Two Occasional Poems

Check out two poems in a new literary journal. One, "The Flannel Lord," is the title poem of my manuscript of short poems currently in search of a loving publisher.

Here is the link to the journal: 
http://www.stsebastianreview.com/Current.html

Dickens by candlelight--Day Twenty

A key character in Bleak House died recently of spontaneous combustion. I was surprised to find that, in fact, spontaneous combustion has some grounding in fact! (Dickens reminds his readers of this in his preface to the novel.)

Considering my experiment, the tragedy of Old Krook reduced to ashes has reminded me that death by fire need not be so mysterious.

So I came up with the following equation:

Candle+Bed+Book+Clumsy reader prone to fits of sleep= Fire Hazard

Also, me and fire: there are stories. In fact, if I ever pen a memoir one of my first title choices is My History with Fire.

If you, reader of this blog, were to write a memoir, what would you have as a title? Comment!!

Am I possessed? Dickens by candlelight--the Experiment Continues

I am not supposed to remember any of this.

Not the cold metal of the folding chairs. Not the stage. Not the dim outlines of the figures watching. Neither the suggestion, nor the trance.

I’m not supposed to remember any of it. Not even the fact that, for a few brief moments, I became, or rather, was possessed by the Late Charles Dickens.

Is there still a circuit known as the National School Assembly? Its members a bunch of traveling “entertainers” wandering from one rural spot of the Heartland to another? troubadours roaming from woebegone elementary school lunchroom, to high school gymnasium? Are school budgets such that they can still pay to book Bob the One Man Band, Simon the Mathematic Magician, Maryjo and her “School Violence is Wrong Puppet Show”?

In those days Wyoming schools had more than enough oil money to hire anyone who’d brave the winds and black ice to drive out 120 miles from nowhere to entertain a bunch of schoolkids. No one cared much for the likes of Bob or Simon or Maryjo. At least you didn’t have to sit in class for an hour, but truth be told most school assemblies suck. Real talent doesn’t play the Middle Schools in towns like Mud Lake, Idaho.

I bet the hypnotist didn’t come cheap, because everybody loved the hypnotist. I never expected him to call on me as a volunteer. I thought I’d be watching from the audience while freshman footballer clucked like a chicken, or an eighth grade cheerleader climbed on a chair, but then wouldn’t get down once she became convinced she was standing at the top of a cliff. It was late in the show for a special segment. I was an awkward middle schooler, lanky and thin as a GULAG survivor; I was used to not getting picked.

But he pointed to me. Said come up with about six others. He put us under, no watch, no candle, no psychedelic light, just his finger. Look directly at his finger, he kept saying. Then, snap. We were out.

I was especially susceptible to suggestion, he told the audience once I had fallen back against the metal chair, chin to chest, my legs sprawled on the floor before me.

“When I count to seven and snap again, Jon, you will awake, but not as yourself. You will awake as a famous person. Anyone man, woman, living, dead. You will not know who you will be until I snap my fingers, until I ask your name again, until I count to seven, six, five, four, three, two, one and snap.”

“Will you stand up please? Would you give us your name?”

“I will,” I announced to the audience in BBC British. “My name is Charles Dickens.”

It's like I told you--possessed.

On Breadmaking as a Metaphor for the Love of God

My good friend, Mark, drew my attention to this poem by Rumi. I had forgotten this wonderful piece. Leave it to a Persian to make you feel insecure, even one from the 8th Century:

