The Garden of the Printed Book: Some Ways to Pass the Time in Viral Lock-up By Happily Turning Pages

So how's the hunkering down, walking outdoors, and virtual interaction lifestyle suiting you? Phone time or Facetime? Zoom in, or simply crash and die? 

         Six feet between us still better than six feet under? 

         I would add to the roster of indoor activities most of us are surviving with by going back to an actually ancient, but viable human-centered technology -- the book. Which is accessed by "reading." And requires the application of human physical and mental senses. 

         And so, based on my own recent downtime experience, a short list of recommended reads. 

         But first, my friend Karl recently wrote me about reading Nathaniel Philbrick's book "Mayflower," a history of the Plymouth Colony from its founding through King Philip's War. A good choice to start with. There are lots of reasons why this book, published some years ago, is worth a read, one of them being this year's celebration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Plymouth. Another, as Karl points out, is the book's treatment of King Philip's War, Colonial America's first 'Indian War,' a neglected subject in American history courses, and a permanent stain on the nation's human rights record.

           The history of the relations between the Europeans who arrived here in the 17th century (and then kept on coming) and the indigenous peoples who had been living here for thousands of years will never, I suspect, cease to be relevant. In my opinion, the history of those relations still calls out for something like the full "Truth and Reconciliation" process carried in South Africa. 

          From history let's move to fiction. The best novels often seem to me to be "history as interpreted by human imagination" -- and repurposed for various needs by the fundamental human gift of storytelling. 

           I've recently enjoyed three such novels.

           "The Strangler Vine," by M.J. Carter, is first rate historical fiction set in India during its rule by the East India Company in the early 19th century. I love novels that give me a sense of what it felt like to 'be there' in some other place at some other time. The was clearly a historian, and has published nonfiction books. Since writing "The Strangler Vine" -- a plant found in the Indian forest that suggests a comparison to the East India Company's hold on India -- she has added two more fictions using the same central characters, one of them "The Infidel Stain," I heard read on discs and found stay-in-the-car-and-listen engrossing. In that book the main characters from "Strangler" are back in England during the period of the Chartist Movement, a time of political upheavals: ghastly crimes, Victorian London, political intrigue, radical politics -- I loved it.

  

         "The Future Home of the Loving God" is the most recent novel by Louise Erdrich, who has written many books dealing with the present and past days of a Native American community in Minnesota. This book fits the current vogue for a dystopian fiction, triggered by -- guess what -- a biological threat completely destabilizing American society. Erdrich is a brilliant character creator, and readers of her other books will note some similarities between the key players here and characters in her previous books. In this book, explaining its title, her pregnant narrator and other Indian characters are obsessed with the Native American Roman Catholic saint Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha -- the name of a church, I recalled, from our days in Plymouth.

          Finally, "Orfeo" is a timely work by another prolific American novelist, Richard Powers. I loved his big recent book about the role trees play in Earth's preservation, "The Overstory."

"Orfeo" is about a musical genius -- Powers' books are always seeped in a thorough knowledge of some field of the arts or sciences -- who is also an amateur chemist who gets in trouble by experimenting in creating genetic changes in -- guess what -- microbes. The book's evocations of various musical works (both famous masterpieces and fictional works created by our spectrum-like hero) are beautifully written. I think I would have appreciated the book on another level if I knew more about, one, music theory or, two, biochemistry. But "Orfeo" is another character-driven thriller (like Erdrich's book), this one  impelled by a post-9/11 -- wow, remember that -- theme of government over-reach in the name of security.

           I don't want to hear anybody say they have nothing to do. Maybe "self-quarantining" is simply the universe's way of saying "drop everything and read a book." 

The Garden of Verse: Family Stories Abound in Verse-Virtual March 2020, from Talking Back to 'Daddy' to the Crime That Destroyed a People's 'Icons'

Poems in Verse-Virtual's March2020 issue told important stories with great skill. Subjects include a re-assessment of the truth behind Sylvia Plath's epochal poem "Daddy," the circumstances behind a first encounter with the muse, and the devastating consequences of a historic disaster. 

         Find these and many other fine offerings in Verse-Virtual.org March 2020

Michael Gessner's "Plath's Father" catches so much about the structure and rhythmic appeal of Sylvia Plath's famous poem "Daddy" while questioning the poem's treatment of its ostensible subject, her father. As "Plath's Father" argues, "Daddy's” denunciation of fascism and patriarchal brutality doesn't appear to have much to do with the biography of her father's shortened life:

"It doesn’t quite seem to mix

Panzer-man and Harvard entomologist,

or the German language ‘obscene’. 

