Tag: Thoughts

Quakers, the New England town meeting, and more

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of the items I wish I had pursued more openly in my history Quaking Dover is the evolution of the iconic New England town meeting from its origins in the Congregational churches of Puritan faith, as a means of collective church governance, and then into a more secular democratic ideal.

The presence of Quakers (Friends), with their unique decision-making that achieved unity without taking a vote, would have been pivotal in this evolutionary step both before and after the Revolutionary War.

A town moderator, presiding over the session, and a Quaker Meeting clerk share a number of commonalities in their efforts to balance the voicing of alternative positions, where all are heard equally and respectfully, at least ideally.

Quakers also realized that a minority position, even a single person, could be closer to the Truth than the majority was. Resolution of the differences could lead to a superior synthesis, done right.

A fuller history would be informative.

I do suffer through public meetings that don’t have that underpinning, especially when it comes down to a clash of egos or power plays or showboating.

Nevertheless, there are clues in my book suggesting that the Quaker minority did temper Dover’s town decisions, sometimes humorously.

~*~

Another point that would welcome further research by a dedicated historian would be the three volumes of Dover Meeting minutes dealing with male Friends who enlisted in the American Revolution, contrary to Quaker pacifism as a matter of faith and faithfulness.

It was a struggle, with no guarantee that the new government would recognize the hard-won religious liberty that Friends were finally enjoying.

~*~

After publication of Quaking Dover, I became aware of the influence of the Scottish prisoners of war who were brought to New England after the battles of Worcester and Dunbar. Like the West Country fishermen who settled before the arrival of the Puritans, the Scots became a subculture in the region, embodying a different culture and set of folkways. It seems to have been a factor in the Bean family of Dover Friends Meeting.

Again, it’s another history that needs fuller treatment.

~*~

Reading a history by someone else dealing with details you’re familiar with can also be disturbing.

For instance, Nathaniel Philbrick’s bestselling Mayflower has no mention of William Hilton and his family, who were instrumental in a scandal involving the Reverend John Lyford, an Anglican priest in the Plymouth Bay colony who baptized a Hilton child contrary to the rules of those we call Pilgrims, or more properly Separatists. The plot thickens with the introduction of John Oldham and events leading up to the Pequot War.

The picture takes on a different perspective when you’re concerned with what was happening north of Boston.

William Hilton headed off to Dover, where his brother Edward had already built in what would become the third oldest permanent settlement in New England.

~*~

Leaping ahead two centuries, I’ve had to ask myself if someone else with Dover Quaker roots, John Greenleaf Whittier, was America’s first great polemic poet.

Not just a forerunner of Robert Frost but Allen Ginsberg, too, in fact?

~*~

Quaking Dover is available in paperback through your favorite bookstore or as an ebook in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. You can also ask your public library to obtain it.

Let me repeat my fascination with subways

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I doubt that I’ll ever get back to New York City in my remaining years. Even Boston seems like a rarity, though far more likely. Yet let me repeat my fascinating with subway trains and their tunnels.

And Manhattan was, after all, the center of publishing, including best-selling novels.

Tackle that from the perspective of where I live now, where the year-round population would fit on a single subway train. Add the flush of summer people and vacationers or even the cruise ships that visit and it still wouldn’t add up much more. Some of the visiting cruise ships would be like three or four trains arriving and totally discharging for a stroll around the village. A hiccup, then, in comparison to a Manhattan underground station.

My playful novel Subway Visions, grew out of my encounters in the Big Apple way back when.

As I once noted, growing up in a Midwestern city that was too small for rail mass transit, or maybe it was from an intellectual awareness of underground as a conduit of counterculture and spiritual wisdom, subways came to define a Big City for me and to symbolize the range of possibilities present therein. A subway transit system separates cosmopolitan from lesser cities. The trains are filled with real people – a cross-section of the populace between many diverse origins and destinations. As an underground, subways also present counterculture and surrealistic currents many of the riders fail to consider. Here, then, were snapshots from that route.

Later, with my wife and kids, came our outings in Boston and its MBTA.

