The Middlewesterner

KARL ELDER'S GILGAMESH AT THE BELLAGRIO GETS NATIONAL POETRY REVIEW BOOK PRIZE CONTRACT

Karl Elder, Wisconsin poet and Lakeland College Fessler Professor and my friend and compatriot in the adventure of poetry, has recently been awarded a publication contract for his manuscript, Gilgamesh at the Bellagio, as a runner up in The National Poetry Review Prize Book Series.  The volume - not to be confused with his recently published long poem by the same name in Black Warrior Review - is scheduled to appear in 2007 or early 2008.

Conceived as a trilogy, the first section of the manuscript, Mead (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize), is followed by Gilgamesh at the Bellagio and Z Ain’t Just for Zabecedarium (portions of which received the Chad Walsh Award from Beloit Poetry Journal). 

"This is a dream,” Elder says of the award, “one that I rarely dared to share for fear that I’d jinx the book, the joy of the years I’ve had working on it, which came to an abrupt halt during my sabbatical last spring when I’d completed the effort. For the last couple of days I’ve been pinching myself to be certain I’m awake.”

Congratulations, Karl!

A WRITER'S JOURNAL - 11-17-06 MY "APPRECIATIONS"

I call my commentary on books

"appreciations" and not "reviews." Why?

I find the term "appreciation" allows me to engage a book on my own terms, and on the book's terms, rather than in terms of the needs of any perceived audience. Rather than responding to the book for any other reader, I am coming to understand the book for myself. I don't owe anybody else anything; my obligations are to the book and to myself.

By calling the commentary an "appreciation," I can engage the book on a personal level, rather than trying to locate it in the grand scheme of literature; I become one reader writing about what he has read, rather than some professional feigning to understand this book in the greater context of all books. I can freely acknowledge how much I don't know, even as I point to aspects of the book which delight me.

I make no commitments to the bookselling industry, nor to the book-buying public. My commitment is to understanding the book on its own terms within my own limited frame of reference.

I can display my prejudices in a way that a "book reviewer" cannot. I can speak about myself in relationship to the book, and about the book in relationship to me, always in the context of my predilections as a writer and a reader and a pilgrim on this old mudball we call Earth.

By calling my commentary an "appreciation," yes, I am saying that I don't owe anyone anything, except for my promise to be honest with myself about the book. Unlike the "review," my "appreciation" is not trying to "sell" the book; I am trying to understand it. The book I am reacting to doesn't have to be newly published; it can be several years old or out-of-print. I don't need to observe any limits as to word count; I don't have to further any program or literary philosophy. My "appreciation" doesn't have to fit anyone or anywhere.

I don't have to hide my ignorance. Indeed, my ignorance becomes part of my response to the book.

As I do not solicit books to review, I do not have to respond to any book that doesn't move me in some essential way. No publisher can put its hooks into me; no author can make claims on me. I give deference to myself. I am free to surprise myself with my response. I owe no one, and no one owes me.

I do not have to comment on bad books. I don't have to write about writing that doesn't engage me. I am free to see the book as it is, as I am. I am free not to respond to a book, if I wish.

I suppose that book reviewing is a necessary evil; yet I don't have to involve myself in that system. I am carrying nobody's water but my own.

By calling my book commentary an "appreciation," I am able to disagree with myself if I wish, to contradict myself when I must, to look at things from the other end of the telescope sometimes, or to overturn the microscope.

There is a great sense of freedom, then, in doing "appreciations" instead of book reviews; yet I am also constrained to tell my personal truth to the best of my ability, for the "appreciation" becomes a measure of myself as well as of the book to which I'm responding. I am always putting my reputation on the line, in addition to the book's reputation.

The "appreciation" is always about the book and about me in relation to the book.

As I say, I am not selling anything. Yet the reader who chances upon an "appreciation" I have written may thereby come away with his own appreciation of the book. That would be a lovely consequence, but it is not required, I think, for my appreciation to be successful.

SLOW ROAD HOME* BY FRED FIRST AN APPRECIATION

The question is raised

in some quarters: all these bloggers scribbling, like all the monkeys in the zoo pounding typewriters, can anything ever come of it? Well, if the blogger is Fred First and the blog is Fragments from Floyd, the answer is yes, yes. Out of his blogging, which arises from his life and his place, Goose Hollow in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Fred has created Slow Road Home: A Blue Ridge Book of Days.* A second edition is already in the works for this collection of short essays, many of them blog-post length, about 750 words, all gathered around a theme: this man finding his way in his place.

Slow Road Home was a series of blog- posts initially, yes, by a fellow intent on finding a path after resigning his job as a physical therapist at a local medical clinic. Fred was at loose ends, and his wife had given him her blessing "to work from home, learn this place, and write about it. This was a gift, and this book is a fruit of those morings alone that she gave me."

I suppose I could make a long list of the reasons I left my job that day. And there are good reasons that I could not have told you then. "The heart has reasons that reason does not know" and this time, at fifty-four, to my surprise, I chose to follow my heart.

Many of us might have pissed away such an opportunity like so many cups of coffee. Not Fred. He proceeded to establish his blog, Fragments from Floyd, proceeded to sort out who he was and what he was maybe going to do with the rest of his life, proceeded to learn the place he inhabited in all of its hidden intricacies, across all of its seasons.

It takes a lot of confidence to attempt finding yourself in such a public forum as a blog (and Fragments from Floyd did become and still remains a well-visited blog), and it takes even more confidence to learn the craft of writing in such a public space, a little bit like learning to walk a tight-rope, up there your very first time, with the whole crowd at the circus looking on.

By disposition and background, Fred was suited to the challenge. He is a little bit like a rat terrier in that way, I think, getting hold and refusing to let go. And he found he had a talent for writing, so he could pull it off. He wrote every day, "keeping a kind of field notebook."

It would become a guidebook to bring back the sound of wind in winter and the smell of pasture grass in moonlight; to remember the way it feels to watch the first fire of autumn in the stove or bring in the harvest from the garden; to lose a dog too soon, or gain the love of his successor at the edge of the creek.

Slow Road Home is divided into four parts. The first three are gathered under the heading "A Year at Home: June 2002 to July 2003." Do not worry of the specific dates here: like poetry, these little essays are news that stays new.

Fred calls Part One "Still, and Still Moving," and here he closely examines the meaning "in the fine details of everyday things." This would be the microscopic view. And it goes without saying that an exploration of a place that has seasons will have seasons, and "Still, and Still Moving" touches on "Summer Lightning," "Gossamer Days," "Fortress of Solitude: October Rain," "Edge of Winter," "Honor of Wood," "Breath of Spring," "Summer Symphony," and such. It takes paying attention to attend such a world, and Fred pays attention:

At last the days have been warm enough so that I am startled now and then by the smell of spring - not any particular and definable smell but rather a kind of teabag steeping of winter's gray dregs, the aroma of green things - mosses, new petals, and liverworts - and warm dark earth.

Part Two is called "Leaf, Feather and Fur." It is more the wide-angled view of "nature and the creatures and landforms that share this valley with me," Fred says. He looks at the honey bee and "The Season of Spiders;" he praises August and explains that "Every Drought Ends with a Good Rain;" he writes of the jewel weed, of the "Blueberry Hills," of the leaf knowing "when its time has come to fall." Of compost and turtles, of insects and the green tide rising. Of fireflies:

Last night late, we saw the first flashes in ones and twos - the earliest fireflies just practicing for the Hallelujah Chorus of Fireflies that will come in legions by late June. I close my eyes and see, in memory of summers past, a constellation of pulsing yellow-golden lights. They will come down to earth on a June night when we can smell the warm meadow in the dark, and we will see in the distance, at the edge of vision, silent flashes of summer lightning.

In Part Three, "Roads Remembered," Fred looks back at the people and places "that are fixed mountain peaks of my past," and that have guided him to this, his current incarnation and his current habitation. We cannot know who we are without knowing who we have been, and Fred recognizes that. This section is memoir, story-telling out of Fred's own story. "Finding Our Place" and "Chickens Come Home to Roost." "Labrador Tractor Abatement Policy" and "On Eagle Wings." "Good Life, Fertile Soil" and "Southern Snow." And other such "Kodachrome Reflections."

Found. Upstairs in the Very Back Room - a favorite photo of three violets. How well I remember: this was one of my very first flower images taken when I was a newly married graduate student. With my first month's teaching stipend, I bought a camera!

Part Four, "Rooted, Grounded, Found," is set off under the heading "Settled In Placed: July 2003 to October 2005." Again arranged in order of the months of the year, these pieces reflect the seasons of the place and the moods of the man over more than two years, "more personal, ranging from the sublimity of falling snow to the absurdities of married life."

"I think of them," Fred says, "as a celebration of the beautiful ordinary, in which I am finally at home."

This section is full of "The Plain and Simple Truth," such as this is:

I've been asked more than once what we plan to do with this land. Knowing the answer they expect from the owner of six fallow and fertile acres along a creek, I could tell my neighbors that someday we will fence it off to pasture a few head of cattle; or that we might plant Christmas trees like so many other landowners in the county who can't make their land pay for itself by farming alone. But I believe that from now on, when they ask me, I will tell them the truth: I plan to use this bottomland for taking spider-web pictures.

That should make for some raised eyebrows, don't you think?

Or this, "Savoring Autumn:"

Listen. Can you hear in the gentle susurrations before first light the papery sounds of leaves jostling, still clinging, barely, to twigs where already the watery sap is heading south for winter?

There is a little Henry David Thoreau in every one of us, and moreso in Fred First. There is a little Walden everywhere, and Fred has found his. He knows the unexamined life is not worth living and the unexamined place not worth inhabiting. If you're worth your salt, you know that. Fred does. This is "nature writing" in a way, in that it follows many of the conventions and traditions of nature writing. Yet it is more than niggling detail piled on wiggling detail. These particulars are more than particulars, but are local truths that are also universally true, as we like to say. Those of us who write to know the places we inhabit, and to know ourselves in those places, are often dismissed as merely "regional" writers; yet this kind of writing is essential if we are to know what life is and what it's worth. There are truths here in Fred's world that the more "cosmpolitan" among us may be blind to, to their loss. Anyone who dismisses such a fine examination as Slow Road Home as mere "regional" writing does not deserve the title "reader," but might be called instead "purveyor of ignorance." And there are a lot of such purveyors of ignorance who fail the examinations that matter. A fellow has come to a sad state if he thinks he cannot learn from such writing as is found in Fred First's little essays.

It is a slow road home. You know that, if you've ever tried to find your own way in this world. Getting to home requires careful attention to all the things around you; you have to watch your world, as Fred watches his world. What one dismisses as unworthy of attention may be exactly what he needs to learn. Fred knows that. I wish the mass of humanity realized it as well; this would be a far better and more interesting planet if they did.

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*Fred First, Slow Road Home: A Blueridge Book of Days. Goose Creek Press, Floyd, Virginia. $15.95. For more information: www.goosecreekpress.com .

ROGUE RIVER JOURNAL* BY JOHN DANIEL AN APPRECIATION

It is an intriguing

prospect. John Daniel secludes himself in a cabin in the wilderness along the Rogue River in western Oregon. The mountain pass will close up with snow behind him, and from November 20 until April 1 he will be left to his own resources.

Why would a man do this? Well, for one thing, John Daniel is a poet. For another, he wants to use the solitude to write about his father; the material hasn't been coming together for him, and perhaps in the quiet of the Rogue River winter, he will see his father more clearly. And Daniel wanted to meditate, to go deeper into himself.

That's 134 days of aloneness. Daniel had promised his patient and loving and tolerant wife Marilyn that he would call once a week and leave a brief message on the answering machine, to assure her that he was okay. But he didn't want to speak to her, nor to anyone else. He wanted to maintain his deep solitude. He packed in a lot of food to get him through the winter, and he tended a winter garden to augment his supplies - and harvested at least what the turkey and the other critters didn't take. He took some fish from the river. He had a supply of wood to chop and split for the cabin's stove. He had the constant sound of the Rogue itself, behind the songs in his head. He had the comfort of the cabin. A French Provincial formica table and the "Route 66 Distinguished Chair in Creative Writing." A big pad of paper. A sharp pencil. Himself.

This is an interesting and intriguing experiment, and Daniel largely succeeds in what he set out to do. He was without any contact with the outside, no radio, no TV, no incoming phone calls. He maintained his solitude, though he admits he had a constant hit parade of songs playing unbidden in his head. He had the mornings for meditation, the afternoons for chopping wood and fishing and such. He had the nights for writing.

And write he did. He scratched out a total of 274 penciled pages over the winter. The book about his father got wound up in the journal of his experience there along the Rogue River. Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone* is one part Franz Daniel, John's father; one part experiment in solitude; and one part memoir and self-assessment. John Daniel's own story becomes necessarily entwined with his father's, and also braided into the journal of his experiences in his solitude.

Franz Daniel was a union organizer of some reputation, one of the tough guys who could withstand pistol-whippings by thugs. Yet he was also a tough father and an alcoholic husband. By the end of his life, Franz was separated from his wife, John's mother, living in Missouri with three of his sisters, attending AA meetings a couple of times a week, taking a leading role in the local Unitarian congregation, and serving on the local utility board. Part of what Franz's son needed to explain to himself was how it came to this. That's what one thread of the book does.

