The Department of Redundancy Department

Redundancy is making a clarification that doesn't have to be made, the equivalent of saying the same thing twice. We do it incessantly all the time. Redundancies include:

• connect them together
• genuine sincerity
  
• bobbing its head up and down
• nodding his head (we don't nod anything else!)
  
• shrugging his shoulders
• visible to the eye (duh)
• we were assuming in our minds
  
• scattered here and there
• gasped for air
• hot embers
  
• retreating back
• a brief second
  
• at this point in time
• pacing back and forth 

What are your favorite redundancies?

Postcard from a Phoenix Motel

A real ceramic coffee cup brought from home makes motels feel more like home and the generic coffee taste better, and on this five-day trip I brought The Cup That Never Healed, a green Syracuse China coffee cup stamped 19-D, signifying manufacture in the fourth quarter of 1990, one of a six-cup motley crew hand-harvested from the factory-store seconds bin. These six were the originals in my restaurant-china-coffee-cup array, a secret source of comfort and pleasure (I have a cup for every mood) to me and nobody else.

This had been "the playful cup." (The others were "the intellectual cup," an unusual one broken when the kitchen table collapsed from metal fatigue, and I never cease looking for a replica; the "cup d'honneur" used for guests because it was the only one with a matching saucer; the pink-striped "feminine cup," and so on, insanely, or poetically.) After an accident cracked this cup from its foot all the way up alongside the handle, filling it with hot liquids put the drinker at risk so I shelved it up high, hoping it would use its vacation time to heal. Because travel puts any ceramic cup at risk, I packed this one for what has to be its last hurrah, conceding that if it hasn't healed itself by now it isn't going to. I planned to list here reasons why I kept this cup and kept my hope, but a sentimental attachment is made up of reasons that sound goofy to anyone else.

We have lived together long, this cup and I, and I can let it go only because I found on eBay one quite similar, although not a replica. Greetings from Phoenix. Get me outta here.

My Team

Couldn't recover myself all alone; it was too much to ask. So now I have a support team. They are:

Taylor, a young Doctor of Physical Therapy. She asks and answers questions, has me practice standing and sitting and flexing and arranging pillows for best sleeping alignment, gives me printed and illustrated instructions for exercises. Probably my problem was a muscle spasm; I am glad to hear this because it means maybe my disk is not squashed. Taylor says that someday I will be able to return to Tae Kwon Do.

Debby, a psychologist. Thanks to talking with her, I began having an appetite again, just last week. I'm starting slowly with food other people cooked, or readymade food such as eggs already boiled and packaged, or Rice Chex or fruit, and bit by bit am cooking, like, kale chips or potato-leek soup in the microwave. For a while there all I could eat was hot wings from the deli at Walmart. Thank you to Terri for the referral to this personable lady who does not ROTFL when I say that.

Emily, a physician's assistant. She prescribed medicine for what I think is a stomach ulcer I've had on and off since about 2004. I also received from her my flu shot and shingles shot. P.S.: Blood pressure 112 over 76.

Normally I would not request the services of any of the above fearing the fees for medical treatment, but I reasoned that it's worth it to try to rebuild myself.

Anthony: Longtime friend 1000 miles away guides me in things academic, even contributed to a fund for a research trip, and I can tell him almost anything.

Patrick: Mows lawns, builds tables and firebowls like it's easy, cleans and clears garages and other spaces, removes stuck-on snakes, fearlessly climbs a ladder to the roof and clears off a ton of storm debris, and does it without complaint and brings beautiful pastel-colored organic eggs from his hens when they lay too many.

Hope, Daria, Derek, Lucy, Holly, Cecelia, Drew and others in Spiritual Group: We meet every two weeks, perfect timing in a perfect space and have perfect discussions about our topic or video or reading. Thanks to this group's wisdom I can now instantly enter meditation mode: something I'd been failing at for years.

Becky, Maria, Gaye, Andie, Mary Ruth, Gail, Karen, Grace, Wanita, Marlene, Nan and more in Women's Poetry Workshop: If it weren't for them I'd probably have given up on poetry. As it is, I'm receiving a poetry prize this week, and so is Maria and a male poet friend, Matt.

Terri: Winner of the Best Neighbor of the Century Award, so cheerful having returned from an amazing three-week road trip to the west, a lifelong dream, including Mt. Rushmore, Yosemite, Crater Lake, sequoias and giant redwoods, San Francisco, Grand Canyon, Sedona, Las Vegas and much more: brought me southwestern hot peppers and a sizeable rock from Sedona as souvenirs.

