Contrary

Audio version plus extra thoughts

Mary, Mary, quite contrary 

How does your garden grow? 

With silver bells, and cockle shells, 

And pretty maids all in a row. 

This nursery rhyme was one of my childhood favorites. I loved three things about it especially. First, the image of Mary standing in her garden among lovely pale flowers (the silver bells and pretty maids) and a bed of seashells (the cockle shells). I didn’t know about the rhyme’s possible references—still an issue of contention—to a royal Mary, either Mary Queen of Scots or Bloody Mary of the Tudors. Nor was I aware of the alternative last lines, with their references to rows of cuckolds (probably meaning cuckoos) and marigolds. Second, I loved the rhythms of the rhyme—the triplet “how does your” of line two and the sixteenths-eighth of “pretty maids” in line four. Third, and most importantly, I adored the word contrary. As someone with a slip-slidey mind, contrary was a position in which I often found myself, often to my chagrin. I pictured Mary, confidently contrary, happy in the place she’d made. 

Therefore when I went looking for contrarian poems about spring, I was delighted to find a sonnet by a Mary, in this case Mary Lock(e). The e is parenthetical because consistency of spelling wasn’t all that important in the eighteenth century. It could have been an attempt to claim a kinship, correctly or otherwise, with the philosopher John Locke, or just a whim.

The poem was originally published in The Gentleman’s Magazine, a publication that ran from 1731 to 1922 and was the first periodical to call itself a magazine. Mary published about 20 poems in the magazine in the 1790s. According to Roger Lonsdale, who edited an anthology of women poets of the eighteenth century, Mary’s verses  “often took …subjectivity and melancholy to alarming extremes.” Here is Mary’s take on spring: 

I hate the Spring in parti-coloured vest, 

What time she breathes upon the opening rose, 

When every vale in cheerfulness is dressed, 

And man with grateful admiration glows. 

Still may he glow, and love the sprightly scene, 

Who ne’er has felt the iron hand of Care; 

But what avails to me a sky serene, 

Whose mind is torn with Anguish and Despair? 

Give me the Winter’s desolating reign, 

The gloomy sky in which no star is found; 

Howl, ye wild winds, across the desert plain; 

Ye waters roar, ye falling woods resound! 

Congenial horrors, hail! I love to see 

All Nature mourn, and share my misery.

This doesn’t seem a particularly alarming extreme, amiright? In 2024 I’m finding it pretty relatable. Here in the jeanSpace household there have been more disasters and crises than usual. Personally I’ve had to actively search for the bump I get from the sunshine, milder temperatures, the little green buds, etc. And that lift has been more forced—and short-lived—than in most years. “Congenial horrors, hail!” is right up my alley.  

Mary was born in 1766 (1768, by some accounts, but her 4x-great-granddaughter says it’s 1766, and that’s the date I’m using). Her father died when she was four. Her mother soon remarried, dying when Mary was 20. Mary’s childhood seems to have been unhappy, without much attention to education. After her mother’s death, Mary was taken in by a relative, Edward Taylor. Taylor was a man of letters, comfortably off, and Mary thrived in her new home. It was during this time that she published her poems. Taylor died in 1797, leaving Mary a substantial settlement that allowed her, at the age of 30, to marry William Mister, a physician and apothecary. The couple had three children, two of whom survived to adulthood. 

After about twelve years off, Mary resumed her writing career, now under the name of Mary Mister. It’s not clear why she was silent for so long. It’s possible that her creative side was fully occupied by the challenges of being a wife and mother. (That has happened to me, and to other writers I know.) There’s a bitchy quote from Christopher Hitchens about everyone having a book inside them, but in most cases that book should stay inside. I hold that everybody has at least one book, which should be written or not, as the spirit moves—though for some people, one book is it. Nevertheless I’m fascinated by people who take a significant amount of time away from their art, then go back to it. Rachmaninoff was so dismayed by the reception of his first symphony that he didn’t write anything for about three years. Harper Lee infamously took 55 years off between novels. 

Mary Mister had more than one work inside her.  In 1810, she published the first of five children’s books, with the final book appearing in 1817. Her inspiration, she noted, was the bedtime stories she told her own children. The works were a far cry from her edgy poems. Maybe it’s an unfair comparison, given the different forms and audiences, but I found Mary’s prose thick textured, sometimes fussy, and slow paced. However, there are interesting and unusual perspectives. “Mungo, The Little Traveller” is a grand tour through Europe from the point of view of a dog. “The Adventures of a Doll” is narrated by a doll as she’s passed from owner to owner. “Tales from the Mountains” is a collection of short stories—morality tales, some with a gruesome edge. In one of the stories a gluttonous child is forced to watch someone of his own age being hanged in order to be cured of his (the glutton’s) vice. I remember devouring similar literature as a child, with relish and without the slightest wish to reform. I wonder what Mary’s unvarnished narrative voice was like—oh, to have been a fly on the wall as she told the stories to her children! 

It seems that Mary’s publishing career finished in 1817. By then her children were grown, or close to it. I have a theory that many creative people find an audience, even if it’s an audience of one, to be a spur to composition. (Or maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think so.) Maybe Mary’s first audience was Edward Taylor, and her second audience was her kids. 

