MIXED METAPHOR By texxnorman

He mixed his metaphors
like a bartender—
the words were Jamaican Rum—
the syntax was syrup—
the grammar was juice—
and the little plastic sword
that pierced a wedge of lime,
and the tiny red paper umbrella,
and the glass
and the slivers of ice
and the coaster
were punctuation marks—
some of it needed—
much of it unnecessary
and used for show.
All together
it was hard to swallow.

Analysis of the David Ignatow poem I Killed A Fly

I Killed A Fly by David Ignatow

I killed a fly

and laid my weapon next to it

as one lays the weapon of a dead hero

beside his body—the fly

that tried to mount the window

to its top; that was born out of a swamp

to die in a bold effort beyond itself,

and I am the one who brought it to an end.

Tired of the day and with night coming on

I lay my body down beside the fly.

The poem begins with a trivial act. Perhaps to a Dalai Lama type, killing a fly might give one a pause, but for most of us killing a fly is an act of hygiene. The flies begin life as maggots nourished and thriving in the purification of rotting flesh or defecation. There is just not much to grieve over when such a disease carrying pest is killed.

THE FLY

God in his wisdom made the fly

And then forgot to tell us why.

By Ogden Nash

I remember back in the 1950’s going to my grandfather’s café, a little place where he sold gasoline, comic books, loaves of bread, and had a short counter where he served hamburgers, coffee, and Coca-Cola. There was no air conditioning then. At this time in our history, people tolerated flies, but keeping them to a minimum was still considered a plus. I was 7 years old and given the joyful job of taking a fly swatter and killing as many as possible.

“Kill ‘em,” my grandfather would shout. “Murder ‘em!”

Now when I read this Ignatow poem I am reminded of those joyful days when I whacked and slapped at these flying

In this poem the speaker equates this trivial act of swinging the fly swatter and killing the Musca domestic. When he places the swatter next to the fly’s crushed remains it reminds him of a conquering hero laying his weapon down after defeating his enemy.

The speaker in the poem has some admiration for his defeated foe. The fly made a gallant effort to escape. The speaker, the killer notes that this fly “tried to mount the window to its top. . .”

The speaker, and killer takes little pride in his victory, noting that the fly died because of a “. . . bold effort beyond itself, /and I am the one who brought it to an end.”

The fly was brave, and seemed to follow the advice of Dylan Thomas about not going gentle into that good night, but instead raging against the dying of the light.

Maybe the speaker in the poem is hypersensitive. Perhaps the speaker in this poem is a drama queen, seeing significance in this trivial act. Then again, it is possible the speaker in this poem sees that all life is amazing, and to cut life short, even the life of a nasty fly, is still a petite crime. Life is too short when it is long, and death is forever.

It is obvious that in this poem the speaker is weighing the significance of life and death. The taking of the life of this nasty fly reminds him of his own eventual demise. The killing of the fly reminds the speaker that his own life is temporary.

Notice the speaker’s line 9: “Tired of the day and with night coming on.” What might he mean by being "tired of the day?” I don’t know, but what I think is that he is tired of life, wearied by life.

I remember once my friend Father Jim Taylor asked me to visit weekly with a parishioner who was dying from colon cancer. The lady was very afraid to die. She had even cut herself off from people she loved because she was afraid of catching some cold or something and, in her weakened state, having that common illness put her in the grave. The lady asked me about death and explained her fear.

I told her that I had known several people who were going through the dying process and everyone one of them had, eventually, been ready to die, and actually expressed a wish that death would come quickly.

Ms. Georgiana did not believe me, but, in the end, she too reached the point where she was ready to die and was looking forward to death. I don’t know if the speaker in the poem was eager to die, or just resigned to death, but for whatever reason, the speaker in the poem identifies with the death of this fly, and he too is ready: “I lay my body down beside the fly.”

Soon, or late, it is the end for us all. Death is our end, and death is the fact that focuses us on life. Yes, some waste life. Perhaps all of us waste at least part of our life. But even the fly had a will to live, a determination that is to be admired. And even the death of the fly is, in its way a sad, inevitable, tragic event.

What should I do about all the shoulds in my life?

I don't like the word should. Should implies that there is something I ought to do, and if I don't do what I ought to do – that I am bad, a sinner, stupid, or foolish. The word should causes me to have a should-y attitude.

