Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Memorial Day weekend with my sister and her family in Fairfax County, Virginia. My parents have been staying with her for about a month now, and they were glad to see me. Not that we have very much to say to each other, but the visual contact was necessary. My dad is not able to walk about much now; he feels tired and breathless easily. He plays with his granddaughters but nothing strenuous like kicking a ball around or chasing them. Last night he sat for a while watching Barney with Hannah. My mother is somewhat stronger. She worries about her hair showing white under its henna dye. I understand better now what Rushdie says in Midnight's Children about characters coming to an end when they have run out of stories and energy. My parents have poured their lives into me and my sister, and now they have nothing left for themselves. I see my sister and brother-in-law doing the same for Hannah and Liesel, and doing it with such love and dedication. It is horrifying. Yesterday we went...

A memorial website has been set up for John Stahle. He was the publisher of the gay men's cultural journal Ganymede , a wonderful graphic designer, and a friend. He encouraged me to set up my own press, and designed my first full-length book of poems. He is sadly missed.

Cimarron Review Issue 171 arrived yesterday. I have a ghazal in it, accepted by Alfred Corn, one of the three poetry editors.  "Take heart and sing of love's recourse: the river" opens my ghazal sequence. Poets in the issue I recognize are Dorianne Laux, Edward Byrne, David Shapiro, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Billy Collins, Christopher Phelps, Michael Montlack, and Brent Goodman. Good company. Seeing my name in print, I feel like a poet again.

When does a life stay still? I am quietly terrified that I will not finish all the work I must before I leave for China in about two weeks. I have just announced at school the selection of the Common Book--Eboo Patel's Acts of Faith --but the books are still not in yet for distribution. There is a report on the diversity survey that I promised but have not written. I am traveling to Fairfax County, Virginia, this weekend, to see my visiting parents and my sister. The certain duties. The uncertain doubts. I escape into the gym almost every day so as to narrow my thought to the weights I am pressing. A hopeful thing, which brings along its own trepidation, is the daily email I am exchanging with KD who seems to make a great boyfriend. All the time the anxiety of these days is permeated by horniness, so that I want to smash my body against someone, and annihilate myself in an instant of pleasure. Watched a mildly good, mildly bad gay film last night called Denied . (Lee Rhumohr play...

I did not say in yesterday's post that another attractive aspect of Heaney's essay is its tender and non-ironic feel for sex. About his poem "Undine": It was the dark pool of the sound of the word that first took me: if our auditory imaginations were sufficiently attuned to plumb and sound a vowel, to unite the most primitive and civilized associations, the word "undine" would probably suffice as a poem in itself. Unda, a wave; undine, a water-woman-- a litany of undines would have ebb and flow, water and woman, wave and tide, fulfillment and exhaustion in its very rhythms. But old two-faced vocable that it is, I discovered a more precise definition once, by accident, in a dictionary. An undine is a water sprite who has to a marry a human being and have a child by him before she can become human. With that definition, the lump in the throat, or rather the thump in the ear, undine, became a thought, a field of force that called up other images. One of these...

I finally made my way to the end of The Poet's Work: 29 Masters of 20th Century Poetry on the Origins and Practice of their Art , edited by Reginald Gibbons. Some pieces are fully developed essays, some are collections of working notes or of aphorisms, a few are interviews, and a few more are poems. Most I forgot the moment I finished reading them. Except for Karl Shapiro's polemical piece "What Is Not Poetry?" Americans writing on poetry bore me. Too often they reduce intuitions to theories. Australian A. D. Hope does the same in his systematic exposition of "The Three Faces of Love." The Spanish are much more readable. Lorca on the duende. Antonio Machado on the sparing use of imagery in intense lyrical poetry. Of those writing in English, Seamus Heaney, in his essay "Feelings into Words" comes the closest to evoking the spiritual in poetry. His figures--the digger, the diviner, the Tollund Man--are originally and finally mysterious. He is ever...

TLS May 14 2010 Clive James on Peter Porter 1929-2010: He had spent much of his career caught in a fork, punished in Australia for trying to please the Poms, and punished in the UK for being an Aussie expatriate with a frame of reference above his station. Later on, he won acceptance in both camps, and by the time of his death he was a living example of the old country's culture reinforcing itself with the energy of the new, and of the new country's culture gaining scope from an expanded context. From the Australian viewpoint, if Les Murray was still the king of the stay-at-homes, Porter was the king of the stay-aways, the position of expatriate artist having at last come to be seen as a contribution rather than a betrayal. For the British, his work and stature added up to a powerful reminder that the old Empire lived on as an intellectual event. * To a painful extent, his character was shaped by what didn't happen: nobody, as he later complained, was ever kissed less o...