Happy New Year!

Did You See/Hear/Read This?

Since "Best of" lists seem to be popular this time of year, I thought I'd do my best imitation of best lists the next few day. Or Top Ten of various and sundry things used for inspiration, or that just made me giggle. If there were ten I liked, I'm flexible. Could be a Top 14 or Top 2 list. Bear with me.

Music
Speechless - Bruce Cockburn

Incredible instrumental guitar playing by the Canadian folk/rock/activist/singer/songwriter. I've listened to Bruce Cockburn for over 20 years and he just gets better and better. His guitar playing on previous albums was inspired, but Speechless is nothing short of phenomenal. You feel every song. You can get lost in the music. It also is great to write to – for certain passages.

I alternate between Speechless and regular Cockburn albums. As a poet I appreciate the lyrics the man composes. How could I not love a man who uses $.25+ words in his songs rather than teeny-bopper Orc grunts??

"Sinister cynical instrument
Who makes the gun into a sacrament --
The only response to the deification
Of tyranny by so-called "developed" nations'
Idolatry of ideology"
from Call It Democracy



Music + Music Video
Straight Outta Lynwood– Weird Al Yankovic
White and Nerdy

I like sarcasm, I really like well done sarcasm. The White and Nerdy video pokes fun at the rap song "Ridin'" by Chamillionaire and Krayzie Bone by making fun of nerds everywhere. For me, seeing Donny Osmond nerd dancing in the background was hysterical. You can find White and Nerdy on YouTube and Google Video, as well as iTune$.

Also included on the album are the songs "Canadian Idiot", a riff on American Idiot by Green Day. In Weird Al's version, it becomes a commentary on the inability of Americans to see their neighbors to the north as anything but stereotypes.

"Well maple syrup and snow's what they export
they treat curling just like it's a real sport
they think their silly accent is so cute
can't understand a thing they're talking aboot"

Then there is "Weasel Stomping Day", where you learn it's okay to do horrid things as long as it's traditional.

"Faces filled with joy and cheer
What a magical time of year
Howdy ho, it's Weasel Stomping Day"


"Don't Download This Song" which is a parody of those artist fundraising songs that were popular in the 1980's. The video for the song was cartooned by Bill Plympton and can be found on YouTube and Google Video. Download it, it's visual sarcasm at its best.

"Once in a while
Maybe you will feel the urge.
To break international copyright law
By downloading mp3s
From file sharing sites
Like morphous or grokster or limewire or kazza.
But deep in your Heart.
You know the guilt would drive you mad
And the shame would leave a permanent scar
Cause you start out stealing songs
Then you’re robbing liquor stores
And selling Crack
And running over school kids with your car..."

NOT included on the album, thanks to Atlantic Records balking, (although the artist gave his okay), is "You're Pitiful", a parody of James Blunt's song "You're Beautiful". Strangely, the song was released into the wilds of the 'Net, where I found a copy HERE. I'm always amazed how Weird Al can get not only the lyrics and tone of a piece to match, but his voice too. Scary.

"Your homemade Star Trek uniform
Really ain't impressin' me
You're sufferin' from delusions of
Adequacy
You're Pitiful
You're Pitiful
You're Pitiful, it's true."

Time to go check my shelves for more "Best of 2006". Stay tuned.

Orc Side Story

Scott Oden, this one's for you. A sort of get well wish and taunt all in one. I love multi-tasking....



Orc Side Story
(Sung to the tune of Gee, Officer Krupke)


GOTHMOG
Dear kindly Fiction Author,
You gotta understand,
We're really not too hardcore
Just a little out of hand.
Our mothers were all humanoid,
Our fathers bred from pork.
Golly Moses, natcherly we're Orcs!

GOTHMOG AND ORCS
Gee, Fiction Author, we're very upset;
We never ate the horse flesh ev'ry Orc oughta get.
We ain't no barbarians,
We're misunderstood.
Deep down inside us there is good!

GOTHMOG
There is good!

ORCS
There is good, there is good,
We're just misunderstood!
Like inside, the worst of us is good!

URUK-HAI (Spoken) That's a bloody good story.

GOTHMOG (Spoken) Lemme tell it to the world!

URUK-HAI Just tell it to the editor.

GOTHMOG
Dear kindly Editor Your Honor,
My face is rather rough.
Green-skinned and beast-like,
No wonder I look gruff.
With a piggish upturned nose
and fearsome little tusks
Leapin' lizards! That's why I'm so brusque!

GORTWOG: (As Judge) Right!

Fiction Author, you really are a square;
This orc don't need a complex, just some tender loving care!
It's just that he once was, a fairy little elf.
Which explains the tatting, he just can't help himself!

