ABOUT "LITTLE ESSAYS"

 

Fourteen years ago, I began writing blogs, or as two of my friends called this medium, "writing essays." When I think back to the inception of "A Word's Worth," I hear those two voices urging me to record short pieces about people and events, "exploring the fullness of life," as Rebecca Dale said of E. B. White's essays in The New Yorker. Some weeks I hear the "thud of ideas" White described as the action of his Muse. On other days, I hear the roll of thunder without the lightning of ideas.

Today is noisy enough with occasional thunder rolls, but the lightning flashes are confined to memories. And that's OK because most subject matter in my on-the-cusp-of 86 years old mind lies in the depository of memories. This rainy day I probe the memory of my decision to become a poet.

I was in the sixth grade and had returned to civilization after my father's great folly about the family becoming gypsies via tent camping, sleeping on roadside park tables, bathing in rivers en route to California in 1946. I was eleven years old and sighed in relief when we returned to the small southern town of Franklinton, Louisiana. There, I decided to become a poet in my sixth-grade classroom filled with what I called "country people" (offspring of farming parents). I'd been reading in a sixth-grade reader and delighted in a section on poetry. "I can do that," I thought, and promptly wrote a few lines about my new home: "away from the town's noisy din/from the roar of the cotton gin…" I wrote this following the example of my mother's hero, Robert Louis Stevenson. It's one of the very few rhyming verses I've left to posterity. Well, it does sound a bit better than "A birdie with a yellow bill/hopped upon my window sill…."

For approximately thirty years, I thought about becoming a poet, read a lot of poetry, and finally submitted a poem to The American Weave (now defunct) magazine, which published "My Father's Hands." The American Weave was a literary journal that paid me $18 from the Hart Crane Memorial Fund. Did I become a poet? No, this publishing event occurred in 1967, and I spent twenty more years reading and studying poetry and writing poems "underground." I did not return to thoughts about publishing poetry until 2008, when I moved to Sewanee, Tennessee. It is here that the biggest lightning strike in my life occurred, the flash in 2020 when I wrote Ridges, now on sale*. It's a book featuring my poems that accompany Don Thornton's wonderful paintings of Louisiana chenieres.

And so much for rain-inspired blogs and "come lately" poetry books. Tomorrow the weather may be sunny.

My latest book of poetry, Ridges, is available from me at P. O. Box 3124, Sewanee, Tennessee 37375 and from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403. 

 

 

LIGHT VERSE

In the midst of critical downturns lately, I began creating some light verse called The Everyday Journal, poems lighter in content than most of the poetry I write. I also re-acquainted myself with the King of Light Verse, Ogden Nash, beginning with breakfast non-rhymes (in contrast to Nash's penchant for rhyming) and concluding with the second cup of coffee.

I had fun unwinding with light verse, and this morning I re-read a few Nash poems for inspiration. Nash, by the way, began making up his droll rhymes at age six and often crafted his own words when rhyming words didn't suffice for his comical verse. He dropped out of Harvard after one year and went to New York a few years later to sell bonds, but admitted that in two years he sold only one bond to his godmother.

Nash then began writing ads for streetcars and later spent three months working on the editorial staff for The New Yorker. After he married Frances Leonard, his fortunes began to pick up, and he published his first collection of poetry, Hard Lines, which brought him national attention. In his spare time, Nash appeared on radio comedy shows, but he was also respected by the literary crowd who wrote and critiqued more serious poetry. Theatre-goers may remember Nash's lyrics from the Broadway musical, One Touch of Venus.

The verse by Nash that I read this morning is entitled "The Anatomy of Happiness," and was longer than his usual snippets ("Candy is dandy/but liquor is quicker"). The long piece of verse spoke to my condition: "...Miracles don't happen every day,/But here's hoping they may,/Because then everybody would be happy except the people who pride themselves on creating their own happiness who as soon as they see everybody who didn't create their own happiness become happy they would probably grieve over sharing their own heretofore private sublimity,/A condition which I could face with equanimity."

An example of one of my non-rhyming poems from The Everyday Journal regarding the efficacy of chaos:

FLASH FLOODING

At lunch, she plays a podcast --
how chaos begets creativity,
"I have a dream," the spontaneous result,
a Civil Rights speech
carefully prepared and thrust aside
as Martin Luther King takes in
his people's heartbreak and struggle
and goes off line,
one of the finest pieces of rhetoric
delivered about the light of freedom,
eloquence born in chaos.

This broadcast plays while I am eating
black-eyed peas and rice,
digesting a poor man's fare
to be in touch with struggle,
rain still falling, puddling the yard.
The day is gray and unsettled enough
to engender creativity
in lieu of reading Trump's Tweets,
which bring up visions of him playing
an old army bugle, flatulent notes rising
on the threat of a massive flash flood.

A BITE FROM E.B. WHITE

For those who’re burdened by political news and the state of the world today, I recommend a “time out” with someone like E.B. White, the essayist who wrote for the New Yorker during the mid 20^th century. White often turned to farm journals to “escape for a few moments the ominous headlines in the papers…” However, he claims to have found danger even in the agricultural news, and this morning I returned to one of his essays entitled “Plant the Garden Anyway,” in which he talked about his dismay after reading a farm journal article listing dangers in the flower garden.

