Happy Birthday Ted

My friends Bob and Ruth Enszer. Bob is retired from teaching chemistry at Arthur Hill High School in Saginaw, and Ruth works at a hospital where she does nursing. I met Bob when I taught chemistry at Saginaw High, the other public high school in Saginaw. Bob retired in 2000. He graciously allowed me the use of his digital camera today. And he bought two of my books. Yay!




Annie Ransford. She teaches English at Caro High School, and she was instrumental in securing the Roethke properties for posterity. She helped to found the Friends of Theodore Roethke Foundation which owns the Carl Roethke and the Otto Roethke homes. She organized the events that we enjoyed today in celebrating the 100th anniversary of Theodore Roethke's birth.




The Andersen Enrichment Center where, for two hours, we read poems by Theodore Roethke. Also, two videos were shown in the Enrichment Center: In a Dark Time which was made in the 60s, and Where Do the Roots Go? which was made in the 90s.




Linda is standing on the left and welcoming folks to the Enrichment Center. Mayor Seals (seated) is enjoying the festive atmosphere with her husband Eugene who just made it into the picture on the right. I taught their son Eugene chemistry at Saginaw High School. Mayor Seals told me her son is now going to be Director of Public Services in Buena Vista.





As you enter the Enrichment Center, you are greeted by the Welcoming Desk full of Roethke poems which are meant to be stuffed in your pockets.








A view from behind the Enrichment Center. The swans are a Marshall Fredericks sculpture. You can see more of them online at the SVSU website.







Tim Ross of Bridgeport. His passion is astronomy; he was looking for sun spots today. Don't know if he found any! He plays guitar & sings too, besides writing poetry.







Dave Romatz, retired English teacher. His wife Wilma is also a retired English teacher. She had with her a video camera from Midland Community Television, the public-access TV station in Midland, Michigan. She was running around getting footage here and there throughout the festivities.



Bill's wife Marie wrote a book of poems which he has in front of him here. Marie read 'Meadow Mouse' in the Enrichment Center after she told us the story of when she was a girl her mother wouldn't let her in the house until she had gotten rid of the mouse she had found.





Poetry people from Michigan State University. The Center for Poetry there is a new thing. Their e-mail is cpoetry@msu.edu. Sorry I don't remember their names better.







Roz Berlin with her mother Agnes' book of poems for sale. That is Tim's guitar next to her.








Marc Beaudoin who has written a novel, a book of poems, and at least one play. He directed the performance of 'Amadeus' at the Pit & Balcony Theater later this same day.







John Palen, a poet, journalist, and retired journalism teacher, among other things. You can find his books at Mayapple Press.







Rachel. She took a lot of pictures with what looked to me like a very nice camera.








Phyllis Hastings, Ph.D. She teaches poetry to inmates at the Saginaw Correctional Facility in Freeland and also to college undergrads at SVSU. In the summer of 2005, Marion and I taught at the correctional facility with her.








Betty van Ochten, a River Junction Poet for several years. She edits our Newsletter now.







Judy Kerman, owner of Mayapple Press. She conducts an informal poetry workshop at Barnes & Noble in Saginaw on the 2nd Monday of each month.









Joe Muenzer, another long-time River Junction Poet. He read a poem by Roethke titled 'Lull,' which was written in 1939. Joe, a retired professor of philosophy at John Carroll near Cleveland, made a few remarks about the poem. It's one of the few in which Roethke even approaches the idea of writing anything remotely political.





Ruth Averill (sp?)









Rosalie Reigle. She's retired from teaching in the English Department at SVSU, and she lives near Chicago now. She worked at the Mustard Seed Catholic Worker house in Saginaw, which was later renamed the Jeanine House.






Roz Berlin, another River Junction Poet. Retired from teaching art in public schools.








Ron Maxwell read 'The Bat.'








Marie read 'Meadow Mouse.'









Pat Yockey, an artist and a poet.









Lisa.