Wendy the housekeeper, Linda the accountant, Dave the Ex Who Vows He Has Changed and I Say I'll Believe It When You Bring Me a Five-Carat Diamond, and you and you and you who are all so important to me. Did I say I felt alone in life? That now that Mom was gone and I've finished  teaching, nobody on earth would give a sharp stick in the eye whether I lived or died?

Prairie Home Companion, Off the Air at Last

I'm in the minority of folk offended by Garrison Keillor's "The Prairie Home Companion" on public radio, and not only because it was feeble humor and 40 years of it, but because I'm a northerner (from Wisconsin) and the people there are not at all like those cracker-barrel types he made fun of.

I will even go so far as to say that Wisconsin's next-door-neighbors, Minnesotans, although of lesser distinction than Wisconsinites who ALWAYS return their shopping carts to the cart corral, are not the bumpkins Keillor portrayed. The more I listened, the more annoying it was. Keillor's humor was for urban people: Their idea of country life.

Some listeners, not very smart, believed the show was serious and that a Lake Wobegon and its "above average" populace were real. As Keillor's career progressed he read poems on the air and somehow became an authority on which poems were "good poems," editing poetry anthologies titled Good Poems and Good Poems for Hard Times.

Missouri, too, gets the "back country" treatment especially by East Coast newspapers which run photos of aged Missourians with their thumbs in the straps of their overalls. All that's missing is the stalk of hay between their teeth.

Bye, Garrison, whose real name is Gary, one of the three bad-luck first names (the bad-luck female name is Jean; the other bad-luck male name is Gene). Keillor said that in retirement he is going to "rediscover lunch" and "rediscover weekends." Have fun, man. Stay off my radio! It'll take us years to undo the Midwestern-stereotyping damage you've done. And Keillor is not Mark Twain; not by a long shot.

"Flowers Kept Alive"

Cited as one of the most grotesque moments in English literature, Tennyson's poem "Flower in the Crannied Wall" goes like this:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

What's grotesque about that is he's singing its praises having torn it up by the roots and killed it: very white western patriarchal. Japanese flower arranging (ikebana, meaning "flowers kept alive") was demonstrated at the History Museum and I was fascinated by the arranger's concerns as she made the arrangement seen at the left. Ikebana cares about movement in their arrangements, thus the tall leaves that wave a little. Then she arranged the white flowers, and then said the arrangement needed depth, and thus the pink flowers. I have often arranged flowers to my satisfaction -- with good flowers one can hardly do it wrong -- but the result of this very conscious and minimalist approach mesmerized me. Right now I have purple irises in the lawn I'd love to cut and arrange, but I think the way the irises have arranged themselves cannot be improved upon.

Seasonal Fuzziness

Warm until February; snow and sleet in March: "Seasonal fuzziness" is what it's called by a Missouri Department of Conservation representative whom I heard speak about climate change (he said that he would not say "global warming" because that phrase was too  politicized). He said weather is drifting away from the calendar and our expectations because of man-made climate change. Yes, the weather is more and more confused; it's not a collective hallucination. Numerous outdoor events scheduled for March, when I'm often rhapsodizing about crocuses, have been snowed out, including a Mardi Gras dog parade ("Mardi Growl" -- everyone goes) in Eureka, and my planned jaunt to the back roads of  southern Illinois, inaccessible after a 7-inch snowfall. They rescheduled those events for April. Tonight it will be 0 degrees. This Saturday it'll be 52 degrees. LaBarque Creek (left), always pretty, looking like a poem, freezes and heats like a fever line.

I Don't Hate Winter Anymore

The winter solstice, the day the daylight begins to lengthen, specifically Sunday, December 21, 5:03 p.m. Missouri time, is one week away. I read that the solstice was also once the day of Saint Lucy, Queen of Light. John Donne wrote a poem about it, which begins:

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
    The sun is spent, and now his flasks
    Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
            The world's whole sap is sunk;

I raised a cup of cocoa to John Donne and to central heating.

Hating winter meant hating a quarter of life, so I had to change my approach. I've posted about caulking, covering windows, and clothes. Daily I push myself out the door, saying as I drive, walk, or feed birds, "Is this really so bad? I dread this all year? It's not bad at all." I gave myself things to look forward to. They cost money, but I tell myself I'm stimulating the economy. This mild December in  eastern Missouri has also helped me toward acceptance. I still hate below-zero temps and icy roads. On today's walk, as rainclouds made an exit, I tried capturing the bald light from the low-slung sun. This is what it truly looked like, without filters or anything.

