1
chest full of secrets
tarnished flapper hair brush
maybe you tried it once
mother son and father
no litanies or beads
money treated with concern
every womans needs
2
we were born
wrong for each other
at wars horrors end
you loved me
with a vice grip
felt money desperate
if only you still had that smooth shiny depression dime
Here's a link to me reading the poem.
Friday, May 10, 2013
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Happy Mother’s Day Mom!
Mother’s day is coming up. This year it will fall on Sunday May 12. It got me to thinking about my own mother, who will be 102 in August 2013 and she is valiantly hanging on to life, such as it is for her now. She is pretty remarkable, to say the least! She taught me everything I know and she did so with all the love she could muster up to give to me.
I was just listening to an internet radio program a few hours ago where they were interviewing Jennie Lake. She talked about her mom in the interview and ever since that time I’ve been thinking about mine. If you are interested, I would recommend that interview because, if for no other reason, I found it really helpful for me to put things into perspective. It has had a wonderful healing effect on me and on our relationship which has troubled me part of the time for years. Here’s a link, if you would like to listen to it: http://tobtr.com/s/4647635 .
I wrote a book of poetry which I published on May 10 last year (Book of Aliases) and that coincidence is a bit startling to me as I now look back on it. I’m an ordinary sort of guy, with very few exceptions. I was a meat cutter for a supermarket chain while my kids were growing up. Later, I pursued my love of food and became a chef. That change took place during some kind of a mid-life crisis I went through in which I also went back to my university and I finished my long abandoned dream of a degree. I’m retired now but that degree led me to teaching English in a University for the last seven years before I hung it all up. Still, this plain old grandpa wrote a book and published it three days before Mother’s Day last year. I’m thinking there is a bit more than coincidence in this!
Am I still trying to get over that feeling of I’m not quite good enough? Good grief, I’m almost 70 years old! I may not have led a very remarkable life but it has been good. When Jennie said that her mom had taught her everything with all the love she had, I nodded and felt the same way. Yeah mom, you did what you did because you believed in it. It may not have worked entirely for you but you believed it with all your heart. Those hard young years as a newly married woman during the depression were your experience. That you got through them is good and the things you learned in those tough days were just the lessons that seemed to fit the times. You shared them with me with all the love you had in you. I can now put those lessons in perspective. I have learned and I am grateful.
So now as I come up on the first anniversary of my book and your 102 birthday, I look at Mother’s day with some new eyes in this old head. It’s a good book but maybe I didn’t believe in it enough. Maybe I’ve kept it hidden like a depression “dime.” Maybe I’ve been greedy and kept it to myself and maybe I even feel a little guilty about that. These feelings are like having gone to a movie I didn’t like and have gotten up and left in the middle of it. So I’m ready now to get up and leave this bad movie of all these bad feeling. I’m ready to say hello mom, happy birthday, here’s my book and Happy Mother’s Day!
I was just listening to an internet radio program a few hours ago where they were interviewing Jennie Lake. She talked about her mom in the interview and ever since that time I’ve been thinking about mine. If you are interested, I would recommend that interview because, if for no other reason, I found it really helpful for me to put things into perspective. It has had a wonderful healing effect on me and on our relationship which has troubled me part of the time for years. Here’s a link, if you would like to listen to it: http://tobtr.com/s/4647635 .
I wrote a book of poetry which I published on May 10 last year (Book of Aliases) and that coincidence is a bit startling to me as I now look back on it. I’m an ordinary sort of guy, with very few exceptions. I was a meat cutter for a supermarket chain while my kids were growing up. Later, I pursued my love of food and became a chef. That change took place during some kind of a mid-life crisis I went through in which I also went back to my university and I finished my long abandoned dream of a degree. I’m retired now but that degree led me to teaching English in a University for the last seven years before I hung it all up. Still, this plain old grandpa wrote a book and published it three days before Mother’s Day last year. I’m thinking there is a bit more than coincidence in this!
Am I still trying to get over that feeling of I’m not quite good enough? Good grief, I’m almost 70 years old! I may not have led a very remarkable life but it has been good. When Jennie said that her mom had taught her everything with all the love she had, I nodded and felt the same way. Yeah mom, you did what you did because you believed in it. It may not have worked entirely for you but you believed it with all your heart. Those hard young years as a newly married woman during the depression were your experience. That you got through them is good and the things you learned in those tough days were just the lessons that seemed to fit the times. You shared them with me with all the love you had in you. I can now put those lessons in perspective. I have learned and I am grateful.
So now as I come up on the first anniversary of my book and your 102 birthday, I look at Mother’s day with some new eyes in this old head. It’s a good book but maybe I didn’t believe in it enough. Maybe I’ve kept it hidden like a depression “dime.” Maybe I’ve been greedy and kept it to myself and maybe I even feel a little guilty about that. These feelings are like having gone to a movie I didn’t like and have gotten up and left in the middle of it. So I’m ready now to get up and leave this bad movie of all these bad feeling. I’m ready to say hello mom, happy birthday, here’s my book and Happy Mother’s Day!
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Poetry Street Metro 3
3
When they finished the steep hike down Rue Ravignan they rounded the corner of Rue des Abbesses and walked toward the first café just behind the bus stop. It is actually a bakery as well as a café and is always very busy. What they failed to notice as they sauntered down the hill was the shadowy figure that stood near a large tree in the little park above them and watched their movements closely. They chatted on unknowingly in Russian until they got to the door of the boulangerie and went in. The figure then left the shadows of the park and walked cautiously down the hill.
Inside the little shop were the wonderful smells of freshly baked bread, pastry and quiches. A crowd of people stood by the display cases and waited for one of the several shop women to take their orders. Russell noticed that they had the quiche with three cheeses and that rich quiche with potatoes before motioning the three of them to go outside and sit facing the little square with its metro entrance and small merry-go-round. They sat at two tables pulled together and began to chat again. When the waitress finally came, Russell ordered tea with milk to go with the quiches for his two guests and a hot chocolate and a croissant for himself. No one paid any particular attention to the figure that darted from the door of the big, brown church to the metal handrails of the metro entrance before sitting in the next café down from them at the boulangerie.
The three friends enjoyed their breakfast and sat laughing and talking in the pale morning sun. People walked or sometimes hurried to the metro station’s stairs to travel under Paris in the relative comfort of the subway system. The merry-go-round sat shining brightly, chiming out cheery music but not moving as it was still a bit early for parents to bring their children out for a bit of fun. All in all, Paris was awake and moving but not quite yet ready to begin another busy day.
There was still much to do to get ready for the party tonight. There would be lots of deliveries and the young people from the drama department at the university would arrive in a couple of hours to learn the scene they were to put on in the brief theatrical presentation when the party started. The minimalistic setting for the light drama must be gotten together. All of these things had been on Russell’s mind since he woke up this morning. He may have been an over-educated brick layer but artistic thoughts danced in his head and a clear plan of the brief play was busily evolving into a rather impressionistic styled visual piece for his guests to enjoy tonight. He sat rubbing his nose thoughtfully as Iliyas, sitting opposite him, noticed that the pad of the ring finger on his right hand had suddenly become numb, which was rather annoying and strange, of course.
