Pajamas or Pyjamas?

OK, do you wear "pajamas" or "pyjamas"? If you wear "pyjamas," you are "chiefly British," according to my American Heritage Dictionary. I love to look up words, and have looked up this one before, forgetting and then remembering that pajamas are loose-fitting Persian trousers, intended for sleeping or lounging. I wear mine to drive my daughter to school in the early, early morning.

While I did not see a windmill or a little person standing on the peak of a barn roof, as in this wonderful screenprint by Daniel Danger, the sky was this blue that early. Danger's art accompanies the new poetry feature just up at Escape Into Life: Bertha Rogers. I hope you will visit it to see more and to read her wonderful poems. Notice how she's a bit of a Chesire cat in her author photo!!

And I love that this one, in its title, hast thou slain the jabberwock?, references "Jabberwocky," by Lewis Carroll!

Have a good hump of the week!

(I don't think the Jabberwock is wearing pajamas.)

Feeding Time

I remember when this book arrived in summer, just in time for me to take it to the beach to read! It's full of fiddler crabs and other marine creatures. Of course, I was at the lake, not the ocean, but there was sand and water. I'm glad to be reading FeedingTime, by Emily Scudder, again now, as the cold comes on, so I can remember that summery shore.

The first poem, "Transitory Adhesion," introduces the conversational tone and a fine "transitory" randomness:

Seagulls bore me.  I like this boredom.

The mind can wander, like this.

Snails latch onto other snails. Or a rock.

Clump.

With drop lines, kids fish.

Pull them up. Throw them back.

I once did that.

Sand robins are ugly fish.

And so forth. I can hear the water plopping. I can look around and see what she's seeing. I'm leaving out the heart of the poem now, the center, the personal, a loss, something for you to find on your own.  Now I'm looking around again, as she does, to recover. The poem resumes

Is it the fiddler crabs?

I count on crabs when other things change.

I call this monotonous attachment.

The ocean is like this: reused, remembered.

The mind can wander, like this.

And morning fog burns off, like it does.

Oh, I love that repeated line, "The mind can wander, like this," and the perfect use of a comma there, as demonstration of how easily it's done, this mind wandering, which the whole poem also demonstrates. I love the use of "like" here, too, conversationally, and especially in that last line, to resist simile and insist on what really happens, the morning fog burning off.

I have so many favorite moments in this book, and so many come from its blunt honesty, its simplicity of statement. It's like the opposite of Virginia Woolf, but here's one I love called "A Room of One's Own" that takes place at a writer's retreat and begins:

I am not very happy.

I am supposed to be very happy.

I am supposed to eat very well.

I order clam dogs and Cokes.

Clam dogs! I didn't even know such a thing existed, but I've wanted one ever since I read about it in this poem.

The women at the Lobster Pot like me.

The women at the women's bookstore like me.

The women at the women's bookstore offer me

the lesbian discount and I am pleased.

I would be pleased, too! This poem keeps building to its solitary writing room and attached "supposed to's" and with wry humor and poignant honesty goes somewhere new that is somewhere familiar, too. I'll let you find it via Pecan Grove Press!

But before you (and I) go, I want to give you the heart of another poem, this one called "Because We All Die Someday." It opens with a Woolfean sentiment, "And all I want is an hour to myself," which is also a Rita Dove sentiment...or any hardworking woman's sentiment, especially the writer kind. But here's exactly what I identify with, connecting me to my mother, who mows, and grandmother, who picked up sticks in the yard, and to the chores we ask our kids to help us with:

When I pick sticks off the lawn

my kids hate to help. Groan.

Why are we doing this anyway?

Because I did when I was a kid.

Because sticks jam the mower.

Because we all die someday, and picking

sticks is a small thing

and makes Grandma happy.

I love that "Groan," like the earlier "Clump." I love, again, that simple repetition that gets the job done.

Despite the reminder of death and the line "I am not very happy," this book is full of animal joy and family joy. I love the poetic renewal of vows in "If I Married You Again" with its new wedding attire--"I'd wear pants / and black boots"--and its raw desire! (Ah, I appreciate this "monotonous attachment" so different from the snail's!) "Throw my flowers like a shortstop."

I celebrate this book the way she'd re-do her wedding:  "Raise a fist / for the real of it."

Poet Emily Scudder is also the founder of Fiddler Crab Review, dedicated to reviewing chapbooks, new or old. I was thrilled when I first found this site, kept reading and admiring, and now I do reviews there, too! So if you have a chapbook, here's where to send it!

