This morning they ran in circles through the kitchen, living room, and dining room, and now they’ve gone to their separate corners to chew on fresh, frozen socks.

With the house now quiet and the world calm, I’ll return to reading Eliot’s 1920 Poems. Randy Malamud’s critical introduction to The Wasteland and Other Poems has been big help in my understanding of the collection. There are so many seemingly random allusions that I was scratching my head in bewilderment.

I’m thinking of writing my research paper about this question: does the anti-semitism in Eliot’s poems contradict his application of Buddhist philosophy?

What would Red and Duffy say? They’d probably tell me to stop running in circles, chew on a frozen sock, and then take a nap.

But there’s a view, with natural light. And the air conditioning works. A huge improvement on last year’s basement office.

It was fun to walk through the exhibit a second time. At my friend’s suggestion, we used the audio tour as we progressed through the halls, and we ended up finding out a lot that would have gone unnoticed had we merely meandered along on our own. One interesting aspect the curators brought out was how Dalí experimented with how he applied his medium to the surface–he used a loaf of bread, his mustache, a rhinoceros horn (which he equated with the unicorn, a symbol of virginity), and an octopus. He also shot paint pellets out of a gun, a technique he dubbed “bulletism.”

I also found out why he was kicked out of the Surrealist movement: with Marcel Duchamp’s blessing he included a painting  with religious iconography in a Surrealist exhibit, a theme the surrealists rejected. So he was ousted. The title of this exhibit is Dalí, The Later Works, a time period that until recently has not been admired by art critics, maybe because of the religious nature of the pieces. I did read, however, that Dalí declared himself a “Catholic without faith,” and that he did not believe in miracles.

I’ve already written two drafts of poems in response to his paintings. This summer has been very contemplative for me. I’ve been reading After by Jane Hirschfield and studying Buddhism, meditation, yoga. All the mind work, plus lap swimming, to calm my inner waters.

Even though I want to be at peace, I’m very drawn to the zany world of Da Da, Surrealism, and dreams. I keep thinking that if I remember my dreams and explore the images the meaning of everything will fall into place. A pretty illusion.

The boys said he was six months old, but I’m not so sure. He chews on anything made of plastic, rubber, paper, or wood. One night he started chewing my toes under the blanket, not understanding the lumps were a part of me!

Freeboarder has started back to school already–they’re moving to a year-round school year where we live–so today I walked Red and Duffy for two miles after he left for school. Red rolled in the creek to cool off, so now we’re on the back porch with the ceiling fans blowing until he dries off. It’s cool out here now, perfect for my morning reading and writing practices.

I’ve been reading about dog behavior, a first for me. When I was a kid my dad paper trained our puppy, and scolded him for bad behavior with a rolled up newspaper he would slap on his hand behind our beagle’s back. But training techniques have changed in the last forty years. Dogs, like people, thrive from constant praise. When I taught school one of our adages was to “catch the children being good.” The same holds true for animals. There’s a lot to be said for B.F. Skinner and positive reinforcement.

Positive reinforcement requires lots of attention and patience. I have to look Red in the eye and praise him when he’s behaving the way I want him to, like when he chews on his toys and not on the furniture. All this attention has shortened the time I can spend meditating, so I’m trying to think about my moments with him as my practice.

I’m mindful of him, I praise him, and I give him affection. When he pees in the wrong spot, I clean it up and take him outside. Rather than getting angry, I practice patient acceptance. There’s a remedy to the situation–a gate, a crate, lots of trips to the backyard, and a few long walks a day.

One of the poems from her collection, “Labor Day Weekend,” was featured on Verse Daily. You can also read the blurbs on the back cover here.

Before reading her later work, Schulten, who has traveled widely, remarked that her more recent poems reflect her thoughts about how we create the concept of home as we move through the world.

Jim Goar, whom I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time at the reading, read a few pieces from his most recent book of poetry, Seoul Bus Poems. Goar told the audience that all the poems in the collection were written on the bus while he was working in Seoul. Great economy of words and meaning in the title, I’d say.

Most of the work he read came from his latest project, a book-length serial poem based on his immersion in the Holy Grail legend, the focus of his studies as a PhD. student in Norwich, England. I look forward to reading the collection. I’d also like to learn more about his method of writing the serial poems.

You can read more about Jim Goar at his blog, Can of Corn. Discover how he named his blog by reading his book, Seoul Bus Poems.

I offer that statement as an apology for my musings about poems, because probably all of it has been said much better by someone else. So you could say I’m writing these musings for myself, or for some future reader who comes along, surfing the web the way some people still troll through microfiche.

