New project

I’ve made a decision about my chapbook-length, hybrid-poetry manuscript The Librarian of Pyok Dong: I’m going to make it into a handmade artist book. I came to this conclusion after meeting with artist/poet MaryAnn L. Miller (Lucia Studio), who was generous enough to listen to my ideas, explain the process(es) necessary, and encourage me to go for it even though I do not feel fully prepared to embark upon, let alone complete, such a project. For people who are thinking of doing this themselves, and for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, I figured I would use my blog to write about the process. It will also serve to goad me into staying on track and actually completing it! Because you know how it goes. One gets distracted, or gets mired in details, or flags in general.

MaryAnn provided meaningful inspiration when I visited her at her studio. She has produced numerous artist books, and they are beautiful objects. Photos do not represent what a joy it is to handle an artist book–the textures of the papers, the feel of the book in hand, the subtleties of color. The book feels like a completed project, and this manuscript really needs that. Or I do, since I embarked on research about Harold Dunn in 2008 and have been working on the poems and historical excerpts on and off since then; it’s something I want to do to honor my friend David Dunn, to learn his father’s story, to help me to understand David’s story–cut short by his own early death.

I have sent the ms. to numerous chapbook publishers, but although two of them expressed some interest in the poems they also acknowledged that the layout of the work would pose challenges for their small presses. I understand that. I looked into print-on-demand options for self-publishing this text, and…let’s just say the process would not have been smooth. Since I’m not doing this to earn any profit, I may as well do it as art for art’s sake rather than tearing my hair out over tech issues. If I make only 10 or 15 books, at least I will have finished this particular project. If I consider this “artistic,” the process becomes more interesting and the result can take its time. I can make a lot of mistakes, and learn from them. Which I fully intend to do.

When she learned I had long ago been in the graphic design industry as a typesetter, proofreader, and small press publisher during the time of the dinosaurs, MaryAnn reminded me to draw upon my past skills. Sure, the technology has changed, but I found that I do recall how to use a mockup for a pamphlet. I can figure pagination and signatures, and I have done quite a bit of proofreading on the computer.

However, for most of the time I was employed in academia, I did not have much opportunity to keep such techniques up to date. The first couple of years I was employed, I put together a booklet of student-written and student-illustrated work for an umbrella program through which my department was partially funded, but that part of my job ended long ago. After that, I had little reason to employ my out-of-date graphics skill set. Now, I have to recall what I know and also learn how to use it with more “advanced” software.

And that’s where I began as of this weekend (a day of pouring rain meant I felt fine about sitting at the laptop for a couple of hours). I’m starting with the text itself, with its indentations and italics and footnotes because, yes, this poem has footnotes. Figuring out how many pages of 8 x 10 Somerset Book Wove paper I’ll need per book and how the text will “sit” on each page. Thinking about cover art.

There’s much more involved, and it’s exciting. To me, at least. On next week’s blog post: more on this project and what I’ve been learning. Or else more on the garden as I put it to bed.

Who can tell?

Perspective, again

My daughter, a veterinarian, has had a wide range of experiences with animals–working at an equid center in Morocco and on a sheep farm in Scotland, observing the feeding habits of platypuses in Australia, and caring for the health and well-being of small domestic animals at veterinary centers in North Carolina, Portugal, and New Mexico. She was briefly here in Pennsylvania, recently, to participate in my mother’s memorial gathering, and one morning at breakfast I mentioned that I have been buying amazingly good sheep-milk yogurt at our local farmer’s market. “It’s so expensive, though,” I told her, “Ten dollars a quart!”

“I don’t know, that sounds a fair price, actually,” she said. “Have you ever tried to milk a sheep? It isn’t easy!”

Well, no. I hadn’t given sheep-milking a second thought. And now that I’ve looked at a few YouTube videos…let’s just say that sheep-milk yogurt is a splurge for me, but certainly a good value for the price.

