Breakages + meme for Ms. Box Elder

I am taking a wee break from blogging because I am having a lovely almost-spring spate of new poems. Also, I ought to be in a dragon-biting gunpowder mood because two of my books are going out of print at once (the Penguin/Firebird paperback editions of The Curse of the Raven Mocker and Ingledove--better get one now or never), and I might just be in that bad mood later on so may as well vanish till I'm over it. However, at the moment I am being of great good cheer because I'm placing a lot of stories and poems and what is even better, having that grand lyric gush of poems. Every now and then I get a flood of the things, and it's the most wondrous pleasure.

See you later! And may you have much happy April fooling! But be sure that this, though possibly written by an April fool, is no fooling . . .

Despite much cheerful tagging, I rarely get around to doing a meme... This one from Box Elder sticks in memory because I actually dredged up the name of the book when Lucy posted her quote.

The rules for Lucy's meme go like this:

1. Pick up the book you are reading, or else the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).

2. Open the book to page 123.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the next three sentences

5. Tag five people.

If you're reading this and have a blog and the funny feeling that I mean you, consider yourself tagged.

No, it was the chirping of birds, which landed like gray shot on open umbrellas, for here I was offered real German canaries from the Harz Mountains, cageloads of goldfinches and starlings, basketfuls of winged talkers and singers. Spindle-shaped and light, as if stuffed with cotton wool; jumping jerkily, agile as if running on smooth ball bearings; chattering like cuckoos in clocks--they were destined to sweeten the life of the lonely, to give bachelors a substitute for family life, to squeeze from the hardest of hearts the semblance of maternal warmth brought forth by their touching helplessness. Even when the page was almost turned, their collective, alluring chirping seemed to persist.

Photograph: The literary mosaic picture is courtesy of http://www.sxc.hu/ and Christa Richert of Berlin, Germany. Now see if you can put any of these little shards of word into a larger mosaic.

The Appreciation Corner: "Spring Pools," for the season in-between + Stories

SPRING POOLS
I always think that Robert Frost must have been somehow remembering—in some vague, inchoate way—Philip Freneau’s “The Wild Honey-Suckle” when he wrote “Spring Pools.” The form is very close: Freneau ends a six-line tetrameter stanza with a couplet; Frost begins a six-line pentameter stanza with a couplet. Freneau and Frost turn to weak rhymes, expressive of the shivery frailties of flowers, and both poets rhyme flower with power or powers. Freneau closes “The Wild Honey-Suckle" with this: From morning suns and evening dews / At first thy little being came: / If nothing once, you nothing lose, / For when you die you are the same; / The space between, is but an hour, / The frail duration of a flower."

In both poems, the flower is tied to the brevity of life. Powers are opposed to the flower: in one, autumn and the seeing death of nature; in the other, a more surprising move—the onrushing sweep of life. There will be more life, but the flowers and pools will be lost in its great pour:

SPRING POOLS

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods--
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

The pools and flowers belong to that tenuous time when the Snow Queen’s grip on the land has loosened and the first brave flowers bloom. The simplicity—the tendency toward monosyllables, the parallelism (“And like the flowers beside them”/“Will like the flowers beside them”, “To darken”/“To blot”) the almost “total” lack of flowery ornament—save for the very appropriate use of antimetabole to describe a mirrored scene: “These flowery waters and these watery flowers.” The use of the antimetabole, the repetition of words in transposed order, means that all ends “in balance,” though it is a balance that will soon be gone. The last line reinforces that balance by returning to a regular metrical line.

This is no allegory, and yet we sense our parallels to these small shining pools and tiny flowers and are capable are feeling grief for their passage in a reading of the poem. The unthinking trees whose branches lend “defect” to the reflected sky loom above in dark patterns, their pent-up life about to break from the bough. Their powers will make a fantastic Black Forest of the land; they will annihilate and suck away the delicate life of pool and blossom. The force is over-bearing; they do not merely “blot out” but “blot out and drink up and sweep away.” Any one of these would do, but the heaping up stresses the utter blank and dark to come.

Instead of joining with the greater life of streams, the pools will be strained through roots and not transformed into darkness but lost there. The snows that melted yesterday have assisted the rule of winter, and the forest likewise is a great power. Flower and pool are but ephemeral: “frail duration.” Already ruffled by chill breezes, they will yield to the dark forces of death and destruction, their own lives taken that there might be more life.

"Spring Pools" came to mind last week. During a sunny day, the snow melted from the two flower beds next to the warm southern wall of the house. Underneath proved to be many yellow flowers, tightly closed, of aconite. Then it rained and mist rose up from the heaped banks of snow, and melting snow and rain puddled in the flower beds. And then I thought of Robert Frost’s “flowery waters” and “watery flowers.”

Addendum, March 26, 2:00 a.m.: Without thinking, I posted something about Frost yesterday--and here today it is his birthday.

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UPDATE ON STORIES

Last night I sent off some stories, and this morning I woke up to find them accepted. I always find that sort of thing pleasing. Enthusiam is always dear. New forthcoming stories: "The Red King's Sleep" (continuing the Carroll motif of the last post) and "The Horse Angel" in Postcripts (U.K.) The "Sleep" takes that old chestnut "then I woke up and it was all a dream" and turns it inside-out and sideways. "The Horse Angel" began with an elderly neighbor here in Cooperstown, and I make use of her character, her house and handed-down possessions, and her marriage of 63 contented years. There are a lot of stories in the pipeline labeled forthcoming, and that is good because I have been devoting myself to poetry lately. Another forthcoming story (from the same editor as the two last, so I just found out about this one as well) is "Static," scheduled to come out this year in Extraordinary Engines: The Definitive Steampunk Anthology, ed. Nick Gevers (U.K./U.S.: Solaris Books). Never had my innocent little mind turned to the thought of writing a steampunk story, but I had a splendid romp in the writing. Lots of steam as well as peculiar characters, an imprisoned young woman, perilous lightning, and some enlivening combustion.