The Epigraph

I took a course on modern British poetry many years ago, and I’ve read T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” several times over the decades, but I never bothered to look up the Italian epigraph until now, and I guess I should have, because it does inform the poem. Or it could be that I forgot the meaning after so many years.

William Blake: "Dante's Inferno, Whirlwind of Lovers."

The epigraph comes from a section of Dante’s Inferno, and is the speech of a man who apparently committed some heinous misdeeds, because he’s consigned to one of the lower circles of hell.  Roughly, the stanza says the man would not tell the story of his sins if he thought the listener could return to the world to relate the man’s crimes, but since he has never heard of anyone escaping from the fiery pit, he will go ahead and spill the beans, or wag his flaming tongue. He has been so terrible that he has lost his human form, and has become only a tongue of fire.

The Poem

When J. Alfred invites the reader to go on a walk with him through the city streets, he believes we are with him in hell, never to return.  If he tells us what’s really on his mind, it’s because he thinks we’re stuck in this place with him.

Prufrock admits he has tried to create a persona to win favors from the world. He admits he’s getting old, and reveals his paltry efforts to conceal his aging. He shows us his hurt when a woman he has either seduced, or tried to seduce, tells him, “That is not what I meant at all./That is not it, at all.”

Yet he thinks he really does have something to say. He wants to come back from the dead like Lazarus to tell everyone about the “mermaids singing, each to each.” But he doubts himself. He doesn’t think he’s a prophet. He doubts the mermaids will sing to him.

But what he has to say is that at night we dream we are mermaids riding the waves out to sea, and it’s only when we wake up that we drown.

Prufrock is  like the rest of us ridiculous humans, caught up in our gains and losses, always thinking we have time to make our “visions and revisions/Before the taking of toast and tea.”

Lately I’ve been reading about Buddhism and the need to follow the Dharma right now. We might die at any moment. It could be in an hour, when we drive to the market, or later on, while walking the dog. And so the need to die with a peaceful mind is of the greatest importance. Catholics might say something about needing to be in a state of grace during the moment of death.

Prufrock obsesses about our having time for all the things we haven’t done yet. But really there is no time left for that. He knows his time is up, yet he clings to the idea of himself: parting his hair down the back, rolling his pants legs up, walking the beach in white flannel, all the images of himself as a lady’s man or an urbane gentleman amid the sordid yellow smoke of the city.

The collection Prufrock (1917) is dedicated to Eliot’s friend Jean Verdenal who, according to the inscription, died at the age of 26 during WWI at Dardanelles. Maybe this character of Prufrock is a satire of Eliot himself and others. Through revealing the character’s weaknesses he exposes our frivolities and our vanities, which at our death amount to nothing.

My favorite lines from the poem are these:

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

and

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

Those lines make me believe Prufrock might not be a bad sort at all. Because he has told us about the mermaids, after all. If he’s in hell, maybe he’ll have a chance to climb out of the pit.

Off I 75 in North Georgia

The following passage continues where I left off in the first post about contemporary poetry.

Contemporary poetry, and contemporary art in general, reveals the Zeitgeist of the 21st century–we seem to live in a moment in which we are reevaluating the myths that motivate us; as a culture we question the roles language, poetry (or art), science, and religion play in our lives. This reconsideration of reality has produced eclectic collections from both younger and older poets.

Each of the books we discussed this semester in our contemporary poetry course, in varying degrees, serves as a barometer of our country’s mood as perceived through the feelings and thoughts of the individual poet, although the psychological and emotional landscapes differ in their representation.

I will identify some essential questions that underlie or motivate three of the individual projects, examining poems from It Is Daylight by Arda Collins, Matthew Dickman’s All-American Poem, and Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife. My hope is that these sample poems will serve as emblems for the poets’ overarching motivations to write, as well as illustrate the wide spectrum of aesthetics in contemporary American poetry.

Among the books we studied, Arda Colin’s It Is Daylight represents the collection least inclined toward the Romantic ideal of union with nature. Luis Glück, who chose Collins’s collection for the Yale Younger Poet’s Prize, characterizes Collin’s poetry as “savage, desolate, brutally ironic” (vii).

Glück later states that “[a]t the heart of the poems is shame, which results not from something the poet has done, but rather from being” (vii). Even though there is an overt depiction of shame in Collins‘ collection, I would say the heart of her poems also contains a desire to understand what being alive means to a neurotic speaker (whom we shouldn’t confuse with the author).

