Open Mike, Week #3

My Poetic Muse sits in a little corner of my brain,

(looking a lot like Katherine Zetas Jones,

in that Zorro movie),

and she gives me bad advice.

That’s partly my own fault.

If you take your Muse out on Saturday night,

load her  up with Tanqueray and Wild Turkey,

and then pay any attention to what she tells you to do?

well then- you’re an idiot.

I want to make money with my words,

I told her. That’s easy, she said-

Write this down on a sheet of paper,

And you’ll make bagfuls of money:

“Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

Fill this bag with 10s and 20s.

No dye packets”.

Ha, I said, good joke.

Easy to make fun at the expense 

of a tortured, starving artist, and, wait-

Should I capitalize “Dye Packets” ?

My Muse told me there’s a ton of money

to be made writing poetry.

Just look at the classifieds

in the back of Parade magazine-

Hallmark’s hiring.

Making money with poetry is easy.

All you have to do is come up with

57 words that rhyme with “Anniversary”.

News Flash to my Poetic Muse:

There is not a single word,

in the entire English language,

that rhymes with Anniversary.

Of all the ones I thought of,

the one that came closest? Penury.

But I tried anyway.

Happy Anniversary,

Happy Anniversary?

Happy Anniversary,

Haaappy Anniversary!!

Fuck it.

Rhyme is over-rated.

Finally, after consuming 5 pots of coffee,

and the entire contents of that little plastic baggie

I found in the back corner 

of my roommate’s sock drawer (in 1997),

I lost consciousness at my desk,

and dreamed that giant pink Easter bunnies,

(Rhyming, carnivorous pink Easter bunnies)

were chasing me around the Eifel Tower.

I woke up to find that I’d used my keyboard 

to batter my monitor senseless.

Thanks, ironic Poetic Muse

(who looks startlingly like Katherine Zeta Jones).

Thanks.

Look, I told her, I want to write poems 

that make a difference in people’s lives.

Failing that, I want to write poems that

at least make me happy. Failing that- 

Wait, she said.  Tell me the truth!

OK, I admitted- here’s the truth-

I am going to write a poem that gets made 

into the world’s first poetry-based

Hollywood blockbuster action thriller!

Leaves of Grass? Meet Die Hard Eight.

-He’s back, and he RHYMES!

It will be directed by Arnold Schwartzenager,

and star Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman, and-

 dare I hope?

Katherine Zeta Jones!

Buying a Book for Its Cover, Episode #40:

Open Mike, Week #2

So, last night I read again at Northampton Poetry's Open Mike- a real change-up from last week's piece, this one is titled "Kosovo" -

Our grandfathers built this stone wall-
It replaced a stone wall our great-great-grandfathers built,
around our little town square.
Today, from the safety of this crumbling wall,
I look out at our small, suddenly-empty square,
Where the bullets patter like raindrops on dusty, packed-earth,
And bright pieces of shattered wedding cake,
scattered like snowflakes, melt, in the hot July sun.

This is the square where I teased you and
you made faces at me so long ago;
This is the square where we first kissed,
waking from our childhood slumber
and seeing each other again for the first time.

This is the square where we held each other forever
on that day we said was the happiest of our lives,
before today -today.
This is the square where you lie so still
on that dust-packed earth,
and I crouch behind this wall
and listen to the patter of the bullets.

You always said your raven-black hair
was not black at all,
You said it had streaks and glints of chestnut red,
and you'd get angry that I could never quite see them,
but I can see them now.

And I think, how generous of your hair,
and how like you, to share that red of which you were so proud,
to share it with the dry, thirsty ground
where the red glints lie now, crimsoned splashes all around you,
soaking deep into the soil.

Just wait another moment, my childhood friend,
just wait another moment my grown-up love,
wait a moment while I screw my courage to the sticking place
on this pockmarked and shadowed wall,
wait a moment, and then I will come out and join you.