Or my favorite Dover lifeguard’s revulsion and disgust after relocating to Beantown for college and having a drunken passenger vomit on her sandals on a hot, crowded platform.

So much for my perception of a carnival air.

Still, I think of subways the way I think of rollercoasters, even with our small downtown of boutiques, less pressured than the subway station settings of much of Boston.

Just how do those cruise ship passengers view our village, anyway?

You can find Subway Visions in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. It’s also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain it.

It’s a heavy awareness to carry, but it’s one I’ve shared 

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Indiana sometimes shows up as a symbolic state. It’s not just a “crossroads of America,” as it likes to tout itself, a blending of North and South or balancing East versus West. It’s an anomaly even in the Midwest, where it’s the only state not bearing an Indigenous name yet it’s named in supposed homage to the Original Peoples – INDIAN-a.

With a capital called INDIAN-apolis. Or Naptown, as it’s known in other parts of the state.

Not that there are any tribes remaining within its boundaries.

It’s not as industrial as Ohio or Illinois nor as agricultural as, say, Iowa or Minnesota – feel free to counter that with hard data, I’m just running on gut feeling here.

And just what is a Hoosier, anyway? There are theories, but it’s certainly not like a buckeye or hawkeye or badger or the Bluegrass State bordering its south or Prairie State on its west or Great Lakes State on its north. You can get a picture in your mind with those.

In short, it rather strives to appear just average, or maybe a level just below. Somehow, that’s what fuels its role as a symbol of America itself, especially the Bread Basket sprawling largely westward, even though it’s rarely in the spotlight, except for Indy 500 week, and even that reflects an earlier glory.

That wasn’t always the case, though. The place gave birth to some leftist progressives over the years as well as some vital inventors. It also gave us the likes of journalist Ernie Pyle, jazz lyricist Hoagie Carmichael, actor James Dean, radio storyteller Jean Shepherd, basketball great Larry Bird, rocker John Mellencamp, late-night host David Letterman. But no U.S. president.

Early on, it had a heavy Southern influence, especially as Quaker families fled the slaveholding economy of North Carolina, as I learned after taking up genealogy and uncovering my roots.

It also has some distinctly different regions, including the once dominant steelmaking crescent along Lake Michigan adjacent to Chicago; the hardscrabble rolling forests and quarries of southern Indiana; and the flat agricultural belt in the middle.

I got to know it first by family camping trips and Boy Scout overnight hiking excursions. Yes, in the southern tracts of the state. We also had journeys when my great-grandmother decided to visit from Missouri or central Illinois; her son and his wife lived in a dreadful corner of Indianapolis and served as the relay point. Later, I finished college, again in the rustic south, and returned four years after as a political science research associate.

I must admit my angst at what’s been happening politically and socially, even though the Indianapolis Star was always a pretty dreadful archconservative voice, proof for me that “liberal” journalism has always been in the minority.

~*~

Not that the state hasn’t had an artistic presence. Just think of the artist Robert Indiana of the iconic LOVE image (born in New Castle).

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut nailed the state for me, though other writers of note include Booth Tarkington, Theodore Dreiser, Ward Just, New Yorker regular Janet Flanner (from Paris), and young-adult superstar John Green. The poets Clayton Eshelman, with his collection Indiana, and Etheridge Knight also have had strong careers.

For my part, my novels Daffodil Uprising and What’s Left are both based in an imaginative reworking of Bloomington – I do play with geography, making the Ohio River a lot closer to Indianapolis, for one thing. My novel Hometown News could also be placed in the upper half of the state, though its setting is more generalized.

My poetry chapbook Leonard Springs definitely reflects the cave country around Bloomington.

I anticipated remaining there much longer than I did, but fate intervened. And after that, I’ve never been back, except in my memories.

 

Dreaming of literary success versus the reality

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Working in the thralls of daily newspaper journalism in the heartland was not my dream. Literary fame was. Of the critically acclaimed sort, as if bestseller status would follow.

Whoa, expressing that so boldly feels harsh, yet true. Even so, I did plod away on both fronts.

And now? I’m a survivor wondering what would have resulted if I had narrowed my focus.

