This Spring Mars springs from the spoils of winter ruins and sends a motorized snake down the clogged sewer shaving the random roots obstinately finding like foraging ants every tiny fissure in a friable underground infrastructure.
The flowers Mars forces the mad dog tramples frothing spittle quick nimble and legs akimble on a first clear warm day with her slimy green tennis ball tossed to fetch tossed to fetch tossed little daylilies looking a bit bedraggled.
The dog’s form holds Spring’s unfolding and stays true to its arbitrary erratic no man’s land of free yard garden room where the dogs come and go speaking of portobello and Punchinello.
A march hare muddles up straw hatted mushing spring riddles that scare off common readers until Mars springs now forward and the dogs are late for work.
The gold movie lion his iron stare and lush loamy mane says Augh! roar from which the lambs retreat but Leo did not bellow for peace bells pealed the turn of the Hun.
And now this ruddy Spring heralds with reels and boisterous calls to protect the sprouts from passing rituals another year gone belogged befogged and begoggled.
adversative? when to whom conversative? with to which
adjourning? now here heretofore? to where
in room? ill lit elbow? move over
“Ill Seen Ill Said,” a novella piece by Samuel Beckett, appeared in the October 5, 1981 issue of The New Yorker magazine, first published by Les Éditions de Minuit in Paris, earlier in ’81. My poem above, “Q & A,” is a bit of a riff on Beckett’s themes.
On page 41 of The New Yorker, where the story begins, is a cartoon by Charles Barsotti. The cartoon shows a duck sitting at a desk. The duck wears glasses, is writing with a short pen or pencil on a piece of paper, a phone on a front corner of the desk, a stack of three pieces of paper on the other corner, the duck looking up, as if thinking of what to write next. Above the duck, still in the cartoon frame, the words: “Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack!” And above the cartoon box, a handwritten caption reads: “THE CALL OF THE WILD.”
There are 77 question marks in Beckett’s novella, including: “What the wrong word?” Just before, “Imagination at wit’s end spreads its sad wings.”
Near 8,000 words to the novella. I counted only 3 commas in the entire piece. Short, staccato sentences.
We hardly see anything of reality’s totality (“Ill seen”), but that is our syllabus, and even that may seem overwhelming, and suppose we could see it all, could we describe it (“Ill said”), let alone explain it, and with only 0.000375% commas! All that said, we sometimes seem to come close, or someone does, and shares, and that’s a pleasure. Not an argument, not a theory, not a grammar, just a pleasure, like at a circus.
Beckett’s piece ends with, “Know happiness.” No end of playing with words.
“Which say? Ill say. Both. All three. Question answered,” says Beckett, in “Ill Seen Ill Said.”
Roses are not nearly as old as rocks. Rocks have their beauty too, but they don’t usually make good Valentine’s Day gifts. But roses do go way back, in botany and in poetry. We find roses in the ancient myths of Aphrodite and Venus. And by the late 18th century, when Robert Burns wrote “A Red, Red Rose,” the rose, used by medieval courtly love troubadours to express romance and devotion, was deeply rooted in poetry, and would soon be grafted by Victorian writers onto the secret language of floriography. But a big secret in the poem Burns wrote is that he never quite explains how his love is like a rose; in fact, he walks away from the rose into song and never gets back, but he does mention rocks in stanza three. 1
O my Luve’s like a red, red rose, That’s newly sprung in June; O my Luve’s like the melodie That’s sweetly play’d in tune.
Kenneth Koch’s “Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children” (1973) takes its title from a poem written by one of his elementary school students. The assignment was to take the question idea from Blake’s “The Tyger” and ask it of some other entity, “a mysterious and beautiful creature” (36), something that can’t answer back. Adults will learn something about poetry from Koch’s book too, if they work the exercises.
Or your love might be like a crabapple, a wild, wild rose, one that wants pruning and dusting and its canes tied up. Koch’s student poet asked but one question of the rose, spending the rest of her five line poem on questions to a dog, a dragon, a kitten, and a bird, but we might never tire of asking questions of the rose, once we get going:
Rose, where did you get that sepal? Rose, where did you get that prickle? Rose, where did you get that yellow? Rose, what have you done to your trellis? Rose, get back into your obelisk; Rose, what kind of trick is this?
Blake recognized the vulnerability of the rose. His rose is crimson. The root of crimson contains some mystery: a red dye made from crushed insects, once mistaken for worms:
The Sick Rose
O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.
