April 24, 2026: “The Meadow,” Poetry and Poetry and Poetry, “Some Thoughts from the Ghost of Mary Oliver”

Some things can change your life forever.  Certainly, falling in love qualifies.  Experiencing a death, as well.  Getting a new job.  Going back to school.  Moving to a new town or state or country.  Watching Star Wars: A New Hope for the first time.  (Hey, it changed my life.)

These experiences are powerfully instructive.  They teach you about yourself.  The first poem by Sharon Olds I ever read (“The Pope’s Penis”) made me want to be a poet.  Because of Olds’ bravery and boldness., I realized no subject was off limits.  I could write about anything.  Language was the key to the world.

Marie Howe writes about the power of language . . . 

The Meadow

by: Marie Howe

As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so
the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together

and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
Imperceptibly heaving with the old impatience, it knows

for certain that two horses walk upon it, weary of hay.
The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot divine

how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence every day.
This is the miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp,

and they turn from his nuzzling with irritation. Everything
is crying out. Two crows, rising from the hill, fight

and caw-cry in mid-flight, then fall and light on the meadow grass
bewildered by their weight. A dozen wasps drone, tiny prop planes,

sputtering into a field the farmer has not yet plowed,
and what I thought was a phone, turned down and ringing,

is the knock of a woodpecker for food or warning, I can’t say.
I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.

But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are. There will come a day when the meadow will think
suddenly, water, root, blossom, through no fault of its own,

and the horses will lie down in daisies and clover. Bedeviled,
human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words

that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

I love that last phrase—“the sentence that could change your life.”  It’s a powerful thought.  We all carry in our mouths words that can cause earthquakes, heal broken hearts, end hunger, stop wars.  Think about it.  If a war can be started by one lunatic who can’t string together a coherent thought, then peace can be achieved by a sane person who’s not afraid to say, “Give peace a chance.”  (Thank you, John Lennon.)

Sorry that it has taken me so long to give an update after my last post about my wife’s health issues.  I’ve been eyeballs deep in poetry for over a week.  Last weekend, I visited a high school in Ann Arbor to talk poetry with the students.  Then I participated in a reading at a bookstore in Dexter, Michigan.  The next day, we drove to Detroit, had pizza with some family members I don’t get to see very often, including my grandniece Abby (one of my son’s favorite people).  Then I read poems at Next Chapter Books in Detroit.  (My first appearance in the Motor City—and my family came to support me.)

I didn’t have much of a chance to recover from this trip.  Monday, I dove right into the Great Lakes Poetry Festival at the library where I work.  Readings and writing workshops and movies and presentations.  Poetry and poetry and poetry.  I was surrounded by people who seize every day by the throat and refuse to let go.  Poets.

I’m pretty exhausted tonight, but it’s a good exhaustion.  Birthday exhaustion.  Christmas exhaustion.  You get the idea.  It’s as if I’ve been laughing for a week straight, and now my sides are hurting and eyes are watering.  I could happily sleep for a week, drunk on poetry.

As John Keating says in Dead Poets Society, “No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”

Saint Marty wrote a new ghost poem this week . . . 

Some Thoughts from the Ghost of Mary Oliver

by: Martin Achatz

You think you know me because you’ve read

my poems about Blackwater Pond and geese,

bears digging honey from rotten tree trunks.

But I never wrote about stepping onto my front 

porch just as sun unzipped the horizon at dawn

and song sparrows shivered the pines with their

hungry music.  I never scribbled how good it was

to stand in that cold air before the woods 

stretched and yawned, how much I enjoyed 

my first wild and precious cigarette of the day.

August 31: "Peonies," Summer Green, Carpe Diem

Mary Oliver practices a little carpe diem . . . 

Peonies

by:  Mary Oliver

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready

     to break my heart

          as the sun rises,

               as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open--

     pools of lace,

          white and pink--

               and all day the black ants climb over them,

boring their deep and mysterious holes

     into the curls,

          craving the sweet sap,

               taking it away

to their dark, underground cities--

     and all day

          under the shifty wind,

               as in a dance to the great wedding,

the flowers bend their bright bodies,

     and tip their fragrance to the air,

          and rise,

               their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness

     gladly and lightly,

          and there it is again--

               beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open.

     Do you love this world?

          Do you cherish your humble and silky life?

               Do you adore the green grass with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,

     and softly,

          and exclaiming of their dearness,

               fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,

     their eagerness

          to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are

               nothing, forever?

