Until telepathy

Poetry Month has come and gone again, and while I rarely take time out to talk like a pirate on National Talk Like A Pirate Day, I have taken time in the last month to give a few poetry readings and to attend a few readings, to buy and to sell a few books of poetry--and to read them--as opposed to stacking them on my nightstand. It's a curious business, much out of fashion, an eccentricity in myself that I rarely examine.

So it was with great interest that I listened to Jeffrey Brown's interview with poet Robert Hass on last night's PBS News Hour. His collection Time and Materials won this year's poetry Pulitzer--yes, there actually is one. The great lit major bull session questions--Why poetry? What is it good for?--are things he has examined in some depth. There is a line in his poem "The Problem of Describing Trees:"

There are limits to saying, in language, what the tree did.

This prompted Brown to question: "Why the need to describe trees?" Hass parried with a quote from environmentalist Ed Wilson: "Every species lives within its own sensory world." We can't say what the tree actually did; we can only say what we saw. The exercise is not to describe the tree, but to record "our memory of the gift of life," to say "here is what it was like for me to be alive." Or to quote another poet, Brett Duffany, "Until telepathy, poetry."

Imaginary vacation

I had another writing assignment today, to write about an imaginary vacation for tonight's meeting of a local poet's group, but my nose is so firmly to the grindstone at NCPR that I am doing double-duty. Here is my offering, with apologies to our patient listeners in the Adirondacks, and to station engineer Bob Sauter for involuntarily sharing his little getaway.

Radio Bob's Vacation

At home, his voice mail fills with calls
from WXLH, Blue Mountain Lake.
but at Sosua by the Sea, I imagine Radio Bob
is adoze beside an aquamarine pool.

In his pocket, the cell phone vibrates urgently
but he can't tell it from the Magic Fingers
in his suite's king-size bed.

He turns over the tiny paper umbrella
from a tall cool drink, but it does not
remind him of a satellite dish.

On Blue Mountain, the NYSEG crew plods
through drifts; their bootprints lost in the blow.
I imagine Radio Bob is lost in thought, walking
the beach at Sosua by the Sea, his footprints
filling up behind him with surf.

His radio is tuned to the Caribbean World Series,
to reggaeton during the seventh inning stretch; it blast
sall across Latin America without his lifting a finger.
Life is good at Sosua by the Sea.

At home the transmitters fall like dominoes
away to the south. Homes fall silent but for
the drip of icicles on the sill. And Radio Bob
falls silent, contemplating nothing but the sweet breeze.

Small world

You know how I enjoy our little weekly get-togethers, and normally there would be some topic upon which I could expound for a couple of paragraphs. But this week, the only thing I want to do is light your hair on fire and suck on your foot. That’s right—it’s time to quit smoking—again. I probably shouldn’t whine about such things, but I find that the process requires of me a level of concentration similar to that needed to land the Space Shuttle on manual control.

I would talk about something other than my “mind-forged manacles” if I could, but I clank like the ghost of Marley beneath their weight, and all other considerations seem alike in universal unsatisfactoriness. (A neologism unsatisfactory in itself, I fear.) Instead, I will slip this poem out through the bars of the cage in which I now reside:

Zoo

It was a very small world
for a Kodiak bear—
a narrow sward of grass,
the same old logs to shred—
bringing to mind my own den,
this green rug worn down from pacing.

Frosty reception

I've been out exploring the googlesphere to find the text of the 88-year-old Robert Frost poem, "War Thoughts at Home," recently discovered by grad student Robert Stilling and published in the new edition of Virginia Quarterly Review. Given that one can find online the full text of thousands of books written before and after 1918, find the full text of Rep. Mark Foley's IM chats and emails, find endless accounts of the informal genetic experiments of celebrities, full-length pre-release Hollywood movies, 911 call audio, and every bad poem written in the last decade somewhere on the internet, I assumed this would be an easy search. Nada—locked up tighter than the next Harry Potter. Four lines here, four lines there, no more.

There's something out of whack in our notion of intellectual property. Robert Frost is, I am sorry to report, long dead. But through the endless legal extension of copyright beyond the lives of the artists whose right to benefit from their own work it was intended to protect, we are instead cutting ourselves off from the richness of our own cultural legacy. The estates and publishers of long-dead artists cling to their debatable rights more fiercely as time goes by. The text of the poem appeared briefly on one website, and was forcibly removed within hours. Ironically, the only new intellectual property associated with the discovery, Robert Stilling's account of the find, is posted on the VQR website for all the world to read for free. I was happy to read it; it's an interesting story. But I will pay VQR's $25 subscription price in order to read the poem online, only if they can promise to bring back Robert Frost to collect his cut. It isn't as if I can't walk over to the Owen D. Young Library and read the current issue for free. Frost himself probably took a similar walk around the St. Lawrence campus when courting his bride-to-be.