The second thread - the report on his experiment in solitude - is brisk and consistently interesting. Daniel's days found their own pace. Though he thought perhaps the winter of solitude might make him a morning writer, that didn't happen and he didn't force it - he continued putting pencil to paper at night. You might think all the solitude would invite undue navel-gazing, and that we'd hear too much about what was going on inside the author's head and not enough about what was going on beyond the cabin walls - fortunately, Daniel held himself in check.

In coming to understand his father, Daniel had to come to understand himself in relation to his father. And that is the third strand of the book, an exploration of the John Daniel who knew his father. And it is in this area that I found the book's only weakness. Like many of us who enjoyed our time in the 1960s, John Daniel enjoyed his. Perhaps overmuch. He used (misused) some hard drugs seriously. And then his discussion of drug use and his attempt at justification sound a little shrill to me. "Let go of it, John, and go on," I want to say. Yet in the sweep of the book, this is a minor flaw.

I am envious of Daniel's winter of solitude, truly envious. What a remarkable experiment. I come away from the Rogue River Journal wanting to tramp myself into a similar experiment. And that's a good measure of a book, isn't it - does it take you someplace you would never have thought to go?

Let me end here by allowing John Daniel the last word, for he earns it. This passage is also the last paragraph of the book, pulling everything together for us, if we let it:

Our lives have flowed from exploding stars, from tides of time and gravity beyond our ken. Nothing in Nature can tell us our story, can explain why today some die while others live on, or why we die at all, or why we live. Never asking or choosing, creating itself out of snow and rain, the river gathers all that touches it and finds its way. In surging falls and deep green pools, in chutes and riffles and silent swirls, it bears us on through winding passages of grace and fury, until once, in a stab of sun on streaming water, the entire aching beauty of being comes clear. And the river - the good, green, terrible river - flows on.

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* John Daniel, Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone. Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005; paperback, 2006, $16.00. More information: www.shoemakerhoard.com .

ELIZABETH ADAMS' GOING TO HEAVEN:* THE ELECTION OF GENE ROBINSON

As you read what I have to say about Elizabeth Adams' Going to Heaven: The Life and Election of Bishop Gene Robinson, perhaps there are some things you should know about me.

First, I consider myself a friend of Beth's; and in her acknowledgements she credits me, among others, with helping her get through the hard times of writing her book. Yes, I tried to support her and encourage her. At the same time, I intend to tell you what I see in the book.

Second, I am the father of a daughter who loves a woman. There is not enough love in the world. I take great joy in their love and their happiness, my daughter's and her partner's.

Third, I was in Catholic seminary for some years, belonged to a Catholic religious order for part of that time, and was under vows for two and a half years. I left that church and that life in despair over the concern for "right thinking" and canon law at a time when we should have been talking about the love of God. I am something of a pantheist now, seeing God in every dooryard, every creek and stream, in the trees, in the tigers and the tiger lilies. If there is anything I bring with me from those days in church, it is two passages from the New Testament: The Gospel of John, Chapter One, Verses 1-10 ("In the beginning was the Word..."); and Matthew, Chapter 5, Verses 3-12 (The Beatitudes).

Fourth, I grew to manhood during "The Age of Aquarius." To the Beatitudes, add these lines from a musical to understand my operating philosophy: "Kids, be free. Do what you want to do, so long as you don't hurt anybody."

Fifth, Dr. Louie Crew, who is a central figure in parts of Going To Heaven, was happily associated with my magazine, Margins, back in the 1970s. It was a pleasure to encounter him again, in this context, and to see his work succeeding.

Sixth, when I had my magazine in Milwaukee in the 1970s, I freely allowed the Gay People's Union to use my equipment to prepare their GPU News for publication.

That said, you know my biases. And my biases don't matter. What matters is the story Elizabeth Adams is telling here, and how she tells it.

First, this is a story, and it is a true story; this is "creative nonfiction." It has the story shape known as "the journey." On one level, this is Gene Robinson's journey, from the darkness of doubt and confusion to the light of God's love; from a fundamentalist background in Kentucky to liberal Episcopalian theology in New Hampshire; from rejection to acceptance. Into Robinson's story Adams has interwoven many related elements and strands, as you would expect she'd have to when writing about the consecration of the Anglican communion's first openly gay bishop.

This is Gene Robinson's story, yet it is Elizabeth Adams' telling of the story. You might wonder why a writer would want to devote herself to such work, for there is not a lot of glamor to be gained here, not a lot of money to be made. The author answers that question right off, in the first pages. The answer has to do with her confirmation as a member of the Episcopal Church in May, 1964 and with her drift away from the church in her unhappiness with women's subservient role and the church's apparent failure to engage the world during the turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s. And the answer has to do with Adams's return to the church in the early 1990s, heeding an insistent voice in her head that said, "Go take communion." When she did, she found the church had changed. She had never heard of "the priesthood of all believers" as a child, and now she was hearing that in the church. The church had changed. And Adams had grown, too; she had "increased in the Lord."

Adams had come to know Gene Robinson when he was assistant to the Bishop of New Hampshire, Douglas Theuner. The parish Adams belonged to was struggling with questions of authority, lay and clerical roles, and conservative/liberal theology. "During this painful process," Adams writes, "I was impressed with Gene's low-key but firm manner of facilitating discussion, his consistent charge to all of us to 'speak the truth in love,' his quick intelligence and awareness of subterfuge, manipulation, and other psychological game-playing, and his insistence we take responsibility for our own issues and patterns...."

Gene Robinson's sexual orientation was known to the people of the diocese, Adams writes, but was "regarded as a non-issue by most of the people; his skills as a priest, facilitator and administrator and his personal qualities of approachability, enthusiasm, warmth, and unshakable faith were the characteristics people focused on and which led, eventually, to his election as the successor to the beloved, charismatic, and progressive Douglas Theuner."

This is a compelling story, this Going To Heaven, told in a compelling way. In writing the book, Adams apparently had unlimited access to Robinson and the other players in the story, and was present at many of the events reported. The method most often used here is the interview; that is, Adams allows Robinson and others to tell the story to the greatest extent possible in their own words. She frames the telling, explains the obscure, and bridges the gaps, but for the most part we are hearing the players in the story. Adams keeps their remarks on task, focused to the arc of the story. She fits together the various perspectives and weaves in the sub-plots and related issues; and she makes it all look seamless and of a piece. As one who has interviewed a lot of people himself, who knows how tiring the work is and how difficult the challenge of fitting the pieces together, I am impressed with Adams' work: she makes it seem easy. The telling is smooth and polished. Just when you might have a question, she answers it. Just when you wonder what the opponents of Robinson's consecration might have been thinking, she tells you. Matters are proportionate: larger issues get more space, lesser issues get less space. Adams is a master at laying out the nonfiction story.

How, you might ask, can an author sustain tension and attention in a book about an event with a known outcome? For one thing, to the greatest extent possible, you create a sense of "present tense;" that is, you tell the story in order and build to the climax in the telling, even if that climax is already known. Second, you re-create the events so that they are keenly palpable, so that the reader feels he or she is present as the actions are taking place. And, third, you salt the telling here and there with half-told stories left unresolved, something left dangling until it is tied up later. The story of Robinson's pectoral cross is one such element in Going To Heaven.

Robinson's cross had been made with gold donated for that purpose by church members from all across the diocese. It might have been grandmother's wedding ring that a woman gave for the cross, or a deceased father's gold watch. All those items were melted down and became the gold for Robinson's cross. Yet at some point the cross got lost, and it was never found. The symbolic melting together of all these church members' stories in one pectoral cross was thereby lost. But we are left hanging. We keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. And sure enough, Adams finally resolves the story. It turns out that the goldsmith who made the cross used only half the gold that had been collected. When the original cross was received, the diocese sold the unused gold to the goldsmith for use in other projects. But for some reason, over the ensuing eighteen months, he did not use it. He didn't want to use it, though he didn't know why. When Robinson went to the goldsmith, finally, to order a replacement cross, the fellow said, "I still have this gold." He showed it to Robinson. There was negative space in the sheet of gold where the original cross had been taken. What remained was the margins of the sheet. The symbolic value? Robinson sees the church's work as ministry to those who exist on the margins of society.

So Adams left some threads loose in her telling, left some doors open, and one by one she brings resolution, tying up the threads, closing the doors. This is good story-telling.

It is Gene Robinson's story, yes. And Adams is a Gene Robinson partisan, yes. Why else would you go to so much trouble. I know that Adams struggled to complete the book. Such writing is hard work. Yet as much as she admires Gene Robinson, Adams strives not to distort the stance of opponents to Gene's consecration; she talked at length with key detractors and tried to represent their views faithfully. There are no literary eye-rolls, so to speak. She tries to be fair to the differing views.

It is Gene Robinson's story, and it is the story of the Anglican communion, of which the Episcopalians are a part. Some of the opponents to Robinson's consecration were very un-Christ-like in word and action. I am thinking here about such people as Rev. Earle Fox who felt called by God to testify at Robinson's consecration against his consecration; Adams writes: "In the most explicit language possible, he began to name and describe sexual acts that he accused homosexuals (and only homosexuals, one had to assume) of engaging in, from fellatio to anal intercourse to much more graphic examples. Some 3,000 lay people and hundreds of bishops and priests, including Gene Robinson and his daughters, partner, and parents, were forced to hear these sexual acts not only named but described in the middle of a worship service.... The Presiding Bishop cut the recitation short as quickly as he could. He said, 'I am sure we all know what you are saying. This is a worship service. Please spare us the details and come to your point.'"

One reads this story realizing that the conservative element in the Episcopal Church would prefer to break up the communion rather than allow the progressives to worship with them and take bread at the same table. The struggle is between the conservative notion that religion is a book of rules and the progressive stance that it ought to be a celebration of God's love. Between the conservatives wanting to tell others how to live their lives and the progressives wanting to open their arms to all God's children, even the least of them. The ordination of women had been an earlier battle in the church, and that struggle has not entirely eased. Robinson's consecration adds to the tension. The conservatives want to reserve power to a traditional patriarchal hierarchy, so that right thinking can be enforced; the progressives believe in servant leadership. The struggle among the Anglicans is a reflection of the larger struggle in modern life between the fundamentalist's rigidity and the progressive's openness. Between believing, on the one hand, that God stopped speaking to us when the last jot and tittle of the Bible had been recorded and, on the other hand, that God is still speaking to us today, in myriad ways. It is a struggle between those who would cling to what used to be and those who are working to midwife that which is yet to be born, the kingdom of God.

This is Gene Robinson's story, and it is the story of a lot of unlikely heroes – Gene's ex-wife, his daughters, his partner, the church-goers who elected Robinson bishop, the Presiding Bishop at the consecration, all those bishops who signed on.

This is Gene Robinson's story, and it is God's story. The Lord moves in mysterious ways. "Love one another," Christ said. Perhaps the consecration of Gene Robinson is a test of God's people, to see whether they do indeed love one another. (The answer seems to be No, I'm afraid; we have not come far enough.)

The opponents of Robinson's consecration say they "Love the sinner; hate the sin," which in practice makes homosexuals feel most unwelcome. Gene Robinson, on the other hand, preaches a theology of inclusion, seeking to bring those at the margins of society into the embrace of the church. Which is the work of God? For starters, didn't Jesus include Mary Magdeline, a prostitute?

Beth Adams is a Gene Robinson partisan, yes; she is telling his story. Yet she does not gloss over his human failings and includes here an account of Robinson's 28-day stay in a treatment center in February, 2006, to deal with his alcoholism. Typically, Robinson sees the hand of God at work in this: "Once again, God is proving His desire and ability to bring an Easter out of Good Friday," he wrote to every parish from the treatment center. Later he acknowledged that the experience was "a bit like dying. Everything just stops... you have to face your life exactly as it is at that moment. And you also have to face the fact that life, in which you were so involved, goes on quite well without you."

Adams notes that Robinson "knew himself to be neither angel nor devil, but merely a human being doing the best he could, with God's help."

This is a profoundly human story, and one that is profoundly divine as well. Robinson acknowledges that "maybe why there has been such a furor over me and and what I've accomplished, or whatever God has accomplish within me, is because it goes beyond saying 'I think I'm all right.' It says, 'I think God thinks I'm all right.' That's something new, and I think maybe that's why so many people are interested in this, or angered by it, because in the last decade we've had more and more people coming out, more and more people being self-affirming. Still, self affirmation only goes so far. But if I say, in a clerical collar, that God thinks I'm all right, it carries a different kind of weight: it means I have the audacity to say, 'Not only am I self-affirming, but God is affirming me.' And that is either good news or bad news, depending on where you are."

In the early 1980s Robinson found John Fortunato's book, Embracing the Exile: Healing Journeys for Gay Christians, and found a way to love and give and find meaning, and to heal. The experience of reading Fortunato's book became "the pivotal point in my journey," Robinson says.

"Up until that point," Adams writes, "Gene had wanted to believe the Good News – that he was actually loved by God, just as he was – but after reading the book, he actually did believe it. He finally had the courage and faith necessary to accept his orientation, to reconcile it with his spirituality, and move forward with those two truths at the center of his identity."