William Blake, 1794
Blake’s poem is from his “Songs of Experience.” Anyone with experience growing roses might at some point have asked some of these questions:
Rose, where did you get that feathery blackspot? Rose, did I pour you too much fish emulsion? Rose, oh, my, your grand floribunda! Rose, where did you get that Japanese beetle? Rose, where did you get that powdery mildew? Rose, oh, Rose, are you going to turn blue?
Roses are favorites on Valentine’s Day, but Dorothy Parker said, don’t send for me a rose; send for me a limo:
One Perfect Rose
A single flow’r he sent me, since we met. All tenderly his messenger he chose; Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet— One perfect rose.
I knew the language of the floweret; “My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.” Love long has taken for his amulet One perfect rose.
Why is it no one ever sent me yet One perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get One perfect rose.
Dorothy Parker, 1926
No end to questions we have for roses, or poems:
Rose, where did you get that big pot? Rose, how did you survive that long war? Rose, where did you get that spider mite? Rose, where did you get that whipped cane? Rose, where did you get that green aphid? Rose, where did you get that hippopotamus?
~~~
The Red, Red Rose
O my Luve’s like a red, red rose, That’s newly sprung in June; O my Luve’s like the melodie That’s sweetly play’d in tune.
As fair are thou, my bonie lass, So deep in luve am I; And I will luve thee still, my Dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry.
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my Dear, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun: I will luve thee still, my dear, While the sands o’ life shall run.
And fare thee weel, my only Luve! And fare thee weel, a while! And I will come again, my Luve, Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!
Are poems like fishes? Why do we put them in schools? The word school sounds like something the angler does, schole-ing leisurely from a sleepy bank for a slippery shoal, far from the madding swarm and floundering souls of the city multitude.
What we call schools would be better named arguments – over what poetry is, what it might be used for, how it should look and sound. A poem is a thing made, and you can go to a school and try to learn how to make it, or apprentice yourself to a master poet and imitate until you find yourself making something new. Or not, an imitation can stand alone. This paragraph would make sense to Aristotle or T. S. Eliot.
Whereas Modernist difficulty was seen to argue against Victorian restraint, as Romanticism was to have recoiled from Augustan manner, our own age draws a blank; no one voice speaks with enough authority to credential all the rowdy students. Poets have at times named themselves partners to this or that poetic theater. Now there are too many partial, local, overlapping or redundant movements, dubbed such-and-such by critics, and often now by the poets themselves. If too many schools is a problem for critics, and for students, it wouldn’t seem to be for poets, each of whom prefers to think of their own voice as unique and above the sound of the babbling brooks, even if subscribing to a particular issue or zine or venue – wherever they can get a toehold.
Of course poetry is not the only discipline (if it can even be called that) where critics form schools to organize and historicize and argue about style and substance, value and influence, from Beaux-Arts to Pop-art, Bebop to Cool, Moz to Min. The method of forming a school and naming it is critical shorthand the artist can exploit or ignore – or name a school of his own making. The starving artist must also make a living.
And yet the original meaning of school is leisure, time set aside not for production but for attention. Reading without credential, writing without outcome. Recess, maybe, but unsupervised. And the true poet drops out even from that respite, to prevent leisure from becoming another class, even if that means abandoning poetry utterly.
Buckminster Fuller was the most optimistic of scientists. He believed synergy solves the problem of entropy. Synergy, simply put, is working together to achieve more. Synergy is sometimes defined as a whole unpredictable from the sum of its parts (1+1 = 3). And Fuller thought there is enough to go around:
“Once man comprehended that any tree would serve as a lever his intellectual advantages accelerated. Man freed of special-case superstition by intellect has had his survival potentials multiplied millions fold. By virtue of the leverage principles in gears, pulleys, transistors, and so forth, it is literally possible to do more with less in a multitude of physio-chemical ways. Possibly it was this intellectual augmentation of humanity’s survival and success through the metaphysical perception of generalized principles which may be objectively employed that Christ was trying to teach in the obscurely told story of the loaves and the fishes.1
Dostoevsky said the same thing in his “Notes from Underground” (1864):
“I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”
Though Orwell in “1984” (1949) suggested we be careful with arithmetic and keep an eye on who’s controlling the data. William Blake also reasoned reason could be a tyranny (“The Book of Urizen,” 1794).
For my own alone little part of the network, I’ve been wondering about the popularity of Doors, Wordless Wednesdays, and other prompts, and have opted to contribute a little poem on the subject of synergy and entropy:
Loves and Fishes
Planets like cauliflower heads can’t go it alone; entropy a flat bald universe, produces no combs.
