October 16, 2025: “Know-Nothing,” Making a Difference, “Let Them Eat Cake”

I like to think I make a difference in the world.  Maybe a small difference, but still a difference.  It’s why I’ve been a contingent professor at a university for over 30 years.  And why I play music at three (sometimes four) different churches every weekend.  And why I write poetry.

All of those things, I believe, can have an impact, maybe bring a little light into a dark world.

Sharon Olds meditates on the difference sex makes in the world . . . 

Know-Nothing

by: Sharon Olds

Sometimes I think I know nothing about sex.

All that I thought I was going to know,

that I did not know, I still do not know.

I think about this out of town,

on hotel elevators crowded with men.

The body of knowledge which lay somewhere

ahead of me, now I do not know where it

lies, or in the beds of strangers.

I know of sexual love, with my beloved,

but of men—I think there are women who know

men, I can’t see what it is

they know, but I feel in myself that I

could know it, or could I have been a woman who

would dare that.  I don’t mean what she does

with herself, or that she would know more pleasure,

but she knows something true that I don’t know,

she knows fucking with a stranger.  I feel

in awe of that, why is she not

afraid, what if she did not like

his touch, or what he said, how

would she bear it?  Or maybe she has mercy on pretty much

anything a stranger would say or do,

or maybe it is not mercy, but sex,

when she sees what he’s like, she enflames for that,

and is afraid of nothing, wanting to touch

stone desire, and know it, she is like

a god, who could have sex with stranger

after stranger—she could know men.

But what of her womb, tender core

of her being, what of her breasts’ stiff hearts,

and her dense eggs, what if she falls

in love?  Maybe to know sex fully 

one has to risk being destroyed by it.

Maybe only ruin could take

its full measure, as death stands

in the balance with birth, and ignorance with love.

To know sex fully, you have to risk being destroyed by it.  I think to know anything fully, you have to risk being destroyed by it.

For instance, I studied poetry in my MFA program.  As an undergraduate, I studied computer science and math.  I was good at calculus and programming.  I got A’s in all my classes (except for a bowling class—don’t open up that old wound!).  Yet, at the end of my fourth year of undergraduate study, the prospect of spending my life coding and debugging programs seemed like a death sentence.  I knew it would have destroyed me.  So, I made a switch.

I think I was a shitty teacher when I first started standing in front of students and pretending I was some kind of expert.  (I ate, drank, and slept with imposter syndrome.)  I think I’ve learned a few things in the three intervening decades.  Now, I would say I’m a pretty damn in a classroom.  But those first few courses I taught nearly destroyed me.

And I kind of stumbled into poetry.  My life goal was to be the next Stephen King.  Fiction was where it was at.  Sure, I read poetry and loved poetry, but I never fancied myself the next Robert Frost of Sharon Olds.  I wanted to write horror and make a boatload of cash.  You can all tell how that turned out for me.  As Neruda writes in his poem “Poetry”:  “ . . . Poetry arrived / in search of me, I don’t know, I don’t know where / it came from . . .”  

That’s a pretty accurate description of the arrival of poetry in my life.  I didn’t know what the hell I was doing the first few poetry workshops I took, and I had one poetry instructor, in particular, who told me I didn’t know what the hell I was doing (which caused an almost year-long battle with writer’s block).  Poetry destroyed my dream of being a zillionaire horror novelist, but, at that point in my life, I really didn’t care.

You see, as you get older, things that seemed really important earlier in life tend to evaporate like an ice cube at the equator.  Priorities shift.  Here is now my definition of a successful day:  everyone is healthy; no nuclear or biological weapons have been used on the planet; and, somewhere during the past 24 hours, I made the world a little bit kinder and gentler.

And if being kinder and gentler almost destroys me, so be it.

Saint Marty wrote a poem about kindness, sort of, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

In 1793, Marie Antionette was beheaded two and half weeks before her thirty-eighth birthday during the French Revolution.  Write a poem that imagine a parade of Marie Antionettes or another famous French figure walking down a street in the city of Pairs, Wisconsin (population 754),

Let Them Eat Cake

by: Martin Achatz

She never said that, was the victim

of bad press and urban myth,

like the one about mixing Pop Rocks 

and Coke or turning out all the lights

and saying Bloody Mary three times

in front of a mirror.  In fact, the last

thing she said as she climbed

to the guillotine was Pardon me, sir.

I did not do it on purpose after she stepped

on her executioner’s toes, words

that I hope clotted his heart until,

years later, he dropped dead while 

feeding his chickens one morning, the ghost

of the young queen greeting him

on the other side, a plate in her hands

holding a piece of lemon chiffon cake

with buttercream frosting the color of pearl.

August 26: "Creatures," Marie Antionette, People Watching

Poets have strange ways of looking at the world.  I know I do.  When other people see a seagull eating a French fry, I see a reincarnated Marie Antionette gobbling a piece of cake.  If there is thunder rumbling in the distance, I hear God suffering from sleep apnea.  Where an oak stands with mustard-colored leaves in October, I recognize fists of light shadowboxing the clouds.