Oliver really is seizing the day in this poem.  She knows the peonies will last only a little while before they are claimed by the terror beneath the grass, so she doesn't waste a second.  In the thin light of morning, she ventures out barefoot and collects them in her arms, hugs them to her body.  She wants to love this part of the world, this short moment of beauty, before it vanishes.

I went for a walk this evening with my wife and puppy.  The long light of late August stretched our shadows out before us, and the trees flashed their last gasps of summer green.  As I looked up into their canopies, I saw the first hints of autumn.  Gold, just tiny flecks of it in that lake of chlorophyll.  Not enough to declare summer over just yet, but enough to send prospectors out to pan for more gold.

It is the last day of August.  I know this.  While the rest of the United States has been baking under a brutal heat wave, I've been waking up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to almost frost on the windows.  I'll call it a heavy mist.  Fall is breathing down our necks.

Change is on the way.

I'm not going to get all Dead Poets Society in this post.  However, I feel that urgency to squeeze as much summer into these last warm days as possible.  I took tomorrow off from work.  I don't have to teach, either.  Maybe I'll go for a long walk with my dog.  Or maybe I'll sit in my backyard all afternoon with a good book, my journal, and a pen.  I still haven't seen Oppenheimer yet.

Moving from one season into another is always difficult for me, because my life changes drastically.  Summer to fall, the shift is all about getting back into the classroom.  No more quiet nights at home.  Those nights will now be filled with grading and lesson planning and calming the fears of anxious students.  

There's something in me that stubbornly wants to hold onto the ice cream days and nights of summer.  I want a few more scoops of vanilla topped with hot fudge, if you know what I mean.  Of course, there's nothing stopping me from going to the grocery store and picking up some Ben & Jerry's in September or October.  Even December, if I want.

But it won't be the same.  Ice cream on a 90-degree July day tastes different than ice cream on a 15-degree December day.  

So, I'm following Oliver's lead here.  Gathering up all the summer I can.  In fact, I just went outside barefoot to look at the full moon, and the air smelled like July and August still.  Cut grass lingering.  Everyone in my neighborhood, it seems, mowed their lawns today.  

Poet Robert Herrick wrote:  "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, / Old Time is still a-flying; / And this same flower that smiles today / Tomorrow will be dying."

Mary Oliver wrote:  "Do you cherish your humble and silky life?"

Saint Marty writes:  "Maybe I should get some Cherry Garcia."  

July 26: "Winter at Herring Cove," Retrospective Falsification, 1980s

Mary Oliver and a remembrance of seals . . . 

Winter at Herring Cove

by:  Mary Oliver

Years ago,

in the bottle-green light

of the cold January sea,

two seals 

suddenly appeared together

in a single uplifting wave--

each in exactly the same relaxed position--

each, like a large, black comma,

upright and staring;

it was like a painting

done twice

and, twice, tenderly.

The wave hung, then it broke apart;

its lip was lightning;

its floor was the blow of sand

over which the seals rose and twirled and were gone.

Of all the reasons for gladness,

what could be foremost of this one,

that the mind can seize both the instant and the memory!

Now the seals are no more than the salt of the sea.

If they live, they're most distant than Greenland.

But here's the kingdom we call remembrance

with its thousand iron doors

through which I pass so easily,

switching on the old lights as I go--

while the dead wind rises and the old rapture rewinds,

the stiff waters once more begin to kick and flow.

Memory is a tricky thing.  Oliver's recollection of these two seals could be completely factual.  Or not.  She acknowledges the slipperiness of the mind.  Every experience is both instant and memory.  The moment something happens, it becomes remembrance, and that remembrance is tinged with retrospective falsification, where the brain filters out the negative, leaving only the warm and fuzzy.  Retrospective falsification is the reason why women will endure childbirth more than once.  The pain and suffering of labor is erased by the joy of holding a newborn child.

Looking back on "the good old days" is something we all do.  I was a child of the 1980s.  That means the soundtrack of my youth was Michael Jackson, Madonna, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and Simple Minds, among others.  Big hair, parachute pants, ripped jeans, and Miami Vice pastels.  E. T. the Extraterrestrial, Dead Poets Society, and The Breakfast Club.  In my nostalgic mind, it was a great decade to grow up in.

Of course, Ronald Reagan was President of the United States.  The AIDS epidemic killed millions.  The space shuttle Challenger exploded.  John Lennon was assassinated.  People were in a satanic panic.  And Betamax cassettes came and went.  So, not everything was sequins and moonwalking.  Retrospective falsification is hard at work.

I don't want to go back to the 1980s.  Being a teenager kind of sucked in all of its painful awkwardness.  I remember the constant feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem.  My inability to ask the person I was crushing on to go to a movie.  I was a mess in a quiet, straight-A-student kind of way.  I didn't even get truly black-out drunk until my senior year of high school.

