The Writing on the Wall: Defense Day

מנא ,מנא, תקל, ופרסין

Daniel 5:25

Anything in My Thesis, OOPS, the Thicket

18-page introduction; 3 sections, 60 pages of poems. That's a lot of work in 2 years. I so wish that I could include a frontispiece--actually, I can and may! Why not add an illustration or two to all this work? The artists are amenable...

My favorite parts: Haiku from Raleigh about rhyming orange. Remembering my grandmother's love for Keats and disdain for Waylon Jennings. Putting together Quintilian and Hannibal Lecter section. Discovering that I have slugs in 2 poems, Mercury dimes in 2 poems, ironing in 2 poems, and bees in 2 poems--none of which "pairs" has anything to do with the others; none of which is even in the same section. How odd that we don't see our obsessions/motifs until it's time for ordering...

Reading and Writing, Shaking and Baking

Readings: On the Road and The Road

The SIU MFA program was kind enough to host readers from Ball State University, Indiana State University, and Murray State University on April 19. I'd like to thank our generous hosts for their gracious offer, kind responses to our work, and potluck after the reading.

I'd also like to thank Holly Goddard Jones for asking me to visit her Forms of Fiction class and share her students' lively, thoughtful, and incisive commentary on Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I advanced my theory that this novel moves in stanzas, like a long narrative poem, and nobody laughed. Surely this class is comprised of fellow geniuses, or Holly has taught them enough etiquette to respect their elders and humor an old lady! (And since no one can tell the lovely Ms. Goddard Jones apart from her students, I am the old lady in question).
_______________

Whole Lotta Shakin'(and a Little Bakin') Goin' On:

Friday, there were earthquake tremors in the early morning, and also mid-morning. I had had a migraine and had taken the day off from transcription/editing, and Harvey was home being a Walt-Whitman-ministering angel. The first one I thought was a migraine-related aura when the bed shifted from side to side, and the house began to twitch--like Ms. D. Gale sings--or as my left eyebrow does when someone particularly annoys me. The second one? We didn't feel it at the time.

I defend my thesis tomorrow. The shaking here is now my knees knocking, which will exceed 5.4 on the Richter scale tomorrow at 10 a.m. CST. I've worked so hard on this damned thing, and I feel pretty certain that I'll pass but...when one's introduction includes a recipe for hummingbird cake, Mercury dimes, shoplifting, uranium, ironing shirts with Mammaw, POW bracelets, and Dr. Hannibal Lecter--well, one's literary influences are going to be under heavy discussion. (I do mention Elizabeth Bishop, Eavan Boland, Lewis Carroll, E. E. Cummings, Mark Doty, Lynn Emanuel, James Galvin, John Keats, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson--hopefully, they'll give me more credibility on the Works Cited page).

Pray for us now and in the time of our defense

____________

I just went outside for a while, and the egg moon is slightly pink and completely full--gorgeous reason to celebrate insomnia/nerves. I've been thinking about eggs--Easter, mittelschmertz, and other ova--for a while, and since Radish King's post about white cake has made me hunger for sweets, and Corn Shake's cupcakes always make me crave cuteness, here's a recipe for hummingbird cupcakes:

Hummingbird Cupcakes
(adapted from an adaptation of Emily Luchetti's Four-Star Desserts --like Michael Keaton's a copy of a copy in Multiplicity)

3 cups all purpose flour
2 1/4 cups granulated sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground allspice (very much optional in the cupcakes)
3 sticks unsalted butter, melted and cooled
3 large eggs (lightly beaten--see note from Pamela below)
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups finely diced banana
1 1/4 cups finely diced fresh pineapple

Preheat oven to 350F. Line 24 (3.5-4 fl oz capacity) muffin wells with paper cupcake liners. (ASIDE: The pastel ones that look like crinolines are prettiest--and yellows look best in my humble opinion).

Sift flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and allspice (optional) into a large mixing bowl. Stir in melted butter, eggs, and vanilla until just combined. Gently fold in pineapple and banana. (NOTE: If you want the moistest cupcakes possible, separate your eggs as you break them; beat up the yolks and barely spank the whites. I truly believe that overbeating egg whites leads to a too-dry cake).

