A Selection of Random Links

After Wednesday's blackout, it appears the interwebs are buzzing with interesting stories this morning. Or perhaps I should credit my friends' Friday procrastination instead; I've found all of these posted by my facebook and/or twitter colleagues. Regardless, because I've come across such a diverse array of interesting things this morning, I don't have a coherent idea to post about; instead, you get a smidgen of many different ideas.

So, in no particular order, I offer you:

A proposal to eliminate university tuition -- With all the crazy shit that's happened at the UC schools recently, this is actually positive information. From the article, "On Wednesday, a group of students at UC Riverside presented a proposal to UC President Mark Yudof that would abolish tuition - and he’s actually considering it." The best thing about it, at least from this short article, is that the plan actually makes sense.

An indicator that I truly am old -- Nothing says "you're not a kid anymore" like the news that your favorite childhood movie is being remade. And now, The Princess Bride is the victim. I'll grant that this cast/director could be a lot worse, but still, they're messing with perfection and I am not pleased.

Comedy, satire, and politics -- and the hazy borders between them. Some of my former Penn State colleagues and I recently had a long, involved discussion on facebook about Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart and political satire. It started with this article, and then this one, which I'd read a few days before, and the link I started with addresses some of the issues we'd been discussing. I will say that I'm not 100% sold on Colbert in many ways, that I prefer Stewart's approach; but I also acknowledge that Colbert's recent "long-form journalism" (as this article calls it) re: campaign finance, super PACs, etc is pretty effective in showing a non-expert audience exactly how fucked up the system is.

Another serious-comic piece -- which I relate to all too well. Maybe cracked.com is running out of ideas, but this one on "The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor" is really on-point. I've had this conversation with a couple of friends of mine, one of whom grew up with less than I did (and I grew up firmly working class, if not "poor" exactly) and the other who grew up in a privileged suburb; the insidious effects of poverty are easy to under-estimate, especially for people who've never been there as well as those who've gotten past that income level. This piece, which is humorous in many places, does a great job of explaining some of them.

And a bit of bad news from India -- I adore Salman Rushdie. I first read him in high school, and my mother disapproved. I've read nearly all his books. I even used a quote from one of his essays as an epigraph for my MFA thesis. I follow him on Twitter. And I find it so ridiculous, and sad, that his life is still being threatened. This article is interesting as well in its discussion of literary festivals, and the question of what happens when these events (or any events) grow too big too fast. It also makes me both sad and relieved to be missing the AWP festival next month.

And I believe that's it for today. I need to get off the couch, run some errands, clean my apartment, and get ready to meet up with friends this evening where I get to hear about L's trip to Costa Rica. Yay! Have I mentioned how much I love my life?

Afterthought: in an effort to not be too "cheery," I'll also give you this morning's small stone:

the furnace works
for two solid hours
warming the morning rooms
enough to move
I don't get up until I can feel my nose

Review of "Mom's Canoe" by Rebecca Foust

I haven't been as diligent about posting my chapbook comments as I planned to be, but I'm right now procrastinating on doing other work, so I'm posting the most recent one. This book resonated profoundly with me; it's set in rural Pennsylvania and both the geography of the land and the issues raised are all so familiar to me from my own life.

Rebecca Foust’s chapbook Mom’s Canoe opens with the lines “You can turn round and round and round/ and always see mountains.” The Alleghenies hover over this collection, they “calve memory from twilight”, they come closer then recede, divide the false from the true, and eventually disappear and “efface into sky” (all quotes from the first poem, “Allegheny Mountain Bowl”). The natural beauty of the land mingles in these poems with post-industrial grit, economic depression, and social ills like alcoholism and domestic abuse. The title poem “Mom’s Canoe” addresses itself to the speaker’s mother and spins a string of achingly lovely images of the canoe itself, the mother’s hard work on land, her easy movement on the water, before ending elegiacally:

I still see you rising from water to sky,
paddle held high, river drops limning its edge.
Brown diamonds catch the light as you lift, then dip.
Parting the current, you slip
silently through the evening shadows.
You, birdsong, watersong, slanting light,
following the river bend, swallowed from sight.”