She passed away twelve years later, in 1829. Her third audience may have been posterity. Her tombstone reads “Sacred to the Memory of Mary Mister, wife of William Mister Esqr of Glantowey, Caermarthenshire, who died 18 July 1829 aged 58 years.” Just as I love three things about the nursery rhyme I love three things about this sentence. First, that some of the language on the tombstone comes from Mary’s will (which was signed in Paris, ooh la la)—so I speculate that she had a bit of creative input here. Second, the evocation of the exotic locale of Caermarthenshire. And third, the fact that Mary–or someone–shaved her age by three to five years. 

I’d like to visit Mary Locke Mister’s garden, without roses or silver bells, but with a windswept, gloomy beauty. 

A Stableful of Wishes

Christopher Morley was a prolific American man-of-letters who wrote more than 100 books. His works include poetry, essays, and novels such as Parnassus on Wheels, Kitty Foyle, and The Haunted Bookshop. In 1934 he founded The Baker Street Irregulars, an invitation-only society of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts who got together for meals and the presentation of papers and thoughts about the great detective. Morley unapologetically analyzed the Holmes stories as if Holmes, Watson, and the rest had really existed. “There is a special and superior pleasure in reading anything so much more carefully than its author ever did,” he said. Morley determined that Sherlock had been born on January 6, 1854. January 6 because Holmes twice mentions Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. 1854 because in a story of 1914 Holmes is described as a man of sixty. The Irregulars evidently agreed with his reasoning. Myself, I prefer to think of Holmes as springing into existence full-grown, like Athena, on December 1, 1887, the day “A Study in Scarlet” saw print. But this past December 1 I was preoccupied with pianos, so I’ll take the opportunity to wish Mr. Holmes a very happy 170^th. 

I’ve adored the Sherlock stories since I started reading them at around age nine. My very first coffee table book was about Sherlock Holmes. The title’s lost to my memory, but I can recall the illustrations: black-and-white photographs of 221B Baker Street in real life and on various movie sets; drawings of revolvers, chemists’ beakers, and deerstalkers; specimens of Conan Doyle’s handwriting; gentlemen with extravagant mustaches. I still enjoy getting a coffee table book at Christmas. At the moment I’m infatuated with a couple of presents from Sonny: Remarkable Books: The World’s Most Historic and Significant Works and Haiku Illustrated. Pretty much any kind of book is welcome on my bookshelf, but like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, I especially treasure books with pictures, and conversations. I also tend to seek out books that can be opened to any random page and read with understanding. Like a coffee table book. Or a music book, or a poetry book. 

Which reminds me that January 6 is also National Take a Poet to Lunch Day. This is a 1995 creation of the American poet Arnold Adoff. Adoff, who was born in 1935, grew up in New York City. He supported himself as a substitute teacher while writing poetry, and he was very into the New York jazz scene, which in the ‘50s and ‘60s included Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Sarah Vaughan, and many others. For a time Adoff was Mingus’s manager! 

Adoff is a new-to-me poet. He is best known for his children’s poetry (although he also produced novels and anthologies) and for his commitment to supporting civil rights. “I began writing for kids,” he said, “because I wanted to effect a change in American society.” I read an interview in which he said that his poetry was “fueled by the dual energies of love and anger” and felt immediately that I’d like his work.  That impulse turned out to be correct. His poems are amusing, surprising, and often edgy, but with a light touch. Here’s one from the collection  Chocolate Dreams (which is typeset better in the original version).

Let The Biter Beware. In the center of each  pale  milk  c h o c o l a t e lump  there is a hard nut  waiting to bump your  front tooth into the  d e n t i s t’s chair.  In the center of each  dark  deep  c h o c o l a t e hunk  there is a car a mel  chunk just waiting to  glue  your teeth to geth er  for ev er.  Take  care.

The start of 2024 is full of wishes for me. On January 1 I floated twelve wishes in a brook, and new ones keep rising to my mind’s surface. On January 5 I wish to finish this blog entry. On January 6 I will wish that we never have another day like January 6, 2021. I pull my mind to something lighter but still important and wish that someone would make a coffee table book of Adoff’s poems and their original illustrations. (The ones in Chocolate Dreams are by Massachusetts artist Turi MacCombie, and they’re vibrant and beautiful.) I wish I’d started my blog research yesterday instead of this morning. If I had, I might have been able to ask a real poet to lunch. Of the fifteen people at Thursday’s choir rehearsal, two have had poetry books published.

We could’ve gone to the Mad Hatter on Route 53. That’s an Irish restaurant, a good place for poets. It’s  jeanSpace-approved because the menu offers grilled cheese sandwiches, as well as less-tasty sandwiches that real grownups like, and salads, and boiled dinner pie and Irish chicken curry for the adventurous. We could have talked about poetry and singing. We might have composed a second stanza to the Mad Hatter’s interrupted song:

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!

How I wonder what you’re at! 

Up above the world you fly,

Like a teatray in the sky—” 

Ah, well…It’s likely that no matter how fast I finish this paragraph, it’s already a little late for January 6 arrangements. However, there’s plenty of time to celebrate word-wranglers and their creations. Poets like to be fed daily! Also The Bakers Street Irregulars are holding their annual BSI Weekend from January 10 through January 14 in New York City, with plenty of Sherlock birthday hoopla to enjoy, along with lectures, vendors, luncheons, a Gaslight Gala and more. All that’s left is a final wish: may there be many happy returns of the day.

Black Oaks

Check out the audio version!

“Let’s start with the bangs,” said Denice. 

