Naked and Aimless

I'm teaching a writing class at SPU this term that I'm calling Thinking Out Loud, the course text for which is Alan Jacobs' How to Think. Yesterday, we were discussing the chapter "The Money of Fools," which, among other things, discusses the metaphors we live by. The book has been a success in class, though sometimes I worry that Jacobs writes so lucidly that I'll have little work to do. We're trying to frame take-aways from the book: how will we conduct ourselves differently after having confronted these ideas, and for this week, one of them was simply to mark, to listen for the embedded metaphors around us, and then to interrogate those for possible unintended (yet still powerful) influences. We'll try to notice when a political commentator refers to the peaceful transition of power between two parties serving the smae country as "a battle," featuring "victories," and even "casualties." And then we'll try to think of other ways the same phenomena could be framed, perhaps more helpfully. 

We talked about the Italian phrase for good luck (particularly on tests)--in bocca al lupo-- "Stick it in the wolf's mouth," and then someone brought up the admittedly strange benediction wherein we suggest to our performing friends that they "break a leg." Our class discussion reminded me of a buried metaphor I heard a few years ago and have been thinking about—on and off— since. 

I found myself sitting on the outside deck at Fremont Coffee one summer morning, on what happened to be the summer solstice. I had heard, vaguely, that there was a parade, but saw no evidence thereof until I saw a fully nude man riding a bicycle, standing on the pedals as though looking around for someone. I looked to my fellow customers for verification that we were all indeed observing the same bizarre phenomena. They were non-plussed. Then three girls rode by, looking similarly lost and also in the buff. By that point, we coffee sippers had pieced together that this was some kind of demonstration, likely connected with the solstice, and I thought: four riders; that's about right for the exhibitionist population of a city this size; plus, it's cold out. Then 150 more rode by, variously body painted, pierced, shaved, not, and otherwise just so very there. 

It was funny to me how the critical mass mattered. The one guy I took for a pervert. The three lost girls I felt sorry for. But when the parade route rode right down the street I was sitting on, the whole mood changed almost to elation. People clapped and cheered. They brought their kids to line the streets, carrying them on shoulders like at any other procession of mayor and firetrucks and marching bands. And then the man next to me said the strangest thing; raising his fist, he shouted to the naked bikers, "Go get 'em!" 

Right then, I asked myself some questions. Go get whom? And how? The clothed? Christians? All that was going to take place, objectively speaking, is these people will ride their bikes naked around a few blocks, then go home, shower, and go out to brunch. But this fellow seems to have thought they were warriors of some kind, conducting a raid. I mused and smiled, and, thinking back now on the morning while thinking through Jacobs' book, I think, I think he imagined these riders as a kind of cavalry and that they were, by airing their fannies thus, going to take down "The Patriarchy," whatever they took that to mean. 

I think he thought--and I think they thought--that they were soldiers, giving up their own dignity, rather than their lives, to wage war on Mr. Rogers, or Andy Griffith, or the guys from Mad Men. That somehow, their taking a stand now against the normal worked to undo the very idea of normalcy and thereby of the status quo and somehow thereby against the church, or the married w/ 2.5 kids, or maybe the suburbs. 

I suppose that's the strange thing about bacchanalian rites: they're great fun, but one can never quite see what the objective is. But that's also the strange thing about metaphors: they burrow and sometimes need to be burned backward out, like ticks.

A Day in the Life

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I’ve just finished reading Ruth Goodman’s How to be a Victorian (Norton 2013) and I found it so informative and delightful I thought I’d mention it here. Like some other period histories, Goodman’s book relies on periodicals, etiquette manuals, and advertisements to render a portrait of daily life in the British c19, but unlike other such works, she actually tries most of the methods herself. It is interesting to hear about the methods of bathing in a typical Victorian household. I’ve often seen the ceramic pitcher and bowl on dressing tables in paintings and illustrations from the period and wondered just how they were used. But it is quite another thing to hear a twenty-first century woman bathing herself according to the methods—say, for example, using no soap or water but merely scubbing the entire body with a linen cloth— and hearing her relate that her skin glowed thereafter and that it somehow kept body odor at bay. I loved hearing that her experiment in Victorian haircare methods—no shampooing, only a weekly rinse and otherwise regular brushing with natural bristles—was so successful that she’s adopted it as her own regimen.

Or again, we’ve all heard over and over the feminist canard that corsets were a tool of oppression and so tight as to render women’s lives a dull dream of constant pain. But here this Goodman tries one out—effectively shrinking her waist up to 4 inches at one point—and saying that she’s rarely felt more comfortable: that it turns out using one’s abs to hold oneself up all day (or slouching when they’re exhausted, as most of us moderns do) is the real pain, and having a little external support not only corrects one’s posture, but makes one feel more elegant almost immediately. She says she felt like she could sit and read all day when corseted: what a life! Granted, she does say that it was itchy, but that isn’t the usual complaint. Also—something I didn’t know and had never conceived of—men used to wear them too. Apparently, corseting was not a gendered activity, especially in the early part of the century.  

Anyway, it’s all wonderful, even when it is depressing. One hates hearing about the long work days for little pay, about the age at which boys were sent off to factory or farm work (often 6 years old) to begin 12 hour days that would not cease for them till death or injury, but even so, the pride they took even at that age in turning over their wages to their mothers is touching somehow, despite everything else. 

A sympathetic, well-researched, and enjoyable project, this.

A Few from Italy

As I intimated in an earlier post, I have had the good fortune some years to take groups of students around Italy. I believe strongly in study abroad programs, my own world having been opened up in so many ways by the first one I took, to England, which made me want to be an English major and a professor. 

Much as I love Italy, I've never brought a camera before. Perhaps that's because I love Italy so. I discuss that conflict--wanted to capture the spirit of a place but not wanting to tame it, to own it-- in the poem "Artifact," from my book. There is more than one way to experience a place, to interact with it and to remember it than most tourists dream. Part of my hesitance was knowing I couldn't do justice to what I was seeing: Rome just doesn't fit in a lens, and part of it was not wanting to participate in the gawkers' impulse to raise a camera (or more often, a smartphone) in these ancient, and often holy, places before I'd tried to see them. I wanted to keep the order clear: engage first; record second.

