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Thursday, October 31, 2013

Number 325: Jim Hall "Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too"

 Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too


All my pwoblems
who knows, maybe evwybody's pwoblems
is due to da fact, due to da awful twuth
dat I am SPIDERMAN.
I know. I know. All da dumb jokes:
No flies on you, ha ha.
and da ones about what do I do wit all
doze extwa legs in bed.  Well, dat's funny yeah.
But you twy being
SPIDERMAN for a month or two, Go ahead.

You get doze cwazy calls fwom da
Gubbener askin you to twap some booglar who's
only twying to wip off color T.V. sets.
Now, what do I cawre about T.V. sets?
But I pull on da suit, da stinkin suit
wit da sucker cups on da fingers,
and get my wopes and wittle bundle of
equipment and den I go flying like cwazy
acwoss da town fwom woof top to woof top.

Till der he is. Some poor dumb color T.V. slob
and I fall on him and we westle a widdle
until I get him all woped. So big deal.

You tink when you SPIDERMAN
der's something big going to
happen to you.
Well, I tell you what. It
don't happen dat way.
Nuttin happens.
Gubbener calls, I go.

Bwing him to powice,
Gubbener calls again,
like dat over and over.

I tink I twy sometin diffunt
I tink I twy
sometin excitin like
wacing cawrs. Sometin to
make my heart beat at a difwent
wate.
But den you just can't
quit being sometin like
SPIDERMAN.
You SPIDERMAN for life.
Forever. I can't even
buin my suit. It won't
buin.  It's fwame resistant.
So maybe dats yowr
pwoblem, too. Who knows.
Maybe dats da whole
Pwoblem wit evwytin.
Nobody can buin der
suits, dey all fwame
wesistant.
Who knows?

- Jim Hall


Hap Notes:
First off, if you didn't try it, go back and read this poem aloud in your best Elmer Fudd voice. The speech impediment isn't only there for humor– there is something very touching in the tone and its human flaws. As "SPIDERMAN" speaks, we become aware that he is talking about our quondam condition: stuck in life with all our gifts and impediments.

Strictly speaking, if you are a Spiderman comic fan, you will have to ignore the flaws in this poem. Hall isn't one of those Steve Ditko vs Todd McFarlane vs John Byrne people who can argue about the comic artist or the arc of the original Stan Lee stories and its consequent development. Only comic geeks can tell you that stuff.  Comic geeks like me who can bore you with droning on about how Spiderman was the first superhero who had money troubles and had clumsy embarrassing moments that endeared him to readers. Although, this point is well served in the poem. And I'll stop the droning. And Hall is aware of the flaws– the governor rarely (if ever?) calls on Spiderman. And even Batman was usually called by the police commissioner, not the governor. Hall doesn't get the costuming right and... Oops, sorry. Superfluous geeking out.

Back to the poem. Even when you are not SPIDERMAN, you think, when you are young, that things are going to happen to you. Big things. Cool things. Different things. But one finds that while life does have its magic, there is a great deal of repetition to it. It's very hard to change lives.

Hall (born 1947) is a writer of crime novels and has taught creative writing at Florida International University for most of his career. He has published four books of poetry, a collection of short stories, a book of essays, and seventeen novels. He was a Fulbright professor in Spain and is the winner of both the Edgar Award and the Shamus. He has a website here. The website also features some of his poems. 

Here's a few things that Hall says about this poem:

"The speech impediment (which might be considered politically incorrect these days) simply started out as a technique to try to be funny, but it turned into more than that. As I wrote in that Elmer Fudd kind of voice, I found places in the poem where the words actually meant something different in the new speech (my heart beat at a different wate (weight) I was also thinking that even superheroesmust be flawed in some way. They LOOK like they have wonderful lives—just as writers do---but that's all from the outside. But when you get close and really inspect them, and hear how they talk, wow, they're just like the rest of us, pimples, warts and all."
And
"I can't remember why exactly I chose Spiderman. I guess I was thinking that as a kid I'd always dreamed of being a writer--and that I'd thought that being one would be like being a superhero of some kind. So I started to wonder if maybe even superheroes got bored with their routines, and their personalities just like normal people did. Voila, the poem began to take shape."
 And
"Of course "buining" one's suit is the punchline of the poem. It's a hard thing to do--recreate yourself, reinvent yourself. Become someone different, someone new. Throw away one identity (and mask) and put on another. We all struggle with that in some way or another. We want to change, to grow, to abandon one set of personality features for better ones. That's why people go to school, to church, to the shrink, and it's one of the reasons why we write. To reinvent ourselves.

But it's a very hard thing to do. Old habits die hard."