GOTHMOG
I can't help myself!

ORCS (Talking over one another)
We'll use Picot sticks, and do some Cluny leaves!
Do you think this armor looks gay with Mignonette stitch?
I think Quatrefoils look simply fab with those boots!

GORTWOG: (Spoken, as EDITOR) In the opinion of this Agent, the Orc is degenerated on account he ain't been venerated.

GOTMOG: (Spoken) Hey, I'm a venerate degenerate!

GORTWOG: So take him to a book signing.

GOTHMOG: (Sings)
My father's squat and flat-nosed,
Ma broad nosed and sallow-skinned.
My grandpa wears support hose,
Much to grandmother's chagrin.
My sister sings Greek Opera,
My brother sculpts ear wax.
Goodness gracious, no wonder I wear slacks!

BILBO: (As Psychiatrist) Yes!
Fiction Author, don't be so gosh darn snobby.
This Orc don't need a shrink, just a good productive hobby.
The Fantasy genre's given him a hatchet job!
This misunderstood Orc, is really not a slob!

GOTHMOG
I'm not a slob?

ORC
We're not slobs, we're not slobs,
We're not slob, slob slobs,
We just need a better description of our jobs!

BILBO: In my opinion, this Orc don't need to have his head shrunk at all. Tatting Orcs are a protected class!

GOTHMOG: Hey, I got class!

BILBO: So take him to a publisher!

GOTHMOG
Dear kindly NY Publisher,
I'm really quite unique.
Do you want to see my tatting?
I'll let you take a peek
I hope you don't discriminate
against humans of our kind.
Gloryosky! I'm tired of being maligned!

ARWEN: (As Female Social Worker)
Eek!
Fiction Author, Throw this Orc a bone.
He doesn't need a contract, just a shelf of his own.
It ain't just a question of wearing tights and looking good;
Deep down inside him, he thinks he's Robin Hood!

GOTHMOG
Robin Hood!

ORCS
Orcs in tights, Robin Hood!
We're misunderstood,
Can you say that, I knew that you could!

GORTWOG (As Judge)
The trouble is he's a gloomy gus.

BILBO (As Psychiatrist)
The trouble is he thinks.

ARWEN (As Female Social Worker)
The trouble is he's ravenous.

GORTWOG
The trouble is he stinks.

BILBO
The trouble is he's muscled.

ARWEN
Inside where he's hard-headed.


ORCS
Fiction Author, quit billing us as dreaded!

Gee, Fiction Author,
We're flat on our ass,
'Cause no one wants an Orc with a wee bit of class.
Gee, Fiction Author,
What are we to do?
Gee, Fiction Author,
Orc you!

Rediscovering Robert Frost - Stealth Sonnets

Digging around my poetry bookshelf I found a battered copy of "The Complete Poems of Robert Frost". How it was overlooked for so long is a mystery, it's a weighty little tome. Then again, there is a Jedi Knight mystique to poetry. When the poet is ready, the poetry form will present itself. I'm ready to tackle sonnets again.

So why didn't I grab my Shakespeare, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or Rossetti? Frost fills the need for sonnet exploration with a more modern twist - but not so modern the form becomes obscure. Shakespearean and Italian sonnets have become ubiquitous, appearing on posters, calendars, and Starbucks coffee mugs. It's like the old days of card catalogs in the library, when flipping through a long topic suddenly made the word you were looking up disappear through excessive familiarity. Frost is accessible, and highly readable. On one level his poetry seems simplistic, basic even. Don't let the ease of presentation fool you, lurking beneath the folksy exterior are some fairly astute observations on nature, emptiness, and relationships.

Frost's poems are deceptive in that they operate on different layers of meaning. At first read you can come away with a quick synopsis of the poem "Good fences make good neighbors" (Mending Wall). The poem is easy to get into with its plain language and clear line of thought. A more studied read through and you suddenly realize that while Frost had the line 'Good fences make good neighbors' in the poem, what he meant might well be the exact opposite. Metaphor works on many levels in a Frost poem, and is a big part of my attraction.

As for sonnets, Frost used both the Shakespearean and Petrarchan forms, although he seems to have blended and borrowed freely between them as well as adding in his own divergence to make a new twist on an old form. "The Silken Tent" is one example, where structure is seemingly abandon as Frost writes the whole sonnet in one long sentence - and it works.

The Silken Tent

by Robert Frost

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas-Part XII, or Egregious Pilfering 201

Poetry Exercise

I like to read other poets, but not all other poets. When I'm in need of inspiration, I go to the public library and leaf through the poetry section books. Margaret Atwood, Jorie Graham, Louise Gluck, Naomi Nye all provide the fodder I'm interested in this week. I bring them home, open up a book at random, and steal.

