Ruthie Mae!

We were up at our Oxbrook Lake Camp as of July 3rd at dark, intending to stay until the 13th, But word came on the morning of the 5th that oldest daughter Erika, mother of four-year-old twins, was right on the point of having her Ruthie Mae Lea-Simons– a month early. We repacked in a hurry and drove the eight hours back to look after those twins for a few days. Mom and her baby got home on the 6th, and both are healthy as horses.

We are lucky enough as to reschedule without a whole lot of hassle, so will be gone this time from the 16th till the 28th of this month, Access to the Internet is pretty much noniexistent where we'll be, so I will likely fall silent a while.

I can't explain why grandfatherhood (and Ruthie makes us that five-fold now) should be so bracing, reassuring, and somehow peace-inducing. Nor would I ever have thought I'd love it as much as I do...and I expected to love it plenty. I think seeing a family into a third generation gives one a sense that things will somehow endure, no matter how we humans try to make that feel impossible. That Ruthie's birth date anticipated our own 31st anniversary by a mere three days seemed to us auspicious as well. We'd had some other form of celebration in mind than changing diapers and chasing kids around on their bikes, but then, what would have been better in the end?

A New Poem At Last

Papillons en liberté

         –Montreal Botanical Gardens, May 2014

My wife of these thirty-odd short years

(why can’t there be thirty more?) and I

look down on a riffled pool

that forms from a man-made flume and shines

under man-made greenhouse light.  These butterflies

have hatched in all their many scores.

We watch them dip and rise among

bright, quick-bursting bubbles. 

Spring blooms surround us in pent profusion.

We smile to recall the words of her sister’s son,

now far from the small blond child who spoke them:

Do butterfries fry good? he asked me.

We repeat the cute question as one.

In the wild some of them “fry” 3000 miles.

I know that’s true, but almost think it can’t be:

They’re swept off-course by the paltry air

stirred by their visitors’ ahs and oohs.

Still I know it won’t do, the trite equation

of frail and lovely. They’re tough. It must

be fleetingness that floors me. That’s what shows.

I’ve learned some names today: blue morpho,

and you, rice paper, all but translucent,

and postman, you, whose very name

now sounds so quaint, so obsolescent.

Hello-goodbye. Nice to have met you.

On Bibliodiversity

I recently came on this short reverie, which I'd committed to the page in anticipation of completing a collection of unfashionable essays. Its opinions may well belong to a man of 71 (68 back when he wrote it) who is set in his ways and who bristles at change. In fact, that's exactly to whom it belongs. Make of that what you will.

 On Bibliodiversity

            I am no theorist, nor even a man who thinks well about philosophy, politics, or social policy in their broader avatars.  My testimony, then, is only that of a writer devoted for the most part to ‘minor’ genres.

            There I stood at the top of a small local mountain in rural Vermont, where I live, the snow  deep, brilliant, crossed only by tracks of deer and coyote .  I was 68 years old, and had  just sold my ninth book of poems to an independent publisher, its editor/director the most sensitive and competent I’ve known. 

            There was some satisfaction in that, but just then another project announced itself to me: a book of essays on certain people and landscapes of  Vermont, and of a place in remote Maine where my family has had a fishing camp for four generations. 

            Many of those people would be well over a hundred if they still lived, men and women so attuned to their backwoods environments that in memory I still find it hard to tell in their cases where human nature ends and actual nature takes over. 

            Their culture and particularly their narrative skills have all but disappeared now, none of them left a written account of those lives and times, yet they had meant so much to me as man and artist that I felt I owed them a tribute.

           

            An evil voice asked, Who will publish a book like that?

           

            A better voice replied, It’s what you want to write, so write it!

            

            As it happens, a certain New York house has since that morning expressed interest in that very volume. This is a ‘niche’ publisher, which caters to readers with similar enthusiasms to mine –canoeing, fishing, hiking, hunting.  There appear to be enough of them that  the house can survive on sales alone.

            To most publishers of poetry, non-academic literary criticism, personal essay and short fiction, however, government support is increasingly crucial, and here’s the rub:  the American hagiography of– The Market.  Despite the fact that unfettered U.S. capitalism lately produced disastrous effects at home and worldwide, an article of Market Faith is that  if it sells in plenty, then it must be valuable.  Efforts, especially from the Republican party, to stifle the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, crucial supporters of work that does not meet the market standard of value, are therefore unrelenting.