My sensory issues can make haircuts uncomfortable. The holidays were heating up, and six months after the last cut my locks were a knotty, split-ended mess. A salon visit couldn’t be put off any longer. I try to bundle onerous tasks as often as I can, so I had brought along my copy of The Satanic Verses to Supercuts. I don’t have complaints about the book itself: Salman Rushdie’s novel is well written, interesting, and often funny as hell. It could turn out to be my favorite of the banned books the book club has read this year. But it’s also 547 pages long, and quite dense. I’ve been tackling it in short bursts and am worried that I won’t finish it by the third Wednesday of December, the book club’s next meeting, so I’ve been on the lookout for spots of dead time. Such as the fifteen minutes of wait time that I’d probably have before a stylist was available.

So far the universe had not cooperated with my strategy. I’d packed the book in my gig bag for a recent rehearsal, expecting to get through a few pages while the conductor went through the strings-only pieces. What happened instead was that the conductor did all of the pieces that included winds first, then let us go early! (And then there was the rough highway drive home; I wasn’t in shape to read by the end of that.) Nevertheless I persisted, bringing the Rushdie to Supercuts. Universe: Nope. Not this time, either. Thirty seconds after entering the store I was settled into Denice’s chair.

I set the novel facedown on my lap, hoping to avoid the “What are you reading?” question. Denise whipped a black smock over my head and attended to more practical matters: “What do you want today?” Fix the bangs, chop off a couple of inches on the rest.   

“There’s going to be some hair in your face, sorry.” I closed my eyes and waited for the water to spray onto my forehead, but Denise just started straight in with the snipping. I’d never had a haircut without my hair being wetted down, so I was astonished. Didn’t say anything, of course, but later I googled and found that dry haircuts are, indeed, a thing. Dry haircutting needs more skill, but it also allows for more precision, according to L’Oreal and surely they’d know. It’s especially useful to dry-cut curly hair, or wavy hair like mine. 

Soon the smock was covered with chunks of hair. 

I go to Supercuts for the prices, and the speed, and most especially for the lack of little touches. For a while back when I was trying to be more normal I patronized the kind of salons where they make you wait, but there’s a little boutique with jewelry and lotions and potions to browse, and also snacks and little cups of coffee or even wine. The stylist knows your name and mentions details from your previous conversations and compliments your natural hair color—such a pretty honey blonde—which just tends to remind me that to my son, my hair is green.

Denise finished my bangs and moved behind me, directing me to bend my head forward. I stared at the hair clumps on the smock. A little jostle would have sent them tumbling, of course—for example if I’d decided to start reading Rushdie while the cut was ongoing—but I was concentrating instead on keeping my chin down. Plus I like the color of my hair, generally, and don’t mind staring at it. I enjoy my hair color’s odds-defying history. When I was a kid and my hair was strawberry blonde, everyone predicted it would turn brown soon. Both my parents had gone from blonde to brown. While over time my hair did get a little darker—honey not strawberry—it still reads as blonde, albeit with a fair amount of red in it.

(It’s probably the bits of red that make it read green to Sonny. He’s got a version of red-green colorblindness, mostly for the less saturated versions of these colors. I was a little miffed to discover recently that there are blondes whose hair Sonny sees as yellow. These are blondes whose hair is a lighter shade.) 

I made peace with my green hair recently thanks to Mary Oliver and her poem “Black Oaks.” Oliver, who died in 2019, found refuge from an abusive childhood in nature and writing and was good enough at the writing bit that she became critically acclaimed and  the best-selling poet in the United States. I appreciate Oliver’s love of walks and the ecstatic comfort she finds in plants and animals. Her composition process also attracts me: Oliver often would walk until she felt a poem coming on, then write. Once she’d forgotten to bring something to write with, and I love her solution to that circumstance, which was…to stash pencils in the trees on her routes. 

 In Black Oaks, she’s resisting the impulse to do the writing part of walk and write. The poem is about oaks and procrastination and creativity and growing the brand, which is a lot of work for 18 lines. Oliver is enjoying the oaks, admiring “the tonnage/of their shoulders, and their shining green hair.” The line about the shining green hair put a bullet through my ambivalence about Sonny’s perceptions.

Oliver herself disrupts the experience of the oaks. “Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from/one boot to another—why don’t you get going?”  (Maybe find one of those pencils and start writing, I think.) “To tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists/of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money,” Oliver insists. But she makes and sells the poem, nonetheless.

Denise tilted my head to the left. At the new angle I noticed one very pale strand running through the biggest of the clumps. It took me a moment to realize that this bit was white. Guess I’m going to skip over the gray thing? The bonus is that this may eventually make my hair look as though it’s a lighter shade of blonde. Maybe even light enough for Sonny to see it as yellow; the pity is, I suppose, that at that point I’ll be nostalgic for the green.

In a couple more minutes, Denise handed me the mirror to check the back. It was shorter, split-ends tamed, knots cut away, but still the familiar shade. She removed the smock and walked me to the cash register. The Rushdie and I were on our way again, waiting for the universe to finally gift me some dead time.

Words and weeds

How a word sneaks into my head…

Poem 1519

The Dandelion’s pallid tube

Astonishes the Grass, 

And Winter Instantly Becomes 

An infinite Alas – 

—

The tube uplifts a signal Bud

And then a shouting Flower,-

The Proclamation of the Suns 

That sepulture is o’er. 