Hey, don’t look at me like that. It's not what you think. I read a poem, think on the keywords or the major theme, then use that as a jumping off point for my own poem. My self assignment is to do this with every poem in a book. (Good thing poetry books are usually short) It's a creativity booster when used properly. I force myself to think on the poet's underlying message, on how the poem makes me feel, what words were used for effect and why, and even the title – does it reflect what I read in the poem?

Margaret Atwood has a wonderful poem called, "Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing". I immediately wanted to read more. How could I not with a title like that? It's a poem about how women view the men who look at them with lust and disgust at the same time. Louise Gluck has a poem with the deceptively simple title "Saints". The opening lines gave me a great deal of inspiration for other poems.

Saints

In our family, there were two saints,
my aunt and my grandmother.
But their lives were different.

The wheels immediately started turning, and dissecting. Why were these women saints? Why were their lives different? Isn't that true of any mother-daughter combination? Why did her family have saints? Were there any in my family?

My grandmother was cautious, conservative:
that's why she escaped suffering.
My aunt's escaped nothing;
each time the sea retreats, someone she loves is taken away.

From this I get that the way to escape the pain of life is to be cautious and conservative, to keep a closed heart so it doesn't get hurt, because if you are like the aunt, it's all out there on the table, in plain view. The aunt suffers for her openness. When you love without restraint, you get hurt. Gluck makes no judgment at this point, just compares the two women and their ways of suffering. Gluck goes on to complete the poem by speaking of the aunt.

Still she won't experience
the sea as evil. To her, it is what it is:
where it touches land, it must turn to violence.

We can no more change our nature than make the sea stop hammering the shore. It is what it is. A very Buddhist reflection. Acceptance of the way the world exists at this point in time. It brings the poem full circle, because you reflect on the title, Saints. The two women were very different in their approach to living, but each reached the same point at the end. You can be lauded for cautious conservatism or lauded for an open heart, but changing your very nature isn't possible, logical, or desirable. You end up in the same spot.

The poem inspires me to think on the cyclical nature of things, on acceptance, and on family. I chose to write about family, a reoccurring theme. Sometimes little revelations carry far more weight than I believed possible. So thanks, Louise, Margaret, Naomi, Jorie and especially Billy.

"the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry…"
.
.
.
"But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask…"

from The Trouble With Poetry by Billy Collins.

Paper Obsession: Read All About It

Being both writer and artist I've been hit with a double whammy when it comes to paper. I obsess over it. I collect it, make it, crumple it, origami it, hoard it and get paper cuts from it. For the writer, it's the look of a poem on the page, or a stack of pages making up a manuscript.

For the artist, the feeling is more visceral. Weight, texture, color, ability to handle media. I have hot press and cold press watercolor and illustration papers. I have more kinds of printmaking paper than I need, but find myself using the same mid-weight, cream colored sheets over and over again. I bought some Thai paper, but it's so pretty I'm having a hard time printing on it. The same with some Japanese papers, they are subtly beautiful, and could be framed without an ink stroke on them.

I've gone as far as making my own paper from scraps of other papers, mostly from printmaking. I shredded, soaked, stirred, and played with the resulting pulp, feeling all the while like an ancient chemist. A bit extreme for connecting with my ancestors, but it was very sobering to consider the long process in ancient times, and the value paper had. No running to Wal-Mart to buy more if you made a mistake.

Which is why I think I have a fascination with illustrated manuscript pages. It combines the best of both worlds, writing and painting/printmaking. Too bad I don't have the patience to actually sit and produce something similar. I did a few scrolls and whatnot for reenactment, but my first love is still graphic design, and printmaking. Like writing a sonnet or villanelle, sometimes sitting and forcing myself to produce something in the 'old style' resets my brain. I have more patience for creation, when I start remembering all the work that used to go into it. Like the creation of a poem or story, art for me is more about process, and less about a commercial end result. Probably why I'm not rich and famous, but I can live with that.

Newsflash - Ancient Swordsmiths Knew What They Were Doing

As long as we're on a roll with the genius of our ancestors... a story today in the Christian Science Monitor on how scientists are just figuring out how ancient swordsmiths made such strong steel swords. They talk about the Damascus swords, and how scientists today were unsure of how the swordsmiths got such "strength, flexibility, and ability to keep a keen edge".

