Thursday, June 29, 2017

Celebrity Pinnacle

His tweets are immature,
But I fear they will endure.
It's part of his routine,
To act like Mr. Mean.
After all, why would he stop?
This role has got him to the top.

Monday, June 26, 2017

Russian Philosophy

I finished Russian Philosophy by Copleston.

I sort of have 2 reasons for reading it.

My first reason is that I'm aiming to plow through Copleston's complete history of philosophy, of which this is one of the volumes, but one of the volumes which isn't included in the big monster-set I have of it. I think because it came later. Wikipedia lists the component volumes like this:

Volume 1: Greece and Rome
Volume 2: Augustine to Scotus
Volume 3: Ockham to Suarez
Volume 4: Descartes to Leibniz
Volume 5: Hobbes to Hume
Volume 6: Wolff to Kant
Volume 7: Fichte to Nietzsche
Volume 8: Bentham to Russell
Volume 9: Maine de Biran to Sartre
Volume 10: Russian Philosophy
Volume 11: Logical Positivism and Existentialism

In this scheme, I've only done 1 & 10.

But, hey,
That's two elevenths out of the way!

My second reason is that I'm planning to re-read Sciabarra's book, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. And I figured I should actually do a little homework so I had some context when Sciabarra starts talking about the philosophical traditions Rand would have been exposed to most in her formative years.

So that's why, having finished volume 1, I jumped ahead to 10. I have to admit, that I know enough of this stuff so that the Copleston material is mostly not really fresh to me. He's a good writer, so it's not actually boring, but it's a fairly fast read as philosophy goes. Thank goodness he writes so clearly!

Philosophical history
Doesn't need to be a mystery.

Lullaby

I sang the babe a silly sort of song,
A tune to soothe his agitated breast,
With syllables serene. It wasn't long
Before he shut his eyes in easeful rest.

An infant listens steadily to streams
Of language that he cannot comprehend.
It is a strange procedure, but it seems
To overcome the challenge in the end.

The human ear seeks out the human voice.
We dream it when in fact it is not there.
In solitude the hermit will rejoice
At whispering winds that visit his lone lair.

In silence we can hear our beating hearts.
But soon our craving for some lyrics starts.

Friday, June 23, 2017

Sort Of

It's a question that's
Always being debated:
Are domestic cats
Truly domesticated?

Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Words

Free speech may lead you to curse,
But censorship turns out worse.

Sunday, June 18, 2017

More Than Anyone Wants To Know

Old notes I came across today, oddly tying in with yesterday's post about my father's birthday party:

I don't expect that many people will be interested in my development, particularly my early development, as a poet. But it interests me, so I am writing it down because I am curious about it myself, and believe I might get a better grip on it by committing it to words.

I grew up in a household where one of my role models periodically wrote humorous, clever, well-rhymed verse. This was my father. I would listen at the dinner table, reciting and sometimes discussing the technical mechanics of verse making. As I recall the form of the Limerick came under particular discussion. I listened closely.

My great Aunt Vera, on my mother's side, was also a writer of verses. As I recall hers ranged more toward the heartfelt and sentimental. So I thought of poetry writing as a noteworthy activity that some normal people engaged in.

I mentioned that I listened closely to my father's thoughts on versification, so perhaps this is a good place to insert some mention of the fact that I had trouble talking as a young child, a trouble that was rooted, at least in part, in having trouble distinguishing some routine English phonemes. I can remember not being able, for instance, to distinguish the sound of This from Dis. This was not because everyone around me said "dis" although perhaps some did. Here's another, different example of my problem. I could not pronounce the word YES properly. I had some problem with the Y and some problem with the S as well. I remember it as extremely frustrating and embarrassing. As the years wore on, I mastered these phonemes, but at a self conscious level that involved really listening to how people spoke.

I think this made me more focused on the sound of words at a conscious level than most kids usually are. In later grade school I was actually better at phonetic analysis than my peers. I imagine it was a form of overcompensation for whatever was "off" in my original linguistic capabilities. I suspect that this overcompensation is one of the factors that drove me to writing and to poetry in particular.

The first poems I remember writing was a fourth grade school assignment. Our teacher wrote a single line on the blackboard: Do you like the sun?

We were supposed to take that as a starting line and write a poem.

Do you like the sun
And the stars that it passes?
....
And its fiery hot gases?

That's all I remember - 3 lines from the first quatrain. It went on for several quatrains more, exploring various facets of the solar system.

Two of us were chose for special acclaim by the teacher. The other student had taken a totally different approach.

Do you like the sun
Or do you like the moon?

He went on to compare the virtues of day and night.