Photo by Mark Stebnicki on Pexels.com

It’s little times like these–moments that could be so mundane–that keep me from becoming too blasé. My daughter inadvertently reminded me that I need to stay curious and not take things for granted, that while looking deeper into a topic may complicate my understanding, complexity and depth are good results! Her worldview varies from mine in interesting ways, and I always gain information from her; sometimes, what I learn finds its way into a poem (see my poem “Drought and Blood” in Canary A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis). But aside from so-called poetic inspiration, what I cherish are those opportunities to look at experiences, places, and people from another perspective.

That’s why I love reading. I read books about history, geology, the cosmos, physics, biology, botany, philosophy, theology, economics, even entomology. It’s also one of the main purposes that people should read fiction and memoir: to get a view into how someone else thinks, lives, experiences the world.

And, of course, it’s why I enjoy poetry.

~

Here’s an excerpt from James Wright’s poem “Sheep in the Rain.” [You can read the whole poem here.]

Sheep eat everything
All the way down to the roots
And maybe that is why
These explorers of the rain
Seem so relaxed in their browsing.
Someone has freed them only a little while
Into the fields, and they have a good life of it
While it lasts.

Poetry online

Suddenly the humidity rolls away and the temperatures drop and, with shorter days, the tomatoes stop ripening. Some of them start to rot on the vine; it’s time to start pulling up vines and cutting down sunflower and corn stalks. The meadow continues being gold with solidago, but robins start flocking in the lawn and there are no more fireflies, cicadas, or catbirds. Karina Borowicz’s poem “September Tomatoes” captures the feeling perfectly: “The whiskey stink of rot has settled/in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises/when I touch the dying tomato plants.”

I’m happy to note that three (yes! Three!) of my poems, all of them fairly new, appear in Issue #74 of Canary A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis. While it’s unsettling that we’ve come to a time when poems about how we’re finding ourselves in environment crisis seem necessary, I’m grateful to Gail Entrekin for editing Canary for many years. And glad to have my poems in its virtual pages. Poet/writer Lynn Levin, whose work I’ve long admired, told me about Canary; I enjoy reading each issue, and the back issues as well. It’s nice that Entrekin keeps the archives of previous issues accessible to readers.

Header image for Canary Literary Journal

Which brings me to what I’ve been reading lately, because I continue to re-read from my poetry library. This week, it’s Adam Zagajewski. But I should mention that I read poetry online pretty much every day, usually on my laptop because the cell phone is just too small and often screws up line breaks. (We poets spend enough time considering line breaks that tech formatting should never decide lineation for us!) Reading online poetry journals lets me keep up with contemporary poetry and learn about poets I might have otherwise missed–such as Borowicz. I found “September Tomatoes” online when looking up something else.

While I hope there are legions of people who read poems online, I suppose readership of literary journals tends to be niche. I hereby encourage you to Google “online poetry journals” and browse a bit. Look at their archives. Google a new poet whose work you admired. Keep reading!

I love books, but certain aspects of the world wide web enable us to find art, music, writing, dance, and so forth that we might overlook otherwise. I’m reminded of how I used to (still do, actually) enjoy dictionaries and encyclopedias when those were the simplest, most accessible forms of compiled and aggregated information for the layperson. I’d open the tome to look something up, and then find something intriguing or distracting, and read about that, which would get me interested in finding out more about something else…or, I’d look for one bit of information and discover a background far more fascinating or that I was unaware of; yes, the old down-the-rabbit-hole effect has been around since long before we had Wikipedia and its ilk.

And that network of educating ourselves, of defining our terms, trying to satisfy our curiosity, questioning our assumptions–that goes far back into human history. The technology behind the technology is cerebral.



Re-reading, re-learning

Circumstances being what they are, too numerous to mention here, I continue amid distraction and creative malaise. To counter the mood, and to educate myself, I turn to poetry. Often I buy or borrow books that are new to me for excitement or inspiration; this month, I’ve decided to do some re-reading. Since I’m not writing much myself these days, and not too thrilled with what little I have been drafting, it seems time to re-examine poetry that I really admire. Maybe I can learn a few things.