Scientists looked at the swords under an electron microscope and found to their surprise that nanoparticles were the reason. I do have one quibble from the article, this thought, "Ancient craftsmen profited from stores of trial-and-error knowledge. They were not practicing materials science as we know it. "

To me, ancient craftspeople were as much scientists as what we have today. Experimenting with proportions of minerals to find a better formula for making steel is scientific investigation. Reducing their accomplishments to "stores of trial-and-error knowledge" is a backhand slap at themselves, because isn't that how we still conduct scientific investigation today? Also reducing these swordmakers to 'craftsmen' is a subtle slam, considering the place craftspeople are regulated to in today's society. Is it because we are so competitive that we can't stand the thought that our ancestors did something we can't figure out? Or are we so arrogant that we think anything not invented in the last 50 years is worthless?

Yes, I have an ax to grind. So to speak.

For us ancient history type people, if you want to read more about the Damascus sword making and steel properties, there are some articles with good explanations - The Key Role of Impurities in Ancient Damascus Steel Blades and Damascene Technique in Metal Working

Further Proof...

That Our Ancestors Weren't Stupid

Just because the Greeks didn't have cell phones and iPods, doesn't mean ancient civilization was barely one step above pond scum. A neat picture on the Astronomy Picture of the Day website shows the Antikythera mechanism in all its encrusted and corroded glory. So what is the Antikythera mechanism? an ancient mechanical analog computer. Take that, Bill Gates.

You can read all about it on Wikipedia HERE and on the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project Home page HERE .

I'd say the Antikythera mechanism is a great example of math in practical application. So why aren't school kids studying this instead of how to calculate ratios of M & M's? Oh yeah, I forgot, M & M's are more relevant. Pretty. Yummy. I sure would have been more interested in science if it hadn't been presented to me as A) only for the mathematical geniuses among us, B) interesting, C) tied to our history, and D) Not taught by those with no interest in anything outside their narrow field. Once they started uncoupling the disiplines from one another, everything went to hell. No disipline is an island. Heck, maybe I need to revisit Venn diagrams too.

Rant for the day is over, you may return to your regularly scheduled indifference now.

Contemplating William Stafford

I've been reading William Stafford, The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems of late. I would identify him as a process poet, one concerned with organics over methodical analysis. Stafford didn't publish his first book until he was 46 years old. He then made up for lost time with 67 volumes of poetry over the next 33 years.

Reading his poems, I can see the influence on other poets I admire. It becomes the chicken and egg problem. Influence --> Poet --> Influence --> Poet.
I'm finding the influences I need at the time I need them. Even a year ago I wouldn't have been ready for William Stafford, Louise Gluck, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, and Jane Hirshfield.

Some poems are difficult to get into. I don't find that with Stafford, if anything I discover I've read the whole poem without realizing it. There is no effort, it flows from one line to the next with clarity and ease. Each part builds, and the endings are not usually startling revelations, but rather a stopping place for the reader to contemplate the meaning of the whole. All in all, a poet to admire and learn from. One of my favorite Stafford poems below.


At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border
William Stafford

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed — or were killed — on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

Villanelle, A Racy Import With An Interesting Form

Because I was away from poetry for a good month I decided to torture myself by working on a villanelle. A villanelle is only 19 lines long, but has a strict form. The lines can be of any length, contain five tercets and a quatrain in the last stanza. The rhyme scheme is aba with the same end-rhyme for every 1st and last line of each tercet and the final two lines of the quatrain. You must repeat two of the lines, the first line of the 1st stanza is repeated as the last line of the 2nd and the 4th stanzas and as the second-to-last line in the concluding quatrain. The 3rd line of the 1st stanza is repeated as the last line of the 3rd and the 5th stanzas, and as the last line in the concluding quatrain.

Got that? Good. (You know the most famous of the villanelles. Think eccentric Welshman.)Remember, it's only aba in rhyme scheme, arranged as follows:

A1 b A2
a b A1
a b A2
a b A1
a b A2
a b A1 A2

The first five lines are the tercets (3tercets x 5lines=15) and the last line is the quatrain (4lines + 15lines=19lines). The last two lines of the poem make a rhymed couplet. It's not as stodgy as it sounds, you can use enjambment to break up the lines, you can modify the rhymes slightly for effect, you can bend the rules to suit your style. So why even bother if there are so many rules to the form? Because it's like scales in music. Working within the constraints is sometimes more freeing than free verse.

Finding the right combination of lines that doesn't sound, well, stupid when repeated is a challenge. Not to mention that it's damn near impossible to create a narrative poem within a villanelle. So to keep myself from getting stuck in a write and writing only narrative poems, I play with other forms and thank the French, who gave us mayonnaise, the gyroscope, and the villanelle. (The most famous example? Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas. Go Google it.)


The Waking
-- Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.I learn by going where I have to go.