Reminds me that too often poets
and scholars often have other poets and scholars solely in mind as their
audience. Perhaps a handful of fawning graduate lickspittles. American crowds
once gathered at the docks when they got news a shipment of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s
latest book of poetry was due to arrive. But I suspect this snippet of powerful
emotional pathos and drama wouldn’t have attracted much of a throng at the
Brooklyn wharf: “because he would not take / the Platonic argument beyond what
was necessary / to establish the text”—dig
those italics, eh! Well, it matters to a scholar, and perhaps the odd
literary/philosophical sycophant is swooning somewhere. It’s true I’ve had
these kinds of arguments in graduate study classes and in the company of my
writers’ group friends and colleagues, so I should tone it down. Not sure verse
is the best way to put the argument forward though.
That’s enough on that. This opens
up a self-indulgent free day! Here are just a few of the things on my mind these days:
--Monarch butterfly populations
are down to 57 million from over a billion just a decade ago. That’s about a 95%
drop if my quick calculation is correct. Corporate agriculture feels the best
way to safeguard its business model is to wipe out the insect world, and it is
being frighteningly efficient at it through new, incredibly powerful
insecticides. This protects short-term profits, but it is long-term suicide,
plain and simple. This is also what’s killing honeybees, and if those continue
crashing, then the quality of our diets and lives will take a sharp and abrupt
turn downward. You can count on it.
--The ebony jewelwing damselfly
has entered my consciousness as one of the prettiest creatures flying. It’s not
only the bright metallic blue and green body, it’s the delightful way they flit
and dance when they’re on the wing. You find them along woodsy creeks and
rivers, amidst the shady undergrowth, though they have a charming habit of
perching in the only spot of sunshine available, the better to sparkle by in
the humid gloom, I believe. We took a dank, sweaty, buggy walk through the
woods along a creek the other day and saw many, there like always, but more
than ever now I notice them. The latent Platonic existence of the jewelwing has
taken form through the triggering of my attention. They’ve always been there,
but now they’ve arrived.
--Gun violence continues in America
unabated, and people continue dying in the most senseless ways. The culture
that has been politically cultivated—rage, along with the unlimited access to
all manner of guns—is incredibly destructive. The NRA is a villainous
organization. Flat and simple, they are villains, and most of their members, of
not louts and villains themselves, are dupes.
--Too many house finches on the
bird feeder. But they’re innocent, and they’re hungry. I’d rather they moved
on, but I’m not going to start picking them off with a BB gun or something ruthless
and coldhearted like that. We get exactly these other birds: goldfinch,
cardinal, tufted titmouse, downy woodpecker, red-bellied woodpecker,
white-breasted nuthatch, chipping sparrow, Carolina chickadee. No others. The
house finches will show up in a flock, though, and just sit there and drain the
feeder. But the others shoulder in, and it can get pretty lively. Ruby-throat
hummingbirds on the nectar feeder, though the honeybees sometimes swarm it and
keep the hummers off. Robins out on the yard like always, a house-wren
twittering always. Mockingbirds come to our yard all day to hunt the
grasshoppers down in the lower part, but it’s all about quiet business and groceries
for them. They don’t sing here. Their singing area is a block away. Crows in
the woods, polite and well-behaved until a hawk or owl shows up, then there’s trouble.
Chimney swifts always at dusk, a hundred feet up chasing bugs. A couple English
sparrows out front that are eating the mortar from out between the bricks on
the porch railing. They’ve actually broken through in a couple spots and we’ll
have to have the porch tuck-pointed next year. The little pests are at it
constantly. They go in back and visit the feeder only rarely, though.
--Not too many deer this year. We’ve
protected the plants we want them staying clear of with little panty-hose
pouches of Irish Spring soap, and we squirt them with a deer-repellent mixture
of hot peppers, eggs and garlic. It really
works, but I think the yard must stink so bad to them that they’re steering
clear. Last year we saw deer in the yard 5 times a week. This summer, it’s more
like once every other week. I always like seeing them though.