            Given the Latin etymology of the word, with its emphases on saving and

together, it strikes me as bizarre that the congregants in this faith regard

themselves as ‘conservatives.’

            As I stood on my snowy eminence, I remembered doing so on other hills when I lived farther south in the state.  From there, my prospect today would be onto out-of- scale new houses ... or else much older ones, lived in by single families for generation upon generation but now belonging to relocated suburbanites, who have entirely altered them and their surroundings. These newcomers seem oddly intent on transforming what they fled to into what they fled from.

            In a word, downriver from me a demographic revolution has occurred, native families –the ones so brilliantly limned by Robert Frost– forced out, consumerist culture imported, along with such notions as that no real town can endure without a five star restaurant, and so on.  

            This is conservatism, this sundering of community and tradition?

           A warning about the extinction of upper New England’s hill people may have less glamor than an elegy on the indigenous people, say, of the Amazon basin;  and yet the juggernaut of The Market and of Globalization is assaultive of both.

            Where am I going with such apparent divagation?  Well, the social transmogrification to which I’ve alluded in Frost’s territory  (and in the Latin-American rain forest) makes a lot of money for certain non-local entrepreneurs.  Similarly, if one looks at the best seller list of the NY Times, one finds it dominated by what we call page-turners, books that have scant regard for felicities of style or intricacy of narrative but seek, in effect, to ape the pace, dazzle and formulaic quality of television, film, and now the so-called social networks and video games– in a word, books which, to the delight of large interests, sell in a hurry and in large numbers.  As with real estate, what makes the most money becomes what’s most important.

            And yet some of us keep insisting on writing and reading the ‘minor’ genres, on the related urgency of language both precise and lyrical; we go on living, at least metaphorically, in precious and vulnerable little houses, which may be razed or ‘refashioned’ when the global market’s juggernaut reaches them, as surely it must.

            With respect to writers and readers of  American poetry, for example, these little houses have been and become more and more the sort of little publishing houses that I have stuck with throughout my long career– with one disastrous exception: I once sold a collection of poems to a company,  only eight per cent of whose assets lay in  publishing as we once knew it; the corporation, or so I was told by my excellent editor there, actually had much more invested in food for pets than in poets.

            My book sold well by my measure...but not nearly well enough to avoid rather quick consignment to a shredder; the pages I’d labored on were then turned into paper towel (another of the company’s investments). That fine editor got fired, probably for taking too many books like mine.  The executive officers wanted an 18 percent return, and neither I nor my poetic fellows would be contributing much to that.

            I’ve never had such an experience with a small press ...and yet, as I have hinted, these presses are heavily dependent on financial support not only from individuals of means but also from state and federal governments.  It’s not hard to imagine what may become of them if the dismantlers of such support for the arts prevail.

            Of course it behooves these publishers, along with their writers and readers, to pressure political representatives for aid to our less commercially viable arts. But I suspect, to make an analogy, that just as many more people watched bear baiting in Shakespeare’s time than watched his great tragedies, so today the poet, the essayist, the short fictionist all appeal to constituencies whose political power is paltry when stacked up against The Market or Globalization or– what is for us the same thing in many respects–  the producers of those page-turners.

             Do I sound like a pessimist?  I am.

            Now it may well be that our future lies in the world of cybernetics: online publishing, electronic books, Google, what have you?  I am all but innocent of that world, my own computer, for example, serving me solely as a very high quality typewriter and a machine for sending and receiving e-mail.  So I can scarcely offer an opinion one way or another on such a score.

            If that is literature’s future, however, I may live long enough to miss the feel of an actual book in my hands, the capacity physically to turn its pages, back as well as forth, and to regard favorite old volumes as they in turn regard me from their shelves.  I'll miss  the tiny Woodsville Bookstore across the river in New Hampshire, from which I buy all my reading materials, and with whose cheerful and literate proprietor I share tips on new authors; the chain Leviathans will have forced such a shoestring operation into nonentity.

            As I stand and look out from any local promontory, it is all too easy to imagine an immense, garish and costly modern structure standing in the vista, like some grand Random House looming over the crumbling small houses and shops of my actual, my metaphorical, my spiritual village.