Fortunato had written: "Once you know, at the core of your being, that you have a rightful place in God's creation, and that nothing can separate you from the love of God, then it doesn't much matter what people say or do to you. Then you are free to give and love – anyway."

Would that all those who need to hear this message were able to! Fortunately, I think, Gene Robinson's ministry and Going to Heaven together will help carry the word to those who need to know that God loves them. That is the final story here, that the word is going out: "God loves you, and loves you as you are."

Will the Anglican communion survive the consecration of its first openly gay bishop? Gene Robinson hopes so. He hopes not only that the church survives, but that it heals and thrives. He hopes that the turmoil surrounding his consecration dies down and he can do what he was elected to do, which is to serve the members of his church as Bishop of New Hampshire.

Do I think the Anglican communion will survive? No. I believe the conservative faction is determined to break the communion apart. Robinson's consecration will not be the cause of the break-up, but an excuse for the conservatives to do what they have wanted to do all along, which is to sit at a table with only their own kind, rather than with all God's people. That's one outside observer's opinion, for what it's worth.

I don't often pray, but to close let me give up this prayer for Bishop Gene Robinson: "O Heavenly Father, keep him in your heart and lift him up when his burden becomes unbearably heavy. Soothe the burn of this life's scourge. Renew his courage again and again. He is doing Your work, Lord, so comfort him when he needs comforting. And don't let the bastards get him down. In Jesus's name we pray. Amen."

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*Elizabeth Adams, Going to Heaven: The Life and Election of Bishop Gene Robinson. 2006. Soft Skull Press [www.Softskull.com], 55 Washington Street, Suite 804, Brooklyn, NY 11201. $14.95/paper.

LYNN LYMAN TROMBETTA'S FALLING WORLD* - MOMENTS OF STILLNESS

I don't know when I've

read a book with more breasts in it than in Lynn Lyman Trombetta's Falling World.* That's just an observation, and I'm not sure what it means.

Closer to the center of the book than the breasts, perhaps, is the epigraph for the fourth section, a quote from a Paris Review interview with Saul Bellow:

"... art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm."

These poems are such moments of stillness, whether it is the moment Trombetta's daughter is no longer a child (in "Abandoned Doll"):

her body has lifted into loveliness - breasts
with a weight, a round tenderness,
she can cup in her palms.

And she thinks it alarming,
and wondrous, too,
how each nipple, dazzling, stares back
at her from the glass.

Or a moment of "Romance:"

You kneel behind me on the bed
   and cup my breasts in your hand, you roll
      my nipples against your palms, and then
         in my mind, I don't know why,
                                               I see star-nosed moles.

There are moments of tenderness in these poems, of joy and sorrow, of turning away and looking back. There is the moment of reflection in the window glass just before her husband turns the light off; she sees herself as a surprise of someone else:

Naked, and leaning over you,
breasts like apples,
like everything ready to fall.
And she looked straight at me
with softness, surprised to see me there.

Trombetta is attentive. She has learned to be attentive. She is still learning. The poet's life, if she is any good, is always an astonishment of days and hours, minutes and these instants of stillness. These moments out of ordinary life blaze with clues, just as when the poet was five years old and saw her father in his bath; the naked clue of his penis makes the young girl "begin to think perhaps he is a god who can create whole worlds." Certainly Trombetta has become a poet who can create whole worlds.

She writes of "The Ruddy Duck's Sky-Blue Bill," saying:

It must start very deep in the inner body
among the paraphernalia of his desire....

She writes of "Earthworms," of

... their tender lengths
stark and gleaming as sex. The sleek tubes

of their bodies all undulation and probe,
all liquid under pressure....

She writes of "The Wild Turkey," a hen:

she was an awful bag of tricks, poor bellows, poor shag.
There was not one lovely thing about her, unless it was
her determination to stick in that tree and stare east.

She writes of "Indian Summer:"

I want to die and rise again.

I want to dream
the tumbling acorn's dream.

Trombetta gives us here both a natural history of natural things and something of a natural history of family life. And all the poems are suffused with a kind of eros, as if at any moment we are going to be happily seduced:

saying, Yes! saying, More! saying,
   Anything you lay down here
      I will take.

She is not without a sense of humor, as the poem "Arse Poetica" illustrates:

Not head and heart's collusion, not their
menage a trois a la muse. Not breathy inspiration
or lines that thrum in the dark. Rather,
I summon rump, summon bum, summon bottom.
I invoke gluteus maximus....

Sweet, hefty peach of the body
that holds me firm so the pen can do its work.
Praise it, praise it roundly.

And she can speak of serious sadness, too, as in "After the Miscarriage:"

Her hands and arms with nothing
to hold, she enters the studio, morning
after summer morning, throws
wet clay down, the gritty solidity
beneath her palms....
...
She is the dizzy hum and revolution,
the muddy eye of the storm; she does not
think of God's own loneliness, pulling
Adam from the damp of the earth
setting him up against the void.

Trombetta writes of the piece of human bone found on a rooftop two blocks from the World Trade Center a year after 9-11, the bone appearing to be a piece of a woman's pelvis:

Name her unfastened one.
Name her open to the sky.
Name her relic, burnt offering,
shard of lamentation.
Name her lamb of the altar.
Unimaginable lamb.
Name her grit off the barges,
ash in the wind. Name her wind.
Name her laved by rats, flies,
by sun after rain.
Name her fallen world still falling.
Name her lost garden;
yoni, womb, place of passage,
Eden's cradle rocking, rocking.

My wife's mother died in September, 2005, and I was sitting with her in those last moments. Mary had gone home to get a shower and a change of clothes, and I sat with her mother and I was reading Trombetta's book to myself. When my mother-in-law's breathing changed for the last time, when breath became rattle moving towards silence, I was reading "Border Lament:"

You can tell by the set of this woman's jaw
her child is dying.
...
Her eyes search the distance as the dark rain falls,
bargaining the long valley, glazed sky, for miracles.
...
She cannot give up the stunning beauty of his feet,
only a little longer than her thumb.
She cannot think that they will never take one step
toward her, or how he is moving back now, alone,
across that final outland.

And then Mary's mother was moving across that final outland and Trombetta's poems became special to me. My mother-in-law's final stillness somehow woofed into the warp of these poems. One recognizes Trombetta's falling world, and he does not forget it.

----------------------------------
* Lynn Lyman Trombetta, Falling World. Sixteen Rivers Press, San Francisco, 2004. Order from: Sixteen Rivers Press, P.O. Box 640663, San Francisco, CA 94164-0633 or www.sixteenrivers.com .

RACHEL BARENBLAT'S CHAPLAINBOOK* POETRY MADE OF PAIN

"Oh, God, no!"

you might say to yourself, holding in your hands a collection of poems written during the author's internship in "clinical pastoral education" at Albany Medical Center. She was training to be a hospital chaplain - confronting those hard moments of life that are easy to get sentimental about, those moments of great pain and loss and death. "Oh, God," you might want to say, thinking perhaps these poems will go soft at all the wrong moments.

Rest assured, friends, this is not that kind of poetry. Rachel Barenblat's chaplainbook* is work by one who is a poet first and foremost. Barenblat knows how to make a poem, and it is incidental that she has shaped these poems out of her hospital experience. Indeed, she has made seventeen strong poems for this collection. She recognizes that whatever the "obvious" subject, a poem is always about the poetry of our existence, that ineffable lifting up that occurs when we are most fully human. It matters less that these poems are about events in Barenblat's internship in the chaplaincy program; it matters most that she pays attention to the importance of those moments, and to the hidden power which fills them with meaning. We are blessed that Barenblat can speak that which otherwise stays unspoken.

Not that being able to see and to make poems out of what she sees is easy for her. Already in the first poem of the book, "First Night," we find Barenblat admitting:

this is real and I am
completely unprepared.

In the next stanza:

The old woman on seven
seems soothed by the psalm
but then rasps "get out!"

The poem ends:

At dawn I walk the halls
like a monastery's courtyards.
I don't know what prayers
do, but I scatter them
like rose petals anyway.

In the poem, "Beginning," Barenblat wonders:

What does it take to begin
when all around you
stories are ending?

She is the new intern in the chaplaincy program, fresh and eager.

We all know frostbitten grapes
make sweeter wine, but
the metaphor only works
so far. Things can go wrong.

And so she gets called to the bedside of an old man whose pacemaker kept going, but whose heart could not:

... his fiancee weeps...
rubbing his wrinkled hand
as if it would ever grow warm
again in her own.

Barenblat's "On-Call Prayer" ends:

Shelter this ship
through the longest night.
Remove the sorrows
of sailors and passengers.
Help us reach the dawn.

She is seeing us at our most vulnerable, and her response to our vulnerability is not some phony "pip, pip" and stiff upper lip; rather, Barenblat acknowledges her own vulnerability, as in "Benediction," when a patient

rasps out a blessing
for my vocation....

The poet can't help wondering:

did some voice tell her
what I needed?

In "Bridge," she writes of a woman who can't remember; her husband

... might be at home
making a sandwich on soft rye
or maybe he's dead, sitting shiva
on the other side, waiting
for her to remember the way.

I think such poems are believeable precisely because Barenblat does not stand above or aside from the pain, but acknowledges her own.

And because she keeps a sense of humor. It never occurred to her that she ought expect such a question when a woman's husband has died:

can't you bring him back?
I'm so startled
I have to swallow

lines like "I'm only
a first-year chaplain;
they cover resurrection
in level two." All I say
is how sorry I am....

"Leaps of faith never get easier," Barenblat acknowledges in "Sea of Reeds:"

Stepping into the hospital hallway
is like plunging into the sea
trusting the waters to recede
so I can get where I'm going....

Still I hover outside patient rooms
cowed by the unkown currents
swirling inside. If I'm afraid
I don't know how to swim
will I choke on salt and drown?

In the final poem in the collection, "Shore," Barenblat admits that:

All our unanswerables...
remain unanswered.

The strength of these poems is that Barenblat declines to accept any easy answers. The mysteries of life and death are mysteries, and she refuses to diminish them with silly talk. She is willing to look at some of the hardest of our experiences and she doesn't flinch; she doesn't hide the pain; she doesn't lie to us about what she sees. Mercifully, she doesn't offer any false comfort.

While we tend to look to the "helping professions" for answers, in fact they have no more wisdom than any of the rest of us. Indeed, the sub-text in Barenblat's poems, I think, may be that - however much the chaplain helps us in the hard moments - our real answers are always and only to be found in our lone hearts. That is quite a lesson to learn from a single internship, isn't it?

-----------------------------
*Rachel Barenblat, chaplainbook. Laupehouse, 2006. Order from Lulu. $10.

THE PINE ISLAND PARADOX* BY KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE AN APPRECIATION - PART ONE

Kathleen Dean Moore, author of The Pine Island Paradox, is an attentive

observer who is bursting to write about place, about the places she loves, about the interconnectedness of all things. She is chair of the philosophy department at Oregon State University, yet she doesn't write like an academic philosopher, perhaps because she is also founding director of the Spring Creek Project "for ideas, nature, and the written word." Moore is as well the author of two previous books, Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World and Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water.

Pine Island is a wild Alaskan island on which Moore and her family have camped repeatedly and where many of her experiences of wildness have origin. The paradox? "Not even an island is an island."

Moore's book (like Eric Sevareid's Canoeing with the Cree, Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, Mari Sandoz's Old Jules, Kathleen Norris's Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, and Ben Logan's The Land Remembers) is one of that kind I like to buy several copies of, to give them away where needed, where they will find receptive souls, where they can settle in and help a reader to grow in wisdom and grace. For there is a lot of wisdom in The Pine Island Paradox, disguised as little essays about Moore's experiences in and at the edge of wilderness, of wildness. You might know I don't tolerate unhinged flights of "nature writing" which mean to create an ecology that does not include humankind; for better or worse, we are part of the equation. Moore includes us in her calculations as she writes of her experiences and what they mean. In most of these pieces, she puts herself, her husband, her family directly in the center of the telling, grounded in whatever place, whatever piece of the earth's crust they may temporarily inhabit. The book starts with and at Pine Island, and with Moore's experiences and ruminations upon that faraway piece of rocky prominence; yet it doesn't stop there: as she sees clearly, there is wildness almost seamlessly visited upon us everywhere, from the Oregon coast at the interface of headland and water, to a piece of ground she and her husband bought with the thought of possibly building a cabin there (but haven't), right up to the darkness at the far edge of Moore's backyard in town.

"Pine Island is the very symbol of isolation and exile," Moore says:

But any geographer will tell you that an island is only a high point in the continuous skin of the planet, the small part we can see of the hidden substance that connects everything on earth. It's a sign - a beautiful, rock-solid, bird-spattered sign - of the wholeness of being, the intricate interdependencies that link people and place.

*

Continued in Part Two, below....

THE PINE ISLAND PARADOX* BY KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE AN APPRECIATION - PART TWO

As a poet, as a writer of creative nonfiction, and as

a person fascinated by this world we inhabit, I am of course intensely interested in the link between people and place. When I heard Moore's book being read on Wisconsin Public Radio - heard snatches of it as I was driving now and again - I was drawn to the places she was discussing, to the stories she was telling. At first I didn't know who had written the words I was hearing; and - read aloud somewhat unempathetically in a man's voice - at times those words sounded glib and cheap and easy. Yet what Moore was searching for, what she wanted to hold in her hands, I could tell, was the same beating heart of place which I have been seeking; so, despite some misgivings, I ordered a copy of The Pine Island Paradox. I'm glad I did. Moore's words are not at all glib and cheap and easy when you're able to read them for yourself, when her voice comes through unmodulated by someone else's intonations. Indeed her voice is thoughtful and lyrical, passionate and caring and wise.