But this summer, I took along my small camera and had a great time with it. Partly, that was the result of discipline. Some days, I toted it around all day and didn't click a single frame. Most days, I took two discreet shots and got back into the present tense as quickly as I could. I'm not suggesting this is the only way to experience Rome, or any place for that matter, and if others take pictures the whole time, that's fine, but for me, the mediating tendency distances in a way I can't reconcile. Still, I'm happy to have the images, from which the following compositions are sampled. 

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I've got a few more travel stories coming out various publications in the next year. If you put your email in the box I'll let you know when they drop. Meanwhile, #protip: if you're travelling somewhere, bring along an actual camera if you want to take pictures, and if you want to make the trip magical, bring along a book of poems. 

Gates Reading

Image by David Wittig

Bless their hearts, my department has just asked me to give the annual Gates Reading at Seattle Pacific University, this year. They had asked if I could recommend suitable candidates to bring to campus for the event, an endowed reading series named in honor of long-time educator Fan Mayhall Gates, and I dutifully furnished a list. X would be great. Oh, I wonder if we could get Y. Then, the reversal. We'd like you to give the reading this year, one of them said, and then, you're the right poet at the right time, which I just found, and find, so endearing.

If also a bit intimidating. I haven't any sense of the scale of this thing, or whether I can find that many people in and around Seattle who want to come hear my poems, but last year's reader was Suzanne Wolfe, who novel "Confessions of X" just won the CT Book of the Year award. Before that, Jennifer Maier, whose career I've watched since attending her first book's release party over ten years ago, and before that Gina Ochsner. As I say: daunting.

But what fun! Since they asked, it's all I can think about. Will my (current?) (former?) students come? Will friends from Northwest University make the great trek across the lake? Will the bookstore stock copies for sale at the reading, or should I bring them?

Because of the timing, this will act as the de facto book release party. We'll see how much the campus community comes out to support their fellows; I can't really surmise. The Roethke Memorial Reading Series at the University of Washington usually has people sitting in the aisles, but then, the last time I went the reader was Paul Muldoon, so. Meantime, I'd better design some posters. And pick some music to play beforehand as people file in. And make sure the book is indeed available by then.

Those of you in the Seattle area (and those with surpluses of airline miles) are most cordially invited to attend.   

27 April 2017

7:30 pm

SPU Art Gallery

Come Away! Come Away!

Coffee at Campo dei Fiori, about a block from our classroom.

This summer, it is my good fortune to accompany my colleague, the (extraordinary) poet Jennifer Maier, on Seattle Pacific University's study abroad trip to Rome. I've been before, both as student and later as writer-in-residence, on similar trips with the University of Washington, and they have been absolutely formative for me as a scholar and as a person. At least half the poems in my coming book are responses to various phenomena I encountered there. A fair bit of my dissertation on The Drive to Failure was conceived as a response to the layers of empire on view in that city and the treatment of artistic fragments in same. I've published two essays about some art I saw in situ, this one on Caravaggio's Calling of St. Matthew and this one on Bernini's David. Basically, I know I would still have been me in some sense had I never been to Rome, but it's hard to imagine how.

Eligible SPU students should consider coming along. While there, we'll see more than anyone could put into words, in addition to furthering mastery of writerly discipline and literary interpretation. There's a reason that generations of Europeans considered their educations incomplete until they visited The Eternal City. Come find out why.

Some highlights, according to previous participants can be viewed in this gallery.

You can apply through the SPU study abroad office, or email me with any questions you might have.

Music/ 2016

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Chvrches

Every Open Eye

This record humbled me. I loved their first, The Bones of What you Believe, and we'd seen a moving concert in our year away, but I couldn't get my head around this one. I'm a crier--plays, mostly, but also classical music-- but nothing wrecks me like "The Mother we Share;" I just bubble right over. On this new one, nothing. I tried maybe three times through and found it all shallow. Then, a tweet. Aaron Sprinkle (@aaronsprinkle), whose various contributions, in Poor Old Lu, as a solo artist under his own moniker, as producer) are featured on my best records lists more often than anyone else's, said: 

GUYS I AM FLIPPING OUT ABOUT THIS @chvrches ALBUM! I can't handle how perfect it is! #everyopeneye https://t.co/PgaP4YKzwk

— Aaron Sprinkle (@aaronsprinkle) December 5, 2015

Perfect? This guy knows more about music than anyone I can think of and he can't handle how great this record is? Who am I then to demure? I tried again. Nothing. But Aaron Sprinkle said! Again. Nothing. That one song is kind of fun though. Again. Again. Pretty soon, I loved the album, song for song and note for note. It just grew. Pretty soon, I didn't want to listen to anything else. It was a case, too rare in this time of fleeting pleasure, fleeting attention, and belief in one's own every whim as the surest route to fulfillment, of shutting up and listening to someone who knows what they're talking about. Of learning then, and of difficult beauty whose pleasures are all the more lasting for the contest. 

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Leon Bridges

Coming Home

A book by its cover. I knew I'd dig this record before I heard any of it. This is exactly the kind of retro cool I'm a sucker for: the font, his clothes, his posture, the old LP label, all catnip for me. When I put it on and heard those rolling drums and the vintage mic (or mic effect, no matter), I was a goner. The heartening backstory, Bridges' devotion to his mother, and his old-time religion all add to the attraction for me. A lot of people compare him to 70's Sam Cooke, so I spent a good few months listening; I can see the resemblance I guess, but none of Cooke's actual songs stick out the way most of these do. I tend to think of Bridges more along the lines of Aloe Blacc, who, if he weren't busy trying to be an average rapper, would be an incredible soul singer. Good stuff. 

