November 7: "Drawing You from Memory," Do Language, Joy

I keep seeing posts on social media about not losing hope and finding light in the darkness.  This Toni Morrison quote has been popping up quite a bit, too:  "This is precisely the time when artists go to work.  There is no time for despair.  No place for self pity.  No need for silence.  No room for fear.  We speak.  We write.  We do language.  That is how civilizations heal."

Billy Collins indulges in a little art . . . 

Drawing You from Memory

by: Billy Collins

I seem to have forgotten several features
crucial to the doing of this,
for instance, how your lower lip
meets your upper lip besides just being below it,
and what happens at the end of the nose,
how much does it shade the plane of your cheek,
and would even a bit of nostril be visible from this angle?
Chinese eyes, you call them
which could be the difficulty I have
in showing the flash of light in your iris,
and being so far away from you for so long,
I cannot remember what direction
it flows, the deep river of your hair.

But all of this will come together
the minute I see you again at the station,
my notebook and pens packed away,
your face smiling as I cup it in my hands,
or frowning later when we are home
and you are berating me in the kitchen
waving the pages in my face
demanding to know the name of this latest little whore.

Tonight at the library, I celebrated my new book of poems--A Bigfoot Bestiary and Other Wonders--with a reading.  Much work went into the event, and I certainly wouldn't have been able to pull it off without family and friends.  One of my best poet friends helped me plan the evening, acted as MC, and played guitar while I read.  Another best friend did the food--charcuterie board, cookies, cannoli cream, chocolate.  Still another best friend set up the merchandise table and took pictures.

Almost 80 people came for the reading.  So many friends and colleagues and family.  My sisters,  My wife's family.  My daughter and her significant other.  My son.  We all gathered to laugh, hug, and forget for just a little while what happened on Tuesday.  It was a balm for my hurting heart.

Collins' poem is all about distrust and anger and accusation.  I like to think the poems I read this evening were all about joy and love.  It was good to be a part of bringing people together, driving out the oppressive darkness of the last few days.

Yes, since Tuesday, I've felt like opening my front door, throwing out a lit match, and watching the world burn to the ground.  But my daughter sent me this text tonight:  "It was a wonderful reading, and I was so grateful to be there.  I don't know how I got so lucky to have you as my dad."

My daughter is an amazing, smart, compassionate young woman, and I'm not going to let Dementia Don and his cronies ruin her life and future.  I will speak.  Write.  Do language.  

Nobody fucks with the people Saint Marty loves.

October 2: "August," Banned Books Week, Bubbles

Mary Oliver gets in touch with her inner bear . . . 

August

by:  Mary Oliver

When the blackberries hang

swollen in the woods, in the brambles

nobody owns, I spend

all day among the high

branches, reaching 

my ripped arms, thinking

of nothing, cramming

the black honey of summer

into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is.  In the dark

creeks that run by there is

this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves; there is

this happy tongue.

It has felt like late August for almost a week now in my neck of the Upper Peninsula.  Lots of 70- and 80-degree days, sun, moonlit nights, and confused geese, unsure of whether to head south or hang around for a few more days.  I imagine Mary Oliver would still be eating the black honey of summer, if she were in the U. P. right now.  Because summer has finally arrived for us, just after the autumn equinox.

Unfortunately, I spent most of this beautiful day inside.  Didn't get to bask in the warmth and light.  

You'll forgive me if this post seems short on wisdom or poetry tonight.  I'm beat.  I just got home from an event for Banned Books Week at the library.  Yes, in the 21st century in the United States, there are still people who want to censor, remove, and ban books from libraries and schools, astounding as that sounds.  For a couple hours, I sat in a room of like-minded people, listening to the words of John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, and Chaucer, to name a few.  All banned writers.

I don't understand the impulse to remove books from institutions.  There is one simple solution if you are offended by a book or its subject matter:  don't read it.  Period.  If don't want your kids to read a book, make sure to monitor what they check out from the library.  Unfortunately, some people simply don't want to control just what they read; they want to control what everyone else reads, as well.  And that's a big problem.

