Happiness and Cheer

In Defense of Poetry

(This is not a poem). Just yesters, I ran into some friends of mine who asked me if I read the latest Sojourn. "Alan, you write poetry - did any of that stuff make sense to you? I mean, do poems really mean something to the people who write them?" This is not a unique sentiment. In fact, the majority of friend-types I run into say that poetry doesn't make sense. So what's it worth, anyways?   Chances are, if you don't like poetry, you won't even start this unless I make you think it's not a poem.  (It's not).  Plato says poets are liars, but I'll let you take that for what it's worth.  

This is what I'm trying to say:

Poetry is a lot

like coffee - once you acquire the taste

you enjoy it in ways others can't.

It takes some time, sometimes, but once the time is taken

you don't miss it - for what it's worth.  Still, 

at the same time, some people find it

so repulsive, they never want to like the taste.

Why learn to like something you don't already naturally?

That's how I am with coffee, so I

at least understand.

First, they say, try it with sugar

or cream or even honey.  Do 

people drink coffee with honey? I

would start drinking poetry with it.

This is what you read most of the time:

Bitter droplets of afternoon

drip down buttonholed

mugs of lava - where

do we come from said

the bee-keeper's wife, but she knew

his mustardseed skirt was too short 

for the making.  Baking.  

Caking.

I drink mine hot when I drink mine

but I don't drink mine when I do. just

listen. 

That's as much poetry as I'll inflict on you for the time being (remember, this is not a poem).  The most common question I get regards the meaning of poetry.  "Why do people like to use words nobody knows and flowery language no one understands - it's like they're trying to make things confusing?"  

Poetry requires a reader.  Just writing poetry does you no good - that's not the point of it.  If all I wanted to do was tell you something, I wouldn't need to do so with poetry.  I would just tell you.  Or write you.  But what if I had more in mind than telling you?  A good poem, in my books, is one that tells you something, but "tells it slant," as Ms. Dickinson would have it.  This is where some problems come in, of course.  Quite a few contemporary poets have gotten so caught up in the way of telling you something that they forget what it was they were trying to tell you.  Or maybe they didn't care about what they were telling you to begin with.  

Telling it slant is the real trick to poetry, though.  I need to make you understand what I'm telling you, but I need you to do some work to understand it.  That's part of the whole poetry thing.  If you have to do work to figure out something, it becomes more yours and less mine.  (This paragraph is mine). The more it's yours, the more I've done my job.  But if I just tell you, it was never yours to begin with.  Roses are Red will always be plagiarism - yet we always look for "the road less traveled" as if it were our own to take. 

What can I give you, though, to make it your own?  Think of it like a game, where you're the detective and I can give you clues.  What clues, you may ask?  The title, for one, should give you some direction on how to read the poem.  If the poem is called:  "A Fig or Two," you should ask yourself it that means the whole poem is a "fig" or if it represents a fig or it imitates a fig or it is describing a fig or...you get the point.  I can also enjamb lines or use binary oppositions or self-conscious gestures, but if you don't know what any of that means, don't worry.  Poetry is not only for the elite.  I can also use capitalization techniques and line-breaks and puns and dashes and colloquialisms and parentheticals (and the like) to give you direction. 

As a poet, I can't give you the destination, but I'll at least offer some road-signs.

This was not a poem. (That 

was a poem).

       See?

When I Were a Dragon

I realize now

that the poem I gave you

was incomplete.  I forgot to mention 

the cold and the fog 

          you see spackling out your mouth

when it comes down upon

the sky.  Clearly

I meant to include that bit but 

you know how it is you 

get on the train and think

you'll do this and that when you get there

but not here.  

                   Here is only a moment

but moments are all so

        I'm looking 

at it now and remembering.