Fill each muffin well about 2/3 to 3/4 full. Bake until golden brown, and a cake tester/broomstraw/toothpick comes out clean, about 25 minutes. Allow cupcakes to cool in muffin pan for about 5 minutes, then gently remove them from pan and put them on a wire rack to cool completely on a wire rack before frosting. (QUERY: Cupcake torment--put them on the rack?)

Cream Cheese Frosting (almost everyone has this, but just in case...)

One 8-ounce brick of cream cheese, softened at room temperature
4 ounces (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened at room temperature
1 tsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/4 cups powdered sugar, sifted

With an electric mixer or with a wooden spoon, beat cream cheese, butter, lemon juice, and vanilla until light and creamy. Beat in the powdered sugar until well combined. (DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER: Only use this frosting at room temperature, so if you make ahead and refrigerate, allow it to warm. Otherwise it's like adding elementary-school paste to your cupcakes).

Fancy-Schmantzy Dried Pineapple Flowers
adapted from an adaptation of Martha Stewart's flowers



2 large or 4 small pineapples

Preheat oven to 225 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone sheets. (I have used baking PAM with success, too).

Peel pineapple; remove the "eyes" with a "melon baller" (PG-13 ADVISORY: Doesn't that sound kind of dirty--melon baller?). Leave the center core. Using a sharp knife, cut pineapple crosswise into very thin slices. (MUSICAL NOTATION: You can use a mandoline to slice your pineapples if they are small. Not a mandolin, or a violin, but a mandoline. See below for some of Harvey's sculptural tips on how else to cut out the flowers).

Transfer pineapple slices to baking sheets. Bake until tops look dried, about 30 minutes. Watch these times carefully, as ovens differ. Flip slices and bake until completely dried, about 25 minutes more.

Pinch the center of each dried pineapple slice to shape into a cone. (CURLI-CLUE: It's easiest to pinch these into cones/spit curls if you've left the core in). Let cool in a clean egg carton (or something similar) to form flowers). Refrigerate in an airtight container up to 3 days.

Also, Harvey and I have discovered that you can also use a flower-shaped cookie cutter to shape perfect Martha-style blossoms, instead of curling in the carton as above, and you can also cut out/crimp the edges of these petals to make them appear fancier. This is prettier on an actual hummingbird cake or on a carrot cake, than on the cupcakes, the cones are adorable. If you want to go uber-Stewart, add brown sugar for pollen when you're decorating, and Harvey has made royal icing/marzipan bees before--I do love him for things like this and also for migraine/earthquake moments).

Salome: Pink Slip?

>

Heartbreaker #4: W. Szymborsksa's "Hitler's First Photograph"

Watch this link first with the sound muted, then turn it on and re-view. The poem that's being read is Szymborska's. The music is just such a beautiful counterpunch. How can humans make both beauty and the beast from the same womb?

Hitler's First Photograph--Wislawa Szymborska

And who's this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?
That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers' little boy!
Will he grow up to be an LL.D.?
Or a tenor in Vienna's Opera House?
Whose teensy hand is this, whose little ear and eye and nose?
Whose tummy full of milk, we just don't know:
printer's, doctor's, merchant's, priest's?
Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander?
To garden, to school, to an office, to a bride,
maybe to the Burgermeister's daughter?

Precious little angel, mommy's sunshine, honeybun,
while he was being born a year ago,
there was no death of signs on the earth and in the sky:
spring sun, geraniums in windows,
the organ-grinder's music in the yard,
a lucky fortune wrapped in rosy paper,
then just before the labor his mother's fateful dream:
a dove seen in dream means joyful news,
if it is caught, a long-awaited guest will come.
Knock knock, who's there, it's Adolf's heartchen knocking.

A little pacifier, diaper, rattle, bib,
our bouncing boy, thank God and knock on wood, is well,
looks just like his folks, like a kitten in a basket,
like the tots in every other family album.
Shush, let's not start crying, sugar,
the camera will click from under that black hood.