Buying a Book for Its Cover, Episode #39:

Buying a Book for Its Cover, Episode #38:

Haiku

Some Thursday morning Bookseller Haiku:

Yesterday the book
Was here. Now (sold), it's missing.
!@#$%^&&*((*&^%#@!!!!

Open Mike, Week #1

Last night I stood up during Northampton Poetrys open mike period and read something I’d written. It was a lot of fun, I’m glad I did it. Now I’m going to be even more self-indulgent and post it here. Friends who read my book catalogs may notice some similarity of tone and style -

Your poem is lovely, she said.
Quite charming.

Lovely? Charming?
I’d hoped she’d say moving,
thoughtful, thought-provoking,
intense, insightful, inspired,
brilliant, barn-burner, bad-ass!
You’ve written a poem that would make
Charles Bukowski weep with pride!!!

But lovely?
Charming?
How about-
cute?
sweet?
adorable?
preciousssss?????

It was a poem about a homeless man
who gets flattened like a pancake by a bus
on the 12th street bridge.
Lovely?
Charles Bukowski gently wept.

I wanted that poem to make her
question her beliefs,
fight the system, rage against the machine,
re-arrange all the paradoxes
and go help me save a little baby seal.

I wanted that poem to make her
quit her job as a bank analyst
and dress up in gypsy bohemian caftan
and write rude emails to Ted Cruz.

I wanted that poem
to make us have hot poet sex
on the floor
of T.S. Elliot’s kitchen.

Charming doesn’t get you there.
Charming gets you high tea
in William Wordsworth’s living room.

I dragged out the dictionary
and logged into my account
on Wiki-Synonyms dot com.
I pricked my finger and,
by the light of a black candle,
swore a blood oath
never to rhyme again.

I tore that poem open,
took a pail full of adverbs,
and stuffed that sucker up.
I removed every word suggesting
a color brighter than gray.
I called my cousin,
the career Navy man,
for some evocative words for
interesting bodily functions.

Well, she said,
putting down the poem,
her eyes fixed on the table,
her face the color of unripe dough:
This is- interesting.
Sort of like ... phlegm.

That’s cool.
It wasn’t getting me into
T.S. Elliot’s kitchen,
and the little baby seals
will have to make it through
another winter without us,
but at least it wasn’t fucking lovely.
It’s a start.

Books in the Valley-

That's Spelled How??

Spellcheck shrewdly points out that the miss-spelling "bith" could be either "both" or "bitch". Just to be nasty, I'm making it guess...

Black Friday-

A very cool video which gives black Friday new perspective-

Tomato Update-

I do love the taste of a freshly-killed tomato, its warm, firm body still screaming for mercy as you sink your teeth into it. We've got great soil for tomatoes here in the Valley, but I've struggled a bit finding the best way to grow them. I'd always used stakes, but then the blight hit here 2 years ago, and stakes can harbor blight unless you basically nuke 'em clean. Last year we tried pots, and the plants all died in mid-July.

This year I tried, for the first time, making a frame from which to grow them up strings. This is a commercial method- you tie the string at the top, tie it around the base of the tomato, and twirl the tomato around the string as it grows.

Here's how that's working-

May 11th
Tomato plants planted in the bed
(three days before the tornadoes ran through the Valley)-

July 6th-

July 28th-

No ripe tomatoes yet, but the plants
are LOADED with green tomatoes.
I think I have found the perfect way to grow tomatoes.

Garden Notes for Late April-

The bleeding heart by the kitchen are getting an early start-


Progress is being made on the back wall. Here is a shot of the area behind the wall "before" (well, "before-ish", -the entire area was overgrown with Burning Bush & grape vines when we started, and in this shot half the berm they were growing on has already been excavated)-


A here's what we have today, with everything cleaned up and several clumps of tall (well, they will be later) perennials already moved over from the front of the wall-


The bee-balm has been moved from in front of the wall and looks happy-

Want some poison ivy? Have we got poison ivy. Here's an example which must be at least a decade old growing up a tree. If you see anything like this, don't touch the "hairs" on the vine (they're actually tendrils the vine uses to grasp the bark), because they've got irritating oil in them, just like the leaves-

Oh, Honestly-

Truth in advertising was never one of Hollywood's strong points, but what if it were?