This blend of the beautiful and the sad, heightened in “Mom’s Canoe” by the fact that the canoe was mentioned in an earlier poem (“Backwoods”) which places the mother in an abusive relationship, typifies the tone of the collection. Foust utilizes rhyme in this and many of her poems, but never in an overbearing way. “Things Burn Down”, a rough-cut villanelle, repeating words rather than full lines, also epitomizes the style of the chapbook. Foust invokes specific family stories, broad socioeconomic commentary, and the physical atmosphere of her upbringing in this poem which questions what might bring her parents back. In this poem and throughout the collection, subject matter, form, and tone all seem to flow from the poet’s “hardscrabble” background and articulate a wry acceptance of both past and present. In “Altoona to Anywhere”, the speaker addresses herself: “Go ahead, aspire to transcend/ your hardscrabble roots…//But when you’ve left it behind you/ may find it still there” and ends the poem with a list of things she can not transcend, concluding beautifully with “the same siren nights pierced/ with stars seeping light, all that/ gorgeous, pitiless song.” The recognition of both beauty and ugliness, love and pain, lift the collection above either simple angst or romantic naturalism; the image left is one of reality with all its contradictions.

Documentary

Possible beginning of a poem, or just a random bit of thought.

Documentary

Two shoeboxes full of photographs
a flip book of evolution, a novel
in glossy 3x5s and 4x6s, main characters
and minor, some who’ve died and some
who’ve disappeared, a poor white
station wagon and my baby sister
in a stained dress playing on a bare
floor, friendships and tourist attractions
and yellow fields and red brick,
dogs I remember and cats I’ve forgotten

July 1988

long, probably rambling, too prosey perhaps....

July 1988

Those blasphemous raspberries resolutely refused
to ripen during the bright clear days of June,
color rich and glossy but tart enough
to keep even the youngest of us from eating them.

Every day my mother sent us up the hill
to check on them. We’d try a few, competing
to find the largest, the darkest, the highest, hoping
to find one sweet, return defeated and scratched
with that sour still-green taste in our mouths.

We watched the sky for rain because she did,
eyes darting west at every little breeze, watched
the garden dry and crack, plants yellow and droop.
Every evening when the sun went down, we filled
five gallon buckets in the stream, as full as we could
carry, my sister and I sharing one bucket,
my mother with one and a baby on her hip,
my father a bucket in each hand, a scowl on his face.

We poured water carefully, focusing on the roots
not the leaves, trying to save the rows of corn,
the hills of potatoes, squash, beans, the sad spindly
tomatoes and peppers. The garden seemed endless
in those dry, rapidly cooling twilights, no humidity
to hold the day’s heat, spilled water quickly evaporating
from our hands and legs. It should have been enough
to feed all of us with plenty left over to sell
and freeze and can and keep for winter.

When it rained on the 4th of July, we ran outside barefoot
to play in the muddy water that filled the yard
too much for the dense clay to absorb so it splashed
around our legs, scooped up by hands too young
to be grateful, watched by eyes too young to be desperate.

The rain didn’t stop.

She forgot about the raspberries, worried now
about flooding, drowning the plants in the garden,
water in the basement and mold and mildew. I woke
on the 7th, the first day of sun, everything in rainbows
and mud puddles. The overflowed stream had stopped
just shy of disaster, the corn in the garden stood tall
and truly green, bees reappeared, buzzing heavily
between the purple blossoms of beans. I climbed the hill,
my sister in tow, carrying one small metal bucket.

The raspberries hung from their pale thorny vines
plump and beaded with dew and rain. I reached for one
and it fell apart in my hand, juice staining like wine,
tried another and it too dissolved. A smell rose
from the crushed berries, too sweet, too soft. We turned
guiltily, humbled by those blasphemous berries
we’d forgotten for a few days, long enough to miss
our chance. She wouldn’t blame us, we knew, but we would
blame ourselves as we'd been taught for not braving
the rain to pick berries before they rotted, for not remembering
what we’d spent the past weeks looking for, for not
picking them sour and adding sugar, for not outsmarting nature.

Alessio

A poem for the my dear friends' new baby.

Alessio

Born when the lilacs bloomed,
when that beautiful filly ran her heart
and her ankles out. Roses fell
like rain in Kentucky that Sunday,
a state above a baby boy was born.

May he have his mother's fire, his father's
beauty, the strength of their love. May flowers
bloom beneath his feet as walks to school
that first day. May he always feel safe enough
to take risks. The only wishes

I can offer: the magic of childhood,
the smell of springtime, the rhythm
of the lake like his mother's heart for nine months.
A charmed life. Dark hair and blue eyes. All
their love. All their hearts and the bones to bear them.