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Alvaays

Alvaays

Glorious girl pop. I love the self-aware contradictions in their breakout track that begins "you expressed openly your contempt for matrimony," and whose chorus swells into a plea, "Marry me, Archie!" Another win for the retro-cool camp, this time 1950's beach-core. When I thought about the year in music, this was always the first to come up as one of the clear contenders.  

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Julien Baker

Sprained Ankle

Heart. On. Sleeve. This music is painfully earnest and painful in all the best ways. It's devastating. I used to think early Bright Eyes, or maybe Grouper was the saddest music I knew. No more. It's Baker by a yard. But what a sweet ache. Thanks to Joel Heng Hartse for the tip on this one. 

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David Bazan

Blanco

Basically, if Bazan is making a record, I'm going to buy it and listen to it and think long and hard about it. At this point, we've been together so long that to do otherwise would amount to a kind of adultery. Since Pedro the Lion's Whole ep in 1997, I have adored this music. It's shaped a huge part of my aesthetic. Now that he's gone from believer to thoughtful questioner to glib reactionary atheist it's harder to get behind some (most?) of the things he says, but the music is still concerned, still true in ways I hardly ascribe to any other recording artist. Blanco came out within a week or so of the new Radiohead and was everything I wished that latter album would have been.

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Bon Iver

22, A Million

This album makes me feel old because it's so clearly from the future. I just shake my head muttering "what will they think of next?" How did he manage to make that beautiful? And then that too? All the bits and beeps that make Age of Adz so precocious and annoying are here used in service of..well, not songs quite...what even are these sounds? Does this count as music? This is art-core of a type no one would have expected from the bearded cabin boy from Wisconsin. That makes three Bon Iver records now that have topped my year end lists, each massively, unrecognizably different from the rest. 

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Various Artists

Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording)

And then there's this. Hamilton is a cultural phenomenon at present, and a play before it's a soundtrack, but this recording is how I encountered it, not having seen a single scene from the set, not knowing what anyone involved looked like, and having no sense of its popularity. I just listened to this soundtrack because I liked the star on front and the idea of an historical musical. Using a streaming service, I read along with the lyrics to the whole album the first time through, so this was sort-of concurrently a literary experience. It was late when I put it on, so I listened to the first half and went to bed feeling like Keats' "watcher of the skies;" something new and strange and beautiful had entered the galaxy. Next day, I couldn't wait to find the alone time to finish the record and I basically haven't shut up about it since. I'm not sure this counts as music, quite, but 2016 will always be for me the time when this was happening. 

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I've kept a list of the most important records for my life every year since 1992. I haven't posted them all, since I'm daunted by the task of explaining why each of over 100 albums is so meaningful for me, but you can see a few recent years here.

Happy 2017!

Writing Pet Peeves

In a sense, it isn’t right to call the following errors “pet peeves,” since they are, well, errors. It’s not like they’re idiosyncratic to me; it’s not like they’re pets that I nurture, little annoyances I nurse for the pleasure of hating something. It’s just that these are the writing errors that I’m tired of pointing out. I’d like to move on to getting upset about other mistakes you make, to believe that your sins are unique to you instead of stamped out at some kind of demonic factory.

Since I’m posting them here, I’d like to say make any one of these errors in a paper you turn in for me and you automatically fail. I mean, forewarned is forearmed, right? But I’m not really saying that. I’m just saying knock it off.

I’m tempted to list plagiarism here at the outset because it’s the most disconcerting, but plagiarism isn’t really a pet peeve; it’s a crime. It’s a subcategory of fraud, actually, since it involves a writer trying to gain access to a degree that confers benefits (incl. subsidized loans rates etc.) under false pretenses. Stay as far away as you can.

Referring to anyone by his or her first name who is not your roommate

Students do it all the time, especially to women. Here’s the rule: when talking about historical personages you get to write a first name once: the first time you write it. Every time after, it’s just the last name. So, “Dickinson says,” not “Emily says.”

Misusing the conditional tense

This one is so ubiquitous and so new that I think it must be the fault of some sarcastic movie I didn’t see. I can just imagine some character sneering in response to a parent who asks “what’s this” something like “that would be a tattoo” meaning of course, “that is a tattoo.” Anyway, it leaked into the language. About five years ago, students started writing “would be” instead of “is.” I get papers that say things like “John Keats would be the best Romantic poet,” and I think to myself, "Would be” if what? If Shelley hadn’t lived? Before that, no one ever misused the conditional, which, as the name implies, suggests conditions. Don’t say “would” unless you’re prepared to answer them.

Dropped Quotes

Every sentence you write has to have your words in it; you don't get to pop a quote into a paper, let us awe at its majesty and then watch you stand back and say things about it. You don't spoon spaghetti into someone's open palm, do you? Same here. Get a plate and serve up the quote like a good host.

Citation Errors

These bother me only because they’re so easy to get right. The differences between MLA APA and Chicago citation styles can be daunting, sure, but no one is asking you to memorize them. You should write academic papers with a style guide right in front of you. The other thing that’s weird about them is that people usually do extra work to make the error. MLA requires, for example, just the page number after a citation, as in “Whitman writes ‘Oh me’ (43),” yet I frequently get (Page 43), which is 4 extra keystrokes, or (P. 43) or (Pg. 43) or some other fantastic variation.

So,

It may seem to you that these don’t matter much, and perhaps once they didn’t, but in a digitized academy, command-inputs and metadata matter more than ever. Put a } instead of a] in a line of code and the program will not work. It may only mean that the little jumping man in a video game glitches for a second, but then again, it may mean that someone’s heart medicine isn't dispensed into the IV bag. Be careful in small things. Learning to take care is one of the things you’re here to master after all, and if it isn’t, it should be.

Other things come up all the time: grammar perversions, punctuation whimsy, topic sentences exhibiting irresponsible leadership, but those things I take in stride. Not so the above. The proverbial stride, the whole gait and carriage is hobbled hereby and, like any wounded animal, I start snarling.

