In music, the melody often trumps what's actually being said. (OMG, what an offensive thing to say!) Anyway, as far as I know, most music starts with the rhythm, hook, riff, etc., and goes from there. In many cases, the entire composition is completed, with vocals, before any words are written down. There are plenty of demo tracks out there with vocals recorded as simply gibberish set to the melody. (One sec, I can't take the German anymore.)

...I'm also a Client

OK, back to George Jones. Now then, I wonder if my performance project last year fell victim to this. I wanted to combine media in a way in which no one piece would work alone. It was a good first try, and I'm not being a perfectionist about it (Eric Byers=badass). It did not achieve what I wanted as fully as I had hoped, though. Here is where I would add a link to a recording of the performance. Sadly, and somewhat awesomely, no such recording exists. It exists only in the brains of those in attendance.

What a Crappy Ending

If you are still reading, here is where I admit that I have no conclusion, just observation. Also, this bit of thinking in writing is a substitute for an actual poem today. I guess if I want to draw a one-liner from all this, it'd be that it's really hard to create something that functions optimally across art forms. And everything kind of irritates me.

April 25 - Against Whatever It Is That's Encroaching

This image is here for one reason: it was one of the top results for "sitting at home."

Not much time today, I have to go to Venice. Here's a poem by Charles Simic. The link on his name is to a very good bio of him, so I'll just say that he's won the Pulitzer and was poet laureate in 2007. He is currently a co-editor for The Paris Review. This poem is from The Voice at 3:00 AM, a finalist for the National Book Award. If you're not busy tonight, it may give you a nice way to spend your evening as well.



Against Whatever It Is That's Encroaching

Best of all is to be idle,
And especially on a Thursday,
And to sip wine while studying the light:
The way it ages, yellows, turns ashen
And then hesitates forever
On the threshold of the night
That could be bringing the first frost.

It's good to have a woman around just then,
And two is even better.
Let them whisper to each other
And I you with a smirk.
Let them roll up their sleeves and unbutton their shirts a bit
As this fine old twilight deserves,

And the small schoolboy
Who has come home to a room almost dark
And now watches wide-eyed
The grown-ups raise their glasses to him,
The giddy-headed, red-haired woman
With eyes tightly shut,
As if she were about to cry or sing.

April 24 - Like Our Bodies' Imprint

Like Our Bodies' Imprints

by Yehuda Amichai

Like our bodies' imprint,
Not a sign will remain that we were in this place.
The world closes behind us,
The sand straightens itself.

Dates are already in view
In which you no longer exist,
Already a wind blows clouds
Which will not rain on us both.

And your name is already on the passenger list of ships
And in the registers of hotels
Whose names alone
Deaden the heart.

The three languages I know,
All the colors in which I see and dream:

None will help me.

(Translated by Assia Gutmann)



Yeah, so I missed a day yesterday. Sometimes a breakfast and movie with a friend is more important than just about everything.

So I open up Chrome this morning to find a reason to write about a particular poem. My home page is BBC News, so first I see an article about the university police officer shot and killed during the pursuit of the Boston Bombers (which just makes me glad they didn't bomb a marathon in the Bronx, or we'd all just be confused). They are having a memorial service for him today.

Below that was an article about an 8th century minaret (a kind of bell tower for mosques) that was destroyed during the fighting in Aleppo between the Syrian government and the rebels. Of course, both sides blame the other for its destruction. In any case, the mosque was a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Well, what's left of it still is, I suppose. Really, the only reason this stood out to me was the mention of Aleppo, a city that comes up in "My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears." It must be sad news for that family.

Sheesh, the Google Image results for Aleppo are a total downer. This is just from Wikipedia.

Hopefully, no one of Syrian descent will object to my immediately thinking of an Israeli poet. Actually, according to his Carolyn Forche's bio of him, "Israel's foremost living poet." Unfortunately, he died in 2000, so now he seems to be considered the greatest modern Israeli poet, though, it is said, much is lost when it is translated from its original Hebrew.