Nevertheless, when I hear the word should I feel like a kid missing out on something, and about to be punished for not doing what I should have done.

I don't seem to be able to avoid the word should, at least not in my mind. Maybe, with great effort I can stop myself from saying, "I should do this," or "I should have done that," but that word is still in my mind.
And should is not just a word, not to me, it is also an emotion. The word should feels like guilt, fear, and shame. Just hearing the word should sends negative emotions flowing through my capillaries and it seems to me this surge of emotion contain about fifty percent Chipolata sauce.

Sometimes the word should imply fairness. For every should there is a shouldn't. The should is FAIR and the shouldn't is UNFAIR.

• The candidates should be open and honest.
• The candidates shouldn't use attack ads.

To be honest with myself, and with you, I am disenchanted with my life right now, and I don't think this disenchantment is at all unusual. I don't know if most adults are similarly sad, but I feel absolutely certain that this mood malaise is not an unusual state for grow-ups to feel.

As a child adults in my life took some role in providing for my needs, and provided me with love, entertainment, and problem solving. As we grow into adulthood there are fewer and fewer people in our lives that provide our needs, or wants, and very, very few that shield us from the pressures and pains of life. Any childhood awe that existed within us, has diminishes because of the entanglements of life, and all the demands for our time and all the effort to do what has to be done to ensure our survival and provide what we can for our family unit.

Most people who have jobs will spend at least eight hours a day at work, and many work MORE than eight hours a day. When we are not working we have a long list of obligations that must be done. You can't go to work tomorrow unless you have a clean change of clothing, so clothes have to be washed, ironing might be involved, and mending could be required from time to time. We have doctor appointments, social responsibilities, you have to go to the grocery store, and you have cooking, cleaning the dishes, and picking up the house, hauling out the trash.

If you have children you add soccer games, school activities, and squeezing in a few minutes of nurturing quality time.

If you have pets you have to go like a prospector panning for kitty poo, or walking behind Arphus with a plastic bag doing the ole puppy poo pick-up. There will be vet visits.

Toss in some quality time for yourself: regular exercise, hobbies, and political activities.

And God forbid you forget your duties to God. I was raised in a Christian fundamentalist church that demanded a minimum of 3 church services be attended each week, and if you were really faithful you would provide some service to the Lord in the form of chores around the church, or serving on some visitation committee, or preparing for and teaching Sunday school, and, let us not forget the tithe.

The cars, the housing, the clothing, the children, the pets, and the church all need funding which explains why we work so hard, and sometimes take on a part time job to meet all the funding demands in our life.

It seems like where ever I am, my mind is somewhere else. Every task I take on is done with only have my mind. The rest of my mind has jumped ahead to the next task.

All of these things demanding my attention are pressures, and stressors that insert weariness, and bleeds off what little joy had been there before. Pressures and stressors are SHOULDS.
I should work hard, I should exercise, I should spend more time with my children, I should walk the dog, I should stop and smell the roses, I should read more, pray more, and spend more time nurturing my marriage.

All these should statements have the effect of narrowing my life, and once life is sufficiently confined, once my daily existence has eliminated my options I am going to suffer from a dull, depressing hopelessness, and so will you.

What should I do about all the shoulds in my life?

1. Seek Balance:

Too many shoulds can crush a person's spirit and leave one floundering in a Navy Blue melancholia, but that does not mean that there are not things you should and should not do.

The balance comes when all your shoulds come from you, instead of someone else, and when all your shoulds are based on logic and in sync with your personal goals.

Do your should list, but do the most essential stuff, and let some stuff go, so that your life will have room for, well, your life. The key to balance is to remember that you will eventually die. Life is brief, and death is eternal. When you remember that you have a limited time to enjoy something, your should list will look a lot different.

2. Stop Being Such An Egocentric Should-y POOP-head!

Too many shoulds are a sign that you have taken on too much responsibility. The Greek myths have a story about Atlas cursed by Zeus to carry the world* on his shoulders. When you believe that things won't get done unless you do them yourself, when you feel that you are the finger in the dike, the only one who is equipped to handle problems, that the world will stop spinning if you don't do everything – then you are an aristocracy of one, and you believe you have more power and control than is possible for any human to possess.