The uses and misuses of Piglet's friend Pooh

Having named our house after a certain "wise" feathered character in the Hundred Acre Wood, I am obligated to make a statement about our dear friend Pooh.  Over the years, the bear of little brain has lost a great deal of his fur to the mass-market corporate world.  From diaper advertisements to disney sing-a-longs, Pooh has received far more bruises than he did in his days of bump-bumping down the stairs behind young Christopher Robin.  But now the heffalump-hunter has been disgraced in a way I fear to even name.  The story can be found here (click).

It's a silly little phrase at first glance, a harmless, charming, witty little jig: "Return to the Hundred Acre Wood."  And to that I say, Humbug.  Some loon has decided to write the sequel to A.A. Milne's classic story, even after Milne went to so much trouble writing a perfectly fitting ending himself.  It's like joining a game someone else has already won.

If Pooh had his say on the matter, he'd probably mumble something about a "bother" and then go off and forget what he'd bothered about.  Piglet, meantime, would try and be very brave by imagining himself fighting off the hordes of misguided publishers.  Eeyore, of course, would be neither fazed nor surprised.

Perhaps it won't be all that bad, you may say.  And then, you should at least read it first before you say anything about it.  Well, Bubba, I *have* read it - or at least the free excerpt they put online (here) - and it was most disconcerting.  The author strikes me as one of those types that thinks good children's literature must include lots of simple sentences to help the child understand.  Even Dr. Seuss would not be amused.

----

But now to happier things.  First of all, there's Pooh Hour - which clearly falls in the the Proper uses of Piglet's friend Pooh category.  Pooh Hour, as the term is used by some goodly friends of mine (and perhaps the phrase will soon permeate pop-culture), is the term for those times when everything - yes, yes...everything - is delightfully humorous.  If you walk into a room full of normally low-key types who are rolling on top of tables laughing about a bag of pop-corn popping, you're probably witnessing someone's Pooh Hour.  Typically, it hits sometime in the mid-afternoon, or, after a long, stressful day is over, in the wee hours of the night.  If you're lucky (or just plain loony), Pooh Hour strikes the clock every day of the week.  And Rabbit would not approve.

Lastly, there's this.  A group of psychologists decided to poke fun at themselves by diagnosing Pooh's friends and Rabbit's many relations with psychological disorders.  The resulting medical review can be found here (click), and the world's greatest chart can be found here (click).  Sometimes things like this can be just the catalyst one needs to be thrown directly into Pooh Hour.  One can only hope for such a fate.

What a Billow be...

When given the choice, I go to the beach about twice every decade.  

Not because I hate the beach, or that I ever leave the beach unsatisfied, but the mountains, the rivers, the trees, the puddled-marshlands, have always proven superior in my experience.  Nonetheless, here I am listening to the crashing waves (a most lovely melody, I readily admit) for the second time this year.  The ocean is unusually packed with jelly-fish this year, so swimming in the ocean isn't quite the charm I remembered it being.  So today, my brother and I opted to build a sandcastle at the edge of doom.  

Why the edge of doom? you may ask, and rightly so.  The edge of doom, I have long believed, is the only place a sandcastle should go - otherwise, there's no point in even building one.  The kings of old didn't build castles just to feel better about themselves or to say, "Hey, ma! look at these white-washed walls!"  No.  They built them for protection from plague-ridden swineherds and over-zealous knights who thought chivalry meant the slaughter of small children.  It is in a similar vein, I reason, that sand castles should be built.  If there's no threat of a jelly-fish hoard pouring over the walls in a splurge of salt-water, there's no need for a castle.  

So Andy and I built ours at the edge of doom, and just as we finished he called it a day and went in.  And there I was by myself, guarding everyone else's towels with a castle under siege.  Fortunately, the castle was holding its own, so I let myself relax. The natural thing to do in such situations is to sit in one of the nifty seats Andy and Haynes dug in the sand earlier that afternoon.  So I did - minding my own business, not causing anyone any grief or trouble - the sun going down on my right and some sand-pipers piping away at my left - when a girl a few years my elder passed by and started loitering in the area, picking up shells every so often - or shall I say acting like picking up shells.