[By the by, I hope you get the joke with the Halloween costumes on the masthead. There's the obvious costume connection, and the Halloween thing (Happy Halloween!) but I was hoping you'd get that they are usually flame retardant. ]

































































































































Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Number 324: Jackie Wills "Japonica"

Japonica


Our house shuddered with bass lines
as my brother burst into his teens
like a skinhead emerging from a chrysalis.
Downstairs, watching tv, we'd feel the room vibrate–
dialogue drowned out as his filled with sound,
thick as the smoke from my father's non-stop cigarettes.
No-one dared knock on his locked door
we just turned the volume up
until it became a duel and when each record stopped
we'd rush for the set, ashamed to be caught out.
It could go on for hours until he went for a bath,
every towel left wet as a flannel on the floor.
When he came out, his face had been picked
into a mess of blotches and blood.

But he was the only one of us who knew the Latin names
of plants at ten, who'd asked for a patch of his own
in the garden, where he planted lettuce alongside daffodils
and night scented stock. He buried japonica apples
all along the fence one day because the pink flowers
were my mother's favourites. He took the dog
on a five mile walk across the common
the day it was put down and he knew why my father
had spent so many months at home
but never let on – just punched more holes
in each cheap plywood door.

- Jackie Wills

Hap Notes:

Jackie Wills (photo right of poem) is a Brit, which you probably figured out from the spelling of  "favourite".  I believe she lives in Brighton where she is a free-lance writer and teacher.  This is the opening salvo in her first published book of poetry "Powder Tower". She just launched her fifth book "Woman's Head as Jug" this month. She has won awards and critical plaudits and tries to make ends meet on the salary of a poet and poetry teacher, which means she economizes as a way of life. I could launch into my rant about how poets should make CEO money and vice-versa but I will restrain this preaching to the choir. You can thank me later.

How many of us can relate to this brother with his booming bass-cranked records shattering the quiet of the house and shaking the pictures on the walls? That angry, acne-plagued, hostile brother, mad at the world for a variety of reasons in addition to his "bursting" into the hormone-ridden teens. It's both amusing and frightening– that ferocious brother. I had one and his sensitivity and high intelligence made his anger even more frustrated. I don't think I know many people who had a brother who did NOT punch holes in the walls and doors. (Actually, I punched a hole in a door once (I used a rock), in my late teens but that's another story for another day, and I add it only so my brothers, who read this blog, will not mention it to me in a frustrated/sarcastic facebook missive. And it was a "cheap plywood door", too, anyway.)

I love the family rushing to turn down the TV, ashamed of their sound-jousting with the brother's music. One does feel shameful after being so childish. I used to blast Fudge Tunnel's "Tweezer" to get back at my very noisy neighbors and one does feel foolish and ashamed after doing it.

I suppose you know that a flannel is the British way of saying wash cloth. I remember hearing the term in Squeeze's "Tempted"– remember ? " I bought a toothbrush, some toothpaste A flannel for my face/Pajamas, a hairbrush new shoes  and a case /I said to my reflection /Let's get out of this place..." Whenever I managed to think of it, I asked everyone what a "flannel" was in the song– this was before Google, of course.

Back to the poem. Of course the top half of this poem illustrates the teen-aged brother and the last half shows you the boy underneath. A sweet lad who planted flowers for his mother (japonica flowers are in the masthead today) and gave a doomed family pet one last jaunt. It always makes me tear up to read this part.

But there's more. Why do you think the father spent so many months at home? Unemployment? Illness? The father was most certainly a nervous smoker, yes? What is the significance of a locked door on her brother's room– what is being locked out and locked in? One could ask similar questions with all locked doors but we get a brief glimpse, in the second part of the poem of what is behind that door.

This is "confessional" style poetry at its best– it tells part of a story, leaves us with
mystery, tells us something about the author and her upbringing and yet, somehow, seems to be about us.

And, let's not forget that the title of this poem is "Japonica"– why do you think that is?

Jackie Wills has a lovely blog here which is well worth a read and includes a selection of her poetry. I highly recommend it.

Here's a good Wills quotation:

"For years I've been aware of the different way my mind works when I'm handwriting and typing, particularly on a computer keyboard (rather than a manual typewriter).
There's a different connection between my hand and brain, when I'm holding something. Well, that's what I thought it was about. As if the rounder, more organic action of writing, the different pressure I put the pen under, the way it feels on the page, even its taste and texture, the smell of ink, might have something to do with this. So I tell anyone who'll listen - use paper, a pen or pencil when you want to come up with ideas. A keyboard's brilliant for transferring them, for editing, but the best ideas come in lead or ink."