Sepulture, I think. Hmm. It’s close to a familiar word…sepulchre, that’s it. A tomb. A church word, in my experience. This is fitting, because Emily’s poem—as I’ve read her poems 1 through 1518 before today, in my mind we’re on a first-name basis—is in a hymn rhythm. Common meter, in fact, which is iambic tetrameter (four feet) alternating with iambic trimeter (three feet). Isaac Watts, the “Father of English Hymnody,” often used this metrical structure in his works. After annoying his relatives by speaking mostly in rhyme, he eventually wrote the lyrics for around 750 hymns. Emily’s family attended First Church in Amherst, Massachusetts, where Watts’ hymns were a regular part of services.

These are the same rhythms that I belt out on Sunday mornings while processing to the choir stalls. Procession is a rather grand name for it; it’s more of a jerky shuffle produced by trying to sing the right line in the hymnal without bumping into anyone or tripping on the steps to the chancel. Still, there are candles and crosses and robes and music, so procession it is.

On my two feet, in common time, I circumambulate the bedroom. Not quite sure about the meaning of sepulture, I don’t want to stop walking to google. Emily often uses words in a way that suggests that her English is not my native language. I figure that I get the gist: spring’s coming and there’s nothing that winter can do about it. Or maybe it’s about the way that weeds can take over a patch of grass before you realize it. Dandelions weren’t considered weeds in Emily’s day, though, undercutting that interpretation. Plus I love the sight of them.

I can only walk with my Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems for a few minutes at a time, maybe 15, maximum. It’s a big paperback with a purple cover and more than 700 smooth white pages. A Christmas present. Nine months later it’s lost its new-book smell. It weighs a couple of pounds, but that’s not the problem; it’s the awkwardness. I’m in the 600s, page-wise, and the book, off balance, keeps trying to close itself. I have to actively hold it open, which gets annoying after a bit.

I return Emily to the shelf, pick up Poems of Robert Browning, Oxford Edition, and resume my steps. Mr. Browning’s book is smaller and lighter. It’s a hardback, bound in brown leather. The front cover has R. Browning, embossed in gold, and coffee cup speckles that look rather similar to a photograph of Browning on the frontispiece. (Check it out at the top of this post: can you see it?) The pages are yellowing, no surprise for a collection that was published in 1919. The poems are presented in two columns per page, single-spaced, in 8-point font. I have to hold this book very close to my face to make sense of the itty-bitty words.

Mr. Browning doesn’t use the hymn rhythms as much as Emily does, although he’s fond of couplets with a long first line and a short second one. I’m not far into the collection (so he’s still Mr. Browning, not Bob). It’s very different from Emily’s, with lots of stories and drama. Some of them I quite enjoy. Today’s selection is “A Grammarian’s Funeral.” As someone with grammar problems, to put it mildly, I’m eager to find out about this guy and what he might have had coming to him. The first lines are promising:  

Let us begin and carry up this corpse, 

Singing together. 

A thrill runs through me as I wonder if this may be a mystery story. Did the grammarian correct one too many subject-verb disagreements? Then, ten lines later: 

Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; 

Seek we sepulture

On a tall mountain, citied to the top, 

Crowded with culture!

Sepulture, again! I’m pulled out of the book entirely at the wonder of reading this word twice in ten minutes.

I lay Mr. Browning down–carefully, as he’s rather frail–and google. The rest of the poem will have to wait for another day. Sepulture means either the placement of something in a grave, with synonyms including burial, interment, entombment; or the burial chamber itself, with synonyms including crypt, tomb, and sepulchre. Its origin is the Latin word sepultura, which made its way into Old French and then Middle English.

I want to find some extra significance when a new word hits my brain. Especially such a weighted word. In actuality this isn’t surprising, especially when reading two poets writing in the same language during the same century. Unlike some of the words that work their way into my brain, I can’t figure out how to use sepulture in a real-life sentence. But I do spend a few interesting moments contemplating tombs and burials, rebirths and resurrections, and how words live on, in that nonliving way of words, after their authors.

Larkin in the Library

I recently finished Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems. It’s a relatively slim book for such a major poet. This may be because Larkin  wrote a fair amount of prose as well, producing novels, criticism, and reviews. Or maybe it’s that he had a full-time day job for thirty years as a librarian at the University of Hull.

The list of writers who have been librarians, or who’ve worked as library assistants or clerks, is shorter than I’d expected. Maybe because librarians don’t have a ton of free time? Maybe there are enough books in their lives already? There are some big names, though. Goethe. Borges. Proust. Proust doesn’t belong here, properly speaking. His time at the Bibliothéque Mazarine was short-lived and unhappy. He only took the job so that his father would stop bugging him to go into the law. Almost immediately Proust managed to wangle a sick leave and never returned to work. The other authors on the list did show up to their jobs, though. Librarian-authors who are in my personal pantheon include Madeleine L’Engle, Andre Norton (the nom de plume of Alice Norton), Lewis Carroll (NdP of Charles Dodgson), Archibald MacLeish, and Anne Tyler.

