Friday poetry challenge: It takes a village (idiot)

So I'm driving home from Aldi where I've witnessed three random acts of kindness in a single shopping trip and I'm filled with a warm sense of appreciation for the community of Aldi shoppers, and I'm on a stretch of twisty country road that runs past a property formerly owned by a con man who tried to bilk our community out of piles of money through a complex scheme thwarted by a few random locals with the courage to open their mouths--so yes, I'm feeling good about the power of ordinary people to keep their community safe and happy, when suddenly there's this kid riding a scooter in the road right in front of my car.

I'm not talking about a Vespa; I'm talking about a glorified skateboard with handlebars, a flimsy thing that this kid, who looks to be about 12 years old, is zipping and weaving and swerving around on right in the middle of my lane with no helmet or knee pads or any other kind of protection. I come around a curve and there he is, but he must have heard me coming because he quickly swerves into the other lane to get out of my way. Right: he's riding a foot-powered vehicle that clearly isn't roadworthy straight into oncoming traffic--if there's anything coming around the next curve, he's toast. Why not steer his scooter to a safer place, like, for instance, off the road?

I barely have time to think all this before I'm past him and rounding the next curve and relieved to see that no cars are coming, and I look in the rear-view mirror to see that Scooter Boy has swerved back into my lane, which is the right lane for motorized vehicles but not for helmetless boys on scooters. Someone needs to teach that kid a lesson, I tell myself, and suddenly I hear my dad yelling at a bike-rider who crossed (in a crosswalk! in a school zone!) in front of his car: It'd serve you right if someone ran you over! 

And I don't want to be the cranky old person who yells at random strangers, but I also don't want to be the benevolent old person who drives blithely around a blind curve and flattens a kid on a scooter. I can see why that stretch of road would be appealing to a scooter-rider, with all the curves and hills offering opportunities for daredevil jumps and spins, but that one-mile stretch of road serves as a shortcut between the interstate and a busy highway. It gets traffic! Someone could get killed! Someone needs to teach that kid a lesson! But there's nowhere to pull over and even if I did, what would I say to the kid--and why would he listen to me?

So I drive on home, hoping that the kid has a mom or aunt or nosy neighbor nearby who will witness his shenanigans and give him a good talking-to. It takes a village to raise a child, but unless he's auditioning for the role of Village Idiot, he needs to get his scooter off the road. 

I'm tempted to leave him a note in the style of William Carlos Williams:

This is Just To Say

I have driven
my car
past your
scooter

which you
were probably
proud to be
riding so well

Forgive me
for not stopping
(you stopped
my heart cold)

Try yelling that message! Or better yet, trying putting some unsolicited advice into verse form for the benefit of various Village Idiots.

And then we'll rank the lists of the greatest lists of lists

I'll bet I'm not the only English professor on the planet who has been asked recently--usually by people who have never read George Eliot--whether Middlemarch is the greatest novel ever written.  

I'm not remotely qualified to determine whether Middlemarch is the greatest novel ever written because I haven't read every novel ever written, but since it's summer break and there is literally nothing at stake, I'm going to go ahead and offer my unqualified answer: No. 

Now don't go hating on me already. I like Middlemarch; I've read it several times and I'll no doubt read it again; but not only do I not believe it's the greatest novel ever written, but I'm not convinced that it's the greatest novel about an intelligent woman who makes unfortunate choices. I would far rather read, for instance, Portrait of a Lady (Henry James) or Howards End (E.M. Forster) or The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton). 

Then again, it all depends on what you mean by greatest. There's a difference between an engaging novel and an important novel, a diverting novel and an influential novel. The categories may overlap, but still, there's a reason that many of the people asking me the question haven't ever bothered to read Middlemarch. It starts slowly, for one thing; the opening chapter doesn't provide a sufficient taste of the pleasures that await.

