. . . . . .

From "A Conversation with Harryette Mullen":

So I had the feeling we were growing up between the Anglos and, as we called them then, the Mexicans, you know. I was aware of Spanish being spoken; and in our community, a black Southern vernacular was spoken, which my family didn't exactly speak. When it came to class, our income and the neighborhoods we lived in, at first, were working-class, while our values and aspirations were middle-class, so in terms of class, we were also borderline. I also knew the prejudice of Northerners against the languid Southern drawl and the nasal Texas twang. I sound more Southern now than I did when I was a kid. And, you know, partly I sound more Southern, I guess, because I had to get with the program and blend in with my peers. My mother, my grandmother, the people who raised me, were from Pennsylvania. They were from Harrisburg. So my whole relationship to black English, like that of a lot of middle-class black people, is, you learn it to keep your butt from getting beat in the streets. You know, what we spoke at home was basically what I would call black standard English. You'd learn the vernacular on the streets and playgrounds in order to have some friends out there. The essentializing of black English as the natural way that black people are supposed to speak is problematic for me. Of course, I enjoy using different linguistic registers and I enjoy throwing Spanish words into my poems, you know, and I think that the variety of languages and dialects makes life more interesting. Standardization for its own sake is boring. We like to taste the different flavors, and that's something delicious about literature. You know, Langston Hughes' poem "Motto": "I play it cool and dig all jive and that's the reason I'm alive. My motto as I live and learn, is to dig and be dug in return." And the more people you can talk to and understand, the richer your life and experience can be, potentially. But also we learn these languages and these dialects and these ways of presenting ourselves in an atmosphere of coercion. There's the coercion of the school and workplace telling us: "You must speak this way or you will not be employable." Then there's the coercion of the streets: "You can't hang with us if you talk too proper." And on both sides there's coercion. So that's something to bear in mind when we're talking about language, that there is violence, there is pressure, there is force involved in making people conform to a particular way of speaking, writing and so forth.

***

. . . . .

Birthday #8. Pirates.

***

Meanwhile woke in time to run then slipped back into bed with some trick in mind about lying awake there for a few minutes longer.

***

More related to aesthetics, "good/strong"-ness, and the political. "A work that was radical was a good work," she begins. From "What Anti-Colonial Poetry Has to Say about Language and Why It Matters":

They felt annoyed when their friends did not want to discuss colonialism or did not want to go to the African film festival because they did not like that sort of stuff. What sort of stuff they would say defensively. It was like nationalism. They had been against it as they were for the radical at one time. But now they saw it as a tool, one that could liberate and repress, like most tools. And they felt obligated not to dismiss it too easily. They cringed when the woman who was at Cambridge sent them a paper in which she kept talking about all of American poetry as if it was one whole thing and she said that that poetry is guilty of nationalism when she meant something more like jingoism. Or when their work appeared in an anthology and in the anthology it was said that what was good about the work in the anthology was that it was anti-nationalist. They knew these feelings were silly, unfair, even damaging to their relationships with kind people. But they continued to find it impossible to talk about aesthetics without also talking about who took over who. It was like nature poetry. It enraged them if it didn't somehow address the human occupation of nature or culture.

--Juliana Spahr

(read the whole thing here)

***

. . . .

To continue with "good" and "strong": what has contributed to "a badness not be believed" in poetry: the PC ethical theme takeover, the loss of aesthetics: OR a reminder of what Marjorie Perloff said to Harold Bloom (in which Adrienne Rich gets flogged from the left and the right but good).

"If representation-by-category is to be the law of the universities," Bloom asks not unreasonably, "what 'minority' is to be excluded?" And again : "If what Walter Pater called 'Aesthetic criticism' dies, then what he termed 'Aesthetic poetry' must in time die also, since we will cease to know good from bad poetry."

Bloom's Exhibit A, in this particular instance, is the Best American Poetry 1996, the one volume he has refused to draw upon in selecting The Best of the Best. This is the volume edited by Adrienne Rich, whose name Bloom unaccountably refuses to so much as cite. "It is," he says of the 1996 anthology, "of a badness not to be believed, because it follows the criteria now operative: what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet." Here I think Bloom gives voice to the dismay many of us felt when Rich's selection appeared. Too many of the relentlessly PC poems in this volume are maudlin, self-righteous, boring, and ultimately just plain incompetent; I would add that Rich's rant against contemporary culture in her own introduction seems as unaware of the basic facts of economic life in late twentieth-century America as it refuses to acknowledge the genuinely radical poetry now being written.

