Holiday poems

We had a lovely Christmas with my mother here. As usual, everyone got many presents and if anyone complains they will be duly smacked. A highlight was driving up the Rhine on Monday to a restaurant overlooking the vineyards and river. There was a sun shower and lots of wind and our brunch was horrendously expensive but I’d do it again. 

In writing news, I’ve got two poems up at Ghost Proposal: “Gestures in a Landscape” and “Rome Postcard.” I really enjoyed the issue and hope you’ll spend some time there. “Gestures” is aphoristic, moving through war, landscapes and air. “Rome” is a travel fragment. 

Barnstorm, where I had a poem a couple or three years ago, also published my poem “Rue Musette” mid-month. I wrote this mostly at the end of last year after visiting Dijon and visiting the beautiful Fontenay Abbey in France. I usually decline to record a reading but I went ahead this time. When I sent it I said “if it sounds terrible just toss it” but the very kind editor said it was beautiful and I felt happy about that for a long time! 

Three more of my Misery poems have been accepted, and I’m looking forward to seeing them out in the world soon.

Goldfish Sitter

I’ve been remiss! I had a rich October doing the Stephen King found poetry project. I had more energy than I expected, turning each daily poem into a little creature with various kinds of collage and drawing, which motivated me. I ended up submitting lots of poems in November, without much payoff so far - a few rejections, a stray acceptance.

I also visited the states last month to help my mother prepare to move and to enjoy a rare Thanksgiving, a holiday I always loved because of the food (and family). The family has scattered I’m afraid, and my mother, our last New Jersey stalwart, picks up stakes in January, too.

I did have one poem published last month, Goldfish Sitter, in the National Poetry Review. It’s a poem I wrote after Christmas last year, when I was indeed assigned to babysit a neighbor’s goldfish over the holidays.

On Christmas Eve, in honor of a particularly marvelous passage from Proust, I wore my monocle

The Marquis de Forestelle’s monocle was minuscule, had no border, and, requiring a constant painful clenching of the eye, where it was encrusted like a superfluous cartilage whose presence was inexplicable and whose material was exquisite, gave the Marquis’s face a melancholy delicacy, and made women think he was capable of great sorrows in love. But that of M. de Saint-Candé, surrounded by a gigantic ring, like Saturn, was the center of gravity of a face which regulated itself at each moment in relation to it, a face whose quivering red nose and thick-lipped sarcastic mouth attempted by their grimaces to equal the unceasing salvos of wit sparkling from the disk of glass, and saw itself preferred to the handsomest eyes in the world by snobbish and depraved young women in whom it inspired dreams of artificial charms and a refinement of voluptuousness; and meanwhile, behind his own, M. de Palancy, who, with his big round-eyes carp’s head, moved about slowly in the midst of the festivities unclenching his mandibles from moment to moment as though seeking to orient himself, merely seemed to be transporting with him an accidental and perhaps purely symbolic fragment of the glass of his aquarium, a part intended to represent the whole, reminding Swann, a great admirer of Giotto’s Vices and Virtues at Padua, of Injustice, next to whom a leafy bough evokes the forests in which his lair is hidden. (Swann's Way)

Week that was

Liked: Free cookies at the video store

Disliked: The German railway (punctual, my ass)

Watched: The Dark Knight, better the second time

Saw: The Montmartre exhibit at Schirn Kunsthalle

Reading: The Siege of Krishnapur (still)

Listened to: Abbey Road

Lent: Two Gabriel Garcia Marquez books to a friend

Received: A new purse from my husband 

Ate: Grilled peppers

Drank: Sparkling water

Learned: How to make Absinthe 

Bought: Bath bombs for Easter baskets

Realized: In 1900s Paris what a woman needed most of all was a good hat 

Dreamed: I was at a camp or vacation spot with a group of people I only vaguely knew & when I woke up in the (dream) morning they were sitting in a semi-circle waiting for me to empty the dishwasher & fold the laundry & I was like I already have a family & began angrily throwing their clean clothes into a pile on the sand.