In any case, Yehuda Amichai is a major figure of international poetry in the 20th century. But that's not really why I bring him into this post. I think as Americans, we have not experienced the destruction of historic objects like older civilizations (certainly not the nuclear family Americans I so callously envisage). That being said, we sure love to play with the idea. How many times have you seen a destroyed Statue of Liberty in a movie? Also, have you seen any film by Roland Emmerich? That's his whole career.

Top two results before we see a flag or fireworks.

We love the idea of vengeance and resurrection. It's a great marriage of Old and New Testaments.

The Romantics dwelt on the idea a bit, what with Shelley's "Ozymandias" and Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Hell, lots of poets these days love talking about the Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy), it's terrifying to think that all will be lost at some point, but comforting to think that includes all the mistakes, faults, and atrocities we commit and remember today.

April 22 - Their Faces Shall Be as Flames

OK, I'm back from Coachella. As many may suspect, I am not much for large festivals. Crowds make me a bit nuts. That being said, I had a great time, although the fact that the two bands I enjoyed most, Blur and The Descendants, are from another era made me feel a bit old.

But enough about that, today's Earth Day. I think that's more important. Of course, how do I start it? By forgetting to turn off the AC last night. Anyway, Earth Day often seems marketed as a kind of celebration of the idea that we all live on the same planet and lots of fun activities to help us better protect it. I was lying in bed thinking about what Earth Day reminds me of, and I came up with three things: Roald Dahl flying over Africa, the population of frogs in America and hive collapse.

Roald Dahl has an autobiography about his life before during and after World War II entitled Going Solo. In one passage he is training in his plane over the Serengeti and he writes about the vast herds of animals he sees. It is easy to forget the sheer quantity of wildlife that used to exist, the casual vastness of unique biomass.

Like this, but not at all like this.

Which reminds me of catching frogs in a bowl when I was a kid. My friend, Spry, and I could run through his backyard and catch a dozen frogs in minutes. Even thinking about this now feels like an exaggeration. Bullfrogs seem like an endangered species.

Which leads into the more recent population cliff of colony collapse disorder, in which we can't even keep them alive when we want to.

Here is a poem by G.C. Waldrep, originally published in The New England Review and Harper's Magazine, though I found it in Best American Poetry 2010. Waldrep is in his forties and has been the editor of the Kenyon Review and professor at Kenyon College. He currently works at Bucknell and edits the journal West Branch. He also is an historian, completing his undergrad at Harvard and doctorate at Duke. I first saw this poem in Best American Poetry 2010.

To say this is an "environmental" poem is not entirely accurate, nor is it entirely inaccurate.