Early on, in the essay "Stalking Seals," I wasn't so sure. Moore told of kayaking out to visit a colony of seals on their rocks. Yet "some sentinel always gave the alarm," she said, "and they humped in a panic to the edge of the rock, heaved themselves overboard, and sank out of sight."

"I came in friendship," she said. E-uuuu, I grimaced. Can we speak of seals and friendship in the same sentence? I don't think so.

"My feelings were hurt when they didn't trust my efforts to make friends," she said. Oh, no, I thought, she's trying to make friends with nature. Things already seemed headed south by page 19.

Yet Moore redeemed herself. Within pages I had forgiven her lapse. Soon enough I was awash on the rush of her words and stories, ideas, insights.

*

Moore's is not a bloodless, bugless version of nature. Standing in water and holding bioluminescent plankton in their hands, she and her husband, Frank, were being bitten viciously by some of those bugs. "God," Frank said, rubbing his forehead. "These bugs are awful." And later:

"We stumbled through the darkness back to the tent. I had inhaled a blackfly, and I coughed for a long time before I fell asleep."

*

Continued in Part Three, below....

THE PINE ISLAND PARADOX* BY KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE AN APPRECIATION - PART THREE

At one point Moore was alone in a boat

out on the water, notebook on her lap and pen in hand, and she was trying to understand "the beautiful, complicated ways that love for people is all mixed up with love for places. The ecology, one might say, of caring." She continues:

"I opened my notebook. Let's put this gathered evidence in front of us and let it speak. Love has as its object: daughter, son, young woman who loves son, sudden quiet, a certain combination of smells (hemlock, saltwater, gas fumes), mist swimming with light, purple kayak, fog-bound island, hidden cove, and a man who can drive a boat backward through a whirlpool. The list is, of course, incomplete. Add silver salmon. Add unexpected sun. Add the whirlpool."

She made two lists - what it means to love a person and what it means to love a place - and found them to be the same list: (1) wanting to be near, physically; (2) wanting to know everything about; (3) rejoicing in the fact of; (4) fearing the loss of and grieving the injury to; (5) wanting to protect, "fiercely;" (6) being transformed in the presence of; (7) wanting to be joined with; (8) wanting the best for; (9) "desperately."

There was something important missing from her list, however. "Loving isn't just a state of being," she recognized, "it's a way of acting in the world. Love isn't a sort of bliss, it's a kind of work, sometimes hard, spirit-testing work." This is the wisdom of thirty-two years of marriage and a lifetime of loving the world around you, isn't it? What was missing?

"Number ten, I wrote in my notebook. To love a person or a place is to accept moral responsibility for its well-being."

Ah, this is where many of us fail - we say we love a person or a place, yet we fail to take care of her or him, of it. This means you cannot pretend to be an environmental president if you are pushing slash and burn policies, Mr. Bush. One cannot pretend to be a nature-lover if wilderness is lessened by his presence.

*

"I believe that the most loving thing you can say to a person is 'Look,'" Moore believes. The most loving stance, she says in the piece "Refrigerator Fungus," is two people standing side by side, looking out at the world together. "When people learn to look," she says, "they begin to see, really see. When they begin to see, they begin to care. And caring is the portal into the moral world."

The saddest, most self-destructive mistake we make, Moore writes, is "to think that humans can degrade their habitats and not degrade themselves." Even pigs know not to shit where they sleep. The extractive heart of the miner beats markedly different than that of the best husbanding farmers.

Moore quotes something that the Powhatan-Ren'pe writer Jack Forbes said to her:

"You could cut off my hand, and I would still live. You could take out my eyes, and I would still live. Cut off my ears, my nose, cut off my legs, and I could still live. But take away the air, and I die. Take away the sun, and I die. Take away the plants and the animals, and I die. So why would I think my body is more a part of me than the sun and the earth?"

Suddenly we have perspective: this little mudball spinning in space is all we've got and we should be taking care of it, for it is as much a part of us as our hands or eyes or legs or lips, as much a part of us as our own heart.

*

Continued in Part Four, below....

THE PINE ISLAND PARADOX* BY KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE AN APPRECIATION - PART FOUR

In "The Moral Equivalent of Wildness,"

Moore writes of taking her Philosophy of Nature class into the wilderness, to experience wilderness and wildness and to talk of them, of what they are and why we - as humans - need them in our lives. Yet she recognizes that it's an error to pre-suppose wildness "is something we find in the mountains and don't find in the valley, something we might transport from nature into culture, from wilderness to town, from far to near."

"Doesn't the moon rise over the sororities," Moore says, "when it rises also over the howling hills?"

"Maybe wildness isn't something we need to bring down from the mountain," she suggests.

"We are wildness - soil, water, oxygen, sunlight," she says. "It's all there."

The question may not be "how can we bring wildness into our lives?" The question may instead be:

"how can we remember to notice the wildness in every sweating pore, each stewed carrot, every solid step, the morning air noisy with rain, the reeling stars? Or maybe the question is: How can we live as if we were in the wilderness, with that same respect and care for what is beautiful and beyond us?"

One of Moore's students, with a wisdom not usually given to undergraduates, at least not when I was an undergraduate, said: "Wildness is a kind of silence, and silence is wild. You can bring silence down from the mountain, or you can find it in youself - either way. The importance of silence is that it allows you to hear." Although this Philosophy of Nature class, camped out in the wilderness as it was, still "had a lot of material to cover" at that point in the discussion, Moore assented: "Maybe this silence was our most important material."

And to some extent, I agree. One needs silence. And I agree silence need not be defined as something outside ourselves, any more than wildness is something outside ourselves. The secret is not so much going to wilderness as it is paying attention. If we pay attention, even the humblest pebble has much to teach us, even the merest grain of sand can take one's breath away. We value wilderness because it so readily transports us beyond ourselves. We recognize wilderness as "awesome" because it so readily draws awe from us. Yet if we choose to live an attentive life, if we choose to notice anything and everything in the ordinary world around us, if we learn to look and to see intensely, the beauty to be found in even the most ordinary of things can transport us far beyond ourselves.

As they sat at the fire, someone in Moore's class asked "everybody to hum a note and hold it. Doesn't matter what note. Just start to hum and don't stop." And so they did.

"Everybody hummed their own note, and it was a crazy, discordant chord we made. But gradually - inevitably - the voices tuned themselves together into a rich, beautiful, lingering chord. In the wild night, in the firelight, the students' eyes were bright with tears."

*

Continued in Part Five, below....

THE PINE ISLAND PARADOX* BY KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE AN APPRECIATION - PART FIVE

As I do, Moore finds beauty in the ordinary

stuff of the world. And it leads her, as it should lead all of us, to gratitude. In the essay "The Sacred and the Mundane" she writes:

The mundane - the stuff of our lives - is irreplaceable, essential, eternal, and changing, beautiful and fearsome, beyond human undersanding, worthy of reverence and awe. The English word for this combination of qualities is "sacred...." If the mundane is sacred, and the sacred is mundane; if there are not two worlds, but one, and it is magnificent and mysterious enough to shake us to the core; if this is so, then we - you and I and the man on the beach - ought to live lives of gladness and gratitude.

Then, every act of gratitude or gladness is a counterforce to those who would make the stuff of the earth into commodities only, as the writer Freeman House pointed out. Gladness lifts the material world out of the merely mundane and makes it wonderful, and reminds us that as we use the sacred stuff of our lives for human purposes, we must do so gratefully, with full hearts.

*

Oh, would that Paul Hoffman believed any of this, would that he'd ever had a grateful, non-commercial moment in his life: this Hoffman, who - according to the New York Times - is the deputy assistant secretary at Interior proposing to undermine the protected status of our national parks, to open them to oil and mineral exploration, and to ease Park restrictions on off-road vehicles, snowmobiles, and Jet Skis. His secret draft revision of the park systems management policy, prepared without consultation within the National Park Service itself, would explicitly allow the sale of religious merchandise, would remove any reference to evolution, and would strip away the scientific basis for park management. Not surprisingly he envisions a wider range of commercial activities within the parks.

TIRADE MODE ON: My anger at this news knows no bounds. Our national parks do not belong to the Bush administration, to do with as they wish. They are ours. They are to be "protected," not "conserved" - Hoffman's minor change of wording which considerably softens the standard used to gauge the effects of park policy. :TIRADE MODE OFF.

*

I so much envy the way Moore writes of the world in "One Night, of Three Hundred Sixty-five." She thinks she sees a miracle, then realizes "it's just the everyday working of the world."

Warm moist air encounters cold air and turns to shards of ice. Light catches the crystal planes. Tundra swans fly in to feed. Geese cry out. The lake reflects the sky. That's the real miracle: that it's no miracle at all, just Earth, sailing on in the dark.

*

Continued at Part Six, below....

THE PINE ISLAND PARADOX* BY KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE AN APPRECIATION - PART SIX

Moore goes on to talk at length about gratitude

later, in "The Night of the Razor-Clam Tide." She believes that gratitude "is a kind of seeing, an awareness of the magnitude of the gift of this earth." That gratitude is attentiveness. That it is a kind of terror, and that the gifts of this world come undeserved and we have no claim against the universe for starlight or clams. "Rain is not a birthright," she says. "The world is contingent, improbable, beyond our control: it could be, or not." That gratitude is a kind of rejoicing. And that gratitude is a moral obligation, owed to the earth itself. "To be grateful is to live a life that honors the gift," she says.

"To care for it, keep it safe, protect it from damage.... To celebrate it, to honor the worth of it in a thousand ways, not just in words, but in how we live our lives."

*

How we live our lives. Hmmm. Moore talks about personal responsibility in "The Parable of Rats and Mice:"

"A mouse was crushed," Jon said as he loaded the tent bag into the boat. He and Frank and I had been camping on a gravel bar in the Willamette River, not far from home.

I looked up from my oatmeal.

"What are you talking about?"

"A mouse died under our tent."

"Of what?"

"Crushing."

Nobody talks this way.

"What kind of mouse?" I asked. "How crushed?"

"Deer mouse, I guess," Jon said. "Very...."

"It was under my sleeping pad, wasn't it," I demanded....

A mouse was crushed, we say. The forest was cut. The birds were poisoned. An opossum was run over. A good time was had by all. So nobody's acting here, only being acted upon....

I think about this story and wonder what it means. One thing, I think, is clear: I should go on full alert if I hear myself say, "I'm not the one who does harm; harm just happens around me." Like it or not, I own the consequences of my acts. They're mine. That mouse is mine.

Thank God, I say. Nothing aggravates me quite so much as someone's refusal to accept responsibility for her actions. Whether it is a president whose misguided foreign policy increasingly troubles the world or the old lady who put a hot cup of McDonald's coffee between her legs and was burned when she spilled it, or a writer who crushes a mouse beneath her sleeping pad while camping on a gravel bar in the Willamette River, we own our actions, and we should accept responsibility for them. Increasingly among us there are those who wish not to own their actions, who think they do not act but rather are acted upon, who are "victims;" Moore is not among that ugly bunch.

TIRADE MODE ON: I suppose there is no politic way to say this: the tragedy in New Orleans is not that Hurricane Katrina blew in and breached the levees, but that so many people had chosen to build their houses and live their lives below sea level in a region through which hurricanes such as Katrina are known to blow. Each soul chooses where it wishes to be. By default, not to choose is a choice one makes. Unfortunately, we seem to hear about personal responsibility only from the God-hugging right-wingers; yet we need to be having a serious national discussion about our responsibilities, not only about accepting responsibility for our own actions, which is what the God-huggers want, but also about our responsibilities to and for each other and our responsibilities to and for the natural world around us. I'll add that the problem of responsibility in our country is compounded because we have too damn many lawyers willing to go to court in an attempt to find someone else to blame for choices we've made.

A sojourn in the wilderness has much to teach us of responsibility. Giving yourself to the water in scuba diving, you are acutely reminded that: (1) each diver is responsible for himself/herself; and (2) you are also responsible for your dive buddy. Canoeing in the wilds of Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada, it becomes clear that: (1) you've got to save yourself for there's no one out there who's going to save you; and (2) all of us on the expedition, we're in this together, and we'd better act like it.

I know it might sound as if I'm beating up the wrong people here, and I don't mean to do that. There are a lot of incentives in place to lead people astray, to encourage bad decisions, and those who offer such incentives need to be called to account as well. Those who took tax money and spent it on war instead of the upkeep of infrastructure also need to be taken to task - and it's our responsibility, each of individually and all of us collectively, to see that they are.  :TIRADE MODE OFF.

*

Concludes in Part Seven, below....

THE PINE ISLAND PARADOX* BY KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE AN APPRECIATION - PART SEVEN

The final essay in The Pine Island Paradox

reprises the image of musical harmony we found in "The Moral Equivalent of Wildness." Moore remembers standing up to sing in church, her sister beside her. A couple hundred people rose with them:

"all open their mouths at the same time. Ordinary air sucks past lips red or wine or pallid, and when the air blows back out of all those lungs, it has become one amazing, beautiful thing."

