Swagger & Remorse

I've been re-reading Swagger & Remorse, a book of poems by Richard Fox that I read a few weeks ago while preparing his poetry feature at Escape Into Life, up now with fabulous photographs by Katinka Matson (that are actual flowers reproduced by scanner!). This one is called Spiders.

And pondering (sometimes while lap swimming) the phrase "swagger & remorse," which has a terrible perfection to it.

I hate "swagger" in myself and am uncomfortable around it in others, and so often, yes, it is accompanied by remorse. Or followed by it, often quickly, as in the shaking of salt & pepper onto one's food.

Excerpt:

Am having Coke & meatloaf:

everything is too salty--
there is such salt

to make everything
taste like something:

does taste like something:
tastes like salt

[...]

I remember some of the poems in this book from their appearance first in journals: "Medusa/Superman" in Court Green, "There were multiple things we did in all the wrong order" (a line that might describe my own life!) in Diagram, and "Cinderella" which we took when I was at RHINO, so I probably also recognize others from that particular submission, too.

In fact, I wonder if that was a moment of "swagger & remorse," as "Cinderella" is here titled by its first line, "The dead shall know the dead by their shoes," as are many in this book, and sometimes, when there was disagreement in the group during our decision-by-committee process, we'd ask a poet to re-title a poem, etc. Well, it's done now, and no doubt Richard Fox has a way of accepting it, as in this (otherwise untitled) poem:

If your house is on a hill, it's because someone decided it would be.

If your body feels tense, then it is.

You leaned for so long against your hall locker that your grade school principal said

       You holding that wall up

You wanted to talk to me, but could not find the time;

looked for the vanishing point & saw none.

I am getting ready now to age.

Everything is fearless in the wind.

Thanks to you, I have never walked into the same room twice.

This is a gorgeous book, melancholy, precise, and wise. It feels like a sustained elegy, and is indeed a book-length series of meditations and observations, some titled and some simply beginning. The table of contents is a poem in itself, therefore.

I might quote anything from the book to show you its beauty and melancholy, but I will quote one last poem in  full, choosing it because I once wrote a poem to my son with the phrase "Choose happiness" in it, so this resonates in that personal way with me and, I hope, in a personal-that-is-universal way with you.

So, another by Richard Fox, from Swagger & Remorse, a Tebot Bach book:

Happiness is in the smallest hands.

Where could you be when the air smells of boxwood;
the new-mown lawn of watermelon.

What could it be when sweat bands your shirt
before clouds genuflect in front of the sun.

What turns happily large & luminous, suffers the little ones
to touch the skin of others,

rises & falls in the happy atmosphere.

Choose.

You can't.
You won't.
You will.

A Maze of Daisies

I'm not giving up on Dick! Having just read UBIK, I'm now reading A Maze of Death, by Philip K. Dick, who seems like a really great guy. Though dead, and surely now really discovering what that's like.

In A Maze of Death, people go as a small group to another planet--also part of the plot in UBIK--but now they are getting picked off one by one, as in a murder thriller.

Will a detective arrive in a noser (small spaceship with only enough fuel for a one-way trip) to sort it all out?! Or is it all a metaphor for death? (That seems likely, given the title. Don't tell me, though!)

In both books, it's important to stick together. People die when they go off by themselves....

It's interesting to note the parallels and to discover Dick's obsessions. I see why people like him, and how these novels can turn out as really cool movies. I know (from Wikipedia) that a film version of UBIK is in the works! It's great that the age of special effects can handle Dick's ideas about perception and alternate versions of reality. What is reality?

Answering a comment from Kim, I tried to clarify something about my preference for realistic fiction, as it's true I have complained before about 1) easy happy endings in feel-good or genre fiction and 2) fiction that is really disguised autobiography. She is reading Widow for One Year, by John Irving, in which characters discuss writing and particularly fiction based on real people and real events...

I think science fiction writers, just like realistic fiction writers, might easily base characters on real people they've observed, or people similar to themselves or versions/aspects of self, or composite characters drawn from real life.

Write what's at hand, so to speak.

What I admire and desire, then, I guess, is the transcendence of self through art. That might sound uppity! I mean that I find it disappointing to learn that such and such a novel is a roman a clef, unless it was a really, really funny satire. If it's a personal vendetta, or an achingly sensitive self exposure, then, pfft! I still sound uppity. Well, pfft! on me then.

