Happy birthday to me!!! It's only 12:30 and have had such a grand, grand day. Now, of to the Harry Ransom Center to see the Jack Kerouac scroll, then a Texas BBQ lunch and we can only guess what will happen after that.
In honor of ME, here is a birthday poem by e. e. cummings from cummings 95 poems published by HBJ.
your birthday comes to tell me this
-each luckiest of lucky days
i've loved,shall love,do love you,was
and will be and my birthday is
So busy doing all the little things that I ordinarily would put off until another day - cleaning and errands. We are having company coming to visit us from Pittsburgh. We told him to bring shorts! It will be much warmer here than at home.
I don't want to neglect my poems though as it is the last week of National Poetry Month. I received a new book in the mail so I will chooose from it. North Of The Cities by Louis Jenkins. The poem is called Nonfiction and I had to post it partly because I heard that Pres. Bush was on Deal or No Deal. Is that even true? It couldn't be weirder. So I will post that and then package up the 11 books that I sold recently and get them out. Bookselling has been very, very good to me. Forgive me Mr. Sosa.
NONFICTION
I don't like it when someone else's fantasy world
interferes with my own. That's why I don't read
novels much anymore or watch television. I don't go
for nonfiction either. Fiction and nonfiction aren't
opposites. It isn't truth vs. lies. Nonfiction is simply
not fiction - it's something else, I don't know what.
Take the president, for example, from what I've read
in the newspapers, (which, as I am led to believe, are
nonfiction,) can't be real. He has to be made up by some
really bad writer. Unless I imagined all that stuff.
by Louis Jenkins
My parents aging may be their saving grace. While my dad's mind may take a leave of absence from time to time, my mother has always been "with it". She watches the news and sports and has a good memory and does alright for herself for the most part. She lives alone. She's creeping up on 80.
I phoned her tonight and the woman made me laugh until I cried. We were talking about current events and she tells me that the Pope is in the US. In fact, today is his birthday. After a brief rundown of his itinerary she follows up with this little known fact, 'That Pope's an actor". I quickly try to process this. I think to myself, she means figuratively right? But I ask, "What do you mean?" She just sticks to her guns and says again that he's an actor. With a little hesitation I ask, "Are you going to tell me a joke?" because she likes to tell jokes, and here, in this moment, she is playing the straight man oh so well but she says, "No. No joke. He's an actor."
I can tell that she's being sincere so I desperately try to make sense of this simple statement. My mind is reaching for any tangential piece of information that could make this so. Let's see...German. Academic. Prolific author. Cardinal. Supreme Pontiff. No. Unable to process.
I cannot for the life of me hide my disbelief. I repeat, "Ratzinger? The Pope now? He's an actor?"
"Yeah. This one. Benedict"
"This Pope?" I want to make absolutely sure that I am hearing her right. But she is taken aback by what is clearly a huge busload of doubt careening at, dare I say, a very high rate of speed right toward her. So, being cautious, she steps aside. She pauses.
"Oh, no. No. Not this one, the last one. John."
Now I have to laugh outloud. I can't NOT laugh about this.
"JOHN???" Huge and multiple question mark sprout from the top of my head. I am now wearing a tiara of disbelief "The Polish Pope? The one who died?" I notice the volume in my voice has increased.
"Yeah," she says "He was an actor."
I try my best to rein it in a little, "Are you thinking of Ronald Reagan?" I know, I know. I can't believe we've pulled Ronnie from his grave to join this crazy little tea party but hey, the more the merrier.
"No, the John. The last Pope."
"You're telling me that Pope John was an actor? Like on TV or the movies or what?"
The word Broadway comes out of her mouth. It's such a hilarious and outrageous claim but she's so earnest and even sounds a little proud of herself for sharing this little known fact about Pope John Paul's thespian past. I say to her, between the laughing and crying, "Okay. You're telling me," and here I punctuate each facet of fact with a pause, "You're telling me. That the dead Polish Pope. Pope John. The one who died. Was an actor on Broadway?"
Here she does an interesting thing, she attempts The Complete Reversal. She says to me, like I'm completely out of my mind, "Not on Broadway. I didn't say on Broadway, I said 'like' Broadway."
Oh. Okay. Yeah because now it all makes so much sense. Then she adds, "Look it up on your internet. If you don't believe me, look it up."