Russell Ragsdale needs an apartment in Montmartre and kindly asks neither for donations nor gifts but just that you will buy his Book of Aliases at some e-book retailer of your choice. Thanks. Now keep your eyes open for further installments of this story which should be appearing here soon.
When they finished the steep hike down Rue Ravignan they rounded the corner of Rue des Abbesses and walked toward the first café just behind the bus stop. It is actually a bakery as well as a café and is always very busy. What they failed to notice as they sauntered down the hill was the shadowy figure that stood near a large tree in the little park above them and watched their movements closely. They chatted on unknowingly in Russian until they got to the door of the boulangerie and went in. The figure then left the shadows of the park and walked cautiously down the hill.
Inside the little shop were the wonderful smells of freshly baked bread, pastry and quiches. A crowd of people stood by the display cases and waited for one of the several shop women to take their orders. Russell noticed that they had the quiche with three cheeses and that rich quiche with potatoes before motioning the three of them to go outside and sit facing the little square with its metro entrance and small merry-go-round. They sat at two tables pulled together and began to chat again. When the waitress finally came, Russell ordered tea with milk to go with the quiches for his two guests and a hot chocolate and a croissant for himself. No one paid any particular attention to the figure that darted from the door of the big, brown church to the metal handrails of the metro entrance before sitting in the next café down from them at the boulangerie.
The three friends enjoyed their breakfast and sat laughing and talking in the pale morning sun. People walked or sometimes hurried to the metro station’s stairs to travel under Paris in the relative comfort of the subway system. The merry-go-round sat shining brightly, chiming out cheery music but not moving as it was still a bit early for parents to bring their children out for a bit of fun. All in all, Paris was awake and moving but not quite yet ready to begin another busy day.
There was still much to do to get ready for the party tonight. There would be lots of deliveries and the young people from the drama department at the university would arrive in a couple of hours to learn the scene they were to put on in the brief theatrical presentation when the party started. The minimalistic setting for the light drama must be gotten together. All of these things had been on Russell’s mind since he woke up this morning. He may have been an over-educated brick layer but artistic thoughts danced in his head and a clear plan of the brief play was busily evolving into a rather impressionistic styled visual piece for his guests to enjoy tonight. He sat rubbing his nose thoughtfully as Iliyas, sitting opposite him, noticed that the pad of the ring finger on his right hand had suddenly become numb, which was rather annoying and strange, of course.
Russell Ragsdale needs an apartment in Montmartre and kindly asks neither for donations nor gifts but just that you will buy his Book of Aliases at some e-book retailer of your choice. Thanks. Now keep your eyes open for further installments of this story which should be appearing here soon.
Thursday, March 07, 2013
Poetry Street Metro
2
He sat in his garret, the studio that had a great view of the white domes of Sacre Coeur. The shutters had been removed for the party and the stark white dome dominated his view. He did not see it as his view was confined to the pages he held in his hand. As he wrote poetry, there were columns and short lines that seemed to be marching down the page. He realized the paper he held was anachronistic and that there were electronic armies on the march as he sat reading. They were marching everywhere and always. But what and who would they conquer, if they even had that as a desire. There was no question that he was mad but he gave good parties.
His house guests came in the large room under the skylights and it was suddenly a much smaller space. He looked up from his work and smiled.
The older man Andre asked in Russian, “How are you doing? Is your work going well? Do you have more to do?”
He answered, “it is going well. I have enough done that I may finish for the day. Shall we go have Breakfast?”
Andre looked at his younger accomplice who was called Illyas, with a questioning look and the young man said, “Why not. You will have to order for us though because we don’t speak French.”
Russell replied in Russian slang, “No problem!”
They got their coats as the fall made the streets a little cool and Russell put on a scarf in the French fashion as if he had forgotten what it was like in Kazakhstan where a fall day could be quite chilly or just as easily pleasantly cool as are fall days in Paris. Andre, who was a diplomat, thought to himself that Russell might have an apartment in Paris but he dressed a little like a bum. Neither of the Kazakh guests wore their scarves for the walk down to the café.
Russell Ragsdale needs an apartment in Montmartre and kindly asks neither for donations nor gifts but just that you will buy his Book of Aliases at some e-book retailer of your choice. Thanks. Now keep your eyes open for further installments of this story which should be appearing here soon.
He sat in his garret, the studio that had a great view of the white domes of Sacre Coeur. The shutters had been removed for the party and the stark white dome dominated his view. He did not see it as his view was confined to the pages he held in his hand. As he wrote poetry, there were columns and short lines that seemed to be marching down the page. He realized the paper he held was anachronistic and that there were electronic armies on the march as he sat reading. They were marching everywhere and always. But what and who would they conquer, if they even had that as a desire. There was no question that he was mad but he gave good parties.
His house guests came in the large room under the skylights and it was suddenly a much smaller space. He looked up from his work and smiled.
The older man Andre asked in Russian, “How are you doing? Is your work going well? Do you have more to do?”
He answered, “it is going well. I have enough done that I may finish for the day. Shall we go have Breakfast?”
Andre looked at his younger accomplice who was called Illyas, with a questioning look and the young man said, “Why not. You will have to order for us though because we don’t speak French.”
Russell replied in Russian slang, “No problem!”
They got their coats as the fall made the streets a little cool and Russell put on a scarf in the French fashion as if he had forgotten what it was like in Kazakhstan where a fall day could be quite chilly or just as easily pleasantly cool as are fall days in Paris. Andre, who was a diplomat, thought to himself that Russell might have an apartment in Paris but he dressed a little like a bum. Neither of the Kazakh guests wore their scarves for the walk down to the café.
Russell Ragsdale needs an apartment in Montmartre and kindly asks neither for donations nor gifts but just that you will buy his Book of Aliases at some e-book retailer of your choice. Thanks. Now keep your eyes open for further installments of this story which should be appearing here soon.
Wednesday, March 06, 2013
Poetry Street Metro
1
Tommy Normal needed a toothbrush so he slipped into the market on the corner with the number “Huite” on it and bought one with nice firm bristles. His current toothbrush had lost the quality that he needed in a toothbrush since Tommy Normal needed one that could star him like the hero in a movie. He stayed across the street from the red café, the café of the two monsters and headed down towards the little Chinese food place where he was to meet the other Tommy, the one called Tommy Toilet. The two had been friends since they decided to be roommates during the great hippy invasion in Tucson, Arizona toward the end of the millennium. They would have a little snack before heading off to their respective workplaces. They had a party to discuss.
Tommy Toilet would go off to his porn shop on a side street of the main drag between the Moulin Rouge and Le Chat Noir. Tommy Normal would descend into the bowels of Paris at the Blanche Metro entrance and come back up for air at Plaisance. He liked the idea that he could go in at that broad boulevard filled with pickpockets and petty thieves and emerge at a smaller one filled with fewer of the same low characters. It was a type of purification that he enjoyed although he could never be persuaded to move nearer his office and leave the honesty of Montmartre for an illusion of being a gentile Parisian.
