Elizabeth Bishop, That Bitch

Today might have been about poetry but instead it became about a poet and her lovers, and my desire to steal her poetic for my own, as it is my aspiration.  Actually, I don't know enough about Elizabeth Bishop, beyond her poetry, to know what aesthetic she claimed.

Ha ha ha!

I learned why there are so few pictures of Bishop.  She disliked the roundness of her face due to the steroids she took for asthma.  I'm with you, there, girly-girl!  After 15 years on prednisone and with CRPS spread to my face, I'll clock you before you'll get a snap of this visage.

elizabeth bishop

But very distressing, as the hours passed, was the lack of photography of  Lota de Macedo Soares.  In all my searching, and I search well, there seems to be one photograph that has simply been resized, reconfigured, recast, and it's far from revelatory.  Forget flattering.  More insulting than distressing are the masses of still shots taken from the insipid play and movie of their life together -- was it based on Rare and Commonplace Flowers?  I've not read it;  Reading about it is irritating enough.  Get this:  It's recommended for academics in the most fawning blurbs and yet is clearly "novelistic," and somewhat "disappointing" for concentrating more on Lota than Elizabeth.  Never mind that there is little in Bishop, beyond her isolated years in Brazil, to endear her to Brazilians.  Anyway, despite a dearth of primary sources -- their letters were destroyed -- probably flambéed in tequila -- the book hints at intimate photos of the couple.

Not one goddamned photo of the two together could I find.  ("...and I search well...").

And the weirdness.  Why must there be weirdness?  In lieu of scratching out the clear political liens tugging at Lota, the difficulties of working with and for Rio de Janeiro’s Governor, Carlos Lacerda, mostly over her work on Flamengo Park, she's made out to be an emotional cripple (while Bishop is drunk in some well-designed corner).  Lacerda was one of those brief Communists who flipped in the 1940s to become rabidly anti-communist and archly conservative... who opposed almost every Brazilian presidency and then stubbed his toe in the military coup of 1964. Anyway, Lota was a magnificient urban architect but all anyone can agree on is the primacy of her status as autodidact.  Not only did I have the sense that everyone is waiting for her buildings to literally fall down, but there's an audible sighing between sentences about her decision to kill herself -- pure irritation that she couldn't stick it out with the great American lesbian writer.  Midst the saws of the sighs are the pig grunts of joy with each synonym used for "aristocratic." Or was it "autocratic"?

I love Elizabeth Bishop's poetry.  I've been decidedly neutral about her as a person (Why should I care about her as a person?) until today.  A kind of tragic childhood, except it does not seem to have bothered her overly much, though it may have influenced her desire for words, if nothing else, to be just so. At some point, she did describe herself as "naturally born guilty," and there's no pickier poet than a guilty poet. A trust fund baby whose friendship with my truly beloved Marianne Moore garnered her awards, laureat-ships, teaching positions, and publication -- Bishop being, apparently, too shy, too busy building a street rep as a "poet's poet," to take care of the business side of poetry.

Randall Jarrell, too, I suppose, was a gate-keeper.

Who does not love Randall Jarrell? (I imagine a sea of nods.  Don't cross me today. So: nod.)

Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell were an item.  He proposed, even.  I remember laughing at a NYTimes reviewer of their correspondance, who chose to sum up the inbred impossibilities of that endeavor this way:
"Bishop was an alcoholic and a lesbian, as well as half a dozen years older."

Journalistic integrity.  Gritty digging in the archives.  Ha ha ha!

I figure there aren't that many unsnagged aesthetics/poetics to go around.  You do the math.  So as I sat here vigorously nodding at Slate's Meghan O'Rourke and her summation of Bishop's guiding constellations, it was positively debilitating to read such an excellent description of mine own work, in her brief article, "Casual Perfection," published in June of 2006 (before, it must perforce be noted, that I seriously returned to writing).  O'Rourke purportedly was addressing the outrage at the publication of Bishop's drafts, a reaction understandable on behalf of a poet whose drafts might encompass a decade of searching for the flaubertian mot juste.  Or perhaps it'd be more correct to speak of an anti-mot juste?  I guess what I'm floundering on about is that her drafts did not represent a high kick toward progress but more of a holding pattern while the poet waited for the correct wording to show up.  It's not like her empty spaces were spatial abstraction, imbued with whatever -- she was no Mallarmé -- but more like her empty spaces were empty spaces.

