Tag: Relationships

MEETING IN THE MIDDLE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The prose-poem presents a subtle challenge. In theory, it should be a natural fit for the English language. In practice, however, what I see all too often is simply wordy prose. Somewhere, the poetry gets trapped or tangled or loses its spin.

Coming across a guideline to keep a prose-poem under a hundred words spurred my thinking. As I considered revising a clutch of drafted poems, a sensed an opportunity. Recast without line breaks, they flew – especially when I removed the punctuation that pushed them toward prose.

I’m satisfied with the results, which I feel are more powerful and vibrant and authentic than either a straight-prose or straight-verse version would present.

Take a look for yourself. Just click here.

harbor cover.jpg.opt370x493o0,0s370x493~*~

 

POOL BUM

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

“Hey! You! Come here!” Black man, about thirty, in Pitt sweatshirt and Pirates cap, stands at the fence and motions one of the tough talking grade-schoolers over. “I said, Come here! Yes, YOU! I’m warning you, leave my daughter alone. Don’t call her, don’t talk to her, don’t approach her.” He fiddles with his car keys. The kid smirks. “Listen to me,” I suspect he wants to add “you little asshole,” but he restrains. “If I ever hear that you’ve said anything like that again, you’re in deep trouble. Understand me? Real deep trouble. And that goes for my wife, too. You’re to leave them both alone, got that. You can tell your mother what I’ve said to you, I don’t care. You can tell your pa, too. I don’t care. But I’m warning you, hear?”

(The blond brat, walking back to the pool from the fence, smirks to his buddies.)

I’m itching like crazy. This has been going on the past two weeks, ever since the first flea bites. Those are gone now but the itching gets worse. Hellfire. Mites? Fungi? Anemia? Allergies? (WATER! Hot showers or swimming?) Negative effects from the sun? First sunbathing in three weeks: my tan’s faded to half.

Hot shower and soap up thoroughly. No relief.

Much lotion, which I’ve been using for a week and a half anyway.

Iron pills.

Spray, for relief: Solarcaine. Tinactin. Bactine.

Avoid water now. Salute the dad.

Riverside 1~*~

For more, click here.

IN ITS URBAN DECAY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

It’s life in the inner city, usually not far from downtown and often in an enclave near the river. High density population, at least compared to the suburbs, and filled with children. Usually blue-collar or poor or a mix of students added in, it’s noisy and lively, even colorful in its urban decay. You can walk to the store or corner bar.

We lived on the second floor and later, a street over, on the third.

That’s where these poems originate and resonate still.

Riverside 1~*~

For your own copy, click here.

STILL LOOKING FOR A WORKING ROUTINE OR BALANCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Years before I left formal employment, I’d occasionally try to sketch out daily and weekly routines I might follow once found myself free (that is, retired or in some other way financially independent). Usually this exercise would arise as part of my annual year-end review and year-ahead planning, an event that included drafting my Yule letter to family and friends.

I remember my wife’s reaction on chancing across one of those, once I’d remarried. She thought I’d left a lot out – essentially, I’d overlooked all the important stuff, and not just more time for the two of us to spend together. These days, I think she’s right, and that’s even before I reopen any of those proposals.

What I’d envisioned was more time for meditation, yoga, reading, and reflection – none of which have manifested, by the way – plus deep pockets for writing and serious literary enterprise accompanied by intensified Quaker activity. Whatever I’d considered for home maintenance, inside or out, now appears totally inadequate. And that’s before adding time for activities that weren’t on the horizon in the earlier grid sheets – choir (which occupies most of one afternoon and evening), my daily laps in the pool, and blogging and other social networking.

Maybe downsizing to a smaller house would free up something, but just thinking of that effort’s intimidating.

I remember pondering what kind of schedule would work best for me – a rather strict daily round, but that somehow always seemed to shortchange something, or a more flexible weekly one based on blocks of time, somewhat the way an attorney bills clients for hours worked. As I recall, that seemed to settle into two-hour blocks for most of the activities, with the option, for example, of using all five of my literary blocks for the week in a single day or stretching them out.

Let’s just say I’m still looking for a workable system. My late-night commute to Boston for choir throws the next day out of whack, I’m still not napping in the afternoon, the best swimming slot depends on what opens up around the indoor pool’s schedule of teams and clubs, and rising early is something that fits best with my wife’s natural rhythms and my creative energy flow. And that’s before we get to something like trying to help the carpenter in major house renovations or addressing an unexpected emergency of crisis (aren’t they all unexpected?).