I can understand, then, that Bloom is disheartened by such recent manifestations of what he calls the "Culture of Resentment." But I am not sure it is enough to respond to that culture by citing large chunks of Emerson and Whitman or by invoking Shakespeare as our tutelary spirit. To begin with, I would argue, Bloom is himself partly responsible for the shift from aesthetic (or formalist) criticism to the "cultural" model he denounces. For despite his current endorsement of the aesthetic position, Bloom's own perspective, at least from The Anxiety of Influence (1973) on down, has been much more thematic than formal or structural or linguistic; indeed, its central thrust has been primarily Freudian. Why Freud and not Marx? Why the vocabulary of clinamen and tessera and apophrades rather than, say, the Russian Formalist vocabulary of faktura and "making it strange" or the Bakhtinian vocabulary of dialogism and heteroglossia? And why the admission of Wordsworthian and Emersonian poets into the pantheon at the expense of poets of rival persuasions, beginning with Eliot, who, like it or not, has had such a seminal influence on Bloom's own favorite "spent seer," John Ashbery?

I would argue that the insistence on the Romantic paradigm as the paradigm has made Bloom curiously impervious to some of the most exciting poetry now being written. And that even in the case of his favorite modernist poet, Wallace Stevens, his refusal to deal with matters of sound, rhythm, and syntax in Stevens's "poems of our climate," has not exactly helped to pave the way for an aesthetic criticism. Indeed, the psychology of tropes that is central to Bloom's readings has a way of bringing us back to thematic motifs outside the materiality of the poetic language itself. Why is Ashbery's Three Poems written in prose, not verse? One would never know, reading Bloom on Ashbery. Such "technical" details are evidently judged to be irrelevant.

(The turn to Eliot "to pave the way to an aesthetic criticism"--well. That's a slightly offensive way of saying that the "minority" too could get with the program. But see the whole for yourself. Tell me about the "good".)

***

. . .

. .

From Rich Villar:

Ugh, okay, enough metaphor. Here's precisely what I mean.

Acentos is right now formulating a plan for building an organization for Latino/a poets, something modeled after Cave Canem. One of the poets involved with the planning brought up an excellent point, which has had me thrown for a loop for quite a while, to the point where I've had to seriously rethink some things. What she addressed, more or less, was the need for vigilance. That in building an organization designed to remedy a historical slight (the overlooking of Latino poets), it is essential not to become the very same structure you criticize by virtue of your very existence. Couple that with a new book I'm reading, entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, which argues that even the most well-meaning non-profits have become corporate caricatures of themselves, and you can see why my inner Keanu Reeves is currently muttering Whoa! to whoever will listen.

From Sheryl Luna:

This is an interesting conversation. I would like to add that one important thing for us to remember as U.S. Latino/a poets is that the work itself must come first. In a sense, ongoing discussions about Latino/as not getting enough attention with very little attention being to the work itself is problematic. Francisco [Aragon] has done a lot of work, but he tends to focus on connections more than strong work, and this in itself will not get Latino/a work anywhere in my opinion. We must support good work first and foremost. The new think-tank group El Labortorio out of Colorado hopes to put the focus on good strong writing first and foremost.

From Francisco Aragon:

I interpret the comment as saying: it is counter-productive to promote mediocre poetry by Latino/as. I don't think anyone would disagree with that. I know I wouldn't. Given that, what do we make of the comment below in light of what Letras Latinas is trying to do?

Is the writer of this comment suggesting Letras Latinas fold up shop; that its efforts do more harm than good? It borders on suggesting that---enough for me to write this post. Why am I bringing this up here? Because Letras Latinas' mission is one that has been articulated in good faith, and Letras Latinas is striving to do good by Latino poets & writers and welcomes reasoned feedback.

The most useful thing about the comment is that it has generated the question I pose as the title this post: "What constitutes 'strong' and 'good' work?" The comment doesn't specify what "strong" and "good work" means, nor give examples of (nor characterize) the work that led to the remark.