Tonight, when I got home from the library, it was around 9 p.m.  The houses in the neighborhood were bathed in a kind of golden summer light that appears only around dusk in July or early August.  I took my puppy for a trot around the backyard, and she flushed a rabbit out of the lilac bushes.  I could smell barbecue--someone had grilled some hot dogs.

I love this time of the year, when the hullaballoo of Independence Day subsides and what's left are long days of sun and blue, blue sky.  Is the world a perfect place tonight?  No, but it's really not about perfection.  It's about being content.  That's what I am tonight, Donald Trump and Canadian forest fires notwithstanding.

In short, for Saint Marty, it's the best of times, it's the worst of times.  Right here.  Right now.

February 19: Keep Strong, "Dead Poets Society," Sobbing Mess

Santiago regains his mojo . . . 

I wish I could feed the fish, he thought. He is my brother. But I must kill him and keep strong to do it. Slowly and conscientiously he ate all of the wedge-shaped strips of fish.

He straightened up, wiping his hand on his trousers.

"Now," he said. "You can let the cord go, hand, and I will handle him with the right arm alone until you stop that nonsense." He put his left foot on the heavy line that the left hand had held and lay back against the pull against his back.

"God help me to have the cramp go," he said. "Because I do not know what the fish is going to do."

Santiago has a hand that's cramping and an unpredictable fish on his line.  He has no idea what the day has in store for him.  Or if he's going to be able to outlast his brother of the sea.

My son is 13 years old.  Loves writing and poetry.  Has dreams of Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize.  He also wants to be a primatologist.  I don't think these goals are mutually exclusive.  He could be the first Nobel Prize-winning primatologist poet.  The Jane Goodall of verse.

This evening, I introduced my son to the sweet sadness of Dead Poets Society.  Like Santiago in his boat, my son had no idea what he was in for.  The last time I tried to watch DPS with him, he showed little interest.  Tonight, he was totally invested.  Didn't miss a second.  And, by the time Neil had committed suicide and Ethan Hawke was standing on top of his desk at the end, my son was a sobbing mess.  (This after I watched Il Postino with him last week and reduced him to a puddle of tears.  Perhaps we need to have a Will Ferrell movie marathon soon.)

My son watched DPS all the way to the end of the credits, and, as the bagpipe music faded, he got up, went into his room, and said he needed to be alone.  I gave him his space and then, after a few minutes, checked on him to make sure he was alright.

He had recovered enough to speak to me.

"Are you ever going to watch another movie with me?" I said.

"We'll see," he said.

If you are one of my constant readers, you know the struggles my son has had in the past year or so.  Last February, I didn't even want to leave him alone.  Ever.  I would never have shown him DPS twelve months ago.  Now, he's focused and happy.  Doing well in school.  And he's thrown himself into writing.  And poetry.

I know that my son is young, and tomorrow he could wake up and decide that he's going to be a chef.  Or a Chippendale dancer.  Next weekend, an auto mechanic.  (If he becomes a Trump supporter, I may have to put him in foster care.)  Like Santiago, I have no idea where the fish is going to pull my boat.

But, right now, Saint Marty enjoying his sensitive, poetry-loving son who isn't afraid to cry at the end of sad movies.

May 19: Occupied My Imagination, Reality, Mitty Breaks

Merton worries about names . . . 

The general impression I got was that all the unpleasantness and hardship was crowded into the year of the canonical novitiate, and that after that things opened out and became easy and pleasant as they were now: and certainly these clerics as I saw them were leading a life that could not by any stretch of the imagination be called hard. Here they were living at this college, among these beautiful green hills, surrounded by woods and fields, in a corner of America where the summer is never hot, and which they would leave long before the cold weather came. They had whole mornings and afternoons to read or study, and there were hours in which they could play baseball or tennis or go for walks in the woods, or even go in to town, walking two by two, solemnly in black suits and Roman collars. 

They told me elaborate stories of the ways there were of getting around even the easy regulations that prohibited too much familiarity with seculars, and of course the good Catholic families in the town were falling over themselves in their anxiety to invite the young Franciscans to come and sit in their parlors and be made much of, with cookies and soft drinks. 

For my part, I was already deciding in my mind that I would make use of all these opportunities to get away and read and pray and do some writing, when I was in my brown robe and wearing those same sandals. 

Meanwhile, I got up when the clerics did—I suppose it was not much earlier than six in the morning—and went to Mass with them, and received Communion after them all, and then went to breakfast with the farm hands, where a little nun in a white and blue habit brought us cornflakes and fried eggs: for the cooking was done by some Sisters of one of those innumerable little Franciscan congregations. 