I’m thinking, too, of the many different ways individual writers approach their use of time. Some, like Jack Kerouac, would go off on binges – two weeks of nearly no sleep to pound out a frenzied draft, followed by months of recovery – while others put in their daily “butt time” at the keyboard, as Charles Bukowski phrased it. I prefer the latter, though in my employed years often had to indulge in the Kerouac method over holidays, weekends, and vacations.

Perhaps my central concern here is that without some structure – a daily routine, a weekly pace, a monthly and yearly calendar, nothing of note will be accomplished. I harbor a nagging suspicion somewhere – could it be a seed of Protestant guilt carried from childhood? – that the endless interruptions of life will engulf and swamp any greater ambition? (Or is it even, as one beloved uncle has sensed, that we Hodsons have never known how to have fun?)

So here I am, needing to dress for the day and charge out into the garden as promised.

One thing I can definitely say: Everything takes longer than planned.

RENOVATING A PERENNIAL BED

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Gardeners in New England – especially in its northern realms of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont – soon discover the month of May can be a frantic stretch. (Or, for those of us with short memories, the word should be rediscover. I keep hoping for something more orderly than what feels dropped upon us each year.) For much of April, even apart from the threat of killer-frost nights or piles of lingering snow, the ground can be too cold or too wet for planting, and that’s if rain’s not falling. With our clay-based soil, I’ve learned not to turn it when wet, lest it form brick-like clumps. For that matter, in a typical year our large compost bin can still be frozen at heart, posing another obstacle to preparing the garden beds themselves.

When it comes to these projects, I often find myself in a bind. We simply don’t have enough room to “park” something while waiting for something else to open up or be moved to another spot. Compost is a case in point, though hardly the only one.

So when May hits, we’re rushing to get as much in the ground as soon as possible to maximize a relatively short growing season and, frankly, to try to beat the weeds to a solid start.

And that’s where we are at the moment.

I feel pretty good about a lot of the pace. Two of our raised beds have received new wooden frames, the compost bin’s been emptied and refilled with a new round of leaves and garbage, black plastic and a soaker hose are in place on what will be this year’s nightshade bed (tomatoes and peppers), the pea frames are up as are the seedlings below them, the bean tripods are in place … and we’re dining on what I think’s the best asparagus ever.

Let me add that my wife’s scheduling here means a few other outdoor projects I thought I’d be addressing are put off for a few weeks, and that’s frustrating. I hope they don’t get pushed back for months, because, well, that would affect other projects in the pipeline – and that touches on yet another issue she raised today. What if we just moved to a condo with a deck and a small garden bed about the size of our dining room table?

I could see that if we did square-foot gardening as intensely as we once envisioned, we might raise enough to keep us smiling at dinner. But my beloved asparagus bed’s larger than that. Ahem.

~*~

So we finished our first round of morning coffee and headed outside for the day’s task, the fourth of the raised beds in what we call the Kitchen Garden, the one on the far side of the driveway. The one we’re tackling is a perennial bed of bee balm (which attracts hummingbirds as well as bees), sorrel (which makes for an excellent sauce on fish), and chives, all of which we’d hoped to salvage. Unfortunately, a bout of lemon balm’s gone invasive, along with grass, plus our ubiquitous ground ivy, dandelions, vetch, and several familiar weeds I have yet to identify.

In short, this has meant uprooting most of the bed, attempting to save what we could, including some hyacinth bulbs, and admitting we’d have to start from scratch with much of the rest, including new bee balm.

So here we are, ripping out, grubbing, turning, cursing, adding compost, wondering how this got away from us, anticipating, what?

I have to admit I’m not the gardener, the one who plans the arrangement using page after page of grid paper or reads up on the options or orders the seeds or starts the flats indoors under the grow lights I set up or waters them daily while envisioning the results or anticipates the way they’ll wind up in tasty dishes or fill the freezer for dinners next winter. (I admire the one who does all this, in more ways than one. After all, I married her.) At the moment, though, I’m more concerned with what goes into the wheelbarrow, shovel by shovel or handful by handful, and where it goes from there.

And then, there will be one more thing checked off my to-do list … while adding to hers.

MOODY RIVER WINDING AWAY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

What may appear to be a lazy river meandering amid its wooded isles deserves consideration and room to run wild.

Passions arise and freeze over. The flow dwindles to rock. Rats run along the shoreline of factory brick at the dam. A few miles on, either direction, the dairy herds gather.