Russell Ragsdale lived up above the Rue des Trois Freres like some lunatic bum camping in somebody else’s studio. The rumor was out that he would be throwing a party tonight and, despite what you could see of his lifestyle, this party was definitely due to be a mad one. He was a poet and everybody knows there is no money in poetry, but somehow he was able to throw these crazy parties that were a bit too interesting and wild. They seemed to court the kind of decadence one might have expected to find a century earlier. Because of this, they seemed misplaced and out of sync with everything else. But if you looked at his lifestyle it was not hard to imagine why.
The magnificent view of Sacre Coeur afforded by the skylights of his studio had been covered over with metal shutters. He said it gave him some relief when he dreamed of Dali, which he did every night. The Dali he saw in dreams was blind like Oedipus and would paint the visions of his mind without being able to see what was on the canvas. Dali always said this finally made him the artist he had always wanted to be. Of course tonight those shutters would be open and the white dome would glisten in the moonlight. Tonight, he said, the blind would see.
Russell Ragsdale needs an apartment in Montmartre and kindly asks neither for donations nor gifts but just that you will buy his Book of Aliases at some e-book retailer of your choice. Thanks. Now keep your eyes open for further installments of this story which should be appearing here soon.
Tommy Normal needed a toothbrush so he slipped into the market on the corner with the number “Huite” on it and bought one with nice firm bristles. His current toothbrush had lost the quality that he needed in a toothbrush since Tommy Normal needed one that could star him like the hero in a movie. He stayed across the street from the red café, the café of the two monsters and headed down towards the little Chinese food place where he was to meet the other Tommy, the one called Tommy Toilet. The two had been friends since they decided to be roommates during the great hippy invasion in Tucson, Arizona toward the end of the millennium. They would have a little snack before heading off to their respective workplaces. They had a party to discuss.
Tommy Toilet would go off to his porn shop on a side street of the main drag between the Moulin Rouge and Le Chat Noir. Tommy Normal would descend into the bowels of Paris at the Blanche Metro entrance and come back up for air at Plaisance. He liked the idea that he could go in at that broad boulevard filled with pickpockets and petty thieves and emerge at a smaller one filled with fewer of the same low characters. It was a type of purification that he enjoyed although he could never be persuaded to move nearer his office and leave the honesty of Montmartre for an illusion of being a gentile Parisian.
Russell Ragsdale lived up above the Rue des Trois Freres like some lunatic bum camping in somebody else’s studio. The rumor was out that he would be throwing a party tonight and, despite what you could see of his lifestyle, this party was definitely due to be a mad one. He was a poet and everybody knows there is no money in poetry, but somehow he was able to throw these crazy parties that were a bit too interesting and wild. They seemed to court the kind of decadence one might have expected to find a century earlier. Because of this, they seemed misplaced and out of sync with everything else. But if you looked at his lifestyle it was not hard to imagine why.
The magnificent view of Sacre Coeur afforded by the skylights of his studio had been covered over with metal shutters. He said it gave him some relief when he dreamed of Dali, which he did every night. The Dali he saw in dreams was blind like Oedipus and would paint the visions of his mind without being able to see what was on the canvas. Dali always said this finally made him the artist he had always wanted to be. Of course tonight those shutters would be open and the white dome would glisten in the moonlight. Tonight, he said, the blind would see.
Russell Ragsdale needs an apartment in Montmartre and kindly asks neither for donations nor gifts but just that you will buy his Book of Aliases at some e-book retailer of your choice. Thanks. Now keep your eyes open for further installments of this story which should be appearing here soon.
Monday, February 25, 2013
New video about Book of Aliases
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Book of Aliases could be in French this year!
This is the French version of my poem Sometimes a Pearl. It comes from Book of Aliases (in the French version still under way). I hope you enjoy it.
Parfois, une perle (Pour Pris Campbell)
La fleur blanche pousse dans une mer de boue,
Du jamais vu, ne sachant jamais les lèvres du soleil.
J'ai grandi dans une culture de parents perdus,
Trouver ceux que je ne voulais pas,
Recherche de mystère et de ce que je ne sais pas;
Je suis là pour John Merrick dans toute cette difformité,
Essayer de faire ma propre lumière,
Essayer de lueur dans l'obscurité,
Essayer d'aller au-delà de la haine et de la colère,
Trouver humour léger, léchage d'une plaie -
Parfois, pas tellement mal,
Parfois souffle pris dans la belle profondeur,
Parfois, une perle d'essayer d'inventer
Une huître j'aime.
Parfois, une perle (Pour Pris Campbell)
La fleur blanche pousse dans une mer de boue,
Du jamais vu, ne sachant jamais les lèvres du soleil.
J'ai grandi dans une culture de parents perdus,
Trouver ceux que je ne voulais pas,
Recherche de mystère et de ce que je ne sais pas;
Je suis là pour John Merrick dans toute cette difformité,
Essayer de faire ma propre lumière,
Essayer de lueur dans l'obscurité,
Essayer d'aller au-delà de la haine et de la colère,
Trouver humour léger, léchage d'une plaie -
Parfois, pas tellement mal,
Parfois souffle pris dans la belle profondeur,
Parfois, une perle d'essayer d'inventer
Une huître j'aime.
Friday, January 18, 2013
New Review of Book of Aliases
For those of you who would like to know more about Book of Aliases, you will find an informative new review here: Shelfari. Just click on the name of the location or the name of the book and it will take you there. Enjoy!
Wednesday, January 09, 2013
Whether To Punctuate Is The Question
I guess it is obvious I’m a bit of a rebel. I first started writing poetry in the 60’s and that was definitely a rebellious time. I now am writing poetry that has no punctuation in it at all. That seems pretty radical when it appears in print. Actually, however, it is a venerable tradition that goes way back in the history of poetry, so maybe I’m not as much of a rebel as I appear.
What I’ve found is that the poem often reads like we speak when recited out loud (I mean we don’t actually include the punctuation per se when we read out loud). You, of course realize that we use no punctuation when we speak and tone, inflection, context are relied upon to do all the work that punctuation has to do in the printed format of our language. I believe much poetry carries tone, inflection and context in it so I reasoned that it might possibly be relied upon for the entire task that printed punctuation does. Thus I started experimenting with this about ten years ago and now I often write poems that contain no punctuation at all. For a long time I was afraid to leave the punctuation out of contractions and possessives but I finally realized that that was just me being silly. I now assume that people will be forced to read my poems out loud to understand them fully and that is a wonderful side benefit to the style of writing that I do.
Here, a few words are going to be necessary about the more complex form of the basic unit of meaning in any printed language – the sentence. Poets have been trying to understand what makes or doesn’t make a sentence syntactically for hundreds of years at the very least. Perhaps we have always had that question lurking somewhere in the back of our thoughts. After all, how can one even write poetry without considering how that form carries your thoughts and is able to transmit them effectively into the minds of one’s readers?
