On Emily Dickinson and the Girl from Ipanema (also, cats)

Listening obsessively to a new (to me) band called Cotton Jones, which is something of note because over the last several months, most of my reading and writing has been happening while listening to Meklit Hadero’s On a Day Like This and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Master’s Hand.

I’ve listened to these albums so often that they’ve taken up residence in the deep limbic structure of my brain, to the point that I find that I can sing fluently (albeit atonally) in languages in which I am merely “proficient” (French) and in languages that I know not at all (Amharic and Portuguese). How to explain this? Iain McGilchrist writes:

“Poetry engraves itself in the brain: it doesn’t just slip smoothly over the cortex and language normally does. It has all the graininess of life, as it rips into being from deep within the limbic system, the ancient seat of awareness and affective meaning. Sometimes this is most obvious in a foreign language, because there the smooth, familiar words recede, and the sheer awesomeness of what is meant comes refreshed by the new encounter. As a child, I was bewitched by the poem of Heine that my father would recite to me while shaving. Im Abendsonnenschien…I remember thinking then that the real word for sunshine was Sonnenschein. So, too, something seemed missing when things disappeared: they only truly disappeared when they were verschwunden. This is odd because my father was a Scot and my mother English. It seems like a sort of latent knowledge.”

McGilchrist shares this reflection in the most recent issue of Poetry, the same one that has the most excellent essay by Lynda Barry, who gives a most fabulous interview that is on the Poetry Foundation’s website. She talks about how she used to lie about understanding Emily Dickinson then discovered that when she memorized Dickinson's work “the thing just unfolds….it’s like food coloring, when you just need a little drop.” She notes that Dickinson’s cadence works not only with “The Yellow Rose of Texas” but also with “Rhapsody in Blue” and “The Girl From Ipanema,” and begins to sing “I felt a cleaving in my mind” a la Gershwin, then a la Jobim, illustrating her point that poetry opens up in radically different ways in different contexts, or as you bring new experiences to bear.

McGilchrist writes that “Although I have favorite periods for music and painting, I do not for poetry. Poetry can occur anywhere there are words, even in daily life. After twenty years I still remember the response of a psychotic patient of mine when asked to distinguish between a river and a canal. Without hesitation he responded: ‘A River is Peace, a Canal is Torment,’ a line worthy of Blake. The forging of unusual links – metaphor – in which poetry resides depends on the right hemisphere of the brain, where the overall meaning of language, rather than mere syntax and semantics, is appreciated. It is here, too, in the right hemisphere, that experience is fresh, truly present, not pre-digested into re-presentation.”

Or as Cotton Jones sings of everyday miracles of transformation and regeneration:

There came yesterday a cat
I had no love for cats
I had no words for cats
But I love the cat
And now I’m a grandpa

You can't have it all (or, gather ye sneakers while ye may...)

On the last stretch of a multi-leg road trip I stopped in at a used book store housed in an actual barn on the road between Lancaster and home, despite the fact that I had made not one, but two trips to the used bookstore in town in the previous 72 hours and there were several bags in the trunk of the car that carried a bit of laundry and several pounds of books, some still waiting to be read.

There are times when I practice the speech I’d give to the folks from Child Protection Services when they ask me why household money went to volumes of poetry, comics anthologies, and cookbooks instead of to keeping the kids shod and fed. Truth be told, what I’ve spent in second hand books comes out, almost to the penny, to two pairs of new kids’ sneakers at the buy one, get one half off sale, which itself is reminding me of Liz Windover’s poetry cycle that revolved around memorable pairs of sneakers, so perhaps the trip to the Sketchers outlet was in fact seeding the ground for poetic revelations.

At the bookstore on Strasburg Pike, you set off the electric eye when you open the bottom half of the dutch door; as you try to figure out the layout of the place, a woman with kind eyes swings by to tell you “he’ll be out here in a minute,” and you begin to hope that you will find something that you actually want to take home with you since you’ve probably roused the proprietor from his early afternoon nap to make a special trip out to tend the shop. If you read mostly contemporary stuff, this may cause particular anxiety because most of the volumes on the dusty shelves have something to do with military history, or were published around the turn of the last century – the poetry section is very heavy on the names that have been assigned to the streets in the subdivision next to my folks’ development: Whittier, Longfellow, Tennyson.