After breakfast, I would walk over to the library, breathing the cold morning air as the dew melted on the lawns. Father Irenaeus gave me the key to the philosophy seminar room, and there I could spend the morning all alone reading St. Thomas, at my leisure, with a big, plain wooden crucifix at the end of the room for me to look at when I raised my eyes from the book. 

I don’t think I had ever been so happy in my life as I now was in that silent library, turning over the pages of the first part of the Summa Theologica, and here and there making notes on the goodness, the all-presence, the wisdom, the power, the love of God. 

In the afternoons, I would walk in the woods, or along the Alleghany River that flowed among the trees, skirting the bottom of the wide pastures. 

Turning over the pages of Butler’s Lives of the Saints, I had looked for some name to take in religion—indeed, that was a problem over which I had wasted an undue amount of time. The Province was a big one, and there were so many Friars in it that they had run out of all the names—and you could not take a name that was already taken by someone else. I knew in advance that I could not be a John Baptist or an Augustine or Jerome or Gregory. I would have to find some outlandish name like Paphnutius (which was Father Irenaeus’ suggestion). Finally I came across a Franciscan called Bl.John Spaniard and I thought that would sound fine.

I considered the possibility of myself running around in a brown robe and sandals, and imagined I heard the novice master saying: “Frater John Spaniard, go over there and scrub that floor.” Or else he would put his head out of his room and say to one of the other novices: “Go and get Frater John Spaniard and bring him here,” and then I would come humbly along the corridor in my sandals—or rather our sandals—with my eyes down, with the rapid but decorous gait of a young Friar who knew his business: Frater John Spaniard. It made a pleasant picture. 

When I went back to the cottage on the hill, and timidly admitted that I thought I might take the name of Frater John Spaniard, Seymour at least thought it was a good choice. Seymour had a weakness for anything that seemed to have some sort of dash about it, and maybe in the back of his mind he was thinking of Torquemada and the Inquisition, although I don’t think the John Spaniard in question had much to do with that. But I have forgotten where that saint actually did belong in history. 

All this fuss about choosing a fancy name may seem like nothing but harmless foolishness, and I suppose that is true. But nevertheless I now realize that it was a sign of a profound and radical defect in the vocation which so filled my heart and occupied my imagination in those summer days of 1940. 

The portrait of the religious life that Merton paints here is almost of a country club with sandals, robes, and Roman collars.  Or a monastic Dead Poets Society.  Certainly, his vision is not based in any kind of reality.  He is worried more about accoutrements and less about sacrifice.  In some ways, Merton sort of reminds me of myself when my wife was pregnant with our first child.  I dreamed of first pictures and Christmases.  Cute outfits and the smell of baby shampoo.  Nothing in my fatherly daydreams contained the sleepless nights, colicky screams, or my wife's descent into depression and mania postpartum.  

I wish that Merton's visions of religious life were true.  If they were, half the world would be monks, the other half cloistered nuns.  Who wouldn't want days of cornflakes and fried eggs, some not-so-inconvenient menial labor, and then an afternoon of reading, writing, and contemplation?  Followed by a trip into town for some cookies and pop (soda, for all you non-Michiganders.)

The truth of the matter is that reality rarely aligns with fantasy.  Take me, for example.  Yes, I work for a library now.  Yes, I spend my days dreaming up readings and concerts and classes.  I've talked with a two-time U. S Poet Laureate.  I just booked a National Book Award-nominated writer for an event this fall.  I spent part of this afternoon creating a script for a podcast episode that I'll record tomorrow.  It sounds like a dream job for an artsy person like myself.  And it is.

However, I work hard.  Every day.  That conversation with the two-time U. S. Poet Laureate was the result of months of negotiation, contracts, chasing down sponsors, promotion.  Getting in touch with the National Book Award-nominated writer took me several emails, and I'm still not completely done.  I have to negotiate dates and times and an honorarium.  And writing the podcast script involved research, revision, and a fair amount of creativity.  

Merton falls into the same trap that we all do.  To borrow from James Thurber--we are all Walter Mitty.  Trapped in day-to-day monotony, we dream ourselves into lives of adventure and recognition.  We become saints or celebrated writers or gifted surgeons.  Heroes.  It's a comforting place to reside, but, eventually, we must all return to our offices. computers, hammers, and cash registers.  You can't Mitty yourself permanently out of life.  That's not how it works.