Welcome to Utopia

Carol invited me to stay with her at the Poet's House, 404 Granary Street, in New Harmony, Indiana, population 800, founded in 1814 by the Harmonists, Germans who came to the then-wilderness on the Wabash River to establish an ideal society. They built cabins the first winter and brick dorms that still stand. These progressives believed in honor, sharing, hard work, friendship, education, and going to heaven -- everything good but sex. Men and women lived in separate dorms. Those already married could live together but chastely. The Harmonists' experiment failed, but they built a fabulous church that their leader saw in a dream, a brewery (try the beer from their recipe, Harmonie Bier), a granary, a workingman's library and a town with prayers and poems posted along the cobbled, tree-lined residential streets and at its famous Inn and gardens and Roofless Church and two labyrinths -- symbol of the city. It's all about beauty and spirit and views of cornfields. Everything there becomes art. Above is the Poet's House living room, showing the simple look that is typical (the flooring is poplar wood; through the doors is an herb garden); a photo taken in a oversized chair sculpture near the Inn. And the more-than-awesome "bier" from the 1816 recipe, available only at one cafe, called Sarah's; I will drive six hours round-trip to get another one. A wonderful and refreshing visit. They need to move this town to Missouri.

Poems of the Plant Kingdom

Fresh fungus is one of the joys of spring. I kid you not. I like fungi and enjoy hunting it in the woods with a camera a day or two after a soaking rain. This is a bouquet of fresh Turkey Tail (Trametes versicolor). Either that or it's Violet-Toothed Polypore (Trichaptum biformis). It's violet-purple, just as it shows in the photo, very impressive, and it's early, according to the textbook; neither type should be out until May. In my own lawn after a rainstorm I once found 11 different types of fungi; that was a great day....(thank your lucky stars you aren't here so I can tell you all about it). A reminder that I never eat wild fungi, I just love their creative shapes and colors. They are the poems of the plant kingdom.

August Cornfield

The ears ripen in late summer
And come on with a conquering laughter,
Come on with a high and conquering laughter.

The long-tailed blackbirds are hoarse.
One of the smaller blackbirds chitters on a stalk
And a spot of red is on its shoulder
And I never heard its name in my life.

Some of the ears are bursting.
A white juice works inside.
Cornsilk creeps in the end and dangles in the wind.
Always—I never knew it any other way—
The wind and the corn talk things over together.
And the rain and the corn and the sun and the corn
Talk things over together.
       (excerpt from "Laughing Corn," poem by Carl Sandburg.)

The Poet Laureate of Missouri Said:

Walter Bargen is the Poet Laureate of Missouri, the first one ever appointed. Notes taken during his talk to the St. Louis Writers Guild preserved some of the intriguing things he said:

• "The role of the writer in society is to keep us awake."
• "Poetry is like music; talking about it is not experiencing it."
• "Each first line [of a poem] is an argument for the poem's existence." For example: "About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters. . ." and "You don't remember the hanging, but you do. . ."
  
• "It's rhythm that marches your reader through the poem."
• "You know you're really writing well when you're surprising yourself."

Also in the notes, perhaps not a direct quotation: "IDEA: read poetry to stone, birds, and trees."

The Almost-Finished Poem

I have this little paradise of almost-finished poems: a file called "Completed Poems - Almost."

When I have time I draft like crazy, writing big, big, long, sloppy, inclusive first drafts. I let it all hang out. I run the idea into the ground. These drafts are raw material. I mark each of them "Draft 1" and print them out. They go together in an envelope marked with the approximate date of composition (such as "Fall 2007").

When there's another spot of time (at least six months later) I delete and toss the hopeless drafts. Those that still stand are so long & sloppy I can refine them simply by cutting. If after that I still care, I print these drafts out, mark them "Draft 2," and then the intensive crafting work begins.

When a poem is almost finished -- when it's whole except for, say, one nagging word, or one line, or a closing line -- it is promoted to the file "Completed Poems - Almost."

I visit this file with pleasant anticipation, when I have time, usually every six months or so. Often I can immediately see what the poem needs, supply it, and promote it to "Completed Poems." Those I print out and put in a binder.

A really sticky "almost-poem" I'll read aloud. My sense of embarrassment, boredom, or distaste tells me exactly where to apply my crafting efforts -- or whether any further efforts will be in vain.

Some drafts do hard time in that "Almost" file. But I like that file even better than "Completed Poems" (whose drafts are disposed of). A completed poem is satisfying, but the adventure of making it, the romance, the wild guesses, the risks, the faith, the Nikola-Tesla-like moments of revelation, the experimentation -- is so OVER.