May I ask...

I’ve recently received the four volume set of The Paris Review Interviews. These books, colorful inside and out, are a pleasure to look through and laugh or cringe at the pith and wit of the 20th century’s best writers. Here are some noteworthy excerpts from my morning skim: Interviewer: Are there any authors you’d like to have known but haven’t? Harold Bloom: No. I should like to have known fewer authors than I have known, which is to say nothing against all my good friends. Interviewer: Are there any characters you would like to have known? Harold Bloom: No, no. The only person I would like to have known, whom I have never known, but it’s just as well, is Sophia Loren.

*

Interviewer: Do you ever think about where your creations are coming from while you’re in the process of writing? Stephan King:Once in a while, something will declare itself so obviously, that it’s inescapable. Take the psychotic nurse in Misery, which I wrote when I was having a tough time with dope. I knew what I was writing about. There was never any question. Annie was my drug problem, and she was my number one fan.

* Interviewer: Was your adolescence a calmer time?

Elizabeth Bishop: I was very romantic. I once walked from Nauset Lighthouse-I don’t think it exist anymore-which is the beginning of the elbow (of Cape Cod), to the tip, Provincetown, all alone. It took me a night and a day. I went swimming from time to time but at that time the beach was absolutely deserted. there wasn’t anything on the back shore, no buildings. *

Interviewer:Have you ever drawn from those years (childhood) for story material?

Dorothy Parker: All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine, you wouldn’t want to sit in the same room with me. Interviewer:What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work? Parker: Need of money, dear. Interviewer: And besides that? Parker:It’s easier to write about those you hate-just as it’s easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.

*

Interviewer: What tools do you require? Ted Hughes: Just a pen. Interviewer: What do birds mean for you? The figures of the hawk and the crow-so astonishing. Are you tired to death of explaining them? Hughes: I don’t know how to explain them. There are certain things that are just impressive, aren’t there? One stone can be impressive and the stones around it aren’t. It’s the same with animals. Some, for some reason, are strangely impressive. They just get into you in a strange way...

*

Interviewer: a Blackjack? Jack Kerouac: It’s a blackjack. Bill says, “I pulled out my underneath drawer, and underneath some nice shirts I pulled out my blackjack. I gave it to Danny and said, ‘Now don’t lose it, Danny’-Danny says, ‘Don’t worry I won’t lose it.’ He goes off and loses it.” Sap...blackjack...that’s me. Sap...blackjack. Interviewer:That’s a haiku: Sap, blackjack, that’s me. You better write that down. Kerouac: No.

This Catalogue is Analogue to the “Seen and not heard” rule -a quick look at J. Crew

We are getting mail in droves. We aren’t getting holiday cards, we’re getting catalogues, by the dozens. The people who lived here before us were certainly eclectic-Parts-Unlimited Snowmobile Catalogue, Orvis, and my recent study: the seemingly innocuous J.Crew glossies. It didn’t take a very long or discriminating glance through a few catalogues to notice something strange is going on with J. Crew. Something smells one-sided to me in their advertisements-and it’s not the Europhile merch they are pushing. It’s the fact that the catalogue is working hard to humanize their male models and is therefore glaringly objectifying their women models by that light.

Now, I know catalogues are only picture advertisements, not literature; and models are only models, not meant to be real people, but idealized concepts of human form and beauty. But, something is awry. Why has recent J. Crew marketing chosen to give real life “voice” to their male models, who aren’t models at all, but local production designers, or Brooklyn artists. And why are their female models still just quiet and cute, silent representations of our best awkward, adolescent female selves?

A quick look at their website supports this male/female model discrepancy too. The intro page of the Women’s shop is a pretty, red-lipped waif (stepping off her soap box!) in a belted “puffer” coat. The advertisement snippet: “It beats the cold (and looks good doing it!-next page, the “Boyfriend Fatigue Jacket”) That’s it.

The intro web page of the Men’s shop is a striking picture of twins, Dexter and Byron Pearts. It is the introduction to a life story. Both Pearts are designers for the company who have been recurring characters in the last two catalogues. In big red letters behind them, “Family Guys” appears, asking us to click and read on about what “holiday tradition” these handsome and talented designers “most looked forward to.”

Click on the red, “See what they said” and the online and catalogue reader is charmingly introduced to four more handsome men and their pulled quotations about holiday traditions. Each man is ostensibly a J. Crew employee-outside of the modeling department. They’ve been brought in to model-just this once-because they are attractive and interesting. They represent how every person wants to see him or herself. They are portrayed as dynamic humans who happen to be wearing J. Crew clothing.