Before I knew it, she asked me if I was comfortable in my little seat.  "Yes," I said casually, "my brother made it and I stole it from him after he left."

"Oh!" she laughed, coming closer to me.  "You mind if I sit down?"

I wish someone other than the girl had seen my face in that moment.  I think it was akin to an old photo my mom took of me seven years ago.  We were in Hawaii for my 9th grade Spring Break and my brothers and I were posed with the coconut-wearing, grass-skirted Luau dancers.  Ben and Andy are very natural - smiling and holding up a pineapple rind or something.  But not Alan.  Horror, sheer horror, holds my face together as I breathe in the shock of the scandalous moment.

And so it was today, as the bikini-clad girl sat by my side on the gulf coast.  Why?  I will never know.  I did, however, manage to maintain semi-control of my shock as I conversed with her about her school, her hometown, and her age (6 years my elder).  Eventually, my parents both walked up from their stroll down the beach and gave me the "what in tarnation?" look.  Andy, meanwhile, looked on quizzically from the balcony, as Ben showed up with Whitney and both of their heads cocked.  

And you wonder why I like the mountains better.

Only the children know what they are looking for...

I'm at the beach again, which means I'm supposed to feel small again.  You know, the vast ocean compared to the small human - you're supposed to feel insignificant at times like these.  Truthfully, though, I don't - at least, not any more than I normally do.

If I ever need to feel insignificant, all I have to do is look out the windows of my house and watch all the cars go by.  Look at all those people, I tell myself.  You don't know any of them and they don't know you.  You have no idea what their stories are - where they're going, or why they're even in the car to begin with.  For all you know, they want to change the world, just like you.  Then again, maybe they're just mindlessly going from one place to the next - like the train-riders in The Little Prince.  "They are asleep in there," said the switchman, "or if they are not asleep they are yawning. Only the children are flattening their noses against the windowpanes."

I was looking at one of my old friends' Facebook pages the other day, and I came across this:  

About me: Honestly, It's not really about me at all.

yep.

What if? Why not? Could it be?

Wondrous wondrous Kate D. (think Edward Tulane and Desperaux) has come out with another glorious tale - full, as always, of light - The Magician's Elephant.  My book recommendation habits, however, will allow me to tell you precious little about what the book is about.  Halbroox Bros. rule number one in picking up a new book - *never* read the back.  Why? because too many a good book was ruined by some overzealous publisher who thought it'd be a grand idea to reveal half the plot on the back cover.  

This is how it usually goes:

Jimmy was always a strange boy.  But one day, his whole world is changed - an even stranger, eight-legged creature shows up on his bedstand to tell him the meaning of life and to set him off on the most exciting adventure of his lifetime.  

So you pick up the book (I'm not really sure why at this point) and start reading...and reading, and reading.  On page 320, the spider finally shows up in what's supposed to be a plot-twist.  FAIL.  All this time you were waiting, expecting the eight-legged wonder to appear and change the boy's life. The book ain't about the spider - it's about Jimmy.  But now that Jimmy's life is a sub-plot and the spider has gained full rights to the climax, you set it down and find a cheese muffin.  And with a plot like that, we can hardly blame you.*  In other words, you limit the amount of times you get moments like these:

Note: I must admit that every now and then, you will, in fact, come across the back of a book that is just vague enough to get you interested without giving away anything you shouldn't know.  So perhaps Halbroox Bros rule number one in picking up a new book is a bit harsh.  Just know that we have had far too many a good book spoiled to remain detached from what we see as the inevitable disillusionment with book-backs.  Of course, there is always hope for a better future...in fact, one of my friends wants to be "one of those people who write blurbs on the backs of books," so we cannot give up on back covers altogether.  

All that to say, this book is grand, and has nothing to do with 8-legged creatures or boys named Jimmy.  And whatever the back cover says, don't read it.  It's Kate DiCamillo, so know it's pure goodness.

What I can tell you is this:  it's full of hope, loss, wonder, and Home.  And already, I've said too much.