Meanwhile, 1) my flowerbeds are a maze of Gloriosa daisies and 2) I am still reading the baseball book (but it's hardcover and signed, so not poolside or lakeside). And soon, for book group, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon.

Summer on Speed-dial

As soon as July hits, summer starts speeding by, each day calling up the next, or the last, as if on speed-dial.

I'll think I have all the time in the world, and suddenly I'll be taking my daughter in for her sports physical and registering her for fall semester. Big housecleaning plans fall through. Summer writing deadlines come up too fast, like road signs. I almost miss the turn! And so on.

I almost titled this Summer on Speed, as I've begun the summer reading of Philip K. Dick, planned since a great boxful of books arrived from college friend Doug, and Dick apparently sometimes wrote on speed, or so says Wikipedia.

I read Ubik with a faint feeling of familiarity, as if indeed I'd read it some previous summer. Since it folds back in time and suspends reality, I couldn't be sure and I couldn't remember what might happen next, but I expected to be left hanging...and was.

That's often my reaction to metaphysical science fiction, a feeling of vague disappointment. You've got a good story going in a realm of utter fantasy, where you can make it all work out, Mr. Author. Why don't you? I know that's not quite fair. And I hate when it works out just to be parallel to an existing religion, usually Christianity.

What seems to me to be the greater challenge, to read or to write, is realistic literary fiction. At least when things don't quite work out there, I am affirmed in my own experience of life, and might have picked up a few pointers on how or how not to cope with that. Again, I read to learn how to live. In this world, in this life.

So that's my bias.

Nonetheless, I am now reading A Maze of Death, also by Philip K. Dick, and will take the VALIS trilogy with me, to share, on a beach week later this summer. I think my dad might like Dick, too, especially this A Maze, where the Author's Foreword states, "The theology in this novel is not an analog of any known religion. It stems from an attempt...to develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that God exists."

We'll see.

Resurrection on the 4th of July

Red, white, & blue Monday in the blog.

Lovely weekend with family wamily. Swimming, talking, eating, go-carts in the rain.

Plus City Museum of St. Louis.  A total wow experience!  I climbed higher (on ladders and spokes) and lower (down tunnels of rock) than I ever imagined I would with these old bones!

But we were insulated from the bad news about the Exxon oil spill in the Yellowstone River and came home to that awareness. Sigh...

So here is a poem from Living on the Earth. For some reason coming-back-to-life after a period of distance and numbness hits home with a number of readers/hearers. It may capture the mixed mood I feel right now, with the actual fireworks audible in the hometown distance as I type.

Resurrection on the 4th of July

I can't reach anyone anymore,
bound hand and foot by graveclothes.

On the deck under the grapevines
a tall thin man who makes flowerboxes
from fallen tree branches
offers me half a Weiss beer
with a slice of lemon in a paper cup.

I avoid my husband, my old friends.
They don't see the miracle,
they only recoil from the stench
of what's over.
                         I sit on the cooler
till someone needs another beer,
then plunge my dead fingers into the ice
for a stranger.

My face is bound about by a napkin
to keep my jaw from hanging open

in perpetual awe.

The man who writes about jazz
gives me a plate of blackberries.
One by one they dissolve on my tongue.
My belly still functions, my womb lunges for a child
running down the wooden steps.

Fireworks begin in the alley,
a great spoked wheel of flame
between the fence boards.

No one notices the light.
Maybe I've come too far from the stone.

I'm Outside

Here comes the holiday weekend! Swimming and fun and eating and probable cupcakes! I hope you USA celebrants of the Independence Day weekend have lots of fun and safe travels.

Lately, I spend most of each day outdoors. I take books, journal, pens, paper outside and write at the picnic table on the patio until the sun takes it over, then move a chair under a tree and continue.

I get up, water flower beds, pull weeds.

Hang the wet swimsuit, dry my hair in the breeze.

Polish the dagger and white holster. (Oh, wait, that's Halle Berry.)

Go in and out the house for ongoing chores, bring the laundry basket outside to fold the clothes in the sun.

Run errands, visit the sick.

It's summer. I cannot make myself stay indoors!

This is my usual rhythm since childhood. School year, indoors. Summer, outdoors. As a grown-up, during the teaching years, this academic schedule still worked, and I am still in it...until the next rhythmic change.

So, anyway, if you don't hear from me, I'm outdoors, and I don't have a laptoppy thingey of whatever G would Grab the internet out there. (3G and 4G are powers of "Grab," right?)

Grab the day! (And, yes, it's a Fat Tuesday on a holiday Friday!)