MEMES

I know. Haven't done them. Will do, honest. At least one or two. Soon.

Photograph credit: The "spring shot of Llantisilio churchyard with snowdrops" is courtesy of www.sxc.hu/ and "Plutarch" or Sandi Baker of "Chester, Cheshire, U. K." It's not in the woods, and it has no spring pools. But it has spring flowers and bare branches and more than a hint of time's passage.

Falling toward Easter

CARROLL AT EASTER

As it is a busy week in the snowdrifts of upstate New York, I shall just wish friends and passers-by a happy and blessed Easter-to-be.

And if you are in need of some writing advice while I am out-of-the-palace, please take this: "'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, very gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'"

That is, of course, from the immortal nib of a pen held by Lewis Carroll or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the kaleidoscopic, the myriad-talented, and the Reverend. Ah, to be born under the tilted grin of a Cheshire moon, caught in the branches of the Daresbury parsonage tree!

I am glad of his tenderness for little girls because he gave me a gift at an early age that has served me all my life and given me much joy.

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HOMOMONOJOT

Here's an on-line poem of mine that just popped up today: "Homomonojot" at The Round Table Review (U. K.) If you're wondering where the name came from, it is a portmanteau word (thank you again, Lewis Carroll) that puts together bits of "homonym" + "monometer" + "jot." Does that sound a little smart-alecky? Blame it on the one-stress lines. Thanks to Jon Stone for suggesting that I submit to The Great Monometer Challenge.

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ILLUSTRATION CREDIT

The contemporary Alice falling into a marvelous rabbit hole can be found on DeviantArt; it is by "Tahra" or Kyoung Hwan Kim of South Korea. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

The Youmans - Spitzer connection

Poet William Harmon gets the grandest kind of a prize for being the very first person to drop me a note about my young music-minded cousin who has just hit the big time under her professional name of "Kristen": "In 2006, Ms. Dupré changed her legal name, according to records in Monmouth County Superior Court, from Ashley R. Youmans to Ashley Rae Maika DiPietro, taking her stepfather’s surname since she regarded him as 'the only father I have known.' But in . . . interview, she referred to herself as Ashley Alexandra Dupré, which is how she is known on MySpace" (The New York Times March 13, 2008). The just and jolly reward for dropping me a line on this important political matter of forbidden fruit will be an immediate name change from "William Harmon" to "Billy Rae Taylor D'Anunnzio," with alternate monikers of "Jonesie" and "Brandyn."

Billy Rae has expressed the thought that life is a lot more lively in New York than back home in the Carolinas. The North Carolina governor is downright boring "except for 30 mins. a year when he drives around a NASCAR track." Perhaps we can fax him Eliot Spitzer, who is terribly available this morning. Client-9. Kristin. Let's hope they can stand the excitement of their lives. Maybe even hope for a smidge of redemption and a scrap of good sense. As a dyed-in-the-cotton Southerner raised to be riddled with guilt, I have a hard time smacking anybody. Besides, Randall Jarrell told us all, "You know what I was, / You see what I am: change me, change me!" (“The Woman at the Washington Zoo.”) Of course, the context was a bit different.

Is "Kristin" of "Kristin and Client-9" related to me? I suppose so, since it's said that people in the U. S. who bear the name of Yeoman(s) or Youman(s) are all descended from four brothers who sailed to New York before the Revolution. Three (including my direct ancestor) skedaddled to Georgia, but one dug in where he landed. Evidently his branch was doing very well in the nineteenth century, but perhaps some of them have come on hard times since. By the Depression, most of mine had had their skinny Georgia butts vigorously kicked by history.

My husband, having read the Times and The Drudge Report over breakfast, suggested that I tart up a good nom de plume. I'm working on it, now that I've finished laboring over Billy Rae's reward. And Mike reminded me about all the mightly hordes of people who will be googling the young was-Youmans and discovering their passion for poetry and novels . . .

Now ain't that a thought?

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Photograph credit: I've wrested this piece of forbidden fruit from the pictorial tree by permission of http://www.sxc.hu/ and J. G. or "LittleMan" of Belgium. Seems as though we all have at least two names today . . .

Darconville's Cat, Ugga-Bugga, etc.

What bookish bloggers say when they have nothing to say

I am going to tell you what I am reading, as I do from time to time when I refuse to write a proper blog post (whatever that might be) because I do not feel like writing a proper blog post. So now I will undertake to write an improper blog post, born like a slatternly, slovenly Venus from a sea of laziness.

What I'm rereading or reading on this very day

Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

W. B. Yeats, The Poems of W. B. Yeats (Feeling queasy? Want a bit of basalt in a world that's boggy and squelchy underfoot? Remember that I will be reading Yeats.)

Romans 8

Wislawa Symborska, Poems New and Collected

Paul Celan, Speech-Grille and Selected Poems, trans. Joachim Neugroschel

Archibald MacLeish, Collected Poems 1917-1952

What I wrote today

I wrote a poem having to do with Celan (yes, that sounds evasive--my rule is "don't talk about new things!") in the wee hours of the morning and fiddled with it again in the afternoon. I didn't mean to; the thing just seeped in, all those Celanese stones and the man himself, his terrible losses and death.

