The Garden of Verse: A World of Gratitude in a Harvest of New Poems -- October's Verse-Virtual

  

         It's harvest season. Here's a harvest of offerings from the October 2017 edition of Verse-Virtual.com.

As Joan Mazza's poem "Before the first bite" reminds us, when the harvest brings us to table,

Pause to see the colors
in front of you. Reflect
on those who grew
this wheat and ground
its heart, turned semolina
into pasta. Who tends
olive groves, presses
the fruit into oil, bottles it.
Grazie."
 

The poem's fine dining vocabulary, its active verbs (tends, presses, bottles) and compressed lines work together to focus our attention on the ides of gratitude. It's a good season for it.

            On a similar theme, gratitude to the "ordinary saints" who serve us, both mind and body, is always in season. Joan Colby's fresh supply of praise poems for oft-overlooked occupations introduces us to facts about these jobs and those who do them are either ignored (meaning I ignore them) or simply unknown (a similar declaration of ignorance here). Such as the farm worker: 

"attaching the vacuum tubes
To the teats so the milk will flow"

A second poem reminds me, painfully, how we call on the "Saint Geek" to address "the blue screen of perdition" -- god, naming the devil! I have to cross myself after naming that one.

As for the manicurist, see these brilliantly apt lines:

 "How you nail us
With a styled creation
To indemnify against an
Onus of manual labor." ​
            The onus is on us.

           

            The cleverness of "You, Singular" by Edward Conti relies on its brief declaratives and witty rhymes. Its lyrics evoke not only singularity, but childhood, as in the unexpected final line of this stanza:

"You can make fun of me
I hope you do.
There’s only one of me.
How many are you?"

Only one, perhaps, but one can be more than enough. I also enjoyed the poem's reach into the "Thin Man" comedies to find an unexpected canine rhyme for "master." That line "I’ll be your Asta" may dog me for some time to come. And I'm grateful for it.

            We're likely to find more than a measure of gratitude in Joe Cottonwood's "Autopsy of a Douglas Fir" as well. In the beautifully composed first stanza alone, the poem evokes not only the act of harvesting a tree, but the land, ecology and peoples of "three centuries of wooden wisdom."

"In your bleeding cross-section I count
three centuries of wooden wisdom
since that mother cone dropped
on soil no one owned.
Black bears scratched backs
against your young bark. Ohlone
passed peacefully on their path
to the waters of La Honda Creek."

            I'm thankful also for the poem's introduction to me of the name "Ohlone," used for the surviving lineages of the indigenous peoples of the San Francisco Bay.

            Gratitude for a certain kind of immortality is the theme of Marilyn Taylor's "The Day After I Die," expressed with a fine satirical eye.

"they will find the cure
for whatever got me,
and a unified theory
of physics will be announced
by a consortium
from M.I.T."

            Those aren't the only wonders that will follow the demise of the speaker of this poem. Also predicted are answers to the age-old questions. Are we alone in the universe? What address do I plug into the GPS for the fountain of youth? The energy crisis? -- all resolved. Check out the final stanza for the greatest discovery of them all.

            Alan Walowitz's moving poem "Anthony Peter Tumbarello" may remind us to be grateful for those who cross our paths in life, and keep re-crossing them. The poem tells the story of the poet's relationship with his childhood friend, and the cross "Tony" bore all his life, in a few perfectly chosen lines that pack a whole story into a sentence.  

"When we walked
other kids would stare
and sometimes strangers’d
cross the street to inquire, Son, what’s wrong with your friend?
as if Tony couldn’t hear
for being so bent.

            There's a world of tragedy in the stranger's thoughtlessly expressed inquiry, even if it was not ill-intended, and even if it was actually well meant. And a world of stubborn courage in Tony's response, delivered smartly at the end of this poem.

            The title of Robert Wexelblatt's poem "Going to Bed with Jane Austen" has a ring of inevitability. We all go to bed from time to time with a favorite author. Where the poet takes this notion however is wholly original, satirical, revealing, and wise. A sort of compact novel in a concise lyric.

