October 10: "Bathtub Families," Nobel Prize in Literature, "Lost in Space"

I spent the first couple hours of my day listening to a livestream of the announcement of this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.  It was supposed to happen at 6:45 a.m. EST.  It didn't hadn't until after 7 a.m.  I never realized that Swedes weren't punctual.

In case you're curious, I didn't win.  It was the South Korean experimental novelist Han Kang.  A few minutes after the announcement, I received a message from one of my best friends.  "Robbed again!" he texted.  "You were the first person I thought of this morning when I saw that.  Always the bridesmaid never the bride, dammit!!!"

Perhaps next year, now that my Bigfoot book has been released, I will win.  In the meantime, I will just continue to love language, like Billy Collins . . . 

Bathtub Families

by: Billy Collins

is not just a phrase I made up
though it would have given me pleasure
to have written those words in a notebook
then looked up at the sky wondering what they meant.
No, I saw Bathtub Families in a pharmacy
on the label of a clear plastic package
containing one cow and four calves,
a little family of animals meant to float in your tub.

I hesitated to buy it because I knew
I would then want the entire series of Bathtub Families,
which would leave no room in the tub
for the turtles, the pigs, the seals, the giraffes, and me.

It's enough just to have the words,
which alone make me even more grateful
that I was born in America
and English is my mother tongue.

I was lucky, too, that I waited
for the pharmacist to fill my prescription,
otherwise I might not have wandered
down the aisle with the Bathtub Families.

I think what I am really saying is that language
is better than reality, so it doesn't have
to be bath time for you to enjoy
all the Bathtub Families as they float in the air around your head.

It was a long day of teaching and work, with very little in the way of downtime.  I did host the monthly meeting of the Marquette Poets Circle this evening.  Lots of people showed up, including some new faces.  We workshopped some drafts of poems and then celebrated an Open Mic.  I read from my new book (the first time I've been able to do that).

When I got home, I was pretty beat.  But then I got a text from another friend:  "Can you see the lights from your backyard?  We can see them here."

So, near 10 p.m., I found myself in my backyard, taking picture after picture of the auroras jetting across the heavens, unfolding like butterflies just out of their cocoons.  And it was magical.

Sure Han Kang won the Nobel Prize today, but Saint Marty got to show his son the Northern Lights for the first time.

A poem from yesterday . . .

Lost in Space

by: Martin Achatz

I'm not allowed to enter

my son's room anymore,

must stand at the bottom

of his steps, call up to him

the way I used to call him

from the front door when he was

younger and outside playing

in the backyard with sticks

and rocks and garden hose.

Tonight, under a bite of moon,

I gaze at two bright stars

in the heavens.  They may be

planets.  Perhaps Venus and Mars.

I don't know, refuse to dig out

my phone to check.  No, 

I'm simply happy to see 

them together up there,

so close, as if they could

throw their cosmic arms

around each other, embrace

like old classmates or war buddies.

Or maybe, just maybe, they are

father and son, separated by

hundreds of thousands of miles,

a divide that would take months

to cross.  Yet, there they are, 

next to each other up there,

so bright and alike they could

be each other on this dark 

night when my son is locked

in his room, light years away.

October 9: "Baby Listening," Jody, John Lennon

I remember those nights when my daughter and son were infants, and I would lay in my bed, unable to sleep, listening, listening, listening for any sound--a whimper, cry, burp, or (most frightening) nothing at all.  Even now--with my daughter living with her significant other in a town 20 miles distant, my son a high school junior and secretive as an oyster--I still worry about them every day.

Billy Collins gets into baby listening . . . 

Baby Listening

by: Billy Collins

According to the guest information directory, 

baby listening is a service offered by this seaside hotel. 

Baby listening—not a baby who happens to be listening, 

as I thought when I first checked in. 

Leave the receiver off the hook, 

the directory advises, 

and your infant can be monitored by the staff, 

though the staff, the entry continues, 

cannot be held responsible for the well-being 

of the baby in question. 

Fair enough, someone to listen to the baby. 

But the phrase did suggest a baby who is listening, 

lying there in the room next to mine 

listening to my pen scratching against the page, 

or a more advanced baby who has crawled 

down the hallway of the hotel 

and is pressing its tiny, curious ear against my door. 

Lucky for some of us, 

poetry is a place where both are true at once, 

where meaning only one thing at a time spells malfunction. 

Poetry wants to have the baby who is listening at my door 

as well as the baby who is being listened to, 

quietly breathing into the nearby telephone. 

And it also wants the baby 

who is making sounds of distress 

into the curved receiver lying in the crib 

while the girl at reception has just stepped out 

to have a smoke with her boyfriend 

in the dark by the great sway and wash of the North Sea. 

Poetry wants that baby, too, 

even a little more than it wants the others.