We Three Kings

This coming 2017 is going to be a great year for poetry. Apart from my own poems, coming in March from Cascade Books, my friend and sometime traveling companion Kevin Craft is publishing his second book, Vagrants and Accidentals with the lovely University of Washington Press. Craft's previous book Solar Prominence is full of formal fun and closes with the poem "To an Amphora, Salvaged," which is one of my top ten favorite poems ever, by anyone, and which I read on my podcast here.

Meanwhile, Jeremiah Webster, another dear friend and my erstwhile colleague at Northwest University, is publishing his first collection of poems on Anchor and Plume. I wrote the following endorsement for the book's rear cover, so I won't elaborate here. Suffice it to say: I'm excited for the next year. 

After so much posturing on the parts of pundits, preening celebrities, poets on the picked through street market of the avant-garde; after so much hollow flash, so much essentially genre-bent lineated prose of small epiphanies; after so much, well, else, Jeremiah Webster's After So Many Fires comes out of the Pacific Northwest like rain: greening everything, cleaning the language, sharpening the eye, casting a slant-lit wonder about this whole good God-haunted earth, and, most importantly, allowing again a kind of deep breathing. 

• You can pre-order Webster's book from the A&P website
• Or order Craft's from the UWP website
• Watch this space for ordering info for Phases.

Happy 2017, readers! 

Big News

Phases

A little bit ago, I posted about my new poetry collection, 10+ years in the making and how I was ready to send it out. I'm excited, deeply humbled, a little giddy and a little scared to say that it's been picked up for publication this year by Cascade Books. I sent to them because 

• they're based in the Pacific Northwest (and if this book is set anywhere [other than Rome] it's set here 
• they have a small, carefully curated poetry roster, including Luci Shaw, Paul Mariani, Brad Davis, and Jill Peleaz Baumgaertner: poets I admire, all
• they published Joel Heng Hartse's Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll, which I adore. 

I'm calling it Phases, because it's more moon-y and map-like than self-concerned and confessional. Currently, I'm busy culling the manuscript of weaker poems and adding in some newly finished pieces that better fit with the press series. More "Sir John Donne" than "Jack Donne, rake," if you take my meaning. 

I've just had the news so it's all a little dizzying right now, but watch this space, follow my Fb page, twitter, or tumblr for (sporadic, non-spammy) updates. Meanwhile, rejoice with me! 

From Seattle to France, with Love

I was devastated by the Nice attacks. I don't know if it was because this has already been such a difficult year in world events, or because I was just there recently and so know the place, or because of their particularly gruesome nature, but I just can't find any words to say to myself or to anyone else about them. 

Thankfully, we don't always have to say things. As I tried to make clear in this talk on Poetry and the Art of Suffering, one of the key functions of art is to do the thinking for us when we can't think straight, to order our feelings when all is disorder. It's the only thing that has helped me through this awful week. 

The day after the attacks, my wife was set to have rehearsal for her upcoming Romeo and Juliet at City Opera Ballet. Instead, they improvised movement in response to the Bastille tragedy. Nothing was scripted: the props in the dancers' hands are just what happened to be in our trunk. The tube in the background just happened to be sitting in the studio as a prop for another show. They just moved. She set up a camera to record the 40+ minutes of dancing but the battery died after 17. 

When she came home, I spent the day cutting together this little video of their work that seemed like a gift, to me, to France, to each other. It's a single take and a single angle, but working with these images, movements, and emotions has helped. Usually, I just well up with tears seeing these bodies holding each other, but that seems to help too. 

Anyway, I know it doesn't do anything, but here it is: a gift for the grieving.

Allons enfants de la Patrie. Vive la France.

How does one help those suffering thousands of miles away? Sometimes, we can merely weep with those who weep, we can pray for them, send our condolences, and also love and care for the people around us. We can also make art, which speaks where words can't. On Friday morning, instead of commencing with my usual rehearsals for another project I am working on, I gathered the dancers, and we created an improvisational tribute to the recent tragedy that occurred in Nice on Bastille Day, 2016. This video is a segment of the 17 minutes that my camera captured before running out of battery, out of the 40 minutes that we danced.

A New Collection

I've been writing poems since I was 14 years old. At least, those are the earliest poems I've saved, or that I know anything about. It seems to me sometimes that I must have started earlier than that though. Looking though old papers a few years ago, I found a stack of poems given to me by my 4th grade teacher--her own--that I remember her sharing with me during recess. There was one particularly fine line about a rabbit's having been run over by a train, "escaping on iron wheels into the Kansas blackness." I remember imagining that darkness more black somehow than ours, out on the Oregon coast. What kind of teacher shares her own verse with a 4th-grader, or, better yet, what kind of 4th grader volunteers to stay in from recess to discuss poetry with his teacher? This guy. 

In high school, I wrote all kinds of poems. Usually, they were rhymed and formal, Keastian and melodramatic, obviously, but still interested in the sounds of words at least as much as in my touchy feelings. I wrote poems in pencil on my desktops because I wanted them to exist only in time and not in space: to have worked hard at something and not to preserve it, not to find it precious. I wrote poems with a friend, a version of the exquisite corpse done through note passing to opposite sides of the class.  

In college, my freshman year RA recommended I take a Creative Writing class with Jill Peleaz Baugaertner. So I kept an eye on the schedule, but none were offered that year, nor the next. Flummoxed, I stopped by her office and asked "what gives? How am I supposed to learn to be a poet if you don't offer this important class?" She said she loved teaching that class but that enrollment needed to be met. 

"Well, I'll take it, and I bet I can get 3 friends to take it too. Let's just offer it and see what happens." 

Bless her, she agreed and the class filled right up.

After graduation, I headed to Flagstaff, AZ, mostly to hang around with my brother, who I'd missed while in college. Once there, I started to miss the life of the mind and so enrolled in the Creative Writing MA at Northern Arizona where I studied under Barbara Anderson and Jim Simmerman. Sitting in the Flagstaff library one day, I sent an email to Richard Kenney (whose book I had just picked up on a nearby shelf) from the University of Washington. I want in, it said, basically. 