*The story of Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders is the commonly understood story, but the actual mythological story shows that this is a misunderstanding. Classical art shows Atlas holding a Celestial Sphere, not the globe. What Zeus actually did is condemn Atlas to stand at the western edge of Gaia (which is the Earth) and to hold up the Ouranos (the sky – or atmosphere) on his shoulders) to prevent the two(earth and sky) from resuming their primordial embrace.

The Birth of Free Verse

The scholars cannot agree on when free verse began, or who might serve as the father/mother of free verse. Walt Whitman is often called the first free verse poet to write in English, but, as you might imagine, that is not true. Free verse in English has a long history. It is likely that the influence that inspired Whitman to write free verse came from the King James Bible. Not merely the Psalms, but also the Books of the Prophets and the poetic prose found through out the scriptural text.

There are examples of free verse predating Whitman, going back as far as Abraham Cowley (circa 1665) and including many other poets who lived and died long before Leaves of Grass.

Regardless of its origins, there is little doubt that free verse became firmly established as the dominate form of poetry during the 20th century. If the 20th century is to be delineated in terms of its characteristic poetry, it would be known as the Age of Free Verse. Knowing this does not satisfy us, and should not block or quest to understand the roots of free verse. Nor should it lead one to believe that free verse in former times was marginal and not influential until discovered by modern poets and scholars. John Milton, for example, wrote some free verse. Was this merely a fit of experimentation that had negligible impact on the rest of his work or the others around and after him? If so, then no linkage might be discerned between free verse before and during the 20th century.

We should also note that meter did not congeal spontaneously in Modern English. Surely, Anglo-Saxon poetry did have its strongly stressed meter, and relied heavily on accents, alliteration, and caesuras, but the transition to syllabic-accentual meter by the 17th century did not happen instantaneously. Instead, there was a period of several decades as the new poetry (new for poets composing, to oversimplify in the extreme, between the times of Chaucer and Shakespeare) took hold.

During this period, accentual syllabic meter found its voice mainly through the influence of non-English poetry. The attempt to adapt classical meters to English took strong stress meter, which relies on the number of stresses per line and alliteration, and turned it into the accentual-syllabic meter, which founds itself on the relation between stressed and unstressed syllables in the line. Though Chaucer broke with this prior tradition in introducing the new meter, it took decades for it to finally sink in. This led to a proliferation of accentual-syllabic meters, given the variety of combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables possible and their combinations in lines. At the time, this was highly unusual, given English’s penchant for stress over all else. Now, of course, we experience such meter as normal if not expected in poetry and some of us might even be bored with it. Hence free verse in all its varieties.

The varieties of free verse can be categorized into six different varieties. Of course, given humankind’s penchant for organizing and categorizing, free verse might also be divided into the Ten Commandments of Free Verse, or the Twelve Traits of Free Verse, or The Twenty Five Principals, or the Ninety-five Thesis of Free Verse. I picked six just because that’s how many I thought of during this one sitting before the keyboard.

1. phrase-reinforcing
2. word-breaking
3. word-jamming,
4. concrete poems,
5. the prose poem
6. the Animated Poem

1. Phrase-reinforcing works by using lines parallel to natural phrasal units. Phrase-breaking free verse interrupts the natural phrase “an unexpected point." Needless to say, formal verse can and has used such techniques especially to highlight meter.A good example of Phrase-reinforcing is the Hebrew poetry found in the Book of Psalms:

Happy are they who fear the Lord,and have great delight in his commandments!
Their descendants will be mighty in the lands
the generation of the upright will be blessed.

2. The word-breaking kind of free verse splits a single word between lines. Perhaps the ultimate example comes from this odd poem by e e cummings:

l
(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness

This is a blending of the words loneliness and a leaf falls.

Another example from ee cummings is: two nuns wandering in sin gu lar adding a layer of meaning to the word singular

3. Word-jamming kind squeezes words together.

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

in just was originally published in The Dial Volume LXVIII, Number 5 (May 1920). New York: The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.

Note the Eddie and Bill and then balloon man and Betty and Isabel where the words are most definately jambed together in Mr. cumming's poem.