Rereading

While I may have been a rather different person when I last read Darconville's Cat, I am pleased to announce that Darconville's Cat is the same book that it was before. This is a valuable piece of news and not always what comes of rereading a book. I have read many a book that turned out to be another book entirely on rereading. Darconville's Cat appears to be a book that can be relied upon--in contra-indication to those mutable books that refuse to be the same thing twice.

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Later the same day: What I meant by the above is that they are still "good books" twice. As happens with a lazy post, I now have to add an explanation. Here it is:

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More on rereading; or, what comes of a lazy post; or, a note to Lucy

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All books are different when reread. That's obvious. But some books shouldn't be tried again--one could only read them at a certain age, it seems. As Heraclitus keeps on saying, even after all these years, "You cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you."

It's sad when you try to greet an old-friend book and find it is a stranger with little to interest or hold the attention. What I like is meeting a beloved book once more and finding that it still has something to say--often something very different from what it said before.

Overheard in Cooperstown, also this very day

On the general decline in vocabulary: "In another generation, people will just be saying 'Ugga-Bugga, Ugga-Bugga.'"

Suggestion for reversing tendencies toward Ugga-Buggadom

You know those horrid let-everybody-read-the-same-dratted-book programs? (Of course, if everybody was assigned one of my books, I'd have to change my mind about the "horrid" part.) Let's make everybody read Darconville's Cat. In that way, Alexander Theroux can take a long sabbatical from the Augean Stables of teaching because he will be so Lydian-Croesus rich from everybody on the planet reading Darconville's Cat. I suspect that the mass reading of Darconville's Cat will cause an important shift in human history and increase the sale of dictionaries. Have I mentioned the title often enough? That's Darconville's Cat. You might read it. Theroux has a new novel as well: Laura Warholic. I'll have to get around to that later.

The Return of the Pot Boy

the Pot Boy,

Palace Advice Columnist

& general answerer of questions

Lori Witzel said...

Dear Pot Boy:

Who wrote the Book of Love?

Sincerely,

Sorry, that was the best question I could come up with on Short Notice.

Ms. Witzel,

The Book of Love was written before the worlds were made. If you don’t believe it, just read more Yeats. We are made to read much Yeats here.

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Yours truly,

the Pot Boy

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blog queen said...

Ah, I have one. What is it like to be a boy/man in love? I've wondered lately. We girls get all giddy, look starry eyed, feel weak in the knees when kissed, etc. I've wondered if boys and men feel the same or is it different for them? I read also that usually one of the couple is "more in love" with the other, and saw this played out today at McDonalds. I saw a chap with his arm around a girl looking totally besotted. Giving rise to the above questions in my mind. She on the other hand looked like she was just tolerating his being there and was more in love with the ice cream cone she was holding. I was thinking, poor chap, she's probably going to dump him sometime... but anyhow, do boys/men go all gagga like girls/women do when they are first "in love".?

Ms. Blog Queen,

I cannot speak for all men, but I can certainly speak for myself. In love, I have floated past the moon head over blue-lit heels and found butterflies in my bed in the morning. Nevertheless, I have managed to keep a straight face, gaga being alien to my nature.

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Sincerely yours,

the Pot Boy

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Susangalique said...

I have been working with my profile and looks like I will just have to be faceless and hatless, I so wanted to wear my turbin hat for the potboySusangaliques question, is how a soul might beat the lethargy of bla

Miss Galique,

I will be happy to see you in your turban, whenever it appears!

A soul might beat the famous Lethargy of Blah by waking up. As Thoreau said, most people are sleepers in a long railroad track. Spices and hot oil, a pan full of suds, a book or picture I almost understand and want to grasp, unearthly encounters, music, the opposing sex: all these wake me up.

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Snappily yours,

the Pot Boy

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Dear Pot Boy,

What we would all do without pot boys?

please, i'm being rhetorical.

After all, armies and families must be nourished on a frightening regular basis. And this requires pots. Clean pots. Lots and lots of clean pots.

So, dear pot boy, please let me off the hook if you can. What i need to know is this:is it absolutely necessary for me to keep my copper pots shined at all times? i only have two in my humble kitchen, but they are used frequently and while i do often enjoy shining them 'til them gleam, i am almost always compelled to fly away with dishes dripping dry on the rack while the last of the soap bubbles slips down the drain. This means, of course, that the copper pots develop a well-worn patina i've often spied on tv chef's copper pots...but...please tell me the truth: am i slothful for not polishing them every night?

Humbly yours,

Fitful Zephyr

Fitful Zephyr,

Shine not at all times! You are a zephyr, not a sun.

Women ripen, copper tarnishes. I am also fond of copper as it heats quickly and is responsive to temperature changes. Some people clean tarnish with vinegar or salted lemon halves or other easy home remedies, but I do not dislike the evidence of time.

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Mythologically yours,

the Pot Boy

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blog queen said...

I have another question for the pot boy. Are there ghosts in your palace? I was with a friend tonight at our local coffee house and we had contact with a ghost. Details are on my blog, but I want to know about your palace, does it have ghosts, and what are they like?

Dear B. Q.,

How satisfying! A second question.

There is some disagreement about the matter of ghosts. This place is a regular rabbit warren, and it’s possible to get lost… Generally it is people who are lost who see ghosts. Some shriek and depart as quickly as possible. Others attempt to bless the ghost and lay it to rest. “In the name of Christ, be at peace!” is a common utterance. So the numbers of the ghosts may be in continual decline. Of course, some ghosts plug their ears.

I believe that the kitchen and butler’s pantry are haunted by the ghosts of vegetables. Ghosts of avocados rock back and forth in the tiered basket. Melons skitter about on tiny legs like unexpectedly graceful pigs. I once saw the ghost of a large rutabaga tapdancing on the kitchen table, surrounded by a ring of bobbing scallions.