--Lazarus lizards. Some kid in
the 1950s brought home a paper sack of wall lizards after his summer vacation
in Italy (his family owned the Lazarus dept. store chain). He let them go in
his yard. He brought another batch home a year or two later from Spain, a different
subspecies of the same critter. They hybridized, and they now inhabit every
wall and stone outcropping in the Cincinnati area. They’re spreading slowly,
but they still haven’t gotten not too far away from Cincinnati yet. They moved
in on us a couple years ago and we got to know the few of them out there. Now
they’ve reproduced and the yard has gotten pretty lively with hundreds of tiny
Lazarus lizards. We’re on the lookout for some garter snakes, which should calm
things down once they get established.
--John Berryman’s Dream Songs,
but anyone reading this knows that. I blog every day about these poems. The
writing itself is never a burden, any more than brushing my teeth or showering
is a burden. Some days are better than others as far as the material, which
runs the full range from inspiring and electric to torpid and pointless. I’m pretty
much sick of John Berryman at this point, though the ideas in his work just
keep coming, and that’s fun. I knew this project would range widely, and it has.
I’m finally convinced of something teachers and real writers have always told
me: Writers don’t write from flashes of prior inspiration. That’s backwards. Writing
itself generates the inspiration. If nothing else comes of this blog, that
lesson will make an incredible difference to me going forward, and it will
still have been worth it.
--Various extended-family dramas
that I won’t mention here. Life for us in this house is good, and we’re dealing
fairly well with whatever circumstances throw at us.
--I was under anesthesia back in
mid-June to have a troublesome wisdom tooth removed. While anesthesia is one of
the absolute blessings of modern medicine, it’s not benign. It took me six
weeks to recover from the lingering physical fatigue it caused. I had to
remember that it was the drug, not my age that was making me feel so tired. The
last couple days have been quite peppy, and I can now contemplate a hike with a
backpack again. I read Cheryl Strayed’s Wild
to celebrate. I liked it, and while it doesn’t make me want to hike the Pacific
Crest Trail (me and altitude have trouble seeing eye to eye) I could see doing
the Appalachian Trail some day. My life doesn’t have room for that, but maybe
when I retire, if I have strength and body enough left for it. My brother is
planning on doing the full length of New Zealand’s answer to these 1000-mile+
trails when he retires in a couple years.
--I only have four items on my
bucket list: 1) Do a loop in an open cockpit biplane. 2) Pet a tiger, lion,
leopard, jaguar, or cougar. 3) Climb up the ratlines to the maintop of a
square-rigged ship under full sail. 4) Scuba dive with a whale. I’ve done #1, which
was an absolute hoot, and the best birthday present I ever got. #s 2 & 4
seem doable, and I’ll begin taking action. #3—I don’t know how to go about it. This
occupies more of my brain clutter than it probably should.
--I had a novel under way, which languished
for awhile, and is starting now to reassert itself. I’ve been productive as a
writer this year—almost 40 poems is very respectable. But if fiction is coming,
then I have to accommodate it, because I get physically sick if I don’t. I may
have to start getting even more productive here soon.
--I’m teaching a summer class,
the senior capstone, about transportation, oil, and cities. Had a good,
respectful and worthwhile, but somewhat tense, class discussion about climate
change the other day, featuring a student who could not or would not
acknowledge that anthropogenic climate change is a real thing. Hopefully the
lecture that followed on the science of climate change helped open up new
avenues in his opinion-making. But as we also tactfully noted in class, climate
change denial is not predicated on climate science. Something both political
and psychological is at work. It may not have mattered.
--There’s more. Yard projects.
Taking on piano and re-engaging with my guitar. New semester looming. I’m
getting older, but life is good. I feel like things are in an opening phase, not the closing-down that
one sometimes imagines as a result of aging. Day by day, month by month, bring
it on!
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