Walt Whitman and Regret

When I was a young and single mother, my mother gave me a copy of a first edition of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself . It was bound with a suede cover and I do not think it had a title on the outside cover. Mother had found it at an ephemera auction, or at Hershey one year, I don't remember. She presented it casually, as if the whole thing were a nuisance to her. I remember feeling humiliated upon receiving it, as if I had done something wrong to make her go out of her way to acquire and pass it on to me.

A year or so later, I started dating a co-worker who was studying to be an environmental chemist. At the time, he was unsure of which side of chemistry he wanted to work for: the good guys or the bad guys. Dow, Monsanto, or The Environment. As was my habit toward material things, especially gifts from my mother, who made them all impotent and complicated, I gave the book to this young man with the idea that it might possibly do more to serve the future of Earth in his hands than it would in mine.

It was, and is, a pattern of mine to give valuable personal belongings to others. I almost must give most everything away or I become overwhelmed. Now though, my mother is gone and I am at an age where I am ready to study Whitman by way of holding objects that were immediate, close to him, intimately connected to time and place...and I deeply regret giving this book away. I didn't see the man much after giving him Song of Myself. Not that that would have made a difference, I just wonder if it ever occurred to him that maybe, it was his place to not accept the gift, or to return it. Maybe he sold it or gave it to his parents. It's quite valuable.

Anyway, I wish I had that book again. I miss my mother, and it would be a connection to her as well. Maybe a deeper one than to Whitman. I am too overwhelmed and made tired by other recent events to see clearly on this.          

Unavoidable Cut

Led Zeppelin

"I'm Gonna Crawl"

I sit in the coffee shop where we agreed
rolling the brown diamonds of poorly ground
grounds over my tongue, tapping out the minutes
you make me wait. The wait is our little game.
A punishing borne to forge violent surrender.
You, off on another bender beat the pavement
peel rubber down to smoke, drive, drive.

They nibble on a lie, which feeds them the same
as would a truth. If a truth exists, it is slain, quickly.
I tire of the new order. You tire of the distance between
the lie of folded papers, iron sealed ink, Sunday's hall of mirrors.
It is almost too much for you to find me waiting.
You wanted a behaviorist, I am a humanist.
Still, I brought the first aid kit, you, the silk wrapped needle and thread.    

2nd Draft


I sit in the house where we agreed
the coffee house on Wikinden
rolling misshapen brown diamonds
on my tongue, sifted remainders
the bottom tapping out the minutes
you make me wait. The wait is our little game.
A punishing borne to forge violent surrender.
You, off on another bender beat the pavement
peel rubber down to smoke, drive, drive.

They nibble on a lie, which feeds them the same
as would a truth. If a truth exists, it is slain, quickly.
I tire of the new order. You tire of the distance between
the lie of folded papers, iron sealed ink, Sunday's hall of mirrors.
It is almost too much for you to find me waiting.
You wanted a behaviorist, I am a humanist.
Still, I brought the first aid kit, you, the silk wrapped needle and thread.  

Voices and Visions Biography Series

One of the greatest gifts to me on the internet is the large collection of open sharing (free education) documentaries, biographies, and academic lectures. My latest finds include two stellar educational series. The first is through South Carolina Educational Television. The series, Voices and Visions, is a thirteen part series of one-hour biographies covering several of the major canonical poets of the mid-to late 19th and the 20th Century. Below is a list of the poets covered with an embedded link to their program:

Elizabeth Bishop

Hart Crane

Emily Dickinson

T.S. Eliot

Robert Frost

Langston Hughes

Robert Lowell

Marianne Moore

Sylvia Plath

Ezra Pound

Wallace Stevens

Walt Witman

William Carlos Williams

Enjoy!

Another Brilliant Poetry Professor Discovery on YouTube!!

