Washing By Hand

Laundry

On my knees,
I can wring out the dirt
into a small white basin.

These garments of mine
have soaked a long time,
soaped now fruited,

rinsed, hung out
on a thin, white cord
between the walls

that hem me in, before
and behind, stretching out
from one end of all space

and time to the other.

I took a bit of Sunday afternoon to do my laundry. The machines here are ludicrously expensive, and besides the laundry room seems open infrequently, at best, so I decided to invest in a plastic bin in order to wash my clothes. For drying, I strung up a bit of rope or I utilize the extensive radiators and heated piping that runs along the border of my room. It was such a good experience, I think I might try to do away with the use of laundry machines even when I get home. I can simply purchase a washboard from Lehman's or make a more serious investment, such as the Wonder Wash. Great!



| video: a demonstration of my groundbreaking, state-of-the-art laundry techniques

Poetry Manifesto

For my "Creative Writing: Poetry" class last semester, we were implored to write a "manifesto" of sorts, elucidating our take on some fundamental elements of the craft of poetry--meter, rhyme, diction, and so on--as well as a big-picture analysis of what poetry is or should be, what it should do, how it relates to other arts, how it relates to life. I felt a lot of tension in preparing for this assignment, as our class spent a large part of the semester pressing against conventional and personal boundaries of what poetry was allowed to be. We looked at poems by E.E. Cummings, prose poems, and digitally-animated poems on the internet. We looked at the word paintings of Joan Miro, and we even listened to sound collages by John Cage. In every instance, we were supposed to deal with the question, "Is this poetry?"

I enjoyed tracking this expansion of what is legit poetry, and I was grateful for the passion my professor (L.S. Klatt) had for refreshing the shape and content of poetry and for trying to re-engage it with its brother and sisters in other forms of art/science/life. However, when it came time to lay out my opinions on the subject, to mark out some boundaries and definitions, I felt immobilized. The best I could do, at the time, was to let loose with a somewhat obscure philippic as a form of catharsis. After turning in my purgation to Klatt, the real world of grades and potential failure set in, and I found myself nervous about how the thing would be received. Thankfully, although I "failed to engage the terms of the assignment" and "did something completely different, to the extent that it it couldn't be graded," my gracious and understanding professor understood that what I did was worthwhile and valuable for myself. Therefore, he simply pretended it wasn't on the syllabus and didn't factor his non-grade into my final shakedown. At any rate, here is my poetic abreaction:

*

Something Scrawled on Napkins in the Attic, Overheard in a Dream

"The emotion of art is impersonal."

- T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

"lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen until unwish returns on its unself."

- E.E. Cummings, “pity this busy monster,manunkind,”


§ 1: That if one wants once to be undone, then tons of dust and rubble must from everything of It become (and us’s It, as well)

Words

Words are crunchy. Words are oozing. Words are kaleidoscopes and chisels. Swiss Army words. Words deal quite a blow. They are, in fact, a gamble. Or, words are upside-down, sometimes. Have you ever had the inside outside? Words have. Or at least, they did once. It’s words when you remember everything, 1 2 3. First comes the picture, then comes the feelings, then comes the phrases in the baby carriage. Words up the ante. At Christmas, or on other special occasions, words make sense. Words are all in, all the time. Words taste good over a warm meal. Reports indicate that they may even contribute to factors which are responsible for low cholesterol and a healthy heart. What wonderful little engines! Words come out to play at night, when the neighbor kids are fast asleep. Sometimes they shoot hoops, and you hear the drumslap of the ball hitting asphalt while you sleep. Slam dunk! Two plus two equals words. Two times two equals words, too. Words break open the ground on their way towards sunlight. They just keep coming. Do you see where they end? Beans and leaves bud on their tips, and their wide stem reaches up, up, and we see giants climbing down, down, word by word by word.

When you go to visit your grandmother, that’s not words. It’s not words if and only if it’s indeed you. What’s you? Not words, that’s for sure. Kissing’s not words, neither. Nor washing dishes. Nope. You are making a quiche with the tomatoes from your garden when you realize there’s a camera outside your window and Martha Steward is beating the eggs. Not words. Nada. Words are not this stale-potato-chip culture. No-sir-ee. Words don’t make cents. Just sentences. Personally, I’ve never had a halo, only visions of paystubs and diplomas. But, words are not quite enrolled in college. And paystubs are just numbers, that’s all. Words have been received with little critical acclaim. They were not nominated for any awards, this year or last. Words are forgotten, or can be. Words have been banned as playground equipment--too many sharp edges. For now, words shiver through the night on a bench in Central Park, wrapped up in newspapers without headlines or captions, only images. The police find words and beat them out of the park, out of the city limits, banned for good, like graffiti in a dark alley or a tattoo on the small of Lady Liberty’s back. Goodbye, words. Goodbye for now. Please speak well of us to whatever lies beyond.

Presence

Oh, but what about the paper? Where is the inkwell? I would recommend a few things: 1) artifacts, 2) artefacts, 3) art, 4) facts, or forget 1-4 and just come inside to drink some cocoa with me by the fire. I have a friend, actually several, that do certain things better than I do. One draws pictures, often utilizing the circle. Another calculates the phases of a chemical shift (on four sheets of paper, stapled one to the other). Some strange denizens downtown attach objects onto walls. They call this “art.” My grandfather makes the walls to which these objects are attached. But as for me and my house, we are bound lock-stock-barrel to: Hallmark Publishing House in 3 easy steps; Walmart University; or, if you’re lucky, you go to bed in a slim volume beneath a dictionary on the 5th floor of an empty library. I invited my friends to come along for a poem, but they objected to my use of the term on the grounds that its utilization marked a cognitive instability on my part and that it would be in the best interests of all concerned if I were committed to a mental institution at once. Well, shucks. From now on, anything goes.

And everything goes with it.


§ 2: That a lantern lights a small, warm cabin and the cave Itself is dark, dark, dark

A Partial, Indirect, and Admittedly Biased Summary of the Issue

Ronald McHegel runs for President of something or other. You drop your great aunt’s glass vase. Ronald McHegel trips and falls. Our poems come to us on a box of Wheaties. Or on the milk carton: Missing Child. What nonsense. Even worse? Yes. In fact, there is a heavy, dusted book in storage in the basement at the museum in a ghost town on the edge of nowhere in a black hole--as of now, the final resting place for all our poems--from hereon referred to by the prosecution as “It”.

It is a pair of moldy socks disguised as a university setting. It is a hot dog in a tuxedo. It is an festering zit under your sister’s... It has issued an array of designations, jurisdictions, blueprints, modules, collections, modifications and edits, implications, resolutions, citations, documentations, complications, and so on and so forth. Lots of words from Greek or Latin, I think. Who knows how things got to be this way? This bad! Yes, you in the front. Speak up, please, this is no cubbyhole we’re suffocating in.

So you would say that the issue is not a new one? Oh, you would rather learn how to bind books yourself, and make one for your dead dog, than release a hit series of novels that reaches high tide on the New York Times Bestseller List? You’d rather eat a brick than here your publisher call you by name through a levitating Bluetooth device? You’d rather burn your manuscripts in the fireplace, taking turns with your best friend, than wire yourself into the intertwining infrastructure of post-industrial wordsmithing? You would rather receive feedback from your little brother than T.S. Eliot, or even a Writer’s Guild, certified non-profit as described in Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986?

Calms, Balms, Alms...

Swish-swish my friend, and listen-listen.

R.S.V.P

We are leaving this damp, dripping hell-cavern and there’s nothing It can do about it but join the parade. Supplies have been gathered from the furthest recesses of the dark, the lonely, and the blind. We may have to do without technology for a while, but typewriters are not so hard to come by. Neither are our voices and handshakes, small but shiny, glowing even, like the esteemed and mysterious Lingulodinium polyedrum. We’ve hands and voices together, you and I. We’ve them! Our itinerary is carved in the soles of our shoes, a tattered atlas. When we hold them all together, we decipher the way. We find the way out of It. As I was saying, It is a dragon

turd. Will it join the parade? This party is not by invitation only.

So forget chatrooms, scholarly journals, and Barnes and Noble Booksellers. Forget It. Go read a diary or a letter, a masterpiece. Write a sonnet with your eyes closed. Goodbye cool world! There’s an old device called a ditto machine. It ran on a liquid called “spirit fluid.” Now there’s something you don’t see too often these days: spirit. If you see fit, please hide a poem for me under the “Welcome” mat, beside the Hide-A-Key. I won’t even spellcheck the thing. Just be sure to put some soul power inside. Be sure to go it alone, without no recipes. Meanwhile, we’ll be outside, warming our hands over your anthologies, such beautiful glowing embers. We’ll be waiting for It, waiting for you.


§ 3: Appendix

Poetic Units by Era



The Author’s Logical Technique for Analyzing A Text

If a thing says a thing, then that thing is true.
A thing isn’t true.
Therefore, the thing doesn’t say a thing.

A Brief but Exhaustive History of It

- March 15, 37000 BCE: It is a pond
- March 16, 37000 BCE: It crawls out of the pond, grows legs
- February 18, 1237 BCE: another pyramid is built out of It
- December 25, 500 BCE: the It dynasty rules in China
- August 17, 3 CE: Peace on Earth, and Goodwill toward It
- July 6, 700 CE: the Dark Ages begin It in Europe
- October 12, 1492 CE: Christopher Columbus sights It
- April 6, 1909 CE: It is found at the North Pole
- September 1, 1876 CE: the Dutch found It in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA
- November 30, 2007 CE: this is It!

a few poems

untitled earth song

Oh circulating cell,
wrapped with flesh,

all rests upon a root,
life rushing beneath.