And another which illustrates the "training" one goes into to writer:


"Over Easter I've been reading Rumer Godden's autobiographies - A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep and A House With Four Rooms. Godden, famous for her novels Black Narcissus and Greengage Summer as well as her work with Jean Renoir on The River was an utterly focused writer. She sent her children to boarding school so she could write. But one of the points she makes that has been in my mind too, is to live on less to allow more time to write. She was single minded.
And it is too easy to be distracted - not by tidying and sorting which are part of the process, or the allotment and dog walking which are sanity channels. But I mean clothes, gadgets, socialising, anything that involves spending money, or phone calls from friends.
So the answerphone's on. I will not answer emails, texts, bbms or go on Facebook.
I'm in training for a summer of writing."



Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Number 323: Kay Ryan "Bad Day"

Bad Day


Not every day
is a good day
for the elfin tailor.
Some days
the stolen cloth
reveals what it
was made for:
a handsome weskit
or the jerkin
of an elfin sailor.
Other days
the tailor
sees a jacket
in his mind
and sets about
to find the fabric.
But some days
neither the idea
nor the material
presents itself;
and these are
the hard days
for the tailor elf.

- Kay Ryan

Hap Notes:
Kay Ryan is one of my favorite contemporary poets. Her style is witty and deep. Her rhymes are clever (did you even notice that it rhymes?). But most of all, her poems are somewhat like mysterious telegrams that you just happened to find laying around. Little wisps of wisdom float through her (sometimes) dark whimsy and if you think there is much, much more to the poem than meets the eye, you are a good reader. Like all good poems, hers seem to be telling you something very personal and exclusive about her and you.

A weskit is a sort of vest (the picture to the right of the masthead- the brown vest) is a weskit. It's another form, as you may suspect, of the word waistcoat. Recently I mentioned to a friend that the word fortnight was fourteen days and fourteen nights shortened to one word. He was terribly disappointed by this practical truncation and was hoping it meant something more magical. So if it disappoints you to know weskit is a shortened form of waistcoat, let me brighten your day by saying that the word jerkin (a sort of vest worn over a coat, usually, and pictured at the right of the masthead in black and white), has no discernible origin. So, I suppose it could be magical.

The point with the weskit and the jerkin is that they are older terms that mean, essentially the same thing. It's just a matter of function and era. Think of this while contemplating the poem.

I hate to do too much interpreting of a poem, don't want to spoil the enchantment of it, but certainly this poem has something to do with the act of creating; art, music, a poem, a good cake. And more. But notice that the creators, like the elfin tailor, are searching for material. Sometimes there is a clear vision of a weskit or a jerkin ( and the differences therein known to the creator) sometimes it isn't there.

Stolen cloth? Well, isn't everything we say or do or write or paint or make derived from something else? Something born of your experiences, your feelings, but certainly influenced by everything you have heard or seen or read? We are all using stolen material in some sense.

The bad days are when you can make nothing from it.

There's more in this small poem than just these few ramblings. Ryan uses every word with efficiency so there are many patterns in this material.

We have already talked about Ryan here.

The background of the masthead today also features "elf coats"-coats made of recycled sweaters that I find delightful They are so colorful and swirly. You can find her (Unique Design) etsy shop here. I don't know this artist at all but I like to credit when I find something so fun.

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Number 322 : John Whitworth "The Examiners"

The Examiners

Where the house is cold and empty and the garden’s overgrown,
They are there.
Where the letters lie unopened by a disconnected phone,
They are there.
Where your footsteps echo strangely on each moonlit cobblestone,
Where a shadow streams behind you but the shadow’s not your own,
You may think the world’s your oyster but it’s bone, bone, bone:
They are there, they are there, they are there.

They can parse a Latin sentence; they’re as learned as Plotinus,
They are there.
They’re as sharp as Ockham’s razor, they’re as subtle as Aquinas,
They are there.
They define us and refine us with their beta-query-minus,
They’re the wall-constructing Emperors of undiscovered Chinas,
They confine us, then malign us, in the end they undermine us,
They are there, they are there, they are there.

They assume it as an impost or they take it as a toll,
They are there.
The contractors grant them all that they incontinently stole
They are there.
They will shrivel your ambition with their quality control,
They will desiccate your passion, then eviscerate your soul,
Wring your life out like a sponge and stuff your body down a hole,
They are there, they are there, they are there.