The Klinger Atelier, Grabenstrasse, Braunau,
and Braunau is small but worthy town,
honest businesses, obliging neighbors,
smell of yeast dough, of gray soap.
No one hears howling dogs, or fate's footsteps.
A history teacher loosens his collar
and yawns over homework.

--- Stanislaw Baranczak and
Clare Cavenagh, translators

From the Farmers' Almanac: Egg Moon

April is known for its showers and ever-warming temperatures, but it is also known as a month when spring flowers begin to show up. Herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. As the name infers, the flowers are pink in color, thus the name for April's full moon.

This pink moon has also been called: the full sprouting grass moon, the egg moon, and among coastal tribes the full fish moon, because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.

According to the Farmers' Almanac, this year's full pink moon will take place on April 20th at 6:25 am EDT.


"Time to plant tears." (Elizabeth Bishop, "Sestina")

Heartbreaker #3: From Judy Jordan's 60-Cent Coffee and a Quarter To Dance

Prologue by Judy Jordan


In winter’s spider-eyed light strung through steam grates, the tunnels turn feral.
This is the other city, the dark one
of hidden passages, runaways and orphaned days

and like me it sleeps in broken buildings
and smells of a sad suicide from the fifteenth century, and like me
it has smoked three things on the mold-furred walls

which are the only altars
of those who’ve dropped through holes in the sidewalk
to descend to these steam tunnels rung by slick rung.

This city shambles room to room.
Drawn to the easy sound of sleep,
it knows the pattern night pens on tender skin,

knows your darkest secrets and tells
no one except the sycamore
which rips from its skin with shame.

It wants absolution,
taps your sins on water pipes to shudder out of faucets,
ties them to the tail feathers of soot-mottled birds

who beat up from the concrete-lipped curb,
falter over cars, stutter
then catch an oily gust and wheel into the scalded sky.

It claims to be blind though it might have a thousand eyes,
screams obscenities from 13th and University and pisses in alleys.
Sometimes it drinks too much. Sometimes it begs for more.

It hides tents among trees in the park by the sluggish river
this red-eyed thing blinking from storm grates.
It is a window breaking.

Other people’s blood in its veins, skin on fire,
smack, crack, meth, strychnine and scouring powder sold as speed,
some drug or another telling it die, you must die. But it doesn’t die.

Step around it on your way to the theater.
It crawls through your bedroom window, a warm bed and in the morning
the smell of coffee and bacon spitting in grease. That’s all it wants.
Aching hands in underwear drawers,
snagged silks.
You are its worst nightmare.

Coiled cable, blood and razor-wire, shredded muscle and blue bone,
cold nights, the city under the city
is where you’ll find me. Though not now.

Now it is heat-hazed summer and sunset
and I whisper the four-syllable name of the stranger
I should have become and disappear through the back door

of the Villa Inn where the cook paces the few feet
between the makeline and the ovens
muttering Chimbukee Chimbukee Chimbukee

It’s been nine years since he’s known the burned light
of his own country or a woman’s name churned in sea foam, nine years
since he’s clung to flesh which smells of rosemary and dried tomatoes.

He checks his billfold, thick with this week’s pay. Let’s go
he says to me, pointing toward his apartment across the alley.
Let’s go Super Ju. Party. Party, he says

then reaches his swollen hands deep into his pants
past the flour-grubbed belt line
and with a hard twist adjusts his truss.

We call him Chris though that’s not his name
and I think to myself, Homer, Odysseus,
the blood-blue sea, the sun in its relentless veracity

be damned to hell and back. Sweating pizza drivers, me sleeping
in my truck or if it’s winter in empty buildings and the steam tunnels,
and every weekend the parking lot filling up with dope dealers

with their out-of-state plates
and hookers dropped off by their pimps
and the homeless who stumble

from the boarded buildings and doorways to this oiled kaleidoscope
under the warehouses’ dark windows—
the broken, fish-line-strung and eye-level hooked—

this grease-barrel and sour dumpster-stinking,
trash-can-blaze, busted bottles, pissed on pissed off
fuck you fuck you kill strong-armed ambulance scream, parking lot

and Chris saying Chimbukee Chimbukee Chimbukee
cussing us, Scata. Malaka American. Sto dyavolo malaka,
Pizza malaka. Deliver,Chris yells but slow night

no orders, no tips so we yell back, You malaka.
Give us pizzas. To krima sto lemo sou,Chris says
Greek which to us means nothing.

