I recently had occasion to remember my proudest moment as a contender for national Poet Laureate. I know we’re not supposed to reveal such things, but enough time has passed that I think I can speak of the grave injustice that was served to me on a platter of shame. (It’s writing like that that got me onto the short list.)

It was in the late 1980s or early 1990s when I was working in the marketing department at Interleaf, the creator of the first fully WYSIWYG electronic publishing package. At that point, being WYSIWYG — “What you see is why you get” — was novel because it was damn hard to put text and graphics on the same page in real-time editing mode. Plus, Interleaf’s text and graphics editors were ahead of their time, providing near typeset quality text, and integrated raster and vector graphics, all elements adjusting their layout as you typed. And much more. It was truly amazing software, and included functionality — including an extension language — that has still not been fully matched.

I spent eight years there learning about technology, including tech that presaged the Web, and about tech businesses. It was a great experience.

Then one day as I sat in my office, a poem flowed from me as if I were a teapot and the keyboard was a cup. (Again with the great analogies!) It turned out to be the poem that brought me to the attention of the Federal Department of Poetry, and I present it to you as best I remember it:

FuzzyWuzzy the Bear

FuzzyWuzzy was a bear.
FuzzyWuzzy had no hair.
FuzzyWuzzy wore a fuzzy wig.
FuzzyWuzzy wasn’t WYSIWYG, was he?

Or possibly the bear’s name was WhizzyWhizzyWig. Or maybe just WhizzyWig. Either way, it is a reference back to Ovid’s immortal “FuzzyWuzzy,” which was later stolen from the commons by the CoolTime Kids, with the copyright assigned to “Music Sales Corporation” which is clearly a cover for SMERSH, as exposed in the 1963 James Bond movie, “1 800 Kars for Kruschev.”

But I digress.

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Because it’s August and I’m at a lake:

The great blue is such an ungainly bird
that “heron” should be an explainly word.

It flaps so slow as it takes to the air
I could beat it by climbing stairs.

It’s great, it’s blue, it’s a little absurd.
A pile of sticks became a bird.

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I read in my alumni magazine today that one of my old teachers, Douglas Sturm, died on May 6.

The freshman seminar I took with Prof. Sturm modeled for me what intellectual discourse could be like. It set me on my course.

Prof. Sturm was sharp as a tack but never used his analytic skills to make things smaller. Rather, he modeled a way of inquiring into big ideas by asking careful questions, and then asking more questions. He was a brilliant teacher.

Only after I graduated did I learn that he was a committed community peace activist. That side of him did not show up directly on campus. But I would have been very glad to have him as a neighbor.

Thank you, Prof. Sturm. As with all the great teachers, you taught me more than you know.

By coincidence a couple of days ago I wrote this poem. (Remember, we are required to forgive one another’s bad poetry.)

Dead Weight

If the death of each we knew
were stored as we do corn,
we each would have to buy a mule
and load it every morn.

Poor mule it is who in our wake
clip-clops uphill and back.
Poor mule it is who for our sake
stays hidden in its track.

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There’s a terrific article by Helen Vendler in the March 24, 2014 New Republic about what can learn about Emily Dickinson by exploring her handwritten drafts. Helen is a Dickinson scholar of serious repute, and she finds revelatory significance in the words that were crossed out, replaced, or listed as alternatives, in the physical arrangement of the words on the page, etc. For example, Prof. Vendler points to the change of the line in “The Spirit” : “What customs hath the Air?” became “What function hath the Air?” She says that this change points to a more “abstract, unrevealing, even algebraic” understanding of “the future habitation of the spirit.”

Prof. Vendler’s source for many of the poems she points to is Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings, by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin, the book she is reviewing. But she also points to the new online Dickinson collection from Amherst and Harvard. (The site was developed by the Berkman Center’s Geek Cave.)

Unfortunately, the New Republic article is not available online. I very much hope that it will be since it provides such a useful way of reading the materials in the online Dickinson collection which are themselves available under a CreativeCommons license that enables
non-commercial use without asking permission.

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Everything happens by ones.
Each step
Each cobble
Each mile
Each leg
crossing a line.

Then in a moment
we close our eyes
and remember how
the sea’s front edge
paws at its shore.

April 16, 2013

Please remember that according to the official Rules of Blogging, on the Web we must forgive one another’s bad poetry

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I woke up this morning with this forming in my head. Afterwards, I realized it’s about my friend Michael O’Connor Clarke who died yesterday.