The question arises, of course, in response to the list of 100 greatest novels in English published last month in The Guardian (click here for full list), which surveyed 170 authors, critics, and academics to come up with the definitive list, which aroused so much discussion that they then assembled a second list of 100 best novels drawn from the votes of more than 3000 readers (click here for the readers' choices). 

There is some overlap; Middlemarch appears on both lists, but the readers placed it at number 2, after Lord of the Rings. I'm pleased to see that the readers' choice list elevates Joseph Heller's Catch-22 from number 99 to number 8, just one indication that the readers placed a higher premium on comedy than did the academics. 

I had a feeling that I'd read most of the books on both lists, but then I counted. On the academics' list, I started at number 1 and didn't hit a novel I hadn't read until number 42: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which I tried to read--twice!--but gave up halfway through because I couldn't stand to spend another moment amongst all those whiny people. Reading a book halfway through twice is not at all equivalent to reading it all the way through once. It's the only book that appeared on my PhD comprehensive exam reading list that I never actually finished, not that it's ever made any noticeable difference in my career or life.

After I stumbled on number 42, I found another 16 books on the list that I either haven't read or else have retained no memory of reading. The Leopard? The Golden Notebook? No idea. I am ashamed to admit that I've never read The Master and the Margarita, but there's still time. I'm not sure there's time to slog through more than 1000 pages of The Man Without Qualities, but then again I've read In Search of Lost Time repeatedly without complaining about the length, so no excuses!

On the readers' choice list, I start running into trouble around number 30. I've never read Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, or if I did, I don't remember. I've never, believe it or not, read Watership Down, or Lonesome Dove, or The Outsider. All told, I've overlooked something like 23 titles on the readers' choice list, but I had trouble keeping count because I kept getting distracted by the titles on the list that I regret having read.

Hemingway? He wrote some nearly perfect short stories--"The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "Indian Camp," and others--but his novels leave me cold. 

Jack Kerouac? The prose in On the Road might carry me away, but the casual acceptance of domestic abuse in Big Sur left a bad taste in my mouth that tainted my every encounter with Kerouac.

Dune? Please, no. Impressive world-building, depressing sentence-building.

Despite my disdain, these novels got enough votes from readers to put them on the list of the 100 greatest. But again: what do we mean by greatest? The voters, whoever they are, may believe they're relying on objective criteria, but we're all human. By any rational measure, Middlemarch is an important, influential, even ground-breaking novel--but I'd rather read Edith Wharton.

The House of Mirth doesn't even appear on the critics' list, but Wharton's Age of Innocence is number 38. Wharton appears nowhere on the readers' choice list. No accounting for taste!

I wouldn't put Wharton at number 1, but I don't know which novel belongs there. Every title I choose makes me feel guilty about all the ones I'm neglecting. 

On the original list, you can click on a link to see the list of authors, critics, and academics and how they voted, which is pretty interesting. Both Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan rank Ulysses as the greatest novel ever written, but I could happily put Midnight's Children or Atonement in that spot if it didn't require shoving Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick out of the way. Michael Chabon put Moby Dick first and so did Stephen King, who warmed my heart by including McTeague at number 10. Jennifer Egan put Middlemarch first but included The House of Mirth at number 10.

The more lists I read, the more novels I want to put in first place, or else make up different lists for different types of greatness. One of these days we can make a list of the top 100 lists of top 100 greatest novels. It might be the size of a library's card catalog, but what a wonderful invitation into the joys of reading.

Readers: what's on your list--and what isn't?

Mystery of the dying maple

It's a little disconcerting to park my car next to a maple tree in rapid decline. Last year about half of the limbs looked dead, but this year very few limbs have any leaves at all. 

Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Dig down in that part of the yard and you'll find a thick layer of gravel a few inches beneath the surface, and many things we've planted out there have failed to thrive. The maple was here before we moved in and looked okay for many years. A dogwood we planted seems to be thriving, but the Japanese maple nearby has a few leafless limbs. We've taken some dead limbs off the big maple but at some point the whole tree needs to come down.