I’ve long been a fan of Elaine Terranova, whom I met many years ago in Philadelphia. I have all of her books but the latest (and will get to that one soon), but the one I’m re-reading is Not To, New and Selected Poems, which came out in 2006 and which contains selections from The Dog’s Heart, Damages, The Cult of the Right Hand, and from her early chapbook called Toward Morning/Swimmers –as well as about 80 pages of what were then new poems.

I don’t want to do a book review here, nor am I interested in poetry analysis right now. The reason I’m re-reading these poems with care and interest is to endeavor to understand why I appreciate her work so deeply. For one thing, Terranova consistently surprises me, but with quiet surprises. The turns in her poems are seldom the powerful, swift changes of mood, direction, or language that I like in many writers’ work…but they are there, and their subtleties and reflective twists engage me in ways perhaps more lasting. Because I have to think about where the poem chose to go, and how it got there. It’s not merely ambiguity, though sometimes the closure’s ambiguous, it’s because the last lines of Terranova’s poems feel so right to me. They don’t always circle back to an image or idea in the opening–sometimes, they travel quite a distance away. And I love her observations and the occasional aside that seems to break the fourth wall:

...Once a squirrel
dropped through the chimney into the whole
ruined civilization of the basement. Here,
I'm taking the squirrel's viewpoint.

That’s from “Small Hours.” How terrific is that–the ruined civilization of basements? And the little comment that suggests indeed, the squirrel has a viewpoint. This poem ends 8 or 9 lines later with the sense of “being swept up/and contained in my bed” but the image she chooses is that of a child on a bicycle, which (to this reader) evokes memory and those hours we find ourselves in the somewhere-else of sleep and remembrance. No statement. No whole-poem metaphor. How did she come to those closing lines? Why do they work so well?

I want to learn that.

~

Brian Turner’s book The Goodbye World Poem is another re-read and feels utterly appropriate for a time of personal losses and deep reflection. And thankfully, it’s also a reminder of joy. These poems were written after the deaths of Turner’s wife (poet Ilyse Kusnetz), his father, and his best friend–truly, how does one find the means to say anything at such times? Yet somehow, Turner produced a trilogy of poetry books: The Wild Delight of Wild Things, The Goodbye World Poem, and The Dead Peasant’s Handbook, all published in one year (2023). Exploring what grief feels like has a long history among poets, and Turner’s work reminds me, in topic, of such collections as Donald Hall’s books Without and The Painted Bed, among others; Turner’s poetry is quite different from Hall’s, but the pain of loss and the gratitude for memories of the loved one are similar. And his work differs a lot from Terranova’s.

What do I want to learn from Turner’s poems, what is it he can do in these works that I would like to learn how to do? I love that I learn things in his work, information about whales, jellyfish, swamps, science. His work is usually narrative, doesn’t pretend to be anything but personal and memoir-based. Use of the first-person in poems doesn’t necessarily mean the poem is the writer’s experience or even her own memory/story, but it’s difficult to imagine Turner’s poems as being a stand-in persona. The imagery may offer metaphor but sure feels like “I saw this, I observed that.” Real stuff. Real life. That can get old in poems–but Turner keeps these observations new. Again, there’s reflection in the work that takes us past the surface words, tries to get the reader to find a way in to this grief, this loss, this mix of human feelings.

I think what I like in this work is how Turner acknowledges and presents the mix of human emotions and the movement toward compassion for the sufferer, whether the person suffering is a dying loved one or one’s own distraught and agonized self, whether the sufferer is an animal or a place (environment, region, biosphere). His poem “Fallen Giants” just gets to me each time I read it. It can be read almost as non-fiction prose, though it is lineated–long lines–and uses rhythm and repetition carefully. But, in fact, the poet is describing what whale fall might be like as the huge carcass descends through the silent ocean. And knows that whales are intelligent and can grieve:

...They fall into a hunger they cannot imagine,
with the sound of loved ones in their ears, calling to them, sonorous
and mournful, the pathos undeniable, and mournful because called out
for love's sake, the fluid world a conduit for the voices of these giants,
who sound themselves across the globe, across generations, speaking
to their loved ones...