I press two feet to you,
soles in osmosis,

and my mouth shapes a seed.

Resting against the trunk,
a gradual spine--

the bend of shade reaches
down, your hands over my eyes.

I see our horizon, swaddled
in skin and bloodstreams,

turning into turning.

Three Haiku

I. Water
drench in amnion
an ocean inside a cup
and spilling over

II. Ice
fluid takes body
creeps down into a valley
a slow, rounded breath

III. Vapor
the lung's final clutch
now a thousand floating hands
touch your ears and knees

Wyoming

On every side,
we see the lip
of our brown dish of earth.

The sun stirs westward,
its wake pulling
at the prairie grasses
like they are fronds of kelp.

This wind would enjoy
the quick whistle
of dissolving us into itself,
but we brace ourselves against it.

We pee along the highway,
hidden behind a shrub,
careful not to face the wind.

We hold onto each other
by smiling.

Our van follows the thin road
towards an early dusk,
dragging tumbleweed beside us.

Away from the breeze,
we fall into each other--
in the rush forward,
leaning ahead--
insatiable in our want

to exceed the horizon,
to outrun the wind's coaxing
and pass beneath every color here.

Do we notice as we pass
from state to state?
Can the sea breeze blow so far?
Will we arrive in time for dinner?

We proceed inch by inch,
with the ground now breaking apart
and the sky spilling over its edge.

Simple Sonnets

I.
Thou
brings
things
now.

Why
comes
some
sigh?

Small
voices!
All
noises!

Silence:
Violence.

II.
Whisper
Each
Speech
Crisper

As
Hum
Hmm...
Passes.

Cower!
Here
Nears
Our

Coming
Drumming.

"Born to Farming: Connection and Reincarnation in the Poetry of Wendell Berry"

This is another piece, a shorter "critical appraisal essay," that I wrote for my Craft of Writing class. I checked out half a dozen collections of poetry from the school library, but Wendell Berry's "Farming: A Hand Book" caught my attention. He writes pastoral/nature/farming poetry that actually results from his lifestyle as a farmer. Sometimes political, sometimes meditative, usually simple and earthy, always authentic. He's lived in Kentucky with his wife and family(?) for the past two decades, farming the earth organically (using horses not tractors, for example) and writing poetry, essays, fiction, etc. He inspires me to do likewise.

---

"Born to Farming: Connection and Reincarnation in the Poetry of Wendell Berry"

Farming: A Hand Book is Wendell Berry’s guide not to the literal techniques of farming, but to living as “the grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming” (3). First published in 1967, the work is divided into three unnamed sections of poetry and a short play entitled “The Bringer of Water.” The second section of poetry contains a series “Mad Farmer” poems, which allow Berry to express more fiery and provocative sentiments through an alter ego. Occasional internal rhyme is the closest he comes to any conventional poetic device, and his diction is straightforward and unostentatious. Overall, the poems are simple, peaceful, usually pastoral, and advocate a lifestyle of the same qualities. More than just an agricultural activity, farming is presented as a way of living, thinking, and being that is rewarding, beautiful, and sustainable. It is the ideal life.

As a farmer, Berry has a view of the world that is joyfully reincarnational, of life as “only the earth risen up a little way into the light, among the leaves” (20). To him, life is cyclical: “Going and coming back, it forms its curves, a nerved ghostly anatomy in the air” (7). Thus, he will “take [his] stand on the earth like a tree in a field, passing without haste or regret toward what will be, my life a patient willing descent into the grass” (31). Ultimately, Berry sees an organic sameness between human and plant life and a union of every life with the earth--all are dust, either constituting life or nourishing it. The farmer’s life is but one stage of this cycle.

This reincarnational understanding stems from the farmer’s central concern of connection: connection to his own birth, present existence, and imminent death; to his family and community; and most vitally with the earth, even a specific plot of land, as the context and source of his life. First, the meditative quality of Berry’s writing is an example of him connecting to himself as a farmer and is a model for others to do likewise. Part of the farmer’s meditation is appreciating the roots of his birth and the fruits of his present life. Another is coming to face his mortality. Death is presented as good and necessary, as “the seed of the beginning and the end” (31)--the last that the farmer sows. By understanding the cyclical nature of his life, he will be able to connect with it.