Which is a shame because it's an ideal staging space for birds visiting our feeders. This morning I watched an adult red-bellied woodpecker grab a seed from the feeder and then fly back to feed a juvenile waiting in the tree. The dearth of foliage makes it easy to observe birds' social behavior: cardinals fighting for territory, male cowbirds putting on a courtship display for a female, and, this morning, two house finches having an encounter I couldn't quite interpret.

Taking out the sickly maple will provide more sunshine for the dogwood, but I'll miss that tree when it's gone. Is it a mistake to get so attached to particular trees? That maple seems like a permanent fixture of the landscape, but a tree that stands tall today may well start dropping limbs in the next windstorm.  

Just not on my car, okay? 

Cowbirds vying for the attention of a female.

Wish I knew what they were thinking.

Same tree, different branches.

Dead limb between two still living.

A model of sharing.

Friday poetry challenge: Mulling over mullein

Is it pathetic to admit that some days the thing I look forward to more than anything is a particular patch of weeds growing beside the highway on my drive home from work?

After a day involving too much administrative claptrap, a long but productive meeting, and an infuriating encounter with a person whose idea of an apology is "I'm sorry you feel that way," I was driving home wanting to punch someone when I passed a mullein patch and saw that the weeds had started blooming.

Elsewhere mullein may be a medicinal plant cultivated for its power to attract pollinators, but around here it's considered a weed that flourishes accidentally in sunny spots that the highway mowers can't reach. A volunteer promoting health, attracting pollinators, and providing beauty--what's not to love?

I know the spots along my commute where mullein grows best and I look forward to the blooms every summer, my eyes searching the shoulder for yellow when they ought to be fixed on the road. Yesterday my husband and I were on our way home when I pointed out a cluster of blooming mullein, maybe six or eight plants in all, and he said, "We've got more than that growing just uphill from the house."

Well I didn't know that because my bum knee has been resisting hilly walks, but it's feeling significantly better after a cortisone shot so when we got home I walked right up the hill to the spot in question. A few years ago we'd had a massive dying tree cut down there, a process that had obliterated the few mullein stalks growing nearby--temporarily. Bringing more sunshine into the area has resulted in a mullein boom--close to 20 stalks rising up and starting to bloom.

One definition of weed is a plant to which we say We'd prefer your absence, but I'm not complaining about a bumper crop of mullein bringing beauty into my back yard. They make me want to squeeze out some doggerel, but what rhymes with mullein?

I can't be sullen
around a mullein.

Its fuzzy leaves
are never dull. In

woods where there's
rarely a lull in

songs of birds,
where trees are fallen,

just uphill from
a creek that's swollen,

I can't be sullen
around a mullein.
  

So okay, it's weedy but at least I tried. Who else will give it a shot? 

Making the strings visible: Things My Grandmother Said by Amit Majmudar

"Every kite forgets its string," writes Amit Majmudar, but the poet has not forgotten the strings that tie him to the women in his life--grandmother, mother, wife, friends, and others who feature in his new collection, Things My Grandmother Said. The kite line comes from the title poem, full of pithy aphorisms expressed in a voice so familiar it could belong to anyone's grandmother:

I wasn't crying, I was dicing onions
in a memory in Ahmedabad.

Sure, the Ganges is holy
but who told you to drink from it?

                                Love
should be diving board, marriage
should be lap swim.

I like that old lady! I've written before about how skillfully Majmudar plays with voice, language, poetic forms, and images, but in this collection I was frequently struck by line breaks. In the title poem, for instance, the grandmother says this:

This girl is perfect for you, I know
her aunt.

Look at how the line break shifts the function of "I know": in the first line, it indicates a confidence in the girl's perfection; but "I know / her aunt" suggests that the girl's perfection is contingent upon her connections. 

Or take a look at the ambiguity encouraged by the second line break below: 

What does it mean when the white
man trying to enter me
in a database asks
Sweetie, aren't you hot
under all that
cloth?