So glad I could clear that up.

So here is O'Rourke writing about me before I mattered, thoughtlessly erecting hotels on Boardwalk:

[It has to do with] ...the mystery at the core of Bishop's work: the way her poetry evokes powerful, intimate feelings without devolving into mere self-revelation. Bishop chose a path of aesthetic discretion at a time when many of her peers were pursuing, to great acclaim, confessional self-disclosure. Publishing her fragments seems a betrayal to those who believe that Bishop's genius is largely a product of this reticence—who fear that coming upon Bishop in naked moments of aesthetic undress would destroy the spell cast by her poems.

[...]

A midcentury poet, Bishop wrote at a time when academic studiousness was one vogue (Allen Tate, Randall Jarrell) and self-revelation another (Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton). Following neither, she carved out an original niche, a poetics of subtle observation. Bishop writes about things: filling stations, radio antennae, shampooing another person's hair, a moose in the road. Her work has, as Vendler has put it, a remarkable commitment to exactness, and her primary mode is description. Consider the opening to her poem "Arrival at Santos," the first poem in the prize-winning Questions of Travel:

Here is a coast; here is a harbor;

here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery,

impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains,

sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,

with a little church on top of one. And warehouses,

some of them painted feeble pink, or blue,

and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist,

is this how this country is going to answer you

and your immodest demands for a different world

and a better life, and complete comprehension

of both at last, and immediately

after eighteen days of suspension?

Characteristically, this poem describes a landscape in the act of being perceived, rather than as the poet has decided (or recalls) it looks. What you first notice is the accumulation of adjectives: meager, self-pitying, sad, harsh, frivolous, little, feeble, tall, uncertain, immodest—precisely the type of pile-on you're taught in introductory writing classes to avoid. But the adjectives are transformative rather than redundant, because they are deployed with such unorthodox precision—as in "tall, uncertain palms," or "feeble pink." Bishop uses adjectives not only to describe, but to anthropomorphize what she's looking at, so that what we see and what is seen are inextricably fused. Her subject, as John Ashbery once memorably put it, is the way we are "part-thing and part-thought." Seeing becomes a form of feeling.

 Me, and my art, in a nut shell.  Damn this whole business of time as a river, temporal progression.

"Make it new"?  Up yours!  Damn me to being "in the tradition of..."?  Well, I think we know what you can do with that, eh?

A frustrating day.

Oh, you wouldn't understand.

In one of her convivial letters to losing-lover Lowell, Bishop has the gall to write (and he who cites the gall to characterize the sentence as "written more in sorrow than in pride":   “I feel profoundly bored with all the contemporary poetry except yours, — and mine that I haven’t written yet.”

See what I mean?  Out of some sort of asynchronous allegiance to Starfleet's General Order Number One, the Prime Directive, Bishop simply chose to ruin things for me over potentially causing a minute pinprick to the fatalistic space-time continuum.

So let's just close, shall we?  And why not go out with one of Bishop's most famous -- that in the writing hand of another might slip and slide with the pathos of having lost a former lover to an excess of valium, and on the kitchen floor, no less.  Oops.  More sleuthing -- you know, that academic art -- suggests that the "art of losing" references her broken relationship with Alice Methfessel, Lota's successor, as well as the dead Brazilian.

I chose "One Art" not only because of its fame but also because it's a modified villanelle, a form that I adore and fail at, with regularity.

One Art 

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP 

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

--  from The Complete Poems 1926-1979

Jack Gilbert: The Dance Most of All

I do not intend this blog to become one long obituary or saga of ills, but one must celebrate the passing of greatness and those things that tug at the heart.

So Jack Gilbert died last Sunday in Berkeley, at 87, after a struggle with Alzheimer's.
[Reminding me of Oppen, also of Berkeley, also taken by that ravaging disease, but at 76.
I am pretty sure the longer struggle with Alzheimer's is no cause for celebration.]