Laughed at: Cat video (what else)

Cried: Nope

All the Presidents' Furniture

I was reading about Freud a month ago and recall someone saying the couch where his patients reclined was the world’s most famous piece of furniture. That made me think about other famous pieces of furniture, such as the chair that Van Gogh immortalized.

If I weren’t American maybe I’d have better examples (the knights’ round table!) but for me a lot of famous furniture is presidential: the desk in the Oval Office, JFK’s rocking chair, and FDR’s wheelchair. When I mentioned this recently it led to a discussion on whether a wheelchair is proper ‘furniture.’ A friend with a loved one in a wheelchair argued it was an instrument of mobility and absolutely not furniture. While primarily a mobilizer, as soon as a wheelchair pulls up to a desk or a table it also serves as furniture. Anyone can park one in the living room, whether they need it to get around or not. Same with a dentist's chair. No disrespect intended.

Many things not designed to be furniture end up as furniture. Take those cable spools that get made into coffee tables. Or milk crates used as modular shelving. A sail can become an indoor hammock. Today I saw a horse carriage seat repurposed as a bench. 

Anyway, back to the presidents. Surely the best piece of “presidential furniture” is Thomas Jefferson’s revolving book stand. I thought of it this President’s Day when I was sitting at my desk, my eyes traveling from a newspaper, to a book to the computer screen. I think of the stand, which holds five books, as a precursor to internet tabs.

How much 14 there has been in existence

César Vallejo cuts a sad and driven figure. He was a Peruvian who lived the last quarter of his life in Europe, mostly poor and in bad straits. His poetry was dark and surreal, original and haunted. His most famous poem is probably Black Stone Lying on a White Stone, a fabulous poem.

With 2014 coming over the past few days I’ve been thinking of Vallejo’s poem “Anniversary.” Like so much of his poetry, “Anniversary” mesmerizes. It comes to me often when I encounter the number 14. I don’t know what 14th anniversary he is immortalizing, but for all its mystery, “Anniversary” seems one of his more affirmative poems, to the detriment of 15! 

I give you below the first stanza. Google “César Vallejo anniversary 14” and Google Books will gift you the whole thing. I will tuck Vallejo in my pocket and keep him with me this year.

Anniversary

How much 14 there has been in existence!

What credits with mist on a corner!

What a synthetic diamond the skull is!

The lengthier 

the sweetness, the deeper the surface,

how much 14 there has been in such a small 1!

One terrible thing

In a story I was reading today came the question: What is the most terrifying thing that ever happened to you?

This is hard because you really have to mine your memory. As always I am afraid I will give the wrong answer and that once I give an answer that I won’t be able to change it, as if there were some superpower somewhere keeping track. Of course this is counter-productive and neurotic and prevents the person questioned (me) from even approaching the question, being so preoccupied about the conditions. I had the same problem last month when a friend asked me to name my three favorite Elvis Costello songs were. (WAS NOT ABLE.)

Anyway, I tried to get over that and can tell you one of the first things that comes to my mind, the thing that sifts to the top early on in the memory-mining. 

For Easter I go with my husband and kids (6 and 4?) to London to visit friends. In turn we are invited to friends of theirs for dinner and we set out on the tube to a balmy, upscale suburb. On the way, we arrive at a stop and our friend remembers at the last moment that we should get out. We frantically jump out, grabbing all our stuff, which is voluminous since they have a small child and our children are also not big. We are on the platform with baby buggy, etc. and all, and suddenly she says, “NO! This is the wrong stop!” and exhorts us all to jump back on to the train. 

We do. I am a bit annoyed but to top it off as I am turning around I notice that my daughter is still on the platform and I haven’t a second to do anything but gear up to freak when she realizes herself that she must get in urgently and she takes a long-legged leap through the closing doors, the swoosh of which is burned into my brainplate, and I am so grateful and at the same time (perhaps unjustly) pissed off that I nearly left my daughter behind at an abandoned stop in a foreign city. 

But I didn’t.

Valentine is the patron saint of epilepsy

Charles Dickens wanted a woman with oomph on his arm, but his wife Catherine was reserved and rather a homebody. You might excuse her considering she had 10 children. One would have hoped Charles could have set her up and parted amicably so he could court Ellen Terry, the young actress; instead he belittled and exiled Catherine, and blamed her for so much birthing. Though history points to the contrary, I like to think she was relieved to be rid of him.