Stephen (Steven?) read the first part of 'The Lost Son' after sharing with us that he walked to Saginaw from Toledo after reading a few Roethke poems in a public library there. Nice pilgrimage.







Marion Tincknell, latest and greatest recipient of Saginaw's All-Area Arts Award. She is a founding member of the River Junction Poets and remains a pillar of our community as well as, with her husband Les, the greater Saginaw community.






Arts Activist Al Hellus. For ten years or so he organized Saginaw's Poetry Slams, and for ten years he organized the annual Rouse for Roethke in which volunteers read all of Roethke's poems (an event which takes about six hours to complete). He has a new book of poems out by Ridgeway Press.




Carol Lopez, former Treasurer for River Junction Poets.










Jim Piazza, an attorney in Saginaw.









Carnations provided by? There are three more like these on the other side of the podium.








Some of my stuff. The t-shirt says 'Center for Poetry;' the tote bag says, 'What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible,' and underneath that it says Theodore Roethke and then underneath that it says PoetsHouse. The book is Straw for the Fire, and the posters indicate events in Lansing next Fall.





After reading poems for two hours in the Enrichment Center, we headed up to the apex of the Court Street bridge for a few more poems. Annie is walking next to the car; her daughter is driving. Mayor Seals is reading 'The Saginaw Song,' and Marion is in the passenger seat.





Les Tincknell, on the left, designed the Andersen Enrichment Center. That worked out well since he's an architect. Tom Lynch, on the right, is a writer and an undertaker in Michigan. He read a few Roethke poems on the bridge with us.






Annie read two or three poems as well. One she read to her daughter but I don't remember which one. It mentioned an old maid though.








The Court Street bridge as seen from a bank of the Saginaw River.









A closer look at the bridge. See those wooden pylons sticking up in front of the concrete supports? I'd like to have small ones like that in my yard. I'd connect the tops of them with thick rope.







Roethke went to elementary school at John Moore Elementary, but it wasn't this one. The one he went to was at another location in Saginaw. This one was built in the 60s.







Across the street from the John Moore Elementary School is the First Presbyterian Church. This is where the Roethke's went to church. Ted took his sister June to Sunday School until it was nearly time for him to go to college.










































This marker is in front of the Otto Roethke House.












This is the other side of the marker.













The Carl Roethke House.





















The Otto Roethke House.























The Carl Roethke House is on the left and the Otto Roethke House is on the right.








The entrance to the Oakwood Cemetery where the Roethkes are buried.



















Otto Roethke's gravestone.









Helen Roethke's gravestone.








Theodore Roethke's gravestone.










June Roethke's gravestone.









The Roethke Family gravestones.










Two big oak trees near the entrance to the Oakwood Cemetery.








All these pictures I took myself on the day of this celebration of Roethke and his poems.

David Wagoner Birthday Reading

What

A poetical celebration of David Wagoner’s birth, life and poetry.

When
Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at 7:00 PM

Where
Barnes & Noble Bookseller
3311 Tittabawassee Rd.
Saginaw , MI 48603
phone 989.790.9214

Who should come
Join us if you love poetry or are curious as to what poetry is all about. Join us if you'd like to talk to people whose hearts and minds are more open than closed. Join us if you can agree or disagree with someone's opinion respectfully. Bring a book if you can. It’s OK if it’s from your library. Note: David Wagoner will not be joining our group.

Why
Find out what poems sound like out loud. Listen in on the group and then find a place where you can jump in and read something yourself. Great fun for the whole family. If you have specialized knowledge regarding our poet, do not hesitate to regale us with your story. Don't expect to leave our event with a definitive understanding of the poet or the poems but please do seek to experience and communicate the joys of poetry with others. Join in our informal discussion of poems we know and love and poems we are only just discovering. Better readers make better writers. Visit with our group where everyone's poetry is valued if not appreciated. If you have a smile to share be sure to bring it; otherwise be prepared to leave with one on your face and in your heart. If you're too far away to join us, create your own Birthdays of Poets Reader’s Workshop. Speak up now and forever share your peace. Tell (bring!) a friend.