"Well, it's a competative program, he said, "but here's what I'll do. If you send me some poems, I'll read them."

My advisors at NAU said outright that they'd never placed anyone at UW and that I was aiming a bit high. "That's like a top ten program," they warned.

Next thing I knew I was headed to Seattle to join to cohort in the MFA program taught by Heather McHugh, Linda Bierds, and Richard Kenney, who, under the auspices of the Rome trip, became a close mentor.

I started publishing individual poems right after college, but I've never been very good at submissions. First it was all the stamps, now it's recombining individual poem files into selections and uploading them through e-portals. That, and keeping track of where I've sent them and which ones I have out. But I'm trying to make a commitment to share more this year. I feel like all this work (my hardrive is full of casual essays, recollections, book ideas, and of course poems) is choking me. I need to get it out into the air so I can make some more things. 

To that end, I've put together a collection of poems. I've got enough for two books at least, but I've thinned it down to what I believe are my strongest pieces. None of the ones from college survived, and only one, I think, from Flagstaff. Six or so are new this year. I've had hordes of ideas for clever organizational schemes, including one based on Galileo's names for lunar regions, which have great titles like "Lake of Hatred" and "Sea of the Unknown," but I've dropped them all here and just tried to link one poem to the next based on shared imagery or some other evolution. It's just a gathering and I'm getting ready to send it out to publishers this summer. It's called Hail, and I can't wait for you to see it.

Our June

When it isn’t summer, I always think of it as a magical time, but can’t always recall why. Sure, the weather is better, but does that really lend so much to my experiences? Last month we moved back to Seattle after 2 years away. It’s bliss. This is some of why. Here’s what I did each day in June, when I wasn’t working.

1. Lunch at Senso Unico w/ my daughter while wife shopped downtown.
2. My first day getting into the gym at SPU.
3. Finished my children’s book.
4. I don’t know what I did this day because I forgot to write it down.
5. Pancake breakfast at Swedish Cultural Center. This is kind-of a Seattle tradition and something I’d always wanted to try. 
6. Family evening walk in Mrytle Edwards Park along Elliot Bay. 
7. Morning walk with wife on the beach at Golden Gardens. A heard of sea otters barking like mad! 
8. Normal day: worked then grilled outside in evening.
9. Poetry Reading at Phinney Books, featuring Richard Kenney, and where I was tons of friends. Beers with Fowler before.
10. Quiet evening at home.
11. Meet Jeremiah at Third Place Books at the top of Lake Washington. (I buy Iphegenia at Aulis trans. Merwin)
12. Art opening for my friend Hopkins, spent the day meeting people and having hors d’ouevres at Zingaro. Wife attends Pacific Northwest Ballet season finale in evening.
13. Recovery day
14. Visit to Frye Art Gallery 
15. Tennis in the morning
16. Lunch with my friend Andrew, then family evening walk from Queen Anne to Fremont, over the bridge at sunset. Drinks at Red Door.
17. Surprise concert by The Helio Sequence, a favorite, right across the canal. We walk to it in our pajamas and dance like children.
18. Wife attends Whim W’him show at Cornish Playhouse
19. Day in Capital Hill: Top Pot doughnuts, Elliot Bay Books, then CD store. (I buy MWS Project)
20. Worked and grilled in eve.
21. I teach evening class at Northwest University.
22. Alain de Botton reading at Seattle Public Library. Drinks after at Good Bar in Pioneer Square, which is amazing. 
23. Taking it easy.
24. Our friends the Foxes come for dinner.
25. My first soccer game ever: go Sounders!
26. Picnic lunch by Fremont canal, evening church meeting.
27. Sunny day, reading Henry James on bench in front yard.
28. I get good news regarding a publication.
29. Men’s morning meeting; dinner al fresco.
30. I write this, thinking what a blessed existence this is.

Next month, we’re hosting my friend El Che, going to the Olympic Peninsula with my brother’s family, and camping on the Lower Skokomish river with my father-in-law; wife is having a dance show at Bellevue Art Museum, and Shakespeare-in-the-Park begins, so things don’t show any sign of letting up.

Taking Stock

Inspired by my sometime life coach, a part-time position he shares with Annie Dillard, Frederich Buechner, C.S. Lewis, Winston Churchill, Austin Kleon, Matt Might, Brett McKay and Marcus Aurelius, I am taking a moment at the outset of summer to take stock of the year. Though the natural breaking point for the year is December, and though I usually do feel reflective then, as an academic, my years sheer cleanly along the school calendar’s lines, recently involving moves, new places of employ, and similar obvious points of development. So, what has happened just now? And am I living the sort of life I mean to, or just letting it happen to me? Following the model, then, I asked myself some questions.

1. What are the core values that drive my life and work?

These are the things I think I’m about, when I remember to think about myself and what I’m doing here. 

I. Scholarship

• Am I contributing to the discipline, or merely standing around in it?
• Am I teaching in such a way as not only to impart skills, but to elicit wonder and appreciation for the subject?
• Am I making an effort to create a more sociable, connected academia?

II. Creativity

• Am I writing poems, which fills me with purpose as almost nothing else does? 
• Am I engaging in other artistic pursuits that nourish my spirit and benefit others?
• Am I sharing these things with the world?

III. Hospitality

• Am I acting as a steward of my place on earth, making it as comfortable and welcoming as I can? 
• Am I reaching out to others, fostering connection through shared space, time, attention, conversation, meals, adventure? 

IV. Strength

• Am I mentally strong? Reading difficult texts, working through problems, memorizing poetry? 
• Am I physically strong, working out strenuously and regularly in order to discipline my body, which helps me both sleep and focus? 

V. Spirituality

• Am I praying or meditating regularly?
• Am I involved in the local church?
• Am I studying theology (books, podcasts, sermons)?
• Am I reading the Bible? 