These lines appear in "The Migration Diary of Hala Almasi," a long poem dealing with various violations of women's privacy, rights, and bodies. In this context, a man's trying to "enter me" suggests physical violence--but "enter me / in a database" leads to a different type of violence as the veiled migrant from Kabul gets squeezed into a little box on a computer screen. The final stanza plays with permutations of a common phrase to convey the many ways a woman may be denied agency:

The woman undergoes
the marriage. The woman goes under
the man's last name. The woman goes under
the man. The woman undergoes
the parting of the seas so the man
with the staff can enter
her promised land. The woman undergoes
the miscarriage. The woman undergoes
the man's war. The men say they promised
the women nothing. The country
goes under. The men put
the women on a raft and say:
Go. So we go. Some across, some
Under.

Another poem dealing with a woman's pain, "Regeneration," describes a traumatic brain injury:

You shaped and smashed
Your brainstuff flat
On all the scattered
Bits of matter
Gray and white
To piece your anguish
Into language
And write.

"To piece your anguish / Into language" is an apt description of the poet's purpose, especially in a world where, as "Meteorology" insists, humanity seems 

Trapped in chaos
country during
chaos season. 

"Meteorology" wonders whether the butterfly's flapping wing can affect distant weather or chance encounters can change a life:

One summer day
you see a face
in a coffee shop
and chaos pulls
a fire alarm
deep inside you.  

That fire alarm rings in other poems presenting novel images for human connections. "Recourse," for instance, is a lovely sonnet corona dealing with love, time, change, and constancy, in which the ties that bind may be benign or menacing:

I want to weave a crown for you, design
a daisy chain whose threaded stems become
a bracelet that handcuffs your wrist to mine...

And in "Remote Work," a poem decrying the isolation of the perpetually online,

We are kites without strings, strings
desperate to be strummed ...

But how can strings be strummed over the distance imposed by technology? 

Another poem, "School of Witchcraft and Wizadry," recalls the loneliness of a schoolboy who feels isolated until someone sees through his invisibility cloak:

One friend is all it takes,
one person to rhyme with the mysterious
magical word you always were.
Together, you're a spell now,
conjuring happiness
with a wand
no bigger than a No. 2 pencil....

A pencil may be a magic wand in a world where anguish becomes language. Among the poems celebrating connections among friends, relatives, lovers, and others, poems exploring grandmother's words, mother love, and Mother Earth, Majmudar concludes the collection by asserting that "We Are All God's Poems":

We are all first drafts, shy in public
and rhythmically iffy. We are all
orphan lines yearning to become
couplets, willing to rhyme slant
if that means we don't have to be alone.

In a volume full of love that survives beyond loss, Majmudar invites us, in "Cat's Cradle," to recall

how beautiful and necessary beings
who give you love can take their love
but keep on cradling you, unseen  ...

Yes, the kite may forget its string, but that doesn't erase the unseen strings that are strummed so potently in Things My Grandmother Said.

Summertime and the living's sneezy

Sometimes I have to get away from my office, books, and screens and find a place outdoors to sit and breathe some fresh air, which is difficult right now when the air feels saturated with pollen. Yesterday on the drive home I had a sneezing fit so severe that I had to pull off the road until I could see again, but sometimes getting outdoors is worth a little discomfort, especially when campus is abloom with lovely things.

Except wait a minute, what happened to the pollinator gardens? For years now two plots just outside my building have barely contained a riot of sunflowers, dahlias, coneflowers, and more, attracting all kinds of birds, butterflies, and bees. 

They're gone, torn out in favor of neat little rows of marigolds. Someone in a position of authority decided that the pollinator plots looked too messy, that gardens are best when they're neat, tidy, and arranged in straight lines. This is clearly someone who hasn't spent much time in actual woods or meadows or other wild places. I've been cheered to see some sunflowers lined up in rows at the end of the plots, but otherwise, no pollinator gardens this year. How am I supposed to endure six more months of office work without the opportunity to commune with butterflies? 