How to find the organizer(s)
We are in the Poetry section, near the window that affords a view of Tittabawassee Road. The staff at Barnes & Noble will put up a sign that says 'This space reserved for The River Junction Poets at 7 p.m.' We'll be getting a few folding chairs to add around the coffee table there.

Details
Born (June 5, 1926) in Ohio and raised in Indiana, Midwesterner Wagoner has been initially influenced by family ties, ethnic neighborhoods, industrial production and pollution, and the urban environment. His move to the Pacific Northwest in 1954, the result of his teacher and friend Theodore Roethke's recommending he apply for a teaching position at the University of Washington, changed both his outlook and his poetry. Writing in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Wagoner recalls how "when I drove down out of the Cascades and saw the region that was to become my home territory for the next thirty years, my extreme uneasiness turned into awe. I had never seen or imagined such greenness, such a promise of healing growth. Everything I saw appeared to be living ancestral forms of the dead earth where I'd tried to grow up."

Although Wagoner has written numerous novels, Robert Cording believes that "it is Wagoner's poetry on which his reputation will rest," for Cording notes that for Wagoner, writing poetry is "a constant attempt to break through the barriers between interior and exterior so that whatever lies behind 'the dark window' might be revealed." Leonard Neufeldt calls Wagoner "simply, one of the most accomplished poets currently at work in and with America." "His range and mastery of subjects, voices, and modes, his ability to work with ease in any of the modes (narrative, descriptive, dramatic, lyric, anecdotal) and with any number of species (elegy, satirical portraiture, verse editorial, apostrophe, jeremiad, and childlike song, to name a few) and his frequent combinations of a number of these into astonishingly compelling orchestrations provide us with an intelligent and convincing definition of genius."

Excerpted from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=7134 accessed 5/24/08

For a Student Sleeping in a Poetry Workshop

by David Wagoner

I've watched his eyelids sag, spring open

Vaguely and gradually go sliding

Shut again, fly up

With a kind of drunken surprise, then wobble

Peacefully together to send him

Home from one school early. Soon his lashes

Flutter in REM sleep. I suppose he's dreaming

What all of us kings and poets and peasants

Have dreamed: of not making the grade,

Of draining the inexhaustible horn cup

Of the cerebral cortex where ganglions

Are ganging up on us with more connections

Than atoms in heaven, but coming up once more

Empty. I see a clear stillness

Settle over his face, a calming of the surface

Of water when the wind dies. Somewhere

Down there, he's taking another course

Whose resonance (let's hope) resembles

The muttered thunder, the gutter bowling, the lightning

Of minor minions of Thor, the groans and gurgling

Of feral lovers and preliterate Mowglis, the songs

Of shamans whistled through bird bones. A worried neighbor

Gives him the elbow, and he shudders

Awake, recollects himself, brings back

His hands from aboriginal outposts,

Takes in new light, reorganizes his shoes,

Stands up in them at the buzzer, barely recalls

His books and notebooks, meets my eyes

And wonders what to say and whether to say it,

Then keeps it to himself as today's lesson.

Source: Poetry (October 2002).

From http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=30899 accessed 5/24/08

Expect more at the Birthdays of Poets Blog. Go now.

All best and see you Wednesday,
Andrew Christ

Legal stuff
Your e-mail address will not be sold or used by me for any purpose other than to promote these events and the Birthdays of Poets Blog. If you prefer to not receive these messages, reply to this e-mail address (riverjunctionpoets at gmail dot com) and include the word ‘unsubscribe’ in the text of your message.

Parting Thoughts
Research indicates that better readers make better writers. Maybe this is why, in the Poet's Market, editors of literary magazines often recommend poets read more poetry. Are you not aware? You are a cultural event, and so is everyone else. Celebrate (poetry) together. May God continue to bless us mightily one and all. Be sure to thank a veteran for his/her service. Remember: only you can improve the audience for poetry. Please read, discuss and share responsibly. And vote.