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Peace-be-with-you yours,

the Pot Boy

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Amanda J. Sisk said…

Dear Pot Boy:

Pls do not feel unloved and come out and play! There are few worse fates than being unloved, it is true...but you could have a name that means "worthy of love" and feel the weight this title adds to the burden that is absence.

I've a query for you, but perhaps you require some gentle coaxing. Since you spend your hours in the kitchen, I assume you like to eat and also approach the edible with a certain creative flair. I've just perfected my recipe for simple home-made pasta sauce here in Italia and shall give it to you. It is not a bribe, just a gentle offering.

1 lb sun-ripened tomatoes

1 lb spaghetti

1/2 cup grated ricotta salata or pecorino

salt and pepper to tastea pinch of red pepper flakes

olive oil

6-8 basil leaves

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

Cut a small "x" in the tops and bottoms of your fresh tomatoes (pls avoid grocery tomatoes... grow them yourself or go to a market). Boil them in hot water until their skins loosen. Peel the skins whilst making sure you don't singe your own skin. Chop up the tomatoes and and put them in a saucepan with the garlic (finely chopped or pressed). Let this mixture simmer eight-ten minutes - stir occasionally. You can add a TBS or two of olive oil at this point. This is a personal choice. I find too much olive oil makes the sauce less hearty. Also add salt, pepper, and the red pepper flakes (be very sparing on the flakes). Boil your pasta in salted water. Add shredded basil and cheese to your sauce just a few minutes before serving.

Variations: Eggplant - Peel and slice into 1/2" slices and salt them. Place in a colander for 1-2 hours. Then rinse, pat dry, and fry in hot oil, turning so both sides brown. Drain on absorbent paper and add to your sauce before serving.

Black olives - 1 1/2 cups black olives, pitted and coarsely chopped. I don't use canned olives... I remove the pits myself. Try adding these with a tsp or two of oregano and a little chilli pepper for a second variation on the sauce.

Serves 6.

Some people like to add a pinch of sugar to cut the acidity of our tomato friends. I did not detect a difference when I tried it.

There will be pots to scrub, of course.

Now: Do you think it is a person's duty to build a life around a gift/skill (one recognized by the individual but also one others have defined for him or her)? Suppose it is a skill that few possess, but that the person only enjoys him or herself 95% of the time? Is it the greater duty for the person to follow his or her bliss, even if it is unrelated to the gift?

Joyful Amanda,

The recipe is in the file, waiting for the appearance of lovely red orbs of tomato. I look out the window and see much snow. A ripe tomato would make a fine contrast.

Your question is challenging. It seems, perhaps, that you may have more than one gift (sculpture, printmaking, drawing, painting?) but that you have been repeatedly urged to follow a certain way. The gift or gifts you relish are ones that you enjoy more than 95% of the time. The gift that seems “right” but lesser you enjoy a mere 95% of the time.

First, I would suggest that 95% is quite high.

Yet you love something else more.

Since I am somewhat in the dark—not completely, from what I gather of you—I would give these examples.

Here’s one that’s bliss followed in despite of gifts. A man I know—shall we call him X—was talented in the theatre and writing. Nevertheless, he had a pronounced to become a doctor and did so, despite the fact that math was not one of his favorite enterprises and was a thing that had to be endured along the way. Many people protested his decisions.

As a doctor, he has a notable talent at diagnosis because he has a strong memory and can make imaginative leaps to new possibilities. It seems that the old gifts have not vanished but give strength to the new vocation. He still does a little theatre. He still writes. But these will never be his life. They add much—very much—but the art of medicine is his.

And let us consider a stubborn woman, Y, who is an example of braided gifts. She writes poetry, she writes stories, she writes novels. Yes, you know who I mean. When she calls a stop to one thing, something else bubbles up. One mode influences another. Has she been writing a novel and turns to poems? Well, then, narrative and characters creep into the poems. Has she been writing poems and turns to fiction? Then maybe this time she wants the prose to go bow-string tight. The three fertilize one another. Borges said of his fiction and his poetry that he didn’t know which was the dog and which the tail, and whether the tail wagged the dog or the dog wagged the tail.

Let us consider Z, a Pot Boy and Advice Columnist. The mystical circles that I inscribe on the shining bottom of a pot as I scrub are what bring forth the gush of truth.

Those are examples I well know: gifts united or gifts abandoned and yet somehow bound to new vocation. But you are a mystery, somewhat to yourself as well as me. Are you better at one pursuit now than the other or others? Years can change that: persistence can change that imbalance, swing it around to the other side.

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Yrs in chasing bliss,

the Pot Boy

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Lucy said...

Dear Pot Boy

Verily my pot runneth over and there is little I need to ask. But while we're on pots and pasta sauces, are green bell peppers, capsicums, what you will, the same species as the red ones, only at a different stage of ripeness, or are they something of a different kidney? (Always loved Eliot for rhyming that with 'Sir Philip Sidney...)

Dear Lucy, resident of Box Elder--

The delightful green of Capsicum annuum or the bell pepper is, I believe, its immature state, while ripeness leads to red, yellow, or orange. (There are more than 20 species of Capsicum, and within these are many more varieties—as here, with the bell pepper.)

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Yrs in affection for peppers,

the Pot Boy

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Illustration: Credit goes to sxc.hu and Nathan May of Durant, Oklahoma for the photograph of the inside of a copper pot.

Gardenias for Kate Deriso

The Pot Boy has not yet moved from the fire. If you have a question, leave it in the question box, one post below… When he moves, all will be answered!

