Tag: Poetry Footnotes

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A renewed compulsion had me rethinking, reworking, pruning, and punching up much of my earlier writing – the dozen unpublished novels; the genealogy research and narrative; several hundred poems, many of which had been published in literary quarterlies; and varied essays and journal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.