These are my core values. I wouldn’t name them except that Brett said it would help, and then this study showed that it would help massively, like, in every area of one’s life, to conjure such a list and act in accordance with it. Honestly, it was super fun to try to whittle down my first list of 20-something “core” principles to these five. Now that they’re up there, they seem about right. 

2. How am I living and working with integrity right now?

Academically, it was a pretty good year. I published one article in Romantic Circles and finished two more. One is in the revise and resubmit stage at a good journal, and the other is under consideration elsewhere. I’ve agreed to review a book for Romantic Textualities, which I’ll do over the summer, and I presented at one conference Faith in Humanities at Northwest University, and had an abstract accepted to another, my first NAVSA, which will be held in Phoenix in October. Moreover, I taught 9 undergraduate courses, some of them the best I’ve ever given. 

Creatively, the year didn’t feel full, but looking back on it (the point of this exercise) it doesn’t seem to have been a wash. With my friend Joel Hartse, I co-edited (his idea, I just set up the format and harassed writers) Chrindie 95, a music appreciation site for a rather particular sub-culture, to which I also contributed an article. I also joined a writers’ group at the university, whose encouragement (and deadlines) led me to finish I think 10 new poems, which is a good haul for me. None published, alas, but a few sent out, which is a start. I also reformatted Poems for the People and added 2 new episodes, and counseled my wife ad infinitum on her Romeo and Juliet project, which will continue into next year. 

We moved twice within this last year, from London to Kirkland, and then to Seattle, so much of the year was spent setting up homes. In each of them, we did pretty well, despite barely being able to afford them. The suburbs were alienating. Despite our invitations, we could hardly get people to come, but we still had my brother’s family out, my wife’s mother, and my friend El Che (twice), in addition to hosting Christmas with our friends and their kids. Since moving to Seattle last month, we’ve already had two proper dinner parties, and the house is coming together weekly. In addition to our time abroad, we also took a trip to Arizona to see our families, and I took a road trip with my Dad from there to Seattle, which I cherished.  

Physically, I’ve probably never been in worse shape. It happens to all new dads, I hear, but it feels awful. I’ve turned a corner on it though, and am beginning to see change. Happily, this was probably the best year for sleep in my whole life. An insomniac since birth, this year I was just so exhausted, it was rarely an issue. 

3. How can I set a higher standard in the future?

There are some areas where I’m still struggling. Summer is always a time of renewal for me, so I’m at the beginning of a new set of resolutions. It’s hard to say which of them will stick, but…

I need to be in better shape. I’m just not as much fun to be around when I’m low-energy, and I get crankier more easily when I don’t have the serotonin balance borne of having sweat through toxins. I’ve exercised more this month than I have in the past 12 combined and it’s just starting to show in both my moods and my arms. Need to keep this up. 

Write consistently. I wrote a lot this year, and in a number of genres, but they were all random, done at odd moments and cobbled together piecemeal. I never had a plan for any of it. Maybe this is just my style, what “works” for me, but I want to be more consistently productive, if only for the sake of my anxiety. I feel terrible when I think I’m not getting any work done. Part of curing this is taking care of the step above, and part is scheduling. 

I can share more than I am now. This was an intensive year for mentoring students, supporting colleagues, and advising artist-friends, so I probably can’t give any more of my time, but I have way too many projects living on my hard-drive. I need to share more of the things I’m making, even if they aren’t perfect. Some of my reticence is professionally motivated. I’m still looking for a full-time academic job, and one of the first things committees do is google the applicant, and I can’t really post poems that haven’t been published yet for legal reasons, so I guess I have to submit more so that I can eventually share them. I’d like to share more classroom ideas too. 

Read the news less. This might seem counter intuitive, but I’m motivated by Yeats, who wrote in June 1915 to his American friend and patron John Quinn about WWI then raging across Europe. "It was," he said:

merely the most expensive outbreak of insolence and stupidity the world has ever seen and I give it as little thought as I can. I went to my club this afternoon to look at the war news but read Keats’s Lamia instead.

At least half of my reading time, writing time, and emotional energy get sucked up by responding to items in the news cycle. Someone will write something silly, and instead of shrugging, I churn out a response (which usually lives in my notebook) and spend the next few days fuming about it. This is ridiculous. This year, I’d like to direct my energies more than having them directed for me.

So there we are. I’m in the city I love, in the neighborhood I want to live in, working at the university where I’ve always wanted to work. It’s the start of summer and everything feels possible. 

Extraordinary Life

My favorite part of last night’s American Literature lecture was talking about how Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative both reads us and revises earlier memoirs. A moving account of his abduction and enslavement from Nigeria all through Africa begins with a kind of apologia for his writing in the first place. He begins,

I BELIEVE it is difficult for those who publish their own memoirs to escape the imputation of vanity; nor is this the only disadvantage under which they labour: it is also their misfortune, that what is uncommon is rarely, if ever, believed, and what is obvious we are apt to turn from with disgust, and to charge the writer with impertinence.

We discussed this text in my evening course following a break in which, once announced, every student pulled out a phone and stared into it for the duration, and preceding another one, which proceeded similarly. Oh if only Equiano were here to indict us! Too much attention to oneself is vanity, he admonishes. And furthermore, 

people generally think those memoirs only worthy to be read or remembered which abound in great or striking events, those, in short, which in a high degree excite either admiration or pity: all others they consign to contempt and oblivion.

Which is to say: no one cares what you had for lunch, or that you’re feeling sleepy right now. These “updates” to which so many of us devote so much energy are bound for oblivion. But Equiano takes it a bit further still. “ It is therefore,” he writes, “not a little hazardous in a private and obscure individual, and a stranger too, thus to solicit the indulgent attention of the public; especially when I own I offer here the history of neither a saint, a hero, nor a tyrant.” I just love the care and deference he shows his audience. His apologia is a real apology: sorry for taking your time. I know it’s a bit vain and self-indulgent, but I thought I could help… Would that more of us felt the public indulgent and ourselves hazardous to solicit it.