Just how does a sentence transcend the unit of the phrase and become a carrier for truly complex ideas? I’m not sure I can answer that question easily (if at all) when we are talking about poetry. The linguists inform us that they believe the sentence to be capable of infinite variation therefore the subject becomes too large for discussing outside the possibility of generalities. If the sentence is indeed infinite, we may not yet know all the generalities that it is capable of producing. We do, however know a lot of the mechanisms that have been in use for thousands of years and we employ them over and over again. I’m now talking about metaphor, simile, form, comparison, contrast and such things that can be made useful to understand things which might otherwise be too complex to express.
Okay, enough dry talk about theoretical things! I’ve selected a poem from Book of Aliases that we can use to see how this works in actual practice. Here is the poem OUI which I first published in March of 2007. I hadn’t gone for total consistency yet so I still capitalized my I’s.
oui
starving on the apricot cross
I believe in the mysteries
starving in your gaze
fondly returned
I also believe in the obvious
you play like a kitten in my lap
yet you are trying to kill me
you need no absolution
it is your act of grace
that like a serial killer
you stalk salvation
come to me trembling with
the rage that is love
bend back the limbs
that gave you no freedom
there is only one moment left
between the future and the past
and it is ours
That first stanza is really a lot of contradictory things all lined up and made to try to have some comprehendible relationships to one another. I believe that is one of the ways love expresses itself and no discussion of the idea that love causes us to exhibit different personalities (aliases) would be complete without looking at a few of these variations. The first five lines could either be two sentences or one sentence joined with a semicolon. The next two lines are a single sentence that pivots on a condition. The next four lines could either be two sentences or one depending on whether you wanted to use another semicolon. So the first stanza might look something like this using traditional punctuation: Starving on the apricot cross, I believe in the mysteries. Starving in your gaze, fondly returned, I also believe in the obvious. You play like a kitten in my lap yet you are trying to kill me. You need no absolution; it is your act of grace that like a serial killer you stalk salvation.
The second stanza only has a couple of strange things about it. The intensity of love is seen ironically as trembling rage. This image kind of speaks to us of the helpless power we feel when we are overwhelmed with passion. Next we get a lot more physical when we talk about limbs that probably are not branches although that is a possibility, depending on what you think is restricting your freedom. If you can’t see the forest for the trees then the problem is the branches but if you feel like you are all knotted up then you need to straighten (another kind of bending back) your arms and legs (limbs) so you can move. The final image in that stanza is that of what it feels like to act on impulse.
If we look at how this would be punctuated, it might look something like this. The first two lines are a complete sentence as are the next two lines. Finally the last three lines make the final sentence. Using traditional punctuation it might look like this: Come to me trembling with the rage that is love. Bend back the limbs that gave you no freedom. There is only one moment left between the future and the past and it is ours.
As you can see, it is easy to re-punctuate a poem like this and, in fact we do this in our minds automatically when we read it in its unpunctuated form. I hope you enjoyed looking at this and hearing why I write this way. Please help me out and buy my book. Go to Book of Alaises and get a copy of your own or one to give as a gift to someone you love. If you already have a copy, I am deeply grateful!
What I’ve found is that the poem often reads like we speak when recited out loud (I mean we don’t actually include the punctuation per se when we read out loud). You, of course realize that we use no punctuation when we speak and tone, inflection, context are relied upon to do all the work that punctuation has to do in the printed format of our language. I believe much poetry carries tone, inflection and context in it so I reasoned that it might possibly be relied upon for the entire task that printed punctuation does. Thus I started experimenting with this about ten years ago and now I often write poems that contain no punctuation at all. For a long time I was afraid to leave the punctuation out of contractions and possessives but I finally realized that that was just me being silly. I now assume that people will be forced to read my poems out loud to understand them fully and that is a wonderful side benefit to the style of writing that I do.
Here, a few words are going to be necessary about the more complex form of the basic unit of meaning in any printed language – the sentence. Poets have been trying to understand what makes or doesn’t make a sentence syntactically for hundreds of years at the very least. Perhaps we have always had that question lurking somewhere in the back of our thoughts. After all, how can one even write poetry without considering how that form carries your thoughts and is able to transmit them effectively into the minds of one’s readers?
Just how does a sentence transcend the unit of the phrase and become a carrier for truly complex ideas? I’m not sure I can answer that question easily (if at all) when we are talking about poetry. The linguists inform us that they believe the sentence to be capable of infinite variation therefore the subject becomes too large for discussing outside the possibility of generalities. If the sentence is indeed infinite, we may not yet know all the generalities that it is capable of producing. We do, however know a lot of the mechanisms that have been in use for thousands of years and we employ them over and over again. I’m now talking about metaphor, simile, form, comparison, contrast and such things that can be made useful to understand things which might otherwise be too complex to express.
Okay, enough dry talk about theoretical things! I’ve selected a poem from Book of Aliases that we can use to see how this works in actual practice. Here is the poem OUI which I first published in March of 2007. I hadn’t gone for total consistency yet so I still capitalized my I’s.
oui
starving on the apricot cross
I believe in the mysteries
starving in your gaze
fondly returned
I also believe in the obvious
you play like a kitten in my lap
yet you are trying to kill me
you need no absolution
it is your act of grace
that like a serial killer
you stalk salvation
come to me trembling with
the rage that is love
bend back the limbs
that gave you no freedom
there is only one moment left
between the future and the past
and it is ours
That first stanza is really a lot of contradictory things all lined up and made to try to have some comprehendible relationships to one another. I believe that is one of the ways love expresses itself and no discussion of the idea that love causes us to exhibit different personalities (aliases) would be complete without looking at a few of these variations. The first five lines could either be two sentences or one sentence joined with a semicolon. The next two lines are a single sentence that pivots on a condition. The next four lines could either be two sentences or one depending on whether you wanted to use another semicolon. So the first stanza might look something like this using traditional punctuation: Starving on the apricot cross, I believe in the mysteries. Starving in your gaze, fondly returned, I also believe in the obvious. You play like a kitten in my lap yet you are trying to kill me. You need no absolution; it is your act of grace that like a serial killer you stalk salvation.
The second stanza only has a couple of strange things about it. The intensity of love is seen ironically as trembling rage. This image kind of speaks to us of the helpless power we feel when we are overwhelmed with passion. Next we get a lot more physical when we talk about limbs that probably are not branches although that is a possibility, depending on what you think is restricting your freedom. If you can’t see the forest for the trees then the problem is the branches but if you feel like you are all knotted up then you need to straighten (another kind of bending back) your arms and legs (limbs) so you can move. The final image in that stanza is that of what it feels like to act on impulse.
If we look at how this would be punctuated, it might look something like this. The first two lines are a complete sentence as are the next two lines. Finally the last three lines make the final sentence. Using traditional punctuation it might look like this: Come to me trembling with the rage that is love. Bend back the limbs that gave you no freedom. There is only one moment left between the future and the past and it is ours.
