Torch

I don't know how it will all fit together this Tuesday, when the poem-a-day prompt is, randomly, other than the weekday name, Tuesday Weld, but here goes.

To cook, I need music, so last night's dinner was cooked to Torch, an album made by Carly Simon while she was breaking up with James Taylor, surely a fact every Carly Simon fan but me knew before this morning's brief visit to Wikipedia.

The album cover shows him what he'll be missing, as does the song "What Shall We Do with the Child."

"Torch songs" are songs of unrequited love, for the one you "hold a torch" for.  Again, thanks to Wikipedia, this time for a list of noted torch singers, a list that includes Fiona Apple, Paul Anka (out of alphabetical order), Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Etta James, Norah Jones, Ethel Merman, Kate Smith, Sophie Tucker, and Amy Winehouse, but no Carly Simon.  So, an odd list, but lots of fun.

Today's imaginary playlist, then, is all the songs on this album, including "Spring is Here," which contains the ironic lyric, "Spring is here, I hear," which does apply to today, blue sky but 36 degrees so far this morning.

Tuesday Weld carried a torch for Warren Beatty, the rich kid, on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, a tv show I vaguely remember loving in early childhood, especially for the Beatnik character played by Bob Denver and sweet-faced Dobie Gillis.  Mainly, I loved saying his name!

Dobie carried a torch for Thalia, played by Tuesday. Zelda carried a torch for Dobie. Zelda was played by Sheila James, now known as Sheila James Kuehl, American politician, and, Wikipedia tells us, "the first openly gay person elected to the California legislature." Go, Zelda!  If it weren't a sitcom, it would be Chekhovian, this unrequited love circle!

Added to which, "I don't consider myself to be not gay," said Carly Simon. "I've enlarged all of my possibilities."  People are so interesting!

Anyhoo...I would just like to say that, despite the hot background music, I did not torch dinner.

***

Poem-a-day prompt:

April 5--Tuesday Weld

Monday, Monday

There's been a request that I share my poetry prompts for April, National Poetry Month, so I will try to do that from now on at the end of each blog entry in April (today including the earlier prompts), but I urge all you poets out there to Google around till you find just the right poetry site for you.

Some of the prompting sites are in the blogroll here on the right.

Today's prompt from me is the phrase "back-to-work" because it is Monday, Monday. Plus, it is Blue Monday in the blog. Yesterday the college boy went back to school, after a pleasant long weekend at home, picked up by his friends in a blue car.

This Mama and Papa had been hanging out with our "boy" outdoors in the wonderfully windy 82-degree day, on the patio, at picnic table and on rusty glider, talking about nothing and everything, as life rolled by.

Speaking of blue, I continue to admire Gina Berriault's stories in Women in Their Beds. A lot of them of are blue. A lot have a slice-of-life quality, showing us the blue moment and/or the tender, aching moment of love or grief or regret, and doing nothing artificial to resolve it, erase it, or appease the gods.

I love the coincidence that some of her stories are about actresses, artists, or novelists, and about the dilemmas of balancing life and art, or what is reasonable to reveal in art, or why it might not be reasonable to reveal (or distort) it.

That reasoning goes on in the reader's head (my pretty blue head), not necessarily the story.

*****

So, prompts for April poem-a-day:

April 1--personal folly
April 2--slatternly tendencies
April 3--group dreaming (Google Inception or Jung)

April 4--back-to-work

Poetry Sunday

It's Poetry Sunday at my church! That's how we celebrate April, National Poetry Month.

What we do is follow our churchy routine but instead of a reflection (which is what we usually have instead of a sermon) we go up one by one, those who choose, and read a poem--a favorite poem by someone else, or a poem of our own.  There are several fine poets at church, including my mother!  Also, I've invited members of my poetry workshop to attend today, if they like, to listen or join in.

And this afternoon, the poetry workshop meets at my house to share poems and wine!! Yes, we are participating in the poem-a-day celebration of National Poetry Month by writing (or attempting) a poem a day.  I gave them 30 prompts in advance, and am doing them myself, sometimes combining my own prompt with one of the kazillion wonderful prompts out there at various poetry blogs. It's fun and inspiring.

I won't be posting my attempts here, but I'll post this poem, which is in today's church bulletin as our "gathering words" (I am very honored!) and also from my chapbook Living on the Earth.