It was the language your parents spoke

before making the love that was you."

"Plath's Father" is a thoughtful, strongly written response to a widely anthologized poem which at the time of its publication seemed to catch the anger of the rebellious sixties. This sympathy for a 'Daddy' definitely deserves a read.  

David Graham's "Your Poetic Career" is another poem that looks back, not on a classic poem, but on a poet's own beginning. A story poem set in undergraduate days, it catches the mood of youthful 'thinking' and insecurities and finds an implicitly sensual imagery that describes what's so -- uh, likable -- in another student's work: 

"She's so damn good, her lines slithering like anacondas

of dirty ice and lonesome fire and all kinds of stuff

you'd never in a million years come up with, so

for a few shiny minutes you are utterly swallowed

by the beautiful Becca-mind,"

...while also a youthfully "bothered" by the rest of the package. A fun and convincing poem.

Another poem that tells a story, Jim Lewis's "penny loafers" recalls a hungry boy, born in 1929 among a parade of siblings

"that stretched
across that great depression
like a trans-continental railroad..."

The poem's imagery and diction catch the mood of the era, especially its Depression generation theme of making do with a watery-soup existence. The mortifying second-hand shoes of the poem's title lead to the fitting word play at the poem's conclusion that I won't spoil by repeating here.

Michael Minassian's "The Icons" looks back as well, from a family perspective, to a grandmother's remembrance of the year 1915, when

"history exploded
like a sleeping grenade,"

destroying both her brother, their church and "all the icons" -- a word that serves for both a concrete meaning and an entire community's world view. Actions tell the story here. The grandmother's post-genocidal world view is evoked by her act of

"dumping the coffee grinds
into the backyard
where nothing ever grew..."

The March 2020 issue is rich in family stories. Alan Walowitz's "My Father Stops at Corners" paints a portrait in a poem whose structure seems to capture its subject's path through life. I particularly enjoyed the long and garrulous sentence that begins with a reference to death -- "He knew he wasn't due to die till 68" -- then works through several other subjects, including its subject's physical resemblance to his own father -- before returning to the theme of a father's death with a striking image,

"which now he owned—
hanging low over his head
like the black fedora
pulled tight over his eyes."

A memorable portrait, indeed.

Tom Montag's author's note to "Three Poems from 'The Woman in an Imaginary Painting'" series is a poem in itself. "I don't know what started this, nor how it will end, but here we go, for as long as she continues," he tells us. "Poets may think they are in charge of their work, but really they're not, as this series is proving to me daily."

These poems flow like time does. As thought does. They're about one thing, and everything. I love its transition from the woman's perspective, to the artist's, and then back to the woman's own self-examination.

"Because she always loved art
she posed for him.
Because it was unlike anything she had ever done.
Because she wanted to impress her friends..."

Every line feels just right and, perhaps, inevitable.

And there's lots more where these came from at http://www.verse-virtual.org/poems-and-articles.html

 

"American Rot": My Poem on the Steady Decay of the American Political System

         We can see from from Americans' increasingly nervous response to the spread of the Coronavirus just how much damage can be done by three years of an incompetent, corrupt national administration to the nation's health and well-being. By government that is based on loyalty to a criminal boss rather than to the public good, that puts the interest of party over the interests of law, equity, and the needs of ordinary citizens. And by a form of politics that ignores 240 years of precedent and law to insure "winning" at any cost, including outright cheating, voter suppression, and encouraging interference by foreign governments that intend us no good.  
        The spread of the contagious virus also answers the question of who needs a 'big,' but also well functioning government? Apparently every country in the world -- even this one... Who needs public heath care? Who needs a national health care system that guarantees all have access to health care without worrying about how to pay for it?... Americans do.
         Well before the arrival of the new plague, back during the Senate's farcical impeachment 'trial' -- which now seems like democracy's last, wasted chance -- I wrote the poem below, "American Rot." It appeared in print earlier this month in the March 2020 issue of Verse-Virtual.
         


American Rot

Sepsis gone too far
Surgery the only option,
cutting away the rot,
joint by joint,
cell by cell

We surrender a toe,
or two,
almost willingly
Who walks any more
anyway,
while we stare,
'devicively' at screens

Take the foot, why don't you,
and perhaps a hand
Give a hand for your country,
won't you?
What price the oblivion
of endless rot?