From the NYT' obit:

Mr. Gilbert, who won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1962 for his first book, “Views of Jeopardy,” and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2005 for his fourth, “Refusing Heaven,” was a peculiar figure in the contemporary poetry world in the sense that he wasn’t exactly in it. A restless man who traveled a great deal, lived frugally and occasionally lectured or taught to support himself, he spoke and wrote with enthusiasm about life in the world, without failing to acknowledge its terrors and miseries. 

Famous for eschewing fame, he did not go to writers’ conferences or cocktail parties, gave readings sporadically and did not publish a great deal, either. His output over a half-century included a mere five slim volumes; his “Collected Poems,” which Knopf brought out earlier this year, squeezed the entire oeuvre into 400 pages. Reviewing it in The New York Times, Dwight Garner called it “a revelation, almost certainly among the two or three most important books of poetry that will be published this year.” 

With their blunt-force assertions, their challenging irony, their earthy sexuality and their embrace of life as a big, messy possibility, his poems were for many readers both serious and accessible, connecting to their own feelings of having to endure in an often cruel, unfair world. 

“On the rare occasion when Jack Gilbert gives public readings — whether in New York, Pittsburgh or San Francisco — it is not unusual for men and women in the audience to tell him how his poems have changed their lives,” The Paris Review wrote in 2005. 

His work is redolent of place: Pittsburgh, where he grew up, or San Francisco, where he lived in the 1960s, or Mexico or Greece or Denmark or Paris or other places he called home at one time or another. His poetry expresses a worldview genuinely of the world. One of his best-known poems, “A Brief for the Defense,” opened with these lines about the need to accommodate oneself to tragedy:

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

Jack Gilbert's last book, "The Dance Most of All," was published in 2010 and this poem, I think, is my favorite, as of now:

He was no Oppen.  Oppen, as his mind got all snarled, gnarled, and shrunken -- I always envision the Alzheimer's brain -- the autopsy still being the moment and means of diagnosis -- as a dried up, beyond chewy pretzel that can no longer hold onto its big grains of kosher salt -- Oppen took to nailing his poems to pieces of wood.

He probably did the same with what I might jot on a Post-It.  "Buy juice but not the kind with food coloring or cane syrup but not too pricey either.  And yogurt, some Kroger low carb vanilla and peach but also some lowfat plain.  The fake sugar in the blue packets, not the pink."  This is what happens when you haven't been in a grocery store for a long long time but you still want what you want and you need to help the people helping you to get it right.

Or not.  I think Oppen stopped eatting.  I'm not sure Gilbert ever did. Eat much, I mean.

Oppen typed, I believe.  Gilbert wrote in big block letters, messy, but with remarkably few corrections.  The pages I have seen photos of looked like the graphic production of a frenetic fourth grader, the poetry flitting across the parameters of the lined paper -- clearly a big tablet of writing paper, with traces of the previous indented.  How often I have read that he was frugal.

"Ovid in Tears" absolutely spanks Marianne Moore's "Poetry." At least today, when it is cold, and pewter. and the gardens in which the brain of Ovid weeps are as far from imaginary as can be.

Living All the Ages of Man (btwn 3:48 AM and 5:26 PM)

It's 3:48 in the wee morning.

I am tired of getting up every 40 minutes, so let's pretend rested vigor and proceed with the day. Imagine an exclamation mark, if it helps.

Has anyone ever suggested that you fake it until you make it? Should that helpful advice figure among the chesnuts your friends serve up, I share your pain. It's not like someone telling you that a pinch of sugar will make your marinara sauce *pop* or even that those oversized scrub pants make your butt look... not huge, exactly... more like -- misshapen. No, it is clearly a critique of your very essence, and understand this, if nothing else: you have been found ANNOYING.

It has been a long while since I've been permitted to voice complaints around The Manor. A year and a half or so ago, Fred begged for me to suffer in silence. We were spending most of our time in hospitals and doctors' offices, infusion centers and labs. I was out of my mind with pain and infection.