4. Concrete poems are poems where the words are arranged on the page in such a way as to create a picture. I found some great ones, but this program won't retain the forced spacing needed to turn the words into a picture. Check out the following: http://www.slwa.wa.gov.au/liskidz/allsorts/concrete/
http://oregonstate.edu/~smithc/poems/salmon.html

5. Prose poem, are a fade that will not die, and so it must be accepted. If free verse is verse free from the rules then anything anyone calls a poem becomes a poem. I personally don’t like the concept of a prose poem. By definition a prose poem is a piece of writing that falls into sentences rather than lines, that lacks regular meter or rhyme, that is printed like all other prose, and that... a poet has chosen to designate as poetry." Consider the following prose poem:

The Port A Port

is a delightful place of rest for a soul weary of life's battles. The vastness of the sky, the mobile architecture of the clouds, the changing coloration of the sea, the twinkling of the lights, are a prism marvelously fit to amuse the eyes without ever tiring them. The slender shapes of the ships with their complicated rigging, to which the surge lends harmonious oscillations, serve to sustain within the soul the taste for rhythm and beauty. Also, and above all, for the man who of mysterious and aristocratic pleasure in contemplating, while lying on the belvedere or resting his elbows on the jetty-head, all these movements of men who are leaving and men who are returning, of those who still have the strength to will, the desire to travel or to enrich themselves. --Charles Baudelaire

6. THE ANIMATED POEM: Perhaps the newest and freest form of poetry is called Animated Poetry. This new art form grew out of recent developments in technology have unleashed simmering creative impulses in all directions. The ability to combine moving image with sculptured text, and to disseminate the results widely and inexpensively, has produced the following interesting manifestations. Most are smallish downloads. Some can be viewed by clicking on the web addresses below. Others may require you to copy and past the address in your search engine address box. View and have fun:

http://animation.about.com/library/weekly/blmystgood.htm
http://animation.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/flash/whatwant.htm
http://animation.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.coloredhorse.com/BroadsideOnline/poem/poem.html
http://www.imaginesongs.com/pencil2.html
http://animation.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.hitchcock%2Dpresents.com/corey%2Dhitchcock/illustration/interactive/mermaids.htm
http://www-personal.une.edu.au/~lgrunwa2/animations/exultedgrief.html
http://www.xenowave.com/moving1.htm
http://members.aol.com/opalazure/page7.html
http://robinson.usd259.org/complab/poems/poemsamples/alyssalivemotion/poempage.html
http://www.forestry.toronto.edu/ac_staff/emeritus/loonsforever/poetry_in_motion.html
http://www.forestry.toronto.edu/ac_staff/emeritus/loonsforever/abc_book.html
http://www.patchword.com/original/animated_poems/animated_poems.html

Panicked Poet: Needing Prompts

I learned a lot from reading biographies of several poets. Frost was a night-owl and tended to write into the night and this, of course, put him late on the day. It was not a great schedule for a poet who was, in the early years, also a farmer. But William Stafford, Ted Kooser, and Billy Collins all have said they get up early to write.

In that great work Early Morning by William Stafford’s son, Kim Stafford has the great poet talking about how his kids would get up early and interrupt his morning writing, so he would get up an hour earlier, and then another hour earlier, until he found that sweet-spot where the house was quiet, the kids were asleep and he could write.

I took this practice on myself, getting up at 5, or 4 am to write. The problem, for me, is that I don’t always know what to do at that hour. In fiction I just make it a practice to stop writing in the middle of a scene that I know where it is going. That way, when I go back to it, I know how to start. I just take up where I left off. But with poetry, sometimes, I need prompts.

Here are some prompts that I use, and you are welcome to use too, if you want to, or feel it might be helpful.

1) Start a notebook and fill it with prompt stuff: Stuff like a list of topics to write about:

• fear


• sleep


• death


• spring


• snow


• a spider


• paying bills, and on and on

2. Prime the pump: Either collect in your prompt notebook a list of phrases you come across as you read. When you need to prompt yourself, scan those phrases and pick one. Paraphrase the line in 5 or 6 different ways, and see if it leads you to a poem.

3) Take a color and color a poem: Jot down every memory you have that includes that color. See if it leads you to a poem.


4) Never, ever, no way: Start by making a list of stuff you could never, would never do. See if it leads to a poem


5) Start by making a list of stuff you could never, would never do: List, explain, read, delete, add to, and see if this starts to lead you to a poem.