I had no idea how crassly market-driven the shrinking book-publishing world was. So much for idealism.

~*~

Still, I pursued, working on my own into the wee hours.

These days, I have the luxury of revisiting my earlier work and wondering just who wrote it. The pages are so unlike what I’d venture today – wilder, for sure, and more profuse, often leading to an Oh-Wow! of admiration. The dross, fortunately, has been stripped away.

That’s been my reaction in presentations at our monthly open mic night here in town even when I’ve veered toward the edge of embarrassment yet still being warmly applauded.

Passages in both my prose and poetry make references I no longer understand but trust to leave untouched, perhaps for others to reconnect.

Writing? It’s like talking to yourself, ‘cept sometimes you have to get up to allow the rest of you to reply.

~*~

Another recent experience has come in assisting a friend to create a remarkable novel, one he finally presented to a literary agent whose thoughtful response seemed quaint, actually – the perspectives of three people in the agency, even though no. Somebody actually has time these days for such reflection?

It really did feel like an earlier era. I was rather envious.

~*~

I’m also recalling another experience after I had returned “back east” and was reading an essay about Snyder, Whalen, and Kerouac in the North Cascades, I felt sharp pain, knowing the lookout stations and High Cascades were so far behind me and the rest of my generation.

~*~

Add to that the fear of being discovered once your early book approaches publication. How strong are you in its potential storm?

Except, that you instead encounter indifference.

~*~

It can lead to bitterness, considering all the years and lost potential.

As for inscriptions at book signings?

Keep the faith!

Share your Light, too!

I don’t remember his name

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Or much else, for that matter.

He was my introduction to philosophy professor, and then a semester of logic.

I expected to learn pithy bits of wisdom but discovered that philosophy is mostly about bottomless questions. I did find symbolic logic enticing, akin to geometry a few years earlier.

He was young, apparently Greek, as I recognize today – that curly hair and beard resembled any of a slew of statues. Rumors were that he was madly in love with his girlfriend and spent most of his nights talking long-distance to her in Europe.

What fascinated us was his clothing, the same cheap gabardine suit and tie and pair of scuffed brown oxfords every time he showed up for class. We assumed it was the same pair of socks and same shirt, too.

The next semester he wore a different suit but only that one to every class.

Later, hearing of his finals question from the previous year, I was grateful I hadn’t had him then.

The question he assigned for the blue-books scribbles was just one word:

“Why?”

Nothing else.

Most of the students labored away, hoping to chance across an acceptable answer.

The “A” grade went to the one who wrote a one-world answer:

“Because.”

And the “B” went to the one who used two: “Why not?”

Like a boat, a book is launched

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

That image seems especially appropriate as we celebrate the appearance today of my newest collection of poems, Ocean Motion, now available in the ebook platform of your choice. Yes, let’s envision a book floating on the water like a boat.

For much of the first half of my life, the concept of an ocean was incomprehensible, even more so than mountains.

As I’ve noted earlier, I grew up far from the seashore or even craggy ranges like the Rockies or Alps. The Great Smokey and other Southern Appalachian glories were a bit closer. I didn’t encounter the ocean until I’d reached adolescence and we visited Florida on a camping trip with some of Dad’s old Army Air Force buddies. I next saw surf my senior year of college, with my then-girlfriend and her parents. From there, my encounters went to a few times on the Staten Island ferry or other points in New York City or Long Island, and then the ferry rides in Washington state, a few days camping along the Pacific (recorded in my American Olympus book), a jaunt along the Oregon coast, and then Maryland, New Jersey, and ultimately New England, plus a few returns to the Gulf Coast of Florida.

In all of those, I faced an enigma, a recognition that I didn’t quite grasp its appeal. Something was missing. It was like a gray Lake Erie looming with whitecaps I had seen around age seven, except that there was something else called tides. It was water with nothing else but sky on the horizon.

The pace of my encounters picked up, especially once I moved to New England, nearly half of my life ago now. Having a boss who owned a 32-foot sailboat fostered some of that, especially when we ventured forth once or twice each summer from Newburyport, Massachusetts, or once from Portsmouth, New Hampshire – both notoriously treacherous harbors.