Abraham Lincoln remained loyal to Mary, although she was less competent than Catherine Dickens and as dowdy. And Hilary Clinton remains loyal to Bill, despite his womanizing. There’s more to love than sex, the saints say. 

The less you know about people’s relationships, the better the relationships seem. Anyone care for more Sylvia & Ted?

“We’ve Only Just Begun,” the Carpenters’ song played at millions of weddings including my aunt’s (later legally terminated), was originally written for a bank commercial. Karen Carpenter, coincidentally, died the day her divorce went through. 

John Keats might have happily wedded Fanny Brawne if he hadn’t wasted away from TB. Fanny’s own brother also died of TB a few years later. TB is an ardent suitor. Which reminds me to read The Magic Mountain. 

Fernando Pessoa seems to have never loved anyone at all, on purpose. 

Erik Satie, too, made a clean break. His one love affair, with Suzanne Valadon, left him heartbroken, and Satie abandoned romance. He died of cirrhosis, and the posthumous excavation of his lodgings revealed excrement on the living room floor. Perhaps he didn’t want to venture too far from the piano? Which remained true to him?

the blood-sucking sun

As if part of some cosmic joke, we have had two straight days of sunshine, beginning exactly at the moment a US news outlet said solar energy won’t work there because it’s not sunny like Germany. From the dim northern coast to the overcast border town of Regen (“Rain”), that expert reporting caused the whole of Germany to erupt in a wet, grey guffaw. In fact, from what I’ve read, even the sunniest spot in Germany can’t hold the proverbial candle to the US. How (and where) else could Weltschmerz have been invented?

Anyway, yes. My son asked me at breakfast to please draw the shades, raising the back of his hand to his eyes like a vampire being drained of strength. The sun is confusing. What if it reveals something to us? Like how dirty our windows are, or the cobwebs fusing the piano to the liquor cabinet? Or something even worse, and more personal? 

Coincidentally, it is Carneval weekend, what most of the world calls Mardi Gras. The Rhine is the magnet for Carneval partiers - Mainz and especially Cologne. Maybe we’re enjoying this sunshine in preparation for a long, dark period of fasting? 

Coincidently, I’m reading Heinrich Böll’s Group Portrait with Lady, set in Cologne. I read it in college decades ago and remembered liking it, despite the lackluster leadership of our literature professor. Re-reading, I find out it is post-modern. Of course it was post-modern in 1984, too, just at that time I didn’t have the faintest idea what that was. So good was our professor! (I’m sure he didn’t know either.) In his defence, he was a German professor and not a literature professor. Which is fortunate because he really sucked at teaching literature. You know that winners of the Nobel Prize for literature don’t win for any particular book, rather they win for a body of writing. Still when Böll won the Nobel Prize, the committee cited Group Portrait as the “crown” of his work.

Song of the day: Was a Sunny Day

1854

It's supposedly Sherlock Holmes's birthday, who, like Jesus, was a Capricorn.

I don't know who arrived at this how. 

I don't know if there's a party to be had somewhere serving cocaine and opium. 

I take that back. Vice is hardly Holmes's defining characteristic. (NB: Capricorn's weakness is "too much work and not enough play.") 

My husband bought the complete Jeremy Brett series for Christmas, which is my absolute favorite. We've been watching an episode here and there since the holidays. Sometimes the overacting is quite funny, like the fisticuffs in "The Solitary Cyclist." The one we saw last night, "The Crooked Man," was a disappointment because Holmes does not figure out one thing. Rather all is explained to him. That was a rip-off, Holmes-wise.