In the desert of your dreaming they are humped behind the dunes,
They are there.
On the undiscovered planet with its seven circling moons,
They are there.
They are ticking all the boxes, making sure you eat your prunes,
They are sending secret messages by helium balloons,
They are humming Bach cantatas, they are playing looney tunes,
They are there, they are there, they are there

They are there, they are there like a whisper on the air,
They are there.
They are slippery and soapy with our hope and our despair,
They are there.
So it’s idle if we bridle or pretend we never care,
If the questions are superfluous and the marking isn’t fair,
For we know they’re going to get us, we just don’t know when or where,
They are there, they are there, they are there.


--John Whitworth

Hap Notes: John Whitworth (born 1945) is a British poet who excels in winning poetry prizes.  In his  book Being The Bad Guy (2007) fourteen of the poems won prizes. Today's poem won second place in a the London Times Literary Supplement's Foyles poetry competition. Poetry prizes in GB often have hefty sums and impressive judges (I believe Wendy Cope, whom we've mentioned before here, was a judge for this competition.) He is vocal in his defense of rhyming "formalist" poetry which is both refreshing and necessary.

In today's poem Whitworth is having fun with our paranoia (or is he?) and at the same time says some very grave things. His work is often the epitome of Shakespeare's comment in King Lear that "Jesters do oft prove prophets" and that the gravest things are said in jest.  

I'll let you decide who "they" are (you've probably already thought of "them") and give you a bit of info on some of the details of the poem. 

Plotinus was a Greek philosopher (205-270 A.D.) classified as a Neoplatonist and he had some interesting ideas that were influential to many religions but, really, Whitworth is mostly using the name as a marker for some kind of ancient, high-falutin', obscure philosopher.  Ockham's razor is statement by philosopher William of Ockham which states that simpler explanations are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones. Aquinas is the highly influential Dominican friar and philospher Thomas Aquinas.

The beta-query-minus is a grading system employed by traditional British universities using Greek letters (Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta for the American equivalent of A,B,C, D and the plus or minus accorded to indicate incremental differences). A Beta-query-minus is, I think, technically a B + (no kidding) but that isn't the point in the poem– it's about the act of grading itself.

The poem is both amusing and sinister, a very rare combination. Whitworth pulls people, objects and places that are at once random and calculated. In fact, it is this very calculated randomness that is deeply chilling; "they" are everywhere, in everything.

Whitworth is adamant about rhyming in an age when there are few poets (that are any good) doing it outside of rappers and Hip-Hop artists. The cadence and sound of rhyming is what often makes a poem remarkable and certainly makes it memorable. I daresay you could memorize this poem a lot faster than you could memorize something famous that did not rhyme, say for instance, the Gettysburg Address.

Whitworth argues (and I agree) that a poetically phrased statement is a wonderful thing but not necessarily a poem. Poems have cadence, rhyme, and form: try writing something decent in one of the forms of poetry, a villanelle or a sonnet, and see just how hard it is to make a point, turn a phrase, make an analogy without descending into forced Hallmark card cheesy sentimental territory. Just writing a poetic statement in a spiny, segmented way, is not writing poetry- it's cheating the form.

As far as unrhymed poems containing more "sincere" feelings, Whitworth argues that no poem is particularly "sincere",  the act of writing it is somewhat dissembling. I'd also argue that beautiful prose is something for which we all could strive in this day of text messages and tweets and blogs. But it's not necessarily poetry. Or rather, the world is full of poetry but this is not necessarily a poem.

Some poets have a gift for unrhymed free verse, no denying it. But in general, a good rhymed poem packs a much bigger punch. Don't you think this poem, The Examiners, explodes because of the form and the rhyme?

You can find more Whitworth here.

Here's a good quotation by Whitworth:
"I think a poet who never, or rarely, rhymes, isn’t much of a poet, just as I think that a painter who never draws figures, who very possibly can’t draw figures, isn’t much of a painter. And the same goes for a composer who never writes a tune. But then I am a reactionary old elitist. And probably not serious."

And another talking about today's poem:
"In the second stanza the rhymes lined themselves up: Aquinas, Plotinus, beta minus, which is an old Oxford and Cambridge method of marking using Greek letters with plusses and minuses. It produced wonderful marks like beta query minus, to be distinguished from beta minus query. How? God alone knows. So I've got these rhymes and I'm looking for others. That's how the Great Wall of China gets itself in. And last of all, the wall suggests an undermining of the wall. You see, it's not having a meaning and then looking for rhymes. It's the other way round. It was good enough for Poet Laureate John Dryden who admitted the rhyme had often 'helped him to the sense'. It's really a method of allowing your unconscious mind to work, or your Muse, to use an older terminology. It's the same thing. It's analogous to a method my daughter, who is a painter, uses. She sometimes lets the paint find its own way, and this suggests things to her. The rhymes and the rhythms are my wet paint."