My work-study job at Northwestern was in the music library, part-time during the academic year and full-time during the summers. After university I spent almost a year as an assistant at a trade association library. I enjoyed those jobs, both the work itself and the atmosphere. The creaky floorboards! The card catalog! And of course the books, all those words, illustrations, and notes! The Northwestern stacks were open (meaning that patrons could browse the shelves and pick books out; closed stacks give these privileges to library staff only). This left the shelves in a state that provided daily opportunities to discover a misplaced item and return it to its rightful place, an activity that I found incredibly satisfying. Sometimes I imagine going back in a time machine to the 1980s, where I’d practice clarinet more seriously, forego the suntan and perm, and go for a degree in Library Science.

I’m not sure whether the profession would have been a good fit for me. Most librarians I’ve met have been great people, but also there’ve been a few who were spectacularly, memorably, miserable in the job. The head of the music library was moody with explosive tendencies; when she left for a new position, a wave of relief flooded the building. Dealing with bankers all day took its toll on the librarians at the trade association. One of them became stressed to the point of a literal physical collapse on her bathroom floor. Also, the only person I know who was stabbed on the job…is a librarian. Librarians in the 2020s have to manage threats of defunding and hordes of wannabe book banners, which is well outside of my capabilities.

At the start of Larkin’s tenure, in 1952, Hull was still recovering from the devastation of World War II, when air raids had damaged or destroyed most of the city center and 95% of the houses. By many accounts it was a gray, depressing place. The library and university were small. Larkin’s curmudgeonly view, expressed in a letter—“God, the people are awful”—might have been a passing one, though he apparently felt disdain for a lot of things. His views on modern life, politics, women, and people of other races and classes are at best problematic and at worst despicable. Posthumous publication of his letters made him much less beloved than he used to be. Larkin seems to have felt proud, generally, of his work at the library, which grew in size and reputation during his time there. He was even fond enough of the physical space, once the building was renovated, to compose a four-line verse about it. “By day, a lifted study-storehouse; night/Converts it to a flattened cube of light./Whichever’s shown, the symbol is the same:/Knowledge; a University; a name.”

He was also proud of his poetry, which was fueled in part by pessimism and angst. “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth,” he told one journalist. It feels a bit wrong, somehow, to be so exhilarated by his lines, but they are so, so beautiful. Some stanzas float my brain into a star-field. Many bits echo my interior thoughts and frustrations in finer words than I can assemble. “Strange to know nothing, never to be sure/Of what is true or right or real…” Larkin writes in his poem “Ignorance,” and I’m oddly comforted.

Althea

I was thinking about dogs and hoping to see some on my walk on Althea Road this morning. It’s a bad sign when I’m this much inside my head, rather than being open to what the universe has in store, but I needed some distraction from my Achilles heel. This is no metaphor: my left Achilles tendon— same side as the Achilles’ weak spot!—has been acting up for about a week now. I’d prepped with stretching and a couple of tablets of Aleve, but each step was still uncomfortable. 

It was a few minutes after seven. The gnats and birds were out in full force. A girl waited on the corner for the school bus. Somebody was moving a trash bin. Nary a dog was in sight. Not the pair of golden retrievers who remind me of our dear departed Watson, not Skye, the black lab who lives next door, not the Pomeranian triplets and their lady-with-the-hat.

When she was 29 years old, Emily Dickinson’s father gave her a dog for company on her walks. What kind of animal do you picture? I am slowly reading her Complete Poems and am up to #473, “Fashion My Spirit quaint – white,” with just 1302 more poems to go. Dickinson often describes herself as small, so I would have thought an embroidery bag-sized dog, tiny and a fierce yipper.

It turns out that the dog—which she named Carlo after a canine in the novel Jane Eyre—was a brown Newfoundland. This is a big dog that can weigh up to 150 pounds. It also turns out that Emily was not unusually tiny. She was probably around 5’3” tall, which is the same height as me on a tall day. On the short side, but very close to average, and people were a little shorter in Emily’s day. It’s all in the way you see yourself, isn’t it? Still, Carlo would have counted as a big dog for an owner of any size.

Finding out about Carlo shifted my perceptions of Emily a bit. It’s always clear that she loved nature and was sensitive to it, but she seems to have been quite outdoorsy, especially in the company of her “shaggy ally.” I wondered if Carlo was an asked-for present or a surprise. I used to think I’d prefer a little dog, or a medium-sized one, but by the time Watson grew into his paws and reached nearly 90 pounds, a giant of a golden, I felt he was the ideal size for a dog. 

Commuters beeped the locks on their cars. I was about a mile from home, with still no dogs sighted. A lady in a house dress did something to her plant pots. I took the next step and it felt as though Paris’s arrow had hit my ankle straight on.  I breathed, waiting for the pain to subside. And thought-thought-thought.

It’s Mozart who owned the lapdog I’d imagined for Dickinson. He had two, actually, named Pimperl and Bimperl, and they often traveled with him. Mozart also kept some pet birds, most famously a starling that he bought at a Viennese pet shop on May 27, 1784, for 34 kreutzers. At the time Mozart was 28 years old, about Emily’s age. Starlings have extensive vocal ranges and are great mimics. This bird learned to sing the 17-note theme of the third movement of the Piano Concerto No. 17 (K. 453), which had been completed earlier that spring. The bird’s version was a little different than Mozart’s, which we know because Mozart transcribed it, noting the changes the bird had made, which included a fermata (hold) on the sixth note and a half-step up for the ninth and tenth notes, from G to G#.