The thing is, Equiano led an extraordinary life! Remarkable in every way, from his early Edenic life in the jungle kingdom of Benin, to his travels all over the continent and then the globe, to his survival of the horrible slave ships, everything that happened to him was useful for correction as well as full of the marvelous, and all couched in his lucid indulgent prose. That this man says: 

I believe there are few events in my life, which have not happened to many” which is again deferential and apt, and still further did I consider myself an European, I might say my sufferings were great: but when I compare my lot with that of most of my countrymen, I regard myself as a particular favourite of Heaven, and acknowledge the mercies of Providence in every occurrence of my life.

I find it heartening, beautifully felt and beautifully expressed, and well, extraordinary. 

In Praise of Peer-Review

Can I just say that I love the peer-review process? Sure, it’s a bit cumbersome, and the timeline to publication rather long, but sometimes it’s enormously helpful.

I just sent back to the editors an article that has been through the revise and resubmit stage twice. At the first pass, the readers asked for lots of information I had no intention of providing; essentially, they wished I had written a different paper. I fussed about it for a day or two, and then decided to write the paper they were hoping for anyway. I think I kept 2 pages of the original 27.

Then I sent it off again and the anonymous reviewer, though convinced by (nearly) each point of my arguement, thought I didn’t sound very nice. So this week, I’ve been altering the article’s tone toward kindness. It’s tedious work, but as I do it, I’m struck by the accuracy of her judgement. Why do I bite so vicously here? Why state that so aggressivley? And as I seek to alter those moments–largely by crediting other researchers with building the foundations of my position–I’m finding more support than I had previously and showing a whole movement toward the re-interpretation I’m proposing rather than an idiosyncratic approach by some cowboy.

Finally, her one quibble turned out to have been a major foible in my paper, and I would have looked pretty stupid had it gone to print. In discussing five book-length poems from the 1850’s, I had misread a plot point (because the act isn’t stated, only implied by reactions). I re-read it in light of her note and it changed that section of my paper entirely.

I think it’s just dandy that when I have an idea about a poem, I send it to an editor who will then run my idea by the world’s foremost expert on that poem/figure, and that the expert will, if impressed, recommend publication, and if less so, at least give me feedback on it.

I can’t share what it’s about yet, since the peer-review process is blind (no one knows who wrote the paper they’re reading so that prestige or collegiality can’t factor) and if they google the topic (likely, since obscure) I don’t want to spoil things by bloviating here. But once it’s accepted (fingers-crossed) I’ll post an abstract of the argument here, and once printed, a link to the content.

Meanwhile, I’m enjoying the process.

Progress Update: Children’s Books

A few years ago, I started writing children’s books about poets. My head is full of anecdotes from literary history that come up in lectures, and I started writing some of them down. As with most of the things I make, they sit on my hard-drive because I’ve never been good at sending things out, preferring instead to make more things. But this year, trying to follow the advice of Austin Kleon, I sent a few query letters to agents, and the practice of sharing, even in just that small way, got me excited about the project again. That excitement has led to my starting two more books.

I imagine these as a kind of series, though all about different poets. So far, I’ve finished:

1. The Poet’s Castle, about the place where Rainer Maria Rilke wrote the Duino Elegies.
   
2. The Poet’s Shipwreck, about the nautical obsessions of Percy Shelley.

Who knows what will happen with them, if anything, but it’s been great fun putting these together. My friend Lenae Nofziger, a poet and teacher of Children’s Literature at Northwest, has been giving me tips on the professional side. Meanwhile, I’m working to finish the next installment: The Poet’s Menagerie, about Byron’s collection of animals. 

I’ll keep you posted about relevant developments. These are uncharted territories for me, but I hope to share one day these charming stories with you. Perhaps by the time my daughter starts reading?

The Spasmodics’ Social Anxiety Salve

I’m presenting a paper at the Fall 2016 gathering of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) hosted by the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at ASU on the theme of “Social Victorians.”

I’m looking forward to it because, while I regularly present at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism’s (NASSR) conferences, and though I’ve presented on the Spasmodics before in other contexts, this will be my first NAVSA. Here’s my pitch, the full presentation of which will be given in Phoenix in November:

The reluctant founder of the so-called Spasmodics, Phillip James Bailey, trained as a barrister before turning to compose his enormous and enormously popular poem Festus (1839). For a book both long and difficult, full of grand abstractions and abstruse theological musings, Festus was a hit, to quote one early reviewer, “even among those who do not usually go in for poetry,” a popularity that began with its very first public reading, conducted by the mechanics working the printing presses and binderies on which it was produced. The book became a social object as soon as it became a book, and Bailey’s home became a social space, a place of pilgrimage almost immediately thereafter.

One such pilgrimage was made by Alexander Smith, inheritor of the Spasmodic mantel, whose first book A Life-Drama (1853) likewise blurred social barriers, this time, within the text. Poets and prostitutes blend therein with aristocrats and even goddesses in a drama not only of one person’s life, but of social life in Britain generally. Like Bailey’s, Smith popularity cut right across classes, the working-class writer a guest of nobility immediately following his book’s publication. Here too, the book became not only a social object, but a ticket for its author into new spheres of sociability.  

As Antony Harrison and Charles LaPorte have noted, the Spasmodics touched off a kind of Victorian culture war in criticism, but, this paper shows how their books also created radically new social–from their radically new artistic–forms.

Churchill’s Largess

I’m listening to the audiobook for Winston Churchill: The Last Lion by William Manchester on my tube rides, which I borrowed from Scottsdale Public Library’s Overdrive subscription and which I was inspired to do by this series of posts at AoM. Only on chapter one, I’m already floored by the resourcefulness of the man, but also his principles. When coalminers staged a strike during his tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he broke it by founding an anti-strikers newspaper. Then, after he’d won, he sided with the miners, steering through parliament a campaign for better wages and safety standards. Noblesse oblige.

