While much of my Great Black Swamp residency has been distilled into my novels Nearly Canaan and Secret Side of Jaya, it also infused an outpouring of poetry. By the time I arrived, the land had long been drained and turned into some incredibly rich farmland. Something, apparently, had been drained from the people as well.
Among the free PDF poetry broadsides available at my Thistle Finch blog are Toward Tiffin, Farmer Disking His Fields, and Prairie Wind. Once again, I must confess to being quite fond of micropoems as well as “found” poems. Poetry can be a state of mind as well as craft, wherever you are.
In addition, you’ll also find a free poetry chapbook, Furrow, and two photo albums, Prairie Depot and Vast Plains. It is hard to envision such a landscape if you haven’t traveled across the American Midwest of Great Plains.
Kat made her first bread (five loaves): not bad. Also, first bus trip to town and back.
Sitting at our kitchen window and looking out at our new birdfeeder, watching cardinals and titmice, such a treat to examine them almost microscopically: free pets, in nature!
In the year 2003, I will be 55: the door is always open.
She is tired of my talking always about things. Or, as I see 50 years later, facts. Not my feelings. [Seeing that pattern would take years of therapy.]
Kat and I are private people: we know no one we can drop in on.
Mail addressed to Ms Jnana Hodson
Some days nothing goes right – up too early, humidity and heat, killer sinuses – wife dragging feet and my late start to work.
They can’t fix the car today. The mess started a week ago with auto inspection. Mr. Muskrat (pointy nose, sunglasses, and cigarette, smiling) and Mr. Ladykiller (cigarette and fast-talking) selling Kat into shocks with alignment and inspection, but the car wouldn’t pass inspection because it needed new king bolts, $60. Next day, to Brinegar’s, for the king bolts and, surprise, rod ($75) … and a long walk to work.
Still, no inspection sticker: the horn wouldn’t work.
Off to Ohio, stopped by state cops (bears), right front light out – warning ticket – and then the Bloomdale patrolman.
After fixing the horn, the turn signals didn’t dink.
In the end, it was a shorted fuse.
And then our check bounced, adding a $5 fee from the bank.
That defeated feeling you can’t get ahead of the game. Can’t save, car’s falling apart, only a fool would write poetry and submit. The more you rework for them, the more you lose from your own life.
“Life is worth living only in retrospect.”
At dawn on the 4th, Nosmo (our black kitten) wasn’t back. The house seemed empty.
Chicago trip; we stayed with Celeste and Luis, edge of the DMZ twixt Hyde Park, University of Chicago, and South Side.
unstretched canvases tacked to walls
massive waves crashing into shore
cold, stiff wind
The Maxwell Street market, block after block of hot goods amid burned-out lots abutting the precinct station house and state college campus. Catholic church, Masses in Spanish packed every service.
Mirrors, mirrors.
Hyde Park, with Frank Lloyd Wright houses
and a Swendenborgian church
~*~
On opening a page, amid Sunday afternoon jazz, a startling confession: “So hard to say what I really feel.” Specifically, it was regarding the music, but the fuller scope came back to haunt me throughout the rest of my life.
With Kat at S. John’s, the heathen beauty of ritual: No music, a relief from music poorly done. I’m bothered by the emphasis on sin, which should not be applicable to those who have been baptized in grace, and also bothered by the political positions from the pulpit … especially interpreting scripture to support family when Jesus clearly called men away …
CLOUDS WITH RAIN
~*~
21:II:76, a rainy morning: Omkara, our VW, towed in again, the coil had fallen off …
Kat shaved her legs last night, first time in a year or more – their smoothness, newness turns me on, especially after sitting across from JB the previous night, she was dressed up, eyeshadow, too. Funny, looking at your own wife that way and so delightful. Not to take anything away from his partner, who could have swept me away, too.
Delightful? Or deceitful?
The high scolding scream of a little rabbit freed from our cat’s mouth as it runs shitless home.
Kat, with her wanting a divorce …
She wants affairs and a place of her own. So often she fights us yet often keeps us solitary, complaining of Aquarians’ love of friends and strangers.
How strange to see that latter observation, considering how solitary most of my hours in retirement have been.
Can’t take it anymore – her inarticulate depression, her months of “You don’t love me anymore,” her jealousness of my writing and my music, her desire for a divorce, her blaming me for our marriage, her resentment of my practices – my yoga, my Friends, my need for a meditation area, for silence (her yap-yap, her Qs w/out answers, her constant efforts to drain me: the meat, cigarettes, TV, radio, her desire to spend money, her efforts to push me out, to keep me from having friends or from having them over, her withdrawals, her Jekyll-Hyde snappings).
