Americanathon

I thought this poem by James Galvin would be appropriate for today.

Americanathon

WAITING FOR THE NEW ice age to come along
Like a dawdling child from a previous eon,
Waiting for the homeless man to go on home
With his tired cardboard sign that says “anything helps,”
Waiting for a cure, waiting for the closeout sale,
The black sail, a new tarboosh and a tiny red car,
A new improved and safer war,
A harmless war, a war that we could win,
A brain tumor in your smart phone, an entitlement check
(Will you please check on my entitlement?),
Waiting for the bank hack, the backtrack, the take,
Waiting for a calabash, the calaboose, an acquisition,
An accusation, resuscitation from a total stranger,
Waiting for the finish line to explode.

James Galvin, from Everything We Always Knew Was True

More Baldwin: Whoever debases others is debasing himself

I was so impressed by The Fire Next Time, which I finished today, that I have to quote a few more passages.

This after Baldwin’s meeting with Elijah Muhammad, talking in the car to a young follower about the idea of black nation separating from the United States:

“On what, then, will the economy of this separate nation be based? The boy gave me a rather strange look. I said hurriedly, ‘I’m not saying it can’t be done–I just want to know how it is to be done.’ I was thinking, In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have. I didn’t feel that the things I had in mind, such as the pseudo-elegant heap of tin in which we were riding, had any very great value. But life would be very different without them, and I wondered if he had though of this.”

Later:

“If one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch. This is precisely what the Nazis attempted. Their only originality lay in the means they used. It is scarcely worthwhile to attempt remembering ow many times the sun has looked down on the slaughter of the innocents. I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. I think I know–we see it around us every day–the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads. It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That is not a mystical statement, but a most realistic one, which is proved by the eyes of any Alabama sheriff–and I would not like to see Negroes ever arrive at so wretched a condition… Continue reading “More Baldwin: Whoever debases others is debasing himself”

Still relevant

I was inspired by the movie “I Am Not Your Negro” to reread a bit of James Baldwin. I find his essays every bit as lucid and apposite as I did in the late 60’s. Here’s a sample, in which he is talking about his adolescence:

“I certainly could not discover any principled reason for not becoming a criminal, and it is not my poor, God-fearing parents who are to be indicted for the lack, but this society. I was icily determined–more determined, really, than I then knew–never to make my peace with the ghetto but to die and go to Hell before I would let any white man spit on me, before I would accept my “place” in this republic. I did not intend to allow the white people of this country to tell me who I was, and limit me that way, and polish me off that way. And yet, of course, at the same time, I was being spat on and defined and described and limited, and could have been polished off with no effort whatever… Continue reading “Still relevant”

Anyone who writes can appreciate this

from an interview with Troy Jollimore, poet and philosopher:

What lessons were most important to you as a student of writing?

I think what I most needed to learn was that the fact that I sometimes, indeed often, wrote things that weren’t very good and that did not mean that I wasn’t a good writer. I had this illusion, I think many people have it, that when you’re a good writer you have a kind of golden pen, your first drafts are wonderful, there is no struggle; the mark of genius is apparent in everything you produce. Which of course is insane! Your favorite writer, no matter who they are, produces lousy first drafts. And lousy second drafts. And slightly less lousy third drafts. Continue reading “Anyone who writes can appreciate this”

When Larry notices the garden

you know it has to be spectacular. Mostly, he doesn’t pay any attention to it except to ask for a handful of herbs or spinach. Right now, though, after the rainy winter and a few weeks of sun, it is so dazzling that it can’t be ignored.


 

 

 

 

 

The camera on the iPhone really doesn’t do it justice. Walking out in the morning is a glimpse of paradise. This poem comes to mind:

God’s Grandure

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
xxIt will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
xxIt gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
xxAnd all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
xxAnd wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
Continue reading “When Larry notices the garden”

Poems at Mill Valley Library

Last week the Marin Poetry Center cosponsored an event called “Stump the Laureate,” at which volunteers from the audience recited poems, and Dana Gioia, the California poet laureate, alternated with the audience, poem for poem. The idea was to keep going until we or he ran out of poems. But I don’t think he would have run out for a very long time. It was such fun, with many voices and many poems. Dana was going t6o recite sort of chronologically,  but wound up often echoing a poem by the same author or time period as the reciter who preceded him. Pretty nice trick!

Here’s a lovely poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that was part of the recitation.  We all agreed she is undervalued.

 Love Is Not All

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Continue reading “Poems at Mill Valley Library”

Shade

It’s been a really long time since I had an invention to post, but this week, with the return of the sun came the return of my shade problem.  We have a deck with a great view. Lovely to sit out on a sunny day. But it’s hard to get shade that moves with the sun. I’ve tried several umbrellas, tilting ones, straight ones, ones with overhanging arms, Coolaroo shade triangles, sheets with bungee cords that I adjust during the day, but nothing really did the job of shading the table and chairs without blocking the  view. The sun comes from too many different angles. What works best is just a standard umbrella in a stand that I move around. But the stand is so heavy.

Then I had the brilliant idea of putting the stand on a wheeled plant stand that was just sitting around. This way, I can wheel the umbrella around the deck to follow the sun. Continue reading “Shade”

One from Szymborska

When we were in Krakow two years ago, we went to an exhibit at the National Museum called “Szymborska’s Drawer.” It was a recreation of the home office of the Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska. It had her desk, her yellow typewriter, her bookcase, her postcard collection, many strange and delightful artifacts. You can see some photos here.

Born in 1923, Szymborska lived through the upheavals of central Europe, the invasion by Germany, control by the Soviets, constant political change and public hardship.

He poems are mostly deceptively simple and intensely moving,  as this one.

Children of Our Age

We are children of our age,
it’s a political age.

All day long, all through the night,
all affairs—yours, ours, theirs—
are political affairs.

Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.

Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don’t say speaks for itself.
So either way you’re talking politics.

Even when you take to the woods,
you’re taking political steps
on political grounds.

Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
and though it troubles the digestion
it’s a question, as always, of politics.

To acquire a political meaning
you don’t even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,

or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months:
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one.

Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.

Wislawa Szymborska
translated by Stanisław Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh