I had an idea today while walking the dog. It’s an idea for a word fuse.
As a fuse is the wick you light to cause an explosion, a word fuse is a little phrase or sentence intended to jump start writing. To prime the pump, in other words. Here’s my new one:
This is what I want to remember:
So I’m going to try it out, see how it words. You do the same, OK?
I don’t care for poetry much either except for my own, of course. (Have you seen mine? Did I forget to send you a copy of ‘God’s Hand Shadows on My Bedroom Wall’?) And that’s the real message of Poetry Month, not that you should go back and reread the one about the cherry tree wearing white for Eastertide or the plums in the icebox so sweet and so cold — no, no, no — it’s the month when you should write a poem and see how powerful this can be in winning the favor of women.”
Funny stuff! You gotta love Garrison Keillor. Great sense of humor, and he can write, which is a little strange.
I haven’t had much to say about National Poetry Month this year. So it goes.
I was in the kitchen this morning, stirring Splenda into my Folgers, when the phone rang. Actually it doesn’t so much ring anymore as it tweedles frenetically, almost psychotically. It’s annoying; I guess that’s the point. I peered at the caller ID, muttering Oh what fresh hell is this. Ironically, it was the local Catholic church. I was perplexed.
I am by the grace of God a Christian man, by my acts a great sinner. I can’t say that I’m not in need of an occasional Come to Jesus call from whatever ecclesiastic folk find themselves so disposed. By the same token, I’m Russian Orthodox; we have certain brotherly disagreements with the Bishop of Rome. Why would they be calling me? Still, we love each other, right? Of course, we speak. So I did.
“Mr. Wakefield!” the man on the line said. I thought about this for a moment. I considered it a most excellent assertion, borne in so much faith that I wondered if it might not be true. Could I possibly be Mr. Wakefield? For a moment, I wanted this very much. I just hated so much to disappoint.
“No,” said I, “you have the wrong number.”
And it all came flooding back in memory. Wakefield was the guy who had my phone number before me. I used to get a call for him every few years. And I’ve only had the number since May, 1978, so naturally it’s still on the records at the church. I picture a big rolodex on the rector’s desk in that pretty building down the street from my parents’ house.
I explained to the nice man on the phone that this is no longer Mr. Wakefield’s line. He apologized, and we hung up. Now I’m left with these nagging questions:
How long as it been since they tried to call this poor lost lamb?
Do they still have Pinewood Derby races in the church’s Boy Scout troop?
Whatever happened to Wakefield?
I knew nothing of him before except his old phone number, and now I know he was a Catholic. So I’m making progress; things are starting to heat up.
Being a fictional writer myself, I could make things up for old Wakefield easily. Tiring of perpetual seasonal drought, he drug up, packed his grip and dixied north, finally alighting in Suquamish Washington. He has a little house on the shore and a telescope to watch the boats. He drives to St. Olaf’s in Poulsbo for Mass. And the rain is just all right with Wakefield.
It has been a week since I posted anything to the old blog. Sorry about that, though no one has actually complained. I know how it is to keep checking a site for new content and finding bupkis. I got a little a annoyed with The Guardian recently, when they took a week’s break from their Writers’ Rooms series , without so much as a by your leave. Grrumble.
I’ve had a cold. Been thick as a dawg, don’t ya know. That’s my excuse. My ears are still stopped up, got a bit of croopiness in the bronchi, and the attic is still … flooded, I suppose. And wouldn’t it be great to hear Obama come out in purposeful support of a cure for the common cold? He can raise my taxes for that.
I’m thinking of moving the blog.
Been pondering it for a long time, actually. I keep waiting and hoping that Google will give us a writing interface that isn’t the Internet’s equivalent of a small box of Crayola Crayons. It makes me a little crazy, trying to express myself in a box the size of an index card on my monitor. You can’t see very much of your post at a time. Sure, I don’t have to type the post in the box. I’m typing this one in Google Docs. But when you paste it over, often you have to reformat paragraph breaks, links, etc. And you have to add images and embedded files from scratch.
Sometimes when I open Blogger and try to type something literary or meaningful to me, it feels like I ought to follow the exercise with milk and cookies and a nice nap.
So my idea is to move Metaphor from kylekimberlin.blogspot.com to kimberlin.wordpress.com . It’s an address I’ve had for a long time, and I’ve been running a kind of mirror copy of this blog there, so there’s much of the same content there already. WordPress has a full size text editor, plus static pages to add more content. It’s a little harder to use, but what the hell.
If I did move, I would miss some things about Blogger, like the Send To Blogger tool in Google Toolbar. And the fact that Blogger is so easy and user friendly. But if Google is never going to spend a few bucks to upgrade the kindergarten text editor, then I’ve already waited too long.