-- "It is our goal to appreciate and improve our talents, to share our own work and to communicate the joys of poetry with others. Everyone's poetry is valued."
River Junction Poets Mission Statement

Found Poems

Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.

A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet.

Examples of found poems can be seen in the work of Blaise Cendrars, David Antin, and Charles Reznikoff. In his book Testimony, Reznikoff created poetry from law reports, such as this excerpt:

Amelia was just fourteen and out of the orphan asylum;
at her first job--in the bindery, and yes sir, yes ma'am,
oh, so anxious to please. She stood at the table,
her blond hair hanging about her shoulders,
"knocking up" for Mary and Sadie, the stichers 
("knocking up" is counting books and stacking them in piles to be taken away).  

Excerpted from http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5780 accessed 5/22/08.

The Wikipedia entry for 'found poem' agrees with the description given above.
According to Wikipedia, The first major example of the extended use of found 
poetry is Isidore Ducasse's Poesies.  Also according to Wikipedia, Isidore
Ducasse is the pen name of one Comte de Lautreamont. The Wikipedia entry contains
an interesting bit about his influence on the early Surrealist writers.

I expanded the notion of found poetry for a prose poem I wrote. The poem came to
me as I watched an episode of 'The Simpsons.' I don't have a title for this poem.  

My grandfather usually sleeps at
Mass. Afterwards, when he talks to
the priest, he imagines doves descending
on the priest and carrying him off
peacefully. Then my grandfather wants
to take us for ice cream.  


Except for the ice cream, this was a scene in a Simpson's episode.
Grandpa Simpson daydreamed while Reverend Lovejoy talked to him.
In his daydream, four doves quietly came and grabbed onto
Lovejoy's clothes and carried him away while he continued to talk
as though nothing had happened.

-- "It is our goal to appreciate and improve our talents, to share our own work and to communicate the joys of poetry with others. Everyone's poetry is valued."
River Junction Poets Mission Statement

Cool Web of Language

The Cool Web
by Robert Graves

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by,

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the roses's cruel scent,
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.

Cogent commentaries on this poem are available now at
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/298.html.

I'm guessing that Mr. Graves would agree with Mr. Sapir & Mr. Whorf in their theory that language
has an impact on thinking.

I would like to know whether sophisticated thought is possible at all without language.
I don't think it is. I don't see how it could be. Hm. What about chess? Maybe we could play it
just by logic, without using language. Or no, wait a minute. Logic can't happen without language.
Is that so? Hm.

Without language, we would still seek food to eat and water to drink, but would we still have
funeral ceremonies? Any rituals at all? I don't even know how to formulate a scientific
hypothesis because who doesn't have language? Dyslexics? Can we prove that dyslexics
don't have language? No. They speak and listen well enough to be understood.
And if we don't have any examples of people living without language then we can't investigate
a hypothesis about how anyone would behave without language. Interesting though that we
have examples of children who struggle to learn language at all if they don't learn it by age 8
or something like that. So that seems to me to be evidence that language acquisition is
socially mediated and not, as Chomsky would have us believe, inherently wired into our DNA
somehow. And we have case studies of children of deaf parents who sometimes struggle
to acquire language skills.

It's probably more complicated than what I'm trying to understand here but anyway
there's my two cents. Here is another site that addresses the issue of language and experience
and even knowledge assimilation.

Have a marvellous day full of every blessing!

-- "It is our goal to appreciate and improve our talents, to share our own work and to communicate the joys of poetry with others. Everyone's poetry is valued."
River Junction Poets Mission Statement

Theodore Roethke 100th Birthday

My Papa’s Waltz

by Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

This is one of the most anthologized of Roethke's poems. As an adult, Roethke mined his childhood memories for material. This one features Roethke as a child speaking the poem directly. His father actually died when Ted was a young (13 or 14 year old) teenager. This poem features a recognizable rhythm and rhyme which suits well the notion of waltzing which is a formal dance with clear expectations. The second stanza seems to me most closely associated with childlike thinking. I like the sense of abandon in 'We romped until the pans/Slid from the kitchen shelf,' and romping is something children do more than adults. The notion that 'mother's countenance/Could not unfrown itself' takes away the idea that mother could, if she wanted to, smile. A child would think this, not an adult because an adult knows smiles can be forced.

Another much-anthologized poem of Roethke's is 'The Waking.'

The Waking

by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

I've never tried to write a sestina, but I've heard it's one of the more difficult forms to satisfy. Roethke makes it look easy, and not only in this poem. John Ashberry has a humorous/serious one that features Popeye, Olive Oyl, etc. 'The Waking' is one of the better sestinas we have in the English language. It seems a bit abstract to me though. Is sleep here a metaphor for death? Could be. In the last stanza, what is the shaking that keeps the speaker steady? How could any shaking keep anything steady? He hears his being dance from ear to ear? What does that mean? This poem seems to me to have a philosophical aspect to it, and I can say the same for Roethke's poem 'In a Dark Time.'

In a Dark Time

by Theodore Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goesfar to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

As the Good Book says, 'Blessed are those who have not seen but believe.' (John 20:29) Perhaps the speaker is secretly grateful for the darkness that trains his eye to see. But what is the darkness? It could be something within himself. It could be a portion of history. In much of his poetry, it's hard for me to see whether Roethke is entirely within his own consciousness or if he is going outside himself when he talks about nature etc. The last two lines of this poem smack of Transcendentalism; they remind me of Emerson's line 'We are part or parcel of God.'

The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org) has a nice selection of Roethke poems online. http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=80965

We'll be celebrating the 100^th anniversary of Roethke's birth this Sunday, May 25^th, 2008 in Saginaw (where Roethke was born and raised). Be sure to stop by the Court Street Bridge and the Andersen Enrichment Center early in the afternoon to see what's going on with that celebration.

-- "It is our goal to appreciate and improve our talents, to share our own work and to communicate the joys of poetry with others. Everyone's poetry is valued."
River Junction Poets Mission Statement

Dan Gerber

The Rain Poured Downby Dan Gerber

My mother weeping
in the dark hallway, in the arms of a man,
not my father,
as I sat at the top of the stairs unnoticed—
my mother weeping and pleading for what I didn't know
then and can still only imagine—
for things to be somehow other than they were,
not knowing what I would change,
for, or to, or why,
only that my mother was weeping
in the arms of a man not me,
and the rain brought down the winter sky
and hid me in the walls that looked on,
indifferent to my mother's weeping,
or mine,
in the rain that brought down the dark afternoon.

Dan Gerber's most recent book is Trying to Catch the Horses (Michigan State University Press, 1999). "The Rain Poured Down" copyright © 2005 by Dan Gerber and reprinted by permission of the author.

From http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171141 accessed 5/17/08

Doing Nothing

When I passed him near the bus stop
on Union Square while the cops
cuffed his hands behind his back, while he
said, “I didn’t do anything,”
I didn’t either,
do anything but look away,
a little afraid they might cuff me
if I paid too much attention,
and walked on still wondering
what he might’ve done
and still more what I
might’ve done.

Christmas Eve 1944

He remembered his mother singing
“Silent Night” in German
and how odd it seemed, now
we were bombing the people
who sang in that tongue.

And just down the road, in a maze of barbed wire,
under the watchful eye of a gun,
soldiers who would sing Stille Nacht
were being kept in the snow,
waiting for the war to be over.

In the hall outside his bedroom,
a painting one of the men had done for his mother,
who supplied him with canvas
and all th
e colors he remembered
of his home in the snow that was falling there, too,
and where,
if the bombs weren’t at that moment, also falling,
or even more likely if they were,
his wife and two daughters might still be singing
Stille Nacht,
through what seemed to him, now,
the not so quiet night.