6) Don’t start the morning with writing, start with walking, or standing, or sitting: Take the dog for a walk, or take yourself outside, and intentionally look, listen and feel. Then come back in and write down what you saw, heard, and felt. Do haikus or just very short poems that tell no story, or reveal some memory or opinion, they just capture the moment.

7) Write a rant: Take some issue that really chaps your hide and write a ranting tirade about it.

8) Write a funny rant: You can make this a separate activity, or you can let it spring from the serious rant poem. Take the ranting poem, make it rhyme, and make it so extreme it is silly.

9) Write an inventory poem: Inventory a drawer, or the contents of your pocket, or your purse, or three or four things you lost recently, or all the pieces of mail that arrived yesterday.. Maybe you could write some thoughts or memories about each of the items in your inventoried list.

10) Looking for your mind, a million miles away: I have often heard, and sometimes said, “My mind was a million miles away.” It is a phrase used to explain why we didn’t hear something or notice something that happened right in front of us. Well, go find that mind. Where is it. What is it thinking about? See if it leads to a poem.

Revision Includes Editing, but Editing is not Revision

I write about the things I think about. I write about the things that bug me, that I can’t understand, that I am trying to understand. The revision of one’s writing (especially poetry) is something that bugs me so much I’m tempted to call the Orkin Man.

I think I have often mistaken editing for revision. If I went over a poem, reading it both silently, and aloud, adding needed articles, correcting spelling, I was thinking I was revising, and now I’m starting to think that is NOT revision.

I started thinking about the differences between editing and revision when I read some interviews with other poets.

I revise extensively and have never written a first draft that I left as is. A short poem might go through 30 or 40 versions. I revise toward clarity and away from difficulty, wanting the poem to appear to be written with ease. Ted Kooser

I realized two things from the Kooser quote:

1. I don’t count how many versions of a poem I write, but I feel like it is fewer than 30, and

2. I have no clue what is a guy like Kooser doing when he revises a poem 30 or 40 times. If you are not familiar with Kooser’s work it tends to be short.

You have probably heard folk use the cliché illustration of some effort resembling someone rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic, and that is what I feel when I revise several times. Am I making a difference with my work, or am I just moving lines and words around in a futile effort to keep the ship from sinking?

Well, I’m no linguist, but I can divide the word into syllables and when I do that I get this:

revision

Vision means to see, and re means to repeat. This means that at least one meaning of the word revision would be to See Again.

When you edit a poem you are checking grammar, spelling, syntax maybe, looking for lazy or unintentional clichés, redundancy, and so on, but if you want to revise a work you have to see the work again.

Revision means to look at the work with fresh eyes.

I remember watching a TV interview with James Dickey who was asked about writing his fabulous novel, Deliverance. Mr. Dickey said that revision was particularly hard for him, because when he wrote a poem (and he tended to write long poems) he would lay out all the pages on the floor so he could sort of scan the whole thing at once. He was looking at the work again (re-vision), but this practice was very difficult for him with a novel. Even a long poem might have only a dozen pages or so, but a novel will be made up of hundreds of pages. Who has a floor that big? My point is that re-vision is to re-see, and if that is the goal then we can start coming up with some activities or steps to make re-seeing the work possible and effective.

One of America’s great poets, Elizabeth Bishop wrote a fabulous villanelle entitled One Art. Go to www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bishop/drafts.htm and read this article about how Ms. Bishop struggled to revise this 19 line poem.

One of the problems that has bugged me most is that editing and revision is not as thrilling as composing. There is a certain excitement that surges through your body and floods your brain with a vibrating pleasure. Creating is fun because it is new. You sit there jotting stuff down, you come up with a neat-o mosquito phrase, and you pause and go, “I can’t believe I just wrote that!” Revision is work. It doesn’t feel spontaneous when you tweak, and adjust, and try, and fail, and retry, fiddle with, and fine tune a work.

For me it is a little like rehearsing for a play. A few years back I did some community theatre. Reading the play that first time was great. I could imagine me in the part, I was delighted by the story, but after going to rehearsals 5 nights a week for 3 or 4 weeks, I got to the place where I knew my lines, I knew everyone else’s lines, and I had moved stage left on a key word a hundred times. At that point, the rehearsals felt like work, and all the fun was gone. The fun came back on opening night. Every show brought me a thrill because now we were presenting something that was perfected, imperfect, but closer to perfect than it would’ve been had we not done what had to be done.