Furthermore, each man is seen with the accompaniment of someone “near or dear” to them. Two models, Pedro Gomez and Christopher Brooks, are with their equally handsome children. Christopher has his wife with him in too, and the family sits around him Cosby Show style. And one other model, Mark Welsh, is accompanied by his dog, Agnes. Spencer Lyons, a J. Crew creative director made it to the shoot too. His sister and father were lucky enough to be suited up to join him. Wait a minute, I know the names of every male in this catalogue! Who are these people? And why do they get names and pulled quotes, and the women models get none?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not dying to read the personal lives or favorite holiday traditions of catalogue models. I may be interested in storytelling and the things pretty people say, but a grocery line skim through US weekly can satisfy me for months. It just seems to me that this compelling marketing scheme by J. Crew is glaringly one-sided, and one that still ‘objectifies’ women models as nameless nymphs flitting about arm in arm, from party to party (many of the pages market the women’s clothes as the “Friday” coat, or “ready to party!”) and that is it. While their male models are not just made models: they are creative directors, husbands, pet owners and dads too-and we know what they think about. Pedro Gomez philosophizes on page 114, “Giving and getting are opposite sides of the same coin.” What gives?

In spite of our economic (dep)recession, J. Crew has had the golden touch, ever since they outfitted Michele Obama. In May, Time Magazine reported, ‘no retailer owes more to the First Lady than J. Crew. In October, amid the Sarah Palin $150,000 wardrobe scandal, Obama wore a $340 J. Crew set on the Tonight Show. "Ladies, we know J. Crew," she said to the studio audience. J. Crew's Web traffic shot up 64% the next day, and the yellow blouse, cardigan and skirt she wore on the show sold out immediately. Later she wore a J. Crew camisole, cardigan and pencil skirt in the March 2009 issue of Vogue. A hefty wait-list immediately started for all three fall items.” The Obama girls have also been seem wearing J.Crew-cuts, outfits for little people. What does that mean? Did they figure they have Michele Obama speaking for them to all women customers, and stop there? The market would suggest this. But if I know J. Crew, I know from their catalogues that male and female customers are marketed differently, and therefore valued differently.

In March of last year, The New York Times reported on Dexler, the CEO of J. Crew, and they applauded him as a bold leader who ‘wants to get to know his customers. “ At J.Crew he’s (Drexler) intent on doing what he does best — visiting stores every day; reading, responding and acting on customers’ emails; and asking customers for input. He told Nocera (reporter):

“People want to be listened to and they want to be respected. Besides this is how you learn what is on their minds. What can be more important than that?”

Maybe he’s only talking to his male customers, because his female models, we are told, have nothing on their mind. And are they respected?

How can we ever know what is on the minds of the pretty young thing on page 29 in this week’s Holiday Catalogue? She’s got her Metropolitan Suede Ankle Boots on -one of them is hiked atop of a TV that is playing a video of a yule log burning. Her hands are in her pocket, she looks defiant. She isn’t saying “Holidays are an over commercialized joke--on you! Ha! Ha!” or even, “ I am killing my TV!”

The catalogue's only quotation on that page is, “Send warm wishes-shop out coat collection at JCREW.COM.” Maybe what she is saying is, “Shop!”

Fair or not, if you want conversation, and “real-life-J.Crew-wearing people,” skip ahead to page 114 where the men are. Ladies, we know J. Crew!

The missing lung and The Resurrection Trade

The other day, I woke to the radio reporting, “Lung stolen from Peru exhibition of human cadavers.” And then later that morning, I read Leslie Adrienne Miller’s fifth collection of poems, The Resurrection Trade and the missing lung in Peru began to make more sense. The collection of poems knocked my socks off. It left me quite gasping after a few particularly brilliant poems. The impetus driving The Resurrection Trade is Miller’s exhaustive study of the ancient practice of “trafficking corpses.” For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, the study of anatomy and medicine heightened a need for bodies. Scientists paid and so people robbed graves, and some made art of the science and the dead.

Miller’s scientific and poignant craft provides a sort-of answer to the question of why humans are so interested in dead bodies. She writes about her own life as a mother and poet and the 18th century sketches intermittently, and in doing so, there is a certain stitching together of these two worlds.