Her satire of suburbia implies a certain amount of anger on the narrator’s part.  The anger points to the speaker’s frustration at finding herself in a life she can’t entirely understand.  Her minimalist style, with its minute focus on the ordinary, refers to a longing to penetrate and look past the everyday world we find ourselves in.

She depicts the human desire for transcendence through art as quaint, almost as if she were a teenager who won’t admit her real feelings out of fear of rejection. An example of her satire of Americana, or kitsch, is her poem “Pennsylvania” (61).

The list of artifacts the speaker remembers from Pennsylvania serves as an indictment of a suburbanite’s attempt at sophistication or decor: “ … There were wood clocks/ and a cuckoo bird in the panoply; chest of drawers/ engraved with silver acorns[.]”

Her descriptions provide a shared laugh with the reader, especially if we recognize ourselves in her satire of a middle class person who tries to imitate the upper classes.

Her poems of social isolation and despair are more easily understood by reading the following statement she makes in an article titled “Poetry as Process of Inquiry” from the Poetry Society of America: “The process of inquiry is one place that poetry comes from.  Another way to say this might be that poetry is the emotion of the act of thinking[.]”

If one views her poems from the perspective in which Collins describes poetry in this article, her work takes on new meaning. As a writer, she tries to make sense of the banal world in which she finds herself . She pokes fun at society for creating objects that copy art, but are not art in and of themselves.

Why these objects don’t transcend the everyday  is one of the themes of her project. By contemplating the failed attempt at art, she creates poetry, which is ironic in and of itself.

Later in the article, Collins explains that she finds motivation to write in “the desire to know, feel, or imagine something, to conjure a scenario, as a form of emotional intensity.”

Her serial poem “Dawn” (67), which is a type of black humor (and a visual pun, considering the poem enters the mind of a serial killer) comes from the place of inquiry Collins describes in the above quote.

Some might question why she would explore the psychosis of a serial killer. Does she want to shock the reader? Is she trying to show that poetry can do what fiction and film do, only better? As a society no one seems to question why Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men was written or made into a movie. The mind of a serial killer is a frightening, nauseating place to be, yet Collins also allows the character to express moments of beauty:

There wasn’t a calf
or a person,
there had been no
killing. He put his arms around it,
made up its soul. (67)

If Collin’s quest as an artist was to question what would be like to experience life as a serial killer with all its complexities and social isolation, she achieved her goal.

I think of  the Eastern concept of yin and yang, and how the material world contains the potential for both good and evil. To pretend the dark side of human nature doesn’t exist puts us as a people in danger of committing evil or malignant acts. By not writing about these themes we deny their existence.

Collins questions the nature of reality through her exploration of the human psyche. She creates a character who talks to herself, as she illustrates in “The Sound of Peeling Potatoes” (7). In a list of images and sounds, she writes: “talking to someone in your head/ who bears witness to your thoughts” (7).

The character talks to herself because she doesn’t think there is a God who will listen to her prayers. But I would argue that because the character obsesses about God, she holds out the hope that a god, or something besides the humdrum reality of suburbia, exists.

However, the speaker denies a personal God who sits on a throne above the clouds. In fact, her final poem “Snow on the Apples,”  satirizes an infantile concept of an Almighty Creator when she writes,” God’s going to a dinner/ where they’re having lamb chops/ and veal stuffing with/ roasted almonds and fig sauce…” (92).

Collins does not break new ground in her criticism of theology–Wallace Stevens cast doubt on modern theology long before Collins in his poem “Sunday Morning,” but her imagination and sense of humor do point to a humorous view of an old theme.

I’ve spent the morning reading and shopping online for a used canoe. We didn’t join a community pool this year, so I’m thinking about taking advantage of the nearby river and lake for some outdoor fun.

I saw two guys wind surfing on boards that looked like snowboards. They were riding the waves all the way down miles of beach, at times shooting up twenty feet in the air. The upper body strenghth it must have taken to hold onto that parachute sail… .

My son and his friend walked out into the surf, and the current took them down about five hundred feet. They kept getting out of the water and walking up the beach and swimming down current, as if it were a river.

Anybody’s Child from christine swint on Vimeo.

This is a video of a poem I wrote called “Anybody’s Child.” The inspiration to write it came after watching the CNN documentary, “Atlanta Child Murders.”

I lived in the Atlanta area around the time of the murders, in the late 70s and early 80s, but the poem comes more from my experiences as a mother, and how I can identify with the grief the mothers of these murdered children continue to feel.