Stream of Consciousness

Desperately Seeking...a Partridge in a Pear Tree?

 

 

I've decided to spent the twelve days of leading up to Christmas reading a book of poetry each day. And then writing what I learn, observe, feel after reading the volume here on my blog. And seeing if I can find any of the objects in this famous holiday song in the poems I read, too. I may also try and write a poem a day that somehow uses these famous true-love gifts:

The twelfth day of Christmas, | My true love sent to me | Twelve lords a-leaping, | Eleven ladies dancing, | Ten pipers piping, | Nine drummers drumming, | Eight maids a-milking, | Seven swans a-swimming, | Six geese a-laying, | Five gold rings, | Four calling birds, | Three French hens, | Two turtle doves, and | A partridge in a pear tree.

I know, I know -- it's technically December 25 through Epiphany in January that count for the real twelve days but I know I'll be way too busy then to do all that reading so I'm starting now instead...first up, Drift and Pulse by Kathleen Halme.

Truth in Force

A recent assignment for my narrative poem class asked us to write a multi-part poem about a forgotten social injustice. I decided to boil down my words to tell the story of Gandhi's march to Dandi, a railhead by the sea as part of a non-violent protest against the viceroy's egregious tax on salt. This became the famous Salt Satyagraha of April to May 1930, a cornerstone of the Indian independence movement. Below a snip. 

Dandi Salt March

What hope shall we gather, what dreams shall we sow?

Where the wind calls our wandering footsteps we go.

No love bids us tarry, no joy bids us wait:

The voice of the wind is the voice of our fate.

                                    —Sarojini Naidu

 

1.

Satyagraha, truth in force:

a peace brigade of khadi-clad disciples

on those winding roads to the coast.

 

Even the famous poet joined—

Naidu, a woman—scandal in 1930,

those purdah days of veiled isolation.

 

The evening before saw

60,000 on a bank of the Sabarmati, prayers

then witness to Gandhi’s call

 

To non-violent arms. No holy war,

this offering up, oblations

for the poorest of the poor.

 

Less than twelve miles a day without luggage?

Child’s play, the Mahatma said.

They simply walked, a month to march.

 

Nom de Plume?

Writing assignment #3 for our narrative poem class was this:

Write out your full name.  Research the meaning of your name (which can include any or all of the following: your nickname, first name, middle name, surname, and/or mother’s maiden name if you use it).  If possible, interview someone in your family of origin about the story behind your name.  Write a poetic sequence called “How I Got That Name.”

I struggled. My first and middle names are derived from the same name, Hannah, which means grace or mercy. My last name, like so many Irish surnames? Put in the missing O and of course, you get “son of the” (in my case) red-haired man. But it turns out the name Nancy is quite the topic of discussion in the user-created Urban Dictionary as well—I'm sure these are because of the very beguiling Nancy Botwin character on the Showtime series, Weeds, played by Mary-Louise Parker!

Here are some sources/definitions:

                                 

NANCY. Origin early 20th cent.: nickname for the given name Ann. Either a typically English metathesis of Anne or a variant of Agnes, perhaps influenced by the Italian Nanna, a diminutive of Anna. ‘A gipsy name’ remarks Charles Williams in his Tarot novel, The Greater Trumps, 1932. 

—Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Traditional First Names

 

NANCY. a male homosexual. From the female name. Originally as Miss Nancy and then as nancy boy.                  

—R.W. Holder. A Dictionary of Euphemisms

 

NANCY. A rare beauty who’s extremely smart and has a love for life. The definition of a great lover. She is an amazing and beautiful girl. Men easily fall for her. She has astounding sex appeal by nature. She has gorgeous green eyes and a breath-taking smile! She is fun, random, and sweet. You may find yourself addicted! If you have the fortune of falling in love with a Nancy, your life will be forever fulfilled. Damn that girl’s a Nancy!                                     —February 5, 2010 entry, www.urbandictionary.com

 

FLYNN is a surname of Irish origin. It is an Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó Floinn ‘descendant of Flann’, a byname meaning ‘red (dish)’, ‘ruddy’.           —Wikipedia       

 metathesis. Noun: 1. Grammar the transposition of sounds or letters in a word.

