Children in red & gray

 Another image from my mother's slides. I do not recognize a single one of these children, nor the location, but think this would make a great painting in the manner of Velasquez? Vermeer? Bruegel? I am going to go with Bruegel after all. It's partly the presence of the large red shapes. I love the textures of the brick floor. It looks like there might have been moisture in the cracks between bricks.

I know it must be cold outside, because we always tied up the heads of the little ones in scarves like this when it was very cold. Their heads and necks are all swathed. Why the boards? What is the golden shape at the top center? If one of my brothers has a perfectly simple explanation for this pictorial event I will let you know. In the meanwhile, let's all write our own poems.

Here is a poem by Brenda Hillman that also has children and strangeness in it. It is from her book Fortress, which was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1989. It is on page 15.

Saguaro

Often visitors there, saddened   

by lack of trees, go out   

to a promontory.

Then, backed by the banded   

sunset, the trail   

of the Conquistadores,

the father puts on the camera,   

the leather albatross,   

and has the children

imitate saguaros. One

at a time they stand there smiling,   

fingers up like the tines of a fork

while the stately saguaro   

goes on being entered

by wrens, diseases, and sunlight.

The mother sits on a rock,   

arms folded

across her breasts. To her

the cactus looks scared,   

its needles

like hair in cartoons.

With its arms in preacher   

or waltz position,   

it gives the impression

of great effort

in every direction,   

like the mother.

Thousands of these gray-green   

cacti cross the valley:   

nature repeating itself,

children repeating nature,   

father repeating children   

and mother watching.

Later, the children think   

the cactus was moral,

had something to teach them,

some survival technique   

or just regular beauty.

But what else could it do?

The only protection   

against death

was to love solitude.

My Mother's Photographs

Tonight I unzipped and uploaded some more scans of the slides my mother took in the Fifties and Sixties. I love the effect in this shot of my sister at our place caused, I guess, by sunlight on the lens. It was nice that she was wearing a long red spring coat, so you can pick her out of the green expanses. And it looks like the trees are all leaning toward her protectively,
She is a widow, now, and her four daughters all live in the town where she does, and 12 of her grandchildren do, too. And the youngest of her sons. Three other sons live elsewhere. Quite a family! And quite a time, our last half of the Twentieth Century.

For tonight's poem, let's have one by the Canadian painter and poet Lawren Harris (1885-1970)  who did his work largely in the other half of the Century from my sister, who was born in 1939, (She was a premature baby and was saved from that eye problem  (I think it is called retrolental fibroplasia) caused by two much oxygen given to newborns by the fact that at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady, all the incububators were in use by preemies who needed them worse that she did. Still, before she came home, my mother had time to knit her an outfit, blanket, sweater, hat and booties of soft peach colored yarn. Later, her husband had it framed and it hangs in her home.)

Oops, back to Lawren Harris! He worked very hard at  modernizing his painting, and achieved striking results. He was also interested in what we now call Modern Poetry. I had heard of the Group of Seven, Canadian painters who banded together to promote a more modern style, but I didn't know their names. Harris was a founder of that group. In addition to the stark Lake Superior paintings for which he is known, he painted and wrote poetry about the urban life he knew. The source for this poem is Lawren Harris in the Ward; his urban poetry and paintings, edited by Gregory Betts. The poem is on page 32.

Look at All of Us

Here, look at me
Going along my little way --
Here, look at you
Going along yours --
There, look at you-him and you-her,
And me-her and me-him
Going along theirs --
Each knowing what he knows
Or not knowing --
But each
Dragging one foot along
Behind the other
Up hill,
Or down hill,
Or along the gutters --
Look at all of us --
Take a long look.

Modern as this poet was, notice that he still begins each line with a Capital Letter, uses commas and dashes and ends with a period. I find that it is very hard for me to think of capitalizing the first letter of each line of one of my poems. I also like to punctuate in the regular way, and bring things to a stop now and then with a nice, definite, period. I also like to break poems up into stanzas and I often prefer stanzas that have the same number of lines throughout the poem. I think many of these preferences are unconscious, and not really based on anything that has been carefully thought about. I also don't like poems with short lines at the end; they look to me unbalanced, as if they could tip over. I think it pays to examine these unconscious, or semi-conscious biases, and see if new ways can improve our poems. And I've preached enough tonight, here in the still-unfolding Twenty-First Century.  Good night!

Taking Flight

In lavender chiffon and and on a day with just the right breeze to keep her in motion, she greets the visitors to Lavender Hill Farm outside Boyne City, Michigan. Early lavenders are in bloom now (some are still to come--I had no idea there were so many different kinds! And white ones!) and the moving air is gloriously scented. I loved the way her dress and arms move with the air, and come to rest when the wind pauses. I spent quite a while thinking about the idea for this human simulacrum and wondering who the artist is, and if she does it for love or for money. The white gloves seem like a double layer of stitched felt and have the right weight and substance to catch the wind and make such a fine confident walking illusion. The hat is perfect and the ropes of beads at her neck also!