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Today is the birthday of my paternal grandmother, Kate Deriso Youmans of Lexsy, Georgia. In the past decade I’ve heard that her grandparents owned much of Treutlen County and were big slave-owners. Evidently they lost everything after the Civil War and were pitiful and often starved in their old age. I found the idea that they had been owners of land and slaves very startling because I had long connected my grandma's past history with the sort of plow-mule poverty that features in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the accompanying photographs by Walker Evans. The shack at Lexsy was crowded with flowers and trees and a great shining hedge that shaded the porch; it is a primary place in my imagination, a place out of time—the sort of place where people do the same things in the same way for hundreds of years.



Kate Deriso Youmans was a Primitive Baptist who lived hard and close to the bone; she was a sharecropper in the Depression and for most of her life, and she could make fried chicken and cakes and pies like nobody's business. At the farm, we would go out on adventures to gather food, crossing a stream to collect the wild sweet plums, yellow and clear red, or toting buckets for berries. My grandmother carried a cudgel against cottonmouths and rattlesnakes from the swamps. It seemed to be that she was always busy shelling lady peas or canning peaches or capping blackberries, her arthritic fingers never at rest. Her table was always a bumper crop.

She gave birth to six children. In her youth, she was called "Little Bear" because she was willing to defend them with her fists if she had to do so. Willie, a little boy nicknamed “Peter Rabbit,” died of meningitis in the wagon on the way to the doctor. The others grew up and became what they became. My daddy became tailgunner and a chemist and then a Professor of analytical chemistry. He is dead, and she is dead, and the world is still spinning and flowering and burning and needing all the things that it needs so desperately.

In speaking of her, I have limited what she is. She rode wagons under the stars, she pushed children from her body, she buried a child, she plowed a mule and labored in the hot Georgia sun, she did infinite things I do not know. Widen all that I have said by a thousand miles on foot and add a million over-heated suns, and you and I might get an inkling of what that life was like.

Credit for photographs: The gardenias are courtesy of "xymoneau" or Dez Pain of Australia and www.sxc.hu/. I believe I've used some of xymoneau's images before...







***

Here is how my day is going:

Hokay,

I start out the outer-world part of my day by running two blocks to the bus-stop to hand R the forgotten dowel for her dratted art project: all this dressed in my bathrobe, tucked under a long coat. The thermometer says 10 below zero--dunno if I believe it, but it's cold. Fine. Done. Can sit down and work on the FAFSA form at last.

Phone rings at 8:15.

"Hi Mom."

"Hi B. What did you forget?"

"My backpack."

Oh, only a two thousand pound backpack... Only a thing as big as a small icehouse that straps to one's backside. Only every single book and notebook and pencil needed to attend high school.

Sigh.

The wackiness never ends.

The Return of the Pot Boy

Creative speller, bonfire-maker, collector of hats, and history teacher Susanna of Alabama has suggested in the Comments that it is high time for the Pot Boy to stir up some mischief. As I am bogged down in college searches, revision of a 60-poem ms., horrid financial papers that don't bear thinking about (must pay taxes, must send three children to college), story requests, and being Mama, I think this a first-rate idea.

I have rousted him from the chimney corner by the fire (yes, I have a real old-fashioned chimney corner in my cottage of sagging floors, as well as an I-beam that holds up the floors as well as it can), and that daring young fellow has pronounced himself eager and willing to entertain questions. You may recall his piratical ways, his seizure of the premises in the guise of Palace Advice Columnist, and his dispensing of Pot Boy wisdom to novelist, poet, art teacher, person of ungraspable foreign name, child, graphic novelist, and nature photographer. You do not have to be one of these (though you may be) to ask for his sterling advice, but you do have to deposit a question.

In case you need to refresh your memory about his role and ambitions in life, you may inspect them here (and elsewhere in snips and jots of news):

The Pot Boy Spouts Off
The Pot Boy Meditates on the Tea Cosy
The Pot Boy Gets the Boot
Ask the Pot Boy, contd.
Ask the Pot Boy
The Pot Boy Tells All

Need advice or answers on matters of the heart, pots and pans, etiquette and protocol, the hunting of buffalo, why mome raths outgrabe? Please leave that question. Nothing under the sun is safe from the Pot Boy's eloquence.

Image credit: Photograph courtesy of http://www.sxc.hu/ and Valber Cortez of Maceió, Brazil.

A Sweet St. Val's to You--

My book-progeny (the fiction, anyway) and I appear on the Guardian (UK) blog here. Recently I've been a bit startled to find that I'm often labeled as a young adult fantasy writer, since most of my books have been published for adults, and much of what I do is not irrealist--although I certainly have committed some strange fiction over the past few years.

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But who can knock being talked about on the other side of the great puddle? And he mentioned my upcoming Val/Orson book as well. Thank you for that Valentine's gift, Damien G. Walter!

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And thank you to Imani for telling me. I like her blog, The Books of my Numberless Dreams (another Yeats lover.) In fact, I'm making a note to myself right now to put Imani in my blog roll.

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Image credit: The romantic valentine is courtesy of Gabriella Fabbri of Rapallo, Italy and sxc.hu.