The title poem is a mediation on the illustrations in an 18th century French text entitled, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration. In this text, Miller focuses on the particularly striking portraits: a woman, a pregnant woman, and a woman in labor-all dead and rendered as study, sketched as figures in various stages of flayed and grotesque beauty. (The cover of the book is one of the mezzotint illustrations, and as Miller points out, the woman was left with her “ rococo face.” Apparently, these women often were depicted in medical books with still, quizzical and romantically flushed faces.)

The back of the book is rife with mini history lessons as addenda to many of the poems. Her poem “Rough Music, Edinburgh, 1829” was written about a rush of 17 women in Edinburgh who were murdered, and whose bodies were sold (at a good price) to anatomist Robert Knox. One of the women whose cadaver was portrayed was named Mary Paterson,“too fresh/for legitimate death” and delivered to Surgeons Square “still warm.” She was a:

gift to men of science, and so also to me, woman of the new world digging through old books to resurrect her murdered parts, to offer her my own rough music, the strange collusion of imaginary science and real art.

She draws with her words, not just the lives of the sketched the flesh, but of those sketching and cutting, like Knox himself. In “’The Flayed Angel’” I began to wonder who was the artist portraying whom:

If she were a photograph or simple lines less art or more science, what we’d miss is the man who had to be there in the flesh with a tray of graving tools and pair of living eyes, who had to read her with a knife and scrape the burr from every rib, who had to know the permanence of every cut.

And there is the sense in here of archeology: that in order to discover more about a place, people, or body, the layers of dirt or skin must be destroyed. To “read with a knife” is a phrase that comes up a few other times in the collection. This idea that in order to learn more, we have to uncover and wreck is a wonderful paradox that floats through the book.

Maybe this is the same idea that makes the stolen body parts from The Bodies Exhibit seem so compelling. It is the missing piece that calls attention to the meaning behind the exhibit-why we’d want to go. The lung, gone missing, sheds light on the human need or want to see the body, to understand it. We learn, too, by making art. Did the thief need to touch or sketch, or photograph the lung? If so, why?

Think of the thief’s hands hovering over the cold organs before sliding a lung into a knapsack; such a stunning portrait that would make! A portrait of a basic human trait: uncontrollable curiosity- or so I’d like to think. But, This is exactly what makes The Resurrection Trade work. It is uncontrollably curious and surprising and honest. It makes art of the grotesque-made-art. It’s honest as an open heart and mind would be.

The lung has since been returned to the exhibit in Peru. No questions asked. Maybe the whole thing was just a dare.

How is Loneliness Pure? And why?

I was hankering for a good adventure movie the other night- something 18th century and swashbuckling. I stumbled upon The Red Tent, on the cover: a tattered crew huddled in a wreck in the middle of an Arctic landscape-and a headshot of Sean Connery. I was sold. What Andy and I settled down to watch that night was not just a fun and harrowing adventure movie, but an artfully shot, psychedelic and psychological mediation on Loneliness and its close relation to the extremes of Nature.

The movie was about Umberto Nobile’s famed and follied trip to the North Pole in 1928. He piloted the Italia, an ill-fated blimp that crashed and ripped apart leaving six crewmen trapped in the ice floe in the Arctic circle. There the men waited for 48 days while a rescue mission of 20 ships, 23 planes, and numerous dog sleds tired to reach them in time. It’s a true story of a frozen zeppelin, Fascism, international aid, and snow-blindness.

The narrative was told as a flashback, in a dream sequence. Past characters from the adventure convene in the middle of the night in Nobile’s apartment to rehash the technical and logistical details of the expedition. They were in search of blame and justice, and to some extent forgiveness. It was your typical ‘play within a play’ set up, and there was something Star Treky to it-the characters in a Modern Italian apartment walking around in bearskins and with disheveled hair.

The most most striking concept in the movie though, (aside from the anomalous scene of the Swedish meteorologist Finn Malmgren and his nurse girlfriend laughing on the back of a reindeer pulled sled and then rolling down a snowy hillside together,) was Malmgren’s monologue in the bar before embarking on the Italia. In reply to the question about why he was going out on the blimp across the North Pole, he said that it had “something to do with Loneliness. With Purity.”

How is Loneliness pure? And why?

The Norwegians call it Polarhulle: “a yearning forever to return to the far, dark, cold places.” Is that what made General Nobile want to fly a dirigible to the North Pole? The accounts for longing in Polar explorations, the polarhulle, seem to have something to do with a human need for a Loneliness that emulates, or is at least well acquainted with, death. Then, there is a relation of that feeling to Purity.