So, most days, I take Mitty breaks.  Allow myself to go for a walk along Lake Superior.  Stare out of my office window.  Let my eyes unfocus, and open the gates of fancy and dreams.  In those few minutes, I am standing next to the King of Sweden, accepting my Nobel Prize.  Reeling in the big fish with Santiago off the coast of Cuba.  Painting a mallard with James Audubon.

At the end of those Mitty breaks, I'm ready for the next email or phone call or knock on my office door.  Reality.  Merton, struggling with his trust in God.  Me, contacting another prospective sponsor to beg for money.

Saint Marty gives thanks for the ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa of his imagination.

May 6: Everything Seemed Clear, Hard Truths, "Dead Poets Society"

Merton readies himself for the monastery as Paris falls to the Nazis . . . 

The months passed quickly, but not quickly enough for me. Already it was June 1940: but the two months that remained until the date in August when the doors of the novitiate would open to receive thirty or forty new postulants seemed infinitely far away. 

I did not stay long in New York when I came back from Cuba. I was there only a few days, in which I went to the monastery on 31st Street, and learned from Father Edmund that my application for admission had been accepted, and that some of the necessary papers had arrived. It was a very good thing that this was so, because postulants entering a religious Order need documents from every diocese where they have lived for a morally continuous year since their fourteenth year, as well as a birth certificate and a lot of other things as well. 

But this was precisely the time when the German armies were pouring into France. At the moment when I stepped off the boat in New York, they had made their first great break through the French lines, and it had at last become obvious that the impregnable defence of the Maginot Line was a myth. Indeed, it was only a matter of very few days before the fierce armored divisions of the Nazis, following in the path broken out before them by the Luftwaffe, pierced the demoralized French army and embraced the betrayed nation in arms of steel. They had Paris within a fortnight, and then they were at the Loire, and finally the papers were full of blurred wirephotos of the dumb, isolated dining-car in the park at Compiegne where Hitler made the French eat the document on which the 1918 armistice had been written. 

So, too, if my father and mother’s marriage certificate from St. Anne’s in Soho, London, had not come in that year, it might never have come at all. I don’t know if the parish records of St. Anne’s survived the blitzkrieg that was about to be let loose over the head of the huge, dark city full of sins and miseries, in whose fogs I had once walked with such wise complacency.

Everything seemed clear. A month would go by, and then another, and soon I would be walking, with my suitcase, up some drab, unimaginable street in Paterson, New Jersey, to a small brick monastery which I could not very well envisage. But the drabness of the city would be left behind at the door and I knew, although I had no special illusions about St. Anthony’s novitiate either, that inside I would find peace. And I would begin my retreat, and after a month or so I would put on the brown robe and white cord of a friar and I would be walking in sandals with a shaved head, in silence, to a not too beautiful chapel. But anyway, there I would have God, and possess Him, and belong to Him.

It's amazing when your life seems clear, your way straight and unencumbered.  That's what Merton sees.  He is seeking a path to God, and that path runs directly through the Franciscan monastery in his mind.  Of course, life is never that simple, as Merton will soon learn.

It has been over a week since my last post.  In the betwixt time, I graded piles of student essays, entered final grades, took a day or two to celebrate surviving a year of pandemic teaching, and watched Dead Poets Society once or twice or seven times.  Other good things have happened, as well.  I got my teaching assignment for next fall semester, and I received some good news at my library job.  Overall, with some minor bumps and twists, my path to this point in the year was pretty much as I expected.  At least, in my professional life.

My personal life is a whole other ball of wax.  I am some place where I never thought I'd be.  Thirty years ago, I had a vision of what home and wife and family would look like.  I saw a clear path.  And now, sitting on my couch at 11:30 at night, watching Dead Poets Society yet again, typing this blog post, I can say that the road hasn't been all that easy.  In fact, it has twisted, turned, detoured, and potholed.  A few times, it completely shut down for construction.

No, I'm not feeling sorry for myself.  That's not what this is about.  It's about coming to terms with hard truths.  (Is that vague enough for you?  Unfortunately, that's about as specific as I'm going to get right now.)  Truth is not always pleasant.  In fact, truth can cause a whole lot of sleepless nights.  You can fight truth and be absolutely miserable.  Or you can accept it and make the necessary (if uncomfortable) adjustments.  

Me?  I'm somewhere between World War II and the Potsdam Agreement.  Not quite at peace, but really battle weary.  

So, disciples, this post will not be my Nobel Prize acceptance speech.  I have no wisdom to impart tonight, except for the fact that Dead Poets Society is a really damn good movie.  In some ways, I'm standing on top of my desk with Ethan Hawke, looking down at the world from a different perspective.  Not really liking what I see, but not being able to change it.

Say it with Saint Marty, "O Captain!  My Captain!"

