Author: ellen

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Words of advice

When I was a child I became intrigued by a book on the family bookshelf, a big thick one, dark blue, by Emily Post. Its words of advice have never failed to steer me in the right direction on the critical everyday questions of leaving a calling card or addressing an ambassador. They have also, gentle reader, given me insight into the later novels of Henry James.

I found–and continue to find–the book a wonderful glimpse into another age. And what I took in, too, was the underlying message, not of snobbishness, which it often stands accused of, but of consideration for one’s fellow human beings and of a democratic idea that establishing rules everyone can know can allow anyone to feel at ease no matter the social situation

Of course fast forward to the 21st century and the rules have become a little muddled. It’s still easy to know which fork to use, but other issues are less clear. Which is exactly why we’re drawn–and by we I mean me–to advice columns. How to navigate the intricacies of ex and step and blended familial ties, the appropriate reaction to the cell phone on the dinner table, the friending and unfriending of friends and unfriends. We need advice.

Some of my favorite comes every Sunday in Philip Galanes’ Social Q’s column in the New York Times Styles section. His answers feel like the perfect mix of snark and compassion. He seems to recognize that since we’re all in this together why make anyone’s life harder than it needs to be.

Galanes has a new book coming out soon, a compilation of the columns. It’s called ” Social Q’s: How to Survive the Quirks, Quagmires, and Quandaries of Today.” Ah, quite. I’m looking forward to reading it. Maybe you’d like it, too.

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Speaking to the crowd

One of the most fascinating things about the Occupy movement is the method it has developed to communicate with large crowds without using microphones. Since most of the spaces occupied (Occupy-ed?) are in the middle of business and/or residential neighborhoods and since permits are usually needed for sound amplification, care has been taken to keep the volume down, literally and figuratively.

So how do you speak without amplification to a crowd that stretches beyond the reach of the lone human voice?

Occupy’s stunningly simple answer is a lesson in public conversation. The people nearest the speaker echo his or her words and the people behind them do the same and the people behind them do the same and the words are carried out to the far edges of the crowd by It’s the most ancient and low-tech way imaginable. Effective, too.

I’m wondering about what it feels like to have someone else’s words coming out of your mouth. What does that do to the potential for anger, disagreement, misunderstanding? For concurrence, empathy, acceptance? What if you didn’t agree with them, but still had the responsibility–a basic part of this social contract–to pass them along accurately?

“I hear you” has long been part of our conversational repertoire, but that is a non-committal response that basically says, “Okay, you said it and I stood here and heard it and now we’re done.” And when someone we don’t agree with is speaking, listening doesn’t really describe the situation. What we’re more likely doing is waiting, not too patiently, for a slight pause into which we can inject what we want to say. In its Occupy incarnation, hearing is active. It leads, not to responding, retorting, rebutting, but to repeating. You listen to the words coming to you. And you hear them again, in your own voice, going out beyond you.

What could that kind of listening do to our most banal daily interchanges, not to mention our most heated or heartfelt? (What if we could get them to do that in Congress?) What if this were the great legacy of Occupy: hearing and helping your neighbor hear. Listening and helping your neighbor listen. Feeling the power of someone else’s words in our mouths. Who knows what we might find out about each other? Who knows what we might learn?


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Where the poem comes from: David Surette

Continuing my very sporadic feature that feeds my curiosity–maybe yours, too?–about how a poem comes to be written, here’s one by David Surette from his new collection, “The Immaculate Conception Mothers’ Club.” I’ve had the great pleasure of reading with David once and of hearing him several times.


David lives in South Easton and is a frequent feature in and around the Boston area. His two previous collections are “Young Gentlemen’s School” and “Easy to Keep, Hard to Keep In,” which was named a “must-read” at the Massachusetts Book Awards. His poems have been published in literary journals including Peregrine, Off the Coast, and Salamander and appear in the anthologies French Connections: A Gathering of Franco-American Poets and Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses. He has been a co-host of Poetribe, a contributing editor at Salamander, an instructor at the Cape Cod Writers’ Conference, and a contributor at the Bread Loaf Writing Conference.

Bookmaking


One of the Sisters of Notre Dame,

my mother’s second grade teacher, was telling

the school kids about the value of books.

They were to be loved, covered, and cared for.