***


Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" came on the radio yesterday (of course it did) as we drove home from the grocery store, and eight year-old Trystan made the point that this song has made her most popular album. "Yes, well," I said, "it's too bad it's not good, given her talents." Later, with some irritation, he dragged me over to his computer screen to show me the album ratings. "That still doesn't make it good," I said. He put his hands on his hips, exasperated: "It makes it POPUUULAAAR. And I like it. "

Had he asked--had it mattered to him--"so then what makes it not good?" I probably would have admitted that I'm just being snobby and that he shouldn't follow my lead.

But I know there's more at stake for me. That I was tempted to argue with an eight year-old. That what I find distasteful and disappointing in Lavigne's latest success is not its aesthetic failures, but its ethics. That what makes pop culture so catchy is also what makes it predictable, repetitive, iconographic, and ultimately traumatizing. That what is reiterated in its structures and in its forms is a seductive denial of reality, a fantastic nostalgic imaginary erotic monologuing, the cost of which, obviously, must be everything as you know it, given that living is so full of limitations.

That much as I'm loathe to admit it, I like my art good and good for me, thank you very much. What I love about that inner Keanu Reeves is that his sense of awe is almost infallible. He lacks the sort of discernment that would know how to build mainstream empires.

***

How do you know you're on the margins? On the margins of what? Isn't there a mainstream in Latino poetry? Something that resides in the "popular" imagination as iconographic, self-reiterative, predictable, caricature-making, catchy? If I said: "you know, that Latino poet sitcom poetry" would you know what I mean?

I certainly don't mean any particular poet here. I mean something more profoundly generic.

***

Except that maybe when you feel you're really down and out, the fastest way to get on the main highway is to hitch a ride on somebody's muffler. Or to pimp your ride a lot like theirs--especially when ya'll have already got so much in common. Only I hate that the art then becomes static, monolithic, and so quick to be perceived that way. Why is it that when readers--my students, say--pick up a book by a Latino poet, they think they already know what they're in for? There are giants in the industry, don't forget, novelists who have powerhouse agents and publishers behind them--they write poems too--and those are the poetry collections that sell inside the clubhouse. Nothing wrong with that. But readers' perceptions might be based on a mere handful of books.

***

If I'm drawing on what I think is "good" and "strong" in poetry in general, I'd wish for a versatile art and a colossal diversity of (at least slightly iconoclastic) poets who were absolutely unwilling to position any one community effort against another. What Francisco Aragon has done, just about single-handedly with his many efforts, I think, is to create a stronger, more cohesive connective tissue (himself) between various established Latino poetry groups and organizations. He's worked hard to identify pre-published young writers and writers entering MFA programs and has helped them get their bearings in the publishing world and in the Latino writing communities through chapbook publication and word-of-mouth networking. He has (at last!) raised awareness in the poetry world about the rich diversity of work available to readers, should they choose to go looking. And he has provided venues, prizes opportunities, discussion forums, and visible publications where they didn't previously exist.

***

Has he been discerning? If you've met the man you know he's incredibly discerning--that if you've gotten on his radar it's partly because he's got a sense of where you might fit into his vision for the wider world of Latino poetry down the road. He starts to imagine ways he might be able to light a fire under your derriere should you need one. And next to him, you probably need one. It's a little bit dizzying if you lack that kind of vision. It might make you want the world to be a bit smaller, a bit more manageable and "good," and to call that effort strong work and foremost.

***

Well, that's a popular way to do things. It's become so popular to complain about the mediocrity of Latino poetry--to apologize, to assume we're not doing good work--that I hardly see how we stand to regain any sense of awe of the poetry we're writing without somebody calling even the most truly discerning among us Keanu Reeves. Oh we imagine he is, after all, such an easy target. The man (we are told) doesn't know how to buy a chair for himself.

And yet the man has become an empire.

***

summer: week four

Utter: outer.

***

[disappeared it]

***

. . . . . .

The window is now. Anytime after seven in the morning and those 3 miles hurt a whole lot more and walking sounds like a good idea for the duration. So I'm off to try that run again though I'm up a little later than is wise. Wish me a cool morning.

***

Yes it was hot. Thanks for asking.

***

. . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . .

. . .

I'm here.

