Tag: Poetry Footnotes

OH, YES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

 As I said at the time … Eighth Month 24, 1997 

Dear M of the Warm Heart and Extraordinary Signature …

Thanks for giving those five poems a first home. I look forward to seeing what you’re doing with your ‘zine, being already intrigued by your sense of graphic design. (A lobster in the crest? Great touch, especially considering how many French-speaking kids in Maritime Canada used to go to school with lobster in their lunchboxes while their richer English classmates had roast beef. How times change.)

You have no way of knowing how much your letter meant to me. (So I guess I’ll have to try explaining, right?)

Here I was dragging home from another hellish Saturday at the newspaper office — the 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. drill — well into a mounting depression that has been building for the last several weeks. (In part from watching an ex-girlfriend slip into alcoholism and eating disorders, and also in part from going to contradances where we’ve been way short of women partners, as well as in part from the pleasures of adult orthodontics, and even in part from car trouble, blah-blah. You get the picture.) So there, amid the junk mail and a bill or two: your letter. Poetry acceptances are always nice, especially when an editor selects more than one. An entire batch, of course, is a winning scratch ticket. But a letter? Not just a form acceptance? I’m touched.

You pack a lot into a single page. Things that trigger emotional reactions within me, too. For starters, you write so well — with seeming ease, grace, intimacy, color and a varied vocabulary, joy, and encouragement. You leave me arguing with myself: Is she really 18? (Na, can’t be … way too insightful to be a kid.) (Yes, she is: Listen to the dreams. Listen to the inner connections. You don’t get that from university study.) (Nah, it could be a very studied imitation — somebody who would like to be 18, like your friend who decided 17 was the perfect age and then spent the next half century remaining 17.) (Yes, see how she leaps with playful touches — the “love and liquor” or “little blade of grass in the garden of literature.”)

So, M, which is it? How is it you apparently have so much going — plus the resourcefulness and skill to launch your own magazine? Tell me, do … I’m intrigued. (And why, by the way, were you home on a Friday night instead of out on the town. Especially a big town, like Chi’town?) Ah, life! Ah, mystery!

“Professional” writer? My dear, all writing is work — and sometimes, when we’re really blessed, it becomes intense prayer, no matter how that particular piece turns out. Writing is a process, with two muses, as Wendell Barry insists: one says you can do it, you really have to give it a try, before the other reminds us, it’s harder than you thought! For most journalists, it’s a trade, as in plumbing or meat-cutting. Since no poet today pays the rent or mortgage from royalties alone, my definition of a “professional poet” is anyone who gets pieces published while being employed to teach “creative writing.” That makes the rest of us “amateur poets” — amateur, as in one who loves. Of course, as an editor now, you are “professional” to whatever degree you want to accept — especially since you’re in position to endorse some of those creative-writing teachers through publication. (Feel the power yet?)

Literary masterpieces? Don’t worry about that, not for a long time, if ever. The important thing for you now — as well as those other “mostly manic, angst-ridden teenagers,” who, you acknowledge, “produce some fine work too” — is to ride the energy, recording as much of it as you can while everything is extraordinary, intense, and fresh. This — your “shit load of poems (from) the last several years” — is the Mother Lode you’ll be drawing on for the rest of your writing career. Lucky you! Thirty years from now, you’ll shriek: “A diamond in the muck! A turn of genius where I had seen nothing remarkable!” Trust me. And in the meantime, throw nothing away. I wish I had begun keeping a journal six years earlier I did. One detail can spring an entire movie from oblivion.

A theory: By the time most writers develop the craft to accomplish what they intend technically, they’ve lost the opening that compelled them in the first place. The result is dry, technical work.

Put another way: A critic on PBS remarked that no other visual artist has produced as much bad art as Picasso did, yet we need the nine bad pieces if we are to appreciate the genius of the tenth one. Ted Berrigan, in one of his taped teaching sessions, says much of the same in warning writers to be wary of the limitations success can put on their outpouring.

About my poems in your hands: Yes, these five are delicate, subtle, even dreamlike. Lately, I’ve been reflecting a lot on how the conflicts within any relationship often form as much of the fabric of connecting as the basic erotic/romantic attraction does. Of course, either partner can really know only his or her half of the interaction, at best, so there are always these gaps and misunderstandings and expectations and — well, the kind of lacy texture I think you perceive. I’m trying to let the images themselves convey this energy, without limiting it by any editorial comment. Does this make sense to you? (By the way, a hambo — one of the images — is a wonderful pivoting dance for a couple: somewhat like a waltz or a polka, except that the woman really does seem to fly about five feet rather than five inches above the floor.)

So how ‘bout sending a big batch (copies, of course) of your writing my way? Not that I’m bored, mind you, but as I’ve said, intrigued. The whole point of writing is to share it. Enclosed check, too, is for past issues, future issues, a subscription if you have one.

Wish you were here to read to me. It’s a lovely, dry, cool New England Sunday afternoon. A great day to head to the beach or the mountains. Or even off to Boston, for whatever. Thanks for making up for being so mean to everyone that day by being nice to me. Your penance worked!

Cheerios and grins …

THE INSPIRATION OF PICASSO

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

There it was on a public television broadcast, a curator proclaiming that no other artist had made as many bad lithographs (and maybe other kinds of prints) as Picasso. But, came the rejoinder, no other artist had made so many of genius, either. The freedom of one was necessary to open the other.

I took the message to heart. Genius, of course, is another matter.