Early Morning, River and Grasses

This is dawn in our own private Eden.
We have risen
from the soft grasses
as deer rise from their trusting sleep
and are gone.
Trees shine in the river
beside our bed
and take a pale fire from the morning sun.
The curve of the earth is visible.
Beside the wild slope, the farmer plants his ordered rows.
A dead branch hangs fragile and stricken
in the live oak.
Let us care for each other.
Let us care for this earth.

*****

White Camellia with Vase is another wonderful painting by Jonathan Koch.

To participate in the Big Poetry Giveaway, go here (my post, where you can click other links to get to other giveaways!).

Saturnalia

No terrible pranks were played on us yesterday, April Fool's Day, and even Fool's Fest, a wild drinking party, was a flop. Apparently, via Facebook, local college students had invited college students from all over to come to Normal (what an exciting location!) to party this weekend. Local university and town officials were proactive, increasing security, closing liquor stores early, and reminding tenants of fines for big, loud parties, and, poof, not much happened.

That is, there was no Saturnalia.  Saturnalia was a feasting, gift-giving, drinking party and pagan holiday that in some ways resembles Christmas, falling in mid-winter, the timing noted by scholars and theologians. And while it is April, we do have winter temperatures at the moment, and we did have hail yesterday, a fine April Fool's joke on all of us hoping for spring.

But I do love this detail of Saturnalia:

"Saturnalia involved the conventional sacrifices, a couch (lectisternium) set out in front of the temple of Saturn and the untying of the ropes that bound the statue of Saturn during the rest of the year."


I don't love the sacrifices. I do love the couch coincidence.  As this is the time of year when couches and armchairs start to emerge on front porches and lawns, to ease the drinking parties of students. Except for when there are ordinances against that. I wonder if the council debates do include references to the ancient Roman rites?


Anyhoo, the sun is up, the sky is blue...Ah! Today's imaginary playlist must include "Dear Prudence" by the Beatles!


Let us go now and celebrate the birthdays of Hans Christian Andersen and Casanova.  Let us be slatternly if we wish. And/or let us do our laundry, beat our rugs, clear our gardens.


And, if we are poets, write our poem-a-day.

Women in Their Beds

I am reading, among other things, Women in Their Beds, the short story collection that won Gina Berriault the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the REA Award, also won by Andre Dubus, who admired her greatly.

I first encountered Berriault in "The Stone Boy," a chilling and heartbreaking (but not sentimental, never sentimental, far from it) story I was reading for a Great Books salon. (It's been made into a movie, with Robert Duvall and Glenn Close, and Berriault also wrote the screenplay for it. And it was previously adapted for television.) After I'd read "The Stone Boy," I thought, "Who is this writer?" and kept looking for her in anthologies and bookstores. (I found her collection at Babbitt's, when I worked there, on the floor.)

Alas, she was, apparently, a "writer's writer," defined here as someone admired by other writers for "purity and passion" but sidestepped by fame.  "It seems I'm going to be famous," Emily Dickinson once wrote (to whom? my source is The Belle of Amherst, the play by William Luce that pieces together snippets of notes and letters) but it seemed her fame would come in the form of immortality, a thing she also hoped for.  Berriault eventually met with fame and acclaim but, the above article claims, wrote mostly in obscurity.

No wonder Richard Yates loved her! He, too, was appreciated by other writers but suffered obscurity after early acclaim, and the film of his novel Revolutionary Road was made after his death. Yates said, "Gina Berriault is one of the finest writers alive." But, as you can see from her New York Times obituary, she's dead.

I like Berriault in the way I like Alice Munro--although the scenes and characters are very different--for the close observation of real human behavior, the understated but firm connection to the emotional life, and the quiet, steady confidence that just to say what's happening is enough, to leave as is whatever is mysterious, to reveal whatever can unfold on its own.

Here is a brief Salon review of Women in Their Beds; reviewer Katherine Whittamore doesn't like the title story as much as I do but we both love the librarian/homeless man story, "Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?" By chance, I am about to read "The Overcoat," the story mentioned at the end of this review, and a title also used by Nicolai Gogol for a story I have also discussed in a Great Books salon.

Full circle.

And I am a woman in her joy, who answered the doorbell last night to find my son, the home boy! College friends dropped him off on their way elsewhere for the weekend. I knew he was coming but did not know the details, and at that moment was expecting my daughter at the door. He then surprised his father and his sister, as each came home, and was himself surprised to find his mattress stolen, as was the overcoat in Gogol.

But that's another story.