I've always believed that the way to foster peace, understanding, and compassion in the world is through knowledge.  Books can be the vehicle for that knowledge.  I get that it's easier to ignore people, places, and subjects that make you uncomfortable.  We all go through our days in a bubble.  We see the same people, do the same things, visit the same places.  Stepping outside that bubble can be scary.

Yet, ignorance isn't the answer, either.  Eventually, all bubbles pop.  They are temporary and fragile.  They aren't meant to last forever.  Just like August or ripe blackberries, they disappear.  Time movies on.  August gives way to September and October.  Summer turns into autumn and, eventually, winter.  The blackberries will disappear until next August.

The best things in life are like that--they provide sun-soaked joy for a short while, sweetening the tongue.  And then they vanish, leaving only memory.  If you keep going back to the same blackberry patch, over and over and over, eventually there aren't going to be any berries left to pick and eat.  Then, you can wait around for the blackberries to return, or you can go find an apple or plum tree.  Fill your mouth with a different kind of sweetness.

So, tonight at the library, people got to taste something besides blackberries.  Some bubbles were popped.  And it was wonderful.

Saint Marty encourages all of his disciples to be adventurous tonight.  Sit by a lake or on a beach or on top of a mountain.  Count lily pads or hummingbirds.  Taste what's out there.  The thick paw of your life may dig up something new, sweet, miraculous.

March 7: The Champion, Good Fortune, Overnight Recognition Story

Santiago reflects on his glory days . . . 

For a long time after that everyone had called him The Champion and there had been a return match in the spring. But not much money was bet and he had won it quite easily since he had broken the confidence of the negro from Cienfuegos in the first match. After that he had a few matches and then no more. He decided that he could beat anyone if he wanted to badly enough and he decided that it was bad for his right hand for fishing. He had tried a few practice matches with his left hand. But his left hand had always been a traitor and would not do what he called on it to do and he did not trust it.

The sun will bake it out well now, he thought. It should not cramp on me again unless it gets too cold in the night. I wonder what this night will bring.

I have had some good fortune in my life.  I won a full-ride scholarship to go to college.  Teaching and doctoral assistantships to go to graduate school.  I sent my first manuscript of poems to one prospective publisher, and it was accepted.  When I was in high school, I entered a playwriting competition.  I didn't win, but I did receive a signed letter from Stephen Sondheim, talking about my script and telling me how much he liked it.  I was served as Upper Peninsula Poet Laureate.  Twice.  A few years ago, I was given the Part Time Faculty of the Year Award by the university where I teach.  Last year, I submitted a $20,000 grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Arts for the library where I work.  We got it.

As you can see by that short little laundry list, I have been very lucky in my professional life.  Of course, I worked very hard for every lucky thing that's happened to me.  Lots of late nights, long hours, and personal sacrifices.  Most of the time, what some people call "luck" is the result of a little talent, a lot of late nights, and tenacity.  When she was a young, working mother, Toni Morrison would get up at 5 a.m. to write before her kids woke.  Then she punch a time clock as an editor at a publishing house.  She did this for years and years before she became a full-time writer and won the Pulitzer and Nobel.

There are no such things as overnight success stories.  There are, however, overnight recognition stories.  That's when people work their asses off for a long time and finally someone notices.  Again, luck has nothing to do with it.  It's all about sweat and resilience.  Never giving up.

Here's the other side of the coin:  professional success doesn't always coincide with personal happiness.  In fact, those two conditions rarely go hand-in-hand.  There is always a price to be paid for any kind of success.  I try to keep that in mind whenever I see someone who seems to be on top of the world.  Even saints face long nights of the soul, when God seems as distant and silent as the stars.

Saint Marty is still waiting to be an overnight Nobel Laureate.

Please vote for my sister-in-law Cindi for this contest.  She has earned her "overnight" success:

Cindi Carlson DIY Hero Contest

March 5: Young and Strong, WWDD, Heroes

Santiago does a little DiMaggio hero worship . . . 

"Unless sharks come," he said aloud. "If sharks come, God pity him and me."

Do you believe the great DiMaggio would stay with a fish as long as I will stay with this one? he thought. I am sure he would and more since he is young and strong. Also his father was a fisherman. But would the bone spur hurt him too much?

"I do not know," he said aloud. "I never had a bone spur."