You see what I mean.  Poets just have a different way of understanding the universe.

Billy Collins writes about creature features . . . 

Creatures

by: Billy Collins

Hamlet noticed them in the shapes of clouds,
but I saw them in the furniture of childhood,
creatures trapped under surfaces of wood,

one submerged in a polished sideboard,
one frowning from a chair-back,
another howling from my mother’s silent bureau,
locked in the grain of maple, frozen in oak.

I would see these presences, too,
in a swirling pattern of wallpaper
or in the various greens of a porcelain lamp,
each looking so melancholy, so damned,
some peering out at me as if they knew
all the secrets of a secretive boy.

Many times I would be daydreaming
on the carpet and one would appear next to me,
the oversize nose, the hollow look.

So you will understand my reaction
this morning at the beach
when you opened your hand to show me
a stone you had picked up from the shoreline.

“Do you see the face?” you asked
as the cold surf circled our bare ankles.
“There’s the eye and the line of the mouth,
like it’s grimacing, like it’s in pain.”

“Well, maybe that’s because it has a fissure
running down the length of its forehead
not to mention a kind of twisted beak,” I said,

taking the thing from you and flinging it out
over the sparkle of blue waves
so it could live out its freakish existence
on the dark bottom of the sea

and stop bothering innocent beachgoers like us,
stop ruining everyone’s summer.

I spent most of today at Fall Fest at the university where I teach.  It was hot.  Near 90 degrees.  Thank goodness I was sitting underneath a tent.  Fall Fest is the annual back-to-school event where student organizations, local businesses, non-profits, and churches set up tables, trying to lure students into their fold with free candy, pizza, ice cream, bottled water, socks, tee shirts, and Koozies.  I attended representing the library.

I love people watching.  Assigning stories to the guy who walks by with so many piercings he could be melted down and made into bullets or coins.  Or the girl who's holding onto her friend's hand so hard their fingers are turning the color of birch bark.  Like Billy Collins spying creatures in wood grains, I sat at my table, imagining the couple with the tattooed faces are renegade cyborgs from the distant future.  The world is a constantly fascinating place, full of grinning stones and hollow-faced paneling and young people on the cusp of changing the world.  

And that's only the first day of teaching this semester for Saint Marty!

August 7: A Squeeze of the Hand, Queen Elizabeth, Holy Spirit

That whale of Stubb's, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod's side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.

While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.

It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine's bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times sperm was such a favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener; such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.

As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, wove almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as. I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,- literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,- Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side; the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.

Now, while discoursing of sperm it behooves to speak of other things akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works. First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It is tough with congealed tendons- a wad of muscle- but still contains some oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is first cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much like blocks of Berkshire marble.

Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale's flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.

There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in the course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. It is an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case, coalescing.

Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland or right whale, and much of which covers the decks of those inferior souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan.

Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale's vocabulary. But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman's nipper is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of Leviathan's tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is about the size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless blandishments, as of magic, allures along with it all impurities.

But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates. This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale. When the proper time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment is a scene of terror to all tyros, especially by night. On one side, lit by a dull lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen. They generally go in pairs,- a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man. The whaling-pike is similar to a frigate's boarding-weapon of the same name. The gaff is something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches and lurches about.  Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan's feet are shoeless; the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistants', would you be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men.

This chapter is a little strange.  Full of homoerotic symbolism.  I would say that Melville is being a little heavy-handed, if it weren't such a terrible pun.  Let's just say that this passage is not very subtle.  Now, whether Melville intended to include a strongly queer reading of this novel is questionable.  My guess is that he did it intuitively, without fully realizing all the implications of what he wrote.

I experience similar things all the time when I'm working on a poem or essay or short story.  I start writing with a certain idea of where I'm headed.  Suddenly, the poem goes in a direction I didn't expect.  The essay, which I thought was about solar eclipses, turned out to be about childhood mental illness.  That sort of thing.  That's when the writer has to step aside and let the writing take over.

I'm not going to get all New Age here, talk about channeling, although that is one explanation for inspiration.  Some Christians call it the power of the Holy Spirit.  God working through you.  Speaking in tongues and all that.  I don't discount that possibility at all.  It depends on your belief system, I suppose.  If you're Christian, it's the fiery dove.  If you believe in reincarnation, it's Marie Antionette or Truman Capote or Queen Elizabeth.

For the last year or so, I've been channeling Bigfoot, in all his hairy, wild wisdom.  He's been my Holy Spirit, if you will.  Melville speaks in the tongue of Ishmael.  I speak in the tongue of Sasquatch.  Yesterday, I wrote a new poem.  It wrote it quickly, full of hairy fire.  It was far from perfect.  It needs a good five or six more drafts before it's even close to decent.  I'm not even sure what it's really about at the moment.  Bigfoot will show me the way.

Tonight, Saint Marty is thankful for the Holy Spirit of Sasquatch.