A Star at Dawn, a Bubble in a Stream

And what if it’s true,
as my mother insisted in her final years,
that she’
d never married, never given birth,
that the memory of my childhood is a story I was told,
or concocted from old books and movies,
that I may be the product of someone else’s dream,
set free like the second stage of a rocket,
to dream and imagine even more?

But then there are all the old photographs
and a birth certificate, though I’ve never seen it,
the recounting of my twelve-pound delivery,
my first spanking at sixth months
when I stiffened out in my high chair,
the legend of my learning to walk,
grasping the fur of my Great Pyrenees dog,
my first historical memory, the day the war ended
in August, two
days after I turned five,
my first day of kindergarten and six more
decades I’ve spun out
to convince you, imagined reader,
busy as you must be
with your own anthropic freight.

Three poems from A Primer on Parallel Lives, Copper Canyon Press, 2007.

From http://www.coppercanyonpress.org/catalog/dsp_bookDetail.cfm?Book_ID=1272 accessed 5/17/08

Dan Gerber was born (1940) and raised in western Michigan. He has published novels, essays, and of course poems. I haven't met him, and I don't know where he lives or works now. I found his book A Primer on Parallel Lives at the Grace A. Dow Memorial Library in Midland, Michigan where I live and work. See http://www.lib.msu.edu/coll/main/spec_col/writer/MWCDanGerber.html for more info on Dan Gerber.

Three Poems

Two poems that are not great but are nevertheless worth considering.

County Fair by Charles Simic

If you didn’t see the six-legged dog,
It doesn’t matter.
We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,

One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.

Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.

She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.

From Hotel Insomnia, published by Harcourt Brace & Company, 1991. Copyright © 1991 by Charles Simic. All rights reserved.

It seems a simple poem at first. I laughed out loud when I read it the first time and then again when I read it to a few friends. A six-legged dog at a county fair lays around most of the time. For the speaker, the dog seems to be about as interesting as the fact that it's “a cold, dark night/To be out at the fair.” When the dog's keeper throws a stick and the dog fetches it, the poem gets even more interesting.

First of all, the speaker of the poem is acting as witness and more. I didn't see this at first because the importance of the dog is downplayed (in line two) and because the “we” of the poem is never clarified. But the speaker is more than a witness when making the assertion “One got used to them quickly.” How would the speaker know how quickly you or I might get used to the dog's extra legs? It's an interesting assertion. It almost seems to me an allusion to the part toward the end of The Stranger by Albert Camus in which the narrator talks about how a man could get used to anything, even to living in the trunk of a tree. But one reason I remember “County Fair” as well as I do is because of the extra legs and the hilarity of the speaker's matter-of-fact description of them without being judgmental about the keeper's intent to hoodwink people in order to separate them from their money (Why else would there be a six-legged dog at a county fair?). So to me it's interesting that the six legs are treated so casually in the poem because it is those six legs that for me make the poem memorable.

The addition of the drunken girl's laughter and the drunken man's persistent kissing increase the value of the poem. The two of them get three of the poem's sixteen lines, which doesn't seem like much, but if we take them out of the poem, we lose the idea that the speaker knows of the humor in the dog keeper's attempt at deception by adding a pair of phony legs to her dog. We also lose the idea that the speaker of the poem is aware of people doing what they want without regard to what others are doing or thinking around them.

The last line adds still another dimension. Are the girl and man part of “the whole show”? Is the speaker aware of the unclear meaning of the last line? Finally, we are left with the dog standing there with the stick in its mouth, looking “back at us.” Maybe the dog has lost interest in the fetch and will not return with the stick. And we still don't know who the “us” is.

Here is another poem that I would say is not great but is nevertheless worth considering.

Why I Am Happy by William Stafford

Now has come, an easy time. I let it
roll. There is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind comes by and a willow listens
gracefully.

I hear all this, every summer. I laugh
and cry for every turn of the world,
its terribly cold, innocent spin.
That lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.

