I heard the Spring Peepers this evening!

Notice the size of this creature!  This evening I heard what were probably hundreds of them indulging in their mating calls. The second photo shows one with his throat expanded in song.

I love the sound they make.  For me, it signals Spring.  I'm reposting a poem from a few years back about them:

Spring Peepers

In spring the frog sounds like a bird

who with his cousins curves the night

around the pond with hot blue songs

that bend the mud and send the slight

sounds shivering into the dark,

across wet pasture, black with sleep

Across the field the undulating

chorus bites through rock and mud

to say the winter yields its howling

to the tough truth’s greening blood

The eyes of songbirds cut the clouds,

their silent flight to north and nest.

Jennifer Lommers Painted that Bird Painting

Thanks to my friend Teresa Thacker, I have the name of the artist who created the painting I have as my main page header.  Her name is Jennifer Lommers, but she goes by Jenlo. She has a Facebook page and a website for her art, and a blog:  http://www.jenniferlommers.blogspot.com/

I hope anyone who sees her painting here on my page investigates further and buys some art from her - she's great!

Feeble attempts at Gardening

The new title picture - all the information I have is that it's a "Birds Painting" from the Facebook page Shaman Tube. Wish I knew the painter!

Sunny and 50 degrees today - wonderful.  I spent an hour out in the garden, pruning back the Butterfly Bushes , raking leftover leaves, cleaning out some old lily and gladiolus stalks, and attempting to beat back the tenacious wild strawberries that seem to survive when everything else dies off for the winter.  I had to come in then, sweaty and shaky.

I have been sick for a month. The flu hit me on February 6th, and an upper respiratory infection accompanied the virus. So the doctor gave me both Tamiflu and Azithromycin. So the flu virus lasted its usual two weeks, but the antibiotic was not strong enough to prevent me from getting a sinus infection.  So I went back to the doctor on Feb.21st, and she prescribed Keflex. Now that usually works, and ten days of it also is pretty hard on my system.  However, though I feel somewhat better, the sinus infection is still lurking. I know because I have a sore throat still, and still don't feel really better.  I actually spent most of last week - our Spring Break - in bed... but still not well.  Very discouraging.  But I am dragging myself to school. Actually, teaching enlivens me! But by the evening, I am wiped out.  Last night was our university's annual Relay for Life - a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society, and I raised some money for it, and usually walk in the Survivors' Walk, but last night I could not get myself back over there for it.  I am sorry to have missed it.

The garden still looks as it did when I took this photo in January; maybe the daffodils and hyacinths are up a bit more, but the intervening cold and snow kept them from growing much. Note the weeks and debris, though:

Missing AWP

Tonight I am missing the AWP Conference in Boston.  I decided many months ago not to even attempt to go; it's just too expensive. It would probably cost about $1000 between the registration, the hotel and meals, and the transportation.

 about 8000 writers and publishers and teachers go to this monster conference.




But I would have loved to hear Seamus Heaney read.  And I would have loved many of the other readings and panels. But most of all, I would have loved to see so many of my poet friends who are there.  Oh well, I will just have to rely on their Facebook posts to hear about it.

The blizzard that didn't happen

this photo of our front drive was taken by my friend Shannon Boyle in 2009, but it looked like this here today.

Dire predictions from the weather forecasters. So much so that our university announced it would be closed as early as 9:30 last night, when the snow did not begin until about 1AM.

We did get some snow, but not the 8-12 inches predicted. I am not  complaining!  March snow , fortunately, doesn't hang around here in Maryland. 

By the end of the month, it will be Spring.

On Poetry, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney

On Poetry, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney

Tonight I was continuing to read and comment on my students’ poems. Each of them had to hand in twelve poems to me on February 21. So I’ve been reading them all through our Spring Break, and I’m still not done. It takes me a long time to read them, and to decide what to write on their poems. I keep reminding myself that I have been writing poems for roughly 55 years, and that at 20 I wasn’t writing the way I write now.  It’s that whole thing of putting old heads on young shoulders.  I want to write comments that will urge them on, that will be very specific.

Anyway, in the process of this, I stumbled upon an essay by Seamus Heaney in an old book of his that practically fell off my shelf this afternoon. 