After a bit I took a few small, careful steps, bending my left foot as little as possible. The gnats swirled, and I heard a crow caw—or maybe it was a starling, pranking me. There would be no dogs today, except in my imagination. I conjured Emily and Carlo. Fortunately they slowed down for me, Emily humming and Carlo sniffing at the daffodils, as I hobbled home.

e.e.c…

The Forest Hills Cemetery is a little more than 10 miles from my house. I’ve driven by it many times on the way to Jamaica Plain, which is one of my favorite spots in Boston. My clarinet teacher lived there—in Jamaica Plain, that is, not the cemetery—for years. I’ve been to the Forest Hills grounds many times, sometimes attending and performing concerts and sometimes just to walk around the place. There’s lots to see. I just discovered that the poet E.E. Cummings is buried there.

(The uppercase letters are correct, by the way, even if you’ve always seen it spelled lowercase. Cummings himself was dismissive of prescribed orthography.  As he put it, “since feeling is first/who pays any attention/to the syntax of things/will never wholly kiss you.” However, he didn’t have a preference that his name always be in all lowercase letters. That was a marketing decision made by one of his editors.)

For several weeks I’ve been reading through e.e. cummings, a selection of poems. I bought this paperback for a dollar years ago in a second-hand bookshop near Harvard Square.

I bought it for the inscription, which reads Bridget—let’s carry on the wine and cheese party—J. 9/4/71 My own initial!

Some of the poems are familiar, as they’ve been widely anthologized. At the time of his death in 1962, Cummings was the second most-read poet in the USA, just behind Robert Frost. I often mix E.E. up with William Carlos Williams of the rainy red wheel barrow, but E.E. is the one who jams the words together and capitalizes capriciously. He wrote that verse about spring, with eddieandbill, bettyandisbel, and the goat-footed balloon man in a world that’s turned mud-luscious. Also the one about Buffalo Bill that ends “so how do you like your blueeyed boy, Mister Death?”

Cummings is classified as a “modernist free-form” poet, which is daunting to someonelikeme. At times I agree with the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. As she wrote the Guggenheim committee in 1934: “there is fine writing and powerful writing (as well as some of the most pompous nonsense I ever let slip to the floor with a wide yawn).” By pompous nonsense, I think she means a Harvard whiff, sometimes showoffy, sometimes lazy, always condescending, given off by some of the poems.

(When I moved to the Boston area I assumed that it was just a mean-spirited, townie snipe that a Harvard grad would work that fact into the first three minutes of conversation. I discovered that the characterization actually was a calumny–as occasionally, alums would withhold their alma mater’s name until nearly four minutes in…

…Anyhow!)

Some days it’s lucky for the book’s structural integrity that I read Cummings before my coffee’s kicked in. Otherwise I’d have enough energy to hurl the darn thing across the room. Even if I’m fully caffeinated, though, I spare it for Bridget’s sake. Also because there are more fine and powerful than pompous pages in here.

Here’s an ending that I particularly liked:   

       the trees stand.  The trees,

suddenly wait against the moon’s face.

Here’s a longer bit from a different poem: 

And I(being at a window

in this midnight)

for no reason feel

deeply completely conscious of the rain or rather

Somebody who uses roofs and streets skillfully to make a

possible and beautiful sound:

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in 1894 to a Harvard professor, grew up in Cambridge, Mass., and obtained two Harvard degrees himself. He aspired to being a poet from around the age of eight. In 1916 he joined a volunteer ambulance corps in France. His snarky comments and mischievously mysterious letters home got him interred for treason; he spent a couple of months in a French prison camp before his dad pulled enough strings to get him released. He married three times, or maybe twice, as the final union may not have been strictly legal, though it lasted the longest. He loved Paris and traveled extensively throughout his life.

There are some less appealing aspects about Cummings, including his support of Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, his willingness to name-check his literary rivals, and too much contempt to my taste towards the younger, lower, and lefter classes.

Cummings was a novelist, playwright, and essayist as well as a poet. Also he was a fine and serious painter. I wonder if his painter’s eye is part of the reason that his poems are decorated with semicolons and parentheses and extra spaces. I like some of these features but have spent a bunch of time this month trying to make verbal sense out of a visual flourish. Although as I don’t have a Harvard degree, it could be that I’m just a little too dumb to get it.

So many interesting poems, though. Worth the read, and every few pages there’s a line or two that hits a really sweet spot. Last week I met “if you are glad/whatever’s living will yourself become,” and I’ve been pondering that ever since. 

 Cummings succumbed to a stroke in 1962. His Forest Hill spot is in lot 748 on Althea Path. near a pond called Lake Hibiscus.

(I’ve known just one person named Althea. She and her husband lived on Althea Road, a couple of blocks away from my house. They had a lab-mix who used to visit and play with our golden until the day they played too rough and then our dogs weren’t friends anymore and, shortly after that, neither were we.)

It’s a simple plaque, probably granite, set in the grass, by a stone wall, engraved with just his name and dates. There’s a pond just down the path, Lake Hibiscus, a good spot to rest and watch, on mud-luscious days, for the goat-footed balloon man.

The fountain pen people

December 26. I was back from trips to two grocery stores, both of them empty of eggnog. That was a pity. I’d intended to sit down with an eggnog, enhanced with a bit of Christmas spirits, and play with my present. Also, perhaps, with my future.

Dave’s gift to me this year was a gold-colored Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen, plus an ink sampler. I made myself a mundane cocktail, rum and Diet Coke, then retired to my studio to sip and write. The nib scratched on the paper. My shirtsleeve brushed the page, a gentle swish. The sound of reluctant first thoughts, so different than the Irish jigs my fingers danced on the computer keyboard.