If we can create such harmony out of thin air, why can't we live in harmony too, Moore wonders. We come so close, she says. "We almost find a way to live together like a song." And then:

"again and again, we fail: a small meanness or prolonged war, a lonely child or a poisoned river. This is the sorrow in the heart of all music."

In the final paragraph of that final essay, the final paragraph of The Pine Island Paradox, Moore recalls a time when she and that same sister were at the Oregon coast "in a wind so strong it almost flattens us." They fought their way to the top of the headland where someone had posted words from Tennyson's poem "Crossing the Bar:" Twilight and evening bell, and after that the dark. How many years ago, Moore wonders, did we sing that song with the church choir?

"Do you remember?" I ask my sister, and of course she does. We stand in the protection of the lighthouse and try to sing, but cry instead in the perfect joining of headland and poetry, and wind and rain and sorrow, sisters and the surging sea.

*

Moore's prose sings. It swoops and soars and swings. It moves from image and experience, from the small things, the casual motions, through narrative and language to meaning: the meaning of what is, the connections between things, the implications for us as moral creatures. Is this philosophy? Only of the best sort, grounded in experience, in humankind's longings, in our noblest impulses. Is this "nature writing?" Yes, of the kind which includes us, rather than excludes us; we are part of the equation and, being the moral beings on this spinning mudball, we bear special responsibility, the responsibility to care and to care for. Moore's prose does not whine, but rejoices. She is not "preaching," but musing; this reads like meditation. Moore chews her words and chews her ideas; hers are the sinewy kind of sentences I like.

Let me urge you to beg, borrow, or buy a copy of The Pine Island Paradox, to listen carefully and to hear Moore out, to argue with her where you must, then to ruminate on these matters in your own fashion as fully as she did. Every morning the sun comes up and we have the opportunity to re-make ourselves, and hence to re-make the world. Pine Island would be a good place to start re-making oneself.

Let me urge you, indeed, to buy several copies of The Pine Island Paradox and give them away. The wisdom in Moore's prose cannot be scattered too widely.

-----------------------------------
*Kathleen Dean Moore, The Pine Island Paradox. Milkweed Editions, 2004. Order from Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55415; (800) 520-6455; www.milkweed.org . $20.00/hardcover.

THE MAPMAKER OF ABSENCES*BY MARIA M. BENET AN APPRECIATION - 1

Many and varied is the loveliness

in the poems of Maria M. Benet's Mapmaker of Absences (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2004; $15.00). There is richness of language, snap of line-break, rightness of image, clarity of feeling, toughness of wisdom. One wouldn't guess that these are the work of a woman who came to poetry from Romania, then Hungary, then Canada, before she settled into California; one wouldn't guess that English is not her first language: there is such a fineness of tone, such an exactness of expression, such a naturalness here.

Memory, Benet tells us in "Ghazal," is the mapmaker of absences. How the poet is attracted to the darkness of loss: not because she comes from Transylvania, not because her soul is more morose than ours, but because life is as much about what we have left behind as about what we have; and Benet knows it. And memory brings such loss before us. Uprooted from the place of one's birth, one must find a place to call home. Seeing your father slide towards death over the course of your teenage years, sadness becomes an essential component of your emotional make-up.

I would also argue, I think, that the subtext of these poems suggests it is not memory, but the poet, who is the true mapmaker of absences; and not only this poet, but all of us who would write of what the heart dares speak.

Memory provides the stuff the map is made of, to be sure, but it is the poet who gives us a record of the journey, who sets down what has been lost. What we understand, we understand from the poet's vantage. She selects what she will examine, we will see; she chooses the language she will use to report what she finds. She is the intelligence of the mapmaking.

Now, to be clear, I recognize that not everything in these poems is necessarily autobiographical; I acknowledge that the poet can pick up and put down a variety of masks at will – I do the same myself; and I understand that one can speak of herself in the third person or, conversely, can speak of someone else in the first person. Yet there is a wholeness to the voicing of these poems which makes me comfortable using a shorthand that refers to "the poet" when in fact it may or may not be the poet who is "speaking" to us. Ultimately, behind these poems there is a singular intelligence, whatever we call her. I call her Benet or "the poet."

Richness of language? How often do we hear the assonance of the long "E"/long "U" sounds found in this stanza from "A Natural Argument" – scene, these, deep, be, sweetest; blue, true, roots, fruit:

So now this: my postulating garden scene,
these steps and a bare suggestion
of figs ripened into the deep blue substance
of hope. Could this be true –
that only a strict confinement of roots
yields the sweetest fruit?

And again, in the same stanza, we hear "S" piling upon "S," starting with "so" and landing on "sweetest:" So, this, postulating, scene, steps, suggestion, figs, substance, this, strict, sweetest. Sweet.

Continued at MAPMAKER - 2, below

MAPMAKER - 2

Or this, from "Echo:"

Downstream

the one world,
flooded plain
in the mouth. So much
water under the bridge. Over
the chattering flux
an arch of sound

Look at "much" and "flux" here, look at "under" and "over," listen to the roundness of "sound" echoing the "down-" of "downstream."

From "Spring Rites," an end-stop with something around the corner yet:

... Oh, the light;
nowhere to hide....

From "Winter Solstice," how perfect the bareness:

... the bared
fields....

From "Impersonations of the Muse," the syntax lets us stop, but again there is something we need after the turn:

... He tells me of girls,
foundries of wishes in the refine
of bright hair....

And, farther along in the same poem, the rightness of the break between "dress/rehearsal:"

... I am the theater
without opening night, the dress
rehearsal....

From "Quae Amissa, Salva," how the word "now" rings, letting you think one thing, until you have to think another:

... As long as I can laugh, now
and then, I suppose, it's all right.

But enough of this.

Rightness of image? I was struck most keenly by the rightness of Benet's images in the poem about her father dying, "Incomplete Requiem." The poem opens:

I wish I could write something splendid
about death, but my father has been dying
for years....

Before her father's death, the duty to speak had become

... almost like a chore, like waiting in line
for bread in lean times, wondering
if it would be all gone when my turn came,
nothing but empty shelves.

In the second part of the poem, Benet looks at an old photograph of her father and herself taken in a cemetery, and the poem ends:

It was All Hallows' Eve, and we were
still together. We lit candles
and watched the crowd, the living
and the dead in a blaze of light.

So much of the closure here (and in other poems), so much of the meaning depends on the right image set exactly in the right place. This light which now is bright, she doesn't need to say, will soon burn out.

It has been quite some time since I read such a poignant poem by a daughter speaking of her father's death.

Continued at MAPMAKER - 3, below

MAPMAKER - 3

Light and darkness also play out in Benet's poem "Budapest Gothic," which ultimately is about her mother. The poet describes a city scene in the first stanza: the leafless trees, the "black rain," the street "habitually bleak,"

and the buildings, repositories of dreams,
rise on ambition laid to waste,
but in the cracks between the polished stones
there are signs of life,
cigarettes smoked to the bitter end.

There follows a stanza about "the women I used to know," then comes the stanza which ends talking of Benet's mother:

Me, I left with her motherly blessing.
Here, the garden is blooming, like my house.
There are the drought-tolerant trees,
the furniture to withstand stormy kids.
And here, late in the season, among the flowers,
signs of her life: weeds, small clouds,
dark openings and cracks in the splendid light.

It may be that, with the "dark openings and cracks in the splendid light" as the signs of her life, the poet's mother stands in these poems as a marker for all the things that cannot be; she is not, so far as we can tell, "The Queen of Romania," yet she may be another "grande dame of rococo sorrow," of whom the poet could say:

... Where you live,
there is always the heat, that ponderous
dead calm of August.

Can we imagine that the mother was one of these women, and that the poet was the child (from "Harvest"):

The women, dressed in black, bring soup
in tiered tins, bread in stiff linens.

The child is mute as she sits
under the whorled branches of an oak.
She dips her piece of bread in milk....

The poem ends:

The child's dreams are a tangle of stars
sprouting green skies. To her hunger
there is no end.

Continued at MAPMAKER - 4, below

MAPMAKER - 4

The rightness of Benet's imagery surprises which such lines as these (also from "Harvest"):

The language they speak is a low, dark hum,
like a distant gathering of bees
claiming the horizon.

and (from "An Italian Romance"):

The sun is a giant cracked egg;
in its yolk even a single geranium
on a terrace forested with antennae
has the look of an old masterpiece.

and (from "Days of Awe"):

What of the body? Weaned of flesh,
the skin, shroud of bones.
In the lashed raft of a bed,
your outline
a crudely stitched hem.

What of the mind? Filigree spice box
to cinnamon and cloves.
The scent of other days turns
your thoughts
to bitter seeds in your mouth.

We are blessed to fullness. In these poems, we sense that the world is an object for serious attention, to be approached with decorum and treated with solemnity; Benet's language and imagery do that.

Clarity of feeling and toughness of wisdom? The clarity of Benet's language goes a long way towards creating the clarity of feeling in these poems. The poet wants to say what she means, exactly. In "Quae Amissa, Salva," ("What has been lost is safe") the poet's father falls to sleep. She closes the door:

There was his labored breath, and outside, a world
between the changing light, ragged edges everywhere –
and somewhere in America, in the lifting mists,
    the day begins.

In "Trees at Dawn," Benet describes morning's first light as:

... a halo
that obliterates the blueprint
of random stars riveting
night's dark in place.

In "Orpheus," she reports this:

Look, he says to no one in particular,
the world is full of things
unbecoming themselves....

Why are so many poets afraid to speak this clearly?

This is the shrewdness of these poems: a kind of tough wisdom which at times approaches the middlewestern. This line,

For whatever it takes, the sea makes payment

for instance, could be Benet's version of our middlewestern understanding that:

For whatever it gives, the land exacts tribute.

Reading these poems, at times I think of the dark middle European women who peopled Chicago or Milwaukee or Minneapolis. In "Childhood," the poet acknowledges:

The wanderlust in me so strong,
it was hard
to distinguish from homesickness.

Many of those women who settled the middlewest could not go back to the home they came from and they could not call this place home; like Benet, they were lost in the darkness between wanderlust and homesickness. You always want your life to mean something, but you're not always sure it does. You may be one cipher in an infinite procession of them.

Continued at MAPMAKER - 5, below

MAPMAKER - 5

Like sunflowers in late September, many of these poems seem to have dark roots. This is not a brooding poetry, necessarily, though melancholia seems not far off. There is about the poems an essential sadness, like an aroma.

In "A Romance of Roses," the poet has learned of a man in France

who loved his wife the way Romeo loved Juliet,
the way Tristan was beholden to Iseult.

The poet wonders "if you can love me beyond all/words." The poem concludes a little darkly, a little wryly, a little sadly:

I wanted to tell you about love in France,
but when I called out, my voice
wouldn't carry to the other room,
so I fell asleep, certain in the dark
that you would try your very best,
because of your kindness,
not to disturb me, or wake me
later, when you'd join me in our bed.

Perhaps we need to be disturbed, woken, all of us, else we miss the fullness of this life.

The tough wisdom? I have already quoted some of those lines which speak to me:

... Could this be true –
that only a strict confinement of roots
yields the sweetest fruit?

and

For whatever it takes, the sea makes payment....

and

... As long as I can laugh, now
and then, I suppose, it's all right.

and

I wish I could write something splendid
about death, but my father has been dying
for years....

Wise and tough lines such as these abound in the poems. Other examples might be taken from "Days of Awe:"

... To remember
is the kind of hope you
will not claim.

and from "Autumn Begins in Cluj, Transylvania:"

All those who stayed on are proud to be hungry.
Their relatives, far from home, in their new language,
do not know hunger or pride.

...

and pride, like dry leaves, falls to hunger's
bare ground.

and the final lines of the final poem, "Border Questions:"

What is a border?
The ark in your chambered heart
with its twin cargo, wonder and belief,
the scrolled tide of
an untethered conviction
that on the border
every brink is the core.

On the book-flap of this collection, Steve Orlen suggests that "the whole book feels like a vision in which we view the common dramas of our lives: what leads up to them, what ensues." These poems are little dramas. Some rise and fall is being played out, as in Greek tragedy, whether of humans or of something else. We see the poet's role here is to apprehend the drama, like tension in a room, and to give it voice. There are people talking to each other in these poems; or the poet is talking to them; or she is lining up the things her attention has gathered in such a way that we converse with the meaning of them.

Continued at MAPMAKER - 6, below

MAPMAKER - 6

One may wonder: how does Benet make the poetry of her poems, how does she put together the pieces that, together, make us gasp? I find four ways that she arrives at this work.

First, one kind of poem begins with the sense that "I know what this is and I search it for meaning." She starts with a general statement or insight and follows it with the particulars that support it, or with an incident or an item that sparks lines about how it is like something else. Her poem "Recursion" is one such example.

In her second way of constructing a poem, the poem builds to what it means; meaning emerges at the end. Particulars lead to a general statement or insight or understanding. Details accrue to meaning. The poems "Incident," "Ecologue, Minor," and "Disenthrallment" are excellent examples of this method.