My mother saw her opportunity

and bragged, “My father is a bookmaker!”

He was, and he figured the odds

on happiness with a woman

who struggled with happy

and sad, and he left her, and

my mother and her brother

(who wasn’t his)

to be split up,

passed through

foster homes and relatives’ arms.

He died at 95, good news for my genes.

He hadn’t seen my mother since she

was 24 and appeared at his bar to show

him how well she turned out,

pictures of my brother and me as proof.

He had already cashed out.

We didn’t go to the wake or funeral,

and we go to everyone’s.

We figured the over and under of whether

it would make my mother happy or sad

and skipped it.

In describing how this poem came to be, David says, “The poem was inspired by one of my mother’s many stories. She is a great story teller because she uses humor and language to reveal the sadness and poignancy of moments in her life. The humor is in the word bookmaker which she, as a grade schooler, took as meaning an author or publisher of books when, in reality, her father was a bookie.

“It became a poem when I decided to use the language of gambling to tell the rest of the story, suggesting we live by figuring the odds, the over and under, when to stick and when to fold and cash out. We also have to admit there is chance. Why else did my grandfather do what he did, abandoned my mother and her mother, closed off his life from her and his grandchildren, finally dying never reconciling?

“Gambling is seductive because it combines the rational and irrational so by using its language I want the reader to feel what my mother may have felt and later figured out about her father. The poem is set in the Irish-Boston-Catholic world that I mine for much of my poetry and so far is rich in inspiration, imagery and poetry. I also am aware that the poet is a book maker too.”

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Remembering Ricky: Ottone Riccio 1921-2011

My poetry teacher died on September 23. Since then I’ve been thinking about him and wondering what I could say that could give some sense of him to someone who didn’t know him.

My meeting him was a serendipitous thing, a fluke. I was living in New York, about to move to Boston, and, after many years, renewing my interest in writing poetry. In trying to figure out what I was doing I came across a book, “The Intimate Art of Writing Poetry.” Just the thing I needed–a small gem filled with practical information of poetic form, sensible advice on writing and publishing, and soaring inspiration for anyone who, as Ricky did, thought, lived, breathed, and slept poetry.

I bought the book and then discovered he taught a workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education, just a few blocks away from my new home. Lucky me! He taught me how to write poetry. Or maybe I should say he helped me learn how to write poetry.

His technique of teaching was always respectful, always made with the understanding that “this is your poem, not mine, but if it were mine, this is what I would do.” That said, though, he could be shocking in all the “darlings” he wanted us to murder. Cut to the bone, include no word that was not absolutely necessary–that was his approach. There is an apocryphal story that he once told a student with a three-page poem, “This would make a good haiku.”

When he turned 80 “Ricky’s people”–basically anyone who had ever studied with him–compiled a tribute anthology, “Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken.” This was the poem I wrote for him:

Generation

Receive

the secrets.

Trace

the path.

Apprentice

yourself to magic

and the skill

of making fire.

On moonless nights

reweave the stories

thread by thread:

begin to sing

In 2009, with Ellen Beth Siegel, he wrote “Unlocking the Poem,” a guide to writing that included some of his poem-provoking assignments (“Write a 32-line poem in quatrains, 10 syllables per line, using a linked mirror-rhyme scheme as follows: abab bcbc cdcd dede eded dcdc cbcb baba, any subject”)

As Ricky said in his introduction to “Unlocking the Poem,” “Anything less than total commitment, total involvement, is going to make the work of the poet more difficult if not impossible.” Ricky believed poetry was magic. Not some kind of facile conjuring, but something deep and mysterious, a life force. I will always miss him and be grateful to him. He was my teacher.

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Who are the murderers?

I always picture killers as at some level deranged. Damaged goods. Maybe momentarily blinded by passion, maybe methodically malevolent, somehow off kilter. I am optimistic enough to believe that a “normal” person does not murder.

I am thinking about killers this morning, reading the news of the death of Troy Davis. Right to the end there was doubt and, as Nick Kristof, for whom I have great respect, said, “When smart people debate whether or not a man should be executed, that’s a good reason not to execute him.” Seven of nine witnesses who had testified against him later changed their testimony.

