Bittersweet

Sharing something just written, don't know what it means, but I feel it

 

Hot Landing

Heather Ross Miller 

Roaring low over the Boston Mountains,
scattering roadrunners, armadillos, Osage
oranges, the commuter planes sit down abruptly,
what my Vietnam veterans call a hot landing.

I'm here in Arkansas teaching them
to write about jungles, bamboo spikes,
and the hot iron taste of blood.
Fayetteville, the hilltop university,
things I never knew, cultivations of rice
in the Memphis delta, fierce-skinned Cherokees
shooting pool, these border fighters, killers,
Arkansas Oklahoma Missouri.

Up from Carolina, my men stumbled
to Lee's Army of Northern Virginia,
sick as dogs, scared shitless, then into
the burning science of two world wars.
And somehow I got out here to Arkansas
to teach the creative writings of more
sick dogs and shit and stumbling death.
Now I board the plane to take off
for home, for holiday, for leaving
this hot landing hot landing. 
I take off
I take off
to unload put ashore
and come to rest.

 

Here I start a beast fable: turtle love in the melon patch.

Chapter 1.

1.

Waking Up at WaitAMinute Spring

Shortly before sunrise on a pleasant summer morning , Fox entered the small clearing around WaitAMinute Spring, a spring that filled with clear and clean and cool water all the time, and that was more than sufficient for the needs of the wild folks that lived nearby.
    People called it WaitAMinute Spring because for many years children and grown-ups both who visited there found it so pretty and pleasant that they stopped, looked in and spent a lot of time just sitting there. When their friends called for them to hurry on, they always said, "Wait a minute" because they didn't want to get up and go. The spring seemed to help everybody forget about bothersome things. The clear bubbling spring water always calmed people down.
    Now Fox, or any of the other animals, did not really use the spring in that way. And this morning, Fox, a fourth-generation resident of WaitAMinute Spring, had a plump hen slung over his shoulder, and he dropped it at the entrance to his den beneath a big scalybark tree, yawned, and then barked softly to his wife.
    “My Lord!” she exclaimed when she came outside and saw the hen. ‘What a nice breakfast for the children.”
    “I always bring home the best, my dear,” Fox replied, licking dew from his paws. “But this will have to be supper for me, since I’ve been out working so hard all night, and I need a good long nap.”
And he paused to listen to Farmer Crust’s dogs barking in the distance, then the sounds fading away as the whole pack followed yet another false trail laid down by the clever Fox.
    “Farmer Crust must have discovered by now that his prize Rhode Island Red is missing,” he said. “Those fool dogs were all sound asleep when I went through the entire henhouse and grabbed her.”

Does Poetry Matter? - A fun discussion we can take up here too

Link: Does Poetry Matter? - Paper Cuts Blog - NYTimes.com.

Fun discussion on the Paper Cuts blog at the NYTimes. I thought a few excerpts from here might provoke some thought and interesting discussion from our perspective on here.

Chris

Does Poetry Matter?

By GREGORY COWLES

Sometimes the planets align and you start seeing the same idea discussed by different people everywhere you look, as if your brain had stumbled late at night across a niche cable station broadcast by the universe itself. For me lately the show has been all about the relevance of poetry, as in: Is poetry relevant? Even among poets there seems to be a nervous consensus that it’s not.

Writing in the latest issue of Poetry magazine, for example, David Biespiel argues that “American poetry and America’s poets remain amazingly inconsequential to the rest of the nation’s civic, democratic, political and public life.” He suggests, a little hopefully and a little bitingly, that this decline in significance stems from a lack of political involvement. “The poet who engages democratic dialogue and political life is the renegade,” he writes, “while the one who lives on the margins, settles into tenured existence or remains committed to engaging only other like-minded types has aligned himself with something that in its best, purest and most satisfying form is bourgeois comfort.”

the low postmodern

 

Curving Images Overlap in Place

By Chris Boese

M:    What if I had stayed
        hunkered in the Ozarks
        while you fed your head,
        let the land go as dry oatmeal?

E:     If you had stayed
        with your mushy metaphysics,
        Magician?  Your Thoreau was
        a construction of his mother's
        trips with groceries.  You are
        what you eat. I make it grow.

M:    Who eats now, fields dull and heavy
        with wilting wheat?  You call and
        I'm your rainmaker.  You can't even
        feed me.  I ride on the updrafts,
        hot, fiery dervishes I seed
        with dust and water.  Some Great
        Mother, eight dirty faces waiting
        behind your skirts, waiting to feed
        on your empty bounty, and me,
        I come to serve the image
        that swirls between us.

E:     You conjure only vapor!  Reflecting
        water droplets, leftover smoke seeds.
        You make a fiction, all is a fiction.
        Go back to your Ozarks.  This ground
        need not grow; if it did, who would know?

M:    Redeye ham fat browned into gravy,
        spread over a biscuit, gray and sodden.
        You had eight years to plant and build.
        I come in on a fatback rain, hard drops
        beading in fine dust, in tire ruts running
        like interstate on a ridgetop, flattened
        stripe of grass growing up the middle.

E:     So send apocalyptic flood, go ahead.
        I'll shake shaggy trees lush with late growth,
        modeling, vainly, the wind.  There, my
        blue-black earth, deep as mud
        in a drying ball field in Des Moines.
        There, the West slides into the ocean.

M:    Ho, my Empress.  Where is your fiction?
        Mother, you grow, vision lost in abundance.
        What, for your children? What now, for you?

E:     Nothing grows in rows, and even
        your swirling pipe can't walk
        a straight line.  Beauty serves
        its maker, lush resounding
        fiction.  I care little what it makes,
        only that it grows.

 

Chekhov's gun

Or, as Emily Dickinson would say, "My Life had stood-- a Loaded Gun."

Heather was giving me a good-natured hard time in the comment thread on Blues (the Stardust poem), saying effectively, "Shit or get off the pot!" cuz I do tend to go on. But I've been in a stew about the issues I raised in that thread for DECADES.

On the other hand, I might be finally getting close to getting over them. Maybe. But in truth, I've wanted to discuss this stuff with people who think about such things for a long time, so instead of doing what Heather advised and "getting over it," I'm going to throw the issue out here to y'all.

I've got a short story I wrote some years ago that got a personal rejection from a place I really admired at the time (the Atlantic hadn't swung so far to the right back then). It's a decent story, in other words. Except that I can't bear to read it, because the revisions I made to try to get closer to what I thought those kinds of places would take made me feel like a sell-out and divorced the story from its heart.

What's worse, I made the revisions in the interests of "Chekhov's gun." And it irritates the hell out of me.