from "Breadmaking" by Rumi: There was a feast. The king was heartily in his cups. He saw a learned scholar walking by. "Bring him in and give him some of this fine wine." Servants rushed out and brought the man to the king's table, but he was not receptive. "I had rather drink poison! I have never tasted wine and never will! Take it away from me!" He kept on with these loud refusals, disturbing the atmosphere of the feast. This is how it sometimes is at God's table. Someone who has heard about ecstatic love, but never tasted it, disrupts the banquet. If there were a secret passage from his ear to his throat, everything in him would change. Initiation would occur. As it is, he's all fire and no light, all husk and no kernel. The king gave orders, "Cupbearer, do what you must!" This is how your invisible guide acts, the chess champion across from you that always wins. He cuffed the scholar's head and said, "Taste!" And, "Again!" The cup was drained and the intellectual started singing and telling ridiculous jokes. He joined the garden, snapping his fingers and swaying. Soon, of course, he had to pee. He went out, and there, near the latrine, was a beautiful woman, one of the king's harem. His mouth hung open. He wanted her! Right then, he wanted her! And she was not unwilling. They fell to, on the ground. You've seen a baker rolling dough. He kneads it gently at first, then more roughly. He pounds it on the board. It softly groans under his palms. Now he spreads it out and rolls it flat. Then he bunches it, and rolls it all the way out again, thin. Now he adds water, and mixes it well. Now salt, and a little more salt. Now he shapes it delicately to its final shape and slides it into the oven, which is already hot. You remember breadmaking! This is how your desire tangles with a desired one. And it's not just a metaphor for a man and a woman making love. Warriors in battle do this too. A great mutual embrace is always happening between the eternal and what dies, between essence and accident. The sport has different rules in every case, but it's basically the same, and remember: the way you make love is the way God will be with you. So these two were lost in their sexual trance. They did not care anymore about feasting or wine. Their eyes were closed like perfectly matching calligraphy lines. The king went looking for the scholar, and when he saw them there coupled, commented, "Well, as it is said, 'A good king must serve his subjects from his own table!'" There is joy, a winelike freedom that dissolves the mind and restores the spirit, and there is manly fortitude like the king's, a reasonableness that accepts the bewildered lostness. But meditate now on steadfastness and clarity, and let those be the wings that lift and soar through the celestial spheres. --The Essential Rumi --pages 183-185

No Night Could be Darker Than This Night

For the first time in 372 years, a lunar eclipse coincided with the Winter Solstice. I watched it out of my window looking at St. Nicholas Park in Harlem, the Gothic Shepard Hall of the City College of New York in the background.

Below is the view I had from my reading chair. This was the eclipse in its final stages. For all of my talk about the value in slow things, I felt I was watching the whole of winter on fast forward.

I thought of this poem, "Twelfth Night" by Laurie Lee. Although its title alludes to the Epiphany, this poem feels like one for the Winter Solstice, especially a solstice when the hemisphere could see the light of a full moon blotted by shadow in a matter of minutes.

"No night could be darker than this night,

                           No cold so cold,

                           As the blood snaps like a wire,

                           And the heart’s sap stills,

                           And the year seems defeated.

                           O never again, it seems, can green things run,

                           Or sky birds fly,

                           Or the grass exhale its humming breath

                           Powdered with pimpernels,

                           From this dark lung of winter.

                           Yet here are lessons for the final mile

Of pilgim kings;

The mile still left when all have reached

Their tether’s end: that mile

Where the Child lies hid

        

For see, beneath the hand, the earth already

                           Warms and glows;

                           For men with shepherd’s eyes there are

                           Signs in the dark, the turning stars,

                           The lamb’s returning time.

                           Out of this utter death he’s born again,

                           His birth our saviour;

                           From terror’s equinox he climbs and grows,

                           Drawing his finger’s light across our blood –

                           The sun of heaven, and the son of god."  --"Twelfth Night", by Laurie Lee

I learned this poem when I sang it with a college choir in an arrangement by Samuel Barber. Here's great performance of it. (Oh, I miss my days as a choirboy.)

 

Any thoughts on the eclipse and on the longest night of the year? Comment!

You Want Me to Put Your Poetry Where?

Just over two years ago, around the time that I began writing my verse novel, I started another low-tech experiment. It started with flour, water, cheesecloth and a bunch of unwashed organic grapes thrown together in an old Rubbermaid bowl. A couple of weeks later, I was waking up twice a night to feed a little monster that lived by the radiator in my living room. I had given birth to a bouncing—or rather—bubbling, baby sourdough seeder.