            Something else that bedtime is good for, storytelling and its many uses, also comes in for an apposite nod (and wink?)  -- "like that famous sultan, I finally fall asleep." A beautifully crafted poem.
            My thanks, since we're handing out gratitude, also go Verse-Virtual's indefatigable editor Firestone Feinberg, who continues to put together such finely seasoned bounties of verse every month. 
            Find all these poems and others at http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html  

The Garden of Literature: Walking With Thoreau

How can we let this year go by without doing something to recognize the bicentennial year of the birth of Henry David Thoreau? Apparently that year is more than three-quarters gone, while I am somehow under the impression that it is only just getting underway. I fear that events on “the national scene,” to use what now sounds like an antiquated phrase, have pretty much canceled 2017.

Can we get a do-over on this one?

Nevertheless… Concord, Mass., the metaphysical heart of all things Thoreau, put together a website http://thoreaubicentennial.org/ with a full calendar of events around the town where the great American thinker lived and wrote, and where he spent the famous retreat in the woods along Walden Pond before discovering the necessity to go back to work in what most of us call, mostly by habit, the “real” world. In the great philosopher and writer’s case, he worked in his father’s pencil factory.

Concord is surely ground zero for Thoreau commemorations. But we all can touch a little bit of the Thoreau legacy simply by talking a walk. Or reading pioneering works such as “Walden,” “Civil Disobedience,” or his essay about his favorite activity, “Walking.”

My moment with Thoreau came this summer when I picked up a book published two decades ago that featured “Walden” in the title, “Walking Toward Walden” by John Hanson Mitchell. An ambitious intellectual project based on a physical challenge, the book attempted to evoke not only what Thoreau’s neighborhood was like back when he used to take daily walks in the woods outside of Concord, but also what it is like today — along with a fair representation of the Concord region before Europeans arrived in North America and in all the intervening eras since.

Here is Mitchell’s take on the centrality of Concord and its role in Thoreau’s universe. “Drawn by the charismatic Ralph Waldo Emerson, who returned to his ancestral territory to live in 1834, other writers or thinkers began to visit or even settle in Concord so that by 1840, this small satellite of Cambridge and Boston had become the American center of intellectual activity.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne, who referred to Concord as “Eden,” moved there in 1842, Bronson Alcott in 1848. Louisa May Alcott made the place a setting for “Little Women,” a pioneering publishing success. The poet Ellery Channing dwelled there. Feminist educator Margaret Fuller visited often to help prime the Transcendentalist pump.

As for our famous prophet of simple living and love of nature, Mitchell describes him as “the sometime schoolteacher, pencil maker, surveyor and handyman named Henry Thoreau, whose oeuvre was all but unread until after his death in 1862.”

Books about Thoreau are many. Books about walking his land are rare.

When John Hanson Mitchell and his two eccentrically learned friends and traveling companions set out to walk from Westford, Mass. to Concord entirely through undeveloped land — in one day — the literary adventure goes forward but also backwards, with many frequent side trips into the major interests of the three hikers, their previous ventures together, and some references to their separate adventures as well. One of his companions knows everything about birds. The other knows — almost everything — about Native Americans. Mitchell knows Concords backwards and forwards and provides a mean recreation of the Revolution-sparking Battle of Lexington and Concord as well.

Given that range of expertise, the book hangs together because of its concentration on to the unifying concept that was also at the center of Thoreau’s life and thinking, namely “the land.”

Their single-day trek through land preserves, near impassable wetlands, over high bridges, through the backyards of new housing developments, and along dirt paths that once served long-gone farmsteads, succeeds in evoking a sense, however speculative, of what walking the land meant for Thoreau. We also learn what our contemporary three-some discover about the much-changed, much varied, and still-changing Concord region’s landscape. But even Thoreau himself was “passing through time” — that’s the way I’ve decided to think about it — when he walked the surrounds of beloved mid-19th century “Transcendentalist” Concord because the changes wrought by the European civilization planted there were already evident.

The Colonial farms of an earlier day were being abandoned in Thoreau’s time. Farmlands that had been claimed from the wilderness at great cost — certainly in time and energy — in the 17th and 18th centuries had already been ‘farmed out’ by European methods. Their owners had headed west to find new lands to exploit, and the land left behind was going back (or had already gone back) to the wild. The abandoned fields were still far from the largely undisturbed old forest of the indigenous peoples displaced by the Europeans, but lots of land around Concord was heading in that direction. And in some parts of Mitchell’s journey, the same processes could be observed.

In fact, pieces the landscape continue to go back and forth between development and reforestation. The book’s three travelers encounter shopping centers, factories, warehouses, railyards, technology think-tanks and corporate centers along Route 128 (“technology highway”). They pass through suburban subdivisions, protected wildlands with conservation restrictions in perpetuity, dried riverbeds and new wetlands. The beavers that disappeared before Thoreau’s time have now returned. As we know, more clearly than 20 years ago, deer are everywhere today.