As I describe in one poem, my first time of being in a sailboat was also my first time out on the Atlantic and my first time of seeing whales (including a minke that surfaced only feet away from me) and my first time of setting foot on an island, one that was now a Unitarian and Congregationalist churches summer retreat.

Those experiences all infuse these poems.

Moving to Dover, as I remarried, picked up the pace. The tides reached downtown, after all, and Great Bay along one side. Plus, with the kids, we got to visit Maine beaches and Cape Cod at their grandfather’s. And later, picking up one after her work at a coastal motel, I had repeated exposures to the ocean at midnight, another world altogether. I wouldn’t say it was romantic, even with a full moon.

The resulting poems eventually appeared in small-press literary venues around the globe as well as a series of PDF chapbooks at Thistle Finch editions.

As these poems demonstrate, the more I’ve gotten to know ocean as the North Atlantic along New England, the more in awe I am. Other writers can express the ocean from their own locale and nuances.

Still, I have come to love lighthouses and do treasure opportunities to climb up within them to savor the view from the top. But don’t get too romantic, it was a harsh, often dangerous, life for the keeper and his family. I hope these poems reflect that reality and more.

Do note that New England thrived on seafaring, designing and building distinguished vessels along its forested shores and sailing them around the globe to Asia and elsewhere and then back or out to hunt whales. The memories are imprinted in the muscle and soul of its people.

Remember, tides rise and fall dramatically in New England. You learn to be alert, even wary. And, do note, I’ve learned so much more since I first expressed that.

One of the ocean chapbooks included in the final collection was titled “Land Overlaps Sea,” an outlook that still impresses me, considering that it’s actually the other way around. The poems in the collection reflect places close to where I lived at the time and ways they interact with the Atlantic. It has been quite instructive over the years, even for an old landlubber like me.

Meanwhile, bits of sea shanties – the chanted or sung work ditties of sailors over the years – muffled and muted by the wind, flit through background, even if you don’t quite catch their words.

While the poems reflect a period of my life before moving to a remote fishing village at the far end of Maine, what I’ve encountered since confirms my impressions.

Maritime historian and sea chanter Stephen Sanfilippo and his wife, Susan, have definitely added much to my comprehension, as have my new friend, Captain Robert J. Peacock, and my times out on the waters, especially week-long cruises aboard the historic schooner Lewis R. French, as you’ve been seeing here.

~*~

So here we are, with my thought that each new volume is akin to the space within a vessel:

a book launch
rather than release

BOOK
BOAT

the connection floats for me
my experience on the water flows everywhere

For my poems of the sea, check out Ocean Motion at Smashwords.com. You can find also find it at the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. Or ask your public library to obtain it.

So why did I write poetry?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A poetry editor a decade or two ago asked why I write poems, and in response I came up with this:

I’ve been writing poetry and fiction for so long the questions of “how” and even “when” and “where” arise long before any consideration of “why.” That is, the practice quickly turns directly to “just sit down, start keyboarding, and see where it goes.” Even so, my “why” quickly turns to a succession of motivations within an evolving exploration that continued to present itself as poetry. So here are some of my primary Whys along the way:

  • Because it sustains expansive dimensions of language and thinking that have been precluded from my employment as a newspaper (and, briefly, social sciences) editor, where expression is intended to convey a single layer of factual presentation.
  • Because it allows me to pursue wordplay, surrealism, ambiguity, innuendo, absurdities, but especially my own emotions and experiences that are forbidden in objective third-person writing. (Intentionally or otherwise, my literary endeavors have worked as a reaction against and counterweight to the strictures of professional journalism, the way a pianist might balance classical and jazz or country-western performance.)
  • Because it has kept my skills as a headline writer sharp and pliant.
  • Because it collects and distills the seemingly random wanderings of my Aquarian mind and my often-obscured impressions and feelings.
  • Because it reflects the intuition and clarity that arise in my practice of meditation.
  • Because revision, a crucial element of writing poetry, pushes me beyond linear narrative to a more mysterious matrix as I looking between the cracks and broken syntax to admit other voices to appear.
  • Because it allows me mythologies for exploring and celebrating places I’ve lived and people I’ve known along the way. (If I’d taken more photos during all those years, would the drive have been lessened?)
  • Because it immerses me in a long stream of poets, troubadours, singers, storytellers, mystics, prophets, and shamans before me.
  • Because it’s a kind of prayer.
  • Because it keeps me looking at the world around me with an awareness of gratitude and wonder.