I think I’d watched too many fountain pen videos over the past week, making even soft little noises impossible to ignore. There’s a poem by Robert Frost, “The Sound of the Trees,” where he talks about such sounds.

I wonder about the trees.

Why do we wish to bear

Forever the noise of these

More than another noise

So close to our dwelling place? 

Fountain pen tutorials and ratings lists had been heavy in my YouTube rotation since I’d settled on the Metropolitan as the top item on my Christmas wish list. Now present, it became part of the annual ritual where I daydream about becoming someone new. Silly dreams doomed to disappointment. New year, new me? It is to laugh.

The fountain-pen people are not a jolly bunch, so far in my experience. However, they are passionate and knowledgeable about their collections, which contain dozens to hundreds of pens in leather cases, in colorful rows like pinned butterflies. I learned about nibs and filling systems and the many materials that can constitute a pen body. I learned how to clean a pen. I learned that it’s important for a gentleman to know how to write with a fountain pen, as well as to have a pen that both looks good and produces an impressive signature on a business contract.

The fountain-pen people never mentioned the Metropolitan; it’s too basic. That’s okay. An entry-level pen is still a step up from the fountain pens of my past, which were a Sheaffer that I bought at the Osco drugstore when I was 22 and a pack of four Zebra disposables that I found at Walmart at the beginning of the pandemic. The Sheaffer nib tore holes in my pages and smeared a lot–my fault for using it on cheap paper—but its unforgivable failing was that it didn’t turn me into a great poet. By the time I got the Zebras I’d downsized my ambitions, except for new year’s daydreams, and I’d switched to better paper. The Zebra pens glided satisfactorily, but I wanted more choices of ink.

My sampler in my present consisted of three inks in black-capped, transparent glass bottles. Pilot inks, part of its iroshizuku line. A dark blue called asa-gao, or Morning Glory; a blue-gray called shin-kai, or Deep Sea; and a purple-magenta called yama-budo, or Wild Grapes. The videos had taught me well: I inked up my pen with the shin-kai on the very first try.

I have too many pens. I started acquiring them in more colors and textures once I began journaling regularly again, in the late 2010s, and went a little overboard. Most of my pens are from Pilot and Zebra, which I discovered are both Japanese companies. Pilot was founded in 1915; Zebra, in 1914. Pilot was first called the Namiki Manufacturing Company after its founder, Ryosuke Namiki, but its trademark from 1916 onward was Pilot. Namiki had a background in the merchant marine, and his work in drafting ship designs with technical pens had sparked his attempts to improve them. Zebra’s founder, Tokumatsu Ishikawa, chose his trademark to reflect the family-oriented characteristics of zebras and also because some calligraphy pen strokes resemble zebra stripes. 

  I was happy that it was, indeed, fun to write with the Metropolitan. It had a soft brushed finish and was just a pleasant weight. The shin-kai turned out to be the blue where the horizon meets the sea.

I copied the Frost poem into my journal, hoping that by scratching one line at a time onto the paper I’d understand why he seems to have been so annoyed by the trees: We suffer them by the day/Till we lose all measures of pace,/And fixity in our joys…

Maybe Frost was daydreaming of unfixing his life. Maybe there was a new year coming up soon. Maybe a cup of Christmas spirits had set his brain adrift. He concludes: 

I shall set forth for somewhere,

I shall make the reckless choice

Some day when they are in voice

And tossing so as to scare

The white clouds over them on.

I shall have less to say,

But I shall be gone.

My glass was empty. My words were spent. I returned the Metropolitan to its foam-cushioned case and set forth for somewhere.

A Frosty Morning

I’ve started the next volume in the poetry-book pile: New Enlarged Pocket Anthology of Robert Frost’s Poems, edited and with commentary by Louis Untermeyer. Earlier this year I developed a habit of reading a little poetry aloud in the mornings; it’s been fun, mostly. I read a lot of Frost when I was a kid, but outside of revisiting “The Road Not Taken”—because it’s everywhere—I hadn’t felt the impulse to reread him. The second I started the anthology, though, I remembered what I’d loved about his work. The language, exact but not abstruse. The New England landscapes, the farmers and wives and townspeople. The stories, and the way the poet stepped in and out of them.

Today I read a poem called “The Code.” It’s also called “The Code—heroics,” but in this anthology the heroics is omitted. It’s an early work, published in Frost’s second collection, 1914’s North of Boston. It’s early, not youthful. In 1914 Frost was 40 years old. He would live until age 88, dying in 1963. By 1914 he’d dropped out of two colleges, Dartmouth and Harvard, lost both of his parents, married and fathered six children, worked at farming and teaching, and moved his family from New England to Merrie Olde England, where his first two books were published.