In the third type of poem, "This is what it is." She arranges the particulars pretty much without comment, and the poetry is found in their relation to one another. "Performance," "Blood from Stone," and the third part of "Triptych: Crossings" would be examples. "Nil Admirari," which is a kind of litany in answer to her son's question "What is an angel," would also fall into this category.

And, finally, there is the approach which uses a combination of the three previous ways of shaping a poem. For instance, "California Littoral" starts with generalization; but in the end the particulars speak for themselves, i.e. the microwave bobbing on the waves is what it is: it doesn't mean anything; in that it may be like much else in our lives, where meaning is such a frail gossamer.

I have been singing high praise of Benet's work here; and I mean to sing high praise: this is lovely poetry. But the poet is human; and even the best of us falter. For instance, Benet's poem "Roses" fizzles out, and the final five lines "tell" instead of "show;" it starts profound enough, but ends up insubstantial, at least in my reading of it. The poem on the facing page, "Iridescence," takes nothing larger as its subject, yet makes something of it. I could discuss these poems side by side, to establish what makes one of them work, and the other not, but I don't want to do all the work: you, the reader, should read them and compare them and judge them for yourself.

And I suppose I wouldn't be an Iowa farm-boy if I didn't mention that, at least in my experience, you do not put "grain" in a silo, you put silage or haylage in a silo; you put grain in a crib or a bin. What do they say - even Homer nods? So does Milton and so do I. One wishes to forgive Benet's lapse on the strength of the rest of that particular poem.

Thirdly, I would suggest that the vantage and stance and tone of the second last poem in the book, "Instability," are wrong for this collection. The poem is not a "bad" poem by any means, it is simply in the wrong place; it may belong in another book.

Continued at MAPMAKER - 7, below

MAPMAKER - 7

In summary, let me say clearly: Mapmaker of Absences is a terrific book of poems. And though it is a first book, Benet's voice here is not that of a newcomer; rather, the language is so rich, the tone so well modulated that you would think her an old hand at arranging words and lines and stanzas. Benet surprises with the turn of her lines and the turn of her phrases, with the fullness of her understanding and the strength in her wisdom. Hers is a book I will happily add to the shelf of those I keep close to hand, for frequent reference and on-going sustenance. She is a poet I am happy to welcome to the circle of poets who care about the world we inhabit and the language we use to speak of what we find.

Welcome, Maria M. Benet, and thanks for adding the lilt of your distinctive voice to the chorus of American poets.

---------------------------------------
*Mapmaker of Absences by Maria M. Benet. Sixteen Rivers Press, 2004. $15. Available from Sixteen Rivers Press, PO Box 640663, San Francisco, CA 94164-0663. You should probably include a couple dollars extra to help cover shipping costs.

***

THE MAPMAKER HERSELF: AN INTERVIEW WITH POET MARIA M. BENET

I have read Maria Benet's blog alembic for quite some time; when I saw that Benet had published her first book of poems, The Mapmaker of Absences, I ordered a copy. The poems moved me to write an appreciation of the book (see above) and I thought, too, it would be interesting to talk with the poet about her work. I had planned to interview Benet when she and her husband were in Madison this past July, when I went out to dinner with them, but you know how poets get to talking and one thing leads to another and there was no time to conduct the interview face-to-face. So I left my questions with Benet, who graciously agreed to answer them via e-mail. This, then, is that interview: my questions prepared on July 20th and her answers delivered on August 8th.

I completed my appreciation of the poems before Benet sent me her answers to the questions, and I have not revised what I wrote because of her responses; so between the appreciation and the interview you will see some complementary passages, and some that stand in contrast to each other – as the reader and the poet sometimes stand in contrast to one another.

Indeed, Benet appended a note to her answers when she sent them. "Tom," she said, "I have been reading and re-reading all your very thoughtful, considered, and thorough questions, and I only hope that I have answered them adequately for you to get a full picture. Some of the questions you ask me about the making of my poems truly amazed me because I had no idea my poems took on such shapes and tones for readers. But answer them I will try, so here we go. If I get a bit testy in places, forgive me... [It's] not that I am not truly grateful for this excellent opportunity you have provided for me to really take a look at what I consider to be my ars poetica... or the way I make my poems."

So here we go.

Montag: (Q1) Where were you born, where have you lived, how did you arrive here (in all senses of the question)?

Benet: I was born in Cluj, Romania. To be more exact, in terms of a regional flavor that might be familiar to Americans, if not from life, then from Hollywood renditions of it, I was born in Transylvania, a province of sorts that over the centuries has been everything: an independent country, an occupied land, the outpost of empires, and home to exiled Romans, Hungarians, Turks, Germans, Armenians, Jews, Romanians, Gypsies.

I spent most of my childhood in Cluj, in the heart of Transylvania. In fact, I lived there until the age of 14, when my mother and I moved to Budapest, Hungary. This was not an easy move for me, nor was it easy for my mother. I was very "territorial" as a child and fiercely proud and completely enamored with my place of birth. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. My mother, though, who was born in Budapest, was experiencing an increasing number of problems at work as a Hungarian. She ran a pharmaceutical research institute and she had strict work ethics. Form what I can remember, her ethics and drive didn’t sit well in a Romania that ran most of its economy on the idea of 5-year plans instead of the actual work it would have taken to bring those plans to fruition.

To make a long story short, she lost her job and was forced to work at a construction site for some months before she could apply for a passport to leave the country. As my parents happened to be divorced - even though given a housing shortage they kept sharing the apartment in which we lived - she and I eventually were granted permission to leave, and we moved to Budapest.

It was in Budapest that my father’s cousin’s wife from Canada visited me and decided with my mother that I should move to Vancouver. The paperwork for that took some time, but shortly after I turned 17, the week the first man landed on the Moon (in 1969), I landed in Vancouver, Canada....

I grew attached to living in Vancouver, where eventually I attended both the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, and would probably be still living there, had I not met my husband Charlie, who at the time was working at Simon Fraser University. We moved to California in 1985, when he received a job offer from a software company.

Hard to believe now, but California has become the place for me where I have lived the longest in my life. I suppose it is the place where I have the most tangled roots now - as it is here that I had my family and raised my two sons.

Continued at BENET INTERVIEW - 2, below

BENET INTERVIEW - 2

Montag: (Q2) How many languages do you speak? What is your language of preference? How much of the poet is in the "she" of "Polyglot?" How does your experience with languages inform the line in "Harvest" (p. 52) which says the immigrants' language "is a low, dark hum."

Benet: In my life, I learned many languages (Hungarian, Romanian, German, French, Russian, English, and Italian). Some by choice, others by necessity. Of those I speak fluently only one now: English. But there was a time when I spoke fluent Hungarian and Romanian. And French. A long, long time ago, I wrote poems in Romanian and French. And, naturally, in Hungarian.

I went to a German Kindergarten and had private German lessons, too. When I was 9 years old, I found a book my parents had that was all about the Nazi concentration camps. I was horrified by the pictures, by the images of what I thought back then to be unbelievable cruelty. I told my mother that I no longer wanted to keep learning the "Nazi language" and to my surprise, she let me drop the lessons. It wasn’t until much later that I found out why: she wanted to keep me from finding out that we were Jewish, to spare me having to deal personally with the rampant anti-Semitism that still characterized the culture in which we lived.

But back to your question. I learned many languages, but speak few. I speak none without an accent, as if none could be my native tongue.

I suppose the poem "Polyglot" is a distillation of my experiences with languages and the necessity of having to learn new ones.

As for your question regarding the line in the poem "Harvest" that refers to the "low hum," well, that "hum" is not immigrants' language - it’s the men talking while they work in the fields and the child overhearing it from a distance. If you want to get fancy about it, perhaps you can make a distinction such as the gender gap: men keeping to their tasks in the field (to the sowing and reaping), and the women at the edge, nurturing the men and the children. But that’s reading something into it, when the point in the poem is to merely invoke the image of distances - not to comment on them as such.

Montag: (Q3) How is it that you came to write poetry in a language that is not your native tongue?

Benet: I write in a language that is not my native tongue because I forgot my native tongue - because I have no native tongue - because English is what I speak now.

Continued at BENET INTERVIEW - 3, below

BENET INTERVIEW - 3

Montag: (Q4) Let's talk about the grouping principle at work in the five sections of your book. What is the controlling center of each section, and how do they hold together as a book? The section titles are: (1) Wrestling pleasure from the dead calm; (2) Still within site from the house; (3) Wager of spring; (4) The end of daylight savings time; and (5) Raft of words.

Benet: I am not sure I can identify "the controlling center of each section" in my book. I think that’s more a question for the reader, the scholar or the critic. But I can tell you that the "grouping principle" I had in mind when I made the sections, along with the way the poems are ordered in the sections, was that of a reasoned dialogue. Each section and each poem in the sections seemed to me to be part of a conversation. I hoped that this conversation would cover issues raised by childhood (be it from a child’s perspective or the parent’s perspective), marriage (from both spouses’ perspective), art (poem’s relation to language), and faith (art as a spiritual practice).

As for your question whether they hold together as a book - well, the publisher thought so, and I hope that some of my readers think so too. When I put together the manuscript, I thought so too.

Montag: (Q5) Would you explain the choice of "Instability" as the next to last poem in the book? It seems to me to belong to another book entirely.

Benet: "Instability" is the next to last poem in the book because it is meant to return the reader (and the poet too) from the world of words into the "streams of blood," or back to the body - the world of senses. But, given the "grouping principle" of my book, that constant questioning and juxtaposition, it is not enough to leave the speaker or the reader anchored, as it were, back in the world. As a poet, my task is not to reassure the reader or worry about his or her safety. My task, if I have any, is to give the utmost attention to both the world and the words in which I then bring you "news" of this world.

So if the poem "Instability" suggests that there is too great a chasm between the spiritual and the earthly, the last poem, "Border Questions," offers a solution by making that chasm, that "brink" a new opportunity for grounding.

I know that during our dinner in Madison I seemed to have agreed with you that "Instability" might belong to another book. Re-reading that section, I can tell you now with certainty that for me, as the poet, this poem belongs exactly where it is in the book. It doesn’t belong anywhere else, or in another book.

Montag: (Q6) You say memory is "the mapmaker of absences." How would you respond to the suggestion that the poet herself is the mapmaker of absences?

Benet: Well, of course the poet is mapmaker and her tool in this business of charting is language. But the territory that needs to be mapped is different for each poet, it seems to me, even when many of them tread on common ground in terms of inhabiting that space in which the human is at home.

So yes, the poet is the mapmaker, but, in my case, the territory of absences is the province of memory. In other words, memory is my Magellan or Lewis and Clark, the greedy or driven explorer looking for that which gains shape or boundaries, as well as coordinates only in its absence.

Still too opaque with all those fancy words getting in the way? Let me put it this way: I may be the one drawing the map in words, but the only way I can access the field to survey it, is through memory, because what I am charting is a world from which I am absent and which, in my absence, is sinking into oblivion.

Montag: (Q7) It might be a stretch to say these poems are an expression of your dark Romanian soul; yet many of them do seem dark and brooding. Why is that? How would you respond to the characterization of your poems as full of sadness and loss? As a poet, you seem compelled to look at old age and loss and death and to ask: What of us?

Benet: Hmm, dark Romanian soul... I don’t know about that. Transylvanian, maybe, but certainly not Romanian or Hungarian or ... well, I don’t know if my soul in particular has a nationality - hence my obsession with "absences."

A simpler answer to your question of why my poems seem so dark and full of brooding is this: temperament, brain chemistry. Or not enough Prozac....

Continued at BENET INTERVIEW - 4, below

BENET INTERVIEW - 4

Montag: (Q8) There seems to be a sensibility in these poems sometimes that is somewhat akin to the middlewestern outlook. I'm thinking of middle European women who immigrated to Chicago or Milwaukee or Minneapolis, who could not go home, but who were not yet home here. They had some of that wanderlust you write of in "Childhood," p. 47, wanderlust so strong that it is hard to distinguish it from homesickness. We always want our lives to mean something but we are not sure they do. We may be ciphers in an infinite progression of ciphers. How would you respond to a characterization of your poems as "middlewestern" is this sense?

Benet: I don’t know much about the lives of middle European women who immigrated to Chicago, Milwaukee or Minneapolis... and I am not sure if you mean Austrians and Germans by that designation, because where I come from is designated as Eastern Europe, and this territory includes Poland and the former Czechoslovakia, as well as Hungary and the former Yugoslavia... but if you pick up on a sensibility in my poems that reminds you of Europeans, European women, and immigrants to the US, well, I suppose that’s there, in all its mix, given the "coordinates" of my situation.

I would argue that this sensibility you call "middlewestern" such a way in your question is not necessarily limited to the territory you mapped for me in your comparison. Much of it is independent of place - and that’s just the problem. Unrootdness is now global.

In my experience, one of the major socio-cultural (not to mention economic) issues of the last century (and I am talking about the 20^th here) has been about the interplay between "homesickness" and "wanderlust," of being unhinged from our roots, even as we keep going in search of home....

So, to answer your question more directly - and maybe this not the answer you were hoping to hear, is this: globalization has made "middlewesterners" of most of us.