I ended up pulling an all-nighter watching poetry lectures on YouTube last night. Mainly, I spent the night engaged in such bliss because of modifying my search terms in YouTube. In the past, I have entered "poet documentary, long" or "poetry lecture, long" or the specific name of a poet",long" (20+ minutes), the best return on this having been the wonderful discovery of U Toronto's Nick Mount, whose lectures are honestly sublime (writing a bit about the overuse of this word for a future blog post). I almost decided not to embed the video here because it is such a granola bar of knowledge that I wanted to be selfish and keep it for my own. I mean, the professor is a lexicon of Emily Dickinson intelligence. If you can ignore the delivery, which is in a sort of monotonous flatlined long distance single sentence sounding brain dump. And, the impulse to scream at him through the screen to take a sip of water for God's sake! He speaks at record speed and grows parched as a result. This trips into nearly becoming a stutter on several occasions. Also, there are no visuals besides the original -the only- daguerreotype of Dickinson, placed side-by-side with a sort of photo-shopped version of Dickinson; where a curl and a flush to her cheeks have been added, possibly, to make her look less severe.

Frankly, ED might be the first alien-human hybrid. She has those wide planed eyes, the pale skin, the perfect egg-shaped head - one imagines her greeting Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters as he is about to enter the spaceship. In all seriousness, I make the alien connection because, after listening to this lecture, you are going to be absolutely blown away by her brilliance. Her mastery of language is among her greatest tools; she uses this to create the most layered, deceptively simple seeming, though HOTly (higher order thinking) complicated, quadruple meanings poetry I've ever encountered. She is the great aunt, if not the mother, of such poets as Marriane Moore, Sylvia Plath, Richard Hugo, Richard Wilbur, and many others, surely. Before I give too much away, here it is in full:



Beginning at around 44:00 minutes, the professor - sadly, we never find out his name, starts to speak to my present aesthetic perfectly. More on the Saylor Foundation, which is where this video came from, and their wonderful free bachelor certificate programs in the next post or two.  Enjoy!!
      
Correction: I meant to add the new search terms that I used to great success in the post above, but skipped it. The new search terms I used are: "poet biography, long" and just that slight change from documentary to biography led me to "voices and visions," a fantastic find! Read my next post.

Out of My Mind

You were, as a life I might have led
a different lineage along the bloodlines
quietly buried below the farmer's harrow.
A dose of grace had reset the record's spin
smoothly round another table.
Broken over someone else's bread,
the crumbs collect underfoot do not
lead to anyone's gingerbread fable.      


Had to catch these wisps before they fled, indignant and impatient. Will come back to it.

Excerpt from Wikipedia Page About Ruth Stone and an apology

As I was typing this, something kept changing my font size and I got frustrated and typed a very loud bird on here, sorry. I didn't mean to publish that bit, Please, carry on! Also, I cannot seem to paste plain text in this post so please excuse the misfit font color...

What's good is good, what's bad is good.

Had an earlier post entitled "Ruth Stone's Second Hand Coat" not become so very popular on this blog, I would never have sat down tonight to trace backwards how I came to the poetry of Ruth Stone and come upon the following quoted passage from Wikipedia:

Writer Elizabeth Gilbert tells a story about Stone's writing style and inspiration, which she had shared with Gilbert:
As [Stone] was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out, working in the fields and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. It was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barrelling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming...cause it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew she had only one thing to do at that point. That was to, in her words, "run like hell" to the house as she would be chased by this poem.
The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. Other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she would be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house, and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it, and it would "continue on across the landscape looking for another poet".
And then there were these times, there were moments where she would almost miss it. She is running to the house and is looking for the paper and the poem passes through her. She grabs a pencil just as it's going through her and she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. In those instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact, but backwards, from the last word to the first.[5]

This passage, I was meant to find. This is how I come to 80% of my best poems. Many times, I fail to honor the muse as she rushes through my body. I say to myself let me just finish this sleep, this drive, this walk in the woods, there will be time enough to write it down then. But, I rarely remember the exact phrasing, the essence of the idea escapes as if I had Alzheimer's disease, and all I can remember are wisps of feeling of what was so clear to me before. I take the muse for granted, I am ashamed to say, more often than I can afford to. I am better about it now that I am older. Respecting flashes of poetry when they come comes either when one is very young and able to drop everything to write, or when one is very old and must drop everything to write.   

A Man After My Own Heart

The world is not a scary place after all, if you trust what is inside you and let go of fear...there are good people out there.