Sepsis of the spine
the brain stem
Sepsis of the body,
the uselessly failing limbs
they wave in the wind
like the flags of
forgotten nations

that went this way
Weimar, Athens, the Roman Republic
the body politic
flailing, feebly
Proscription for the intelligentsia

Salutes for the surgeon!
for the final solutions
to indelible conditions,
prior or whatnot,
that weaken the nation

Give him the pistol
now, why don't you
See how easily
he finds a trigger
with his teeth


You can find my other poems and those of 43 poets in total in the March Verse-Virtual  here











http://www.verse-virtual.org/poems-and-articles.html

Poets 'Go Deep" in the new March 2020 Verse-Virtual

I am impressed by the poems in March 2020 issue of Verse-Virtual that 'go deep' -- full disclosure: I served as the guest editor for this issue. Read them for yourself at

https://prosegarden.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-garden-of-verse-real-and-imagined.html 

I'm talking about poems such as Alarie Tennille's poem "Taking Forever One Day at a Time," with splendid details in every stanza. For example:

"hearing your voice in conversation
downstairs before realizing
that you’re talking to the cats
in the same serious tone you use
with plumbers"

The poem builds on evocations, from here, from fond recollections, little things, habits -- holding the speaker's hand crossing streets, writing disparaging comments in the margins of books he reads -- to build a word portrait of a 'forever' relationship. A marvelous poem about intimacy.

          And by the imagistic tour of the stages and struggles of putting together a successful lyric offered by Kate Sontag in "Before It Was A Poem," in lines such as these:

"In the house of do-over dreams
the writer sleeps on pencil shavings
and eraser dust, unlearns standard
grammar skills, relinquishes any
obsession with formal elements
of syntax, diction, parallelism."

Yes, "the house of do-over dreams." Sound familiar? Also, Kate's poem "The Poet and the Bee" with its the noirish reference to the classic "Black Dahlia" crime-story to give the poem its sting. From noir mystery –

For all we knew

"she could have been lying,or believed her own lie..."

This poem's buzz takes us to the unexpected prophetic revelation:

"Call it style. Call ita singer whose ghost was a missing guitar.So this was poetry."

Mystery is the mood as well in Penny Harter's enigmatic poem "The Oracle" about a creature, perhaps half-imagined, known by signs but never seen:

"The oracle predicts without speaking,
slaps its tail for emphasis, eludes our traps.
It knows we are bigger than it is,
has learned that we don’t care to heed
the messages it brings us from the deep."

         The theme of human bonds to the wild species that share our universe plumbs the depths of her poem "Snowy Owl," which evokes the animal magic of humanity's ancient connections:
"As a child in my bed at night, I listened to neighborhood dogs, heard their barking picked up by others farther and farther away until it seemed I could faintly hear all the way back to First Dog."

Ingrid Bruck's lively depiction of a place she calls "Country Abecedarian" relies on the evidence of the senses to make a fantasy familiar, citing

"manacled ribs vibrate waves of cicada buzz, the screech
noise joins bleating lambs and grunting hogs.
often crows gather in murders cawing the news."

I've often wondered about the correct term for a gang of crows. "Murders" sounds about right. I cannot imagine a wild place without their annoying, but often provocative commentaries:

And I am moved to wonder by Shoshauna Shy's richly imagined biography for a waiting room patient, called (in the poem's title) the "Silver-Bearded Man in the Waiting Room at the Dental Clinic" -- a presence whom, the speaker of the poem confides, she will never get to know:

"I will not learn his eldest daughter’s
nickname for him nor the story
of how he earned it, where he found
his dog if he has one, what route
he biked after taking the Merrimac
Ferry toward Baraboo. I will not find
out in what country he last drank
a glass of wine."

These are marvelous mysteries. I'm not sure that a flesh and blood connection would be as rich in detail as the person made of words imagined by this poem's speaker. I have no idea where "Baraboo" is, but it sounds like somewhere intriguing. And why should his 'eldest' daughter (how many, we wonder, does he have?) invent a nickname for him, as opposed to, say, the conventional "Dad," "Pops," "Pater," etc. The poem may indicate a longing for connection, but the 'conversation' it starts in the reader's mind may be more fertile than a real one.

Mystery too abounds in Dianna Henning's poem with the alluring title "The Village Lives in the Sheep; the Sheep in the Village." Who would not wonder at such sheep as those, noted here, who escape the walls of their pens to

"wander as though touring the nearby, shags of wool hanging off their chests, their eyes electric with storms."
Any poem with a phrase like 'their eyes electric with storms' makes me a believer. And this poem's final two sentences, strung through four stanzas, serves an as object lesson in the uses of enjambment. Please see them for your self.
These are a few that poems that spoke to me. I have a lot more reading to do.

