Reflections: The Weather Outside is Frightful

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I note that it's been almost a week since I've updated this blog. The primary reason for this, I guess, is that I've been doing very little reading in the past few days. I've been distracted by trying to follow the uprising in Egypt via the internet and television. I've been distracted also by keeping an eye on the succession of winter storms which have been rolling across the map. Some of these have been record-breaking; but, thankfully, not right here.

The final reason that I haven't been posting is that I've been writing an unusually large number of poems lately, which composition has taken up most of the early-morning time that I routinely consign to blogging. A couple of these poems can be read as posts below. A couple more of them are available by clicking their links on the "Rodak's Writings" sidebar to the left of this page. But to read the bulk of them, you would need to become my "friend" on Facebook. (Please, send me a request.)

The latest of these new poems, entitled "Sounds Like..." was inspired by my readings in the poetry collection, Giant Night, by Anne Waldman. She was in her early 20s when she wrote the poems in this collection. It was the late 1960s. She was married to her art and living in, or near, Greenwich Village, had just travelled to Europe, and was digging the Rolling Stones.

Giant Night reminds me--for all of those reasons--of Patti Smith's recent memoir, Just Kids; except that Giant Night is current reportage, while Just Kids is pure recollection. I was there, too, for most of it. Both women get it right.

Pray for spring.
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Reflections: Too Little Seen As Too Much

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Some weeks back, in the course of a discussion about my favorite modern religious philosopher, Simone Weil, Pentimento suggested to me that since I liked Weil, I would probably also appreciate the writings of Caryll Houselander. I seldom ignore book recommendations from persons for whom I have great respect, so I put the name of Houselander at the top of my “to read” list.

This past week I was able to have Houselander’s Marian contemplation, The Reed of God, delivered from the Annex facility of the library in which I work to the main campus, so that I could bring it home and read it. I began to do that this morning. Here, from the Houselander’s Introduction, is an excerpt that immediately caught my attention:

How dear to us St. Catherine of Sienna is, because she loved her garden, because she made up little verses and gilded tiny oranges to humor a difficult Pope. How close she comes to us in her friendships: in the motley company of poets, politicians, soldiers, priests, and brigands; men who idolized her; and not only men, for St. Catherine was not only the most dynamic woman in history but also the best friend to other women that ever lived. Such things almost make us forget that she was fiercely ascetic, that for years she was fed only on the Blessed Sacrament, and that she was an ecstatic: her agony for the world’s sin is hidden under the beautiful cloak of her love for sinners.

“…she was fiercely ascetic…” yet she befriended all kinds of worldly men. Fiercely ascetic, yet she functioned in the world with her sacrifices “hidden under [a] beautiful cloak of love… ” This is a mode of existence for which I have boundless respect.

After a youth and early maturity of hedonistic excess, I have found a certain amount of comfort in the practice of a kind of mild asceticism. I no longer eat for pleasure or entertainment, for instance, but only for nutrition. And I find that in eating a minimal amount of very plain but nutritious food I enjoy my meals much more than I did when what I was consuming was smothered in rich sauces and dripping with fat in its over-abundance. I rise at 4 AM on most days, in order to have quiet time to read and write, or just to think, or pray. I will not provide an extensive catalog of such behaviors here. I cite these few examples only because I have found that people seem to resent such behavior if I happen to mention it. It seems to anger them, as though the way I choose to live is somehow a condemnation of their own lifestyle choices.

It may be that St. Catherine of Sienna had good reasons, other than just not blowing her own horn, to play her ascesis close to the vest.

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Readings: This Caught My Fancy

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In the course of indexing a file, I came across this poem in typescript draft at work this morning and liked it:


Home

Our father owned a star,
and by its light
we lived in father’s house
and slept at night.

The tragedies of life,
like death and war,
were faces looking in
at our front door.