Thoreau observed the landscape changes of his own day, while celebrating what endures. What else Thoreau discovered on his daily walks includes — almost everything. Here’s how his famous essay “Walking” was described when it first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862. The author “explores: the joys and necessities of long afternoon walks; how spending time in untrammeled fields and woods soothes the spirit; how Nature guides us on our walks; the lure of the wild for writers and artists; and why ‘all good things are wild and free.’”

(The essay is available today as a 60-page paperback. See https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/227113.Walking)

Just reading words such as these makes me sad to realize that I cannot today leave my door and achieve by foot in any reasonable time frame “the lure of the wild.” I suspect that even on my best days I could not have kept pace with Thoreau’s habitual walks.

How much philosophical weight Thoreau put on walking can be seen in statements such as these from his essay “Walking.”

“We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return; prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only, as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.”
 And of course the most famous Thoreau quote of all is his evergreen sentiment “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

No doubt we find it harder today to encounter the transformative experience of “the wild” Henry David Thoreau regularly attempted. But in almost any city, state or continent, in any phase of life, we can still open the senses, and the mind, and the heart, to the “wildness” of the natural world. We may not be "walking toward Walden," but we can go a little way toward “preserving the wild.”

The Garden of Stories:Haruki Murakami "MenWithout Women" -- Great Title, So-So Book

   

         Haruki Murakami's "MenWithout Women" published this year in the US consists of stories in which not all that much happens, but what has happened is mulled over obsessively before either an unexpected event or, in most cases, nothing much at all happens to conclude the piece. It's not a good sign when, a week after finishing reading the book, I can't recall  the events of the title story of this collection. 

           The narrator laments, "We've become men without women," and I agree that's a truly horrible state to find oneself in, but I can't remember how it happened to this character. I do remember the final word, in this story, the final story in the collection, is "probably." That word is the leitmotif for the collection, his narrators across the stories use it repeatedly as they mull over events of the past, which is pretty much all they do. After analyzing some condition, or act, to death: offering thesis, critique of thesis, restatement of thesis, and concluding with an expression of belief that thesis is all that can be known of the matter under review, the whole business is then qualified with that most unsatisfactory of affirmatives, "probably." 

            Because "probably" can only mean "possibly not."

            It's remarkable that Murakami can devote a whole book to stories in the key of "probably," but the lack of interesting development is a curious aesthetic choice, almost a stubborn decision to reign in the imagination, for an author whose unrestrained imagination has led to the grand, mythological novels his millions of fans worldwide adore. In my case, Murakami's "Kafka on the Shore" remains not a book I read, it's an experience.

            (I am currently having a similar 'experience' in the company of the novel "Jerusalem" by English novelist Alan Moore." I think of rare imaginative feats such as these as: 'the universe explained.')

            Perhaps an author capable of imaginative extravaganzas such as these needs to spend a few years, occasionally, walking around a familiar block in a familiar city, going over the same ground again and again in his head. Probably.

            The most imaginative leap in this collection is the story told by a female narrator of an adolescent crush that causes her to break into the house of the boy she is enamored of to steal articles from his room. It's psychologically acute. But nothing much develops from this premise. This is no more than to be expected -- probably.

           Most of these tales center on men who have for whatever reason one chance in life at a relationship that goes beyond sex -- there is plenty of emotionally detached sex in this book: can anything be more boring? -- and for whatever reason, it might not even be their fault, missed it. One character returns home early from a business trip and finding his wife in bed with a friend tactfully closes the bedroom door and moves out of his apartment. Is this a peculiarly Japanese response?

            I've looked it up, so here's how the narrator of that title story in "Men Without Women" explains what happened to his relationship with M. (that's all the name he gives her), the one woman in his life whose long-ago loss has condemned him to the dreary status of male-without-female.

            The narrator recalls: "But before I knew it, M. was gone. Where to, I have no idea. One day, I lost sight of her. I happened to glance for a moment, and when I turned back, she had disappeared."

            This is about the most disappointing piece of plot development one can imagine. It's a metaphor, not a story.