Shakleton wrote after one expedition to the South Pole, “After months of want and hunger, we suddenly found ourselves able to have meals fit for the gods, and with appetites the gods might have envied.” It is as if going to the brink of death, (and of the planet) Shakleton discovered a need, so as to stimulate a sublime sense of his appetite for life.

Funny.

I’ve been reading Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? and in this memoir too, is this inexplicable hunger for loneliness as a sort of frontier to charter. Nuala lived a most uncharacteristic life for an Irish woman of the mid-20th century. She never married, was frank in her hunger for passion; she was an intellect and a bisexual. Arguably, her most famous quotation is that of when she rejected chemotherapy as a form of prolonging her life, when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She said “It isn't time I want. Because as soon as I knew I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of life."

Here is a portrait of an internal exploration, and the stakes are different. It was as if in being told that she was going to die, an axis or a Pole was crossed internally for Nuala. There was then no need for a vigorous life. She said “there is an absolute difference between knowing that you are likely to die, let's say within the next year, and not knowing when you are going to die -- an absolute difference.” The absolute difference seems absolute, and relative in light of The Red Tent.

Nuala said of her passion at the end of her life, “passion can go and take a running jump at itself, that's what it can take.” And that’s what Finn Malmgren was talking about in boarding the Italia. Abandon, and Passion taking a leap at itself. But why? The surviving men from the Italia painted their tent-on the center of an ice floe- bright red so they could be seen through the snow. And in their need for survival, perhaps they became the North Pole of Nobile’s dreams- they were a new sort of axis upon which their world would continue to turn.

I am curious about Abandon and how it seems to be in the business of Life, Loneliness, and Purity. I don’t understand it. I think it has to do with each person’s own self.

The other night, I was driving back from my tutoring job at Johnson State college, a small state college on the edge of the North East Kingdom of Vermont. I found a new way home that took me across open fields and paralleled a backbone of the Green Mountains. The Green Mountains are now every color but green. They were alight in the dark. I knew that as my headlights lit up the curvy road ahead. It was freezing outside. There was no one else on the road. Many of the houses had not a light on inside.

That was enough of a feat for me. I sped the whole way home.

Laudo the Seas!

(Relatively) jobless as I am, I've decided to audit a Latin class at UVM. One week in, and there is no doubt that learning Latin is hard work. But it also feels like entering a Fairy Kingdom; the first verb we learn and conjugate is Laudare- To Praise! Lately, I’ve been snooping around 18th century whaling books for good Anglo-Saxon, consonant driven words for my poems. The other day, I read Remarkable Observations: The Whaling Journal of Peleg Folger 1751-1754, edited by Thomas and Nathaniel Philbrick, 2006. Hacklets, sprunyarn, tow iron. Scum, wist, and parbuckle.

Peleg (pronounced Pill-ick) was a teenager aboard various whaling ships out of the great whaling isle of Nantucket during the mid 18th century. What’s funny about reading his journal is that he starts every lengthy entry with “Nothing remarkable today...” and then he manages to philosophize about whales, life, and death, and “drinking flip” for a few, remarkable pages.

I came to love Peleg. His endearing piety (Peleg was a Quaker) in light of his massacring trade is the fulcrum of his entries, like a thoe-pin, (the strong, straight pin) that allows his oars to pivot along the waters of his writing. Peleg quotes contemporary poets, mostly English Quaker writers, practices his signature (there are pages and pages of his loopy scrawl in the original journal), and wrote his own verse:

Thou didst, O Lord, create the mighty whale That wondrous monster of a mighty length Vast is his head and body, vast his tail, Beyond the conception his unmeasured strength.

But, everlasting God, thou dost ordain That we, poor feeble mortals should engage (Ourselves, our wives and children maintain,) This dreadful monster with a martial rage.

Peleg also spends much of the journal writing in Latin, or translating English into Latin. Sprinkled throughout his remarkable observations are Latin phrases: Benedic Dominum, o anima mea, et omnia quae Sunt inter me. Benedicite Nomen ejus Sanctum. (Praise the Lord, o my soul, and all who are with me. Bless His holy name.). And nearly every passage ends with “Hujus dici operis peroratio, per P.F.”, (this concludes the day’s work.) “Laus Deo,” Praise God.