Montag: (Q9) The most middlewestern statement of all in these poems is:

"... an untethered conviction
that on the border
every brink is the core."

And we would say, in the middle, the center is the edge. How have you come by this understanding?

Benet: Well, I suppose that my understanding about the "brink" being a "core," or the center’s recasting as an edge, comes from the simple observation that one’s man’s (or woman’s) blinders are another’s telescope. Again, I am not sure if this is a middlewestern statement, but then, I am not an expert on the middlewest. Given that my son is moving to Madison, Wisconsin, though, I guess that this "borderline" acquaintance I have with the middlewest is likely to become a center for me, which is likely to put me on the edge, sooner or later....

Montag: (Q10) Of all the absences mapped in your poems, your father's absence seems to loom the largest. Would you talk about his absence as a presence in your art?

Benet: I am not sure I have an explanation for why my father’s absence looms so large in the poems. Perhaps because he died when I was 19 or so and I have to go back in time, as well as in space, to "map" my memories of him.

Montag: (Q11) We need to talk about your mother, and what she represents in these poems. She seems to me to be the marker for all the things that cannot be. Is she? (p. 74: "On my mother's lips, joy conscripts my name: a burden.")

Benet: You make an interesting observation about what my mother represents in my poems. I wasn’t aware of this. The fact is that my mother always had high expectations of how life should be in general, and I think that has caused her some distress over the years. Luckily she is very resilient and always found her way back to that perch of expectations, in spite of her experience of years of misery.

Continued at BENET INTERVIEW - 5, below

BENET INTERVIEW - 5

Montag: (Q12) Let's talk about how you shape your poems. Would you describe how you build your poems, about the logistics of putting the parts and pieces together, how you arrive finally at the effect you want to achieve?

Benet: You ask a hard question when you ask me how I shape my poems. If I were a sculptor, I could probably tell you something about how the stone catches my attention in the ways in which it obscures and conceals the life inside it, and how by chipping away at it with this tool or that, I help free its heart, or soul, or former life, or what have you.

But the truth is that I am not quite sure how I shape my poems. Each poem finds its boundaries through different methods. Sometimes the poem is lurking in my consciousness, just waiting to be transcribed. Other times, there are these phrases wandering around, aimless but desperate to belong, or to find a home in a text. They want to in-sense themselves....

But mostly it is an image that arrests me (or my attention, rather). Then the hard work starts: the mixing of words, the scarping away of the blobs of thickened phrases, the layering of more words to bring out a new hue, or the diluting of some brash and bold stroke that might be out of place in this picture. In other words, just plain drudgery until it seems to me that the image the words make approximate the image of the world that spoke to me in the first place.

Rarely do I start (or even finish) by going for effect in my poems. The effect is always, well, the effect of the work - and not the engine of the primary shaping force.

Montag: (Q13) I find four ways that you arrive at these poem, and I'd like you to respond to my sense of them:

First, it's "I know what this is and I search it for meaning." You start with a general statement or insight and follow it with the particulars that support it, or with an incident or an item that sparks lines about how it is like something else. ("Recursion," p. 78, might be an example.)

Second, it's "This builds to what it means; meaning emerges at the end." Particulars lead to a general statement or insight – details accrue to meaning. ("Incident," p. 24, or "Ecologue, Minor," p. 25, might be examples. And "Disenthrallment," p. 64, is an excellent example of this.)

Third, it's "This is what it is." You arrange the particulars pretty much without comment, and the poetry is in their relation to one another. ("Performance," p. 34, or "Blood from Stone," p. 35, would be examples. The third part of "Triptych: Crossings" is another example.)

Finally, there is the approach which uses a combination of the three previous shapes. For instance, "California Littoral" starts with generalization, but in the end particulars speak for themselves, i.e. the microwave bobbing on the waves.

So how accurate is this as a description of the ways your poems are put together?

Benet: Wow... I like the way you broke down the rhetorical thrust of my poems. I wasn’t aware of these structures. I am glad that for you, as the reader, they cohere in these structures, but I can tell you, not one of them was written with a conscious decision that involved something like, "I think I’ll write poem in which "I know what this is and I search it for meaning...."

Maybe because I used to write essays, copy, and technical manuals, I have acquired a pretty fancy toolset of forms of argument and rhetorical devices, so when it comes to writing poems, I just reach into this box without even knowing it....

On the other hand, because I believe that a poem gains its final shape and meaning (its resonance) with the reader (that is, in an exchange, or communicative act), the ways you identify as my various approaches in these poems tell as much about the way you come to poetry as they do about my making it in these poems...

Continued at BENET INTERVIEW - 6  below

BENET INTERVIEW - 6

Montag: (Q14) How would you respond to the suggestion that in your poems the vantage point of the poet is essential to the meaning of the poem, that where you stand establishes what we will be able to see and understand. For instance, the distance of third person in "Harvest" (p. 52) compared to first person.

Benet: I am not sure I understand the question completely, but here are a few thoughts that come to me upon reading and re-reading it:

First, I want to make an important distinction - at least an important to me, as someone who has been trained not only in literature, but also theatre:

The vantage point of the poet is not the same as where the speaker of the poem stands.

In other words, the speakers of my poems, if not exactly characters, are "personas." They are not me, nor the me that’s the poet, though they borrow from my life, often liberally. They get me as their instrument. I give them my voice. In turn, they bring me a greater knowledge of the world through their eyes -- their vision.

Susan Stewart, in her (much too) erudite book on Poetry and the Fate of the Senses talks about the origins of the word "persona" as rooted in "per-sonare," or sounding out. It is in this sense that I view my "personae" in my poems as masks through which voices that are often different from mine can "sound" out almost as intimately as if I were speaking. When I don’t get the process right, that sounding out of a breathing persona, then, often, the mask turns into a masquerade (and don’t quote me too closely on this one, because I think that the business about "mask" and "masquerade" is also in that Stewart book... well, quote me if you must, but with this caveat, at least!).

So yes, whether the poem speaks in the third or first person is essential... not just to the meaning of the poem, but also to "characterization" of the speaker (which, I want to remind you again, is not always the same person as the poet!).

Montag: (Q15) Your poems seem to encase little dramas. Some rise and fall is being played out in them. You apprehend the drama and give it voice. How would you respond to such a characterization of your poems?

Benet: Well, it seems that my answer to the previous question has already addressed some of the issues you bring up in this one. My poems do encase little dramas because, as some dramatists will tell you, character (persona) determines plot, or manifests in drama.

Besides, even as a poet and champion of the lyric and the power of images, I do believe that we humans are driven to tell stories. We make sense of time through stories, as if in revenge for the ravages of time.

In an ideal world, or another life, I would love to be a storyteller, a novelist. I think that I am poet because I failed at telling my stories in other forms....

Montag: (Q16) You sometimes seem to tell first-person dramas in the third person? Why? What do you think this device does for the art of your poems? ("Harvest," p. 52, for example.)

Benet: Well, this one I already answered when I responded to Question 14. The choice of third or first person (and even second person) has to do with the "persona" or character who is speaker in the poems. Sometimes, though, as in "Harvest," this choice also has to do with the setting itself. That’s because, in these instances, the setting is also a character and the drama might be between the speaker and the setting. Having just finished reading your essays in Kissing Poetry’s Sister, I know that you are intimately acquainted with the notion of place as character!

Montag: (Q17) You sometimes seem to use parallelism from stanza to stanza in a poem as an organizing principle – in "Budapest Gothic" (p. 45), for instance, and in other poems as well. Would you talk about your use of that device?

Benet: Hmm, my use of parallelism from stanza to stanza... All I can say is that I use this device when I feel that the repetition of some element, be it in the content or just a matter of form, will texture the poem. But I don’t think it’s a conscious decision as such....

I am, it seems, quite out of words when it comes to your questions that have to do with my specific crafting of specific poems.

Continued at BENET INTERVIEW - 7, below

BENET INTERVIEW - 7

Montag: (Q18) So much of the closure, so much of the meaning in some of these poems depends on the right image set in exactly the right place. For instance, the very end of "Incomplete Requiem" (p. 43): "... the living and the dead in a blaze of light." Would you agree with this characterization of your technique?

Benet: I'll pick bits and pieces from my answer to Question 17. Again, all I can say is yes... the right image in the right place matters, or, to quote an old saw:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

(William Carlos Williams: "The Red Wheelbarrow")

There are those poets who would argue that what makes the poem is the right sound or the right word that shakes language alive. Then there are those, like William Carlos Williams, who put the load of poetry into the wheelbarrow. I like to heap the images myself, but hope (and aspire) to distribute the load into sound and language, too.

Montag: (Q19) Would you talk about your use of images of light and darkness in these poems. What do these light/dark images arise from? Are light and dark powerful images in your life as well as in your art?

Benet: I guess I was not aware of the preponderance of images of light and darkness in my poems, but I can tell you that I do take note of light in my life. I am aware of the skies around me, the slant of sunsets at different latitudes and such. I love the notion of chiaroscuro - the way in which light and dark contrast to create depth and texture. So, as you can see, it’s not a spiritual element in my work, but a strictly visual one. I did also dabble in painting, a long time ago....

Continued at BENET INTERVIEW - 8, below

BENET INTERVIEW - 8

Montag: (Q20) The richness of your language makes these poems especially attractive to me. I'm speaking here about the sound of the words, irrespective of their sense. Examples:

From "Harvest" (p. 52) we find these phrases almost rhyming, though they are not in a typical rhyming relationship:

"... is a low dark hum..."
"... claiming the horizon."

From "Days of Awe," (p. 67):

We begin the first blessing,
as we have each new year
and as we shall again
to remember the way
you turned from us.
What of us? Root ends
in night's dense loam.

I've noticed the following:

The echoing of: begin – blessing – again – root ends – dense.

No other long A sound in the stanza except "way."

No other long O sound in the stanza except "loam."

All the long E sounds are found before "the way you turned from us" – we – we- each – year – we – remember.

How have you developed an ear for this kind of language, how do you arrive at this richness?

Benet: The "richness" of sound in my work is probably the least "conscious" aspect of my poem-making. I do love music, I even play the piano a bit, but I am not a trained musician. In the past, I have, sometimes, written drafts of certain poems while listening to music. Usually the kind of music that would evoke something about the speaker of the poem, or the setting of the poem. I suppose, you could say that parts of "Incomplete Requiem" were "composed" while listening to Mozart’s Requiem, not only because it is about death, but also because my father’s favorite composer was Mozart.

Other than that, during my MFA classes at Warren Wilson College, I did pay attention to Ellen Bryant Voigt, whose lectures on the lyric contained many fine examples of poems in which the patterned use of certain vowels formalized what could have been just a personal utterance into what became a formal poem.

Oh, and I read a lot. Sometimes even poetry... all with my ear, hearing the words, even as I read silently.

Montag: (Q21) Could you talk about how you measure your lines? We might say we find more "free verse" here than iambic pentameter. Yet many times the lines maintain the sense that they are as measured and formal as a sonnet's? How do you know when to turn your lines?

Benet: If you sense a formality in my lines, it’s because I try to make the form I use work for the poem. The form itself sometimes becomes part of the content. Or, sometimes, a counterpoint, to argue with the poem, and so enrich it perhaps.

I don’t measure my lines consciously. I don’t "sound" out the meter. Each poem, depending on the subject, images, and the urgency in the voice of the speaker, lets me know if the line should be long or short. Lately, I started to write prose poems, but I am finding out that a prose poem is more than just a poem without line breaks.

How do I know when to turn my lines? Well, first let me refer to Susan Stewart again:

"The Greek adverb boustrophedon describes both the turning of oxen in plowing and writing from left to right and right to left in alteration. This deep analogy between the turning that opens the earth to sky and the turning that inscribes the page with a record of human movement is carried forward in the notion of verse as a series of turns and in the circling recursivity of all lyric forms." (Susan Stewart: Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, U. of Chicago Press, 2002 - p. 85)

I am a peasant at heart. I remember the plows and what it takes to open the earth to the sky. I know that the taste of bread starts in that turn of earth. So, I go about "turning" my lines with a hunger born from that taste of the senses.

In other words, I turn my lines the ways in which it makes the most satisfying sense for my senses!

Whew... that was some answer, eh? When I set out to answer this one, I had no idea this was going to turn up. See how that sense of plowing works then... even without the formal rut of a line? Does this give you an idea - a peek into - how I work, then?

Continued at BENET INTERVIEW - 9, below

BENET INTERVIEW - 9

Montag: (Q22) Given the ghazal on p. 74 and the "modeled after" sections of "Three American-Style Studies" – after William Carlos Williams, James Wright, and Wallace Stevens – one senses that at least some of these poems were developed in workshop. Were they? How many of them? How did you make them transcend "writing exercises?" How many workshop exercises have you not included?

Benet: The poems you identified as workshop poems aren’t. They were written in response to a course I took on American poets in general, and because the discussion of these poets’ work often made references to the larger culture from which they came and to which they were tied, I felt that as an immigrant I had to play with their form and reference structures in ways in which I could adapt these to make sense of my own past in English and to an American audience who would recognize these forms.