Nothing has changed, except that, now uninsured, my doctors are struggling to keep me going until the advent of the Great Interim High Risk Pool, which will then enable them to toss me back into the operating room to relieve me of my shoulders and any other infected bones/hardware.

I cannot recall whether I was brave enough to set that down in this blog. Did I? I cannot remember. Anyway, that is apparently the final judgment -- since we cannot even identify, much less eradicate, this bleeping infection, the orthopedic surgeon and my internist, both, are lobbying for making me even more of a Depressed Freak.

My internist also won't let up on his contention that my right leg needs to be chopped off.

Ouch.

Ouch, I say!

These thoughts make me cry and sear my brain cells. I smell burning brain. Okay, maybe it is just the fever.

I honor Fred, and understand his need not to have to face what I must face. He will deal with things as if they are surprises sprung upon him by a maverick world. The man has more capacity for denial than anyone I've ever met. It still puzzles him to find me hunched over this laptop, sweat dripping from my matted hair (*ew*!), eyes glazed, so rosy-rosy cheeked. At his incredulous glance, I whisper: "I'm okay. It's just the fever." At my whisper, he reflexively asks: "Why do you have a fever?"

And I imagine tossing him to the Imaginary Monsters in the Real Moat.

[Apologies to Marianne Moore.*** If you love her poem (one version of which is at this post's end), her imaginary gardens with real toads, you should familiarize yourself with the publication history of it -- it's fascinating. And wonderfully instructive.]

So I confess that it is not others who shame me into faking it until I make it, but rather that it is a form of self-flagellation. Why else would I have spent an hour and a half rubbing lemon oil onto a variety of wooden tables while the rest of my country homesteaders snored in peaceful oblivion?

Four end tables, a console table, a coffee table, and a... plain old table. Our Little Idiot, Dobby the Runt, kept me company. He is the SmellMeister and insists on sniffing whatever I am involved in. I fill my HillaryClintonForPresident water bottle and he must sniff the liquid, then taste it from my finger. I do believe that one day he will save me from poison, this furry and personable little tastetesting pink nose of a cat. He smells the clothes both going into the washer and emerging from the dryer. Always well-behaved, he sniffs most everything we cook or bake, and to see him caught in a spasm of rapid eye-blinking is a fair warning that someone ought to have left out that last tablespoon of cayenne pepper.

Even whole suites of rooms away from her, Dobby goes into nose and eye spasm whenever La Bonne et Belle Bianca pops the top of a Diet Coke. There must be microscopic bubbles that travel directly to His Pinkness, as his reaction to the carbonization process borders on the pathological. Whenever flu strikes, we have to shield him from the nefarious effects of Alka-Seltzer Plus.

Anyway, if you've not been advised to stiffen your upper lip and make like tragedy is not your constant companion: Lucky you!

My penance-based life, au contraire, is founded on the mortification of this pesky flesh. I'm paid up through Early Eternity just by the simple virtues of CRPS! Actually, misguided ascetic notions of self-worth are commonly exemplified by flagellantism. I'm not kidding -- keep the thought in mind and go out among The Brethren and The Sistren. You'll see. (The World has become not much more than a Gathering of Frustrated Self-Anointed Life Coaches who, upon realizing that others are not lined up, breath bated, to hear their wisdom, opt to march in the streets, whipping themselves. Remember Perugia -- not for Amanda Knox and murder, but for its cutting-edge medieval flagellants!)

To the right is a bronze, circa 1480,
from the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia.

Another way of foisting pop behaviorism on folks is to sing out, with a smile in your voice: BEHAVE your way to success! It's a favorite among the dOCTOr Phil crowd, but probably not his most quoted, as it sometimes has only a fist-in-the-eye as a reply. My Self-Annointed and Appointed Life Coaches, all of whom have excessive time on their hands, and none of whom are sitting next to me at 4:14* in the wee of the morning, live to employ this dictum (from a distance, though).

[*There has been a brief blogging interruption as I kissed His Fredness off to bed, murmurmurmurmurmuring him into the gentle arms of his fatigue.]

