Good Loving Woman
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the geocentric experience bulletin. lamplighters roadway press. 1972.
POLARITY PARABLE
March 8, 2013
March 6, 2013
“I have a close but at the same time uncomfortable relationship with the natural world. I’ve always been most at home in the country probably because I was raised in the country as a boy, and I know something about farming and woodcutting and all the other things that country people know about. That kind of work has been important to me in my personal life and in my writing too. I believe in the values of manual labor and labor that is connected with the earth in some way. But I’m not simply a nature poet. In fact, I consider myself and I consider the whole human race fundamentally alien. By evolving into a state of self-consciousness, we have separated ourselves from the other animals and the plants and from the very earth itself, from the whole universe. So there’s a kind of fear and terror involved in living close to nature. My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity.”
Hayden Carruth (1921-2008)
March 5, 2013
“Birthday Cake” (Hayden Carruth)
March 5, 2013
For breakfast I have eaten the last of your birthday cake that you
had left uneaten for five days
and would have left five more before throwing it away.
It is early March now. The winter of illness
is ending. Across the valley
patches of remaining snow make patterns among the hill farms,
among fields and knolls and woodlots,
like forms in a painting, as sure and significant as forms
in a painting. The cake was stale.
But I like stale cake, I even prefer it, which you don’t
understand, as I don’t understand how you can open
a new box of cereal when the old one is still unfinished.
So many differences. You a woman, I a man,
you still young at forty-two and I growing old at seventy.
Yet how much we love one another.
It seems a miracle. Not mystical, nothing occult,
just the ordinary improbability that occurs
over and over, the stupendousness
of life. Out on the highway on the pavement wet
with snow-melt, cars go whistling past.
And our poetry, yours short-lined and sounding
beautifully vulgar and bluesy
in your woman’s bitterness, and mine almost
anything, unpredictable, though people say
too ready a harkening back
to the useless expressiveness and ardor of another
era. But how lovely it was, that time
in my restless memory.
This is the season of mud and thrash, broken limbs and crushed briers
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, articulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another. We love this house
and this hillside by the highway in upstate New York.
I am too old to write love songs now. I no longer
assert that I love you, but that you love me,
confident in my amazement. The spring
will come soon. We will have more birthdays
with cakes and wine. This valley
will be full of flowers and birds.
“Birthday Cake” by Hayden Carruth, from Toward the Distant Islands: New & Selected Poems. © Copper Canyon Press, 2006.
Female of the Species
March 3, 2013
Source Unknown (usurped momentarily from the depths of the public library basement bargain bin, then dispatched and condemned to a life upon a dusty thrift store shelf)
So when should you use the dash?
February 28, 2013
A dash is a punctuation mark, similar to a hyphen or minus sign but differing primarily in length and serving different functions. The most common versions of the dash are the en dash (–) and the em dash (—), named for the length of a typeface’s lower-case n and upper-case M respectively.
The em dash, m dash, m-rule, or “mutton” (—) often demarcates a break of thought or some similar interpolation stronger than the interpolation demarcated by parentheses, such as the following from Nicholson Baker‘s The Mezzanine:
At that age I once stabbed my best friend, Fred, with a pair of pinking shears in the base of the neck, enraged because he had been given the comprehensive sixty-four-crayon Crayola box—including the gold and silver crayons—and would not let me look closely at the box to see how Crayola had stabilized the built-in crayon sharpener under the tiers of crayons.
The Pause Dash more or less says to the reader, “Right here, I want you to take a breath. What you will read next relates to what you have just read in an interesting way, and I would like to emphasize it.” When using dashes this way, you are allowed only one per sentence…Writers who deploy this mark comfortably and adeptly (rather than haphazardly) are conscious of the rhythm and dynamics of a sentence. A well-placed dash adds energy and voice.” (from NY Times Opinionator commentary Mad Dash by Ben Yagoda)
get it write right with these handy tools from Ben Yagoda: How to Not Write Bad
image peter arkle
Word of the Weak: SYBARITIC
February 24, 2013
|ˌsibəˈritik| given or devoted to pleasure, even excessively so hedonistic, voluptuous, self-indulgently sensuous (1610s, from Latin sybariticus, from Greek sybaritikos, from Sybarites); More below…
And so the two sybaritic septuagenarians stripped down to their Strumpfhosen and sank into the sumptuous (but waterless) tub—well, the young puppy of a clerk didn’t know whether to avert his gaze or climb in with them, just to clinch the sale.
February 21, 2013
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
Anais Nin
It’s the birthday of Anaïs Nin (books by this author), born in Neuilly, France (1903), the daughter of a Spanish composer and Danish-Cuban classically trained singer. She studied psychoanalysis with Otto Rank, and was a patient of Carl Jung at one time. She wrote in literary obscurity for most of her life, until her diaries began to be published in 1966. She began writing them at age 11 and continued for more than 60 years, and they include accounts of her passionate love affair with Henry Miller in Paris. (The Writer’s Almanac)
She wrote, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” And, “I write emotional algebra.”
End of the Line, Valentine
February 14, 2013
Bored
by Margaret Atwood
All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
distances between things, or pounded
stakes into the ground for rows and rows
of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored)
weeded. Or sat in the back
of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel
he drove, steered, paddled. It
wasn’t even boredom, it was looking,
looking hard and up close at the small
details. Myopia. The worn gunwales,
the intricate twill of the seat
cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular
pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-fans
of dry moss, the blackish and then the greying
bristles on the back of his neck.
Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes
I would. The boring rhythm of doing
things over and over, carrying
the wood, drying
the dishes. Such minutiae. It’s what
the animals spend most of their time at,
ferrying the sand, grain by grain, from their tunnels,
shuffling the leaves in their burrows. He pointed
such things out, and I would look
at the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under
the nail. Why do I remember it as sunnier
all the time then, although it more often
rained, and more birdsong?
I could hardly wait to get
the hell out of there to
anywhere else. Perhaps though
boredom is happier. It is for dogs or
groundhogs. Now I wouldn’t be bored.
Now I would know too much.
Now I would know.
“Bored” by Margaret Atwood, from Morning in the Burned House. © Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
English Pronunciation Poem
February 12, 2013
If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.
Good luck and G-dspeed.
Amp up your next dinner party: print it out, cut it up, pass it around.
Sexy Chic: Viva(cious)! Sentence Diagramming
February 8, 2013
Irresistible? Try these:
Rex Barks by Phyllis Davenport
Sengram app by Soferio
Masterful, must-have tool in photo is the Pentel Twist-Erase III (made in Japan, hi-polymer lead, large barrel, latex-free grip, and extra long eraser that won’t smudge, dry out, or break). Searching for the ultimate automatic pencil? Look no further.
Winter Syntax by Billy Collins
February 5, 2013
A sentence starts out like a lone traveler
heading into a blizzard at midnight,
tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face,
the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.
There are easier ways of making sense,
the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.
You hold a girl’s face in your hands like a vase.
You lift a gun from the glove compartment
and toss it out the window into the desert heat.
These cool moments are blazing with silence.
The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it
it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning
outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon
in a corner of the couch.
Bare branches in winter are a form of writing.
The unclothed body is autobiography.
Every lake is a vowel, every island a noun.
But the traveler persists in his misery,
struggling all night through the deepening snow,
leaving a faint alphabet of bootprints
on the white hills and the white floors of valleys,
a message for field mice and passing crows.
At dawn he will spot the vine of smoke
rising from your chimney, and when he stands
before you shivering, draped in sparkling frost,
a smile will appear in the beard of icicles,
and the man will express a complete thought.
Good Loving Woman 