All of it reflecting my soul when I lived there.

Susquehanna 1~*~

For your own copy, click here.

REGARDING THE EXISTENCE OF SPIRITUAL REALITY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

A materialistic outlook misses so much. As does an emphasis on concrete reality or causality.

How would you explain love, for starters? Much less admit passion? Why does music move us the way it does? And pain, be assured, is more than a neuro-chemical calculation. Why does social injustice to others spur our own anger? How could those who own all the creaturely comforts ever feel lonely?

The materialistic reaction to these, I suspect, prompts what we call addiction. Though it’s not always to alcohol, tobacco, illicit drugs, food, or even sex.

For liberation, a spiritual dimension will open. Or else.

TRIPLE PLAY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Any writer tackling a large work such as a novel or screenplay will need to consider the matter of structure. The easiest way out, of course, is to follow a conventional model.

In fiction that might mean 60,000 words, more or less, spread out over 20 to 24 chapters, typically in a straight chronological order, past tense. For the film, something that would come in a little under two hours. To that you’d add pacing, points of conflict, resolution, number of main characters, and so on.

Sometimes, though, you find that’s not the best way to organize your material.

For example, in its revisions, Promise emerged with three sections, each set in a different locale – Prairie Depot, the Ozarks, and finally the Katonkah Valley. Each one, as it turns out, can be viewed as a novella held together by the central couple, Erik and Jaya.

I didn’t intend it this way. The original version had five sections, for one thing, which I came to feel were simply too unwieldy. The cuts provided what I feel gives a better balance.

Let me also admit to a fondness for shorter novels. Novels, mind you, not simply novellas, no matter how much I enjoy them, as well. Maybe it’s a reflection of my typically crowded schedule.

Still, both short stories and novellas stand as kinds of orphans in today’s literary scene. They should be more popular than they are. An occasional solution, one I’ve enjoyed reading, runs a central character through a set of short stories to culminate in a volume of novel length. It’s a tricky strategy, though, and hard to pull off.

Maybe that’s one more reason I feel a special satisfaction with Promise.

Hope you do, too.

Promise~*~

For your own copy, click here.

THE INVISIBLE FACTOR

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

In the buildup of national elections, once again a major influence remains the elephant in the room. I’m referring to the legacy – make that plural, legacies – of the hippie outburst, especially in contrast to those on the Vietnam war side of the divide.

The wounds and tensions haven’t gone away. Just look at the continuing proliferation of POW-MIA black flags across the landscape, on one side.

For the other, the lines are much more hazy yet festering. As I’ve been arguing, hippies came – and still come – in all varieties and degrees, and likely nobody ever fit what’s become the media stereotype. With the end of the military draft, the movement lost a crucial motivating force and focusing definition.

Complicating the situation was the distancing many youths on the antiwar side felt when it came to politics. With its support of the military at the time, liberal politics were tainted with outdated Cold War ideologies like those of the conservative side. For hippies, radical was the label of honor. And the Democratic Party base of the left was splintered as its youthful potential allies had nowhere to turn or direct their forces in the political arena.

The horror meant going from a hawkish LBJ administration to one of Richard Nixon.

Fast-forward now to the present American landscape. Gone are the grandparents and parents of many of the now senior baby boomers – the core of the hippie movement versus the older generations. Yet political candidates still tiptoe around many of the reality issues, beginning with marijuana and other illicit substances, as if they’re too hot to touch. Let’s get real. Want to talk about litmus tests?

As we look at candidates, ask where each stands on a scale of continuing issues from the hippie stream. I find it enlightening.

  • Peace and social justice activism.
  • Sexual equality … including abortion rights.
  • Racial equality.
  • Environmental and ecological issues, including the outdoors.
  • Educational alternatives and opportunities.
  • Sustainable economics and fair trade.
  • Spirituality and radical religion.
  • Fitness along the lines of yoga, bicycling, kayaking, hiking.
  • Organic and natural foods.
  • Marijuana reform.
  • Arts and crafts.
  • Community as common wealth, including health care.
  • Labor as a matter of respect and a livable income.

Well, we have Bernie running straight true to the cause. Hillary, more cautiously so. But on the right? Let me suggest being wary of anyone in the pro-war camp who hasn’t served. Period. As for other life experiences?

~*~

All of this returns me to my Hippie Trails series of novels. I’d love for you to come along. Just click here.