Recently the mail brought the volume Black Aperture, by Matt Rasmussen (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) which  recently won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and thus wound up in the mailboxes of those of us who belong to the support group. Often it takes me some time to warm up to a new poet, but this was interesting right away, and not just because of the backstory, a brother's suicide. The poem I finally chose is this one.

747

The man who 

drew the first 

map was able
to see through

the eye
of a bird,

Fields speckled
with snow

are covered
in clouds

like dark faces
veiled twice

I have told
you too much,

forgive us both,
O sun,

O stainless fuselage,
weave us

between the veils
before we darken

and dip into
the twinkling net.

Each small town
a blemish

on the night's skin,
each city

a tumor of light.

Matt Rasmussen, op. cit. pages 8-9

There is a great deal to think about in a poem with such short lines, which starts out with
such a promising image. I found it surprisingly difficult to type the linebreaks and had to go back to
insert a return. Right now I am scratching a recent mosquito bite and cannot think about poetry anymore.
But I am planning to write a poem with VERY short lines. Wish me luck! Good night.

My Golden Baby Sister at the beach

I am still working with the slides taken by my mother from 1953-1970s. This was cropped from one of the earlier ones, maybe from the summer of 1954. The light is just about perfection, and the wet sand the perfect background color for the child's coloring. There is even some motion, as she digs in the sand. Mom had a good eye.

Because of the beautiful, tender simplicity of this picture, tonight I have selected some of the haiku of Hosai Ozaki, which Hiroaki Sato translates to be printed on one line. Each line is a separate poem, complete in itself. They are from the one of my favorite books:
Right Under the Big Sky, I Don't Wear a Hat, Stonebridge Press, 1993. Hiroaki Sato has dedicated the book to the poet John Ashbery. Surprises abound on printed pages! Pick up a book at random and look!

Having become a pickle tub weight, smug, a hunk of gravestone

My long-time-no-see face is reflected in the pond I've come to

A spider has caught a dragonfly under the eaves I'm living

Letting a lot of frogs croak I turn off the lamp and go to sleep

I ended up lending my only umbrella

Lake houses in a row, catching small fish, their life

The nail I missed cocked its head

With a face saying I caught something, a child came out of the bush

I go in and out of the back wooden gate, morning glories turn into seeds

The letter I'm writing lying down is peeked in a by a chicken

I walk with children, at our feet waves roll

I hope you can get to the beach this summer, if you want to! Sleep well tonight.

A Whole Roll of Film

My mother took this picture of me days before I left for college in 1953. Despite the fact that cash was short because we were fixing up our old farm, she used a whole roll of film! "You'll never be the same," she said, and it was true. I was gone to Arizona by the time the pictures were developed and only remember seeing a couple of them. These are all rare pictures of me without glasses, (which my mother had instructed me to remove) which I had been wearing since I was nine years old.
I've been working on a batch of these scanned slides today and yesterday; I want to get them tuned up, uploaded to Flickr, labeled, and shared with the rest of my family. It is fun to see these pictures, and also a little sad, because now (if I'm lucky) I have less time left to live than my whole 17 years up until that point. And my brothers and sisters (all younger) were each one of them SO terribly young!

Here is another poem from Dark Elderberry Branch; poems of Marina Tsvetaeva. The translation is by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine, page 15.

I know the truth

I know the truth! Give up all the other truths.
No time on earth for people to kill each other.
Look---it's evening; look, it's nearly night. No more
of your talk, poets, lovers, generals.

Now no wind, and the earth is sprinkled with drizzle,
and soon the blizzard of stars will go quiet.
And soon, soon, to sleep, under the earth, all of us,
us who alive on earth won't let us sleep.

1915

Read this short account in Wikipedia of Marina's life. It will make you relish the pleasures in your own life, I am sure. In the translation above, I am particularly fond of the "blizzard of stars" and the way the word "drizzle" chimes to that.  I also think the one word, "generals" introduces a topic of which all of us are aware, and about which there is nothing that we ordinary folks can do. Tonight, I was asked what "depleted uranium" was by someone who just encountered the phrase in a news article about a veteran's health problems, We read the article in Wikipedia. I'd do something about the way were have strewn and are strewing this stuff about on earth in many places if I could. Or if I could choose just one thing to "do something about" how would I choose?? Perhaps I'll go out now and look at the blizzard of stars, and try to think of some way to do something useful. Good Night.

Summer on The Farm, 1950s

 Here is another one of the family slides. I just had 1468 of them scanned, but you won't have to see all of them here. Eventually most of them will be on Flickr, but as I am cropping some and straightening some and color-correcting some; this all takes a while.These slides have been marinating for a long time, and the technology has improved.