“The Code” is set in rural New England. It begins with three men at work in a meadow: a “town-bred” farmer and two hired hands. Hand 1, James, suddenly leaves. Hand 2 explains to the farmer why. It turns out that the farmer had expressed the thought that with a rain shower coming, they’d need to take pains with the hay-cocking. James had spent a half hour ruminating about the statement, concluded that the farmer was intentionally insulting him by telling him how to do his job, and then huffed away. Hand 2 informs the farmer that “The hand that knows his business won’t be told/To do work better or faster” and goes on to relate a tale about an incident with a country-bred farmer named Sanders. Sanders is an unpleasant but hard-working man who violates the code when he orders Hand 2 to throw a rack of hay into a barn bay, something Hand 2 was already about to do. Hand 2 retaliates by trying to drown Sanders in the hay. Sanders survives the experience, and so does the hand. He even keeps his job, because Sanders recognizes that he overstepped. “Did he discharge you?” asks the (presumably) horrified town-bred farmer. “Discharge me?” replies the hand. “No! He knew I did just right.”

When I was a kid, reading poems like this, I thought that Frost was a native New Englander who’d grown up on a farm. Nope: he was very much instead a “town-bred” person. Frost had relatives in New England, but the poet himself was born in California and raised in San Francisco until age 11, when his father died. At that point his family moved to the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, where his grandfather was an overseer at a mill. That tendency to comment on his stories might originate in his outsider status.

I reflected, on reading “The Code,” that it’s a wonder anything gets done in this world. The prickliness (and deadliness) of the farm hands may be exaggerated for comic effect, but the perils of violating a code are real. This is a serious challenge for those of us on the autistic spectrum. Sonny, Dave, and I have experienced a lot of misery through misunderstandings. We try to trouble-shoot for one another when we’re having some of those interpersonal issues, but it’s kind of a blind-leading-the-blind thing. I wish we had a Hand 2—borderline psychopath though he may be—to explain how to avoid offense.

Haunted

Especially when the October wind

With frosty fingers punishes my hair, 

Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire 

And cast a shadow crab upon the land. 

                                      —Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems 

Until a couple of days ago we’d been having quite a temperate October. The trees were turning amusing colors, and most mornings there were more leaves on the ground, but there’d been no  need for anything more than a light jacket. Then I left book club on Wednesday night–we meet at a restaurant–and it was cold and windy.

“Bring a sweater!” Connie, Choir Director, email, Thursday afternoon

Something was wrong with the heat at St. Pete’s on Thursday. Since the choir rehearses in a room the size of a barn which is a bit chilly on a good day, a sweater would be a good idea. The parking lot was cold, windy, and dark. The only illumination came from the orange fairy lights outlining a sign over the entrance of the “Not Too Spooky Haunted House” for kids that St. Pete’s runs every October. The narrow, steep set of steps descending to a heavy door sure looked spooky to me. I shivered a little as I passed.

That wintry hint in the October breeze was still in my mind this morning, Friday, when I read the opening lines of Thomas’ poem. I’m not far into the Collected Poems yet, and I’m hoping I’ll start to catch on better to Thomas’ style eventually. The autism in my brain has accidentally cemented reading a couple of poems aloud into a morning routine and strongly suggests that I tackle my accumulated poetry collection one book at a time. There have been benefits. I can immerse myself in a single writer’s voice, and also it lessens the guilt I feel when, toting a laundry basket, I pass the bookcase whose contents consist of shrink-wrapped board games and worthy books that I should have read all the way through but haven’t. I’ve checked off Keats and Herrick and moved on to Thomas.

His poems are tougher than I anticipated, adding a frisson of fear to my morning reading. What if I don’t understand this poem? What if I can’t understand this poem? His pieces bring back memories of the star students in the poetry workshops of my past. I did quite a few workshops but never quite got the knack of writing anything that sounded like a real poem— dense, word-drunk, allusive, with subtle points that could only be understood after much reflection and analysis.

One time I came near to achieving something approaching this style through a writing exercise that involved taking a line from a real poet’s poem and manipulating it by using antonyms, changing the word order, etc., and then working from that first line. This technique produced something that sounded like a poem, although I had no idea what it meant. In workshop the teacher liked it, and so did most of the other students, who enthusiastically explained my composition to me. (The best poet in the class didn’t like it—he said he couldn’t make heads or tails of it; he was probably right.)

Thursday evening, most of the choir members wore sweaters. This was handy because after rehearsal we got to tour the haunted house. Five rooms, one ghost, one witch, a trio of singing jack o’ lanterns, an old-fashioned TV in a cabinet, Pirates of the Caribbean, and skeletons galore. We chanted as instructed to urge a ghost to appear. That was the most fun. Repeating short phrases, not thinking about them too hard. I think Dylan Thomas would have enjoyed chanting also. While a child he fell in love with the words of Mother Goose nursery rhymes as “words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance,” he recalled. As an actor, he’d probably have enjoyed playing one of the pirates, or a wizard.

Haunted houses have never been my thing; I usually find them overwhelming and confusing. (Scary movies have never been my thing, either: one horror film can give me a year’s worth of nightmares.) Maybe some of the issue is not being being exposed enough to these situations. The fundie churches of my childhood, generally suspicious of Halloween, didn’t host haunted houses. But surprisingly, I enjoyed the not-too-spooky house, especially the last bit.

In the final room we were given novelty spectacles that made the walls seem covered with floating, twinkling jack o’ lanterns. I loved the nonsense of it. It occurred to me while I was reading today’s selection that requiring that Thomas’s poems make 100% sense might not be the point. So I read without trying to stop and analyze and found my favorite so far. It was like my first time at the ocean, when I stepped into the water and realized the waves would never stop. A little bit frightening, but a bigger bit thrilling.

Here’s how the Thomas ends: 

The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry

Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.

By the sea’s side hear the dark-vowelled birds.