But finally all came in,
from near and far:
you can’t believe in locks
and own a star.
XXXXX~ William Stafford, from “All About Light”

UPDATE: Interestingly, when I came to the proof sheets in the back of the same folder, just now, after having already published this post, I found that whoever set the poem in type for publication had read the penultimate line as "you can't believe in looks," rather than "you can't believe in locks," as I had read it. I thought I was going to have to delete the post, since the word "locks" was what made it work for me. I then discovered, to my immense pleasure and gratification, that Stafford had corrected that "looks" when he read the proofs; "locks" was the correct reading after all.

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Rodak's Writings: Meeting the Challenge

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The challenge, posed by Stephanie Rogers at my writers' group on Facebook, was to look at the picture below and write a piece on what it was saying to you. I composed the poem below when I got home from work yesterday evening:








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Blue

Eddie saw
and his horn choked
and died
The mouthpiece slipped
from his lips’ skilled caress
his eyelids drooping
like the worn felt brim
of his porkpie hat
A hundred ashtrays
and blue haze eddying up
in the rising heat
of ten dozen candles
and a thousand tender lies
Eddie had seen
a red dress rise
and turn toward the door
guided by a pale hand
Bare arms
dark legs invisible
in the blue black gloom
of the falling room
Eddie blinked
as the zircon glitter
of the fancy comb
whose provenance
he had questioned in vain
wagged away
on the coif of a head
that was so goddamned wrong
The rest of the boys
all felt that horn’s last sob
in darkest depths
of their ancient souls
And Benny gave his bass
a twirl and slapped out a riff
to fill the gap
He nodded at Joe
behind his kit
and Joe tapped
out the down beat
Charlie sighed and bent
a blue note from a steel string
This was the jazz life
They could do ‘Blue Skies’
as a blues
Eddie could bring
his horn back up
and blow like he meant it.
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Readings: A Tough Pill to Swallow

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This morning I finished reading Leonard Cohen's poetry collection, The Energy of Slaves. Most of the poems were written in the late 1960s. The collection was published early in the 1970s. There are 116 poems in the book. Most of them are very short. Most of them have no title other than a number, although a handful do have titles.

It seems to me to be an angry, bitter book. The short poem I share here, number 114, seems to me to typify the world-view that Cohen creates with these works:


114

Every time my wife has a baby
she goes crazy
she sees the world clearly
and she goes crazy
We have to put her away
so we can get back to the war
Men and women are killed
right in front of the baby

To see the world clearly is to go crazy. I have to admit that it often seems that way.

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Readings: Art as Life & Vice Versa

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This morning I’ve been reading again in The ABCs of Robert Lax. Below is a rather long excerpt from a piece written by Alexander Eliot, a man who had maintained a decades-long relationship with Lax, beginning when they worked together at Time magazine in the 1940’s. He visited Lax in Greece, on Patmos, in the 1980s and his piece recalls that visit. I post excerpts from it here because it seems to me that what Eliot says about Lax and his art, is relevant to the poems I’ve written recently, especially the one (or two, actually) shared in my previous post:


The older he gets the more Bob comes to resemble a Byzantine saint, in looks & demeanor alike. That’s obvious to all, but I see something there which is more ancient still: a person standing in an open space, alone, well apart from the clustered parasols of piety. To me, Bob resembles a Siberian shaman, cradling his sacred drum, crackling with shock-power, vibrant with silent song.

Bob had fallen recently, & broken a tooth. ‘Jesus!’ he’d yelled as he fell. ‘The neighbors took that for a prayer,’ he told me, ‘which of course it was.’ The dentist who repaired him said, ‘I don’t want your money, I just want to be your friend.’ It’s fortunate so many people feel that way, since money is one thing Bob hasn’t got.

Bob has reached the conclusion that everyone really wants to be perfect. That goes way beyond Socrates’ notion that everyone desires the good. Is there even a path to perfection? If there were, Bob would probably be climbing it; in fact he’s doing something quite different, and far more productive. He’s tending his word-garden, tapping his sacred drum.