Fred, my friends, is pooped. He spent much of the day pretending to be a farmer, picking vegetables and busting up clods of unrepentant clay with the steel-reinforced kevlar toe-guard and toe-cap of his cemented-construction Doctor Martens 7A43TEAK Industrial TrailBlaz safety boots.

Except for those darned boots, he passed the Look-At-Me-I'm-A-Farmer test. Hogwashers and all.

You'd probably be shocked to learn that, in addition to hanging out with the Local Fringe Element -- in our case, a bevy of Existential Feminist Lesbians (I don't care what the ladies screech, you cannot infer one term from the mere presence of another) -- Fred is a Founding Member of the Red and Anarchist Skinheads [RASH]. Another proud New York Native "fighting to win back the subculture from neo-Nazi groups."

It's the quiet druid you have to watch out for. Smile.

Fred said he did some well-timed spitting out at The Farm, and would have gladly climbed a rope suspended from the gymnasium rafters if there had been one. The urge for exertion of masculinity was nearly overwhelming but he stopped short of a chew and a spit.

Thank God. {rolling of the eyes}

So my Macho Darling and the Existential Feminist Lesbians hauled home to The Manor three kinds of beans and some lovely English cucumbers. Turn by unsuspecting turn, three EFLs and Fred sheepishly whispered in my ear that, despite an entire day exposed to manure and burlap, they were unable to identify the bean varieties. He alone, though, thinks the English cucumbers are zucchini.

What?

Oh. Nothing exotic. Yellow wax, French green, and snap pea.

I knew, somehow, when I typed "chew and spit," that it would end up biting me on the ass. A person shouldn't have to look up every dang thing just to avoid some sick unpleasantry.

Chew and spit, in my agrarian world, refers to the gross practice of chewing tobacco and the ensuing spitting out of its nasty juices in a well-controlled stream. Sometimes called chaw rosin, I became familiar with the stuff during a stint at the Gothic Wonderland, a place that owes its existence almost entirely to Mother Tobacco. Don't listen to the revisionist histories which have the Duke Endowment funded by the family's textile and energy ventures... It's all about tobacco.

[My favorite phrase in the Duke.edu bio of James Buchanan Duke describes the Dukes as "[a]rdent Republicans and sympathetic to the downtrodden"!]

I loved the colors and smells of the nasty leaf -- I even visited the fierce and weird auctions that used to be common in local curing barns, trying to decipher the alien poetry spewing from deep within the auctioneer's throat, interspersed with dashes of Christian scripture, and, some say, visitations by the Holy Ghost, as speaking in tongues was not all that uncommon.



Needless to say, I actually do have some understanding and compassion for those raised in the tobacco culture, those who did the actual culturing of the stuff. The reference to chaw rosin, to chew and spit, was a fond and innocent one. [For the record, I stopped smoking around 1994, in fits and starts. Fred? He decided to show me up by quitting... overnight. Smoking is now prohibited in The Manor, though some inviting peppered floral scents waft around on the odd summer evening.]

So would someone please tell me when, exactly, spit and chew became the buzz words for an eating disorder? Like bulimia and anorexia, it is a singular disorder, usually an obsessive compulsion. And lest you be so innocent as to think that C & S might still be a reference to some wholesale grocers or a green engineering design firm, think again. It's much more likely to refer to buccal violence against chocolate-dipped macadamia nuts with a side of whipped cream.

I am further informed that this technique is attributed to Elton John, that its unexpected down side [s:h:o:c:k] includes tooth decay, lots of time demands, and the tendency to shoplift, as it is an expensive eating disorder to maintain.

I dunno. This fake it 'til you make it, behave your way to success movement may be the key to our mutual survival. I will deny the existence of pain, sleeplessness, and disability, and others can deny the existence of calories or God.

What totally sucks? The denial game usually works.

Give it a try -- C'mon! Unless your Gender Rules prohibit, plaster a rigor-inspired grin on your face, smear some raspberry-flavored gloss on those dry lips! Carefully layer concealer under the eye and apply a bit of eyeliner to the lash line. Don't forget mascara, wear something bright to match the vibrant scleral petichiae, and punctuate all utterances with a delighted giggle. (Or, if you are writing, with LOL.)