***

. .

postcard: Ruidoso, New Mexico

Opened the car door last night and pine trees flooded into the car. That's what the people in Ruidoso breathe all the time. Pine. The woman at the desk said the continental breakfast is good. You won't get no bagel with your cold cereal. This is eggs and bacon and pancakes. It's good. From Amarillo to Roswell gas stations were scarce, cars too. Hills rolled into mountains, flat road into valley, and the cottonwoods glittered in the sun and shed their down in the afternoon light. It was ridiculously beautiful. Thus, the scenic route signs appeared on cue. Today a life long dream: white sands. Too bad Romulus can't appreciate it. Wish you were here.


***

summer: week three

postcard: Tulsa

Romulus, the happier traveler of the two in the car. He sleeps in the carrier with the latch open and creeps out to have a look when we stop for gas and food. He nosed around the hotel room surfaces and romped in the tub all morning, talkative, adventurous, calm--clearly much happier to go with me than to stay behind. Which is why I always get bitten when I come home, I understand now.

The vet says he's lost a pound. I don't see it.

We're in a Super 8. Had to give up driving when the first road construction of the day turned narrow single lane concrete divider and cone with traffic headlights blinding me from the other side in the night rain glare. Now we're off again.

***

Listen, she left him for an arms dealer. You couldn't write this kind of absurdity and be believed. I'm just saying, if you're thinking of me, send some good vibes his way on behalf of his kids. He hasn't seen his kids in month and half and has only spoken with them 3 or 4 times on the phone in conversations where they're either too scared to talk or they break down crying and she hangs up the phone. God alone knows what they're afraid of. I'm afraid to guess. Nobody's kids should be that kind of sad or that kind of scared.

***

. . . . . . .

Learned last night that baptism is like this. Didn't you know? Sage is getting baptized this summer. In three days I'll be in Tucson if all goes well. Gimme a ring so we can get together.

***

"Where's the fingerprint? It's that you don't explain yourself."

Br. Nathan Cromly

***

"Our world is in a headlong flight from reality."

***

. . . . .

Packing. Again.

***

Five years ago I ran a half marathon. This morning I'm hacking up half a lung on the walking parts of a 20 minute jog. It's possible this is the body I'll live in for the rest of my life.

***

. . . . .

Trash day. If you've been living around here you know that H lovingly takes the trash out so that I don't have to and that he'd be up and gathering trash to take out now except that he's somewhere on his way back to Ithaca to pack up and move to D.C. So not only is the house empty but it is full of trash.

***

And my house sitter fell through yesterday (again) so unless an orphan who loves cats and needs a summer home shows up on the doorstep before tomorrow, I'll be stuffing Romulus in a bag and packing him up with all the other stuff going to Arizona on Sunday. Three days in a hot car. He's going to be hissing mad.

Orphans, show yourselves.

***

Stephen Colbert burns his honorary degree from Knox College.

***

"Then you can say his heart was not made for me."

***

. . . .

Another brilliant sunny day.

Does there have to be something to do? I'm restless, shifting gears. Do you get like this at the start of summer? "But you're wasting it!" And: "But I don't know what to do first so why can't I read a book all day?" And: "You ought to be packing, baby. The road is open." But I'm on to none of those things. It's like clearing the desk to see what's what. A loathsome task.

***

1. Awe.

***

. . .

I went running and you didn't.

***

. .

dulce et decorum est pro patria mori...

***

What an image can do! All along, daily, the inertia of the images posted here, in public, what I notice while walking around, what interests me and not so much you or others. The images bore me a little too sometimes, I know. Then suddenly an image I didn't make but took and showed around as with other images, just an image, nothing beautiful, nothing novel, but yes a little indecorous, and I discover myself embroiled in what other people see, or what they see others might see, and it might be toothsome and it might be lair-y and covered in scales, what they see behind their seeing, and it might be "hurtful." What I've done by showing it around, I'm told. "Hurt" hurt more than "poor judgment," I notice. What words can do, also.

***

I accuse myself of detraction for no good reason since it had to be pointed out to me. Really I'm wondering what else might be pointed out.

***

"Outside the mystery of Christ there is something that is extraordinarily ordered towards death. The mystery of grace is about salvation from death: the death of intelligence by sin."

Br. John Luke, notes on "Grace"

***

summer: week two

. . . . . .

An interview with the Ithaca Times:

Q. From what I've read, your verse seems to formally run the
gamut--from the more stylized verse of "The Prelude" to the haunting
prose poetry of the works published in miPOesias. Tell me a little
bit about how you personally define your style. How do you combine
both old and new forms?