Notes: 

The prose volume I refer to was A North Country Life, since published by Skyhorse early in 2013. 

The Woodsville Bookstore I thought I'd miss somewhere down the road has already vanished. RIP.

Denial

This summer, my friend and fellow Vermonter Gary Miller (keep an eye out for his excellent forthcoming short fiction collection Museum of the Americas) will be running a weekly writing workshop for recovering opiate addicts at the Turning Point Center in Burlington. He has asked me, a person living in his own long-time recovery, to visit in July.

Drugs did play a part in my long addictive disaster, but only a comparatively small one. Nonetheless, and though some disagree, I believe addiction is addiction, addictive behavior addictive behavior, and that that behavior is hallmarked by persistent denial that any problem exists. The phrase I could quit anytime is repeated, daily and all over the world, by people who don't have the proverbial snowball's chance in hell of quitting without help.

One has to "bottom out," to recognize that he or she faces a problem unsolvable by his or her own personal resources, before anything like light will show at the end of that hideous tunnel. We must recognize that help is available, chiefly, from those who have passed from their pitiable, hopeless demoralization into a life where hope is a reality and not a mere concept.

I don't know what I'll talk about at the Turning Point next month. I've found it best in such a circumstance to show up– and  to be honest. For one like me, that's harder than it may sound, because it's too dangerously tempting to present a neat, coherent story– which can too often be no more, excuse me, than bullshit. We drunks and dope fiends, after all, have made a lifetime out of bullshitting ourselves, telling ourselves neat and clever stories, ones that have blinded us from crucial truths.

At the risk, however, of self-contradiction, I'll offer a story here. It's from an in-progress collection of short essays, one that deals, precisely, with the curse of denial.

Old Country Song

My pal George and I have been in recovery from booze for about the same span of time. The way he tells his own story, or stories, however, has for some reason always especially resonated with me. He remembers most vividly one particular night, and whenever he does, he says his guts twist again, and mine twist too.

He was playing pool, and he reports how he’d lost all feel for cue and ball. He was shooting with this friendly Indian guy named Dee at a gin mill in Wyoming. It’s easy enough to be friendly when you’re robbing another guy blind. For the five hundredth time he’d run way over his limit of gin. He recalls that the racket inside the barroom seemed loud, then soft, like the sea when it washes in and out.  He always shakes his head, which that night had turned to mush. Again.

He kept telling himself he could play this game, damn it all, if only his normal light touch hadn’t flown south.  Of course he knew it was wrong in the first place to be in that stinking hall, what with his wife back there at the Roundup Motel with their three-year-old son. 

That morning the little boy had said, Wyoming Friday is Japanese Tuesday.  Maybe his wife had told the kid how time changes around the world.  The child was heartbreak cute –and all confused.  Who wasn’t? 

By George’s account, a tiny worm, one that could bite, hid under the clack of the balls and that ocean sound. The worm felt like conscience: this had been meant for a family trip. Still, too many years would go by before the damned worm got real big and gripped his neck and sat him down, and chewed right into his pride and broke him but good.

The worm would hiss and growl beside him when that time came; he’d be holding a handle jug of booze, a gun in the other hand; he’d be thinking about putting an end to everything. 

Just a few hours before the pool game, already wasted, his shaky morals gone, he’d tried to talk a barmaid into bed –or into his car, actually.  But she’d had her eye on some other dude.  So what the hell?  He didn’t want her. Not now anyhow. 

All he wanted was the lightness of touch again. At various points, he swore he’d stay away from another drink just long enough to get himself straight and get back on his game, and that would mean this mess was over. He’d be there with the family, on vacation, out west. He flat knew the change he needed was coming, and soon. When it did, he’d take his money back and then some; every time he got beat he got surer of that. It was nuts. He was nuts. So he might as well drink. He had to, of course. Christ, it was what he did. 

He was too strong for the fucking tight pockets, strong off the banks, strong each time he hit a lot-of-green shot.  And he always seemed to get stuck behind the 8-ball.  Dee, his two-hour buddy, kept on being friendly, but why wouldn’t he be?  Dee knew the touch was gone, if it ever did exist.

George had to be done with all this. Then he’d haul his sad ass back to his wife and son.  But he kept drinking, putting the balls in the rack, sticking his glass on the rail, and setting himself up for good, hard breaks.