2. (also metathesis reaction) Chemistry a reaction in which two compounds exchange ions, typically with precipitation of an insoluble product. Also called double decomposition.

                                    —Oxford English Dictionary

 

So I played around with all of that. And ended up with one wild and crazy ride of a poem. Which begins:

The Gypsy Exchanges Ions with the Son of the Red-Haired Man

 

Miss Nancy shuffles the deck,

slaps down the spread,

more swords and cups

beside the Lovers and the Fool.

If sparks could fly,

this nancy boy would flee,

red dish digging

to trump his gypsied nights.

Instead there’s a handshake,

electrostatic exchange,

followed by that iconic lift

of a brow—it’s how you know

you’re in like Flynn.

The Lies Have It

I'm taking a great class in how to write a narrative poem. Our first assignment was to find a family photograph then write a narrative poem in response to the photograph. At some point in the poem,
we were to indicate that the story told thus far was untrue. Then tell a second story.  At the end of the poem, inform the reader which is true. Or maybe not?

We lost so many of our family photographs in the Hurricane Agnes-inspired flood of 1972 that it is always a challenge for me to find something to use for an exercise like this. So I turned to a photo of my own tiny family, my son and me, from 1979, in those last months before I fled Northeastern Pennsylvania for Ithaca.

Here's a fragment from the first section, maybe or maybe not riddled with untruth:

 

 

A Tale of Two Tipis

 

1.

It was the last day of summer.

 

He propped the camera on that stump,

their makeshift chopping block,

then a ten-second scurry to join the portrait--

Smile!--barely time to say cheese.

 

They lived on the mountain all August,

playing hippies in the tipi they’d erected themselves,

drawknife skinning the bark for twenty poles

the canvas wrapped, roped

then pegged to the stony ground.

 

Mornings, he drove into town

where he sketched elevations for a strip mall,

the topcoat she found at the thrift store

hiding his back-to-the-land dishevel.

 

She stayed behind,

gathered berries, chicory, their kitchen fire’s wood

while the toddler played with his trucks

in a pile of shavings left from skinning trees.

Photograph above is from Walter McClintock and Annette Karge and in the archives of the Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Ampersand Meet Syllabics...

The beginnings of one more rough draft taking the evolutionary road to what's below after a Saturday of counting the beats per line...

Yet Another Sales Pitch for the Tongue-Tied

 

There are holes in the street

where words are buried

lower than the blather,

 

language now a factory,

24/7 they slice the spin,

take away the grays

 

& mudsling clarity

to sell you the promise

in a murmur’s delay. 

 

An April of Daily Poems

Turns out it isn't that hard to stay focused, to immerse in the vast sea of poetic language and crank out a poem a day. Of course, revision is still in the offing for most of the ones posted on this site throughout this NaPoWriMo month. Here's the start of my last one for the month, an excerpt of a longer piece based on notes taken from train trip then drive along Highway 101 to Big Sur, California a few years back.

Six Degrees

 

I was on the Coast Starlight, the end point Salinas,

then a rental and the highway, 101, that unwind

of ribbon all the way, Monterey to Big Sur.

But first, the territories and my pop-bead ears

as the train climbed off the grid through the Cascades

and into the Dunsmuir dark. Violins over the PA

were evening’s vespers, Mozart keeping score,

and the cough down the hall might have been anything:

the predictable wheeze from a pack-a-day, asthma,

my coal miner grandfather spitting up black lung.