Here are some steps to effective revision.

1) Just know that your first draft is like panning for gold. You’ve got a pan full of dirt, rocks, and mixed up in all that mud are little grains of gold. This mind-set will help keep you from falling in love with every word you have written down. If you know most of it is crap before you start the revision then it won’t bother you when you toss a lot of it out.

2) Look for repetitions. Of course there are forms where repetition is part of the form (pantoum, villanelle, Sestina), but unless it is a requirement of the form, at least one revision should be dedicated to saying what you have to say only once.

3) Give your re-looking some space. You can look at stuff so long that your eyes cross and you can’t see something that is right in front of your face. Put the work aside for a few hours, or days, and then come back and re-look at it. I read a biography of Robert Frost where I learned that some of his later work was based on early drafts he had written when he was very, very young. He lunged around drafts of a poem, and did not complete the work for 30 years or more.

4) Look for logic. Are you making sense? Is it making the sense that you want to make? Are you communicating what you intended to communicate, or is there something there that is distracting, misleading, or easily misunderstood?

5) Write comments and questions on a draft of your poem. In the Elizabeth Bishop article mentioned above it points out that she wrote notes to herself in the margins of her drafts. Do that. If you don’t, you will forget the ideas. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon. We get old and the filter in our brain that once resembled a Mr. Coffee paper filter, becomes a net with big gaps that lets more get past than is good for you.

6) Have someone or a couple of people you trust and share a work with them, and then take notes on what they say. If revision is re-seeing, then there is nothing fresher than looking at a poem with someone else’s eyes. [WARNING: don’t share too much, or too often. Too many cooks curse the verse.]

7) Use contrasts. Try adding as many different kind of contrasts as you can. If it doesn’t work, so what. Try stuff, and toss out what doesn’t do it.

8) It’s supposed to be fun. Revision may not seem as fun as composing the first draft, but that is because you don’t think so, and you can control your thoughts. Think differently. Think that revision is fun. Enjoy every part of creating, polishing, perfecting a work of art. That is what makes you an artist.

9) Look for and delete summarizing words. Words like “joy, beautiful, delightful, blissful, pain, sorrow,” and “splendor” because these sorts of words tell you what to feel instead of causing you to feel. that summarize without being linked to specific experiences.

10) Look for ways for words and images to do double duty. The word still can mean not moving and it call also mean continuing to be there. Anything that give you multiple possibilities of meaning should be tried. If two or more of those alternate possibilities contributes to the point of the poem, then keep them.

11) Think of the reader. As you look again at your work, check to see if the poem speaks only to yourself, or will some reader you may never meet understand the work the way you intend it to be understood..

12) Look again at your poem. Is there part of the poem that is clearly good? Are there lines that come before the good part? Can you eliminate the boring stuff and start with the good stuff? Try it.

13) Look for chances to read your poems before an audience. Don’t hesitate to revise a poem after it has had a public reading. Just because you read it out loud to a gathering does not mean it was carved into stone. Never feel like it is too late to revise.

At some point, count the cost. You can revise a poem forever, and the right version does not really exist. At some point you just stop, and say, this is the way this one is going to be, and write something else. No one knocks it out of the part every time. Maybe if something is never completely successful, it is still a stone you step on as you make your way to better works.

When I first read Emily Dickinson I sat and read this little selection of maybe 40 poems. About 6 of those poems seemed like the best stuff I’d ever read. Even Emily revised her work, and eventually she stopped and just called it done. Revise as long as you want to revise. Stop when you want to stop. Volume is not better than quality, but volume increases your chances at creating works of quality.

14) FINAL NOTE: Don't follow anyone's revision tips as if it were a check-list. You try things, and try things, and over time you will revise instinctually. Never forget that you craft can be taught, and skills can be learned but art is a mystery that grows in the heart of human desire.

How Atlantic Monthly Changed My Life

Little choices, and unexpected encounters can have big, life long, life changing consequences. When I was raised, my father only had a high school education, my mother dropped out of high school at age 17 because she was pregnant with me. They were two people from the same blackbelt fundamentalist church. My mother was a skilled craft artist, and my father was a wantabee opera singer and wantabee artist/illustrator. They started out with a strained economic situation.