One day Bob remarked that e.e. cummings, Henry Miller & James Joyce had profoundly influenced his youth. ‘Mine too,’ I said, ‘but looking back they seem pretty contrived today.’ Bob disagreed. He argued that their intense concern with words on paper paralleled the modern painters’ obsession with paint on canvas.

The medium is not the message, exactly, but the message doesn’t matter all that much. Instead of exploiting words for illustrative or expository purposes (like me), the modern masters perform in an erudite & yet paradoxically childlike manner with words per se. This tradition, Bob told me, dates back to the Kaballah. It’s his own field of play, clearly.

I’m not certain that Eliot completely gets it. As the penultimate paragraph above indicates, Lax was not sure that he did, either. Nonetheless, Eliot’s observations illuminate some of the things I admire about what Lax was doing with his art—and with his life.
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Readings and Writings: The Only Way Is Up

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This morning I was reading again in The ABCs of Robert Lax, a collection of critical and anecdotal essays concerning the literary theory and poetic works of Robert Lax. The essay by Nicholas Zurbrugg with which I began my reading today kicked off with a Lax quote which I had already encountered in several of the other essays in the collection:

Starting at the top and moving down, sometimes even syllable by syllable…it’s a little like movie film. ~ Robert Lax

Zurbrugg enlarges upon this quote thusly:

xxAs Robert Lax suggests in the lines above…his poetry frequently evinces a peculiarly vertical, cinematic quality, in the sense that it flows downwards, word after word – ‘even syllable by syllable’ – somewhat like the successive frames of a film.
xxConsidered in terms of this trait, the poetry of Robert Lax – and most particularly, those works that he entitles ‘Movies’ – seems to invite partial definition as one of a number of examples of verbal creativity elaborating a distinctively vertical aesthetic, as opposed both to the horizontal discourse of conventional poetry, and the multi-directional, predominately geometrical constellations of concrete poetry.

I decided to continue the series of experiments I have been making based on my appreciation of Lax’s work by composing a ‘cinematic’ poem, employing only one word per line. Many of Lax’s poems in this mode are like time-lapse nature films where one sees 20 seconds of spring unfolding in all its busy perfusion, followed by 40 seconds of quivering summer, followed by 20 seconds of brightly desiccating and molting autumn, followed by 30 seconds of successive sheets of brilliant snow. My concept of a good film, however, is one that narrates a story. So the vertically oriented, ‘cinematic’ poem which I wrote does just that:

artist > shaman > theologian

first
let
there
be
fire
primordial
light
painting
the
cave’s
stone
walls
with
shadows
of
human
form
then
the
sooty
print
of
the
hand
which
next
would
outline
the
icons
of
great
beasts’
deaths
at
the
hand
of
the
hunter
a
correspondence
made
between
the
mental
conjuring
of
the
image
and
the
providential
guidance
of
the
hunter’s
arrow
thus
art
becomes
magic
becomes
religion
becomes
faith
man’s
transcendence

Having worded this piece to my satisfaction, I began considering that a celluloid film does not, as a physical object, actually move on a straight vertical track; it winds its way over the spools, off the reel, and behind the light and lenses of a projector. How to depict this, using the same words? I hit upon the device of arranging the words in four columns, using a boustrophedonic (‘as the ox ploughs’) orientation. But, in keeping with the cinematic concept, the poem would be arranged in vertical columns, rather than in horizontal lines. I constructed the poem using the ‘columns’ page set-up of Microsoft Word. Since this would not transfer to any of the online templates available at the various sites on which I wanted to share these pieces, I scanned the boustrophedonic version, after marking it up to demonstrate the directions in which the columns should be read:


I personally find this latter version to be more satisfying, in that the words of right-hand column climb upwards to the final word: transcendence, rather than descending to it, as they do in the strictly vertical format. This upward thrust to the word ‘transcendence’ seems most appropriate.

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