According to White in Writings from The New Yorker 1927-1976, the journal article warned about poison in a single castor bean that would kill a person… vomiting caused by pinks… sweet pea seeds containing a poison that could keep a person bedridden for months… night blooming jimson with enough substance in the leaves to produce delirium… and daffodil bulbs that, when eaten, cause stomach cramps. Danger in the garden indeed! People “back then” must have had bizarre diets!

White didn’t mention bees, digger wasps, and poison ivy. He may have been threatened by leaves, bulbs, and flowers, but the insects and ivy I just mentioned carry their own brand of poison in the garden. To me, the answer to the dilemma of the poisonous plants highlighted in the farm journal is a simple one: don’t sample the plants! Actually, the author of this article recommended completely doing away with a garden that produced such dangerous plants as the sweet peas, daffodils, etc. and changing the seed! Seems like gardeners in White’s day were either a) hungrier than most gardeners today or b) were experimenting with plants containing exotic substances to see if they would induce some kind of mind alteration.

White also discussed the plant patent business in another essay entitled “Prohibited,” in which a man received a birthday present of an azalea, and tied around the stem of the plant (“like a chastity belt,” White says) was a tag reading “Asexual reproduction of this plant is illegal under the Plant Patent Act.” White’s friend tore off the tag and sent it to another friend with instructions to bed it down next to “an old buck hydrangea.”

Whatever dangers White passed on to those of us who have trouble gardening must be taken with a grain of dirt. We should get our plants in the ground where, for a brief period, they will reward us with their bright faces, every now and then attracting swallowtails, monarchs, skippers, perhaps even a lunar moth.

My love of gardens was inspired by my mother’s nightly readings from books like A Child’s Garden of Verses and Marigold Garden. These books had nothing to do with poisonous seeds, but readings from them actually planted the seeds for my poetry writing today. I was inspired by such poems as Stevenson’s “The Flowers:” “All the names I know from nurse/Gardener’s Garter, Shepherd’s Purse,/Bachelor’s Baths, Lady’s Smocks,/And the Lady Hollyhock…”

The straggly garden pictured above, whose seeds I never saw since I purchased seedlings for my two miniscule beds, contains mostly herbs I can eat without getting sick. The sight of this place where moles and rabbits freely graze would probably cause White to smile. The flowers on one side of the yard are deer proof, so they have a chance of surviving. This is a consideration I gave them rather than worrying about poisonous seeds; however, I didn’t count on the invasions from moles and rabbits.

P.S. I haven’t seen either the asexual azalea or old buck hydrangea in the nurseries here on The Mountain, so I can’t foster any plant coupling.

WITHOUT PUNCTUATION

There's a controversy going on about commas and other points of punctuation nowadays. The latest word, or not-so-latest word in newspaper style, is that commas take up too much space. Further, serial commas should be avoided with as much caution as serial killers. Even E.B. White, the essayist I most admire, had something sassy to say about commas in an interview in the Paris Review: "Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim."

I realize that too much use of anything is bad for the reader's eyesight and brain capacity, but I'm troubled by the trend to omit ideas, abbreviate words, create acronyms, and excise punctuation to the extent that even periods will soon die a swift death in the name of "saving space." I once won a First Place award at State Rally for being able to take shorthand at 140 words per minute—those squiggles and lines were a real space saver in lined tablets—but even so, when I transcribed the material, the words fit in as much space as that required for typed copy.

Can you imagine the dawn of the run-on sentence with all its abbreviations, acronyms, loss of punctuation, and other literary trimming? Would it read something like this:

During the bitter winter of 2015 when temps dipped below freezing in the am and even lower in the pm our electrical power was shut off and we could not use the computer which was penalty for having used too much electricity because we did not try to save space by omitting commas periods and certainly exclamation points when composing copy for periodicals like the NYT and WP and long books similar to War and Peace and had ignored those green lines that denoted too many words in a sentence and the basic rules of punctuation established by Strunk and White who believed in comma serialization and other outdated rules for style so we got out a yellow pad and a pencil and wrote a piece of flash fiction which is the latest form of abbreviated writing that has no plot and few characters and certainly reduces the amount of space that a story takes up on a page while writing in the manner of someone like Gertrude Stein who happened to call her run on unpunctuated style automatic writing or James Joyce who invented stream of consciousness technique both of them I am sure who created in the interests of saving space

Just looking back over that piece of unpunctuated nonsense makes me wonder about the future of literature. However, think of the money publishers could save by printing one-page books, or perhaps we're already at that point in human literacy. After all, we have the smart phone and text messages to save our brains and spare publishers the trouble of having to print something in black ink on paper that might be kept for future generations.

'Seems that if we don't become involved in this mass excision of punctuation and language, those who follow us will know we didn't do much toward saving a civilization dependent on trees. However, if we retain the comma, period, and long sentences that express large ideas, we just might expand human consciousness.