            At a polar opposite in aesthetic strategy, in the the most affecting of one of these stories -- the one about the man whose discovers his wife in bed with a friend -- the narrator, who has opened a small bar on a back street which he treats as a kind of hermit's retreat, develops a spot of trouble with local gangsters. He closes up one night and discovers snakes outside the bar, one of them curled up in a sidewalk tree.

            What happens to -- or because of -- those snakes? Nothing, in this little book.

            I'm looking forward to learning more about them, or their metaphysical equivalents, in a future 'big' book by Murakami. Probably.

The Garden of the Seasons: When the Journey to the Sun Takes a Detour

 

Morning glories like the sun. Especially, as the name implies, in the first half of the day. To get closer to the sun they climb. They climb on whatever they can find, light pole, flag pole, nearby shrub or tree. If you put them along the wall of your house, they climb the wall. As a rule they need some sort of trellis, something they can wrap their viney claws ('tendrils,' I suppose) around. 
          A few years back we tied strings from tacks in the wall to get them going. They do get going. Climb, baby, climb.
          They're annuals. So you have to plant them from seed every year. Sometimes their seeds drop into a planter and they seed themselves. 
           A few years ago, when we had solar panels installed on the sunny half of our roof, a thin pipe protecting some sort of wiring was also installed to run from the hardware near the ground to the solar tap on the roof.
           The climbing vines of the morning glory found that pipe a convenient stairway to heaven. 
           They are currently seeking the sun on the roof. Competition for the panels? I believe there is plenty of sunlight to go around.
            This year, for the first time, a new route to the top attracted some of the vines.
            We have old windows in most of our house. In the room I use for a home office, I lift the window on the hottest days of summer to let the breeze in. This requires pulling the screen down, lest the insect population discover a new habitat to explore for their possible benefit and our certain annoyance. And of course, lifting the storm window. Because of the imposition of a wide, hopelessly immobile writing table between my fingers and the window, I can only manage to lift the storm window a matter of inches, not feet. 
            To lift it any higher would require extreme exertions such as climbing up on the desk and lying on my back with some portion of my anatomy, namely my head, stuck out the window. This would frighten the morning glories. 
             Or, perhaps, hanging by my feet from the ceiling so that I could get a natural purchase on the balky storm window and shove it the rest of the way up.
              No matter. A six-inch screen exposure provides fresh air. And most days the inside window is closed.
              This year, the first time ever, the morning glory vines found that gap.
              They are now climbing, and blooming, in the inch or so of space between the lowered screen and raised storm window.
               It's like having a greenhouse in the window of your home office. 
               The flowers that blossom in this space are of large size and a magnificent sky blue color.
               I think, however, their ascent may have been stalled at this elevation unless they find a gap between storm window and frame sufficient to slip through. Perhaps they will be content to pack as much vine and leaf, plus occasional blossoms, into this protected space as possible. 
               Those I live with, however, have another explanation for this uncanny penetration of outdoor-growing plants into the indoor space occupied by yours truly.
                They believe the flowers are coming in to get me. I trust their intentions are benign.

‘The War in Vietnam’ on the Homefront: Division, Resistance, A Bridge Too Far, and A Lesson in Self-Knowledge — My Story ‘Commitment’

   
  "Commitment," a story based on my own fraught attempt at draft resistance during the Vietnam War, was published by the journal "3288 Review" two years ago. After watching most of the recent PBS documentary "The War in Vietnam," I decided to publish it again on Medium.com.

           Ken Burns’ 18-hour “The War in Vietnam” was riveting TV, with previously unseen combat footage, a useful overview of American political history during that long and brutalizing war, and a commitment to let American veterans tells their own affecting stories.

          However — inevitably; no matter how long it was  — the documentary left a lot out. The death and destruction inflicted upon the Vietnamese by ‘the American war’ was underplayed by a story that was much more about ‘us,’ not ‘them.’ Here’s a link to an article on that point https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/the-ken-burns-vietnam-war-documentary-glosses-over-devastating-civilian-toll/

            The show also shorted the stories of the many young American men who chose — like Clinton, Bush, Trump, etc. — to avoid military service by any means available. And those of us, also many in number, who chose to confront the issue of whether to resist the war, rather than shelter in the privilege of deferment. I started off on that path, but found it hard to stay the course. 

            Here’s the link to my story, titled “Commitment,” published on Medium:

https://medium.com/@rcknox2/the-war-in-vietnam-on-the-homefront-division-resistance-a-bridge-too-far-and-a-lesson-in-self-943eb68ac8a4