I keep thinking that I need to call my Dad, just to say hi. I used to never call him. For years I went without picking up the phone. It wasn't fair because I moved so often and he is easily confused, so he couldn't easily call me. Also, he is more tolerable, more loving, and more lovable since he's aged and lost his edge, lost his memory and lost his mind.
He tells me stories of Santa Fe in the 30's and 40's. He tells stories with every miniscule detail, like my Grandmother making pies and the board she would put them on to carry them to the open window to cool. He remembers every nuance of the wooden board. He remembers the name of his grade school and the street it was on and the route he walked to get there. He says my grandfather would drive him to the track when he was a teen so he could run. He talks about himself now in a way he never had before. It's like he is talking about someone he is very fond of, he is gentle on himself. It is very different from the terse, short-tempered, angry man that I grew up to know. I much prefer the man I am getting to know now. For once, I really like this person who is my father.
My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand
he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know
even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes
he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father
he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me
oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father's hand the last time
he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me
oh yes I say
but if you are busy he said
I don't want you to feel that you
have to
just because I'm here
I say nothing
he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don't want to keep you
I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know
though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do
I suppose I gravitated towards a poem that seemed like a dream to me because of my own very strange one last night. In it, I was at a party and Mick Jagger was there too. "God, who's gonna believe this?" I'm thinking. My friend and I both wanted to have our pictures taken with him. I took hers first, then my camera started acting up. I knew it wasn't long for this (dream) world. But presto! one or two left. Jagger takes the camera from me and snaps my photo. I'm so disappointed. It's just a picture of me. I remember thinking, "This stinks. Anyone could have a photo of themselves and say Mick Jagger took it."
The emotions in the dream were so big. The excitement of meeting a celebrity, the anxiety that my camera was going to fail and the disappointment. No me and Jagger.
So, here's to dreams. A poem from the current U. S. Poet Laureate, Charles Simic. The following was taken from Jackstraws. Harcourt: 2000.
Ship of Fools
I'm the stowaway in the crow's nest.
My old love letters are the sails,
The ones full of sighs and kisses.
At the Captain's Table a moonfaced nun
Is eating a June bug.
In the sky, a flock of white shirts
Are flying to laundry line in Africa.
The Captain sets his beard on fire.
Through the spying glass, I can see the florist on the
back of a shark
Bringing a dozen bouquets of white roses.
I recently read the list of Pulitzer Prize winnners for 2008 and am sorry to say that I haven't read any of the selections, not even of the finalists. The winner for Fiction is "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz. Runner ups were "Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson, and "Shakespeare's Kitchen" by Lore Segal. I feel like I've been living in a cave somewhere because I haven't even heard of these books.
The Pulitzer for Poetry went to Robert Hass for his collection "Time and Materials". The finalists in poetry were Philip Schultz for "Failure", and ''Messenger: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2006" by Ellen Bryant Voigt. It looks like I have some bookshop browsing to do this weekend. I'd like to at least leaf through some of these titles.
Lucky for me I do have an anthology or two. I was fortunate to find a few poems by Robert Hass but as for Schultz and Voigt, I will just have to put them on my list of poets to look for. Enjoy the following by Robert Hass:
Our Lady Of The Snows
In white,
the unpainted statue of the young girl
on the side altar
made the quality of mercy seem scrupulous and calm.
When my mother was in a hospital drying out,
or drinking at a pace that would put her there soon,
I would slip in the side door,
light an aromatic candle,
and bargain for us both.
Or else I'd stare into the day-moon of that face
and, if I concentrated, fly.
Come down! come down!
she'd call, because I was so high.
Though mostly when I think of myself
at that age, I am standing at my older brother's closet
studying the shirts,
convinced that I could be absolutely transformed
by something I could borrow.
And the days churned by,
navigable sorrow.
-Robert Hass
A friend of mine gave me an anthology of poetry entitled A Book Of Luminous Things. The great thing about this particular anthology is that it has poems from all over the world. It's a really good book to leaf through and stop here and there. There are just so many poems and poets that I am not at all familiar with. Plus, the title rocks. Why can't I ever use words like luminous? No, I say things like, "really, really bright" or "all shiny". Like I said though, there are a lot of poets that I am unfamiliar with and then there are the familiars, one of my favorites being Raymond Carver.