If she wants a divorce, OK. Half the bank account, half our goods, no alimony.
She can suffer in her own stupor. I’m tired of it.
Terrible thunderstorm about 6:30 this morning: green/gray skies, leaves scattered all over the yard, cornstalks flattened. No tornado watch or warning.
Car inspection. Needs new tires but Firestone’s out on strike. They tried to sell me retreads, no deal. I wound up buying Dayton Thoroughbreds, but the shop can’t balance or align them. [wonder who did].
~*~
From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.
Starting to get squared away at office: so much space amazes me [my own room!] and then all the backup material, staff, and freedom of movement. I feel like I’m in heaven. Hard to readjust to open work scheduling. New freedom, large-vocabulary return: academic life and performance seem somehow foreign, though I’ve never really left it. Either I perform/deliver now or flunk forever.
Feels very good to work at a slower, more thoughtful pace …
“Have the girls fill this out,” Charlyne said, as I trotted down the hall.
Our administrative assistant, incredulous when I wickedly passed the word along while getting my three carbon papers: “Tell Charlyne the girls are very busy; tell her the girls send their love.”
Charlyne was the uber-feminist in the outfit.
Openly referring to myself as “Jnana” sounds strange again: kept starting to say the legal equivalent of “Boy.”
The leisurely pace of academic reflectiveness, gestation, can be guilt-inducing after the gut-busting pace of the Review-Times [or other newsrooms or assembly lines]. But guilt will only clog intuition. I must learn to pace myself so that I will be producing at peak quality [not quantity]. More than three or four hours of heaving editing or writing is too much for one day, since concentration slips.
Sometimes, on this slower pace, it seems I’m going nowhere, that I should be producing on an 8-5 shift and doing my homework – reading – at other times.
Workshop, a place where craftsmen bring design/theory/aesthetics/tradition/discipline to fulfillment/practice in diverse materials …
In our sense, a place of testing and integrity …
A whole garden to delight the mind’s eye and the physical touch …
Somehow, right after the “little stroll around the block,” I note, 13:XII:74 [a Friday], just back from St. Louis, much energy. [No idea where we stayed – out near the airport? – think we did go to a fancy German one evening.] Came back with a clearer sense of the newsletter, greatly simplified: more like our yoga newsletter!
I think we settled on WORKSHOP REPORTS, with the potential of designating different series such as a police or city government.
Lynn wants at least one foundation or funding source thanked in each workshop paper: it builds their files, gives them a sense that their work is going somewhere (even if only into a folder).
VO discussing difficulties he’s had in writing for publications and how he developed the strategy of writing to write and then usually delivering the work as a paper when invited. Using this approach, he learned he didn’t spend a year to find out the editor had “chickened out” and that if an editor is interested, publication is a byproduct. This way, we have a good backlog so that when the shit hits the fan, we will be ready to market.
He mentioned that Hobbes worked over several decades revising his work.
Another time, he mentioned that his most depressed period was in trying to write a water report and not being able to frame his words: the theoretical framework was weak.
Also, the difficulty of maintaining a creative tension while writing.
My pace is recovering my yogic …
Kat on VO and EO: “I couldn’t imagine them married to anybody else,” and he was now Kat’s favorite person. How curious, considering how upset she would get at my political discussions.
~*~
On the side, Vincent enjoyed designing furniture with carpenter Paul Goodwin. Here’s a sketch of a bookshelf system in his house. I’m not sure now, though, how it connected to the floor, wall, or even ceiling.
~*~
Etienne and Amelie could frame a novel.
Her mother from a very wealthy, steel-making family that lost and regained its fortune; her father, from immigrant Ukrainian miners.
Etienne, from a morbid, divisively argumentative peasant family. It was preoccupied with death. When he was 12 or 13, the grandfather was living in the same farmhouse, not knowing he was dying, though the house reeked of the odor of rectal cancer. The father, in a furious argument, told the old man, “It doesn’t matter, in two months you’ll be dead!” something the wife, Etienne’s mother, could never forgive. The fights that followed led to separation but also their remarriage a week before Etienne and Amelie’s wedding, “so it would be proper.” Yet they still fought.
America? “Here it is just eat your brother!”
France? The mad pace of Paris or the boredom of the provinces.
“I’ve broken many bottles over such cars,” the ones trying to run down pedestrians. “Oh? Did I do that?”
In an office, I feel trapped or cut off. Want to be closer to sun or wind. My mind is no longer original.
Perhaps I write this under the weight of Saturn: I feel sluggish, sedentary. I have piles there and here, projects I do not know how to resolve.
That “little stroll,” by the way, led to my Leonard Springs poems. The site has since been developed into a public nature reserve.
~*~
From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.