As you can see, it is easy to re-punctuate a poem like this and, in fact we do this in our minds automatically when we read it in its unpunctuated form. I hope you enjoyed looking at this and hearing why I write this way. Please help me out and buy my book. Go to Book of Alaises and get a copy of your own or one to give as a gift to someone you love. If you already have a copy, I am deeply grateful!
Friday, January 04, 2013
memoir
(for S. L. Corsua)
weigh myself
120.3
feed the animals
take pills
dress
walk the dog
buy bread and milk
oops
mop floor
have hot cocoa
in recompense
measure blood pressure
make toast
have breakfast
144/92 p57
wash bowl and spoon
kettle on
coffee
many innocent lives are spared
clean cat box
hot cereal cool enough
wipe table
wash breakfast dishes
shave and bathe
dress for the day
write
water house plants
fourth reason for line breaks is it is a list
weigh myself
120.3
feed the animals
take pills
dress
walk the dog
buy bread and milk
oops
mop floor
have hot cocoa
in recompense
measure blood pressure
make toast
have breakfast
144/92 p57
wash bowl and spoon
kettle on
coffee
many innocent lives are spared
clean cat box
hot cereal cool enough
wipe table
wash breakfast dishes
shave and bathe
dress for the day
write
water house plants
fourth reason for line breaks is it is a list
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Monday, December 24, 2012
QUICK CHRISTMAS GIFT
For a REALLY SPEEDY Christmas gift please give an electronic copy of my book. It will be there in a FLASH!
(Just roll your mouse over the link at REALLY SPEEDY above and it will take you there when you click on it)
Friday, November 23, 2012
us
join us
we are
going to
get together
we are
going to get
disorganized
hold a meeting
laugh and drink
we are going to
spread all over
and never see
one another
have an annual
meeting in guadalajara
write and blog
share interesting
things together
play cards on our
computers while we
skype or facebook
lives abandoned
work ignored
what was really
so important to
thirty five thousand people
not dying miserably
every day for
want of poetry
but living
in form and
content reading
poetry join us
(dedicated to modpoers everywhere)
we are
going to
get together
we are
going to get
disorganized
hold a meeting
laugh and drink
we are going to
spread all over
and never see
one another
have an annual
meeting in guadalajara
write and blog
share interesting
things together
play cards on our
computers while we
skype or facebook
lives abandoned
work ignored
what was really
so important to
thirty five thousand people
not dying miserably
every day for
want of poetry
but living
in form and
content reading
poetry join us
(dedicated to modpoers everywhere)
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
terminal 2
(for john ashbery)
im looking past roses
in bed
from kitchen dreams
at cold tile mornings
a hard mattress wall
makes nuclear physics nights
paltry you know
very paltry indeed
and restless
as a bus ticket
a road that
runs between
young souls and
the terminal
random ruminations
what do you think
im looking past roses
in bed
from kitchen dreams
at cold tile mornings
a hard mattress wall
makes nuclear physics nights
paltry you know
very paltry indeed
and restless
as a bus ticket
a road that
runs between
young souls and
the terminal
random ruminations
what do you think
Monday, October 29, 2012
I never wear a beret in Paris
so we were in the moulin rouge
in 1890
i would never go there
today or tomorrow
the deux moulins
has a red framed
glass barrier
the hotel lift
door opens on tomorrow
the day after
people walking
escalators down
sidney is not a city
he loses his head
in my paris
balconies watch
people walking
geraniums flower
windows with
paris inside
doors open onto balconies
henry cant find
the other door
the importance of being
in paris is
coming home
geraniums flower
in my window
who will water them
no bell rang
quasimodo
in 1890
i would never go there
today or tomorrow
the deux moulins
has a red framed
glass barrier
the hotel lift
door opens on tomorrow
the day after
people walking
escalators down
sidney is not a city
he loses his head
in my paris
balconies watch
people walking
geraniums flower
windows with
paris inside
doors open onto balconies
henry cant find
the other door
the importance of being
in paris is
coming home
geraniums flower
in my window
who will water them
no bell rang
quasimodo
Friday, October 26, 2012
An open leter to my fellow Coursera ModPoers
I’m taking a little holiday from studying modern poetry (ModPo is a Coursera study course) because I have pursued it capriciously in the first place, starting in the third week and playing catch-up with what should have been, in some sense background material, a history or a lineage of a kind of “Adams family” of odd members (poets). I never intended to pursue it as if it were for credit because it has the great benefit of not being something attached to getting some kind of degree. This is education as it should be – with no extrinsic pull of the carrot other than the sometimes not so gentle tug of love (intrinsic). I have been free to enjoy it while I have felt those urges (ultimately urges of self-discovery, because they are lacking exterior and, somehow, ulterior motives).
This holiday won’t be as long as the last one (about a week because of a writing deadline), maybe an evening while I write this, because I am also looking forward to a sense of community that I know is tied to the temporal boundaries of the course. So I must do some of this course work which interests me during the same time as others do it and therefore I will be able to share, in some sense, in the process of reacting in new and different ways to already familiar poetry. This is the student community I have so greatly missed in the many years since I was young and at a university.
The community that I have had for the last ten years has been that of the contemporary poets who are connected by the internet. Many of us have never met during our lives although we have come to know one another well over the years. Suddenly I am now part of a (also internet driven) community that has a very different interest in poetry. This gives me the opportunity to make some comparisons. On the one hand, both communities are about poetry but only one part of the contemporary poets, the language poetry people, seem to be a part of both worlds. I find that extraordinary!
Most of the rest of the contemporary poetry group are getting filtered through the market-place of the internet readership. There are a few shy ones in the group but most of us are more or less interested in being viewed. Some years ago we were all happily blogging along when the e-zine editors started refusing poetry that could already be found by Googling. Suddenly we were no longer able to share our poetry and everything had to go through the filter of the e-zine editors in order to appear on the internet. This goes along with that old theme of some things are simultaneously good and bad. For example, suddenly a lot of the poorly conceived experimentation nearly disappeared. The need to get work through the editors was like the discipline of writing a pantoum or villanelle. True to the publishing business, a lot of editors are pretty conservative or reflecting some particular style or school so their tastes must be taken into account (or in some cases, at least pandered to).
I have continued to experiment, currently with the non-punctuated mechanisms of speech as it can be applied to the written format. It is demanding and interesting while not being so much of a put off to the reader who hasn’t studied your manifesto or read your scientific abstract (average person readers don’t do that stuff and are usually left to consume greeting cards, sadly). An earlier example might be found by reading my poem hourglass beach which is in Book of Aliases. It was written probably in 2007 during a trip to Turkey and only has a couple of hyphens that are used rather conventionally. It is a mish-mash of styles that include lists, objects as narration, some clunky metaphors stuck in as a kind of shorthand, a kind of faux objectivity of the Oppen/Zukofsky objectivist variety, indirection as a way of transcending my own spiritual and intellectual limitations, and just a touch of Jack Spicerly “oh I was just taking a dictation” lyricism thrown in for good measure.
