Harrison Knows Teaching

Okay, so one more little thing from Harrison's Off to the Side, which is all too relevant at the moment. In a section describing a year spent teaching composition, Harrison writes off how he accumulated student paper after student paper, could hardly stand to look at them, had no idea how to deal with them, and finally piled them into his car and hauled them to the dump.

Bob Talbert Had a Name for This

More good things, in no particular order:

1. The beating that Detroit put on Chicago on Saturday night: Billups getting Gordon into foul trouble in the first quarter; no one losing it on questionable calls; focus, focus, and more focus; all of those forced Chicago turnovers, etc.

2. Sly Stone’s album Fresh. It’s like Stone trying to bounce back from the darkness and paranoia of There’s a Riot Goin’ On and only making it halfway. The songs are elastic, his vocals are amazing, and it has, in “If You Want Me to Stay,” one of the best singles Stone released. And that’s saying a lot.

3. Joe Henry’s cover of Sly Stone’s “Let Me Have It All” on Henry’s album Trampoline.

4. Harper, two weeks beyond his second birthday, reminding me, throughout the first quarter of Saturday’s game, that “Chauncey Billups is bald.” And then insisting, as we watched a couple of minutes of the Suns-Spurs game, that every bald player he saw was, in fact, Chauncey Billups.

5. A pale ale that I made a month or so ago. It’s hopped only with Amarillo hops and it’s dry and incredibly citrusy. Like grapefruit beer, kind of. Or like Squirt with less sweet and more bitter. I dunno. But it’s good.

6. Just over a month of school remaining.

7. I've been married for seven years today.

The Shuffle

The best songs I heard while running yesterday:

1. "Get to Know You" by the Vandalias. This is from one of the Yellow Pills compilations of power-pop. It's classic late-period crunchy power-pop, and catchy, too, of course. Plus, it has this magic chord in the chorus, the same magic chord that The Beatles use all the time. I don't know what it is, exactly, but you know it when you hear it. It's that transitional chord, that minor-seventh, or something.

2. "Message to the Boys" by the Replacements. One of the two new songs on the Don't You Know collection. I won't argue that this is, like, the equal of "Left of the Dial" or "Alex Chilton" or "Favorite Thing" "Color Me Impressed," but it is good. And it's got a great opening line: "Met her in bar / Like I always say." And maybe that's almost too easy a line for a Westerberg song, but it acknowledges it's own self-mythology, right?

3. "Shake Some Action" by the Flamin' Groovies. This one speaks for itself.

I suppose a real blog-person would go ahead and link to some on-line shop offering those albums for sale. Right.

Jim Harrison's Eye

Some of the great writing in Off to the Side finds Jim Harrison writing about losing his eye as a child and the attempts to restore sight to it.

Here's a poem I wrote that is, I guess, as the title suggests, about that eye.

Jim Harrison’s Eye

A writer I’ve never met
Living in Michigan
Lost an eye as a child
And now sees grace, bones, and spirit in
Immigrants and mountains.

He can sing of oxygen felt
Humming through his heart
On Lake Superior, northern
Lights sent spinning green
Across the sky.

I kept both eyes, grew up easy,
Hunted imaginary deer at dawn,
Pushed slow through November
And crouched behind great rolls of hay,
The straw sharp against my face.

I kept both eyes, tried to forge
Wisdom out of complexity,
Waited for grand visions,
Awe and wonder,
Invented scars to impress the page.

I misled myself and missed
The falling stars and the
Muffled white of winter,
The freedom that rubs
Raw stones, forests, and soil.

Jim Harrison's Memoir

Parts of it are great. Most of the first half, childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, is fantastic. A couple of the "obsession" chapters are great. The Hollywood segments get tiring. Even Harrison seems bored by a lot of the Hollywood stuff and writing about how much money he made and when he made it and what he did with it and who he had dinner with in Aspen, for the writing slips off into repitition.

Following Dunn

A follow-up, this time a fragment of Wallace Stevens, related both to that Stephen Dunn poem and, to a lesser extent, to Jim Harrison’s memoir Off to One Side, which I read over spring break. The memoir itself is okay, occasionally great, especially when focused on Harrison’s relationship, both as a child and an adult, with the Michigan landscape. The pleasure of the concrete. Not of concrete, but of that which is concrete. As Edward Abbey almost put it, of this rock, this tree, this cloud.

“The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair. Perhaps,
After death, the non-physical people, in paradise,
Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observe
The green corn gleaming and experience
The minor of what we feel.”

- Wallace Stevens: from “Esthetique du Mal”

Hubcaps and Day-Glo

I read Stephen Dunn’s poem “Introduction to the Twentieth Century” again today. It opens like this:

“The conveyor belts bearing hubcaps and loneliness
Were everywhere, and the invisible ruts in the air
Could transport you for a lifetime
If you weren’t careful.”

Nothing particularly surprising there, right? And, actually, on this reading, it struck me as rather pedestrian. Almost predictable. Almost, “Yes, right, here’s a poem about the twentieth century and blah blah blah and we were lonely and we lived monotonous lives and we were sedated by luxuries and we bought and we bought and etc.” The whole first stanza is like that for me: “There was no way / to escape the Day-Glo and boldface” and so forth, the only exception being the line, “Monotony had a hair trigger,” which I love.

But the second stanza: that’s where the poem takes off. That’s where we find this:

“Yet some of us were happy for hours, days, weeks.
Even in the subways there were people to love,
There were children who ripped apart their mothers
To get into the world, and them others called them
Daughter or Son, and the fathers got drunk
And felt they had a say in the universe.
This would happen every day!”

Right. So much there. So much that could be, in the hands of a smaller poet, shrugged off as too easy, as almost contrived (in concept), as the same old ground that’s been worked over countless times by others, whether put down in poems or not. It could go the way of the first stanza. But it doesn’t. Here, it lives. It matters. Notice how perfectly the sentiment at the start of the stanza meshes with the exclamatory statement that follows, reminding us, through the speaker, that, yep, given all we’ve seen in the first stanza, all we’ve seen in our own lives, all the time that we’ve spent railing at imperfection, at inadequacy, at the loss of beauty, at the transformation of our lives into routine and advertisements and slow death by acquisition, we still, occasionally, even every day, sit up with sudden joy, sudden wonder, sudden happiness, sudden laughter.

And I love how Dunn allows the fathers to feel they have a say in the universe only when they’re drunk. As if they can dare hope that they matter, that they are not powerless, only when intoxicated, only when they, paradoxically, can claim less responsibility for their thoughts and actions. As if facing that hope, that belief, that bit of fundamental trust that an individual has a say in his own life, damnit, might be too frightening, particularly if facing it might mean acknowledging it, and as if acknowledging it might mean acting on it. And, I guess if you’re drunk, you get to duck the responsibility that such a hope, such a feeling, might entail.

The poem continues:

“This would happen every day! And for every death
There was a building or a poem. For every
Lame god a rhythm and a hunch, something local
We could possibly trust.”

It celebrates, like so much of Wallace Stevens’ work, our ability to find mystery and goodness in the concrete, in our own lives, in “something local.”

Even in the subways, no less.

There are more lines, six or seven of them, but they’re blah blah Hitler and blah blah Stalin until the very end, when Dunn kills me with this:

“In difficult times, we came to understand,
It’s the personal and only the personal that matters.”