Evergreen

The yew that margins our yard
grew so implacably large
that it shoved off the walk
mothers with strollers,
and brought dogs to curse
at its succor for squirrels.
So, when the cold days set in
I did what the Internet said
and lopped and sawed
and hemmed past its quick,
revealing the brute as
a pile of scratchy sticks
without shape except
where it ends.

Now my yew is catching
leaves from more proper plants
that have learned by falling
that autumn is a lie
that winter smoothly tells.

My deepest condolences to Michael’s family. I cannot express the joy he brought to anyone within earshot, and especially to his friends.

Some links: his blog, a page of support, his tweets, tweets about him, joey devilla remembers him, akma celebrates him, Jeneane mourns the loss of a brother on the Net…

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You Barcelona birds don’t know how good you have it.
You give your city two stars
because once a tourist left you a crust that had some mustard on it —
Don’t eat the yellow bread, is that so hard to remember? —
and last February a pigeon bullied you aside.
You ought to come to my city some February.
Is there even a word in Spanish for slush?
Yeah, Boston would grow you a pair,
and then would shrivel them up until they make a high-pitched ting.
How you like them tiny frozen apples?
So why don’t you go back to TripAdvisor and fix your ratings
even if you have to make up a new login.
Try “A_Little_Perspective23”
or “WuzWrongDaFirstTime.”
Stoopid Barcelona birds.

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My friend Evelyn Walsh reminded me of a poem I wrote on September 12, 2001. I had forgotten it entirely:

They dug a hole in the ordinary yesterday,

And already the waves are smoothing its edges.

The earth’s weight

that pulls the tides

draws the bodies that fall

and holds fast the feet

that tomorrow will resume

wearing furrows into its brow.

Sept. 12, 2001

Yeah, it’s a little overwrought, but considering what I was feeling, it was underwrought.

And please remember one of the prime directives: On blogs, we must forgive one another’s bad poetry.

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I’ve been reading John Barton’s book Playing Shakespeare, which pretty much transcribes a series of televised master classes. It’s a pretty amazing book, in which Barton claims that Shakespeare’s lines provide clues to how they should be read — the irregular stresses in the verse, the changes from prose to verse and back again.

I googled around trying to find the original series, but found these instead. Here are two ten-minute segments. Spanning the two is David Suchet reading Sonnet 138 several times, receiving direction. (I think I personally prefer his second reading.)

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I was listening today to a podcast of an excellent On Point program, in which Tom Ashbrook interviews Arnold Weinstein about what we can learn from literature about the stages of life. Here’s a passage Arnold read from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. (I’m using a 2009 translation by G. Theodoridis — thanks!). These lines are uttered by the chorus:

It is obvious to me that those who shun moderation and want a longer life are fools.

The days of an overly long life are filled with pain.

Happiness eludes those who want to hang on to life longer than what the fates have allotted for them and in the end…

…the same attendant awaits him: Hades! Hades waits upon us all!

No ceremony, no wedding songs, no dances and no songs…

Just death!The end of us all is death.

The best would be not to be born at all.

But then, if he is born, the next best thing for him would be to try and return to where he came from…

…in the quickest possible time!

While youth and its careless mind lasts, no thought is given to what pain, what misery will, most certainly, follow.

Murder, mayhem, quarrels, wars will come before the inescapable end…

The hateful old age, frailty, loneliness, desolation and…

…your own misery’s neighbour, is even more misery.

And so, Oedipus like us, is old. Unhappy Oedipus! Bashed about like a reef facing north…

Bashed about on all sides by tempests of all sorts.

Never ending rain and wind crash over his head…

…fierce waves crash over him.

Now from West…

Now from the East…

Some during the midday’s light…

Some from the mountainous North…

…which the deep night darkens.

I’ve loved the bleakness of these lines ever since I read them in college. But I’ve always wondered whether we should read them as eternal truths that apply to us all, or as an anthropological glimpse into another culture. Today listening to them I had a different reaction: Man, have I had it easy!

When I was a youth, my careless mind was actually fairly morbid. I thought about death a lot. I still do. Yet, I think I did not have a vivid sense of “what misery will, most certainly, follow. Murder, mayhem, quarrels, wars will come before the inescapable end.” In fact, of those four, all I’ve directly experienced are quarrels. Murder? No one I knew has been murdered. Mayhem? Nothing that didn’t occur around a conference table. Wars? I missed the draft and did not serve, although like every other American, I have lived with some of the awful consequences of war. But that’s really not what Sophocles had in mind. He was thinking about the imminent sacking of a city, the cleaving of skulls, the starving of children.

Life sucked back then. To those of us in affluent countries, with a job and some health coverage, I wonder whether Sophocles would have sung a different song.

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