Santiago could be wearing a WWDD bracelet in this passage.  What Would DiMaggio Do?  Would his hero be in a boat in the middle of the sea, inextricably linked to a massive fish?  Of course, he has no way to truly know the answer to that question.

Hero worship is a strange thing.  It allows you to imagine a regular person being able to perform superhuman feats of strength or intelligence or skill.  Suddenly, a baseball player can survive on the ocean like wind or current.  Can overcome a sea monster.  And do all that with a bone spur.

I have heroes in my life.  Writers.  Poets.  Artists.  Actors.  Actresses.  Filmmakers.  I just finished watching My Octopus Teacher with my son.  The guy in that movie is a hero of mine.  Last week, I watched a documentary about Kurt Vonnegut.  Hero.  Right now, I'm watching another documentary about Toni Morrison.  Hero.  Flannery O'Connor.  Sharon Olds.  Bruce Springsteen.  Hero, hero, hero.

I have closer heroes.  My sister who just died was one of my heroes.  My son, in all his 13-year-old fierce energy and truth, is my hero.  My daughter, in her intelligence and thoughtful strength.  My sisters-in-law for all the love and support they've given me in my life struggles.  My wife's cousin for her ability to make me laugh in dark times.  My wife for looking into the face of mental illness every day.  All heroes.

I think a hero is a person who teaches you something about yourself.  Who lifts you up.  Who makes you see the world full of light and hope.  That's what my heroes do.  They make me believe in the possibility of God and heaven, because their gifts aren't of this world.  Their gifts are grace.  

I hope that some day someone may think of me as a hero.  In my life, I try to lift people up.  In my work, I try to make my little corner of the universe a tiny bit more beautiful.  Maybe it will be my kids.  Or one of my students.  Or it may be a complete stranger--a person I've never met in my life.

Saint Marty believes that we all can be heroes.  It's just a matter of doing your best.  Day after day.

August 6: Toni Morrison, Unsinkable. "It Comes Unadorned"

The great Toni Morrison died today.  

That news sort of took my breath away this morning.  For me, it was like hearing about the sinking of a great ship that seemed unsinkable.  She has been a part of life since I first read Beloved when I was an undergrad.  And I can't imagine a world without her voice in it.

Saint Marty is going to give the last words of this post to President Barack Obama:

Toni Morrison was a national treasure, as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page.  Her writing was a beautiful, meaningful challenge to our conscience and our moral imagination.  What a gift to breathe the same air as her, if only for a while.

It Comes Unadorned

by:  Toni Morrison

It comes
Unadorned
Like a phrase
Strong enough to cast a spell;
It comes
Unbidden,
Like the turn of sun through hills
Or stars in wheels of song.
The jeweled feet of women dance the earth.
Arousing it to spring.
Shoulders broad as a road bend to share the weight of years.
Profiles breach the distance and lean
Toward an ordinary kiss.
Bliss.
It comes naked into the world like a charm.

March 28: Sperm Whale Now Reigneth, Manuscript Process, Good Friends Who Are Good Readers

Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored harborless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the Pequod's weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow.

It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.

"No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology," says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.

"It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and families.... Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal" (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.

"Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters." "Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea." "A field strewn with thorns." "All these incomplete indications but serve to torture us naturalists."

Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:- The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner; Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson; Marten; Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts will show.

Of the names in this list of whale authors only those following Owen ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing authority. But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the largest of the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of his claims, and the profound ignorance which till some seventy years back, invested the then fabulous or utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which ignorance to this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific retreats and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete. Reference to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was to them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at last come for a new proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people all,- the Greenland whale is deposed,- the great sperm whale now reigneth!

About a third of the way into the novel, Melville pauses to provide a chapter titled "Cetology"--the science of whales.  Keep in mind that the science that he includes is pushing 200 years of age.  It is by no means current.  Also keep in mind that Melville is trying to tell a story and anything that he chooses to include is slave to that narrative.  Thus, "the great sperm whale reigneth" as the lord of the seas.  Large and majestic and terrifying.