So today I fled campus and found a quiet space along the Ohio River. Floodwaters have receded so it's a nice time to watch the boats go by. Years ago--can it be 40 years?--when we spent our grad-school summers working in campgrounds near Port Huron, Michigan, we could go to a park on the St. Clair River any day around noon and see a crowd gathered to eat lunch while watching the ships go by, big lakers that the locals knew by name, length, and cargo. Here we see coal barges and sometimes pleasure boats, but it's soothing to sit by the water even when there's nothing going past except our beloved local sternwheeler, the Valley Gem.

I've been working way too hard so far this summer, especially considering that it's only June. But goodness gracious--it's June already! I have to plan grant-related meetings, prep workshops, write syllabi for two or possibly three fall classes, and deal with  aging-related annoyances. Which would you prefer to do: get a cortisone shot in your right knee, get physical therapy for bursitis in your left hip, or navigate the paperwork required to sign up for Medicare? 

Time is flying way too quickly and I'm getting older by the minute, as my aching joints keep reminding me. But a bench next to the river is a catalyst for healing, a place where I can listen to the birds, watch the boats, and breathe deeply. 

But not too deeply--all that pollen makes me sneeze. 

 

 

Friday poetry challenge: Driven to excel at tedious tasks

Halfway through our long drive home from Columbus after my son's weekly chemotherapy treatment, the hospital called asking him to come back--not today but tomorrow AND Sunday. Yes: they want him to make the four-hour round trip three days in a row, and since chemo makes him too dopey to drive, I guess I'll be in the driver's seat.   

I had just been boasting that I'm getting better at managing this challenging task. If I set my alarm for 4 a.m., take an eye-opening shower, and eat or drink nothing before we leave, I can drive straight to The James without GPS and, usually, without a rest-room break. While my son gets his tests and treatment, I eat breakfast in the hospital cafe and suck in some caffeine so that I'm fully alert by the time we're ready to head back home in heavier traffic. 

So here's my reward for boasting about how well I'm doing: I have to do it again, and again, and again. 

It was a snafu not of our own making. His current treatment plan requires him to get a certain drug by injection four days in a row; he received the first shot during today's regular hospital visit and the remaining pre-filled syringes should have been delivered to our house by courier. Then the phone call came: the pharmacy was out of the drug and wouldn't be able to deliver more to our house until Monday. The hospital has enough on hand to give him the shots tomorrow and Sunday, but only if he can show up in person.

It's important that the treatment not be interrupted, and so, after a bit of back-and-forth on the phone, he agreed to get back to The James on Saturday and Sunday, but the hospital sweetened the deal by offering him some gift cards to pay for gas plus a deeply discounted hotel room for the night. Unless he can find someone else eager to take an unexpected junket to Columbus, I'll once again be doing the driving while he does the sleeping, which plays an important part in his recovery. While I'm getting better at driving, he's getting better at surviving. At this point, the tests are all pointing toward eventual success.

I thought he was asleep early this morning as I drove through dark and fog and traffic, but then he chuckled at the Fresh Air podcast I was listening to: an interview with David Sedaris. Near the end the author was asked why he still writes and goes on book tours and revises his work obsessively at the age of 69, and Sedaris said, "Because I want to get better." 

I immediately wished my students could hear--really hear--that message, but at the time I was thinking only in terms of writing. I have no desire to get any better at driving my son to the hospital, but if that's what it takes to help him get better, I guess I'll do it.

Let's wrap some rhymes around road hazards:

Long lines of orange cones
stretch toward the horizon.
Cars swerve--he's got nerve!
I've got to keep my eyes on
"variable speed limit" signs
and follow to the letter.
I'm not so hot on driving, but
at least I'm getting better.

Your turn: pour some pizzazz on a tedious task.