Their Faces Shall Be as Flames

That was the spring the bees disappeared, we didn't know
where they went, where they'd gone, where they were going, it was a
rapture of the bees, only the weak, the young, the freshly dead
left behind, a rapture of bees, my neighbor with the ducks had begun to walk
like a duck, Follow follow follow Sam he sang as he walked, and they followed,
it was that simple, of course I thought of the Piper, although
this procession was more benign, my neighbor's I mean, though he intended
to have each for dinner, eventually, and he did not name them,
as we don't name bees, because we don't see clearly enough
to distinguish them as persons, person in the grammatical sense, first second
or third, which is why we refer to them in the collective, usually,
they breed, they swarm, they milk their honey for us
in the collective, and they vanish collectively, is this then the true
rapture, was the one true God after all a god of bees, and now she is taking
them home, is this any more comforting than all the other proposed explanations,
pesticide, fungus, mites, electromagnetism, even the infrasound the giant
the giant windmills make, that send the bats and raptors
to their deaths, all invention gone awry, hive after hive
suddenly empty, as if they'd all flown out less than purposefully, casually,
and somehow forgotten to come back, held up at the doctor's or the U-Haul
dealer's, swarms of them, hundreds, thousands vagabond
in some other landscape, or rising, we shall meet them in the air,
at the post office to mail a letter to a woman who might or might not be my love
because a rate change had caught me with insufficient postage
I had to wait, the clerk was preoccupied with a sort of crate
made of wire mesh, through which I could see bees, Resistant the clerk said
as she filled out the forms and sent them, registered parcel post, somewhere
else, only then did she sell me the stamp I needed,
or thought I needed, or hoped to need (there is a season
when one hopes to need), and I thought about what it would be like
to mail a crate of bees, Resistant, to my love, if I had a love, and have them
vanish en route, the mesh crate arriving dusty, empty, one or two
broken, desiccated bodies rattling lightly around inside, like seeds in a gourd,
or like a child you'll never have, that is, the possibility of that child, rattling
blood of it, a different sort of vanishing, we would all like to believe
in the act, that Houdini was a man, only a man, as he proved in the moment
and by the precise circumstance of his death, and the fact of his body,
lifeless but extant, rattling around the arcade, the park, the amusement pier
of disturbing coincidences, while in Missouri another hobbyist beekeeper
walks out to her tomblike hives on a spring morning
to find nothing there, just boxes, empty boxes, a sort of game
a child might invent, this rapture, same sort of funny story
a child will invent, when shown a photograph, This is the policeman, 
and this is the woman with two heads, and this, which looks like a modest
red house in a suburb, this is really the ghost of the bees,
a small ghost, a modest ghost, like the ghost of the locusts and the elms,
not a ghost to trouble us, until (in the photograph) the house spreads its wings
and vanishes, as houses do, or as houses will when the rapture extends
to architecture, the god of small houses having, first, existed, and then wed
the bee god, so that we are left sleeping alone again, and out of doors, in spring,
as one more source of sweetness is subtracted from this world
and added to another, perhaps, as we would like to think, one of the
more comforting ideas, a sort of economics, a grand
accounting, until what angel of houses or of bees blows what trumpet,
and we fall as mountains upon the insects, devour them as seas,
scorch the houses as with fire, we become the ground that hollows beneath
them and the air they fly through, their wormwood star, as all the bees of heaven
watch from heaven and all the houses of heaven lean down
for a closer look, and the smoke drifts upward, and we are the smoke, we are
only the smoke, inside of which my neighbor walks, with his ducks, and sings,
and they follow, and my hive lazes, drowses as if they or it were dreaming
us, as if they or us were touchable, simple as a story, an explanation,
any fiction, as if they thought of us, or were praying, or were dancing,
or were lonely, as if they could be, or would be, touched.

April 19 - From Song of Myself

So in looking at the news and various anniversaries coming up, I noticed that late April is kind of a hot spot for tragedies, disasters, mass murders and so on. I'm not going to write about that. I'm going to start with Mae West and end up with a 19th century firefighter.

On April 19th, 1927, Mae West (she of King Kong and Coke bottle fame) was sentenced to 10 days in jail for writing and starring in the play Sex. This was odd since the play had premiered the previous year and had already been staged 375 times. It was deemed "obscene."

This made me think of another book considered far too sexy for the common man to handle, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, one of the greatest works in the English language.

There was a lot of controversy following the first print of the book, which contained only 12 of what would eventually become over 400 poems. (Whitman revised and added new material to the book from its first printing in 1855 until shortly before his death in 1892.)

Now, of course, with a work as famous as Leaves of Grass, there is a vast amount of available info that I will not include here. I will say that even from the beginning, many critics found the work far too sexual/erotic in nature. First, Whitman's boss at the Department of the Interior read the book and immediately fired him.

Next, critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold called the book a "stupid mass of filth." He even made one of the first suggestions that Whitman may engage in, and he wrote this in Latin in his review, "that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians."

In one of the best reactions to a bad review and attempted public shaming, Whitman included the review in its entirety in later editions of the the book. Of course, other critics compared the work to Shakespeare and Dante Alighieri, and rightfully so.

In the first edition, no author was credited. There was only this steel engraving of Whitman (he was 37 at the time). Why? Because fuckin' Walt Whitman, that's why!

Oh, and for the record, Whitman basically created American poetry as a style truly apart from British lit. Without this gay or bisexual American (unconfirmed which, but does it matter?), we would have lost an incalculable amount of...well, everything.