Endre Ady: Strangeness and Tragedy

As I have indicated in recent posts, I’m a frequent participant in an annual meeting of P.E.N. in Slovenia. Another regular contributor is the charming Elizabeth Csicsery-Ronay, who lives in Budapest, where she both writes and translates poetry.

At this year’s conference, members concentrated on World War I, whose centenary we observe (one can scarcely say celebrate) in 2014. 

Elizabeth’s paper included a poem I found particularly compelling, one composed by Endre Ady (1877-1919), a major Hungarian-language author who was born into a family of impoverished Protestant nobles in Szilagy Country, then a part of Austria-Hungary and now of Romania.

For much of his short life, Edy was an editor of Nyugat, perhaps the most influential literary journal in Hungary’s history. Nyugat eschewed politics, but in other media Ady engaged that world with some vigor. Maverick by nature, he attacked both the nationalism of the more prominent contemporary parties, but also the anti-nationalism of the left.

After the fateful killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, Ady believed war inevitable, and he lamented the Austro-Hungarian elite’s apparent eagerness for it.  Though the following poem makes no direct mention of the horrific cataclysm that was the Great War, it eerily captures the strangeness and chaos that cataclysm meant for all.

REMEMBRANCE OF A SUMMER NIGHT

An angry angel beat the drum on high

Sounding the alarm on this sad Earth,

At least a hundred youths went mad

At least a hundred stars fell

At least a hundred veils were rent:

It was a strange,

Strange summer night.

Our old beehive burst into flame,

Our best colt broke his leg,

I dreamed the dead came back to life,

Our good dog, Brutus, went astray

And our servant, Mary the mute,

Burst into loud song

On that strange,

Strange summer night.

The worthless swaggered like heroes

And true men lay low

And finicky robbers went out to rob:

On that strange,

Strange summer night.

We knew that men were feeble

And bankrupt in love:

Even so, it was weird

The living and the dead on the turning wheel.

The Moon was never more mocking:

Never were men punier,

Than on that night:

That strange,

Strange summer night.

Dread bent over souls

with gleeful spite,

The hidden fate of his forebears

In every man dwelt deep,

Drunken Thought, Man’s once proud lad,
Heading to that grim and bloody wedding feast,

Was now lame and naught:

On that strange,

Strange summer night
I believed at that time, I thought

Some neglected God

Would come to life

And deliver me to death

And now, I live here,

Transfigured by that night

Waiting for God. I remember

That world-destroying,

Dreadful night:

That strange,

Strange summer night.

©  Translated by Elizabeth Csicsery-Rónay

On the late Paul Petrie

At the post office this morning, I found a card signifying that I had a package too big for my little box. It came from a woman named Sylvia Petrie, with a return address to a town in Rhode Island I didn't know.

The parcel was heavy, and when, full of curiosity, I opened it, I was surprised to find a heavy volume, the Collected Poems of Paul Petrie, published by  Connecticut-based Antrim House, founded by the gifted and indefatigable poet and– what? poetry missionary?– Rennie McQuilkin.

What a handsome volume it is, and how gracious of Petrie's widow (a painter and printmaker whose cover image is part of the collection's beauty) to send it my way!

Mrs. Petrie had written a very cordial letter, and with it enclosed a copy of one I had written to her late husband many years ago, in which I praised his 1984 volume, Strange Gravity. (The author had sent it my way immediately upon publication, as an unncessary but welcome thank you for having published some of its contents in New England Review, whose editor I was at the time.)  I spoke in my note of the collection's wonderful mixture of "deftness" and "grace." By that, I am quite sure I meant how taken I was by this writer's capacity to use both the most constrictive sorts of formal verse and free verse with equal agility and to equally moving effect.

I mentioned too that I was pleased by his gift of the book to me, because, "as I'm sure you know, it can get lonely in the House of Verse, especially when, like yours and mine, that house is located out of the usual way for 'career advancement.'" I was vain enough to imagine, that is, that by being ambitious for my own work, as Petrie clearly was for his, rather than for its promotion, I might produce verse that followed its own star, that I needn't get hung up on being a star myself. Paul Petrie, clearly, was not obsessed with reputation; and yet he consistently produced writing that was, to my mind, far superior to that of many contemporaries who were, at least in their time, more celebrated.