I was their first child, and was, in the early years, somewhat pampered. They read to me: the Bible, a pile of those Little Golden Books, Mother Goose poems, and A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. There were two of his poems that I liked and still remember today. The first, The Land of Counterpane, I have memorized the first stanza.

The Land of Counterpane
From A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson

When I was sick and lay a-bed,

I had two pillows at my head,

And all my toys beside me lay,

To keep me happy all the day.

And sometimes for an hour or so

I watched my leaden soldiers go,

With different uniforms and drills,

Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets

All up and down among the sheets;

Or brought my trees and houses out,

And planted cities all about.

I was the giant great and still

That sits upon the pillow-hill,

And sees before him, dale and plain,

The pleasant land of counterpane.

I also liked this short little gem:

Looking Forward
From A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson

When I am grown to man's estate
I shall be very proud and great,
And tell the other girls and boys
Not to meddle with my toys.

I don’t remember much exposure to poetry after that until I was 10 and my father painted a picture that he called, Stopping By Woods. I was an admirer of my father, afraid of him mostly, but still I was fascinated by the guy. If he liked painting then painting was what I wanted to do. When he gave this painting the title Stopping By Woods, I wanted to know where that title came from, and that was my first exposure to Robert Frost. I actually memorized Stopping By Woods then, and still would get about 90% of it right if asked to quote it today.

I really had little exposure, or interest in poetry after that, for the next five years. At age 15 my father decided to be a missionary to the lost souls in Milwaukee Wisconsin (he wanted to take the SIN out of WisconSIN), and we moved from Texas to Milwaukee. There was a medical doctor who was a mover and shaker at the 35th and Cherry Church of Christ, and after moving in the whole family was invited to the doctor’s home for supper.

Inviting our family to dinner was a big deal because there were 8 of us in the family, and a family of four inviting a family of eight meant you had to lay out a table and three card tables for 12 people. This dinner turned out to be life changing for me. Dr. Winship was the most educated man I’d ever met, and as we spread out in the Winship den I noticed some magazines on the coffee table. It was Atlantic Monthly. I’d never heard of the magazine, and since I was a kid, and older than all the other children there, I sat in a corner and flipped through the magazines. I was surprised to see that there were poems in the magazine.

I knew there were poetry books, but I don’t recall ever seeing a poem published in a magazine. I read them, and was shocked that they did not rhyme. They appeared to be written by people who were still living. I don’t recall a single poem, nor do I recall understanding the works, but I was drawn to the poems. I suddenly saw poetry as a means of gaining recognition. I didn’t think I had the discipline, or skill to write a short story, or a novel, but even a kid like me could write 8 or 10 lines of verse, especially if it didn’t have to rhyme.

I started writing poetry the next day, and I have been writing poetry now for 43 years. In high school I was a lousy poet, but I was also a determined poet. I wrote a lot. I shared what I wrote. I was not too bright, so I had no idea how poor a poet I was, and so I was not discouraged by my lack of talent.

My home was chaotic. We were too many people living in too small a space. The school and public libraries were places I could go and things were roomy and quiet. As long as you’re there you might as well flip through some books, and I found myself reading two main areas of literature: poetry and plays. I continued to try my hand at writing poetry and plays. (The choice of writing plays was odd because I don’t think I even saw a play until I was 16 years old.) The more I read poems, the more I read about the lives of the poets, and that lead me to read books about the way poems are constructed. It wasn’t long before my technical knowledge of the nuts and bolts of poetry construction exceeded that of the average high school English teacher.

I was pretty ignorant of everything else. I was horrible at spelling and grammar. I had zero math and science knowledge. Because my father was a little unstable and moved constantly I ended up attending 33 schools before I graduated from high school. This meant that I was always the new kid in school, and that I never had any long-term friendships. Add to that my lack of interest or ability in sports, and my constant writing in spiral notebooks, and reading books that no one else was reading, and you have a really weird guy.

I wrote so much that my senior year when the class voted on the superlatives: Most Popular, Most Likely to Succeed, I was elected Most Creative. I am certain I was not the Most Creative member of my senior class, but I thought of myself as creative, and when the students were asked to fill out their ballets, and they really had little interest in who was creative, they picked me, because they just didn’t give it much thought. Nevertheless, I was, in my own mind a poet, and creative.

