Poems and other things

Last night I picked up a book my mother gave me to read and tossed it back down again. Eight point font! What are they thinking? So I opened Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and read it for a while before I realized I had already read it. This happened to me not long ago with Vanity Fair: about 2/3 or so of the way through it, I thought, hold on, this sounds very familiar. Of course! I've read it!

My mother told me the other day, with a hint of panic in her voice, that she had just baked a quiche without the eggs. . .and I reminded her not worry since I have already held up her tradition of forgetfulness by baking a cake without the flour (she's done this at least twice, not to mention forgetting where she's driving in the middle of a trip, forgetting my father was home in the middle of the night when she screamed: Ah! There's a MAN in my bed! Etc. Etc.) And may I remind you, mother, that your own father was so absent minded that he removed his own birthday cake from the shower (where someone had hid it), took his shower, put it back, and then was genuinely surprised later when they threw him his party? We're all totally wack-o. Crazy and loving it.

I have managed to read some very good books lately. I have some recommendations for you all from my winter so far:

Book: Davita's Harp by Chaim Potok. This was a new Potok book for me, and I devoured it--such beautiful prose, seamless and with told with impeccable timing.

Children's series: Betsy and Tacy by Maud Hart Lovelace. My sister gave the first three to Merry for her birthday and we are speeding through them quickly. Excellent characters, wonderful worlds, a lovely balance of imagination and reality.

TV series: The Impressionists. I thought it might be a bit dull, but it wasn't. Martin and I were enraptured. . .and educated to boot. Plus all the warm and beautiful scenes of France were a good balm to our winter-wearied souls.

What I'm writing: Poetry! I've been on a poetry kick lately. My favorite poems to read are the ones that open a door somewhere inside me. Here's a good one Martin sent me a link to from Poetry Daily, which I guess is sometimes hit-or-miss but this one was HIT: Witness by John Burnside

I've been writing lots of poems about birds, birds moving and appearing, sipping wine, travelling and, my favorite--exploding. I've got two exploding bird poems so far. . .and so many to go.

Martin and I were discussing this morning how poetry is such a freeing genre--it's belted and constricted neither by fiction or nonfiction. I looked at Martin as he edited one of my poems the other day and noticed that his concentrated pose was identical to his puzzle-solving and rubix cube posture. He's a good master of form: he loves the music of lines and words and the way they all fit. We have wonderful times together around the kitchen table, passing back and forth a poem, mine or his, cutting lines and chewing on a single word, spitting it out, finding something else, laughing at an image that seemed so clear to one of us and seems so ridiculous to the other person. My favorite from last night: my Grandpa losing his eyes and teeth, and that one, combined with the exploding birds, led to great hilarity, especially since Martin acts it all out.

I don't know what silly person said that art is a reflection of life, because I am coming to believe that's a skewed metaphor. What you really want in art, in this case, a poem, is not a reflection of life, but the life itself, the colors as bright or brighter than what is banging around in your faded memory. Let me see if I can explain it--the other day I was struggling to write down a dream I'd had that was haunting me: there was a long beach that got wider and wider as my dream progressed. I was walking down the beach to reach my parents, who were walking toward me, but no matter how fast I walked, they were always further away from me. To my right, white wild horses galloped, their manes thick and lustrous, and in mid-stride, vanished, as if they were running through a hidden curtain. There were other details too, but no matter how I tried to record the particulars of my dream, the words would not cooperate. I accomplished what I thought was a fairly decent job, but Martin took out his scissors as usual and began snipping away. "Wait!" I said at one point. "That's not how my dream was!"

But then I realized, it didn't matter what was, only what is in the poem. The poem is a new moment with its own colors and music, not a somewhat dim reflection of reality: if an image works in the poem, than it belongs, but if it doesn't, it should go. I love that freedom. In prose, especially nonfiction, there's so much struggle sometimes to be true, or at least true enough, but a poem is its own thing. And I love having a small space to work a world in: one page, maybe less, maybe only three words, and I've got to find words just the right color, tone, and smell. So I pick over maybe a hundred words, turning them over in my hands, feeling them, smelling them, bringing them to my ear to listen closely, rapping them to see if they will explode--and I pick three or six or twelve and they are the right ones. It's a process of discovery and discipline, and it's so good.