See more here.

Caption Contest-

I don't remember exactly where I found this photo, but I do remember that it was captioned- "Disneyland Asked Us to Never Come Back". Surely, however, there are other captions that could apply, so I am asking for your help. Go wild!

Judging a Book by Its Cover-

This is a fun post to write. When we moved I packed a number of 50s and 60s paperbacks into boxes, an d am just now unpacking them. This one caught my eye as interesting in a number of ways-

-to begin, we have that wonderful 1950s "American Family", a husband, wife (of the other sex) son and daughter (and all the same race- boring, but much admired back then).

-but then we have the huge test tube behind them, something of a fore-runner of later families, where science became an issue.

-and finally, we have the "moral life" thing, which I'll admit I viewed a bit skeptically, at first.

Still- it's a great cover, isn't it?

Then I Wikipedia'd Max Otto, and found... nuthin'.

So I Googled him, and found an extensive entry on something called "Philosopedia" which is now defunct, but still has a Google cache. I enjoyed reading this entry, and came to have great respect for Max Otto as a philosopher. I think some of you will also, so I will paste it in its near-entirety-

G. C. Sellery, of the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, wrote the following for Notable American Unitarians:

Professor Max Carl Otto was born in the historic town of Zwickau, Saxony, in 1876, and was brought to America by his immigrant parents in his fifth year. He went to school, through the sixth grade, in Wheeling, West Virginia, where his father kept a restaurant. He studied the Lutheran catechism diligently under a stern, old-fashioned pastor, and also learned to concentrate so thoroughly on what he heard in church that he could repeat the essentials of the sermon to his Lutheran parents. The resulting development of the power of concentration has stood him in good stead ever since.

Young Max served as a waiter in the family restaurant until he was sixteen. Then he went off to Cincinnati and Chicago on his own. In Chicago he was employed as a messenger for the R. G. Dun rating agency, and did incidental human salvage work on Sundays for the Y.M.C.A. This latter avocation led to a regular quasi-religious post in the Milwaukee Y.M.C.A., where he worked with boys. But recognizing the need for further education if he were to "grasp this sorry scheme of things," he gave up his job in the Y.M.C.A. and filled in some of the many gaping holes in his preparation for college by study in local academies. This accomplished, he was admitted, somewhat irregularly, to Carroll College, Waukesha, by President Rankin, who was not averse to stretching the rules in favor of a young man of obvious ability and persistence. From Carroll, after a couple of fruitful years, he moved on to the state university at Madison, where he majored in history under the great Frederick Jackson Turner, and secured a distinguished B.A. in 1906, with election to Phi Beta Kappa. (At Wisconsin also the rules were stretched—or rather broken—in his favor, for he, whose prose is so simple and strong, had not taken the required course in freshman English.)

Otto took up graduate studies in philosophy, and won his Ph.D. in 1911. The philosophy which Max Otto developed did not involved the abstract, deductive systems which ingenious minds have invented through the ages to explain the universe and man in whole or in part; it was not the sort of philosophy one finds in the older histories of the subject. Of course, he knows these systems, and he has been heard to say that he would give his right arm—"well, at least a little finger"—to read the lost treatise of Protagoras on Truth, for its possible anticipation of pragmatism, of which he himself is a representative. Pragmatism is, in fact, essentially an American product—native, democratic, homespun, redolent of the soil. It grows out of and is rooted in the common problems and common sense of men and women—refined common sense, of course, but still common sense, whether at work in business, agriculture, politics, economics, science, or religion. The underlying purpose of this philosophy is the enhancement of human life for all. "Humane, warm, and in the best sense simple," President Burkhardt of Bennington said of Max Otto, "his wisdom is pervaded by a profound sense of dedication to the enrichment of man's intellectual and spiritual life."