And I know where it is.

When I read this poem the first time, I was disappointed. I couldn't understand how a poet who had been writing and publishing for so many years could write something as simple and bland as this. In that reading, I didn't consider that Stafford may be using metaphor here. Perhaps the lake is an attitude. Whatever the case, the speaker of the poem seems satisfied in her knowledge and is not interested in telling where the lake is. Whatever the 'now' is, it is enough.

These poems seem to me to have in common the idea that any life will do and that what matters is love of self or at least respect of self. Speaking of self-love, it occurs to me now that self-love could be Aristotle's “prime mover.”

And now I come to Derek Walcott's poem “Love After Love:”

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Linda Pastan Birthday Reading

What A poetical celebration of Linda Pastan's birth, life and poetry.
When
Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Where
Barnes & Noble Bookseller
3311 Tittabawassee Rd.
Saginaw , MI 48603
phone 989.790.9214
Who should comeJoin us if you love poetry or are curious as to what poetry is all about. Join us if you'd like to talk to people whose hearts and minds are more open than closed. Join us if you can agree or disagree with someone's opinion respectfully. Bring a book if you can. It's OK if it's from your library. Note: Linda Pastan will not be joining our group.
Why
Find out what poems sound like out loud. Listen in on the group and then find a place where you can jump in and read something yourself. Great fun for the whole family. If you have specialized knowledge regarding our poet, do not hesitate to regale us with your story. Don't expect to leave our event with a definitive understanding of the poet or the poems but please do seek to experience and communicate the joys of poetry with others. Join in our informal discussion of poems we know and love and poems we are only just discovering. Better readers make better writers. Visit with our group where everyone's poetry is valued if not appreciated. If you have a smile to share be sure to bring it; otherwise be prepared to leave with one on your face and in your heart. If you're too far away to join us, create your own Birthdays of Poets Reader's Workshop – adaptable for readers of any age and community. Speak up now and forever share your peace. Tell (bring!) a friend.
How to find the organizer(s)We are in the Poetry section, near the window that affords a view of Tittabawassee Road. The staff at Barnes & Noble will put up a sign that says 'Reserved for The River Junction Poets at 7 p.m.' We'll be getting a few folding chairs to add around the coffee table there.
Details
JEFFREY BROWN: As I read your poetry there was a kind of ease to your writing. Is it easy to achieve that ease?
LINDA PASTAN: No, there is no ease in writing. The job is to make it by the end feel as if it flows easily. But each poem of mine goes through something like 100 revisions.
JEFFREY BROWN: A hundred?
LINDA PASTAN: Yeah, yeah, easily.
JEFFREY BROWN: What is it that you're looking for?
LINDA PASTAN: Well, I want every word to have to be there. I want a certain kind of impact on the reader or on myself when I read it, the sort of condensed energy that can then go out.
JEFFREY BROWN: You write a lot about your life, domestic issues, real-life issues.
LINDA PASTAN: I have always written about what's around me, both the surroundings here in the woods, but I mean, there's always something changing. When my children were small, there were a lot of small children running through the poems. As friends and family have started to age and die, there's a lot more darkness and death in them. But I think I've always been interested in the dangers that are under the surface, but seems like simple, ordinary domestic life. It may seem like smooth surfaces, but there are tensions and dangers right underneath, and those are what I'm trying to get at.
JEFFREY BROWN: Now, I read that you had started writing, you got married, you had children, and you stopped writing for many years.
LINDA PASTAN: Right. I was a product of the '50s -- what I called the perfectly polished floor syndrome. I had to have a homemade dessert on the table for my husband every night, and this was when I was in college I was married and then in graduate school. And I felt that I couldn't be the perfect wife and mother that I was expected to be, and commit myself to something as serious as my poetry, and I wasn't going to do that half-heartedly. It was all or nothing. And I stopped writing for almost ten years, and I was very unhappy about it during those years. And my husband finally said he was tired of hearing what a good poet I would have been if I hadn't gotten married. Let's do something about it.
JEFFREY BROWN: Now, you just have been given a lifetime achievement award, so I want to ask you, as you look back at your lifetime of work, what do you see?
LINDA PASTAN: From the time, and I was about 30 when I started writing again seriously, I've written a lot of poems. I like to think that they're good enough for someone to have given me an award for them, but you never know. Writers, I think, vary from thinking their work is absolutely wonderful to thinking it's absolutely terrible, why is anyone reading it? And I think most artists go through that... that time of doubt and time of assurance. And it feels good that someone from the outside says "Yes, it's okay, you're doing okay."