Tennyson has been surfacing in unexpected ways: Patti Digh writes about finding her copy of “In Memoriam” which she read shortly after her father’s death and seeing her marginalia as a trace of her spirit and state of mind at the time. More prosaically, the poet is namechecked in an animated cartoon my son is obsessed with right now about a kid who can turn himself into mutant alien animals with the aid of a wrist watch; he wore his Ben Ten(nyson) sneakers to shreds over the schoolyear.

Amidst the shelves of 19th century volumes were several collections by contemporary poets, conspicuously slender, tall, and dustjacketed, like volunteers from the Ardmore Junior League Thrift shop crashing the local Assembly of God jumble sale. Someone has offloaded their collections of Garrett Hongo, Li Young Lee, and Alison Hawthorne Deming and I almost picked up Deming’s Science and Other Poems because I like it so much, and was trying to think of to whom I could give it; then I saw Barbara Ras’ Bite Every Sorrow. The cover image is a painting by Robin Eschner entitled Sallie Always Wondered Whether She Was Adopted. Here’s the opening to the opening poem:

You Can’t Have It All
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.

This is dedicated to the one I.....

In a review of the new Library of America edition of Shirley Jackson’s work in Slate, Laura Shapiro duly notes that the series includes Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Edith Wharton, and Eudora Welty, but then goes on to ask: “James Thurber and no Dorothy Parker? Alexander Hamilton and no Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Manny Ferber on film and no M.F.K. Fisher on food? I know, I know, it’s all women’s fault, too many kitchen tables and broken engagements, not enough whales and wars – which is why it is such a pleasure to welcome Shirley Jackson’s work into the ranks of chunky, black-covered books with pages as thin as strudel dough….Jackson took that kitchen table and ran with it.”

I’m wondering if high school juniors are still reading “The Lottery” in their language arts class and if that is still blowing their minds with its portrait of the lethal undertow of the currents of tradition and social conformity in a picture-perfect small town. Knowing her for that, and for The Haunting of Hill House I was surprised to discover Jackson’s Life Among the Savages which shares stories of raising four children in a rambling pile of a house in a Vermont town -- unlike the haunted houses of her stories, this one seems to share its secrets gladly, cuing its inhabitants on where to hang the wash in wintertime and such. Life Among the Savages includes the most perfect story “The Night We All Had the Grippe” which speaks of that fateful night by depicting the constant circulation of sick, solace-seeking family members between different beds with blankets, pillows, glasses of juice, jiggers of brandy, cigarettes, and the family dog in tow, presented as an exercise in logic.

Our household paperback edition of Life Among the Savages fell apart from repeated rereadings, so I’m constantly on the lookout for other copies at secondhand book stores, for myself and for others contemplating or experiencing parenthood, since it strikes me as sharing what really should be contained between the pages of all those tomes with titles like What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I found “The Night We All Had the Grippe” in the posthumous collection Come Along With Me, which was edited by Jackson’s husband and which appeared three years after her death from cancer. At the end of his introduction, he thanks “my present wife…for help in assembling, selecting, and editing the contents of the book,” which struck me as a bit…off, in a very Shirley Jackson kind of way.

This kind of contemplation/speculation about the baroque dynamics of authors’ personal lives is the kind of thing that the folks associated with the school of new criticism tried to wring out of literary analysis; here, one might turn to Jackson’s essay on “Experience and Fiction” where she notes that she wishes to quarrel with a statement made by a young writer that a particular experience “cannot be improved upon because that is the way it really happened. The only way to turn something that really happened into something that really happens on paper is to attack it in the beginning the way a puppy attacks and old shoe. Shake it, snarl at it, sneak up on it from various angles.” A strict formalist would say that to dwell on the life of an author would be to create a frame for a work that takes your attention away from the actual work on the page.

I’m also thinking of the desire to know more about an author’s life as part of a drive to think about the interrelations between stories, that to understand something about another’s experiences – the bad batch of strudel dough, the bedtime ritual, the broken engagements – that may open one’s imagination rather than shut it down, the way that I am forever intrigued by the life evoked in M.F.K. Fisher’s dedication to her book With Bold Knife & Fork: “For my grandmother, born Mary Frances Oliver, July 14, 1838, Dungannon, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland; died Mrs. Bernard David Hobrook, April 15, 1920, Whittier, California, U.S.A”

Joy Harjo and the work of transformation

So Joy Harjo has extended an invitation to readers of her blog (http://joyharjo.blogspot.com/2010/08/your-chance.html) to ask her readers if there is anything we would like her to address in her upcoming memoir, which is about “moments of transformation.”