I can't get away from Raymond Carver and please pardon me if I have posted too many of his poems or posted some twice. As I said, I can't get away from him. I think what I like about the following poem is what it doesn't say. In sculpture I think this would be the negative space and even it contributes to the whole. To me this poem is meditative and filled with self-reflection. The poet briefly feels as though he's never made "false promises" and never committed, "one indescent act". But the musing passes and the reader might wonder if these are regrets and what the depth of these regrets are. It reminds me of the the philosophy of "Via Negativa" or through negation. One can never know what God is, only what God isn't. God is so unlike man that it is too profound for us to grasp or to know.
The Window by Raymond Carver
A storm blew in last night and knocked out
the electricity. When I looked
through the window, the trees were transluscent.
Bent and covered with rime. A vast calm
lay over the countryside.
I knew better. But at that moment
I felt I'd never in my life made any
false promises, nor committed
so much as one indecent act. My thoughts
were virtuous. Later on that morning,
of course, electricity was restored.
The sun moved from behind the clouds,
melting the hoarfrost.
And things stood as they had before.
The first book of poetry I ever bought myself, I bought when I was in my late teens. It was The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged. Published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1979. I had probably read his poetry in school, maybe I knew that he died the same year that I was born. He seemed to me like a guy who spent a lot of time outdoors looking at the world. This book has traveled with me through the years and once in awhile (mostly in April) I take it from the shelf and browse through it.
A week or two ago I read a short bit about Frost on Writer's Almanac. I never knew that he lost so many people that were so close to him. He seemed to have lived a long, sad and tragic life. His poems seem different to me now, all these years later.
A Minor Bird by Robert Frost
I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;
Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.
The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.
And of course there must be something wrong
In waiting to silence any song.
I had a rare Friday off from work today. I planned on going to the booksale in San Marcos and arranged to have this weekend off. I went a year or two ago and it was a very good sale, I only wished that I had more experience at the time. I can still remember a particular book that I passed up. I hate to think back on it, I cringe.
I followed the directions that I had printed off of Google maps and the closer I got I realized that this wasn't the same, much anticipated, really good sale but the much more dismal sale at the park. It was windy and rainy like it always is in April. I day dreamed of hitting the mother lode all week long and I only came home with a few books. I did get a first edition, first printing of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead though. It looks new, the dust jacket is perfect. I'll wrap it in mylar for a little added protection.
The other book I found (and it may be a keeper), is Billy Collins collection of poetry titled Sailing Alone Around The Room. I've read through the first ten pages and have found a favorite that I'll share this evening.
Advice To Writers by Billy Collins
Even if it keeps you up all night,
wash down the walls and scrub the floor
of your study before composing a syllable.
Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.
Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.
The more you clean, the more brilliant
your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take
to the open fields to scour the undersides
of rocks or swab in the dark forest
upper branches, nests full of eggs.
When you fiind your way back home
and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink,
you will behold in the light of dawn
the immaculate altar of your desk,
a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.
From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift
a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,
and cover pages with tiny sentences
like long rows of devoted ants
that followed you in from the woods.
Those baristas at Starbucks are trying to kill me. Yeah, that's what I think. At the counter I order a triple espresso Campana, that's right, count 'em, 3, three shots of espresso after work, after 6pm. That whip cream topper should mellow it out and I've got so much to do and this will really help. But you know ladies, there are laws against assisted suicide in this country, the good ol' U.S. of A, just ask Jack. To protect the vulnerable, to protect those that don't know what's best for them, to protect the weak.
At least I've got stamina enough to page through book and book of poetry seeking out a poem about coffee or caffeine or how barista is just another word for paid assasin, you know, before my heart stops. Now my heads got a throb and my fingers are twitchy enough to have to use my delete key repeatedly. Again and again, typo after typo. I can't type that fast, I never could. And where is the perfect poem? Where's Thomas Lux when you need him? And what about Louis Jenkins, that guy's funny. Funny as hell. I always liked that Jenkins ever since I first read him, a week ago. Nah, just kidding, it's been months now. I admit, not long.
Maybe ee cummings has something to say or Mr. Collins, his friends call him Billy, Billy Boy, do you caffeinate? Surely Raymond Carver does. I once complained to a librarian about an overdue fee I had to pay at the Raymond Carver Library and she laughed and laughed and laughed. "What's so funny?" "That's the George Washington Carver Library" she answered as her shoulders hiccupped with laughter. Yeah, that's what I get for reading so much I say under my breath. That's what I get.