I know the expression "Elementary" is Holmes's most famous linguistic legacy. I don't add "my dear Watson" because last night Watson said it to Holmes, rather sarcastically. But the best and most sarcastic expression born of Holmes is "No shit, Sherlock." Of course it is not uttered in any of the stories, yet even people who have never read (or seen) a Holmes story know and use it. I have even heard a German colleague interject it, in English, into a conversation in German, filling me with secret literary delight.

the year arrives like a shipwreck

Once again the year began with January, and it did even though the calendar I ordered has not yet arrived to reassure me.
For days I have suffered the nuisance of fireworks and firecrackers and the voluminous trash they abandon.
As if a shipwreck's ruins were strewn far from sea.
But the noise is tapering off so I feel we must have made some headway into the month.
Once again the year began with worrying. My daughter called with some news that I would have liked to discuss further, but I took the call on a colleague's phone and could not pursue it. Back at my desk I decided I might be making too much of it. Which may be true. Yet I was soon besieged with the worry that I wasn't worrying enough, which is a kind of meta-worrying. I put aside the problem and focused on worrying in the right proportion.
Are people who tend not to worry doing a better job at life, or worse? One is often told "don't worry, be happy," but the phrase "a lack of concern" suggests negligence.
To support me in my many doubts I got a notification today saying, "We can inform you that your calendar "Dickens' London" has been shipped. The estimated delivery date is January 7." I was glad to hear this, although I won't get a discount equivalent to 7 days of calendarlessness despite the delay. At least when I open it I will know where&when to begin.

Wussy Riot

To be honest, I don’t like New Year’s Eve at all. I don’t like staying up late. I don’t like drinking alcohol after, say, latest 11 pm. I don’t enjoy toasting and kissing and pretending to be having a good time. By 11.15 I start to feel spiritually sick, not to mention physically exhausted. If I wanted to see all those people, I’d see them at a saner hour. I don’t know why I’m too much of a wuss to bow out, but, you know, people get bent out of shape if you don’t play along. It’s like when married people congratulate you on getting married, or people with children congratulate you on getting pregnant. Break out the champagne and get to work.

I do like starting a new year. It is nice to make an appointment, however contrived, with the optimistic impulse. This year as always I promise to eat more broccoli. I may even join a weight-lifting studio, because when I consider my arms, my abs and my back, I face the fact that I'm a wuss in many departments.

Reindeer

Every night the reindeer gaping 

in the basement window. Slenderly. 

Legs flash past the lights, antlers hung 

like candelabra, a matter of faith. 

Their hooves move like spoons. 

Mouthful of mud. Mouthful of Armagnac. 

The sleigh is the absolute rhapsody, the last word in lunging, 

an epée plunging from a white glove.

The reindeer confuse weeping for wind, acorns for bells. 

Since they came, I mourn no more for my horselessness. 

They believe in the least of us. 

They nose unpretentiously through the nativity 

while I unscrew the base of the snow globe. 

They’ve been so patient. 

Now we go in.

Citrus

It snows. It has snown. It snew.

Yesterday we put up the tree, and went easy on the ornaments. This morning my mother arrived from NJ. We spent an hour or so waiting for her to emerge, and passed the time watching other families/friends reunite for the holidays. Exiting the baggage area, the passengers from Miami mixed with those from Rome. They were mostly dark and bejeweled, and it was hard to tell who hailed from where, until they opened their mouths. 

Here at year-end I am cleaning out the stubborn gunk of recent reading experiences with John Banville's Kepler, the mathematician astronomer. Banville's prose works like a tonic, despite the book's being set in muddy, moldy middle Europe. 

* *

Tycho stirred and dealt his moustaches a downward thrust of forefinger and thumb. Kepler with plaintive gaze stooped lower in his chair, as if the yoke of that finger and thumb had descended upon his thin neck. 

“What is your philosophy, sir?” the Dane asked. 

Italian oranges throbbed in a pewter bowl on the table between them. Kepler had not seen oranges before. Blazoned, big with ripeness, they were uncanny in their tense inexorable thereness.

from Kepler

* *

Thanks to Colette Copeland for this linen collage.

Happy even-numbered year

This music makes me glad to be alive.
I wish you a brilliant, beautiful new year.
The dragon is right behind.

It has snown.

I was browsing a Roz Chast book recently and one of the comics was "Kitsch in Nature." The three things singled out were peacocks, foliage season and snowfall shortly before Christmas. All true!

I woke up this morning and it was snowing copiously and beautifully. My son jumped for joy and I kind of did, too, but also felt unnerved because my mother and sister are scheduled to fly from the states tonight and if their trips get screwed up I will be unhappy. Last year my sister had to scrap her trip completely because of snow, and my mother only arrived on Dec. 26. PLEASE GOD! Save the snow for later.