It is as if Peleg translates or writes in Latin as a sort of self-soothing ritual. It’s a way for him to begin and close the day. It’s a language that connects him to the shores of his home and community thousand of leagues away. Only just beginning to know, study and appreciate Latin, and certainly not in the 18th century religious way, I understand it’s magnetism as ritual. Latin is about structure and placement of words. It is a language of spirit, and culture, and democracy (okay, and of crucifixion...).

And the great dialectical pairing of seafaring words next to Latin expression is wonderful. Peleg writes, “to the Westward we found fine Black and White Sand and Whore Eggs (sea urchins). We hope to be at our Bar before Sunset. Deo Volente atque adjuvant.” In our Latin class, we conjugate Laudare, to praise, and a guy beside me asks if I can reach over and plug in his computer to the outlet on the wall.

Apnea Caesura Hold Break

Silence is all we dread.There's Ransom in a Voice -- But Silence is Infinity. Himself have not a face.

-Emily Dickinson

Andy and I have been driving from Burlington, Vermont and back to New Haven a lot lately. Headed north from New Haven, the rise of New England and her green mountains unfolds like mighty sets of biceps, whose arms stretch out and point up and up till we reach the shores of Lake Champlain. Heading south from Burlington to New Haven feels like packing too many clothes into a small, square suitcase.

There is one particularly magical stretch of Route 89 between Montpelier (Capitale du Vermont, 12 KM) and Burlington that’s cause for pause. At this place, the road cuts through a jut of rocks, and for a second or two the road is pinched narrow between the cragged and geometrically planed ravine. Andy calls this pass Silent Rock. When we drive through, heading north or south, at the very start of the rock, we turn off the radio and look ahead, silent. “Yeah, but the funny thing At the end of the pass, the radio's back on and one of us is finishing our sentence. “about it is, there wasn’t even a stove in the house!” Maybe it’s six seconds long, maybe two. But, that silence inside the lash of our speed barreling down the highway has got gravity. It feels like we are living a line out of an Emily Dickinson poem. Silent Rock is our dash.

A friend told me the other night that her son’s been diagnosed with Sleep Apnea. She’s relieved because now there is a name for what’s been going on in his sleep. He simply stops breathing. Snores like an old drunkard. (He’s two.) And then stops breathing again. Maybe he’s got a Silent Rock in his sleep. He is left in the morning exhausted, hungry, clingy, and grumpy. There are various contraptions, of mediaeval proportion, that people strap themselves into to in order to stop themselves from stopping breathing. In this child’s case, he’ll have his tonsils and adenoids out. The cavities where those body pieces will be-apneas of flesh.

In a yoga class the other day, for which I was totally unprepared and much too inflexible, the instructor would remind us in the midst of the hardest most twisty, muscular moves-- to breathe. The sound of breath would rise up again from all of us in the class, as we remembered that we actually need to make conscious the things that are automatic. Like forgetting to breathe is actually a natural thing.

So what of these holds and breaks that we construct or that the body stores as reflexes? All the spaces of silence between things makes me think there is a poem in that. (In truth, there are many poems in that, this is not a new idea!)

Last night on my way south again, I was blasting sad, old John Prine on the radio as I drove straight through Silent Rock. When I realized I missed the place of silence, I felt sick, unholy, and sorry. But, I couldn’t figure out why.

Charles Simic writes of poetry that he’s “in the business of translating what cannot be translated: being and its silence." In the silence, there is witness to being. In silence there is witness to being-even if you are holding your breath, and grumpy or twisted, staring ahead, or alone in the car, you are sharing the silence with being. And silence is the twin of being. Poetically speaking. The excitement of holding your breath passing a graveyard or going through a tunnel is the same thing. Superstition, or an empathetic gesture for the dead or the still? We are honoring, in our apnea, a ghostly infinity, honoring the silence we are not, just to prove we are alive.

Summer Lovin’-in a flashy 19th Century Sort of Way

At the beach this week, my friend was reading Music for Torching by A.M. Homes. After the novel, she couldn't get her dramatic internal monologue to turn off. She confessed the novel left her narrating her life with a similar sort of agonizing ennui. She said it was something like: “Okay, it’s time for dinner.” She hated the way he swung the dishtowel over his shoulder like he’d actually been the one cooking dinner for the last eight years! Or:

“Great. Let’s go.” And for that moment, she believed they could love each other.