His essay is about the poetic development of Sylvia Plath. He says that she was a poet who “grew to a point where she permitted herself identification with the oracle and gave herself over as a vehicle for possession; a poet who sought and found a style of immediate speech, animated by the tones of a voice speaking excitedly and spontaneously; a poet governed by the auditory imagination to the point where her valediction to life consisted of a divesting of herself into words and echoes…”  He observes that he found

“…in her poetic journey three stages which seem to exemplify three degrees of poetic achievement… “(Then he goes on to quote a passage from Wordsworth as a parable of these three stages)

Here is part of that passage from Wordsworth that I love, due to my love of owls:

( he stood alone).. by the glimmering lake;

And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands

Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth

Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,

Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,

That they might answer him . – And they would  shout

Across the watery vale, and shout again,

Responsive to his call, = with quivering  peals,

And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud

Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild

Of jocund din!...

He also says that her poems are, “in Lowell’s words, events rather than the records of events, and as such represent the triumph of Plath’s romantic ambition to bring expressive power and fully achieved selfhood into congruence. The tongue proceeds headily into its role as governor; it has located the source where the fixed stars are reflected and from which they transmit their spontaneous and weirdly trustworthy signals…”

 Now, this is the part I want to remember and share with my students:

“But before all this could occur, Plath’s tongue was itself governed by the disciplines of metre, rhyme, etymology, assonance, enjambment. ..” (152)

Anyway, the three stages:

1.     The first task of the poet… is to learn how to entwine his or her hands so that the whistle comes out right…the satisfaction and justification implicit in that primary sounding forth of one’s presence.   “Listen, I can do it! Look how well it turned out! And I can do it again! See:”

2.     “When the vale fills with the actual cries of owls responding to the boy’s art, we have an image of the classically empowered poet, the one who has got beyond scale-practicing… This represents the poetry of relation, of ripple-and-wave effect upon audience; at this point the poets’ art has found ways by which distinctively personal subjects and emotional necessities can be made a common possession of the reader’s.”

3.     The third kind of poetry Heaney finds in Plath is “that in which the poem’s absolute business is an unconceding pursuit of poetic insight and poetic knowledge… As the (poet) stands open like an eye or an ear, he becomes imprinted with all the melodies and hieroglyphs of the world; the workings of the active universe are echoed far inside him. ..

A degree of imaginative access where we feel the poem as a gift arising or descending beyond the poet’s control, where direct contact is established with the image-cellar, the dream-bank, the word-hoard, the truth-cave…an absoluteness about the tone, and a sudden in-placeness about the words and all that they stand for…”

I can’t go on any further about this in this entry – will have to return to it, because Heaney has a lot more to say about Plath’s poetry.  This much is deep water enough. I need to think about it for a while.

What ARE Scattered Showers in a Clear Sky?

I posted about this title about five years ago when I began this blog, but thought it was time to explain again.

 radar image of migrating birds        

Twenty years ago, when meteorologists saw this phenomenon on their radar, when there wasn't any precipitation, they called it "scattered showers in a clear sky." They eventually found out that what they were seeing were migrating birds! When I read this little factoid, the title just grabbed me, and I wrote this poem:

Scattered Showers in a Clear Sky

What else looks different from far ?

What you expect it to be

it is not.

Four in the morning,

Flurry on the radar screen.

How many miles away

In the upper atmosphere?

We need another name for that direction.

North is different on a map.

It looks like

Scattered showers in a clear sky,

and so the meteorologist calls them.

How did they finally discover

that dust on the radar was

a wide band of warblers,

 storm of black-throated blues,

 tornado of  tanagers,

powder of parulas,

blizzard of buntings?

Prothonotaries enter a preliminary statement

across the night sky.

Redstarts rush down to the new trees.

We need another name for that direction.

North is different on a map.

It became the title of my second book, published by Plain View Press in 2007.  

I still love the thought of those clouds of birds flying by night, showing up on the radar.

It's March now, and some of them will be starting on their journey back to north and nesting season.