Love like the neutrino difficult to detect, plentiful and invisible, with no electrical net.
“Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,” R. Buckminster Fuller. First published 1969, new edition 2008/2011, edited by Jaime Snyder. Lars Muller Publishers. ↩︎
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) and Intuition (1972) – books by Buckminster Fuller
Over the weekend, I read two articles somewhat related to one another: “How Much Are We Paying for Newsletters” (apparently some subscribers are losing track) in The New York Times, and “Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?” (If a tree falls in the forest?) in The New Yorker. Too many subscriptions, paid or free, and the emails begin to pile up like old zines on a rusty rack in an empty barbershop, and come to be treated like spam and deleted, at issue, at bottom, simply this: more than we have resources to profitably or efficiently manage. Millions of miles of Substack track and only one effort is nominated. And part of the success formula is still will you get picked up by a traditional publisher. But there are great novels precursors to Substack serials: Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope. Maybe serializing your novel no one hears on Substack is the theme of the Great American Novel.
Having finished “The Paris Library,” and in long pause from Substack, I perused my small shelf (24 and 1/2 inches, to be exact) usually full of still barely opened or half read or unread books, but also some to-read-again books (as over the last few years I seem more inclined to reread something I particularly liked in a previous reading life rather than risk something new to me that might leave a bad taste or go permanently unfinished, a yucky slice of green pizza). Today, I counted 25 books on the to-read shelf. I feel no urgency about reading from the shelf. Every so often (periodically, but without a period), I wipe it clean and replace the books with a little vase of a freshly cut sprig or two.
About that phrase above, “to be exact.” Am I the type of guy who says things like “to be exact”? I don’t want to be. I knew a guy who habitually talked about other guys, and he frequently introduced his comments or opinions using the phrase, “He’s the type of guy….” He was the type of guy who used the phrase, “He’s the type of guy.” Well, there you have it. And even if he didn’t use the phrase, you felt categorized nonetheless. You got typed, along with the other guy, for you are either the type or not the type, and if you’re not that type, you’re some other type. So, to correct matters, it’s best to avoid any such shorthand phrases, for they are cliched and unnecessary, like most comments or opinions, I hasten to add, this one included. In fact, and in any case, the shorthand ends up making things longer, as I think I’m in the process of showing here. Of course, once you start to strike through stuff, you might end up with nothing. Hang out the shingle, “No Post Today.”
From the shelf of the unread, I picked “Traveling Sprinkler” (Penguin, 2013) by Nicholson Baker. I like Nicholson Baker, though I’ve only read one of his novels, “The Anthologist” (2009), which I enjoyed. But I’ve read most if not all of his New Yorker pieces (but I’ve not seen him there in awhile). I purchased “Traveling Sprinkler” used from Alibris some time ago. It’s a sequel to “The Anthologist.” It must have got wiped from the to-read shelf, not sure when, because it was just a few weeks ago I discovered it on another shelf and moved it back to the unread shelf. It had been sitting next to Baker’s “U and I: A True Story,” which twice I’ve tried to break into, both times unsuccessfully. “U and I” sat on the to-read shelf for weeks before I consigned it to a distant shelf. But I’ll get back to it, sooner or later, maybe.
Anyway, I like Nicholson Baker for several reasons. First, I very much enjoyed “The Anthologist.” I even did a bit of research, the basis for a fun post titled “Nicholson Baker, Nicholas Carr, and Googling Clothespins.” Second, Nicholson seems like a nice guy. For example, he seems to be one of the few fairly well known writers who if you follow them, on Instagram, for example, they’ll follow you back. Not that they actually check you out ever, but still, it’s nice to get followed back once in a while. I’ve not conducted a study on this, but I’m willing to guess that more than, say, 99 followers or following, assuming regular postings from either, and keeping up becomes an impossible challenge.
Baker’s latest appearances on Instagram tracked his efforts to draw, and then he came out with a new book, “Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art” (April, 2024). I’ve not read it, nor am I likely to add it to the to-read shelf anytime soon. Speaking of his wife, who’s an artist, Baker says: “She also draws with colored pencils and weaves fabric. She doesn’t make a big deal of it, she just does it.” I like that, not making “a big deal of it.” I saw it in the “Read sample” of “Finding a Likeness” at Amazon. Anyway, “Finding a Likeness” looks like a cool book, but I’m already out of room on the to-read shelf. Not that I have to self-limit to the 24 and 1/2 inches, but really, enough is enough.