 That’s impressive as an approach to conflict. I dislike unions myself. A liberal in nearly every other matter, I just don’t see the point in education, where I work, of demanding higher wages from departments whose budgets shrink year after year. They give wage increases as often as possible. Nor do I appreciate striking or marching around as a means. Everything is hideous and undignified about the spectacle, from the half-felt chants to the ill-conceived signs. A letter-writing campaign I could see. Or a fundraising campaign to back sympathetic politicians, or a public art project to garner coverage and provoke debate. But not this “me$ me$ me$” which is basically a vocalization of what’s worst in all of us.

Anyway, Churchill has it right. Let them have better conditions; not because they demanded them but because it’s the wise, responsible thing to do.

On Trains

This is a bit of a departure from my usual concerns, but recently, I read Allies of the Earth by Alfred Runte, and Waiting on a Train by James McCommons which are both lovely: Runte looking at evoking appropriate nostalgia for our once-great system and McCommons at describing what went wrong and where we are now. So, I tried thinking about what we could do going forward to make the world a little better along these lines.

Investing in rail and rail infrastructure should be important if you:

• love trains
• love the idea of American supremacy and are embarrassed
• care about the environment
• support the notion of choice in travel modes
• want to help reduce unemployment
• prefer automobiles and planes but would like to see less stress and overcrowding thereon

There are many ways America could achieve a respectable system in the immediate future. I’m not a student of governance, nor a policy wonk, but these seem to me the most pressing, workable solutions.

Nationalize the rails. This will likely be contentious, but it needn’t be. The Federal Highway System is run, regulated, and funded by the Feds, as are the airways (and now, the security at airports). There is no reason that the rails shouldn’t likewise be. America’s railroads are not a property, but a right-of-way, on which any number of businesses ought to have the right to move. This can be sold as a free enterprise solution, rather than a socialist one, because it will allow competition. Private Pullman companies could make quick trips from city to city on our safe, maintained, government owned rails. Moreover, the companies what currently run the hodgepodge of networks would be glad to be rid of them. Rail maintenance backlogs extend to volumes, but they don’t get done, endangering both people and commerce, because each company angles for government dollars before making necessary repairs. We pay for them anyway, but the private companies retain ownership, and therefore rights-of-way. This is why trains are always late.

Require tracking devices on all trains operating on U.S. rails. We have tried this a few times before. I’ve lost track of the current status. They not only keep trains from running into one another, they allow them to go much, much faster (because they don’t have to worry about running into each other). We passed a bill requiring them again recently, but toast I heard the deadline was approaching and the rail companies had yet to comply. Time to stop messing around. Fine $500,000 per week till all rolling stock in the U.S. is trackable. Put the money directly in Amtrak’s operating budget.

Fold Amtrak funding into the annual transportation bill. It’s perfectly absurd that every year congress allocates a transport budget that doesn’t include a mode of transport responsible for goods and 31.6 million people. Instead, Amtrak funding is a line-item on discretionary spending, offering an annual opportunity for Republicans to make petty swipes and to trot out scary numbers about labor costs. The current system also means that the whole system is imperiled every few years when we get a president who does’t like trains. That’s crazy. President Obama has proposed this move in the FY2014 budget, and he should veto any transport budget that does not include funding for Amtrak at 5%. Then congress can strike it from discretionary and tout their accomplishment to the folks back home.

Offer federal matching funds at 1:1 ratio to all states and/or cities that want to upgrade, redesign, or add train stations. This should be an open grant process, not tied to specific bills or budgets.

Incentivize timely completion of infrastructure projects. Projects completed in under 12 months get additional 20% federal funding, for example, 18 months and it goes to 15%, 24 to 10%. We should be much faster at this.

what you can do as a person

• Join the National Association of Railroad Passengers. This should become a strong lobby made up of philanthropists, hobbyists, retirees, environmentalists, bicyclists and students.
• Write your congressmen, especially if you live in a red state. They need reminding that there are people in their constituencies who care about such things.
• Ride the rails! Ridership numbers keep going up, year after year, despite bad design, high prices, and dismal service. Eventually, there will be too many of us to ignore.
• Follow these clever people.

Another Victorian Vampire

I admire Elizabeth Barrett Browning immensely, but I’m tempted sometimes to classify her among the undead. This article by Charles LaPorte in SEL confirms a long-held suspicion of mine: that for all her piety and pretty ringlets, her role was to digest weaker poets to prolong her wan life.

True, nearly everyone copied from Alexander Smith, Whitman (an admirer) being the most prominent. It was hard not too, with sales numbers like those. But EBB did it with panache. She lifted whole cloth his plot structure (a would-be poet composing an epic, achieving fame for it at last, while tangled in difficult affections), style (episodic, and jammed with metaphors), and subject position, and did all this after having been jealous of his fame. In letters to friends she was astonished at how many copies his book A Life-Drama was selling, asking essentially, “why is everyone freaking out about this poem?” Soon enough, she stopped wondering and jumped on the bandwagon.

The most shameful thing about this? People, even most scholars, have forgotten the link. At the annual MLA conference, I heard a panel speaker claim that “Aurora Leigh was the first Victorian peom to show contemporary sexuality and recovery therefrom.” But that’s not so; Smith’s protagonist Walter is the first, and the newspapers were full of debate about the nature of his crime; artists made illustrations of the scene for publication. It was everywhere. Then, the same speaker claimed that it was the first to show working-class figures and upper class-figures together in the same poem. Smith beat her there too.

That would be fine; others wrote derivative epics following Smith’s success. Remember though that EBB is wealthy, connected, and famous already while Smith was working-class and shamed by scandal. She came down up from her villa in Italy, wrapped in the scarlet cloak she could apply afford, and fed on the life’s work of a manual laborer to her own engorgement.

Still, she’s nowhere near as good. I love Aurora Leigh, but it’s tarnished goods next to the shining originality of A Life-Drama. I’m with this early reviewer, who wrote “Smith has composed the best epic of our age…next to [his work] Aurora Leigh is a nightmare medley.”