This is all getting really old -- this emotional gumbo, this lack of sleep, the failure of my environment to pity me. Complaints about my inefficacy are pouring in, despite the make-up, the perky colors, oiled tables, and promises of three bean salads, galore.

Body dysmorphics have taken over my language, and feminist lesbians have stolen away Fred's libido.

Dobby is sniffing my fear with suspicious beady eyes.

I putz away the day, come back to this very blog post, begun after 40 minutes of sleep, 13 hours and 38 minutes ago, in hopes of returning, finally, to bed. A storm rages outside, and three of the four felines are in my clothes closet. Fred slept a proper night's sleep and is now considering a nap. (Farming is hard work.)

The Manor's various Denizens (and Mavens... Never forget the Mavens) are resolute in their message of disdain for my psychic pain. Uncle Kitty Big Balls, the sole cat to brave the storm outside the comfort of my organic cottons and angora leg warmers, announces, in no uncertain terms: *Ack*:*Ack*. I think this means, in MarmySpeak, "Take your pain medication, with a side of muscle relaxant, grab a bowl of lowfat plain yogurt, carefully doctored with aspartame and vanilla extract, put your ass on the mattress, your feet on some pillows, and reread The Once and Future King."

The three frightened cats' tails are all twitching in unison, as they mewl at moi in between syncopated ronronnement.

Yes, something makes me look up mewl. I can't be happy with what I already know, cannot even behave my way to success in the World of Words.

You probably were already familiar with MEWL and PUKE.

My online dictionary cheerfully chatters about it being a well-known "phrase," modified from mewling and puking -- which did finally start the ringing of all sorts of bells inside my poor head.

I know, you are way ahead of me, but cut me some slack, would you? I just got up, sort of, haven't had coffee yet, and eveyone here is mad at me. Mewl! Puke!

Yes, Shakespeare rang those bells, and when Shakespeare sets a bell to clanging, there's no unringing it.

It's the cheery Jaques from As You Like It who intones the well known monologue on the Ages of Man:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

— Jaques (Act II, Scene VII, lines 139-166)

Shakespeare, I see, has brought me to my untimely [melancolic] end...

Unless I choose to check out what promises to be a new toe-tapping favorite, "Sal, let me chaw your rosin some." It's the child of Gid Tanner's Skillet Lickers, and dates from roughly 1930. Tanner's country songs were called "rural drama stories," and I can't think of a more fitting genre to investigate as I go about putting my internal house in order. There's one in particular I want to find -- something about a "corn licker still."

[Spoken: Ah Riley, Lets go down to see old Sal.
See if she wants to give us a cud of
that rosin to chew on this morning.
(Riley:) All right, let's go down to that sweet gum tree and find out.
All right. We'll go down and play her a little tune called
Sal Let Me Chaw Your Rosin Some. Let's go boys.]

(Fiddle)

Jump up Jinny, jump up Joe,
You never get to heaven till you jump Jim Crow.

(Fiddle)

Cabbage in the garden, Peas in the gum,
Sal let me chaw your rosin some.

(Fiddle)

Hogs in the garden sifting sand,
Sal is in love with the hog-eyed man.

(Fiddle)

Along comes Jinny and along comes Joe,
Along comes Jinny with her apron on.

(Fiddle)

Cabbage in the garden, peas in the gum,
Sal let me chaw your rosin some.
(Fiddle)

Hogs in the garden sifting sand,
Sal is in love with the hog-eyed man.

(Fiddle)

Jump up Jinny and jump up Joe,
You never get to heaven (un)less you jump Jim Crow.

***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****
Well, it's been fun, but I've reached my end and will at least go assume the recommended positions for sleep. I've heard good things about them! Enjoy Marianne Moore's poem, and -- if you don't already know -- try to figure what parts she ended up resigning to footnote status, and which she kept as the primary poem. She was a card, was Marianne.

***Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all
this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf
under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that
feels a
flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against 'business documents and

school-books'; all these phenomena are important. One must
make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
'literalists of
the imagination'--above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', shall
we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

--Marianne Moore