I think what must look like a big formal playground (lots of swings) between the poems in The Keepsake Storm and my more recent work isn’t really a fixation with form but a vexation with narrative, both in the way that Wordsworth understood it and in the way I experienced it at home among the storytellers in my family. Absolutely, form interests me. In the way that architecture, billboards, shoes, photo frames, and chairs do. To my mind formal concerns are largely spatial. They appeal to the eye, they are palpable, material. And I think I expect them to offer a lot of freedom of choice, though of course they are ultimately selective as well as reflexive. But as such, they seem to me transparently and self-consciously constructed too, in art, in politics, in living rooms—almost necessarily so—and while they reflect the great stakes of a culture or an artist’s personal anxieties, forms are inherently, often thankfully, revisable. They are even dismissible: one for another.

The problem with narrative though, both as story and as history, is that it is so quickly confuted with form—maybe because it is so urgently forced into form. But before it ever takes on contingency, event, temporality, or setting, narrative appeals to the “I,” to the existential, to the integral. Something in it wants to be true. So the writing of that first collection of poems eventually led to my frustration with narrative conventions inasmuch as narrative, as form, once set into motion, seduces with its apparent inevitability at the same time that it forms its hierarchies, the impressive monuments of its landscapes. It privileges, it erases: one history over another. And often for no good reason.

It’s nothing new to hold history suspect. All things being equal, of course, narrative is an impossibility, but stories and histories are dreams we hold very close, which means that the most pressing questions surrounding narrative writing are ethical. And which also means that it’s convenient but really not okay to elide narratives wherever or however they are wanting. I hear that complaint in the student workshops sometimes: “his poems are so narrative-y.” There is something of the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition (as most people tell it) in that story. To be in a position to erase story or to make story—to be in a position to form such an art—is to be in a very privileged position. So, yeah. What looks like formal range in my work actually amounts to the many attempts I’ve made to grapple with my own privilege and the importance of people’s stories.



Q. In addition to being a poet, you're also a professor and scholar
as well. How do your academic interests coincide with or influence
your poetry?

Teaching is central, partly because my research interests (I am privileged enough to work at a college that encourages me to teach what interests me) run parallel to my teaching interests. So I teach poetry writing, Romantic and Victorian literature, literary theory, Latino literature, translation work, Modern and contemporary poetry, lots of other stuff, really, given the interests of the students, too. But the subject matter isn’t nearly as important as the work the students bring to the table—and I mean here the work of people who are becoming writers and thinkers. The students remind me of my own limitations and they confront me with what I need to be thinking about. They keep me honest. I know a lot of writers would love to have whatever resources it takes to be free to write all day everyday instead of teaching or waiting tables, and I’m certainly not knocking that fantasy because I crave it sometimes too, but my writing and thinking would suffer in all that solitude. I’m too lazy to challenge myself on my own. The students are the best resource I’ve got.


Q. You keep a blog too. Do you think digital technologies/new media
have changed or shaped poetry in any way? If so how? Do you reach
new audiences with your blog?

I’m not sure my blog is any more effective at “reaching new audiences” than, say, a simple author page might be, which is hard to gauge in any case. I use the space as a writer’s notebook, a place to post photographs, morning pages, draft work, or quotations and passages from my reading. The point of keeping a public notebook, at first, was to avoid the drivel of my personal journal venting and to push myself to post something daily—not for the sake of my writing, but for the sake of my memory. As for what the Internet and the blog world have done for poetry and what poetry has done for them? They seem superbly compatible to me, much more so than fiction or creative non-fiction, where money and page length become serious issues. The online community of poets and poetry publications is vast and growing, especially in light of the fact that poetry lacks commodity value (is instead, like the Internet, a kind of repository landscape cultivated by those who work it), and the Internet is cheap. Certainly I’ve bought more books of poetry because of poetry bloggers and poetry e-zines. But I’ve also been grateful for what I’ve been able to read freely online.


Q. When you're not writing/reading/teaching, what would we be most
likely to find you doing?

These days? You’d most likely find me taking photographs or hanging out with monks in theology class or in contemplative prayer. I spend a lot of time with the Brothers of St. John, in Princeville, IL. I take a lot of pictures there too.