Excerpted from http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec03/pastan_07-07.html accessed 5/4/08

Linda Pastan was born in New York City, graduated from Radcliffe College and received an MA from Brandeis University. Her awards include the Dylan Thomas Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Di Castagnola Award (Poetry Society of America), the Bess Hokin Prize (Poetry Magazine), the Maurice English Award, the Charity Randall Citation of the International Poetry Forum, and the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She was a recipient of a Radcliffe College Distinguished Alumnae Award. PM/AM and Carnival Evening were nominees for the National Book Award and The Imperfect Paradise was a nominee for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995 and was on the staff of the Breadloaf Writers Conference for twenty years. She lives in Potomac, Maryland.

From http://www.nortonpoets.com/pastanl.htm accessed 5/4/08

Carnival Evening
Henri Rousseau, oil on canvas

Despite the enormous evening sky
spreading over most of the canvas,
its moon no more
than a tarnished coin, dull and flat,
in a devalued currency;
despite the trees, so dark themselves,
stretching upward like supplicants,
utterly leafless; despite what could be
a face, rinsed of feeling, aimed
in their direction,

the two small figures
at the bottom of this picture glow
bravely in their carnival clothes,
as if the whole darkening world
were dimming its lights for a party.

From http://www.nortonpoets.com/ex/pastanlcarnival.htm accessed 5/4/08

• Three of Ms. Pastan's poems are options for high school students competing in the annual Poetry Out Loud competition: Agoraphobia, I Am Learning To Abandon the World and The Obligation To Be Happy. More info at http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poems/poet.html?id=5253

• Ms. Pastan's poems have been read on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac as many as 34 times.

• About Pastan's The Five Stages of Grief, the poet May Sarton said, "It is about all her integrity that has made Linda Pastan such a rewarding poet. Nothing is here for effect. There is no self-pity, but in this new book she has reached down to a deeper layer and is letting the darkness in. These poems are full of foreboding and acceptance, a wry unsentimental acceptance of hard truth. They are valuable as signposts, and in the end, as arrivals. Pastan's signature is growth." from http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/749 accessed 5/4/08

Expect more at the Birthdays of Poets Blog. Go now.

All best and see you Wednesday,
Andrew Christ
Legal stuff
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Parting Thoughts
Are you not aware? You are a cultural event, and so is everyone else.

House for Sale

Yes it's true. I'm selling my house. 2217 Tennessee Street, Midland, MI 48642. It's a great place. More pictures and information are available at the Ayre Rinehart website.







I had thought about adding a nice big comfy wooden chair to my yard. I mean one with legs that are seven feet tall. The empty chair would be in imitation of the Jewish custom of leaving an empty seat at the seder meal during Passover for a spiritual guest. Isaiah et. al. are welcome at my humble abode any time.



I can only admire and appreciate the work artist Melanie Cole did for her 2008 Emily Carr Institute Graduation Project, for which she earned herself an A. She painted a huge Waldo on a rooftop in Vancouver, hoping Google Earth satellites will capture the image and that users of the software will be able to find her Waldo. Read more about it at her blog.


I am including Tom & Connie Messinger's picture here. They are the realtors most interested in getting my property sold. Call them at (989) 631-7000 and tell them you want to buy my house. They'll be happy to help with that.