and just outside the fish-net stockinged, stiletto-heeled
Star, Joy, Princess. Joy, I think, and am too tired to think anything else
when she tells me she swings, asks if I have something,

anything, coke, smack, speed, rock. At least some pot. Come on. Hook me up, she says.
Then the teams. Salt & Sugar. Salt & Pepper. Nilla & Chocolate
with their matching tattoos, Comedy & Tragedy. Happy one day, Dead the next.

Angel, Love Boat, Crystal.
I got first degree I got MG
Blue ludes, 8-Balls, rocks, the dealers yell.

Quiver & Shiver Come
get my stash I got the stuff
Tongo & Cash

Lot of Candy Man & Sweet Stuff.
Slick the Stick, a pimp caught up in his own rhyme.
Lover Boy & Philly Boy. Wanna-be’s and gonna-be’s


_____________________________________

This poem had me at hello. Judy Jordan is an amazing reader, and I'm so glad I was able to meet her and talk with her about her work. More than a little TSE here, methinks.

Speaking of readings, ahem, I am part of one this evening at Southern Illinois University as part of the MFA Writer's Exchange. (Raleigh wanted to know if what she could get for one poet. I told her that was viatical investment, and I didn't approve!). Here come my 15 minutes of fame! I think I'm going to read these poems: "78 RPM," "First Anniversary: Reading Russian Literature," "I Stand Here Ironing" and "Breasts," plus a 3-page supershort story called "Ivy, Too." Excited and nervous, but am pretty sure I'll have the best shoes in the room. Anne Klein (and not II) today. After all, poetry deserves the ruby slippers.

Wilde One

I think Salome may be my newest obsession.

Heartbreaker #2: My Friend's River

The Ohio by Joe Bolton

Seven miles south of anywhere
You'd rather be, it is autumn.
What sweetened shrivels,
What shriveled falls,
And what fell is leaf-rot,
A sick rich scent in the air.

You are paling, you are bored,
You are zipping up your jacket
And walking into a dynamo
Of twilight and raw wind,
Tossing your hair as a brief bruise
Of pink scores the horizon.

Seven miles north, below the lights
From bars and dance halls
Of small towns, the Ohio swells
With a cargo of barges,
And catfish twist through the bones
Of what never bothered to rise.

______

You're missed, friend. You're missed.

Sushi?

NaPoWriMo--Lynda Hull--Heartbreaker #1

Black Mare--by Lynda Hull

It snakes behind me, this invisible chain gang—
the aliases, your many faces peopling

that vast hotel, the past. What did we learn?
Every twenty minutes the elevated train,

the world shuddering beyond
the pane. It was never warm enough in winter.

The walls peeled, the color of corsages
ruined in the air. Sweeping the floor,

my black wig on the chair. I never meant
to leave you in that hotel where the voices

of patrons long gone seemed to echo in the halls,
a scent of spoiled orchids. But this was never

an elegant hotel. The iron fretwork of the El
held each room in a deep corrosive bloom.

This was the bankrupt’s last chance, the place
the gambler waits to learn his black mare’s

leg snapped as she hurtled towards the finish line.

* * *

How did we live? Your face over my shoulder
was the shade of mahogany in the speckled

mirror bolted to the wall. It was never warm.
You arrived through a forest of needles,

the white mist of morphine, names for sleep
that never came. My black wig unfurled

across the battered chair. Your arms circled me
when I stood by the window. Downstairs

the clerk who read our palms broke the seal
on another deck of cards. She said you’re my fate,

my sweet annihilating angel, every naked hotel room
I’ve ever checked out of. There’s nothing

left of that, but even now when night pulls up
like a limousine, sea-blue, and I’m climbing the stairs,

keys in hand, I’ll reach the landing and
you’re there—the one lesson I never get right.