Q. Who are your biggest influences (poets, writers, or otherwise)?

The Bible looms up from my childhood. I memorized a lot of King James as a kid. When I was ten, I discovered Stephen King had been an English teacher, and that information helped put me on a path. King might’ve planted the seed for my great escape from Morenci, Arizona. I realized I wanted to go to college, as he did, though people in Morenci didn’t much leave to go to college. Later, Percy and Mary Shelley were really important to me. They both wrote prolifically and obsessively—and with heartbreaking skepticism—about love and poetry. And I came across them at a time when I needed to think hard about my own skepticism towards desire and art. Archie Ammons, my teacher, influenced what kind of poetry teacher I would become. Later yet, while doing my graduate work at Cornell, I met writers Helena María Viramontes and Herman Carrillo and the world of Latino writing opened up to me. It’s strange to think I had to come so far east to find it.


Q. I read that you grew up on the border of Mexico and the United
States. How do you see both countries, both cultures, working within
your verse?

I’m not sure they are working. I don’t understand the experience well enough to say. In the same way that I don’t have enough Spanish to converse with anyone but can listen in on conversations and follow along, I feel as if I’m not a full participant, not in either culture. That’s not a complaint or even a reality, but a feeling. Of loss, of silence, of awkwardness. All that recurs in my poems.


Q. On your publisher's website for "The Keepsake Storm," your book is
described as "nothing less than a celebration--and a reassessment--of
American consciousness." Interestingly, both you and Mairead, the
other poet reading Saturday, have the unique perspective of writing
poetry from both sides of America, from the inside and out. How has
this shaped you as a poet?

Probably most people in the U.S. feel as though they are straddling a boundary between a culture of origin (often more than one) and the American scene we grow up in. Maybe what is peculiar to “American consciousness” is just how alienated most of us feel in our own skins, and just how much we feel we need to explain ourselves to fit “in.” A whole lot of us experience this exile acutely, though a whole lot of us have been living with the problem and have been thinking and writing hard about how to put it to rest. But because we’re almost always forced to think and talk in terms of “identity”—who are you?—our position is almost always that of the outsider. “Latino” doesn’t even begin to say: “fourth-generation Mexican American woman from a copper mining town in Arizona.” Maybe “Chicana” is closer, but not by much. This is why stories are so important to me. Identities are generic impositions. Stories are view points. Does America have an inside? Is it a cocktail party of people drinking from their diamond goblets who all look and sound like George and Barbara Bush dolls? No. I think it’s a mythic comfort mall. We buy most of our stuff from there.


Q. Do you think of your poetry as political? If so, what political
issues/ideas in your work are most important to you?

Yes. Poverty and all the suffering that comes with poverty. To be poor is to be in a state of abuse that is unrelenting, violent, traumatizing, laborious, and perverse. When it comes to privilege and what it might do against silence and invisibility, there is always talk about skin color, gender, religion, but what a tangle they become in the context of class. There is talk of honoring difference, celebrating Otherness. I’m all for having that party—I wish we had it all the time. But “class” is not “difference.” “Class” is euphemism, is atrocity on the level of holocaust.

Q. What will you be reading next Saturday? Tell me about some of the
poems you chose and why.

I’ll be reading from a book-length sequence called Utter. The work is some kind of hybrid between lyric essay and prose poem. I’m reading it because I’m writing it right now, that’s all.

Q. Did you and Mairead, the other poet reading, know one another
before this reading? How did the reading come about?

Yes, I do know and admire Mairead and her work, mostly from afar these days, but always with awe and appreciation for all that’s savvy and bold and brilliant in her poetry. She’s the reader I want to hear. Don’t readings often come about so that people can gather, have a reunion, get to know each other better?


Q. You've spent some time in Ithaca, during your graduate years.
What, in your opinion, is the most poetic thing about Ithaca?

The sound of the loose tiles on the roof of Olin Library when you walk on them. And Reeve Parker’s critical prose.


***

. . . . .

The Ithaca Times interview with Mairead Byrne and me. My full response to the Q&A to follow.

***

. . . .

I'm off to Ithaca for a poetry reading. If I can ever get packed.

***

. . .

The cats next door froze all winter in subzero temperatures. We heard them crying all night and found their paw prints on our cars each morning. Now the cats are gone and a shepherd puppy chained to a pole has taken their place. He got himself tangled around a ladder yesterday and the woman popped out the back door and slapped the puppy on the nose twice. The puppy winced. Later he tore into a cereal box from the recycling bin and busied himself on the end of his eight foot chain with making flakes of cardboard that flew into the grass beyond him. Then he barked for a few hours. He got slapped a lot for that.