Still that was not enough to instill doubt in the minds of Georgia’s highest court. A judge presiding over a hearing last year said that although the case against Davis “may not be ironclad” and that there were doubts about his conviction, there would be no new trial. And, finally, the U.S. Supreme Court, too, remained convinced that, even with the “reasonable doubt” jurors are cautioned about, the case merited no further consideration.

And so last night Troy Davis was walked through the hallways, through the meticulous preparations, past the credentialed witnesses to his death. And this morning I am wondering who is a murderer.

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One thing leads to another….

So there I was in San Francisco in June and there were two exhibits about Gertrude Stein, one about her life and the other about the art collection she and her family members amassed in 1920’s Paris.

Fascinating. I didn’t know much about Stein–rose is rose; the unforgettable Picasso portrait which, yes, she grew to look like; the salon where Picasso first met Matisse and where young Hemingway nervously came for opinions on his work; Alice B. and the cookbook. But not much beyond that. And nothing at all about her brother Michael and sister-in-law Sarah, who had a close relationship with Matisse.

When I got home I started reading Alice’s cookbook, which was delicious on many levels and had recipes I was tempted by and a delightfully matter-of-fact voice I was charmed by. And then I couldn’t wait to see Woody Allen’s film “Midnight in Paris,” where I could revisit the time and all those new-found friends. And that led to reading “The Paris Wife,” Paula McLain’s novel about Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife.

And, of course, then I had to read “A Moveable Feast,” Hemingway’s finale book, a memoir, which he labels “fiction,” about those early Paris years. And yesterday I read “The Old Man and the Sea,” which I found beautiful, although, as with his writing about bullfights, I am not entirely sure I see the Large Noble Truth in the killing of large animals.

Now I’m moving on to Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife, whose life with him included time spent in Cuba, where, coincidentally, I will be later this fall.

And isn’t it so often like this–reading, like life, interweaving, meandering, leading to unexpected places?

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An anniversary

It was 34 years ago today and it’s still amazing.

On the Wire

It was just after seven,
people rushing to their jobs
then suddenly the shouts, the
pointing, looking up and
there he was
a hundred ten stories in the air,
a quarter mile straight up, the towers
not yet finished.

The night before, the Grateful Dead
had played Roosevelt Stadium–
started with Bertha, on to Sugar Magnolia, U.S. Blues;
the Astros beat the Braves six-four; the next day
Nixon would resign,
but this

was morning
August seventh
a Wednesday,
and here it was just
the wire–narrow, high–
and thousands watching
as he danced like light between
the solid towers.

He was arrested, sentenced to
make magic in Central Park. Later
he went back, signed his name high on a beam.

The president would helicopter from the lawn
in just a day or two, head back to California, jowled and
grim; Faye Dunaway got married to someone from the
J. Geils Band, the new prime minister of Iceland was
sworn in, all that same Wednesday, and then
nearly three decades passed, almost ten thousand days.

It was in the morning that day, too.

(This poem of mine originally appeared in Muddy River Poetry Review.)

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Punctuation rules!

The news was shocking. To me, at least. Well, apparently to quite a few other people, too. A snarky piece in the HuffPo said that, ho hum, the serial comma is out and who cares.

The news was that Oxford University had updated its style guide and was discontinuing use of the serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma. This is the comma that comes–or not–before a conjunction in a series of three or more: e.g. red, white, and blue instead of red, white and blue. Or eats, shoots, and leaves.

News of the demise comes just as I am hearing the term Oxford comma for the first time. It’s a very good upgrade, I think, since serial has those unfortunate connections with words like “killer.” Though there’s always “serial drama,” which I like.

Whatever it’s called I think it’s a good idea. It just makes grammatical sense. There’s a symmetry in the way it looks on the page. And there’s a nice sense of pacing. It sounds, in your head, the way you’d say it. It doesn’t rush you to the final element. Will we need to say it faster without the comma?

The article is followed by a string of comments, some of them irate and one of them mine (“it’s a good day when people care so much about punctuation”). And many people were all a-Twitter about it.

You can also see a video of a song called “Oxford Comma” by the rock group Vampire Weekend. I’m learning a lot. And I also see that the Oxford comma is sometimes called the Harvard comma. How could I not have known that, right here in 02138 in the shadow of the Great University itself?