Flopped down there as I was on the beach, I was so happy to have an adventure novel to dig into. My beach book was packed with drama, to be sure, but was light on the simple-sentence quips between white suburban depressives. I turned to my yellowed little paperback Flashman in the Great Game. There I could give myself up to that randy ol’ rascal Sir Harry Paget Flashman of the “Flashman” series by George MacDonald Fraser.

The series came about in the 1970s, and are brilliant books. The novels are chronological memoirs told as the found diaries of Sir Harry. (Fraser based his character off of Tom Brown’s bully at Rugby School from Tom Brown’s School Days of 1857.) The memoirs are artfully written; each book packed with forty or fifty encyclopedic footnotes about various geographic or biographic addendums for further historic reading. And they are saucy and witty as hell. The novels take us through Harry’s missions in India, Crimea, the slaving United States, Germany, and back again to Russia. In short, he emerges as the lucky and yet hexed hero of nearly all of the major wars of the 19th century.

What’s fun about reading Flashy are the novels’ absolute cheek in the face of feminism, heroism, patriotism, and religion. Flashman fancies himself to be a Victorian victor and yet few who meet him do not see through his brazen charade. Our hero is a confessed womanizer, whoremonger even, and an absolute coward in the thick of battle. He’d rather throw a drugged naked women off a sled in Siberia to save his own skin from the Cossacks. In his own words, he’s "a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and oh yes, a toady." In The Great Game, Flashy manages to tell off a Christian zealot better than any ethicist, “roger” the princess of Jhansi (an Indian province in 1852), and escape execution by his own English army- all in a mere 300 pages.

I’ve been bingeing on Flashy, plowed through five of the series of 12 books in the last two months, and have bought the first book, Flashman (about the first Anglo-Afghan war) for most of the readers in my family. (That makes me feel a bit odd, because the novels are littered with anglophile/intellectual/farcical sex scenes in which Flashman is unabashedly base and fervent. And yet-my dad loves them!) And best, in my mind, these books are a sort of adventurous and historical antidote to the likes of Music for Torching, books that remind us of our suburban monotony and cliche hairdos. I highly recommend going along for a ride with Sir Flashy.

What I assume, You shall assume

I recently heard that one of my old students fell into a conversation in which my name was brought up. Apparently, he really split everyone’s sides by recalling, “Ms. Moncrief totally has an unhealthy obsession with Walt Whitman!” And that was all he remembered, and all he had to say of the eighth grade.

This child was one of my brighter darlings, with a mind and a mouth faster than mine—and most of his peers. He was frantic and quick-witted. (Once when I turned my back, he threw his shoe at me; it landed on my desk and his face went white. He said in the most adult and caring way, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s come over me.”)

Something other than the smart-alecky tone of this response got to me. You always hear that teachers who follow their passions are the best teachers. But this makes me wonder. When I taught this guy, I was obsessed with Whitman, I suppose it’s true. These kids were a young thirteen and I assigned them to read the whole of Leaves of Grass. That’s 52 poems and over 30 pages in our Norton anthology. I photocopied every poem and made each student his or her own packet! We memorized many of the poems, we wrote Songs of Ourselves! We played, “What would Whitman do?” What was I thinking?! AND, I never told them about Whitman’s homosexuality, because I figured it wasn’t that important for them to know. (I am not sure what my logic was there. They figured it out themselves. How you ask? Well, does this give it away for an 8th grade boy?

The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet it ran from their long hair, Little streams pass'd all over their bodies. An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies, It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs. The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them, They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch, They do not think whom they souse with spray.

I fear I ruined Whitman for them. I fear I was like one of those gift giver types—hovering over you as you open a gift, smiling down at you with an open mouth, ready to gasp and clap and say, “Isn’t it just great? I mean, isn’t it perfect?!” My own joy of reading got in the way of letting others have joy too. That seemed like a beautiful failure. “The mystic anomalous nights, the strange half welcome pangs, (and) visions” that I had in discovering Whitman maybe need to be my own private meditation. As for my old student—he’s off to China, nearly fluent in Mandarin. I heard of him that he’s “settled down,” but hope he hasn’t really settled down. And, well, at least he forgot all my other unhealthy obsessions.

So, Iguana be a citizen?