Fried squirrel: new online poems

UPDATE 2/8/08: I am the premier Q-looney for today at qarrtsiluni with a poem called "Self-portrait as Dryad, no. 5." Thank you to the editors! UPDATE 2/2/08: "Stones in the Wilderness" and "Snow White in Wildwood" forthcoming in the next issue of Mezzo Cammin, an online site for women poets interested in form. I've published there before and like it. With all this luck going around, I'd better send out some more poems. I've been working on my current poetry manuscript and thinking that I ought to be energetic and send out more little white envelopes--somehow I've managed to place eighteen poems in the past ten days, even though I am lazy about such things. Here are a few new online poems: "The Fall," "The Starflower," and "Spell for Raine" (a poem written in memory of Kathleen Raine) are in the just-out "Loss and Restoration" issue of Mythic Passages at the Mythic Imagination site. In addition, there's a poem I wrote in memory of my elderly friend Fae Malania (writer of spiritual essays) in the January/February print issue of Books & Culture. It has now popped up on line as well. The editor, John Wilson, helped us along the path to getting a reprint of Fae's long out-of-print Knopf book, The Quantity of a Hazelnut (Seabury, 2005), so this is perfect placement of a poem. Upcoming: A poem in my Self-portrait as Dryad series will turn up on qarrtsiluni some day soon. It feels luxurious to be giving them a poem rather than editing an issue. Illustration: the hardcover jacket / paperback cover to my first book of poems, Claire (Louisiana State University, 2003.) Unfortunately I will not be publishing my second book of poems with LSU because Claire has not sold a sufficient number of copies.

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Family Frolic

N is discussing Obama. Being devoted to the unconventional, he declares that he will have to be for McCain because everybody in his elementary school is for Obama.

Mike: McCain was a war hero.

N, age 10: Didn't he fry a squirrel in a microwave and eat it?

B, age 18, from under his headphones: I ate what?

Hiatus, hibernation

I am taking a wee break from blogging in order to help with college applications, do taxes, clean the hovel, and perform other jolly duties. I'll see you when it's warmer... If you miss the snows of Cooperstown, you can always read native daughter Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton when it comes out. Oddly enough, I've been writing and publishing Templeton stories for years, so I suppose we had the same Fenimore-Cooperish idea. She seems to be getting a nice solid push from the publisher. Last, a Marly album: here.

Marly, the dervish of NYC

Photography credit: by Ellen Datlow, editor extraordinaire. As I have always been a great maker of weird faces (and even somehow managed to be in a picture at KGB where I appear to have a bust of double-dirigible proportions--how?--bizarre posture? is that my next insult to photographers?), I present a nigh-insuperable challenge to the candid photographer, and I congratulate Ellen for catching me without one of my especially peculiar faces now and then. Most people can't manage it! She has many more on her site, but here are a couple of me (one with Paul Guran of Prime Books) and one of Dan Braum, my co-reader, and his fellow Clarion South grad, Ben Francisco.

My mighty whirl through New York is finished. I took the 8:30 puddle-hopper bus to the city, immediately fell into an on-going interview with Jim Freund of "Hour of the Wolf" at WBAI and John Klima (editor of the anthology Logorrhea and zine Electric Velocipede, recorded "The Girl in the Fabrilon" with Jim, did an interview with Jim, taped a few poems for other shows, did a reading of "Prolegomenon to the Adventures of Childe Phoenix" at KGB Bar (hosted by Gavin Grant and Ellen Datlow and also captured by Jim, though I felt that my reading was a bit ragged-and-rugged by then), went to dinner at a Chinese place with part of the KGB mob, ran around with Dan and Ben, slept for a few hours at the blessedly quiet HoJo Express on East Houston, went to breakfast with writer Maggie Paley at the Noho Star (we met at Yaddo last year--she's the author of Bad Manners and, yes, The Book of the Penis), met up with my friends Jack and Anne for a Turkish elevensies (like hobbits, I was doing an extra meal), bought presents at Pearl River, caught the subway to the Port Authority, hopped on a bus, got delayed by an unfortunate tractor-trailer accident, and finally arrived back in the peaceful little village of Cooperstown (where it is always snowing and so was) around midnight.

Did that sentence seem rushed? Now you know what my trip was like.

But I think it was fruitful; the prose and interviews will be on three shows, and the poems will be tossed in elsewhere on other shows. The next step is that Jim Freund will call and wake me up at 3:00 a.m. when he runs a story so that I can answer questions. I think this will be comical because I am not at my best at 3:00 a.m. We all know that 2:00 a.m. is my proper hour...

Fantastic Fiction reading series: Dan Braum and Marly Youmans at KGB Bar in NYC

January 16, 7-9:00 p. m. Go here for information.

Post-Epiphany Resolutions

Marly’s 2008 resolutions (the bookish ones)

1.
Continue writing about Long Grass Books on the blog.

2.
Cease to pay attention to things that fritter and are devoid of meaning. Live the larger and more radiant life of art; give up what shrinks and darkens the spirit.

3.
Clean up the dratted post-earthquake writing room.

4.
Preserve your humility in the face of art.

Zephyr has floated by and asked that I amplify number 4. What does that mean to me, humility in the face of art?

Here goes, at the risk of sounding like an utter ninny...

It means this: despite our civilization’s current turn away from words and away from beauty, the vocation of artist still exists; that it is a vocation of rightness, a calling that matters; that a vocation is not a thing to rest easy in; that making the beautiful is tied to labor and readiness and willingness to explore beyond what has become comfortable. Most of all, humility before art means acknowledging the great mysteries of life and death and striving with no thought of self—in fact, with loss of self in the striving—to make a thing that radiates life and beauty.

Of course, thousands of artists of all sorts have devoted their lives to this work and have passed away as though they had never been. Yet the striving itself was an assault on death and meaninglessness that affirmed that life can have meaning and that people can live brighter, bigger lives.