Petrie's collected poems, as I say, make a large volume, and I won't pretend at ten o'clock in the evening of the very day when I received it that I have managed more yet than to browse around, which I have done at some length and with the constant, sure sense that I found myself in the presence of genuine mastery. In due course, I intend to go cover to cover, more than seven hundred pages worth.

And all this for free. Mrs. Petrie mailed me a book whose cover price is $40, and I paid not a cent. Let me, however, assure readers that so far as I have seen, both from prior collections I knew and from what little I have gleaned from this one,  the volume is worth every penny of that and you'll do well to buy it.

I am grateful to Sylvia Petrie, and grateful that the world of letters included her husband's canon, into which I give the merest glimpse by reproducing a poem chosen more or less at random.

The Great Depression

Mid-day, mid-week, and father
stretched on the living room couch,
half staring up, half dozing–

and my aunt in the spare room weeping
behind closed doors
with harsh, convulsive sobs.

Consultations– late-night whispers–
two voices, tense with the clinking
of nickels and dimes, the computations of need.

Long lines edging the streets;
workmen loitering, begging
like off-beat Santas with black

stubble beards;
and in the factory on Livernois
the army of the great drill presses
hanging on air.

More stews, more ham-bone soup
laced thick with rice,
and waking long past midnight,
the whir of the sewing machine
stabbing into my sleep.

More hand-me-downs, more quarrels,
more fights at school–
Something hanging over the house
like a huge black veil–
at whose edges we played.

Sad message from Middle Europe

I am just back from my Slovenian conference, during which our P.E.N. group visited the Soca valley (in Italian, the Isonzo), remembered by Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. How sobering to compare the majesty and sernity of that landscape –the most beautiful, literally, that I have ever seen, despite my numerous trips to that nation– to what transpired there a hundred years ago this year: hundreds and thousands of deaths as the Italians faced off with the Austro-Hungarian empire's armies, which included the Slovenes, of course.

In some sense, I believe that western literature owes much of itself since that time to the bullet fired at Prince Ferdinand. Never again would western men and women look at the world and at human existence in the same way.

I met or re-met any number of gifted and thoughtful writers at the conference. One particularly impressed me, a Serb from Sarajevo, who had driven up with a friend who is Bosnian Croat, which simply indicates how futile and ruinous ethnic clashes can be, and how, given the right frame of mind, they can be healed. We all ought to know as much, but how quickly we can forget it.

Nor is the problem one restricted to that corner of the world, needless to say. The news was full of the Russian-Ukrainean crisis in Crimea; my heart wept to consider the more than two hundred school girls carried off by Nigerian rebels, whose leader claims that Allah commands him to sell each last one. Incredible? We need not go all the way back to the bombing deaths of four school girls in Birmingam, Alabama to recognize that our sense of American exceptionalism– it never happened (can't happen) here– is fraudulent.

But back to that Bosnian Serb poet, whose name is Goran Simic. (Though they are not related, he shares a last name with another Serb, this one originally from Belgrade, but now one of America's most distinguished authors: Charles Simic.) Here is a representative poem, though I am sure it loses something in translation.

A Scene After the War

 I'd never been aware how beautiful my house is
until I saw it burning,
my schoolmate told me, who had twenty pieces of shrapnel
that remained deep under his skin after the war.
He wrote me how at the airport he enjoyed
having upset the customs officials who couldn't understand
why the checkpoint metal detector howled for no reason.

I had never been aware I was a nation
until they said they'd kill me,
my friend told me,
who'd escaped from a prison camp
only to be caught and raped by Gypsies
while she was roaming in the woods.
Then they sold her to some Italian pimps
who tattooed the owner's brand and number on her fist.
She says you cannot see it when she wears gloves.

I recognized them in a small town in Belgium.
They were sitting and watching the river
carry plastic bags, cans,
and garbage from the big city.
She was caressing the hard shrapnel lumps
through his shirt
and he was caressing her glove.

I wanted to say hello
and give them a jolly photograph from the times
when none of us knew the meaning

of House and Nation.

                                 Then I realized that there was more meaning
                                      in the language of silence
                                            in which they were seeing off
                                      the plastic bags down the river
                                        than in the language
                           in which I would have tried to feign those faces
                                      from the old photograph
                                     that shows us all smiling long ago.