Back

Hard, as always, to settle back into one's groove after being away, even just for a few days. I'm a creature of habit--is that a good thing or a bad in this part of the world where 'disruption' is the mantra; ie, thinking 'out of the box'? I'm quite happy with my box. Probably shouldn't admit this.

The routine: mornings spent writing and reading, legs stretched out on my (made) bed, books spread around, cups of tea or coffee or hot water with lemon, a handful of almonds. Lunch a salad and fruit, then a class and the gym and maybe the library, home to more reading. Classes at the moment are 1) The art of madness given by a psychiatrist-fiction writer, an hour and a half twice a week with slides. At the moment he is talking about delusions in psychosis and the art includes Elyn Saks' book about her (high-achieving) life with schizophrenia: The Center Cannot Hold. 

2) My other class is in Classics, a graduate seminar on Plato and Eros, texts The Symposium and Phaedrus. That's 3 hours, once a week, with a long and fascinating reading list of secondary texts and terrific discussions among the dozen or so participants, several of them auditors like me.

I'm also reading Peter Handke, lots of poets, of course, including Kenneth Koch, Douglas Dunn and Hardy--and following the political situation here much too closely, like everyone I know.

St Juan Island

Heading up to Seattle tomorrow morning to spend a few days on St Juan Island--about as close as you can get to Canada without actually crossing the border. My daughter is moving up there with her family. Since I grew up not far away I have warned her about the rain (it's raining here today, mind, but that's not usual in the Bay Area). Weirdly they have set their sights on a coastline that is straight across (what's the body of water there?) from the patch of coastline my grandparents settled, where my first memories are of the wilderness and beach (now well populated, with five houses on the lot my grandparents had for themselves). So far the photos I've seen look pretty familiar--log-strewn beaches, strands of kelp (that we'd carve faces in or on), big rainforest-y trees. 

Beautiful day--just the right temperature, not too hot and not too cold, with a bit of a breeze. I'm learning to bike--not ride a bike, but go up small hills and whatnot. My objective is the Stanford Loop, a 14 or so mile run up Sandhill Road and back down Portola and Alpine. Unfortunately the first leg of of it is on a four-lane road with lots of traffic because it leads to the freeway down to St Jose or north to San Francisco. Today I got as far as Whisky Hill Road. Next week--a little more. Oh no, next week we are going to St Juan Island, so it will have to be the week after that.

Meanwhile I've signed up to audit a classics department seminar in Plato on Love: the Symposium and Phaedrus, which begins this Tuesday, and darn, I'm going to miss the first week of that because we'll still be in St Juan. 

The sun is setting behind the western hills, through some kind of white-flowering street tree (I really ought to know its name) which is rapidly filling out with leaves and hiding the hills. The wistaria is in bloom over the building's front entrance, and four pinkish-reddish tulips friends gave us are nodding on the deck.

Handel and Easter chocolates: la friture

Easter weekend. When I was a child ('I spoke as a child, I...'), church-going was compulsory. I have (somewhere) badges, tiny pins  they gave us in Sunday School at the end of each year to reward us for 100% attendance. I probably have one for every year from the age of 6 to 18.  I can't remember what happened there, except memorising verses from the Bible, which stood me good stead when I spent Christmas a couple of times in my 20s with Mennonite friends who lived outside Winnipeg. We'd met teaching in Kumasi, Ghana, me as a Canadian (CUSO) peace corps volunteer and them as a trained teachers sent abroad by the Canadian government. Will and Leona Penner and their children. I've lost touch with them, unfortunately, but I do remember sitting around one member of their extended family's living room in a week when their chicken barns were freezing, and everyone reciting in turn a verse from the bible. In my panic--I've never been comfortable speaking in public--I could remember only one verse (John 3:16: 'For God so loved the world...'). No one else said it before my turn came.

Not many Easter memories. In fact the main one is going to church in a hat and sitting in a row in a pew and standing to sing (Presbyterian hymns). Probably the Hallalujah chorus, rendered by the choir. My granddad used to sing in the choir, so it was always good to sing along beside him. Aside from that...?  Well, my French mother-in-law celebrated Easter by giving us wonderful French chocolates, including a specialty called 'la friture': tiny dark and light chocolates in the shape of fishes and shells. Often they were the surprise filling in the huge chocolate Easter eggs she never failed to send us, even when we were living abroad. And of course any French pastry shop at this time of year will have them.

Mortality

I had been thinking I wanted to read a book of Christopher Hitchen's. After all, we apparently, according to my dentist, shared a dentist in Menlo Park. So I went to the library and the most inviting one was small and black and had one of those one-word titles so popular at the moment: Mortality. I knew he'd died, not long ago, and not at 104 or something, like a lot of people these days (have you noticed that if you are flying on Delta and they offer you a drop-down box from which to choose your age, one of the categories is '100+'?) but at 60-something.