My friend Molly and I were strolling through East Rock Park last Saturday morning. Not unlike the joggers and the church picnickers, we were thinking about life and what it felt like to live it on that sunny morning. We were happily yammering away when in the middle of the path, in broad daylight, unmoving and prone was a four-foot long iguana. There was a man standing next to it and looking down at it sadly. Closer, we realized the iguana was really hurt. I mean really hurt; as in, he reared his head when he was prodded, and opened his big mouth to hiss a silent hiss of dying. His guts were in his mouth. The poor thing was busted up near dead.

The man on the Blackberry was Justin of Friends of East Rock. He had already phoned the police and was on hold with animal control. Molly and I took turns getting closer looks at the lizard, at once morbidly curious and frightened.

Justin looked at us and said earnestly, "I have to go to a meeting. I've called the police…" And with that, we were charged with responsibility, immediacy, and yes, citizenship. He left us and there we stood guarding the dying iguana. Thus began a Saturday morning taste of real community.

A man walked up with a baby boy, came and checked out the iguana, told us it was supposed to be green, not the jaundice it was. We wondered together if it had been dumped, already hit by a car, or if a Parks and Rec. truck had run it over. The cynic in me thought it had been hit then put in the middle of the park to be found and buried. The half-full woman in me believed it had been living happily in the park for months, and upon reaching for a far-off branch, had fallen from the tall oaks above us.

The man with the baby offered to stay with the iguana while Molly gathered sticks to weigh down a make-shift trash bag shroud for the thing. I went to houses around the park knocking on doors, asking if anyone was missing a pet iguana. I interrupted a woman mowing her lawn, explained the story, and she told me that she was certain none of her neighbors to the right of her had a pet iguana. But the people two houses down, who knew? She didn't really know them. At another house, a man came to the door while on hold with the telephone. "I hope you aren't missing an iguana," I greeted him. He was happy to report he wasn't and was so kind to then ask the operator to hold while I filled him in on what was going on in the park.

And what was going on in the park, as I now looked back to see Molly amid a small and curious crowd, was in the business of community. Some sixth graders came with their bikes and their father. Turns out they were from my school, Foote School. Turns out they were coming from an alderman's party. Turns out the man with the baby wants to run for alderman. Turns out the local poet Alice Mattison and her husband Ed came to see what was going on. Her husband is a former alderman.

Then, the policeman arrived and declared, "The Green Iguana is not native to this park." At first I thought no shit, and as he talked it was clear he was familiar with reptiles; he's got a few snakes as pets. He reckoned the iguana was kept by some ignoramuses who dropped it in the park and that then a truck came by and squashed the thing. He went to check on the iguana under the glad bag and when he poked it, nothing happened.

It didn't move. It was dead. It had died just there. It was alive and then it was dead.

He picked up the body, and folded the thing in, and the thing arced at the bottom of the trash bag.

People's faces were all sad. We were all sad for this poor alien, this poor orphan, and this poor untold story of a living thing.

And that was it. We used the bathroom, and kept walking down Orange street feeling like we belonged to something bigger than ourselves. And that the charge of respecting a helpless living thing, no matter how random and bazaar, brought people out of their own lives, and brought us together. Iguana community like that, don't you?

We Shouldn't Should Teach Creative Writing

When I saw Louis Menand's "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing be Taught" in this week's New Yorker, I cringed, sighed, and devoured the article right at the kitchen table. As one of the many MFAs and teachers of Creative Writing, I am intimately and darkly interested in this topic. Turns out, Menand's piece is more of a review of Mark McGurl's new book called The Program Era, in which McGurl focuses on fiction writing programs in relation to the Marshall Plan and Post WWII Literature. The article wanders through some sound investigations and is full of surprising statistics.

Oddly enough, Menand has nothing to say about poetry programs except, "I don't think (undergraduate) workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that others make." He recalls his days at college where " all we were required to do was to talk about each other's poems," and that it "seemed like a great place to be."

My experience at NYU did indeed help inspire a type of care for "made" pieces, and graduate school was a great place to be. But studying in a Creative Writing Program did a lot more than simply inspire in me a compassion for other writers. To think that MFA programs are as Menand writes, "Designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a published poem," is convenient for his argument, but not entirely accurate. (But not one Creative Writing Program student was interviewed for the article -- also convenient.)

Many of my MFA colleagues came to the program having already published poems and essays in widely circulated journals and magazines. Many programs require their students to take at least two Theory or Critical courses for the degree. Some programs have a language requirement; some have a study abroad requirement. But all programs (that are worth their salt) will certainly compel a student to do more than only "require" students to talk about other students' poem. Many of my teachers: Anne Carson, Sharon Olds, Philip Levine would bring in poems as models for the class, and would conduct mini lectures on that poem's strengths, allusions, or patterns. We were apprentices more than we were a gaggle of "twelve-on-one group therapy" goers.