Secondly, human relationships are a foundation of the ideal life. Several poems explore the idea of human connection in spite of humanity’s tendency towards inhumanity. They show that the simple and peaceful farmer will inevitably face isolation from the brooding events of the outside world. And yet, if he will “purge [his] mind of the airy claims of church and state, and observe the ancient wisdom of tribesmen and peasant, who understood they labored on their earth only to lie down in it in peace, and were content” (20)--if he can do this, he will be capable of establishing more humane connections with the larger community. These social connections contribute to the evolving rotation of life, as individuals die but the community continues. Marriage especially is an elemental relationship, seen as a source of restful security and identity (“Air and Fire”) and fiery renewal (“Earth and Fire”). It is the source of the family and all of its inner life and connections. In marriage, the farmer and his wife die to themselves but provide life to each other and to future generations--it makes the farmer “time and again, a new man” (47).

Lastly, “A Standing Ground” explains how a farmer’s connection with a literal place on earth will keep him from becoming “uprooted” in a more figurative sense. Ironically, turning away from crowds to be “apart” holds the “promise of life and peace” and “the healing shadow of the woods.” The farmer by his work is capable of “Enriching The Earth,” as another poem title suggests, and through this he brings forth further life. Only as he serves and becomes unified with the earth on which he lives will he be able to live fully or combat evil.

Farming: A Hand Book is an instructive chronicle of Berry’s own life as a farmer. In it, he has laid down from mind to page his crop of words, which in turn offers seed to readers and inspires them to also grow into the rich life of the farmer. This life’s agricultural work, it’s holistic connectivity, and it’s simple, meditative, and peaceful nature would allow them to live more meaningful and moral lives. Quietly from outside the city, they could sow change in and offer nourishment to other humans and the earth, even into death. Should they choose the farmer’s life, they will surely keep Wendell Berry’s manual close at hand.

Two Poems: A Focus on Audience

The assignment was to write two poems based on the same event, one for a close, personal audience and the other for a more general audience. I'm not sure if I actually did that or if I just changed who the poem was addressed to.

---

Mother, do you remember
when you hugged your brother?
Grandma Wiseman was dead,
and rain fell between the gravestones.
Our umbrellas kept us dry,
but your tears wet each others’ backs.

Just a child then, I looked to the ground.

*

Grandma Wiseman was born
before airplanes or world wars,
when the world’s odometer had just
rolled into a fresh century.
She died after another millenium
had been marked out with three zeros,
with airplane crashes and Hiroshima
as well-known milestones.

Father pulled the Honda off the dirt road.
He appreciated the pastor’s soft words,
mother the selections of Scripture.
My brother and I stayed silent in the backseat.
We drove on to the memorial service,
the numbers on the dashboard
counting off the distance.

John Updike--"Hoeing"

Since class assignments are already completed and typed onto my computer, they are easier to post than anything else I write (if there is anything else I write). Here's an analysis of the poem "Hoeing" by John Updike, with the text of the poem included. I can't figure out how Updike can write such a pure and almost conventionally beautiful poem as this but also produce novels like "Amazon" that are almost pornographic... or so I've heard. I haven't actually read that book.

---

John Updike, “Hoeing”

I sometimes fear the younger generation will be deprived
of the pleasures of hoeing;
there is no knowing
how many souls have been formed by this simple exercise.

The dry earth like a great scab breaks, revealing
moist-dark loam--
the pea-root’s home,
a fertile wound perpetually healing.

How neatly the green weeds go under;
The blade chops the earth new.
Ignorant the wise boy who
has never performed this simple, stupid, and useful wonder.

*

The actual content of the poem is the clearest and foremost way Updike reveals its theme. The first stanza introduces the two levels on which he will be working: the dirt of the earth and the human soul. The progression of these first four lines connects the physical act of tilling the ground to a deeper level of inner spiritual cultivation as a single experience. The second stanza then offers an image describing most obviously an agrarian task. However, this is also an account of the complex nature of soul-growth as a painful and destructive act, but also as a necessary undertaking that offers rich, life-giving rewards. Indeed, hoeing necessarily opens scabs and surface wounds, but this reveals the potential for growth and healing. Finally, the third stanza explains how the green weeds already flourishing, whether rooted in dirt or heart, must be sacrificed to bring forth the “moist-dark” treasures of wisdom, wonder, and ultimately, the new life of earth and soul.

Several elements of form also contribute to the poem’s meaning. Overall, the long, dragging lines set off by short, chopped-off lines suggest the hauling and hacking motions of the hoe. In the second stanza, the crack of the dry earth’s scab is emphasized by the placement of a comma directly after the word “breaks” in line 5, and the two hyphenated words introduce and signify the fusion of destructive and curative powers into a healer-wound. Lastly, the semi-colon at the end of line 9 emphasizes the chopping action of the hoe, serves as the pivotal point of turning-over from weeds to new earth, and sets off the most concrete, concise, and profound image of the hoe’s work: “the blade chops the earth new.” These structural components contribute subtly but powerfully to the theme revealed by the poem’s content.