5.
Bother to send out some poems—don’t sit around waiting for requests.

6.
Post more pieces about younger or beginning writers.

7.
Apply some ingenuity: think about filling all fiction requests, even if they’re “wrong” for you; that is, bend the request into a bow that fits the arrows in your sheaf.

8.
Don’t waste so much time. Listen. That’s time’s winged chariot you hear…

9.
Don’t expect other people to do anything for you, but be sure and thank them if they do.

10.
Grow more chitininous armor, yet grow more tender within.

11.
Don’t wait for someone, something...

12.
And don't fret.



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Fantasy Magazine has been conducting a poll for best stories of the year, but unfortunately "The Comb" was left off. It's now up, third from the bottom; if you're a reader, feel free to go read and vote. "Seven Crooked Tinies" is also on the list. New Year's Day marked the anthology reprint of "The Comb" in Rich Horton's Fantasy: Best of the Year (Prime Books, 2008).

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Photograph credit, "Winter 1": I'd be tempted to call this one after the poem, "The Road Not Taken," and say that this is Frost's "yellow wood" when winter comes, as it always must. This trace through a winter forest is courtesy of http://www.sxc.hu/ and Peter Hellebrand of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. "I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence / Two roads diverged in a wood / And I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference"

The New Year's Feast at the Palace at 2:00 a.m.

New Year’s Eve, 2007


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Persimmon slivers wrapped in proscuitto

&

Tapenade with french bread
Mumm Cordon Rouge Champagne

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Fennel & potato soup

garnished with smoked salmon & fennel feathers
Pouilly-Fuissé Louis Jadon 2003

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Shrimp toast with red pepper rouille
Monterey Valley chardonnay 2003

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Butter lettuce with roquefort, candied walnuts, & blackberries

Glimmerglass water 2007!

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Beef daube (Montana mule deer)

& spatzel & green beans cooked with bouquet garni
Château Lafon-Rochet Saint-Estèphe 1993

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Apple & goat cheese tartlets
Mumm Cordon Rouge Champagne

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Fireworks on snow

Hope I got that right...

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As we had six sleepy children on premises, we ended up skipping the final drinks and tea after the fireworks, but it was a grand six hours of eating and drinking in the new year. May you have a good 2008 with a sufficient scattering of joys and the pleasantest of surprises!

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For a few more menus (wish I'd kept track of these for the past decade), click on the "New Year's Eve" label.

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Michael’s Sour Blackberry & Sweet Walnut Salad

½ sour cream
1½ cup walnuts
1 cup brown sugar
½ cup granulated sugar
Mix sour cream and sugars together in heavy-bottomed pan and boil at 240 degrees (soft-ball stage). Mix nuts in and stir around until coated. Take out and spread on wax paper and separate with two forks. Sprinkle with cayenne.

Wash and separate a head of butter lettuce. Divide lettuce among six salad plates. Top with: four sour blackberries; about an ounce of roquefort; a half dozen candied walnuts.

Dressing: cup of olive oil to ¼ cup lemon juice, one clove of garlic, salt and pepper.

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Upcoming Event: Dan Braum and I'll be reading at KGB Bar in NYC on January 16 at 7:00. p.m. I may read narrative poems and a small story. Hop here to find out who we are and more!

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Photo credit: The photograph of fireworks is courtesy of www.sxc.hu/ and Peter Hall of Valencia, Spain.

16 things I learned from guest-editing "qarrtsiluni" Insecta

Photo credit: Today's photograph at qarrtsiluni is flyy by Emilie Zoey Baker. For more, wing over to qarrtsiluni.


The Good & the Bad

1.

I have always had a terrible weakness for people, their endearing, funny, and un-funny foibles as well as their abilities and their rising-above-self merits, and I still do. I especially liked getting to know Ivy Alvarez and the managing editors, Beth Adams and Dave Bonta, and I relished most of the correspondence with writers and artists.

2.

Never shift to gmail for editing without learning how to use it first, or you will accidentally shoot a bunch of rubbish and notes to somebody and confuse them mightily.

3.

Ask and it shall be given! There’s nothing wrong with nerving oneself to ask somebody you admire for a piece—I asked Paul Stankard for some images, even though I thought he was entirely too famous to bother with us. But he did bother with us. Hooray!

4.

Some people have no self-control when it comes to submissions. After a while, this becomes funny, and a certain name becomes a cherished byword.

5.

It’s lovely to see a piece go through multiple revisions and come back a stronger and more controlled piece.

6.

Now I appreciate magazine editors properly.

7.

Never, no-not-ever sign up to guest edit a magazine during a period that covers both Thanksgiving and Christmas, especially if you have three children and a rotten respiratory bug.

8.

Being fuzzy around the edges, I never ever remembered whether a person had been widely published or not, according to his or her letter. Prior publications made no whit of difference to the work.

9.

Visitors to blog-style online magazines still visit but do not leave comments around Christmas Day.

10.

Come up with an interesting topic and hone the work: a startling number of readers will show up.

11.

Dave Bonta is a gen-u-ine character, wonderfully cantankerous and beauty-loving, and he ought to be in a novel. Maybe he is in a novel. I’ll have to check.

12.

I am excessively dutiful. I do not want to be an editor, because such things would take over the little wisps of time that I gather together to do my writing.

13.

One for Ivy, for luck: Axolotls are useful little beasts, loving and burning and doing handsprings and frolicking.

14.

I am burdened overmuch by a Southern tact handed down from my maternal grandmother, Lila Eugenia Arnold Morris, an upright and shining pillar of her community, a fervent-to-burning Southern Baptist, and a woman who gave birth to nine children and managed to rear them right despite the Depression and many losses.

15.