Trains hurtled by, extinguished somewhere
past the bend of midnight. The shuddering world.

Your arms around my waist. I never meant to leave.


* * *

Of all that, there's nothing left but a grid
of shadows the El tracks throw over the street,

the empty lot. Gone, the blistered sills,
voices that rilled across each wall. Gone,

the naked bulb swinging from the ceiling,
that chicanery of light that made your face

a brief eclipse over mine. How did we live?
The mare broke down. I was your fate, that

yellow train, the plot of sleet, through dust
crusted on the pane. It wasn't warm enough.

What did we learn? All I have left of you
is this burnt place on my arm. So, I won't

forget you even when I'm nothing but
small change in the desk clerk's palm, nothing

but the pawn ticket crumpled in your pocket,
the one you'll never redeem. Whatever I meant

to say loses itself in the bend of winter
towards extinction, this passion of shadows falling

like black orchids through the air. I never meant
to leave you there by the pane, that

terminal hotel, the world shuddering with trains.



This poem is exquisitely elegiac, and the way Hull enjambs and then breaks the stanza form at the end is just genius. I was fortunate enough to have a workshop with her at Murray State when she and David Wohjan came to campus, and I'll never forget when she praised one of my poems. I felt like my harp and wings had just been issued, and I had passed through the pearly gates with a get-out-of-Hell-free card.

Chenille?

D-Day Delayed, Definitely

D-day (defense of dissertation), has been postponed for one more week. I am done, but one of the committee members has a reading.

Trade Day was rained out, and thrift stores were a washout, except for a lovely green and black footed candy dish for $2.00 (Art Deco). I plan to add a zero and resell it after I put it under the black light. It might be, just might be Vaseline glass...and if it is, Harvey will claim it. Here's a picture of an almost identical dish on the net...What do you think, oh, junkers?



Today's the birthday of that master of the labyrinthine sentence, Mr. Henry James. I plan to reread What Maisie Knew and Ian McEwen's Atonement to see about articulation and lack of articulation (disarticulation--to amputate?) I wonder, just wonder if Briony and Maisie have more than a little in common...

NaPO Generated Poem

This is a Dylan-Thomas generated poem, from the BBC Website. I kind of like it.

I was pierced star-struck
By the leaves of the twilight

Limping slowly on cold cobbles,
On thoughts of silver streams

Where salmon lie hazily, where
The moonless milk-mild truant boy

Gets a flogging by the twilight,
On the hazily lazy street

As the rodgered horses wait in barns
While the barge-booted fisherman

Go gentle on jolty cobbled streets
Laughing, laughing into the night.

And mildly the boy goes drooping
Home past the henpecked statue,

Erected in praise of the birds
Seesawing while they rave

Over the light grey blind sea
The light grey blind sea

Winking and winking into evening.
And finally he gets home, dreaming

Of sea-shaken birds that wait star-struck,
in the grassgreen grass blushed beefred

by twilight, raging, raging
to sing against the webfoot night.

____________
I just love the webfoot night.

Now that it's generated, what the heck do I do with it?

Suspicious Minds: My Response to a Maurice Manning Interview

Q. Sylvia Plath says in her journals that one of the purposes of poetry is to “make of a moment something of permanence.” As a way to explain poetry to undergraduates, is that something that you think is a fair explanation of the craft?

A. Yes and no. I think if you consider someone like Plath who is in a way ultra-interested in representing her own experience, and obviously keeping the veil down, I think that notion of preserving the past or making a moment last works. But to me the downside of that is it sort of encourages us to only be interested and curious about ourselves, and our own lives. Unfortunately we sort of live too much under that shadow now, and it’s sort of constricted American poetry especially as a result because we’ve got this confessional thing, and tend to think that poetry can only be about the poet’s personal experience.

Isn't this a great answer?

I find myself becoming increasingly more suspicious of language. Language should be suspect in poetry because we are weighing each word for sound/meaning and weighting each word for music/stress...I think I'm going to write an essay on this for NAPO month.

Yes No Good-Bye