From the 1883 edition. He is never not awesome. The writing says,
Lo, where arise three peerless stars,
To be thy natal stars, my country,
Ensemble, Evolution, Freedom,
Set in the sky of Law.

There's soooo much more to say, but I gotta get to rockin'. So since I'm about to hit the road, here's one of my favorite Whitman poems. Oh, and Leaves of Grass can be downloaded for free on your smartphone. Also, since this is the Internet, and Whitman's poems can be quite long, this is only an excerpt.

From Song of Myself

From section entitled "Heroes"

I understand the large hearts of heroes,
The courage of present times and all times,
How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steamship, and Death 
chasing it up and down the storm,
How he knuckled tight and gave not back an inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of
nights,
And chalked in large letters on a board, Be of good cheer, we will not desert you;
How he followed with them and tacked with them three days and would not give it up,
How he saved the drifting company at last,
How the lank loose-gowned women looked when boated from the side of their prepared
graves,
How the silent old-faced infants, and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipped unshaved men;
All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine,
I am the man, I suffered, I was there.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,
My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.

I am the mashed fireman with breast-bone broken,
Tumbling walls buried me in their debris,
Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,
I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels;
They have cleared the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.

I lie in the night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my sake,
Painless after all I lie exhausted but not so unhappy,
White and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared of their firecaps,
the kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches...

April 18 - Of Love and Other Disasters

Nemo's

So today is Champions Day in Detroit. I only found this out today, but in 1936 the Detroit Lions were NFL champions, the Detroit Tigers were MLB champions and the Detroit Red Wings were NHL champions. They created this holiday to commemorate the success. Since then, no city has ever held three championships simultaneously from the four current major American sports.

Sorry 'Sheed. Wrong year, but happy trails nonetheless.

This is also how Detroit earned the nickname, "City of Champions." Of course, since 1936 the fate of Detroit has been pretty well documented. However, just because the economy went south on the city, there are plenty of reasons why Detroit still deserves the nickname.

Let's talk about Detroit native and Wayne State alum Phillip Levine. As one of America's greatest living poets, his list of accolades deserves to be right up there with the Wings'. He's won the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, multiple Guggenheim fellowships, and was the 2011-2012 U.S. Poet Laureate. None too shabby.

So, in honor of Detroit's day and one of her favorite sons, here's a poem from Levine's most recent book of poems, 2009's News of the World

Of Love and Other Disasters

The punch press operator from up north
met the assembler from West Virginia
in a bar near the stadium. Friday, late,
but too early to go home alone. Neither
had anything in mind, so they conversed
about the upcoming baseball season
about which neither cared. We could
be a couple, he thought, but she was
all wrong, way too skinny. For years
he'd had an image of the way a woman
should look, and it wasn't her, it wasn't
anyone he'd ever known, certainly not
his ex-wife who'd moved back north
to live with her high school sweetheart.
About killed him. I don't need that shit,
he almost said aloud, and then realized
she'd been talking to someone, maybe
to him, about how she couldn't get
her hands right, how the grease ate
so deeply into her skin it became
a part of her, and she put her hand,
palm up, on the bar and pointed
with her cigarette at the deep lines
the work had carved. "The lifeline,"
he said, "which one is that?" "None,"
she said, and he noticed that her eyes
were hazel flecked with tiny spots
of gold, and then—embarrassed—looked
back at her hand which seemed tiny
and delicate, the fingers yellowed
with calluses but slender and fine.
She took a paper napkin off the bar,
spit on it, and told him to hold still
while she carefully lifted his glasses,
leaving him half blind, and wiped
something off just above his left
cheekbone. "There," she said, handing
him back his glasses, "I got it," and even
with his glasses on, what she showed
him was nothing he could see, maybe
only make-believe. He thought, "Better
get out of here before it's too late," but
suspected too late was what he wanted.

April 17 - My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears

Hi again! So it seems important to retain levity without sacrificing a recognition of significance. I say recognition because, political or otherwise, isn't poetry about recognizing the significant? 