April 27: Become a Dilettante, John Keating, What We Stay Alive For

Merton being chastised for wanting to be a writer . . .

It was not the first time I had met Mrs. Pearce, the headmistress of Ripley Court.  She was a bulky and rather belligerent-looking woman with great pouches under her eyes.  She was standing in a room in which were hung several of my father's paintings.  She had probably been looking at them, and considering the error and instability of an artist's way of life when Aunt Maud mentioned the fact that we had been talking about my own future.

"Does he want to be a dilettante like his father?" said Mrs. Pearce roughly, surveying me with a rather outraged expression through the lenses of her spectacles.

"We were thinking that perhaps he might become a journalist," said Aunt Maud gently.

"Nonsense," said Mrs. Pearce, "let him go into business and make a decent living for himself.  There's no use in his wasting his time and deceiving himself.  He might as well get some sensible ideas into his head from the very start, and prepare himself for something solid and reliable and not go out into the world with his head full of dreams."  And then, turning to me, she cried out, "Boy!  Don't become a dilettante, do you hear?"

I was received at Ripley Court, although the summer term was almost over, more or less as if I were an orphan or some kind of a stray that required at once pity and a special, not unsuspicious kind of attention.  I was the son of an artist, and had just come from two years in a French school, and the combination of artist and France added up to practically everything that Mrs. Pearce and her friends suspected and disliked.  Besides, to crown it all, I did not know any Latin.  What was to be made of a boy who was already in the middle of his fourteenth year and could not decline mensa--had never even opened a Latin grammar?

So I had the humiliation of once again descending to the lowest place and sitting with the smallest boys in the school and beginning at the beginning.

But Ripley was a pleasant and happy place after the prison of the Lycee.  The huge, dark green sweep of the cricket field, and the deep shadows of the elm trees where one sat waiting for his innings, and the dining room where we crammed ourselves with bread and butter and jam at tea-time and listened to Mr. Onslow reading aloud from the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, all this was immense luxury and peace after Montauban.

People don't understand the artistic impulse.  Merton, being the son of an intinerant painter, is immediately suspect.  The arts--whether visual, written, spoken, musical--are not considered serious pursuits.  Instead, they should be saved by pastimes, those hobbies responsible people indulge after they have completed their "real work" in a business office, medical practice, retail store.  The arts are frivolous.  The arts are expendable.  (Certainly, the current administration in the White House has made this belief core to their budget proposals, slashing funding for anything to do with truth and beauty and education.)

Me?  I subscribe to John Keating's philosophy from Dead Poets Society:

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute.  We read and write poetry because we are the members of the human race.  And the human race is filled with passion.  And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life.  But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

That's why I stay up until midnight reading novels and poetry.  Why I tap away at my keyboard for a couple hours every night.  Not because I need something to fill my "empty" hours.  No.  Because I need these things to sustain me for the next day, when all the business of scraping a living from the belly of the world absorbs me.  If I didn't write these blog posts and scribble in my journal, I would undoubtedly be ready to take long walk off a short rooftop.

If you're reading this blog post, you probably already agree with me.  There is something about writing and poetry that fills you up in some way.  Gives you something that Wheel of Fortune or 60 Minutes does not.  It may be a secret obsession that you hide from family and friends.  That's okay.  You can still be a part of this Dead Poets Society.  Just be sure to leave your tie and suit jacket at home.

We are dreamers here.  Hopers for a better tomorrow.  We reject practically everything about our present-day world.  The hatred and waste and greed.  Instead, we embrace love and beauty.  That is what I live for, why I punch time clocks, drag myself out of bed at 4:45 in the morning.  It's all about poetry.  The sonnets and lyrics of everyday existence.

Saint Marty is ready to haiku off to bed now.

June 28: Believer in Ghosts, Young Self, "The Princess Bride"

Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!

The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale.The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, waited by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.

There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween, if peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vulturism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free.

Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log- shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabout: beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy!

Thus, while in the life the great whale's body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world.

Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.

The final question in this chapter sticks with me:  "Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend?"  Of course, Melville is talking about the corpse of the sperm whale, how it drifts away from the Pequod toward the horizon, vultured by seagulls and sharks.  Its floating carcass will haunt the seas for quite some time.

I have to say that I do believe in spirits or ghosts or lost souls.  Whatever term you want to use.  Today, I went to see The Princess Bride with my kids at the movie theater.  It's called Throwback Thursday.  Sitting there, eating popcorn, I was sort of haunted by the memory of the first time I saw it.