It interests me deeply that the world of academic poetry is such a difficult world, in the sense that one must leap some hurdles and scale some technical barriers in order “run the Hash” with a bunch outlandish seeming fellow members of this particular in-club. It is also interesting to me that it is so different from the world that creates the poems currently. This is the most perplexing observation for me because it makes me ask about, most importantly why this division has occurred? We both use much of the same literary/linguistic jargon although I am aware of a more practical basis underlying why I use and am familiar with those terms. I find myself tempted to speculate that poetry is changing (in terms of the people who actually write it) precisely because of the unique pressure the internet is putting on it. There is great freedom and, with the exception currently of the e-zine editors and the langpo people, there is also no guiding principle to form little cohesive pockets of like-minded poets. We more or less loosely form them among ourselves but it seems a lot “looser” than the physical alignment that occurred earlier when the poets lived in the same city or went to the same cafes.
Still it remains that the two worlds seem divided by an impenetrable barrier and the poets want the interest of the people (it worked for Whitman) while there remains an ivory tower element (sorry Al) to the workings of the academics interested in poetry. Inevitably, we all come to the same place of wanting to enjoy the magic of words more but we seem to have such different ways to get to there. Most often I feel the richness that has come into my life via my education. I don’t regret that richness and have been sharing those sentiments with students at every opportunity but I also relish the joy, beauty and personal discovery that became a part of my life when I began to want to write well enough so that people would find value reading (I want them to hear it when they read) my words. Now I guess I ought to get back to doing a little studying. I’m really enjoying this course and the thin, clear air way up here in the tower!
This holiday won’t be as long as the last one (about a week because of a writing deadline), maybe an evening while I write this, because I am also looking forward to a sense of community that I know is tied to the temporal boundaries of the course. So I must do some of this course work which interests me during the same time as others do it and therefore I will be able to share, in some sense, in the process of reacting in new and different ways to already familiar poetry. This is the student community I have so greatly missed in the many years since I was young and at a university.
The community that I have had for the last ten years has been that of the contemporary poets who are connected by the internet. Many of us have never met during our lives although we have come to know one another well over the years. Suddenly I am now part of a (also internet driven) community that has a very different interest in poetry. This gives me the opportunity to make some comparisons. On the one hand, both communities are about poetry but only one part of the contemporary poets, the language poetry people, seem to be a part of both worlds. I find that extraordinary!
Most of the rest of the contemporary poetry group are getting filtered through the market-place of the internet readership. There are a few shy ones in the group but most of us are more or less interested in being viewed. Some years ago we were all happily blogging along when the e-zine editors started refusing poetry that could already be found by Googling. Suddenly we were no longer able to share our poetry and everything had to go through the filter of the e-zine editors in order to appear on the internet. This goes along with that old theme of some things are simultaneously good and bad. For example, suddenly a lot of the poorly conceived experimentation nearly disappeared. The need to get work through the editors was like the discipline of writing a pantoum or villanelle. True to the publishing business, a lot of editors are pretty conservative or reflecting some particular style or school so their tastes must be taken into account (or in some cases, at least pandered to).
I have continued to experiment, currently with the non-punctuated mechanisms of speech as it can be applied to the written format. It is demanding and interesting while not being so much of a put off to the reader who hasn’t studied your manifesto or read your scientific abstract (average person readers don’t do that stuff and are usually left to consume greeting cards, sadly). An earlier example might be found by reading my poem hourglass beach which is in Book of Aliases. It was written probably in 2007 during a trip to Turkey and only has a couple of hyphens that are used rather conventionally. It is a mish-mash of styles that include lists, objects as narration, some clunky metaphors stuck in as a kind of shorthand, a kind of faux objectivity of the Oppen/Zukofsky objectivist variety, indirection as a way of transcending my own spiritual and intellectual limitations, and just a touch of Jack Spicerly “oh I was just taking a dictation” lyricism thrown in for good measure.
It interests me deeply that the world of academic poetry is such a difficult world, in the sense that one must leap some hurdles and scale some technical barriers in order “run the Hash” with a bunch outlandish seeming fellow members of this particular in-club. It is also interesting to me that it is so different from the world that creates the poems currently. This is the most perplexing observation for me because it makes me ask about, most importantly why this division has occurred? We both use much of the same literary/linguistic jargon although I am aware of a more practical basis underlying why I use and am familiar with those terms. I find myself tempted to speculate that poetry is changing (in terms of the people who actually write it) precisely because of the unique pressure the internet is putting on it. There is great freedom and, with the exception currently of the e-zine editors and the langpo people, there is also no guiding principle to form little cohesive pockets of like-minded poets. We more or less loosely form them among ourselves but it seems a lot “looser” than the physical alignment that occurred earlier when the poets lived in the same city or went to the same cafes.
Still it remains that the two worlds seem divided by an impenetrable barrier and the poets want the interest of the people (it worked for Whitman) while there remains an ivory tower element (sorry Al) to the workings of the academics interested in poetry. Inevitably, we all come to the same place of wanting to enjoy the magic of words more but we seem to have such different ways to get to there. Most often I feel the richness that has come into my life via my education. I don’t regret that richness and have been sharing those sentiments with students at every opportunity but I also relish the joy, beauty and personal discovery that became a part of my life when I began to want to write well enough so that people would find value reading (I want them to hear it when they read) my words. Now I guess I ought to get back to doing a little studying. I’m really enjoying this course and the thin, clear air way up here in the tower!
Friday, October 12, 2012
On feeling buried alive
Sometimes a pearl (For Pris Campbell)
The whitest flower grows in a sea of mud,
Never seen, never knowing the lips of the sun.
I grew up in a culture of lost relatives,
Finding the ones I didn’t want,
Searching for mystery and what I don’t know;
Looking for John Merrick in all this deformity,
Trying to make my own light,
Trying to glow in the dark,
Trying to get past the hate and anger,
Finding gentle humor, licking a wound -
Sometimes not hurting so much,
Sometimes breath taken in the deep beautiful,
Sometimes a pearl trying to invent
An oyster I like.
(Originally published in the Banks of the Little Miami)
Also, If you would like to hear me read it, this is the You Tube link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeBPZjPn2vs
This poem is an experimental sonnet in terms of form, by the way (fourteen lines is a good clue). Knowing that will help to understand what the poem is doing in the various places. So let’s start with the “whitest flower” found in the first line.
What could that be? There are some clues in the second line which says it is “never seen.” Where would that flower be? The second line continues by telling that it never knows “the lips of the sun.” So it would have to be literally underground, something that grows under that “sea of mud” and how is it that anything which grows literally inside all that muck could be the “whitest flower?” The answer is: it is pure white inside because it is a potato. This is the first of the “buried alive” images and is my attempt to set the tone for this poem. It also shows that something buried in the muck can be beautiful inside, in spite of what surrounds it, which is the message of the poem and is somewhat mysteriously hidden in the first two lines.