I am very, very excited by the news that she is working on a memoir, and reminded of the fact that what I love about her poems like “The Power of Never” from her collection A Map to the Next World is that they offer the reader meditations on the power of language, reflections on processes of transformation , and a working through of the complicated relationship between the words we speak and the changes we enact.

The insight that many of Joy Harjo’s poems about the difficult, sometimes painful, and often beautiful work of transformation was brought home to me by a mathematician, Siggy Moore. In addition to being an astute mathematician, Siggy had built a reputation on campus as a gifted dancer, and in a Contemporary Women Writers class, as part of a group presentation on Joy Harjo’s work, Siggy invited all of us in class to stand in a circle and to do a kinesthetic exercise in which we were to act out our interpretation of central images in Joy Harjo’s work.

The group had come up with a list of images – crows, trees, perfume, snakes, flowers – that recur in Harjo’s poetry, and Siggy told us that he was going to choose one of the images, act it out and have the person standing next to him enact her own interpretation of what she had seen, and so on around the circle. As the interpretations were moving from body to body, we were supposed to try to mark the points at which, in our eyes, the image changed.

I never thought that I would be in a position in which I would be standing in front on my own classroom following a student’s directives that would have me take on the role of a non-migratory bird, which the person next to me saw as a tree -- or at least that’s what I think was what she saw. Suffice it to say that for me, the exercise became a profound enactment and reflection of the ways in which individual interpretations and actions can transform our communal vision of this crazy and beautiful world.

"Life! Get it while it's hot!"

A friend had sent me the latest issue of Poetry, which has a short essay by Lynda Barry entitled “Poetry is a Dumb-Ass Spider” in which her musings on the work of a spider that has spun a web outside of her 14th floor hotel room lead to thoughts about the interrelation between the execution of political prisoners in China and the commercial display of bodies in Las Vegas. This drives her to drink, and as she pops open the $9.00 beer from the mini-bar “a fragment of an A.E. Housman poem memorized two years ago presents itself as vividly as if someone were shouting it at me.” She gives us the poem:

When I watch the living meet,
And the moving pageant file
Warm and breathing through the street
Where I lodge a little while,

If the heats of hate and lust
In the house of flesh are strong
Let me mind the house of dust
Where my sojourn shall be long.

And she notes that “[o]nly now it means the exact opposite of what I thought it meant. It’s not about forbearance and taking the long view in life at all. It’s saying, Life! Life! Get it while it’s hot!”

I’m thinking about this as a I prepare to go to a memorial service at the Society for Ethical Culture in Brooklyn for Joannie Chang who, in her life, was a labor lawyer who devoted a lot of time calling out corporations on their crappy employment policies; she also spent a lot of time training for epic bike rides in Hawaii and Alaska to raise money for AIDS service organizations, reupholstering and refinishing furniture, singing karaoke, and baking cupcakes.

For the last several years, Joannie and her partner Luna were working actively to start a family and she birthed twin girls just two months ago, managing to carry the girls until their 32nd week -- a medical miracle in the minds of the doctors who discovered that Joannie's constantly upset stomach was not just indigestion but stomach cancer. After Joannie brought the babies into the world, she started a very aggressive course of treatment but passed away last weekend.

As I’ve been reading all the stories people have been sharing about Joannie’s vitality, strength, tenacity, good humor, and vision, I’ve been thinking of all the ways in which people continue to inspire and move us even after they’ve moved on. In the memories that we carry, in the words that circulate in letters, poems, and books, in the spirits of their children, in the reverberations of their actions, in the stories that their lives generate. Thinking that one of the ways in which we do justice to the lives of those whom we love is to continue to do our own work in a manner that honors their spirits.

When I’ve needed to lift my own spirits in these last few months, I’ve been turning to Alex Pearson’s interpretation of Sarpedon’s articulation of the hero’s code to Glaukos at the end of Book 12 of the Iliad:

“Friend, if we could live forever, unaging, you and I would simply walk away from this fight. But now that the angels of death and destruction swarm around us on the field of battle, let’s go get our asses kicked, or kick some ass ourselves.”

Mahjong in the afterlife, and pot roast today

I started rereading Kevin Brockmeier’s A History of the Dead last night, focusing on the odd numbered chapters, the ones offer a glimpse of the lives of those who have passed on, but who are still tethered by the memories of the living: these people are starting new businesses, renewing affairs, reading books they never got around to in their earthly lives, and tucking into ham and egg sandwiches in a city that has its own monuments, jewelry vendors, and a newspaper run off of a mimeograph machine by a guy who used to teach journalism at Columbia.