Here are three of my brothers doing what boys did then. I think that is John in the air--but it could be Richard--how to tell?--with Robert and David as onlookers. This time in our family life is mysterious to me, since at that point I had left home. My Childhood Home was in the Village of Scotia, New York, where I spent my first fifteen years. But the boys spent a great part of growing-up-time here on The Farm. (Not that we grew much: a garden, some horses and some chickens; mostly children.) I love the great arching swing of this photo taken by my mother Wild freedom!

Tonight we have a work by Steve Kowit, who lives on the four-point-five acres near Chula Vista, mentioned in the poem. He has written a good guide to writing poetry called In the Palm of Your Hand; The Poet's Portable Workshop. Several fine collections of his poems have also been published. This is another poem from A Bird Black as the Sun; California poets on crows and ravens, Green Poet Press, 2011.

RAVEN

Squawks from a raven in what used to be Jack
Funk's field over the fence, scolding
me til I look up and see that the hills
are still there, that the day
couldn't be lovelier, sweeter. Susan Green's
little girls are chatting in singsong
up in the tree house,
in what used to be Dempsey's old place
to the west, & who will stroll over these four-
point-five acres of rolling high-desert chaparral
when we two are gone?----The tin barn.
The pump house and shed. That underground stream
from which we've been drinking
our fill these dozen years.
Who'll own all this dusty blue mountain lilac,
the aloes & roses & pines & bright orange iceplant?
Who'll walk in the shade of that live oak
under which Ralphie &  Ivan & Charlie
& Eddie are buried? Who'll watch the quail
flutter out of the brush & the rabbits
scurry for cover? Who will these granite
boulders & lovely agaves belong to
when you & I, love, are buried
& long forgotten?----Forgive me,
sweet earth, for not being shaken more often
out of the heavy sleep of the self.
Wake up! Wake up! Scolds the raven, sailing off
over the canyon, Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!
                                                                            by Steve Kowit, page 129

First, I want you to say, "Jack Funk's field over the fence, scolding . ." Say it a couple of times!
Then I want you to follow the ampersands through this poem and note how they support the structure.
Then I want you to read the whole poem out loud. Twice.  Sleep tight!

& 

1955, & all that "O things going away!"

I just got back the group of some of my mother's slides that I sent to be scanned! This picture that I don't remember ever seeing was in it. My husband has just come to my parent's house near Schenectady where I stayed during his basic training. It is near Thanksgiving and I felt very shy about meeting the train in one of my new pregnancy smocks. At the train station, I didn't recognize him when he got off the train. They had cropped his beautiful hair, given him military eyeglasses (he went away wearing classy horn-rims) and he had lost a lot of weight. In mid-December, I joined him at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, where he did the rest of his Army service, and our daughter was born.

I just sent the next to last batch of my parent's slides to Scancafe.com for scanning. I highly recommend their service! These slides (this is one of them, taken by my mother) are old, and often oddly exposed, since you had to set your exposure for each shot, and the slide film was pretty unforgiving. This was probably taken with a Contax or Contessa camera, both of which my folks got when my dad was on a business trip to Europe. I still have these cameras, and fiddle with them once in a while. I took the Contessa to college with me and it was my family camera for many years. I've had all those slides scanned, too, in the last two years.

Today (it's the middle of 2013!) we went on an excursion to a lavender farm. Fields of many different varieties of the scented stuff, some in full bloom, some of it not yet in bloom. Naturally there was a gift shop. And lavender goat's-milk soap for $7 a bar. You can choose the bar with little scratchy bits of lavendar flowers or the kind with no bits.

Tonight's poem was not published by Philip Larkin while he was alive. He left instructions that his diaries were to be destroyed and his assistants duly shredded them; it was a sizable job. He left instructions in his will to destroy his unpublished work unread; but he also gave his literary executors permission to publish what they wished. "The legal word for a will which contradicts itself in this way is "repugnant." Larkin's will was repugnant in this sense. It doesn't help anybody." (Isn't that wonderful??) This information and quote is taken from an article by noted British poet and critic James Fenton in the Summer, 2013 issue of the Threepenny Review, titled  "What Are We Going to Do About the New Philip Larkin," pages 7-10. This is a wonderful article, a review and consideration of Larkin occasioned  by the publication of Larkin's Complete Poems in 2012  by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Fenton  makes a good case for reading Larkin's published volumes in reverse order. He also mentions his surprise at the many unpublished, untitled poems that follow one another in the Collected without a typographical clue as to where a new fragment begins. You can figure it out, but he suggests it was a bad mistake for the reader. Fenton calls this the "yard-sale effect." This review is chock-full of information about Larkin's entire output.

Holiday

Clouds merge, the coast darkens,
Sunless barley stirs,
The sloping field alters
To weed-ribboned rock,
Waders and lichens,
The sea collapses, freshly.

A vacant park inland
Is roughened by wind,
Trees throng the light-oak chapel,
Storms-spots quickly round
A railed tomb of ssilors.
The house is shuttered.

Embedded in the horizon
A tiny, sunlit ship
Seems not ot be moving.

O things going away!

Philip Larkin, as reprinted in the Threepenny Review, Summer, 2012, page 10.