 

By morning, the train closed on Oakland, a station named

for Jack London. But first we had to wait—

for freight to cross a fret, rail bridge above the tidal flats,

brackish water, a mothballed fleet in the estuary

at Sasson Bay. I watched and wished the hard, sad stone

that is the bottom of my heart would float up and out,

mingle with the eucalyptus tang, its grey and silver

peeling everywhere along this siding, turn California

la-la and light. Instead, faded American flags tied

with faded yellow ribbons spiraled a street lamp in Martinez.

 

We passed people fishing in the shallows, tents a skyline

above rubble, a great blue heron flapping, its neck

pulled in. On through the C & H sugar refinery

at the born-again Crockett station. Bake sales were surely

held to pay for its newly-gilt sign. Berkeley’s Xanadu

was a chalkboard—“Whitey Repent”—and West Oakland

boasted a monument to the Brotherhood of Sleeping

Car Porters. We barreled toward the San Andreas Fault.

 

A Starting Line Prompt...

...and a beginning zygote of a poem? That's what this below is. An attempt at explanation along with advice-giving and blame-refusing. Philosophizing I'd like to think a bit as well.

Vendetta

 

What I meant was:

I wasn’t the surgeon who left

the scalpel in your stomach,

wasn’t the nurse who dropped

his scissors, suture mid-thread,

to the contaminated floor.

The Tracks of Memory

 

Sometimes it feels right to start a poem with the old tried-and-true words, Once upon a time. Looking back from middle age at the frenzies—and follies—of youth can make it seem that your life as once lived was, indeed, something of a fairy tale. I find that is especially true when it comes to the memories over of first loves. In December, I was thinking about all that time spent on the phone with my high school boyfriend. Sometimes we wouldn't even talk; we simply needed that phone cord as a kind of umbilical connection. One thing led to another and I ended up writing a poem about those days. I was also big into Russian novels at the time, especially Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. In fact, I was often reading them instead of paying attention to the boring sermons every Sunday at church, so in this opening stanza, even Anna Karenina makes an appearance.  Here are the opening stanzas:

 

Jailbait Rock

Once upon a time, my nights were spent

on skates, scoring every bend of the Susquehanna,

his breath my infinitive, a shooting star

caught on my tongue. I am forever jailbait

in the memories, such hunger a drug

for my longing as I starved through Sunday

sermons, a book hidden in a hymnal,

the telegram Vronsky got from Anna the day

before she threw herself on the tracks.

 

We left tracks in the snow. That’s how

the borough police found us trespassing,

their boot prints down the passenger side,

the windshield fogged, my curls covering

the unzippered feast in his lap. “Tell them

you’re eighteen,” the first words out

his mouth. They never asked.

 

 

Photo: Somewhere in North Dakota, on one of our Empire Builder Amtrak treks across the U.S.

A Book-Closing Poem?

 

I've been trying to write a poem with a specific purpose in mind. To serve as a kind of coda for my series book. I am still debating whether or not it is actually needed. Not sure if I'll call it Coda or Autograph the Body or simply Autograph. The final stanza gives some flavor of what might or might not come before. I'd really like to use this epigraph -- I remember a version of this from high school year book days!

Autograph

When I am dead and in my grave

And all my bones are rotten,

When this you see, remember me,

Let me not be forgotten.

                  —Anonymous, “Love Posies” 1596

 

 

The left-behind signatures are fixed in indelible

ink. Layers below dermis, needle-nosed and 

 

still speaking, deep.

 

 

A Book-Opening Poem?

I am working on a poetry book about, among other things, language, words, writing, men and wild-and-crazy youth. I have been searching for a poem to begin the series and one to end it. Here's my draft's opening so far:

In So Many Words

1.

 

Pick up your pen and stir the sleeping fire.

Form your characters and let the handwriting

tell your fate—Mata Hari or Auntie Mame?

 

Esther Williams could do a swan dive

over my penmanship, perfect cursive,

alphabetical bobbings on a crooked line.

 

Row after row of ovals, push-pulls,

the Palmer Method my last obedience to authority.

Then I changed the way I wrote,

U-turn and full speed ahead to the boys.