That message will be repeated again when we get to the part about John Merrick but first we have to talk a bit about family and why the “I” of the poem (not necessarily the same person as its author) feels buried alive in that environment.
Who could those “lost relatives” of the third line be and what is meant by “culture of?” Perhaps you have known of families that have crests on their wall or a family tree or maybe even some oil portraits of some long dead, well known family member. The “I” of the poem seems to be implying he/she has grown up being told of the lives of the great family members from the past (“culture of”) who are no longer there and therefore “lost.” The “I” of the poem perhaps identifies with some of those long dead relatives but perhaps looks at her/his mom and pop and wonders, “how come you aren’t as special as those old relatives were?” Those famous ones were pretty interesting but the ones he/she has to live with now “the ones I didn’t want” are pretty ordinary by comparison.
Now we finally get to John Merrick and the stuff about “searching for mystery.” The mystery is how do ordinary people come from famous parents? We tend to assume that famous people are different than us regular folk so how can these really ordinary folks who happen to be our parents have come from somebody who was famous and therefore different. It’s like some kind of genetic deformity or an illness that makes the formerly perfect into something much more flawed. We look at somebody like Merrick, the “elephant man” of Victorian times and we see something like the potato; we see a beautiful spirit buried in hideously deformed flesh.
This is the core mystery of the poem because we have to ask ourselves if there isn’t something special buried inside the ordinary seeming shell of our parents. This is the place where the sonnet, as often happens in the middle of sonnets, begins to question itself. This is when the speaker in the poem is faced with “what I don’t know” and cannot give an answer. Instead of trying to solve this larger question, the voice in the poem goes back to trying to solve the discomfort felt by doing personal things. That “I” is like an injured animal: “Trying to make my own light,/ Trying to glow in the dark,/ Trying to get past the hate and anger,/ Finding gentle humor, licking a wound –“ and like all injured things it tends to be primarily self-concerned.
Now starts the repeating litany of “sometimes.” The first one (“Sometimes not hurting so much”) is kind of saying that things are getting a little better. The second one makes a great improvement (“Sometimes breath taken in the deep beautiful”) and also takes us to the bottom of the ocean to set up for the final image contained in the couplet.
This is the part of the sonnet where everything has to get resolved somehow. It finishes the series of the three “sometimes” by focusing on the startling beauty you experience when you find a pearl buried in all that muck inside the oyster shell. It feels and sounds almost proud when it says: “Sometimes a pearl trying to invent/ An oyster I like” as if the voice in the poem has found the way to sort of overcome the obstacle of being buried. It’s as if this rather proactive style of looking at this problem lets the poem’s voice and the reader as well, celebrate some kind of victory.
I hope you enjoyed doing that close reading of this poem with me. I really like that little sonnet and I hope you enjoyed it too!
Sunday, August 26, 2012
YUM YUM! I made big juicy jalepeno hamburgers for Brunch this early afternoon. I love to share pictures of the food I enjoy but unfortunately the burgers never stayed on the plate long enough for the camera to be used. Pity! you'll just have to take my word that they tasted fantastic. Look at that satisfied expression on my face and maybe that'll help.
Monday, August 13, 2012
My NEW workspace
Sunday, August 05, 2012
Book of Aliases
Who are you?
You'd like to know.
A cause for pride?
Or a need to hide?
The answer's in the Book of Aliases!
You'd like to know.
A cause for pride?
Or a need to hide?
The answer's in the Book of Aliases!
Saturday, August 04, 2012
“Help me,” she cried, “I’m drowning in the gelatin center of this birthday cake!”
You are probably a blogger or a Google searcher if you are reading this and you probably have a Facebook page as well. I’ve got one also. So what can go wrong with wishing someone happy birthday?
All Facebook users get notifications about the birthdays of the people who are their Facebook friends. I frequently see people making comments that using the birthday alerts is some kind of cheat or something stupid because it is so easy. I will openly confess I am a bit of a cynic but I find the dismissal of sending a greeting to somebody you may not know as well just because there is a notification as bordering on criticizing someone for doing something nice because it was easy.
Certainly I understand that some people are going to be insincere when they send that kind of birthday greeting but, more than likely, a lot of their more personal correspondence may suffer from the same complaint. On the other hand, some people may actually be glad to reach beyond the limitation of their own close acquaintances and send good wishes to people they would have been happy to be friends with if they could have had more time and closer ties.
The question here is about motivation, why are these people sending greetings, and some blanket dismissal of everybody who does so is neither accurate nor perhaps even appropriate. You can’t simply say smiles are stupid because some people smile insincerely. All I get from hearing such silly comments is that some people are high in cynicism and low in logic.
The headline for this little rant of mine was a metaphor for the girl that comes out of the cake in a fancy, staged birthday bash. Instead of the cake merely being a place to hide a girl who is supposed to surprise the birthday person, it actually has something sweet and gooey (sentimental) in it. So instead of jumping out, she is actually gets stuck in the stuff. I guess my question is really, which is more superficial, the gooey stuff inside the birthday greeting or the surprise appearance?
Anyway, I’m going to keep sending birthday greetings to everybody I get a notice about and I’m not going to listen to any sour people who would call me superficial for doing so. I think you should do so also. Go ahead, call me sentimental!
All Facebook users get notifications about the birthdays of the people who are their Facebook friends. I frequently see people making comments that using the birthday alerts is some kind of cheat or something stupid because it is so easy. I will openly confess I am a bit of a cynic but I find the dismissal of sending a greeting to somebody you may not know as well just because there is a notification as bordering on criticizing someone for doing something nice because it was easy.
Certainly I understand that some people are going to be insincere when they send that kind of birthday greeting but, more than likely, a lot of their more personal correspondence may suffer from the same complaint. On the other hand, some people may actually be glad to reach beyond the limitation of their own close acquaintances and send good wishes to people they would have been happy to be friends with if they could have had more time and closer ties.
The question here is about motivation, why are these people sending greetings, and some blanket dismissal of everybody who does so is neither accurate nor perhaps even appropriate. You can’t simply say smiles are stupid because some people smile insincerely. All I get from hearing such silly comments is that some people are high in cynicism and low in logic.
The headline for this little rant of mine was a metaphor for the girl that comes out of the cake in a fancy, staged birthday bash. Instead of the cake merely being a place to hide a girl who is supposed to surprise the birthday person, it actually has something sweet and gooey (sentimental) in it. So instead of jumping out, she is actually gets stuck in the stuff. I guess my question is really, which is more superficial, the gooey stuff inside the birthday greeting or the surprise appearance?
Anyway, I’m going to keep sending birthday greetings to everybody I get a notice about and I’m not going to listen to any sour people who would call me superficial for doing so. I think you should do so also. Go ahead, call me sentimental!
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Sunday, July 08, 2012
A lost and happy soul!
Friday, July 06, 2012
Can you give a kid a good reason to read?