I would love to know what my readers think about the idea. Please click here to check out the WordPress blog , then click the link to Go Back in the right column, to come back here and leve a comment. Or use the e-mail link on either blog to send me a personal message.
Speaking of Comments
I’ve had to tighten up the comments function on this blog so that comments are now moderated. This is because I got some spam comments on my last post. I therefore renew my call for the world’s powers to leave the extremist failed states to destroy themselves through canibalistic suicide and gross isolationism, and apply all necessary resources to hunting and killing spammers and virus writers. The planet’s true thugs.
Well, here we are, another
Friday in paradise. And on
this soft and muted day
of high gray air, in which
the birds have gone to ground,
sleeping off the seeds pecked
from the good earth in yesterday’s sun,
our property taxes are due.
Dead line.
Just thought I’d bring it up,
to help you out.
Here’s a real poem now:
Rondelet
by AnonymousI never meant
For you to go. The thing you heard
I never meant
for you to hear. The night you went
away I knew our whole absurd
sweet world had fallen with a word
I never meant.
to watch this without laughing.
Comes today from Poetry Daily a missive bearing Selections from The Black Riders by Stephen Crane. Now Crane was a poet of the late 19th century. He died at the age of 30 or 31, in 1900. I read his stuff in college.
This first selection struck me so firmly 25 years ago that I memorized it, and carry it about in my poor brain to this day. I was a little surprised to see it coming at me in an e-mail, because I’ve always considered it pretty obscure.
III
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter – bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”
This section I don’t remember but it’s pretty cool.
XXIV
I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never –”
“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.
Check this out. A metaphor for the stupidity of misbegotten human endeavor, if I’ve ever seen one. And it hands me a chuckle.
XXXI
Many workmen
Built a huge ball of masonry
Upon a mountain-top.
Then they went to the valley below,
And turned to behold their work.
“It is grand,” they said;
They loved the thing.
Of a sudden, it moved:
It came upon them swiftly;
It crushed them all to blood.
But some had opportunity to squeal.
So there’s some Stephen Crane for you. Pretty drear, huh? And you might say, well the poor bastard was dying young, and was justified. Fair enough. But the way we look at life is a choice. And for proof I say Look, there goes Mattie Stepanek, who lived half as long and knew he was sick, and wrote poems to meet his days with joy.
Food for thought.
Galway Kinnell came to Santa Barbara in 1994 to give a reading. It was wonderful, despite his suffering a cold. He was touring for the publication of his book Imperfect Thirst. I was tasked to bring the cake for the reception, which I fetched from a local bakery. It was a large sheet cake in the excellent imperfect likeness of the book’s cover.
That night it rained lightly. Toad the Wet Sprocket were playing The Arlington and we were at the Victoria, not far away. Naturally, all the parking lots were full. I walked carrying this burden of art in the rain, block after block. I thought of that experience the other day, as I wrote a scene for my novel, in which the narrator carries a dead dog through spring orchards. No place to set such a delicate burden down and rest, except at one’s peril of great spiritual debt.
All of which begs questions:
This week marked the birthday of writer Flannery O’Connor, who would have been 84 if she hadn’t died quite young. We all read her work in high school and college, if we studied English at all.
O’Connor’s writing swirls around in my memory along with that of Faulkner and Harper Lee as inspiration in the Southern Gothic style of misfit heroes and mislead mystics. Such is a literature of that part of America where the roads are likely to be dirt, unlit, and walked in old shoes. If she were living, she would have to answer for being an influence on my own creative defects of character. Since she has passed to realms beyond reproach, we should forgive.
She once sent a letter to friends, along with a manuscript of her novel The Violent Bear It Away. In the letter, she wrote:
“I am 100% pure sick of it. I cannot see it any longer and the only thing I can determine about it is that nobody else would have wanted to write it but me.”
I can relate.
The fine poet, activist, and city-enlightener turned 90 on Tuesday 3.24.09. He’s still sharp, thoughtful, wise; he can still teach, is my point. As demonstration of which, The S.F. Chronicle published an interview, which I commend to you.
Here’s a nibble:
Q: Why do you prefer the term wide-open poetry to Beat poetry?
A: I never wrote ‘Beat’ poetry. Wide-open poetry refers to what Pablo Neruda told me in Cuba in 1950 at the beginning of the Fidelista revolution: Neruda said, ‘I love your wide-open poetry.’
He was either referring to the wide-ranging content of my poetry, or, in a different mode, to the poetry of the Beats. Wide-open poetry also refers to the ‘open form’ typography of a poem on the page. (A term borrowed from the gestural painting of the Abstract Expressionists.)
Q: Can writing be taught?
A: It has to be taut.
Today’s Non Sequitur is pretty funny.
Metaphor 