September, 1987.  Two years out of high school.  I was still a teenager, majoring in computer science and math, taking English courses covertly.  The Butler Theater in my home town.  One of the places they premiered Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder back in 1959.  I was so full of hopes and dreams.  Thought I was going to conquer the world, like any stupid kid.  I didn't worry about money or bills.  I had a full-ride scholarship, so I wasn't stressing about paying tuition.

That ghost of myself was sitting next to me this afternoon, watching, eating popcorn.  He was only two years older than my daughter is now.  He wasn't a poet or a teacher then.  He was just one of the guys from Dead Poets Society, sucking the marrow out of life.

I haven't really shaken this ghost off yet.  When I got home this evening, I got on my laptop and submitted some poems for publication.  Took me a couple hours.  As I was combing through the files on my computer, I sort of felt like that kid again.  A little hopeful.  A little dreamy.

Then, I hit the submit button, and my poems shuttled away from me, like a freighter on Lake Superior.  For the last couple hours, I've been second-guessing my choices.  Wondering why I even submitted.  Convincing myself that it was a useless endeavor.  All that adult angst and doubt, banishing my youthful ghost self from the room.

I'm still haunted.  That kid is still wondering when he's going to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.  I don't have the heart to tell him that it's been canceled this year.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for old movies that make him feel young.

November 6: Old Thurmer, Observation, Prep

"Even the couple of nice teachers on the faculty, they were phonies, too," I said.  "There was this one old guy, Mr. Spencer.  His wife was always giving you hot chocolate and all that stuff, and there were really pretty nice.  But you should've seen him when the headmaster, old Thurmer, came in the history class and sat down in the back of the room.  He was always coming in and sitting down in the back of the room for about a half an hour.  He was supposed to be incognito or something.  After a while, he'd be sitting back there and then he'd start interrupting what old Spencer was saying to crack a lot of corny jokes.  Old Spencer'd practically kill himself chuckling and smiling and all, like Old Thurmer was a goddam prince or something."

Yes, Mr. Spencer, Holden's history teacher, has to be observed by Old Thurmer, Pencey Prep's headmaster.  Spencer has to pretend he's not nervous or annoyed.  Thurmer is his boss.  He could stand up in front of the classroom and attempt to fart Handel's Messiah, and Spencer would have to give him a standing ovation.

I'm going to be observed tomorrow in my classroom.  By a professor to whom I've never met or spoken with.  The extent or our communication has been a couple of e-mails.  He told me not to be nervous, that it really wasn't a big deal.  Funny thing is, it feels like a big deal to me.

That's my worry this Wednesday.  Someone is coming into my classroom to assess my teaching.  I've done as much as I can to prep for tomorrow afternoon.  I've got two lesson plans.  I've got backups to those two lesson plans.  I've got backups to the backups.  My whole goal is to not look like an idiot.  That's it.  I don't expect to be Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.  I don't expect to be anything but . . .  mediocre to competent.

Saint Marty can live with mediocre.  He'd be thrilled with competent.

Hopefully, I'll be at my mediocre best tomorrow

August 28: Joining a Monastery, Denominations, Differences

"Listen.  What's the routine on joining a monastery?" I asked him.  I was sort of toying with the idea of joining one.  "Do you have to be a Catholic and all?"

Holden thinks about religion and God a lot.  He's drawn to the idea of salvation and heaven.  He's looking for a place to fit in, to be a part of.  He doesn't really like the people he goes to school with.  He doesn't have many adults he looks up to.  His idea of paradise:  saving kids who are about to fall off the cliff into adulthood.  Holden wants to be the catcher in the rye.


I think everybody wants to fit in.  Everybody wants to be liked.  In the film Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams' character asks what is the purpose of poetry.  Several answers are offered, chief among them being to communicate.  "No," Williams' character says.  The purpose of poetry is to "woo women."  Everyone is the scene laughs.  But I think there's a lot of truth in what Williams says in that movie.  Poetry is about connecting, reaching out, being a part of something important.

So much of life is about disconnection and disharmony.  I've been a lifelong practicing Catholic.  For the last 20 years, ever since I met my wife, I've also been heavily involved in my wife's church.  She's a Methodist.  For the most part, I've always felt welcomed, accepted.  Sure, I've been the recipient of some good-natured kidding at my wife's church, but I would never characterize any of that kidding as intentionally cruel.

If religion is about exclusion, any religion, I have a problem with it.  Methodists think Catholics have too many statues.  Catholics think Methodists sing too loud.  I'm joking, sort of.  I think Christian denominations spend way too much time focusing on differences instead of similarities.  In my experience, Catholicism and Methodism have a lot more in common than either denomination cares to admit.