But I also know he is revered for his wit and writing and his contentiousness, and I like all these things. 

Still when I opened it just now and found that chapter one began with a terminal cancer diagnosis I hesitated. I thought it might bring me bad luck. I was superstitious.

Mary Jo Salter, The Surveyors (2)

Criticisms:

I mentioned the number of poems whose starting point is a work of art.

But a critic and poet I admire, in her review of The Surveyors, speaks of poems that too often wind up on the sunny side of things, witness this poem about 'The Profane Piano Tuner,' a man (who might have a neurological disease, though the poem doesn't raise or eliminate this possibility) who swears at the keys as he tunes them, mostly it seems in a way that expresses anger at women, 'You filthy whore...you stinking, stupid bitch,' but concludes (the poem) with her daughter coming home from school and playing 'a Chopin prelude like an angel.'

So should Salter's poem get more darkness into them? I think this is a fair question. After all, Wendy Cope, who is also a witty, crafty, funny poet is, in fact, extremely dark, and this (all of the above) is why she's so good, so memorable and so often gut-twisting. Salter is not gut-twisting: most situations in her poems seem to come right in the end, they finish politely, with a smile, even when she may be gritting her teeth and feeling more like snarling--and there are enough dark situations in her last two books to suggest that she must have done a fair amount of snarling or weeping or something.

So could there be more edge? Less comfort? Wry is her default tone, and wry has its limits. But wry is clearly her comfort zone and she does it extremely well. On the other hand, there's every indication that Salter is an extremely intelligent, gifted  poet, who has grown better with time, and maybe, if she senses that wryness is limiting, she could push herself beyond it? More angry Anger, more Grief? What about expanding the range of her subjects--politics, history?--though she already ranges  widely, despite the pull and also the warmth and attraction of the domestic.

I guess I'm lecturing myself too.

Mary Jo Salter, The Surveyors

I want to strongly recommend MJS's new (2017) collection of poems. Salter is someone whose books I have been reading and buying for a long time (this is her 8th, without counting the one for children), but though I haven't done anything like systematically rereading older books, this one feels to me even more accomplished and multifaceted than the earlier books. It is witty, crafty, poignant, humourous and a lovely read, in addition to being instructive about technique, if you are interested in poetics.

I bought it when it first came out, but went back to it recently--why?--because I was reading Anthony Hecht's letters and they exchanged a few, including one, that caught my eye, about rhyme, and delaying perfect rhyme till the end of a poem--I think Herbert and Hardy were the examples. And I thought, I've got her last book, I should look at it again, and I have and I am.

Salter is often stuck in the camp of the Formalists, as opposed to, say, the casualness of the NY School or Confessionals (though she's much younger); but there's no lack of feeling, in addition to the rationality, the saneness, in her work, only the feeling is muted, understated, not splashed all over the surface of the poem. She's come out of a divorce, she's in a new relationship, a daughter gets married, she buys herself a house ('a single buyer lately/possessed by self-/possession'). If this book may have a few too many ekphrastic (poems that rise out of art works) it also has plenty of personality, and not only at second hand. There's a lovely poem about her daughter and Paris pastry shops ('Pastry Level') that ends with a thought about marriages--hers broke up a few years ago--and a beautiful, spare, 'Japanese' poem about the moon and a yellow school bus and...I could go on, but won't because blogs should be brief (is my belief).

Reservoir 13 (2)

I've been thinking about how, when I finish reading Reservoir 13, I turned back to the beginning and started reading it again. This isn't something I usually do when I read a novel, at least not right away, because most novels have a plot and main characters whose 'story' finishes in the last chapter.

Reservoir 13 doesn't have a plot and 'main' characters. It's not linear in this way. It's more like a piece of music, the Goldberg Variations, say, with themes and motifs, that combine in different patterns, and that you can listen to again and again without exhausting their interest.

Of course, there's the missing girl. She's the big bad wolf whose appearance we keep waiting for, but not really, because we get drawn into the life of the village, the very ordinary, but somehow engrossing life of ordinary people and plants and creatures.

The first time I read it, I realized the heron kept reappearing. I like herons, and at some point, I tried to go back through the chapters and see what the heron did in each chapter--maybe there was some symbol there? As in a haiku? 

The second time I read more slowly and the people became more real to me, all of them interesting, all of them real, no one especially heroic or they're heroic in small (but important) ways 

And the writing! The non-sequiturs, the evenness of tone, the sentence rhythms, the restraint...