I am the first member of my family to go to college and graduate, and when I had to pick a major I picked English, because that was the one that seemed to include poetry. I didn’t resist my own proneness to depression because poets are depressed. Poets like John Berryman, Hart Crane, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale, and later, Ann Sexton all killed themselves. Depression seemed a part of being a poet, and I had good reason to be depressed even without the poetry aspect. Add in my desire to be a real poet, and you have just taken away my motivation for fighting the depression. For a time I drank too much because Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, and he was a great poet, right?

This is stupid, of course. There is nothing that you can do while depressed or inebriated that you couldn’t do better if you were sober and unencumbered by hopelessness and despair.

Still, I write on, and on with very little reinforcement for my efforts. I self published a novel, and some religious books, and a book of poetry, and I don’t think anyone in my family has bothered to read any of them. In fact, almost all of the copies purchased were bought by me, given as gifts to people who politely said, “Thanks,” and then either shelved the books or tossed them. I am a writer with few readers, yet I continue to write. I don’t write sometimes. I don’t write often. I write daily. I write often. I read about writing. I sometimes fear I may have a mild form of Hypergraphia.

Bra Ads By tex norman

I stand before you
a man racked with guilt
and shame
that came
(or so I felt)
from my Calvinistic, blackbelt,
fundamentalist
father. He wasn’t much fun,
but he certainly was mental.
He could make a hard-shell Baptist
look like a godless ACLU liberal.

No lie.

So all my life I
have felt like a hopeless
and helplessly unworthy one
living in the State of SIN,
the black sheep of my family.
Despite, however, the
the religious oppression of my family
we did have porn in
our house. It was called
the Sears & Roebuck Catalogue,
containing seventeen provocative pages
of brassieres for all sizes and ages.
Back in 1950-twelve, I
perused those over (and under) developed bra models
modeling bra, after bra, after buh-buh-buh bra.
I could sit for hours imagining
their hoooo-haaahs.
Back then there was a poplar song
about an “itsy-bitz,
teeny-weenie-
yellow-polka-dot bikini”
that prompted Sears to add
three pages of two-piece
bra-topped swimming suits
added, I thought, just for me
adding to me variety.
Then, one day, all my fears
came true.
I got caught
while scrutinizing a brassiere
that hooked (oh, my god)
in the front. You know,
between the left hoooo and the right haaah.
My father saw what I was seeing.
There must’ve been like 57 hooo-haaahs
on each page
and I was of an age
my daddy thought too
young to
be forming such mummeries
so daddy worked himself into a
brew-ha-ha
like rage reciting scripture
about how impure
my thoughts were. He
threw scripture at me
like one of those onward Christian Soldiers
lobbing verse grenades.
“The Apostle Paul wrote
in his First Letter to the Corinthians
that, ‘it is good not to touch a woman.’”
When a guy says something like that
you can’t help but wonder,
“Had Paul ever tried it?”
Then my daddy quoted Jesus, who said,
“It is adultery to look at the bust
and to lust.”
Finally, my father bemoaned those cross your heart
Playtex living bra ads on TV.
But I have to say
it seemed to me
that those television bra ads were directed right at me.
Their very name was a Direct Address.
Listen carefully
I’m sure you’ll hear it:
“PLAYTEX”
...............“Play tex”
............................."Play tex!”


The Checker By tex norman

Standing on a rubber mat, she shifts
her weight from left to right, from foot to foot,
as if dancing, slowly, solo, in
one place. She shimmies to the scanner’s beep.
I watch her picking up my purchases,
and waving each across a laser’s beam.
It’s lift, and twist, and wave, then listen for
the beep that says the bar-code has been read.
She doesn’t have to think to calculate
the cost of living. All she has to do
is wave her hand, and, voila, things add up.
The change I’m due is read off of a screen.
“Hard day?”
I ask, though I already know
how difficult it is to do her job.
I use to do what she is doing now,
except, no mat, and registers back then
could calculate, but they did not compute.
“Yeah,”
she says,
“They all seem hard to me.
My feet are getting flat-er every day.
Flat-er, wide-er, sore-er every day.”
I could, but don’t explain why her feet hurt.
The weight of the world is pressing down on her.
The world is barely balanced on her back,
but if she doesn’t know about the Atlas
Curse, she isn’t going to learn of it
from me. She tells me what I owe,
I pay, she reads the screen and gives me change.
I wish she knew the joy of making change.