And I’m enjoying “Traveling Sprinkler.” I’m only about a third of the way through it, through page 109, which ends Chapter 12, to be exact, so I probably shouldn’t try saying too much about it, until I finish it. It’s about the type of guy that’s largely unsuccessful in his career, though he doesn’t seem to have put that much into a career. In fact, I’m not exactly sure what his career is. He’s a poet of some sort, but I don’t think being a poet qualifies as a career. One reason you become a poet is to avoid a career, or to hide what you really care about from a career. Although there’s not much need to hide anything in a poem, given the unlikelihood anyone’s going to read it anyway, or if they do, understand it. He, Paul Chowder is his name, the narrator, started off as a musician, playing the bassoon. He gave up on the bassoon because he didn’t think he’d ever be good enough to make a fixed go of it. He sold his bassoon, a gift to him from his grandparents, for $10,000. I didn’t know bassoons cost that much. And that’s old dollars, before a tariff or two. He had a Heckel bassoon. He comes to regret having sold it. A major regret. I looked up bassoons just now. You can get a Moosman bassoon today for around ten grand. And if you don’t have that kind of dough (or a well endowed grandfolk) to blow on a bassoon, you now have two words to juxtapose in a poem. But what Paul wants now, and, in fact, has purchased, at Best Buy, no less, is a cheap acoustic guitar.
I didn’t know Best Buy sold guitars. Best Buy is where I bought the Chromebook I’m now typing on. I’m pretty sure I didn’t see any guitars in the Best Buy where I purchased this laptop. And Paul wants to ditch poems for songs. You might begin to understand why I said I like Nicholson Baker and “Traveling Sprinkler.” You learn a lot of footnote worthy stuff reading Nicholson Baker, that the poet Archibald MacLeish was a founder of the CIA, for example (105-107). And Baker himself played the bassoon. So is Paul a stand-in for Baker? No, I don’t think so. It doesn’t work like that. That’s too easy. All I wanted to suggest is that what Paul says about bassoons is probably reliable. He says Debussy was a fan of the bassoon, but then anyone could look up something like that.
Paul reads a lot, and attends Quaker meetings, though he’s not a full member. When he was younger (he’s on his 55th birthday as the book opens), he wanted to be a composer. He listens carefully to popular music now, but he divulges he’s never really heard or paid attention to lyrics, but he does now. I’ve made a note of a few of the songs he mentions, that I’ve never heard of, thinking I might look for them on YouTube. Kind of funny, looking a song up now, since the book is now 12 years old, and I’ve never heard of the songs he mentions, and most popular songs don’t have a very long shelf life. But then why would I have heard of his songs? And even if I had, I don’t hear lyrics either, unless it’s a Patti Page or Hank Williams song. In most rock songs, the voice is just another instrument, part of the noise. So he goes on about songs and poems, and Paul gives us the good lines from some poems, so we don’t have to waste time reading the whole poem. There’s much so far, in the first 109 pages, that I relate to. Not that you need to relate to everything you read, or anything you read. It might be better if you don’t relate. Develop new tastes. I wish I’d have discovered Penelope Fitzgerald, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen, and Henry Green earlier, but sometimes you have to wait until you’re ready for something.
Paul clarifies the difference between the oboe and the bassoon, and I was reminded of the jazz appreciation class I took in college, and the instructor told the class the oboe was not played in jazz, no jazz oboe players, and I raised my hand and corrected her, pointing out that Yusef Lateef played jazz oboe. Turned out, she didn’t know that much about jazz, lectured from notes, said I was wrong about Lateef and jazz oboe. Yusef Lateef also played the bassoon. Paul probably knows that, or Nicholson Baker does, but they haven’t mentioned it yet, through page 109 of “Traveling Sprinkler.”
And so Paul buys the cheap guitar, takes a lesson, though it doesn’t sound like the lesson was much help, but he’s enthusiastic about making up some songs:
“Everything’s different when you write a song. The rhymes sound different and they happen naturally, and the chords don’t sound like the same chords played on a piano. Your fingers make choices for you. The guitar is your friend, helping you find chords you’d never have found on your own, and then these chords help you find tunes you’d never have thought to sing. It’s such a simple and glorious collaboration” (104-105).
That’s a perfect rebuttal to the academic’s put down of popular song lyrics when compared to poetry.
The Coming of the Toads 