Well, that’s what I wrote at the time, and the editor fired back with a round of questions I didn’t have time to answer. Way back then. I have no idea how I would answer now. I do hope it would be less ethereal.

What is poetry, anyway?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

After a couple dozen or so years that have been focused largely in the revision of fiction and then the roots of Dover Quaker Friends Meeting, itself a challenge to conventional New England history, I’ve found myself revisiting my trove of poetry.

It’s part of a big cleanup project that’s accompanying our downsizing move from New Hampshire to the far end of Maine, and I’m at a point of trying to discard everything I no longer need and put in order anything else I feel is of value.

As a result, several central full-length collections that had been presented piecemeal as chapbooks at my Thistle Finch editions blog are now released as ebooks at Smashwords.com and its affiliated digital bookstores. You’ll be hearing more about those as the year progresses.

In their place in the Thistle Finch lineup are new chapbooks of sets of my more recent poems, meaning ones from this century, though their origins go back further.

The task has come as a revelation, watching the evolution in my style and underlying voice. Each stage, reflecting geographical moves in my life and the upheavals of my closest relationships, edged me away from narrative-driven content to increasingly image and confetti centered clusters. Don’t ask me to explain them, they just are, whatever.

For me, poetry is a kind of mysticism – one foot in the inexplicable wondrous, the other in everyday life. Prose, of course, is more secular.

My newly released chapbook Aquarian Leap leads off the new run at Thistle Finch. Frankly, looking back over these, I’m not sure what to make of them other than the wild energy they inhabit. I certainly wouldn’t – or couldn’t – draft them today.

These poems, in some manner, still reflect the working of my multi-layered, mercurial thought process. (Never mind my heart, all the more elusive and often contradictory!) I love those lucid moments – sharp, brief – when everything, including thought and emotion, is centered, full, and stilled. Rarely, however, does my intellect flow in such a focused narrative. That requires more effort.

More typically, it flashes on something and then leaps to another, seemingly miles away. Some say this is characteristic of my natal sun sign. That is to say, the typical Aquarian will hear one subject and shuffle through fifty-two logical connections in a flash, and then blurt out something that will leave everyone else in the room wondering, “Just where did that come from?” (Except, perhaps, for another Aquarian, to whom it will seem perfectly logical.)

Often, my writing was constructed and amplified and then distilled from notes, many of them scratched out on a daily commute or on a hike in the woods, or sometimes even a twist while journaling. Curiously, when I assembled these into collage-poems, I was conscious of an underlying logic. That is, many snippets did not fit the emerging sense and must be laid aside. But a few others did, leading to what I hope is an internal thesis/antithesis/synthesis that’s ultimately beyond any surface or attempted cleverness. I prefer for my work to discover and uncover rather than invent.

The result in this set and a few ahead feels more like confetti. So there!

Something similar happens in disciplined meditation, such as traditional Quaker worship, where routine thoughts are patiently laid aside while one’s awareness clears and sinks to a more intuitive and integrated state. Perhaps some of that also infects these pieces.

I should confess to a few works by two poets, G.P. Scratz and Aram Saroyan, I’ve long admired, poems that defy explication or understanding yet spring from the intuitive burst that takes us beyond apparent meaning – and closer to a jewel-like condition.

Or even the freedom of dancing, which I find in a similar vein in the work of Philip Whalen, especially.

Consider the linguist’s Wolves and Consonants. (My reading of “Vowels” in a book title my elder daughter was reading.)

The growling of wolves adds a whole new way of following the Voice here.

As for any effort to define poetry itself? I guess I prefer the wilder side. Go figure.

You can find Aquarian Leap at Thistle Finch editions.