With the increase in MFA programs and graduates, as is the law of supply and demand, the cache of the degree has worn off. Yes, but questioning whether or not Creative Writing should be taught, or if it should exist in the realm of the Academy, seems like a hackneyed old pitch. (Didn't Dana Goia go there already?)

The volte for me though, is that Menard's article contains within its title the word "should." Would the New Yorker publish, "Sight and Vision: Should Painting be Taught?" or "Stories upon Stories: Should Architecture be Taught?" or even "Eat Your Cake too: Should the Culinary Arts be taught?" I don't think so. How and why is writing held to a different standard? Is it that ultimately we don't as a nation really consider writing to be an art form? That we can't understand that painting, buildings, and poems can all narrate humanity-just through different media?

Sketching a Little Madness

I teach 8th grade English here in New Haven. And when I taught my 8th graders Emily Dickinson’s “A little madness in the spring” it was a little joke to myself. I knew they would be bonkers as soon as it started to get sunny and humid. I knew we would be pushing our homeroom, communal deodorant spray on more than one of them, and I knew I would find them lying on the grass during recess, loafing around with each other. I wanted them to use the poem to justify themselves, as a smart way of saying 'let us be.' But here’s the thing. The joke is on me. There is something inside these teenagers that is positively popping. They are taking their newly-over-one-hundred-pounds bodies and they are pawing all over each other. This is what Dickinson calls “wholesome even for the King." For summer reading, I assigned Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. In it, Alexie paints a portrait of a ninth grader named Junior, growing up on the Spokane Reservation. Junior is smart and a self proclaimed "weirdo." He chooses to go off the rez for a better education. The better education, as is often the case, is at a rich, white suburban school over 20 miles away. Naturally, Junior becomes a traitor to his community on the rez, and is ostracized as the token Indian at Reardan, his new school. His people call him an apple-red on the outside and white on the inside. The outsider idea is nothing new to adolescent fiction, but what stands out in this book is Alexie's signature, candid wit, and Ellen Forney's illustrations.

For all of his hardship, Junior is saved by the cartoons he draws. And the cartoons make the book; it's sprinkled with hilarious caricatures cataloging his father’s alcoholism, his best friend’s abusive father, and his sister’s death. His self-deprecation and optimism in the cartoons pull the reader along through a thoroughly weighty and grievous narrative. And Junior says of his cartoons, "I take them seriously. I use them to understand the world…Sometimes I draw people because they're my friends and family. And I want to honor them." Words often fail him and cartoons don't.

Lately, my students have been coming to class early to draw pictures on the chalkboard. A colleague enlightened me recently by giving me a few Maxine Greene essays on "esthetic education" wherein the use of art as a means of expression, inspiration, and invigoration in a classroom is seen as instrumental to better and more holistic learning. So, I always let them draw. Yet again, my students (and Junior) teach me. They already knew that drawing- making pictures of narratives is essential to their learning.

We are reading Lord of the Flies. Of course they have some ideas to process through pictures: Jack just stuck a pig in last night's reading! Golding is forever alluding to the “essential human illness” that we all understand but can’t totally articulate-especially when suffering from heat stroke, or puberty. Lord of the Flies discussions have been markedly focused and engaged; the novel is moving them. How does the elusive and present human illness make sense to these 8th graders? They draw it.

Their drawings, which take up the full length of the board, are the boys-in tattered clothing (or naked-no sniggering!) and the pigs, and always a special focus on the boy with the "mulberry birthmark" on his face, whose only real mention in the novel is that he is noticed to have disappeared. He is a lost boy, gone, early on in the novel. My students can't seem to forget him; they draw him everyday. (And not just because he had a birthmark.) But, I think because they want him to be remembered in the midst of the maddening cries of the novel. Because they wouldn't want to be forgotten.

As Junior says, "I draw because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me."

So I am thinking that a little madness in the spring on all absolutely true accounts is teaching me that my students are reflecting and processing this novel in their doodling. It means something to them, and they want to honor it, even if they can't necessarily write a thesis paper on it-yet. I am thankful that they are getting it out, and the antecedent of 'it' is madness, wholesome, and tremendous.