This contrast of approaches - equally valid interpretations of the first line - struck me profoundly. I began to glimpse how a simple line of poetry can go off in very different directions. It's hard to say why this was experienced as such an epiphany, but it was.

The next poem I remember is one I wrote in my freshman year of high school. It was written to make fun of our elderly theology teacher, Father Lauer. It was written for the amusement of my classmates and included a lot of in-joke references to some of the peculiarities of his teachings. I recall the first quatrain.

God is syllogism.
Religion's diagrams.
Support the Lauer schism.
Pray in traffic jams.

I also remember the last 2 lines;

Just cheat, cheat, cheat,cheat, cheat
And you will get an A.

I wouldn't expect that to mean anything to anyone now, but it was wildly popular with my classmates, one of whom reproduced the poem and spread it around. It did fall into the hands of at least one other teacher who gave us a talking to, and who learned in the process that I was the satirist.

That same year, my freshman year in high school, I began looking seriously at modern, free verse poetry for the first time and puzzling over what it was about, and in particular puzzling over what made it different than prose. Were they really poems at all? I asked. One poem baffled me even more, Grasshopper by e.e. cummings, which just seemed to involve the letters of the word GRASSHOPPER arranged around the page in unpronounceable configurations that visually suggested a grasshopper hopping around. Our English teacher told us something like it was really a poem but we weren't ready to understand it. This bothered me no end.

I recall being puzzled also by our high school literary magazine, which was loaded with free-verse stream-of-consciousness stuff.

I studied the content of these poems, and wrote a poem on their model. It was a poem about drifting of to sleep, and I wrote it in a breathless style of successive drifting thoughts. It was not accepted for publication, but I heard later that the editors had wondered whether it was a parody. I suppose, in retrospect, they might have thought my "falling asleep" theme was a commentary on my level of interest in their poetry.

I think it was that summer that I read the book that really got me interested in poetic analysis. This book was The Design Of Poetry, which I found at the public library. I found the book riveting. The author did line by line analysis of a variety of poems. Specifically, I recall Because I Could Not Stop For Death, by Emily Dickinson, Ozymandias, by Shelley, and that poem about eating plums by William Carlos Williams.

The author was lined up, more or less, with the New Criticism school of interpretation, so he was quite keen on finding ironies and ambiguities in the text. I was quite taken with the analysis, particularly with the very close reading and very close analysis of metaphor and simile. It really was one of those books that changed my life.

The author had a theory about what made something poetry, something like writing designed for no purpose but its own contemplation. This easily included free verse. Later I decided it was an inadequate, over-inclusive definition, but for now it sufficed. I also started reading more poetry as an independent habit. I recall being most struck by 2 poets: Emily Dickinson, and Kenneth Patchen. Among moderns, I was partial to the Beat poets: Patchen, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso. As an individual poet, I was impressed with Lenore Kandel, who published a single book of poems. Among classics, aside from Dickinson, I liked Blake for his short lyrics.

The Beats appealed to me in part because their meaning was manifest and strongly emotional.

I began writing free verse poems, continued writing rhymed poems, and also wrote some poems that combined the 2 modes.

By my Junior year, I was on the high school literary magazine, which had a new faculty advisor, a young Jesuit who was a big fan of Dylan Thomas. He did not care for free verse, said it didn't sound like anything in particular. I argued the other side of this case, but didn't feel I had that great a case, and wondered if I was wrong.

This brings me, roughly, to the development of my interest in Ayn Rand's philosophy. This had an immediate effect on my poetry writing in several ways.

Stylistically, the element of her thought that had the biggest effect was her withering analysis of the modernist revolution in art. She actually had only a few passing remarks about poetry. But I began to think that maybe free verse was in a class with non-representational painting and plotless novels. So I channeled my efforts into verse with more form to it.

A second stylistic impact came from her emphasis on clarity. I had been taught that good poetry was ambiguous. Now I was working with the idea that good poetry should be clear.

Shortly before getting really interested in Rand, I had been started on a study of William Butler Yeats. I was very impressed and he came to be another influential favorite for me.

----------------

This brings us to the start of my high school senior year.
It's already too much stuff, I fear,
But fortunately, it does end here.

Saturday, June 17, 2017

Ninety

My father turned 90 yesterday. We had a big party today. His cake had just one candle. I read this poem. At his law firm, when there was a ceremonial event calling for the writing of humorous verse, they always asked him to write a "limerick" for the occasion. Yes, that's how this talent came to me.

In the firm where he once practiced law
It is clear that his partners all saw
That this man could coerce
English words into verse
With a humor that left them in awe.

I learned lots of things while in school
But none quite so well as the rule
That the third and fourth line
In a limerick's design
Must be short, or you sound like a fool.