Rejecting people you know or e-know is not any harder than rejecting people you don’t know. It’s all the same amount of hard, that hard nugget of no.

16.

Never-ever-ever say that your dear mama, your darling wife, your darling husband, your granny, your granpappy, your adorable kitty, your sweet addled puppy, or any other beloved family member really liked your poem just exactly the way it was. Even if your poem is exceedingly attractive and alluring, this becomes a stumbling block and a hindrance to two editors, who then walk around said stumbling block and talk about it until finally they send your poem back to you with what are really quite sincere regrets, along with a certain amount of bemusement.

Bottles, qarrtsiluni, more--

New wine

Illustration to my story, "Drunk Bay," in the current issue of Postscripts: here.

Old wine in an old bottle

In honor of Advent, the annual money-grubbing Christmas movie rush, "The Golden Compass," and the "dust" kicked up by Philip Pullman, I resurrect an old post from the depths of blogdom--back in the era when I was mostly writing for myself, no doubt! Here is "Pullman, Lewis, & the world-changing redemption of the ordinary."

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New wine in a brand new bottle
qarrtsiluni is sputtering and spinning along in good bug fashion. Ivy Alvarez and I are working on our sixth batch of submissions right now and will probably wait until the deadline of the 15th to begin on the seventh, unless there is an unexpected Deluge. One of the great things about accepting a call to work on a project like this is getting to know the co-editor and managing editors, and I have enjoyed the contact with all three.

One thing that I have re-learned is how very satisfying it is to take a piece that has some flashes of brilliance but really needs more work and help somebody shove it closer to perfection. I feel very pleased with the pieces that are up and those that are in the queue waiting for a turn. It would be interesting to have a site where one attempted to help somebody revise every day--one poem or story per day--but it would take an inordinate amount of time. Of course, it would also be pleasing to have one's own pieces treated in such a detailed way!

Another thing I notice is that the level of competency out there in the world is quite high. The difference between the poems taken and the ones not taken tended to be in the areas of style, love of language, or something we might call vibrancy: the illusion that a work has some degree of life. However, some pieces we didn't take were interesting and lively but seemed to demand more revision than we felt we could fit into our schedule--and the room in our schedule simply had to decline as we moved closer to the submission deadline of December 15th. Some pieces we didn't take were well done but felt too familiar; others we seized on immediately managed to de-familiarize and enchant the ordinary.

We have some surprises hidden up our sleeves and hope to delight and please some more before Christmas. The last postings will be up by early January at the very latest.

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Photo: Artist's bottle house window in bright sun with a misbehaving camera, Wilmington, North Carolina. August 2007.

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Bottle trees

One of the things I want next year is a bottle tree. In a dreary Yankee February, one needs (this one needs) a little bit of Southern color and dash and trash. Otherwise, one might just take the dirty snow at the edge of the street too much to heart. The magpie and the homesick child in me demand nothing more than a bottle tree.

Tinnerty Leaves a Note

During Advent, an evidently-tiny elf sometimes leaves very small messages around the house for N, who a terribly busy small person and easily bored in the absence of daily Peewee football. As I am still laboring away on qarrtsiluni Insecta with poet Ivy Alvarez--please go see our magnificent bugs in word and image--and still struggling to recover from that pernicious bug, The Flu, I now present one of those notes, found under my pillow along with an uncomfortable lump that turned out to be books.

Still wondering what to give your great big lumpen friends of the human kind? How about one of these gigantic books, packed like St. Nicholas's pack with good stories? Love, Tinnerty

There! Getting an elf to write one's blog posts seems an excellent idea. I may have to continue the practice.

Logorrhea has to be the most imaginative idea for an anthology in years. John Klima, editor of Electric Velocipede, invited writers to contribute stories inspired by a winning Scripps spelling bee word. Mine was smaragdine, a word I knew from the marvelous Puritan poet, Edward Taylor. Daydreaming about the metaphysical poet, stuck in the wilds of Massachusetts, I came up with a story called "The Smaragdine Knot. " (I confess to having used the divine Mr. Taylor before, as the unnamed Puritan minister at the close of Catherwood.)

Excerpt from "The Smaragdine Knot"

"Smaragdine" podcast mini-tale by Jeff Vandermeer, from his round-up story that hit each of the words in the anthology.

For author bios, more excerpts, reviews, and more, go here.


Looking for an Epiphany present? Rich Horton's Fantasy: The Best of the Year will be out on New Year's Day. In it, you may find my story, "The Comb." Here’s an Amazon link for reference.


Other recent and forthcoming appearances that may be of interest to the literary shopaholic include my novella set on St. John's, "Drunk Bay," forthcoming in this month's issue of Postscripts (U. K.). The issue is forthcoming in hardcover and paperback. Soon coming up is a story in Firebirds Soaring, the next anthology from Firebird/Penguin and Editorial Director Sharyn November of the magnificent red hair. For more upcoming publications in anthologies and magazines, as well as information about recent publications, see my bibliography for more information.

And here's one final suggestion...

Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling's Salon Fantastique recently won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology.

The collection includes my "Concealment Shoes" (a Locus Recommended Reading pick.) This is a story that--unlike most of my work--uses real elements from my life. The concealment shoes were at one time in the living room chimney. All three of my children and one of the cats (the calico, not the idiot Russian Blue, cute and bug-eyed) make appearances, and my 1808 house gets a starring role, along with a nearby bit of the Village of Cooperstown. It is related in setting and characters to the story "Rain Flower Pebbles," forthcoming in Postscripts (U. K.)

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Image credits:
In order of appearance, the covers shown are from Bantam, Prime, and Thunder's Mouth.

qarrtsiluni's Insecta issue