See these poems and more at Verse-Virtual March 2020. 

Real and Imagined, Pleasures and Pain: New Poems from Forty Poets in the March 2020 Verse-Virtual

I am impressed by the poems in March 2020 issue of Verse-Virtual that 'go deep' -- full disclosure: I served as the guest editor for this issue. Read them for yourself at

https://prosegarden.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-garden-of-verse-real-and-imagined.html 

I'm talking about poems such as Alarie Tennille's poem "Taking Forever One Day at a Time," with splendid details in every stanza. For example:

"hearing your voice in conversation
downstairs before realizing
that you’re talking to the cats
in the same serious tone you use
with plumbers"

The poem builds on evocations, from here, from fond recollections, little things, habits -- holding the speaker's hand crossing streets, writing disparaging comments in the margins of books he reads -- to build a word portrait of a 'forever' relationship. A marvelous poem about intimacy.

          And by the imagistic tour of the stages and struggles of putting together a successful lyric offered by Kate Sontag in "Before It Was A Poem," in lines such as these:

"In the house of do-over dreams
the writer sleeps on pencil shavings
and eraser dust, unlearns standard
grammar skills, relinquishes any
obsession with formal elements
of syntax, diction, parallelism."

Yes, "the house of do-over dreams." Sound familiar? Also, Kate's poem "The Poet and the Bee" with its the noirish reference to the classic "Black Dahlia" crime-story to give the poem its sting. From noir mystery –

For all we knew

"she could have been lying,or believed her own lie..."

This poem's buzz takes us to the unexpected prophetic revelation:

"Call it style. Call ita singer whose ghost was a missing guitar.So this was poetry."

Mystery is the mood as well in Penny Harter's enigmatic poem "The Oracle" about a creature, perhaps half-imagined, known by signs but never seen:

"The oracle predicts without speaking,
slaps its tail for emphasis, eludes our traps.
It knows we are bigger than it is,
has learned that we don’t care to heed
the messages it brings us from the deep."

         The theme of human bonds to the wild species that share our universe plumbs the depths of her poem "Snowy Owl," which evokes the animal magic of humanity's ancient connections:
"As a child in my bed at night, I listened to neighborhood dogs, heard their barking picked up by others farther and farther away until it seemed I could faintly hear all the way back to First Dog."

Ingrid Bruck's lively depiction of a place she calls "Country Abecedarian" relies on the evidence of the senses to make a fantasy familiar, citing

"manacled ribs vibrate waves of cicada buzz, the screech
noise joins bleating lambs and grunting hogs.
often crows gather in murders cawing the news."

I've often wondered about the correct term for a gang of crows. "Murders" sounds about right. I cannot imagine a wild place without their annoying, but often provocative commentaries:

And I am moved to wonder by Shoshauna Shy's richly imagined biography for a waiting room patient, called (in the poem's title) the "Silver-Bearded Man in the Waiting Room at the Dental Clinic" -- a presence whom, the speaker of the poem confides, she will never get to know:

"I will not learn his eldest daughter’s
nickname for him nor the story
of how he earned it, where he found
his dog if he has one, what route
he biked after taking the Merrimac
Ferry toward Baraboo. I will not find
out in what country he last drank
a glass of wine."

These are marvelous mysteries. I'm not sure that a flesh and blood connection would be as rich in detail as the person made of words imagined by this poem's speaker. I have no idea where "Baraboo" is, but it sounds like somewhere intriguing. And why should his 'eldest' daughter (how many, we wonder, does he have?) invent a nickname for him, as opposed to, say, the conventional "Dad," "Pops," "Pater," etc. The poem may indicate a longing for connection, but the 'conversation' it starts in the reader's mind may be more fertile than a real one.

Mystery too abounds in Dianna Henning's poem with the alluring title "The Village Lives in the Sheep; the Sheep in the Village." Who would not wonder at such sheep as those, noted here, who escape the walls of their pens to

"wander as though touring the nearby, shags of wool hanging off their chests, their eyes electric with storms."
Any poem with a phrase like 'their eyes electric with storms' makes me a believer. And this poem's final two sentences, strung through four stanzas, serves an as object lesson in the uses of enjambment. Please see them for your self.
These are a few that poems that spoke to me. I have a lot more reading to do.

See these poems and more at Verse-Virtual March 2020.