***

All this in plain view of my desk.

***

. .

summer: week one

"The truth of things--that is, the inner truth of being, and not the accidental."

***

. . . . . . .

***

Bill Clinton urges Knox graduates to embrace their similarities

GALESBURG, Ill. - Former President Bill Clinton told graduating seniors at a small Illinois college Saturday that the world's divisions can be bridged if people embrace their similarities rather than their differences.

Clinton pointed to human genome research aimed at unlocking cures for diseases that he said shows all human beings share 99.9 percent of the same genetic makeup.
But people still spend their time dwelling on political, religious and cultural differences that spawn terrorism, wars and other divides, Clinton said during a commencement address at Knox College.

"The only way you can give up your malice, your anger, your division is if you believe that our common humanity is more important than our interesting differences," Clinton said.
Clinton delivered his commencement address in the shadows of Knox's Old Main, a national historic landmark where Abraham Lincoln spoke out against slavery during a Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858.

Clinton said the world's political, religious and even psychological differences boil down to a divide between "those who need an enemy and those who are trying to make a friend."
He challenged Knox's 240 graduates to begin the healing once they leave campus, saying their first decision "must be into which camp you will plant your banner."

Clinton cited his friendship with former President George Bush, forged as they led tsunami and hurricane relief efforts. He said they have differences of opinion, but Clinton believes Bush "is a good human being ... and I do not need to look down on him to feel better about my party, my politics or my life."

Clinton joked that he nearly tested his theory about mankind's similarities when he met conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh for the first time recently, while both were eating at a New York restaurant.

"I was so tempted, after all the terrible things that he said about me, to tell him that he and I were exactly 99.9 percent the same," Clinton said. "I thought if I had, the poor man would run weeping from the table and not even get his dessert, so I let it go."

Clinton was the third straight big-name graduation speaker at the 1,350-student liberal arts college. He followed satirist and Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, now making his own bid for the White House in a crowded field of Democrats that includes Clinton's wife, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Knox, located about 150 miles southwest of Chicago, does not pay fees to its commencement speakers, but has at least one well-placed alum. John Podesta, who graduated from Knox in 1971 and served as Clinton's chief of staff, had a hand in lining up all three speakers.

The school awarded Clinton an honorary doctorate of laws for his achievements in public service. The only other U.S. president to receive an honorary degree from Knox was Lincoln, who was honored in 1860 prior to taking office.

Clinton has also spoken at several other college graduation ceremonies this year, including Middlebury College in Vermont, the University of New Hampshire and the University of Michigan.


***

commencement day

Bill Clinton to give the commencement address at Knox College.

***

. . . . .

(Something else to think about.)

Q. From what I've read, your verse seems to formally run the
gamut--from the more stylized verse of "The Prelude" to the haunting
prose poetry of the works published in miPOesias. Tell me a little
bit about how you personally define your style. How do you combine
both old and new forms?

Q. In addition to being a poet, you're also a professor and scholar
as well. How do your academic interests coincide with or influence
your poetry?

Q. You keep a blog too. Do you think digital technologies/new media
have changed or shaped poetry in any way? If so how? Do you reach
new audiences with your blog?

Q. When you're not writing/reading/teaching, what would we be most
likely to find you doing?

Q. Who are your biggest influences (poets, writers, or otherwise)?

Q. I read that you grew up on the border of Mexico and the United
States. How do you see both countries, both cultures, working within
your verse?

Q. On your publisher's website for "The Keepsake Storm," your book is
described as "nothing less than a celebration--and a reassessment--of
American consciousness." Interestingly, both you and Mairead, the
other poet reading Saturday, have the unique perspective of writing
poetry from both sides of America, from the inside and out. How has
this shaped you as a poet?

Q. Do you think of your poetry as political? If so, what political
issues/ideas in your work are most important to you?

Q. What will you be reading next Saturday? Tell me about some of the
poems you chose and why.

Q. Did you and Mairead, the other poet reading, know one another
before this reading? How did the reading come about?

Q. You've spent some time in Ithaca, during your graduate years.
What, in your opinion, is the most poetic thing about Ithaca?

***