Anyhow, I have to apologize for upsetting you. Turns out to be a cruel hoax. Relax. Stand down. Oxford University issued a statement that, contrary to reports, no change in its policy on use of the serial comma is planned. Except maybe to start calling it the Harvard comma?

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After the End of the World

We’re still here, all of us, the faithful penitents and the scoffers, along with the doers of saintly deeds and the usual assortment of sins. Doomsday came and went. And here we are still, all our flaws intact.

Actually, the end of the world–originally scheduled for last weekend and now apparently postponed until October 21–had taken me by surprise. I’m not among those scheduled for rapture, so I had missed most of lead-in preparations. But as the fateful hour neared it became harder to ignore. The man next to me in the supermarket checkout line was saying that he didn’t want to be buying his groceries when the world ended. “I want to be in a better place,” he said. Hmmm….a better place? What if…..?

Since the day was sunnier and warmer than it had been in weeks, Dr. D. and I spent much of it in the garden. We tilled the soil, we sowed for the future, or at least for the next couple of months. Earthworms in generous numbers were there to help. A cardinal was sitting on her nest outside the kitchen door. The peaceable kingdom in the middle of Cambridge.

We were having some computer problems but, as often happens, they seemed to be resolved after we switched off and restarted. Which is kind of what the End Of The World day did, too, switched us from the mildly unconscious to the noticing mode. The next morning the bone-chilling drizzle was back, but we had pleasant things to do. It was good.

A couple of years ago I was asked to be among a group of poets responding to the question “Why do I write?” And, in the way writers find they are sometimes surprised to see on the page what it is they think, I was a little taken aback to find myself saying that I write to notice. Noticing is in relation to daily life the way poetry is to prose–a heightened state. Isn’t noticing what we do when we love? So here I am in a week when the world is not gone. Perhaps, in Wordsworth’s words, it is too much with us. Certainly we do lay waste our powers, frittering away the minute by minute building blocks of our lives. And whatever stops us in our tracks and makes us notice just a little more is a good thing.

The Last Day came and went. The faithful have much to do, picking up the shattered pieces of their belief, some of them now trying to find new jobs and rebuild the savings account. But we who never thought it was going to happen anyway have an unanticipated chance at a kind of redemption ourselves. Maybe it did make us think even for one nanosecond, “what if….” This week the world goes on, complete with its misery, injustice, poverty, oppression, and natural and human-caused disasters in place. But also with its possibilities.for good still standing, unscathed. And we can look around and notice what possibilities exist, in our own little worlds and in our large, shared one. So maybe, we are, after all, in a better place.

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Pomp and this circumstance

Reader, I watched it. Woke up at 5:30–15 minutes before my alarm was set for–and joined the untold numbers tuning in to The Wedding.

Yes, I know, I know: silly, especially for Americans (though at least we don’t have to foot the bill); irrelevant; anachronistic; ridiculous in the face of poverty, oppression, injustice, and misery of all kinds going on now; horrifying in the face of all the aforementioned that have gone on in the name of this monarchy throughout much of its history; how many times in history, from Anne Boleyn to the groom’s parents, this whole thing has gone so terribly wrong; and yet…

The sense of history; the pageantry; the mesmerizing choreographed perfection of the moment were irresistible. Fascinating, too, was the balance of public spectacle and private event. And all the interesting images:
–the historic markers on the Abbey walls
–the earnest faces of the choir boys
–the hats!
–how the queen makes conversation with everyone
–the eternal question–what could she be carrying in the purse
–the moment when QEII was the only person standing silent as Philip, the couple at the altar, and everyone else sang, “God Save the Queen”
–Prince Harry whose red hair and impish grin remind me of my Zach
–wondering what her father was thinking as he walked her down that interminable aisle
–the Archbishop of Canterbury (just writing that!) taking off his hat, putting it back on

I am old enough to remember being ushered with my class into the elementary school auditorium to squint at Elizabeth’s coronation on a tiny television screen and being told, “Children, you may never see this again in your lives.” Like Halley’s comet.

The young couple, attractive as they are, hardly need our good wishes. They have every humanly possible comfort and expectation of a good life. Still, who ever knows what awaits that may be out of human hands. And who knows if they will find a way to fill their years with satisfying endeavors. All that, particularly on this side of the ocean, feels beside the point. But, like those tiny feathered hats perched so fetchingly on the groomed heads, this event, too, was a fascinator!