Snow is nice, though (please stop!). And here's a nicer thing. The International Center of Photography in NY used a photo by my brother Thatcher for its Christmas card this year. Click on it to make it bigger.

The victim has yet to be identified.

Another station of the cross

Telephone Pole

There was a telephone pole
that wanted to be a tree,
to do the birds a service,
birds who now only paused
on wires strung up and shared
with neighboring poles,
evenly spaced
like monotonous clones.

Tapping the land line, the pole
demanded fancy branches
and deciduousness
but the phone company
refused, so the pole
interrupted all outgoing calls,
demanding to be a lamb,
and be brought back as Christ.

ides

The ides of March have come, and things are much worse for the world today than they were for Ceasar. Who really cares about Ceasar at this point. Still, given the nuclear crisis in Japan, this old literary reference is certainly getting a new chance at relevance and householdnamedom. Germany shut seven nuclear reactors for review.

I was thinking, what if all of Japan was rendered unliveable? Would there be a place in the world to re-settle the 127 million beleaguered Japanese? They certainly have emerged in all this as very humane and organized. Not one looting as far as I heard.

Anyway, I looked up 'ides' and it means the 'middle of a Roman month,' but the 15th of March is not the middle. There are 14 days before it and 16 after it. Let us hope tomorrow the situation does not deteriorate further.

And now for my daily grumble, from Yahoo! News, again:
"Japan Faces Radiation Catastrophe Threat"
I guess it's not technically wrong, but it sounds awkward. Does Japan face the actual catastrophe or the threat? I think what they want to say is the "threat of catastrophe." Being in news myself, I'd like to believe there just wasn't room for that "of..."

popgun and cloudburst

I got a black turtleneck for Christmas, a small that can be tucked in in the spirit of all things amphibial. It looks striking against the snow. The black turtleneck goes well with green, brown, tweed, pinstripes and grey. The black turtleneck also goes very well with black.

I made so many Christmas cookies I had to carry more than half of them into the new year: polar bears, sleighs, angels, crocodiles, squirrels, donkeys, Santas, churches and cats. What some of these have to do with Christmas I don’t know.

Like last year, my resolution is to eat more broccoli.
Like last year, this should not be difficult. If I eat four heads of broccoli I will surpass 2010 consumption.

I also intend to read Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, War by Sebastian Junger, and Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. My expectations are not high, a strategy that works for me.

On New Year’s Eve we participated in traditional German molybdomancy, a kind of divination. You melt lead over a flame then pour it into water. The shape the lead takes decides your fortune. M. got a dragon, which means “don’t get all worked up.” C. got a fish, which means “a bath would do you good.” Mine resembled a moon, which means “dreams will be fulfilled.”

It didn’t say whose dreams.

January 3 seems to me completely superfluous. I am wearing the black turtleneck. I would have preferred to stay home to watch 'The Lord of the Rings' triology a few million more times.

When I woke up, I asked, “where am I?,” a trick question posed only for the purpose of raising my bag-like body from bed.

super sad true story

On Tuesday night, the night she was supposed to fly, my sister had to cancel her Christmas visit because of European airport chaos. Poor us! My mother, who was to fly the same day, didn’t have to cancel, but won’t be here until Dec. 26. I’m considering taking a bunch of sleeping pills tonight and waking up Dec. 26. Sorry, I just pretty much had all the holiday joy sucked out of me. I'd put up the video of Elvis singing 'Blue Christmas,' but I hate Elvis. On the upside, I have earned great sympathy from my husband and kids.

Also nice is the deal with my son. I told him that for Christmas I’d like him to read two books for me, and after browsing though my Young Adult expert’s bookshelves (thanks NE), managed to find a couple titles available in German, both by Rick Yancey: The Monstrumologist and The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp. I am happy because I think my son may actually like these books.

I got books for my daughter, too, but she never needs her arm twisted. She went with me to pick up a Yancey book I ordered yesterday and came up to me at the cashier with an armload of “interesting books,” “just to show me,” you know, for my interest...