He supported us all with his earning
And tried to pass on his vast learning,
So let's give a cheer
To this great dad, right here
Today while his candle is burning.

Art of Acting

It is a magic moment. Actors speak,
And what were merely words upon a page,
Bare characters that lay there, listless, weak,
Leap forth with sudden strength upon the stage.

Thursday, June 15, 2017

Front Yard



Mama and baby bunny
Under the cherry tree.
When I got closer - it's funny -
They ran away from me.

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

NYC

Flew into NYC around 4pm, got to a 5pm meet-and-greet read-through of my play, All Mixed Up, which is playing at the Fresh Fruit Festival July 14-16th. I'm currently booked on 2 delayed flights out of LaGuardia and I'm taking whichever leaves first.

Despite the rigors of travel
I have not yet begun to unravel.

Monday, June 12, 2017

Portrait in Yellow



Patiently waiting for a walk.
She'd tell me so if she could talk.

Sunday, June 11, 2017

Format Follies

I've been puzzling over an invoice I got in an email, with an invoice date of 3/6/2017 and a due date of 10/6/2017.

Why, in June, would a company send me an invoice dated March, that isn't owed until October?

Figured it out today, when I got an overdue notice. It's obvious if you don't live in the U.S., I suppose. Those are June dates - it's that foreign date format!

I was taken in, I fear
by the dreaded day/month/year!

Old Phrase

Why does the Department of the Interior
Mostly deal with stuff that's out of doors?
I ponder but my brain is growing wearier.
It's a mystery that the media ignores!

Thursday, June 08, 2017

Parodying T. S. Eliot

I shall wear red and white striped trousers
And walk along the beach.
I have heard the journalists calling each to each:
"Comey scanned his browsers
And has enough to impeach!"
But after testimony,
That promise seems to be phony.
The story ends with a whimper, not a screech.

- from the Trump Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Wednesday, June 07, 2017

Translation

One dog word for humans
Means "wise monkey"
But another one translates
As "poop pick up flunky".

Tuesday, June 06, 2017

The McKinley Mansion, As We Called It

My father's house is empty. He has moved into a retirement village place, and is selling the house. Family members took a lot of stuff from the house, a big 3-story Victorian. Then we had an estate sale. Then we had people fill up a dumpster. And a second dumpster is on order. But, right now, the house is empty. All the furniture, all the stuff, gone. It reminds me, very much, of the first time I saw the house, when we were moving in, in 1966.

My father's house is empty - vacant halls
Echoing with my mother's vanished calls

Monday, June 05, 2017

Back to New York

My play, All Mixed Up, which ran in Fall 2016 in Chicago, is set to be included in the Fresh Fruit Festival in NYC in July 2017.

It's still a bit in flux, but I signed and mailed the contract today.
So I guess once again I'm on my way
To Gotham to put on a play.

Sunday, June 04, 2017

Playwright Reception

This charming theater festival in Heartland had a playwright reception, which gave the six attending playwrights a chance to interact a bit with the evening's audience. That was new for me. Playwrights, as a group, aren't the most sociable people. Writers tend to be introverts - extroverts aren't so interested in sitting alone and making up stuff in their heads.

A frequent audience question is where do you get your ideas?

I wish I knew
The how and where
But some arrive
From thin air.

That can't be true
But how in fact
They really do...
Is inexact.

Escape from New York

I attended a play festival in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois last night, basically because I had a ten-minute play in the festival.

I was struck by the high percentage of people there who had lived in Queens.

Me, of course. I lived in Kew Gardens for a while in the seventies. An audience member near me, the mother of another playwright, was originally from Jackson Heights, although she now lives in the North Carolina. And Vicky Snyder, an actress in my play, was originally from Jackson Heights, although she now lives in the Bloomington-Normal area.

So, basically, just overhearing things, I found 2 other former Queens residents. Is it just a quirky coincidence?

It occurred to me that New York is a very strong theater town, and that early habits die hard, so that maybe you can expect to find ex-New Yorkers in disproportionate concentrations in the world of American small-city theater.

It occurred to me that people flee New York. People swarm in there, people swarm out there - there's a lot of churn.

Lots of people from Queens.
I'm not sure what it means.
You can give my theories a glance
But probably it's just chance.

Saturday, June 03, 2017

Spooky Sound

My Labrador lets out a howl
Whenever a siren goes by.
It's one long continuous vowel,
Sung out with the throat lifted high.

128 Miles

Drove to Normal, Illinois.
Are you a fan of flat?
I'll tell you, boy oh boy,
We've got a lot of that.

Thursday, June 01, 2017

Sign of the Times


Apparently the sign painters did half the job, and took a break. Reportedly they played this same prank 20 years ago.

Really, it's pointless fuss,
But next time start with SUSS.