Worrying about your kids is a lifelong habit.  Tonight, I hosted an event at the library that included the son of one of my best friends.  Jody (my friend) sat next to me for the entire concert, listening to her son sing John Lennon tunes, play piano, and strum a guitar.  He even recited a poem.  She cried several times during the show.

Jody and I are the same age, with just six months separating us.  She has three grown children.  I have one grown daughter and one almost-grown son.  We both worked at the same bookstore in the 1990s.  Eventually, we both earned advanced degrees in English and taught college composition courses.  In short, we are each other, even though Jody has a Southern accent thicker than Andy Griffith.  

I've known Jody's son since he was four or five, I think.  Jody was at the hospital when my daughter was born, and Jody was also one of the first people to hold her.  We're both amazed at how much our kids have grown while we've remained exactly the same.

Jody and I sat and listened to her son sing "Strawberry Fields Forever," and it was both sublime and disconcerting.  Sublime because I remember the day John Lennon was murdered, the outpouring of grief that followed for days.  Disconcerting because I remember the day John Lennon was murdered and the ensuing display of collective grief.

It was a really good night, made better by the presence of Jody and Jody's son.  But friends always make life more joyful.

And Saint Marty didn't have to listen to any baby's, either.

October 8: "The Flight of the Statues," Routine, Hardcover

Most days are pretty routine.  I did the same thing this Tuesday that I did last Tuesday.  Tomorrow, I will follow my Wednesday rituals:  working, teaching, writing, and working some more.  Nothing truly surprising will happen.

Billy Collins is taken by surprise . . .

The Flight of the Statues

by: Billy Collins

The ancient Greeks…. used to chain
their statues to prevent them from fleeing.
--Michael Kimmelman

It might have been the darkening sky
that sent them running in all directions
that afternoon as the air turned a pale yellow,

but were they not used to standing out
in the squares of our city
in every kind of imaginable weather?

Maybe they were frightened by a headline
on a newspaper that was blowing by
or was it the children in their martial arts uniforms?

Did they finally learn about the humans
they stood for as they pointed a sword at a cloud?
Did they know something we did not?

Whatever the cause, no one will forget
the sight of all the white marble figures
leaping from their pedestals and rushing away.

In the parks, the guitarists fell silent.
The vendor froze under his umbrella.
A dog tried to híde in his owner's shadow.

Even the chess players under the trees
looked up from their boards
long enough to see the bronze generals

dismount and run off, leaving their horses
to peer down at the circling pigeons
who were stealing a few more crumbs from the poor.

Okay, I didn't see any marble statues running down the street today.  However, when I got home this evening, there was a box waiting for me.  Inside the box:  hardcover copies of my new book.  This may not seem like such a big deal to you, faithful disciple, but it is huge to me, equivalent to Lincoln stepping down from the Lincoln Memorial and skipping off to Dairy Queen.  Or the faces on Mount Rushmore breaking into a barbershop quartet version of "Stand by Me."

Six months ago, my Bigfoot book was still just a file on a flash drive.  The poems were disorganized and in need of revision.  Tonight, the hairy guy is out in the world.  I'm not sure if people are going to like or buy my book, and, frankly, at this moment, I don't really care.

Cuz Saint Marty has a hardcover copy of his book in his hot little hands.

October 7: "Adage," Monday, Clichés

Since I started taking creative writing workshops, I've been taught to avoid clichés like the plague.  (Okay, I know it's an old joke, but it still makes me chuckle.)  

I've tried to follow that rule, for the most part.  However, there was a time when each cliché was new and surprising.  Some author once wrote "dead as a doornail," and it was considered bold and insightful.  I'm not quite sure when originality gives way to hackneyed. 

Billy Collins clichés it up a little . . . 

Adage

by: Billy Collins

When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.

It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.

A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.

No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.

It was a Monday.  (That may be a cliché.)  Everyone knows what that sentence implies--it just wasn't a good day.  I won't say it was a terrible day, but it certainly wasn't one for the record books.  Nothing exciting occurred.  I didn't get a call from the Swedish Academy.  Or win the lottery.  Or write a perfect poem.

However, I did teach my Intro to Film class.  And revised some poems.  And visited with my great friend Jody.  In short, I kept myself busy as a beaver.  As Mary Poppins said, a stitch in time saves nine.  (I have no idea what that adage means, but it has something to do with careful work.)

I'm not feeling very . . . original tonight.  More like tired, bordering on exhausted.  Tonight feels like a cliché, because Mondays are supposed to be disappointing.  So, I'm going to leave it there.  I'm sure that there are people who will argue with me, saying that it's all about attitude.  If I changed my attitude, perhaps today would not have been so . . . so . . . Monday.

But I didn't.

Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez once wrote, "This should be the spirit of every Monday.  Know that something good will always happen."

Forgive Saint Marty if he doesn't stand up and cheer.

A cliché picture--it has appeared a couple times on the blog..