After a mysterious “great leaving” catalyzed by a plague that has swept over the earth, everyone left in the city is lodged in the memory of a young woman who is isolated in Antarctica, as part of a research expedition funded by Coca-Cola. So the city houses her parents and grandmother, several Coke executives, her best friend from third grade and her first lover as well as a guy to whom she once gave a pack of matches, an aggressive panhandler who used to be stationed outside her office, and a quartet of elderly Korean women who played mahjong in her favorite park.

One quibble with a scene set in a diner: we are told that a character can hear the tiles clicking from the booth where these women are playing….but who plays mahjong in a booth? You need to be at a square table so that your neighbor doesn’t see your tiles! Should pass this information along to Penelope, the mother of Brockmeier’s editor posthaste.

The book raises the question of what memories make up our lives, what encounters leave an impression that we carry for days, weeks, or months, what the web of the world would look like if we were the connecting thread. One of my favorite characters is one of the Coke executives who is, on the one hand, a complete asshole who is spending much of his time in this station of the beyond trying to figure out how to erase all signs of the corporation’s culpability in the spread of the deadly virus. On the other hand, Brockmeier gives you a sense of the guy’s full humanity – perhaps most acutely at a moment at which the character is cursing out the young woman left on earth since she never knew his wife, his girlfriend, or his mother, leaving him without his family in this other realm; thus a reader is left empathizing with his lyin’, cheatin’ self.

Regarding the moments that make up the days of our lives (cue the soap opera announcer’s voice here): I have been dipping back into Julie Doucet’s 365 Days, a sketchbook/journal published by Drawn and Quarterly in which she documents those experiences that usually seem to effervesce into the atmosphere: the trouble she has converting a computer file for a grant proposal, the day’s horoscope reading, making the perfect pot roast for a dinner with friends.

Maira Kalman, and a pop quiz

I have in front of me two books by Maira Kalman: one, Smartypants (Pete in School) which is a children’s book that involves a dog who eats an encyclopedia and momentarily earns most favored canine status in the narrator’s grammar school; the other, Various Illuminations (of a crazy world) is the catalog for a retrospective of Kalman’s work that was at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philly earlier this year; it is currently at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and will be moving on to the Skirball Cultural Center in LA (where I’m wondering if someone has done a Skirball Skeeball installation; thinking now of an exhibition of major cultural institutions reimagined as arcade games – the Guggenheim in NYC could be a great gumball dispenser) and then to The Jewish Museum in New York.

The retrospective includes a host of Kalman’s paintings, primarily gouache on paper, as well as a number of installations of objects -- such as some incredibly well-preserved onion rings -- set out in vitrines, on ironing boards, and in a pie chest. I think I first saw her artwork in the book Stay Up Late, in which she provided illustrations for lyrics to the David Byrne song; the characters who populate her books and paintings remind me a bit of the long-faced figures in Modigliani portraits, if those Modigliani models would ever be allowed to let their hair down and maybe get a hot dog from one of those street-corner vendors who fish the wieners out of water that has been on a high simmer since the spring of 1973.

I like Kalman’s focus on everyday objects – a Snickers bar, a hole punch, a rubber band -- as well as her eye for the extraordinary in the day to day – the sight of a disheveled sofa upholstered in a cabbage rose print on a city sidewalk, an elaborate black lace bow in a woman’s hair, someone’s carefully preserved collection of “mosses of Long Island.”

She’s also really good at creating visions which take the everyday stuff of everyday life and replacing it in a world that is familiar but just slightly more fantastical than the ones we have gotten used to. In Smartypants, the food in the cafeteria line becomes a boxed set of paints; Pete the dog devours a box of crayons, the math teacher’s pants, and a 34, 591 pound block of cheese; people’s hairdos communicate their ideas and anxieties, which for the narrator include the fear of being “stupid in front of the whole class” and pop quizzes – one of which concludes the book itself (a heads up for the wary: two of the question involve stating your name, and making a mistake will actually help you complete the quiz).

Pop quiz for today:

1. Who is the artist discussed in this entry?
2. Who is the person responsible for taking the author of this blog entry to the Maira Kalman exhibit at the ICA (hints: she is a former Maple Queen of Somerset County, and her superpower is the ability to instantaneously fall asleep while riding any form of public or private transportation)?
3. What is it about eggbeaters?
4. Name the illustrator of a recent edition of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (hint: the answer is the same as #1).
5. What do you want to eat for dinner?