 

logo from New River Birding Festival... art by Julie Zickefoose

Another post on Vietnam

Another post on Viet Nam

Then there is Tim O’Brien, whose short story “The Things They Carried” about one small group of soldiers’ experience in Viet Nam is , according to my friend Jim, so true.

Then there is the film “Apocalypse Now” which my friend Jim said is the film that portrays the garish reality/surreal violence of the Vietnam War the best.

from “The Things They Carried”  by Tim O’Brien

“In addition to the three standard weapons-the M-60, M-16, and M-79-they carried whatever presented itself, or whatever seemed appropriate as a means of killing or staying alive. They carried catch-as-catch can. At various times, in various situations, they carried M-14's and CAR-15's and Swedish K's and grease guns and captured AK-47s and ChiCom's and RPG's and Simonov carbines and black-market Uzi's and .38-caliber Smith & Wesson handguns and 66 mm LAW's and shotguns and silencers and blackjacks and bayonets and C-4 plastic explosives. Lee Strunk carried a slingshot; a weapon of last resort, he called it. Mitchell Sanders carried brass knuckles. Kiowa carried his grandfather's feathered hatchet. Every third or fourth man carried a Claymore antipersonnel mine-3.5 pounds with its firing device. They all carried fragmentation grenades-fourteen ounces each. They all carried at least one M-18 colored smoke grenade- twenty-four ounces. Some carried CS or tear-gas grenades. Sonic carried white-phosphorus grenades. They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”

…”On ambush, or other night missions, they carried peculiar little odds and ends. Kiowa always took along his New Testament and a pair of moccasins for silence. Dave Jensen carried night-sight vitamins high in carotene. Lee Strunk carried his slingshot; ammo, he claimed, would never be a problem. Rat Kiley carried brandy and M&M's. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried the starlight scope, which weighed 63 pounds with its aluminum carrying case. Henry Dobbins carried his girlfriend's panty hose wrapped around his neck as a comforter. They all carried ghosts. When dark came, they would move out single file across the meadows and paddies to their ambush coordinates, where they would quietly set up the Claymores and lie down and spend the night waiting.”

…”Some things they carried in common. Taking turns, they carried the big PRC-77 scrambler radio, which weighed thirty pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear, Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself. Vietnam, the place, the sod -a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity…”

“…For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn't. When they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die. In different ways, it happened to all of them. Afterward, when the firing ended, they would blink and peek up. They would touch their bodies, feeling shame, then quickly hiding it. They would force themselves to stand. As if in slow motion, frame by frame, the world would take on the old logic-absolute silence, then the wind, then sunlight, then voices. It was the burden of being alive. Awkwardly, the men would reassemble themselves, first in private, then in groups, becoming soldiers again. They would repair the leaks in their eyes. They would check for casualties, call in dust-offs, light cigarettes, try to smile, clear their throats and spit and begin cleaning their weapons. After a time someone would shake his head and say, No lie, I almost shit my pants, and someone else would laugh, which meant it was bad, yes, but the guy had obviously not shit his pants, it wasn't that bad, and in any case nobody would ever do such a thing and then go ahead and talk about it. They would squint into the dense, oppressive sunlight. For a few moments, perhaps, they would fall silent, lighting a joint and tracking its passage from man to man, inhaling, holding in the humiliation. Scary stuff, one of them might say. But then someone else would grin or flick his eyebrows and say, Roger-dodger, almost cut me a new asshole, almost.
There were numerous such poses. Some carried themselves with a sort of wistful resignation, others with pride or stiff soldierly discipline or good humor or macho zeal. They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it.”

“They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing -these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment. They crawled into tunnels and walked point and advanced under fire. Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move…”

Then there is my friend Jim, who was my first real boyfriend and first love, back in the summer of 1965, before he was drafted into the army and ultimately sent to Viet Nam on two tours. He returned a captain, spent some time in Germany, where he met and married Marie, an American woman my age who was working for the USO there, and then when his time was up, he left the army and he and Marie settled back in West Chester.  He found me on Google about six years ago, and I have spent several really wonderful evenings with him and with Marie. The more I am with him, the more I know how that Viet Nam War was a life-changing experience for him.  The more I know, too, that Marie is a better wife to him than I ever could have been. For many reasons, the Viet Nam War being just one.