Max Otto's philosophy was conceived—and born—in Wisconsin. Of course his native endowment of mind and heart, his experiences of life, and his struggles for clarity of purpose underlie the vision he caught at the university. One may also safely assert that the elder La Follette's program for social betterment had a part in Max Otto's philosophy, and that it was nurtured, enriched, and confirmed by the teachings of William James and John Dewey—especially of John Dewey, his good and great friend.

Within the broad reaches of his philosophy, Max Otto, a man of genuine religious temper, places stress on the need of our age for a nontheistic faith. The writer ventures to quote from his own review of The Human Enterprise, written when that important book was published: "The theistic foundation of truth, goodness, beauty, and humane feeling being seriously weakened, it is an urgent requirement of the times that an alternative foundation be found for those who do not accept the theistic foundation. This other foundation the author finds in practical sympathy for the needs of mankind as they progressively reveal themselves in the working out of the actual problems which confront humanity."

Max Otto's abandonment of supernaturalism, which he pushed to its extreme limits in the debate with Wieman and Macintosh, involved him in serious difficulties almost from the beginning of his career as a teacher at Wisconsin. For it inevitably colored what became his great and increasingly popular course, "Man and Nature," where he takes a frankly naturalistic view of the universe. The first attack came in 1912, when clerical critics and their sympathizers in Madison and elsewhere in the state demanded his elimination from the staff as an enemy of religion, and, strangely enough, as a violator of the state constitution, which forbids sectarian religious instruction in the university. The stamina of the young instructor was put to a very tough test. It would have been an easy way out to give up the course; but Max Otto, after prolonged reflection, declined to do so. His students and not a few of his colleagues—some of whom hardly knew him—stood by him, and Van Hise, the great president, irritated though he was by this additional disturbance, in effect backed him up in his forthright commencement address of that year (1912), entitled "The Spirit of a University."

Freedom of thought, Van Hise here declared, inquiry after truth for its own sake, adjustment of the knowledge of the past in the light of the newest facts and highest reason—"this is the essential spirit of a university, which under no circumstances should it yield."

This spirit, President Van Hise proclaims, "forever makes a university a center of conflict. If a university were content to teach simply those things concerning which there is practical unanimity of opinion . . . there would be quiet; but it would be the quiet of stagnation."

Max Otto's student following and influence grew steadily in the following decades, and many liberal theologians gave him their enduring friendship. Nevertheless, he was exposed to three more bitter attacks. In the latest and fiercest of these, that of 1932, he, a professor in politics, was used as a whipping boy for his friends, the LaFollettes, and was assailed in press and platform as an exhibit of the pernicious radicalism—and atheism—they were said to foster. But again students and colleagues, in increasing numbers, rallied to his side, and again the president of the university, now Glenn Frank, defended him—as his predecessors had done in each of the preceding attacks—and his opponents were thereafter reduced to occasional and ineffective sniping. Max Otto had won—the university had won—a veritable "Twenty Years' War."

Professor Otto's knowledge of scientific method and scientific achievements is wide and deep. It is conveniently shown in a pocket-size book entitled Science and the Moral Life (I949), which consists of selections from his writings. (It is one of the series called "Mentor Books," published by the New American Library.) Mr. Otto was not blind to some of the perilous fruits of science, notably the atomic bomb, and he did not exculpate their propagators. But scientific method, he is certain, must be extended to the social and, of course, to the religious field, to what he calls the search for the good life. Scientific method, he makes clear, is a way of investigation which relies solely on disciplined empirical observation and rigorously exact proof, proof that extends beyond inner or personal conviction to outer or public demonstration.

The search for the good life, to Max Otto, involves not only economic reconstruction in the interest of the fairest distribution of earth's bounties to all men, but also political action to promote this distribution. "Unless enough Americans," he declared in 1939, "are willing to invest their idealism in the project of remaking our social order into a positive means for utilizing our resources for the common good, it will not be long before there will be no idealism to invest."

(Abridged from The Cleavage in Our Culture. edited by Frederick Burckhardt