Or “heh-ell,” as the dialect might say. It’s been a half-century now since I left Bloomington as a research associate, and a few years before, when I graduated.
Rather than rave about the graduate library or the celebrated rare-books temple or the music or business schools, let me take a different tack, as viewed from now.
We’re still in disbelief that the football team could have a winning season, much less be ranked in the nation’s top 25 teams. Basketball’s a different matter.
Considering the conservative nature of the state, it’s a bit shocking that the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction is located on the campus. Its extensive archives and research initiatives are discreetly housed, though, in the ivy-covered former Women’s Residence Center – or was, back then.
Its collegiate gothic-style buildings are clad in locally quarried limestone. As are some more contemporary ones.
The stream that meanders through wooded parts of the campus is called the Jordan River, not as a Biblical reference but rather in honor of David Starr Jordan, the school’s first non-ordained minister to serve as president – he was a scientist who believed in Darwinian evolution and left Bloomington after six years to launch Stanford University in California.
Founded as a seminary in 1820, the school is one of the oldest public universities in America.
The alma mater, “Hail to Old IU,” was set to “Annie Lisle.” a Scottish melody, as was Cornell University’s, and perhaps brought to Bloomington from Ithaca, New York, by Cornell alumni Jordan.
A practical joke is spelled “boress” but pronounced a bit differently.
The dining hall service continues to suck, as I’m finding in online comments. It was a major factor in the upheavals in my novel, Daffodil Uprising.
On-campus parking is limited and expensive.
Nobody’s ever figured out what “Hoosier” means, as far as I can tell.
There’s a huge gap between the previous journal and the one beginning here. Is another volume, maybe two, missing? Did Kat perchance destroy them?
Instead, this one is half Workshop in Political Theory notes, followed by extensive Snyder transcriptions, many of them no doubt from the Lilly Library.
The chronological sequence is ruptured.
And there’s nothing personal, beyond that, in these pages.
We must have made an earlier trip to Bloomington, because I have a listing of research deadlines as of 6/6/74 but apparently for 1975.
Then the minutes from a trip to my first board of consultants’ meeting soon follow.
From there are many penciled Snyder transcriptions; am guessing they’re from Lilly Library. My deep immersion in that sanctum.
Gary was, in many of these, far more prosaic than I now expected. Perhaps that’s a liberating insight!
As for the Stoney Lonesome poetry crowd or Bloomington Quakers? So far, nothing.
That was about to change, though. And how.
~*~
Stretching between the courthouse square and downtown and the college campus, behind the camera, iconic Kirkwood Avenue figures prominently in my novel What’s Left as well as the earlier, Daffodil Uprising, though not by name. This time I would be living to the west of downtown. Photo by Yahala via Wikimedia Commons.
~*~
From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.
Upcoming presentations will break from the chronological sequence into topics, as you’ll see. Our life was getting richer in everything but money.
I came to appreciate lupines in the high country of the Cascade mountains in Washington state. They proliferate on the island in Maine where I now live, too.
Perhaps you never thought I’d meet President Ford or movie legend Marilyn Monroe, but I’m finally revealing what happened. Take a look at Night Visions. It’s free at my Thistle Finch free digital bookstore.
Frankly, I can’t envision my return to Bloomington without her.
Our Bloomington goods runs? Three trips, I’m seeing now. Using whose pickup, with the tarp flying behind it? Followed by our green VW Bug.
Ottawa, Ohio, on the site
of the last Ottawa Indian reservation in Ohio
seat of Putnam County on the Ottawa River
Realize that the move to Bloomington allowed me to reclaim, fully, my Jnana moniker.
Bloomington redux was also, in a way, a return to the grad student realm I inhabited in Binghamton, but with the twist I was now married and officially a research associate, quasi faculty. And my hours were so much more flexible, even regular.
This was second of the three times I stepped out of the newsroom career and had no guarantee of reentry if things soured. The ashram was the first. For me, this was risk.
Much of this move is abstracted in detail in my novels Nearly Canaan and The Secret Side of Jaya, though I did move the locale to the Ozarks – I had already used Indiana extensively in Daffodil and, later, What’s Left.
~*~
From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.
Reporter Tom: “I was building a cabinet several nights ago and everything kept falling into place, everything fit, I cut the wood just right and there was such a good feeling of simply working that in a way I didn’t want to finish the thing. They never taught us to work that way. It’s always to get the thing done.”
Nowadays, no sense of craftsmanship. No unity of elements or workers. Just things, not creation.
For Esquimaux artists, objects do not have to be seen but treasures to be unwrapped and felt on special occasions.
~*~
The downtown since I left. Main Street by Nyttend via Wikimedia Commons.
Jnana's Red Barn 