I am currently revising a manuscript of essays that I have compiled.  I have a good friend reading the book and giving me feedback.  He's a person whose eyes and ears I trust.  Thankfully, he isn't finding a whole lot wrong with what I've written.  I have worked and reworked most of the essays many times over several years.  Most of my usual readers and editors have read and reread these things several times.  In short, they are sick of them.  That's why I asked another good friend, with fresh eyes, to read them over for me and offer advice.

In some ways, this point in the manuscript process is my favorite.  I find out what is seaworthy and what is taking on water.  I love patching the holes of the leaky boats.  (I know, I know.  I'm pushing this sailing metaphor way too far.)  Today, my friend pointed out quite a few leaks in one of the essays.  And tonight, I plan to sit down and give it a look.  I need to save this piece.  It's one of my favorites.  However, I'm not quite sure what it needs.  Perhaps an entire section on the science of whales?

Let me use a Melville-inspired metaphor:  I am confident that I can save this beached whale.  At the moment it's rolling in the surf on the shore, collecting sand and gazing forlornly at the stars and ocean with great watery eyes.  It needs to be slowly dragged back into the waves where it can float and find its flukes and fins again.

I am learning to admire something about Moby-Dick that I hadn't before.  I am really jazzing on Melville's experimentation, how he will interrupt the entire novel to wax eloquent for a few pages on the sperm whale.  He breaks the rules in order to create something completely new.  He is doing postmodernism before the word "postmodernism" existed.  That is amazing to me.

Melville sort of gives me permission to try something new.  Something different.  Weird, maybe.  That's the kind of stuff that excites me as a reader and writer.  That's what I'm going to do tonight as I go back to revise my little beached boat.  I'm going to follow Toni Morrison's advice:  "If there's a book you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

Tonight, I'm going to revise that essay into something I would want to read.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for good friends who are good readers.

October 6: Everything and Anything, Post Saint Marty's Day, 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature

The world is full of creatures that for some reason seem stranger to us than others, and libraries are full of books describing them--hagfish, platypuses, lizardlike pangolins four feet long with bright green, lapped scales like umbrella-tree leaves on a bush hut roof, butterflies emerging from anthills, spiderlings wafting through the air clutching tiny silken balloons, horseshoe crabs . . . the creator creates.  Does he stoop, does he speak, does he save, succor, prevail?  Maybe.  But he creates; he creates everything and anything.

Dillard is writing about God, the creator of everything that crawls and flies and swims and oozes under the sun and moon.  God doesn't get tired of creating.  God is creating.  However, Dillard could just as easily be describing herself or Toni Morrison or William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway.  Writers create worlds, as well.  They creates stories about ghosts and bear hunts.  An old man battling an immense fish in the middle of a unforgiving ocean.

I am now in the doldrums of post Saint Marty's Day.  The celebrations aren't over.  My family is having a Saint Marty's Day party this Sunday, filled with bratwurst and tapioca pudding and gifts.  As Charles Dickens wrote in A Saint Marty's Day Carol, "I will honor Saint Marty's Day in my heart, and try to keep it all the year."

Always around Saint Marty's Day, another event takes place.  Every year, the Swedish Academy in Stockholm announces the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.  I happen to know that, as the Swedes discuss and debate with each other, they eat bowls of tapioca and sing traditional Saint Marty's Day songs.  Now, some of the greatest writers who ever lived have won the Nobel, all under the influence and grace of Saint Marty.

This year, the prize will be announced on October 13.  Reporters will gather in the Grand Hall of the Swedish Academy at the appointed hour.  The gold and white doors will open, and the Permanent Secretary will step into the camera lights.  Then, speaking in Swedish, she will announce the name of a writer.  One lucky writer. 

It may be my year.  Saint Marty.  Poet.  Teacher.  Blogger.  I'm sure that I have made the short list already many times.  The only reason that I have not won already is that the Swedes are highly superstitious academics.  They don't like mixing religion and literature.  That's what cost Tolstoy the prize.  However, I have a feeling that this year, drunk of their feast of Diet Mountain Dew and tapioca, the Permanent Secretary, in a hushed voice (almost a prayer), will say those words that the entire world has been longing to hear:

"The Swedish Academy is pleased to announce that the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to Saint Marty, who in essays and poetry and blog posts characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential part of spiritual reality." 

The Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, and a big Saint Marty fan