This is a world full of video games, movies and rap music clips. You can turn on your TV and find, news, new technology, science, medicine, history, art and even sometimes literature. This gives us the impression that things are to be viewed. If we transfer that perspective to people, they become less interesting to actually meet because they are more comfortable to us when viewed with the kind of detachment we have when we are watching them in a monitor or on a screen.
We want to look at them generally rather than specifically more often and perhaps even by preference. This distancing even changes the way we think about the people we actually meet when we are with them in person because of the tendency to relate them with groups, ethnicities and movements. All this has taken place as a shift in my lifetime with the ascendency of media products such as radio and television. This is because they seem to originate within us, like all of these things were our own ideas. They are sound or sounds and images that seem to start as rather intimate personal experiences. We own them from the first moment we experience them even if we disagree with them.
Other mass media, like newspapers and magazines are, by nature, also an internal experience. It is a different experience than the audio-visual one however because it tends to be one we are easily able to separate ourselves from by doing something as simple as putting the paper or magazine down and sitting there preoccupied by our own thoughts for a few moments. Certainly these are thoughts that can somehow spring from the material we have been reading but still we find ourselves feeling kind of separate from reading and able to disengage.
All this is not to say that reading won’t be something internal, intimate and feeling like a uniquely personal thing. I know I do that too but somehow it happens best when it is on my own terms and not dictated by an ambulance full of edited together two second images shot at my optical nerve machine gun fashion. I sometimes find myself slipping into a trance like state because of something beautiful and pleasant I have been reading. Watching a rap video can also be trance inducing but for me it is more like slipping into a slightly bad dream.
I don’t know how you feel about it but I tend to think of reading and dreaming as being rather similar. Some dreams let you work out problems and, although while not the most pleasant of experiences, they certainly have a useful purpose in life. Other dreams let us experience pleasure and joy that are a much rarer bi-product of real life. They let us dance through meadows barefooted feeling the grass between our toes without even a single sticker or insect bite. They allow us to relax and regroup certain that there is pleasure and joy to come and we can find it, even look for it as we go through our busy days when we wake up.
The point is people who read, look at the world from a different perspective than those of us who have been raised on the television, the movies and the music videos that are so popular today. For better or worse, the world is a different place than the slower, more reflective one that existed before the advent of the visual mass media. So, back to the question that headlined this article: can we give a kid a good reason to read?
Answering that question means that we must come to a value judgment type of conclusion about the relative merits of the two types of experiences we have been taking a look at so far. I wouldn’t be very believable if I told you I had no preference because I am obviously biased toward the slower and more easily disengaged from experience of reading. So let’s parade out the reasons behind that bias a see if it could give us an argument we could use to convince a kid of the value of this seemingly anachronistic persuasion.
I guess I am most biased about the difference in thinking. Call me Orwellian but the visual immediacy of experience seems a lot closer to the idea of mind control than the more self-directed state of the reading experience. I can understand it is easy and convenient to let others do the thinking for you but is it safe? Another part of that same point is that reading gives you time to stop and reflect and you can decide what you really believe in moments like that. The pace of thought is too rapid when someone else is entertaining you by orchestrating your emotional response to allow you such a luxury as in time to reflect. I don’t mean to be alarmist but I see some real dangers in the visually orchestrated entertainment process. Is this an argument, however, that would be useful to persuade a kid with? No, I’m afraid not.
I guess people of my generation are stuck with being out of the fast pace until we can come up with some kind of argument for the reading experience that would seem important to modern children. Well anyway, this seems like a pretty important idea to explore. If you’ve got any suggestions, I’m sure the readers here will be interested to know about them.
Russell H. Ragsdale,
Poet and songwriter,
Author of Book of Aliases
(a poetry collection, which can be purchased electronically at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, Sony, and many other outlets)
We want to look at them generally rather than specifically more often and perhaps even by preference. This distancing even changes the way we think about the people we actually meet when we are with them in person because of the tendency to relate them with groups, ethnicities and movements. All this has taken place as a shift in my lifetime with the ascendency of media products such as radio and television. This is because they seem to originate within us, like all of these things were our own ideas. They are sound or sounds and images that seem to start as rather intimate personal experiences. We own them from the first moment we experience them even if we disagree with them.
Other mass media, like newspapers and magazines are, by nature, also an internal experience. It is a different experience than the audio-visual one however because it tends to be one we are easily able to separate ourselves from by doing something as simple as putting the paper or magazine down and sitting there preoccupied by our own thoughts for a few moments. Certainly these are thoughts that can somehow spring from the material we have been reading but still we find ourselves feeling kind of separate from reading and able to disengage.
All this is not to say that reading won’t be something internal, intimate and feeling like a uniquely personal thing. I know I do that too but somehow it happens best when it is on my own terms and not dictated by an ambulance full of edited together two second images shot at my optical nerve machine gun fashion. I sometimes find myself slipping into a trance like state because of something beautiful and pleasant I have been reading. Watching a rap video can also be trance inducing but for me it is more like slipping into a slightly bad dream.
I don’t know how you feel about it but I tend to think of reading and dreaming as being rather similar. Some dreams let you work out problems and, although while not the most pleasant of experiences, they certainly have a useful purpose in life. Other dreams let us experience pleasure and joy that are a much rarer bi-product of real life. They let us dance through meadows barefooted feeling the grass between our toes without even a single sticker or insect bite. They allow us to relax and regroup certain that there is pleasure and joy to come and we can find it, even look for it as we go through our busy days when we wake up.
The point is people who read, look at the world from a different perspective than those of us who have been raised on the television, the movies and the music videos that are so popular today. For better or worse, the world is a different place than the slower, more reflective one that existed before the advent of the visual mass media. So, back to the question that headlined this article: can we give a kid a good reason to read?
Answering that question means that we must come to a value judgment type of conclusion about the relative merits of the two types of experiences we have been taking a look at so far. I wouldn’t be very believable if I told you I had no preference because I am obviously biased toward the slower and more easily disengaged from experience of reading. So let’s parade out the reasons behind that bias a see if it could give us an argument we could use to convince a kid of the value of this seemingly anachronistic persuasion.
I guess I am most biased about the difference in thinking. Call me Orwellian but the visual immediacy of experience seems a lot closer to the idea of mind control than the more self-directed state of the reading experience. I can understand it is easy and convenient to let others do the thinking for you but is it safe? Another part of that same point is that reading gives you time to stop and reflect and you can decide what you really believe in moments like that. The pace of thought is too rapid when someone else is entertaining you by orchestrating your emotional response to allow you such a luxury as in time to reflect. I don’t mean to be alarmist but I see some real dangers in the visually orchestrated entertainment process. Is this an argument, however, that would be useful to persuade a kid with? No, I’m afraid not.
I guess people of my generation are stuck with being out of the fast pace until we can come up with some kind of argument for the reading experience that would seem important to modern children. Well anyway, this seems like a pretty important idea to explore. If you’ve got any suggestions, I’m sure the readers here will be interested to know about them.
Russell H. Ragsdale,
Poet and songwriter,
Author of Book of Aliases
(a poetry collection, which can be purchased electronically at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, Sony, and many other outlets)
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