Obviously, there are plenty of books discussing what poetry is or isn't, itself kind of a silly question, but I simply mean that humor in poetry allows for a connection to real life that we can all understand. It's hard for me to stay focused on serious issues sometimes due to a constant stream of poop jokes, song lyrics and cheat codes. (Why start with Glass Joe anyway? It's not until you get to the second Bald Bull that you have to start paying attention.)

Fuck you, Mario! It was a fast count! I can see  the coins falling out of your pocket!

The poem today is by Mohja Kahf, a Syrian-American poet. She writes a lot about feminism in the Middle East as well as the various intersections and detours one must navigate in modern American culture as a woman, Muslim, Syrian and American. This is from her first book, Emails from Scheherazad, published in 2003. She currently teaches at the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Arkansas.

My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears

My grandmother puts her feet in the sink of the bathroom at Sears

to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer,

wudu,

because she has to pray in the store or miss

the mandatory prayer time for Muslims

She does it with great poise, balancing

herself with one plump matronly arm

against the automated hot-air hand dryer,

after having removed her support knee-highs

and laid them aside, folded in thirds,

and given me her purse and her packages to hold

so she can accomplish this august ritual

and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares

Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown

as they notice what my grandmother is doing,

an affront to American porcelain,

a contamination of American Standards

by something foreign and unhygienic

requiring civic action and possible use of disinfectant spray

They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see

a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom

My grandmother, though she speaks no English,

catches their meaning and her look in the mirror says,

I have washed my feet over Iznik tile in Istanbul

with water from the world's ancient irrigation systems

I have washed my feet in the bathhouses of Damascus

over painted bowls imported from China

among the best families of Aleppo

And if you Americans knew anything

about civilization and cleanliness,

you'd make wider washbins, anyway

My grandmother knows one culture—the right one,

as do these matrons from the Middle West. For them,

my grandmother might as well have been squatting

in the mud over a rusty tin in vaguely tropical squalor,

Mexican or Middle Eastern, it doesn't matter which,

when she lifts her well-groomed foot and puts it over the edge.

"You can't do that," one of the women protests,

turning to me, "Tell her she can't do that."

"We wash our feet five times a day,"

my grandmother declares hotly in Arabic.

"My feet are cleaner than their sink.

Worried about their sink, are they? I

should worry about my feet!"

My grandmother nudges me, "Go on, tell them."

Standing between the door and the mirror, I can see

at multiple angles, my grandmother and the other shoppers,

all of them decent and goodhearted women, diligent

in cleanliness, grooming, and decorum

Even now my grandmother, not to be rushed,

is delicately drying her pumps with tissues from her purse

For my grandmother always wears well-turned pumps

that match her purse, I think in case someone

from one of the best families of Aleppo

should run into her—here, in front of the Kenmore display

I smile at the midwestern women

as if my grandmother has just said something lovely about them

and shrug at my grandmother as if they

had just apologized through me

No one is fooled, but I

hold the door open for everyone

and we all emerge on the sales floor

and lose ourselves in the great common ground

of housewares on markdown.

April 16 - I'm Explaining a Few Things

After the bombing yesterday, I spent a lot of time last night reading poetry and drinking gimlets. I thought I might put in some Bertolt Brecht, Nazim Hikmet, Osip Mandelstam, Denise Levertov or Wislawa Szymborska, but I decided on Pablo Neruda. If you know the people I've mentioned, you can probably imagine that sitting at a bar and staring at my phone got real damn intense. (Btw, my phone is the internet, the internet is a book, but a drink is still a drink. Good.)

Reading poetry about different wars in different countries, different tragedies and different people, the common humanity of the participants comes through. It is both relieving and frightening.

I know you need to get back to work, and this poem is a little bit longer than usual, so let me give you a link to a more in-depth examination of the poem you can read if you desire. Here is something to note: Sometimes an image or experience is elucidated by metaphor, sometimes we need to have our faces firmly shoved into the reality poetry provides.

I'm Explaining a Few Things

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I'll tell you all the news.

I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.

From there you could look out
over Castille's dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raul?
Eh, Rafel? Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!
Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
stacked-up fish,
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea.

And morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings—
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of the children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!