I have been baking my own bread since 1995 when a friend gave me a baking stone and an odd little book called Brother Juniper’s Bread Book—Slow-rise as Method and Metaphor. She couldn’t have chosen a better book for me. “Brother Juniper” suggested his recipes which required two or even three rises could act as forms of meditation. This was revolutionary for me at the time. Little did I know how slow a bread could actually take to rise. Now I with my sourdough starter, I bake loaves that take as many as three full days. That's not just slow, it's positively glacial.

This autumn in his course on Writing in the Culture, David Groff brought up the so-called “Slow Reading Movement.” I was glad to have a name for my impulse to slow down the reading process. Here I thought I was just a bad reader. It’s probably just delusional to think that being really old-fashioned and out-of-touch could be…I don’t know, countercultural. Leave it to the Internet to make even the most marginal freak feel like he has a subculture.

Check out what the Guardian has to say about it: The Art of Slow Reading.

One of the first times that I workshopped my verse novel, someone first gave me the compliment that she found herself reading the book aloud to herself at home. Unquestionably, narrative verse slows the process of reading. The “economy” of poetry demands that a reader must slow down. If novels were recipes, then the verse genre is the equivalent of a three-day bread. All that time; all those carbs. 

Maybe that’s why another classmate’s accusation that my book was just a “vanity project” really is true. It’s vain enough for a writer to demand the reader’s eyes. The verse novel demands that you take the writer into your mouth as well.

Hey Reader, what was the last book you read that made you want to read it aloud? Comment, Please!

Will It Help Me Survive an Act of Nuclear Terror?

Pictured: bricked in fireplace, one BBB pillar candle (ivory) and a beat-up mirror someone threw out

Dickens by candlelight--Day Four
On 134 page of 852. Bleak House experiences its first suspicious death: young man, advanced stages of starvation. Profession: freelance copier of legal documents. Cause of death: drug overdose. Place of death: a low, filthy bed in a rented room over a rag and bottle warehouse. Drug in question: opium.

Before last night’s reading (with its victim reminiscent of one or two 21^st Century chaps I know), I made the mistake of checking nytimes.com, and came across the following article, full like a punchbowl with holiday cheer:

U.S. Rethinks Strategy for the Unthinkable

Imagine how glad I was to know that in the case of a nuclear blast, I should, stay put, hunker down, have a cuppa tea, let them that know tell me when it’s finally time for me to get the hell out of Sin City. With this news freshly in mind, I turned off the computer and the lights, lit up (candle—not opium pipe) and settled down for the evening’s installment of Dickens by candlelight.

By way of full disclosure, I read by not one candle light but three. In actuality it is one candle, but one of those fancy Bed Bath and Beyond numbers with three wicks.

Each night, I’ve been trying to figure how best to get the optimal light out of what probably adds up to about 20 or less watts of electric light. The main questions being: Where does one place candle? Where does one place self in relation to candle? And where does one place five pound book in relation to self and candle?

Ultimately, I decided to place the candle where I always have one, that is in the bricked-up fireplace in my room in front of the antique mirror I picked out of a trash heap on a Manhattan street. Second point of full disclosure, this does magnify my three wick candle’s light by two. (One might argue that this means I am reading by not one candle but six, but if you want to get technical with me Dickens has just the court for us to settle the dispute.)

Now as for the next two questions: placement of self and book. Optimal placement of self in relation to candle: still undecided. Last night it was on the floor, propped up by pillows, freezing in my longjohns, nearly recumbent like a certain drug overdose in the reading. 

Nemo, the Drug Overdose, with Hellcat

Now for the final question: optimal placement of book in relation to candle. This one is not up for debate. The book must be tilted toward the light and since candlelight is always uplighting (blame the laws of physics), this means that one must angle the pages of the book down. Are you picturing it? This, Mesdames & mssrs, is the hardest part of my experiment, reading with a book pointed toward the floor.

In bed after the overdose, I found my mind conflating the nytimes.com article with my experiment. I wondered if in the case of a nuclear holocaust that my newly found skills of candlelight reading might not help me (and those lucky enough to be with me) survive.

Provided that we find a proper basement or parking garage.

Provided that said basement has a library of Victorian Fiction.

And a candle.

With three wicks please.

Any requests of books for me to read to you in our bunker?