First Snow

Supposedly we've had the first snow of the season, not far from here, and there might be more of a dusting tonight, also not far from here, but I'll be fine if it wants to hold off.

The local flora is in that in-between stage--some trees totally bare, others still flaming, several shrubs half-clothed and shivering. The garden has two stalwart mums in bloom and new growth: columbine and pinks just up from the ground, thanks to that long Indian Summer in October and a warm November.

There are even patches of new grass since the last mow. And on the curb, mountains of leaves awaiting the post-holiday leaf pickup. I took a chilly walk into town for fresh air and to shake off any post-holiday blues. All the time now I am buoyant on an ocean of joy, a calm ocean in this metaphor.

And now a time of advent is coming, that death of the year that makes us put up lights and bring out candles. Soon I'll begin my own incessant playing of "In the Bleak Midwinter." Pink Martini's Joy to the World. Blind Boys of Alabama singing "Go Tell it on the Mountain."  The Trans-Siberian Orchestra's Lost Christmas Eve.   New this year, thanks to a gift last year, Tori Amos, Midwinter Graces.

I love Christmas music! But then, I haven't been out shopping yet. And may not go out shopping at all!

Emotional Opinion

Ah, I like this definition of poetry as "emotional opinion," which I found in Ruth Stone's obituary in the New York Times. She died at 96, so she had a good (I hope) long life, though filled with sorrow and struggle. A poet's life.

I read her book In the Next Galaxy last year and will seek out her others, gradually, if I can bear it. The obituary quotes from a couple of the poems about her husband's suicide, and here's another set of lines: "What is imperative is the Off switch; / which he, at one point some time ago, / opted for himself." She opted to live, and to write, and I am glad of it, but now the Off switch has been flicked for her.

Also sad to learn of the death of biologist Lynn Margulis, a favorite of mine. She was a trailblazer in evolution-ary theory, proposing symbiosis as one path to new life forms, not just random mutation. She allows for a kind of altruism as the basis of life, not just selfish survival, as evolution is so often interpreted, and her definition of "altruism" is, likewise, not the selfish conventional one in biology, which reduces it. That is, to preserve life itself, Margulis suggested, two organisms may share materials and give up their own lives, which is different in essence from those who say the organism is simply desperately trying to save itself and randomly produces something new. Since, in both cases, this is an unthinking intention, as far as we know, someone might say it is just two ways of seeing/stating the same thing. Fine. But they are importantly different ways of seeing/stating, with ramifications beyond biology, and Margulis's own research provided evidence at first rejected, now accepted in mainstream evolutionary theory.

Not surprisingly, she is also the mother of Gaia theory, which should interest and please some science fiction lovers, and was once married to Carl Sagan ("billions and billions" of stars).

And one more recent loss: Shelagh Delaney, the author of the play A Taste of Honey. I am thankful that these women lived and wrote, teaching us what to value and how to live, which, as always, is why I read.

And thanks, again, to Jonathan Koch, for the persimmons, pears, and mandarin.

Thanks and Praise

I wake early. Unless I stayed up too late watching the Star Trek movie with my kids. Then I might loll in bed for a half hour, awake but pondering life. I love when I wake in joy. Waking in anxiety, or in nothingness, tends to happen at 3:00, or 3:03, or 3:06. An excellent time to read a book. But, hey, what isn't an excellent time to read a book?

This morning I woke remembering to post Poems of Thanks and Praise over at Escape Into Life, a mini-anthology of lovely poems by 4 poets whose names link to their solo features there. It has gorgeous art by Christy Lee Rogers, reminding us of the glory and beauty of the human body and the eternal dance. Of the swirls of water and air and color everywhere in our lives. And the darkness always in the background.

And there is a quiet political statement in the center of her feature in a piece called The Promise that seems terribly pertinent this particular Thanksgiving in America, when many are hungry and suffering, or fearful and uncertain; when many are actively protesting injustice; when many are still not seeing or solving the problem; when a few keep a brutal hold on the money, power, and status quo. I'd like to see us instead come together in a feast of thanksgiving and peace. But I see that the promise holds the shape of a V, as for Victory, and remains open to interpretation.

Please enjoy the poems of thanks and praise of Susan Rich, Richard Jones, Maureen E. Doallas, and Robert Lee Brewer, and escape into your beautiful life.