GODDESSES OF AN EARLIER ERA

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

As I said at the time, the attempt to gain a clearer picture of my high school and college years took an interesting turn as I considered (let’s call her) AA, and an attraction that never went beyond a few words and our shared hours in Mrs. Hopkins’ horrid English class. AA was, I believe, the one who knew what a choral descant was, perhaps indicating she was Episcopalian. What I remember – and the yearbooks confirm – was that she was squeaky clean, of the pure skin and bright eyes variety. Even Ivory Soap spotless.

I would have also added “virginal,” though I could speculate there was a hidden passionate side – she was, after all, on the elite marching squad, and ambitious enough to hold several offices. Some of the portraits hint at some mischief or playfulness behind those serious eyes and smile. Yet she did not show up on the homecoming or prom courts. I seem to sense she may have already had a serious boyfriend.

Now I find, as AB, a nurse, possibly divorced and looking nothing like the girl I remember, she’s still in that locale and even contributed to a Republican Senate campaign. It’s amazing what you can discover online, if you find the right thread, even without coughing over any money.

This has me thinking again of the missed opportunities and how, maybe, they were essential to my eventual pathway.

I never spoke much to her or to BB or to CC because I felt they were way out of my league. Even DD, whom I did ask out a couple of times, to no avail – usually too late. Now I see how our youth pastor’s comments about another may have actually been an attempt to bridge something on her part, but again I felt all too incompetent and impoverished and minor-minor league constricted. (Yet, as a golden boy in my mother’s eyes, only beauty would do as my consort, at least in my own expectations.)

The swirl around EE, of course, was a situation in which one person finds himself or herself unwitting having a small but pivotal role in a much larger drama. I wonder what I’d say to her now. (That would be an interesting letter to compose: note to myself.) My mother’s values, my own ambitions, my conflicted religious situation, and the raging hormones all tangled.

Suppose I had somehow found myself going steady with any of them? (Much less the twins or FF or GG – which brings up the younger woman syndrome.) Would I have felt more content, to continue studies at Wright State, work at the Journal Herald, settle in Dayton forever? Would I have been Republican, Methodist, or … ? How small that all looks now!

On the other hand, the hippie movement was around the corner. HH (now there, along with JJ, were older women – a grade or two ahead – I could have gone for!) did move, according to the Web, in that direction.

At the time, I thought the girls all possessed a secret wisdom far beyond what we wretched guys – well, for the most part: a few seemed to be on a privileged inside track – could muster. As if they would only show mercy! As if that was what I was reading in their coy glances. Heavens!

RAT-TAT OSCAR

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The title of a chapter in Bill Adler Jr.’s Outwitting Squirrels says everything: “Know the Enemy.” (My copy was a Christmas present, one of many squirrel-related items the family wraps and presents me, in their own vein of humor.) While Adler’s focus is on the difficulties squirrels cause bird feeders, including me, the bush-tailed mammals can be a homeowner’ nemesis – “tree-climbing rats,” as one friend insists – causing a number of fires as they gnaw through wiring and insulation. Ditto for the electrical utility.

In combat, however, one side can begin to resemble the other: their actions and thoughts parallel and overlap. A canny devil may even earn respect.

Many of the poems in a series I call Rat-Tat Oscar poems originate in my encounters with squirrels as part of my second marriage – evicting them from the walls of the house, from their raids on the bird feeders and garden, and eventually from the haunts in the barn – and are spurred by my wife’s quip, watching me transport them away in a Have-a-Heart trap, that I was operating a squirrel taxi. They can drive a man to madness or violence.

The poems also draw on annual Christmas letters to friends and family over two-and-a-half decades, turning the encounters to a would-be squirrel’s perspective. Of course, my wife and children will also insist I’m often more than a tad squirrelly.

Surprisingly, there’s not a lot about squirrels in mythology. Maybe the most prominent one is the Norse Ratatoskr, along with a handful of Native American stories. Maybe they had as much trouble making sense of squirrels in the universe as I do.

GETTING FREE OF GUILT EDGES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

A renewed compulsion had me rethinking, reworking, pruning, and punching up much of my earlier writing – the dozen unpublished novels; the genealogy research and narrative; several hundred poems, many of which had been published in literary quarterlies; and varied essays and journal entries. It hit with a vengeance, and was given extra clout at New England Yearly Meeting one August when, in a prayer circle, it was made clear to me that these labors are an exercise of talent, a gift, rather than a self-indulgence that had too often before stirred feelings of guilt.

For the first time in my life, I felt free to undertake this labor, the writing that does not pay the bills but somehow keeps me intellectually and artistically alive. What a blessing! (Never underestimate the power of prayer!)

Again, cleaning up these works and seeing them published may be one more way of bringing some closure to what too often seems a honeycombed life! Writing pulls so many of these threads together.

I began trying to set aside one free day each week as a no-automobile day, a kind of sabbath for writing, reading, or reflection; even with my usual three days off at the time (Sunday News worked a double shift every Saturday), achieving this goal became surprisingly difficult – but wonderfully rewarding when it did.

In some rich ways, it became a kind of retirement, even while being employed elsewhere full-time.

SPLITTING THE RENT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Yes, splitting the rent, as I remember it, way back when leaving home and living not with a spouse or a lover, but instead sharing a dorm room or an apartment as a matter of economic necessity. You would wish otherwise, of course, for a space all your own, with privacy. In all of this transition, all the same, the unanticipated connections. As if you would ever go back.

SUMP PUMP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

I’ve learned to listen whenever we get heavy rain. Check to see that the jerry-rigged sump pump is still upright and its line’s not clogged.

Yes, indeed: too much rain, and the sump pump kicks in. Or else the cellar floods, along with the furnace.

It’s all a matter of perspective.