I chose these American poets because of the ways in which they bring "news of the world" to readers: William Carlos Williams for his eye (for bringing news of a world of senses in "sensual" images); James Wright for his desire to commune with us (for bringing news of a world of his senses in his almost confessionals of life in Martins Ferry, Ohio); and Wallace Stevens for the light of his mind (for bringing news of the world through "imagined" argument and interpretation in the language of poetry. Image, feeling, thought... to put it simply, is what I tried to study by recasting what I wanted to say in the venerable mold of three classic vessels that have held the spirit of American poetry pretty well over time and across different sensibilities....

Though I have attended workshops (and there is that MFA, too), I don’t workshop poems. I don’t like poetry workshops, and let’s just leave it at that....

I don’t have "writing exercise" poems as such in this book. I don’t do writing exercises. I write. I write many drafts, of which some cease being drafts and move on to their final form - and not always because I am done with them - but only because they have been published. Otherwise, I would keep working on them....

As you can tell, I have my hackles up a bit ... and I would rather not go into the whole topic of poetry workshops. They are fine for many people - I don’t have a quarrel with that; it’s just that they are not for me! At least not at this stage of my writing practice.

Montag: (Q23) Does it seem appropriate to you that as an immigrant – dislocated in terms of place – you are attracted to the ghazal's formal disunity; is there a connection?

Benet: I think your question may attribute a tad too much here to my immigrant status or that sense of dislocation running through my work in general. I took to the ghazal as a poet first - that is, with a taste for experimentation.

The ghazal was just another rake in the shed of poetic forms with which to go out and comb through the debris. Besides, if the ghazal was good enough for Adrienne Rich, who wrote an entire book of them, well, it was good enough for me to try my hand at it. Had I felt some connection between its formal opportunities and my sense of dislocation, there would have been more of them in this book, or among my drafts. As it is, this is the only ghazal I wrote. They are not easy to write - that is, if you want to do it with the fullest respect for the original form!

Montag: (Q24) What is one to make of your playfulness in handling your "signature" in the signature couplet of "Ghazal," given its somewhat somber content? (p. 74)

Benet: I have no idea what one is to make of my playfulness in handling my "signature" in the signature couplet of my "Ghazal," given its somewhat somber content.

What do you make of it?

Shouldn’t some discoveries be left for the reader to make?

Didn’t someone say already that poetry is that which cannot be paraphrased? Or that which gets lost in translation?

I don’t make anything of it... but I did make it, I suppose.

I don’t mean to be ornery, but not only do I not have an answer for you here, I also don’t particularly feel the urge to provide one....

Continued at BENET INTERVIEW - 10, below

BENET INTERVIEW - 10

Montag: (Q25) What is "a lessened brand?" ("Ghazal," p. 74)

Benet: You know those Rollex watches and Oakley sunglasses you can have for a song on the sidewalks of New York? Counterfeit, forgery... not the real thing, is what they are to the authorities. The law wouldn’t consider them "lessened brands," but to me they are. That’s because they are not only counterfeits, but they also seem to cast a shadow of sorts on the original. They take away something from the original, which in the case of Rollex or Oakley maybe is not so bad, because they democratize these brands. But that’s another argument, and not poetry’s to make. Maybe it’s a Platonic thing... and we better not go there, because, as you probably know already, Plato had more regard for table makers (carpenters) than he did for poets, who, he felt, were degrading the "divine" with their constant whittling at images... those lessening brands, if you will, of the Good.

Montag: (Q26) Let's talk specifically about your use of enjambment in these poems. Where did you learn enjambment, or who did you learn it from? Could you describe how and why you use it?

Benet: I already answered this question when you asked about "turning" my lines. I plow through the text to open up the sod of meaning so that the poem can take root. But enough with the metaphors already.

To give you a concrete answer, at least as far some of my enjambments are concerned, let me tell you that I learned my enjambment from the work of Louise Glück. She is the master of the plow in these fields (and coincidentally, her family hails from Hungary!).

Montag: (Q27) Some of these poems are about the act of writing, the art of writing. What attracts you to write about writing? ("Recursion," p. 78, and "Twitter of Dust," p. 81, are two examples.)

Benet: If some of my poems are about writing, it is because writing is a part of my life. I am not attracted to writing about writing - it just happens to be another subject I write about.

Montag: (Q28) The image of the poem as a "tower" in "Twitter of Dust" might suggest the "Tower of Babel." Is the edifice of sound that the poem makes also a confusion of languages?

Benet: You ask if in my poem "Twitter of Dust" the edifice of sound the poem makes is the "Tower of Babel" and also a confusion of languages?

It is the tower of Babel, but not the one in ruins, not the one in the line of fire of God’s wrath. It is also a building project for Sisyphus, who, as you recall, was stuck with rolling that stone uphill, over and over. Learning new languages and trying to write poetry in these languages is a bit like both signing on the construction crew at Babel and having the tenacity of Sisyphus.

In the end though, the tower stands, because the language spoken there is that of poetry, which goes beyond words and is intelligible to all, in spite of God’s wrath... or perhaps because of it!

[The interview concludes here.]

THE COLOR OF GLORY

Mary gave me the Christmas gift I haven't written of,

a book I hadn't heard of, an 11.5" x 8" volume called Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-1943, with an introduction by Paul Hendrickson (Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Library of Congress, 2004). As Hendrickson notes, we tend to "see" the Great Depression and the war years of the 1940s in black and white. I know that I do. All the great dust storm and Depression images I remember have been black and white, all the Rosie the Riveter photos. Think of Dorothea Lange's  "Migrant Mother," which I just saw again recently, on the cover of The Nation, retouched to make an editorial point; the original is as emblematic of Depression-era photography as any image I can think of. Its force lies in its starkness. The fundamental power of those photos was their darkness and whiteness, their shadow and light, their hard margins, captured with not a single measure of sentimentality. I could not imagine such images in color.

Now I can.

Bound for Glory has 175 color photos from those years, 1939-1943, taken by photographers for the FSA (Farm Security Administration) and OWI (Office of War Information). The images are fully as moving as any you remember in black and white; for some, their power comes precisely because they are in color. I'm thinking of Jack Delano's "At the State Fair, Rutland, Vermont" (1941): most of a family is gathered on the near-empty midway: mother in black; the carrying-child in a dark blue jumper with pale blue blouse; the blonde-headed boy in brown shorts, white shirt, pale blue sweater; the two older girls in small-print cotton dresses of a dusty-rose hue; the three younger girls in similar dresses with a little larger print, a deeper rose color; the girls have little bows and barrettes in their hair. The scene, obviously, has not been posed, yet the statement couldn't be more powerful: the blonde-headed boy divides the sea of rose-colored girls with his blue exclamation. No two of the family look off in the same direction; rather, each of them poses this question, one familiar to me: what is all of this and how do I get ahold of any of it? The sensation of being in an unfamiliar environment is palpable. Only the second youngest of the girls in rose-colored dresses is looking at the camera. Her right hand plays with the index finger of her left hand. Her head is cocked slightly, to suggest "Yeah, what?" with no disrespect intended. Her blonde hair is chopped the way mothers used to chop their daughters' hair back then, a straight cut all the way around a little below the ears. Her ears are for hearing; they are not beauty accessories. Her mouth is turned up at one end, in a question, not so much a sneer. The shot of her eyes pierces the camera, enters our souls. She wants to know: who are you, who am I?

There is Russell Lee's "Distributing Surplus Commodities, St. Johns, Arizona" (1940). It looks like peaches would be what they're giving out, ripe peaches in wooden crates, only one of the crates broken open at this point. The long line of men waiting for "surplus commodities" snakes all the way out the back of the photograph. All those men have hats, except for one of them; and many of the hats have the same dun color everything takes on in the light of the southwestern sun. All the men have serious looks and serious coats, one or two of the coats rolled into the crook of an arm. The man who would be in charge doesn't look like a bureaucrat; he looks like one of us: his greenish cap and shirt of matching color a kind of working man's uniform. The seriousness on his face as he checks through his file of index cards suggests that if we are to survive, it's up to him. Behind him, and off his left shoulder, there are four women in surprisingly formal dress; one of the women wears a hat and broach. The woman in the blue coat is turned away from us; she has a gunny sack under her arm.  Now turn your attention to the woman standing in the center of these women, the woman in the white coat and a white blouse or dress visible beneath it. Look at her. She is looking at you. If she's not your great aunt or your grandmother, if she's not your mother or your sister, tell me who she is.

"Living Quarters and Juke Joint for Migratory Workers, Belle Glade, Florida" (1941) by Marion Post Wolcott is a study in grey and blue and tan and black and white. Weathered wood, the ground, the sky. Signs: Ice Cold Coca Cola and Drink Royal Crown Cola and Ice Cold Jax Ale Beer Stout - the Drinks of Friendship. The old buildings have electricity, yes: you can see the wires and meter. Four black men and a black woman face us. The woman is off by herself, her back is against the corner of the farther building. The man coming out the doorway of the first building is hitching his pants as if he'd heard somebody was taking pictures and he's late for it. Another man is sprawled on the landing at the same doorway, one leg hanging off, the other knee up, the look on his face suggesting he has been here waiting for this all of his life. A disembodied hand shows at the edge of darkness, the edge of light in the doorway; and an elbow and shoulder are seen at a nearby window: every other part of these couple of men is hidden from us. There is another man, in the center of the photo. He has his back turned to us. His tan shirt and tan pants look more like uniform than the clothing of any of the others. He wears a hat the color of the weathered wood. You'd swear he's holding a shotgun. The barrel would be pointed slightly towards the ground. I'm the only one who seems to notice.

John Vachon's "Worker at Carbon Black Plant, Sunray, Texas" (1942). The background is black except for a triangle of deep greyness in the upper right-hand corner. A man stands facing us in the center of the photograph, enough light on his clothes that we can see their darkness. The light comes at him from his right, our left; it shows us half his face and a stub of hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lip. His neck is black as the darkness, yet his face is a half-moon cracked and pale in an otherwise blank night sky. He looks everything like death come to take us.

"The Caudill Family Eating Dinner in Their Dugout, Pie Town, New Mexico" (1940) by Russell Lee. Mother is jammed in the corner. Perhaps a teen-age daughter at this end of the table. Her little blonde brother around the corner from her. Father across the table from Mother. The thumb of his left hand is bound up in bandage. Mother is reaching for something with her right hand; you don't know what - her hand is hidden behind the can of "Karo Crystal White" with a plate of biscuits on top of it. A glass container of milk at the far end of the table, a glass pot of applesauce, perhaps, dead center. Two canning jars stand opened on the table; I cannot guess what's in them. There is a dish with green beans here, and plate with what might be meat pie there. Mother seems nearly finished eating. I think Father is having a little more gravy on bread. The plates of daughter and son suggest they had a different meal almost entirely, corn soup or rice and milk. Son took a few green beans - because he had to, I suppose - and they are pushed to the very edge of his plate and onto the table. Mother's face is as serious as sorrow . The fingers and thumb of her left hand are shaped as if she is holding a pole, or the shaft of hope; there is red polish on her fingernails, which is chipped, or else the light catches the tips of her fingers just so. The daughter's thumbnail is polished too, I can see that, and her hand holds its spoon so delicately. There are two other places at the table, set with plates and silverware; yet no one sits at them. For whom were these places prepared?

"Lathe Operator Machining Parts for Transport Planes, Consolidated Aircraft Corporation, Forth Worth Texas" (1942) by Howard R. Hollem. The nail polish seems nearly worn off the thumb of the right hand gripping the machine. There is grease at the front edge of that forearm and on the back edge of it and up near where the arm bends. The work apron, which has a "Consolidated Aircraft" logo on it, was once white but it shall never be white again. The chambray shirt was once blue, but it shall never be blue again. The machine operator is paying attention to business, not to the camera. A yellow cap sets atop her head, with its bill tipped away at a jaunty angle, and brown curls dropping over the ears and down to the collar. There is color to the woman's lips, the color of fierce determination, not of lipstick. Her nose is to the grindstone. We cannot see her eyes but we know they would be fierce with determination, too. You have to believe we will not be defeated so long as this woman is on the job.

I could go on. I could write about every photo in Bound for Glory; they all speak to me. But let me stop. I'd rather that they have the opportunity to speak to you.

NEW PAGES REVIEWS PHIL HEY'S HOW IT SEEMS TO ME

Some of you know

I am a small publisher, as well as a writer. Some of you know that the most recent title I've issued is Phil Hey's new and selected poems, How It Seems To Me. Some of you have already seen me brag and brag about the book. Yet it is not bragging, is it, if others keep a similar opinion? Ann Stapleton, over at the NewPages book review, holds How It Seems To Me in equally high regard. This is how her review opens:

“I want to talk about things I love,” begins Phil Hey’s poem “At the river’s edge,” but this line might speak for all the work here. For these are love poems, not in the man-woman sense (though you’ll find some of those as well), but in that these poems make a place (a star-filled night, a green field, a known house) where what is loved is brought to be saved, even if (perhaps especially if) it cannot find any other way to survive in this world.

And this is how it closes:

How It Seems To Me is not your typical “nice words, but so what?” book. Life matters here. Every transcendent, mud-caked moment of it. And the stakes are very high: all we are or have a chance to become before we leave this world, and what, if anything, we leave behind.

You can read the complete review here. You can order your copy for $12.50 plus $2 s&h from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI. Make checks payable to me. You'll be glad you did.