Lutheran.  Baptist.  Methodist.  Catholic.  Assembly of God.  It's all about salvation.  It's all about Jesus Christ catching us all at the edge of the rye field.  My worry is that too many people fall off the cliff because they're looking for a Methodist catcher or a Catholic catcher.

Saint Marty doesn't care.  As long as the Catcher is there for him when he gets to the edge of the field.

Catch me, Robin

April 9: Ace Composition Writer, Teaching, Saint John Baptist del la Salle

"What was the trouble?" Mr. Antolini asked me.  "How'd you do in English?  I'll show you the door in short order if you flunked English, you little ace composition writer."

Holden turns to his former English teacher, Mr. Antolini, when he has run out of options at the end of The Catcher in the Rye.  He's pretty much broke and has no place to stay.  Mr. Antolini opens up his home to Holden and tries to offer some life advice, as well.  (There is this whole creepy intimation that Mr. Antolini is interested in giving more than fatherly advice to Holden a little later, but I'd rather focus on the pre-sexual-molester Antolini.)

I think everybody, at one point or another in their lives, has a teacher like Mr. Antolini.  A person who seems to understand everything about you--your hopes and dreams.  I had a few teachers like that, in high school and college.  If it weren't for my senior high English instructor telling me I was a talented writer, I would be programming computers right now instead of blogging.  If it weren't for a fiction-writing professor handing me the application to graduate school, I never would have earned a Master's degree, and I wouldn't be teaching university students.  And if it weren't for a mentor and professor telling me I was a poet, I would never have gotten my MFA in poetry or published a book.  Yes, I've had a fair share of Antolinis in my life.

I'm not sure I've ever served the same role for any of my students, however.  I've had a few young people come to me with personal problems.  The Antolini age of offering a homeless student your couch for the night is a thing of the past, however.  I can't even close my office door if a female student is telling me she's a victim of date rape.  No, I have to sit and watch her sob with the door wide open, maybe hand her a Kleenex or two.  It's all about boundaries these days.

Saint John Baptist de la Salle might not have survived in this modern age of education.  His feast day is April 7, and John is the patron of teachers.  He did a lot of things in his lifetime for the advancement of schools for impoverished children.  He founded the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools.  He wrote The Conduct of Christian Schools, which created a modern pedagogical system and is a classic text in education.  Most of all, he encouraged his followers to "have a father's love for their pupils, be ready to devote all their time and energies to them, and be as concerned to save them from wickedness as to dispel their ignorance."  My guess is John thought very little about teacher/student boundaries.

I'm not saying I'd like to make my house into a shelter for students in crisis.  No, I wouldn't go that far.  But, if one of the kids in my class is suffering from crushing depression, I'd like to be able to put my arm around his or her shoulder, say that I care for their safety and happiness.

Basically, Saint Marty wants to be Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.

O Captain, My Captain!

November 2: Lost Child, A Song, P.O.E.T.S. Day

...All the time the chestnuts and the jug went round and round, and bye-and-bye they had a song, about a lost child travelling in the snow, from Tiny Tim, who had a plaintive little voice, and sang it very well indeed...

Not too many people know Tiny Tim sings in A Christmas Carol.  Except for the musical version of the book, Tiny Tim does not sing in any other movie adaptation that I recall.  I particularly love the description of Tim's voice ("plaintive little"), which just reinforces how sick and weak he is.  Dickens is great a depicting small, doomed children.  He does it in quite a few of his novels.  Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop.  Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son.  Smike in Nicholas Nickleby.  And, of course, we have Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.  That's a pretty long list of sick and dying kids.  The fact that Tim's song is about a lost child in the snow isn't very surprising.  It strengthens Tim's vulnerability.  He is singing about a lost child and he is a lost child himself.

Today is P.O.E.T.S. Day.  That stands for Piss On Everything Tomorrow's Saturday Day.  I was introduced to this term by one of my English professors when I was an undergraduate.  He would gleefully come into the classroom every Friday, carrying an anthology of poems, and, for the first 15 minutes of class (sometimes for the entire hour), he would read us poems.  He took the day seriously.  He didn't believe in working too hard on Fridays.  I remember those days as some of the best I ever spent in a college classroom.  I felt like Ethan Hawke in Dead Poets Society, listening to Robin Williams read Walt Whitman.  It was great.

Yes, I will be giving you a new poem today.  I have already begun working on it.  It will be included in my second post, this afternoon or evening.  At the moment, it's not quite formed enough to carve it electronically on this Internet cave wall, so to speak.  Never fear, though.  Poetry is on the way.

Saint Marty will sound his barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world very soon.


O Captain!  My Captain!