This poem closes with the image of whales’ huge lungs, how they hold their breaths until they ascend “to the surface/ with a terrific blast of exhalation, a kind of announcement to the universe/that they were here, on planet Earth, a presence in this world, alive.” Compassion for whales that feels like compassion for human beings, for the earth, for the universe. I want my poems to acknowledge and evoke compassion in readers, remind them that the world is complex, beautiful, though often sad. And that it is good to be alive in the world, if only for awhile.

~

From the late summer/early autumn garden, several beautiful reminders of what life on Earth can offer. I recognize very clearly that not everyone has the good fortune to have a life that gives them bright flowers and ripe tomatoes. So I will be grateful today.

Radio Nowhere

Some days, this, from Bruce Springsteen…

I was tryin' to find my way home
But all I heard was a drone
Bouncing off a satellite
Crushin' the last lone American night
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?

~

You get older, you recognize that technology is changing, you grew up with the radio and now there are podcasts and streaming platforms and what-all, which are sometimes a pleasure but also not what you were used to; there are so many ways to reach out to somebody, and smaller and smaller chances that anyone is picking up on your wavelength (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSChVd3yQ_A). You’re not lying on the beach with your friends listening to your transistor radio or boombox or mixtapes or iPod. Maybe you need a little more silence and a little less popular culture in your life, maybe you need a coffee meet-up now and then with your besties, maybe you need a long walk in a quiet woods and no headphones or earbuds. Maybe no one is listening.

Maybe you’re feeling like Radio Nowhere.

If you happen to be a writer, do you find there are times you doubt your audience? Are there readers (of your work)? Do they bother to pay attention, maybe for longer than 20 seconds? Can you name some people who support what you do as a word-artist? –I hope the answer to this is yes, but sometimes that dead-air drone of a satellite picking up no signals can feel discouraging. Literary journals that don’t get back to you for many a month; independent presses that offer no feedback for why they kept your manuscript for a year and then rejected it; I could go on, but you get the picture.

And maybe the problem, if there is one, is that you’re not keeping up. No dedicated website, not enough social media presence, no X thread, no podcast, no Tik-Tok book launch, no visual excitement. I mean, I get it. One reason I left academia when I did was that the university was making a change in its education LMS platform. I would have had to re-do all my tests, assignments, syllabi, etc. to mesh with the new platform, which would have required hours of Zoom and in-person training for which I would not be remunerated. Oh, that and the spectre of ChatGPT/Claude. And fibromyalgia symptoms taking over my days.

Nope.

I’m just going to sit with this knowledge for awhile, see whether I can balance 1) my desire to reach people through poetry in books and journals and online with 2) my desire to opt out a bit further from the popular culture that I and most US citizens grew up with. Poetry and popular culture overlap occasionally but not often [Rupi Kaur & such like], except in the poems themselves, since poets can hardly help but live within their cultures/societies. In contemporary poetry, I’ve seen references to cell phones, credit cards, artificial intelligence, smart cars, social media, celebrities. Heck, I have used those things in my poems. I love the metaphorical possibilities of the GPS, for example.

For thousands of years, poems contained images of goats, sheep, horses, chariots, shrines, birds, hearths, wells, orchards, and other things observed in the world of those writers’ contemporaries. Surely poetry can include a far wider range of images, metaphors, content, commentary! So poetry evolves within culture; I cannot ignore the things of this world. I continue working on achieving some kind of acceptable balancing act.

Even if I can’t quite keep up.

Ellipsis…

“ellipsis(n.) 1560s, “an ellipse” in geometry, from Latin ellipsis, from Greek elleipsis “a falling short, defect, ellipse in grammar,” noun of action from elleipein “to fall short, leave out,” from en- “in” (see en- (1)) + leipein “to leave” (reconstructed to be from PIE root *leikw- “to leave”). The grammatical and rhetorical sense in English is attested by 1610s: “a figure of syntax in which a part of a sentence or phrase is used for the whole, by the omission of one or more words, leaving the full form to be understood or completed by the reader or hearer.” Earlier, in prosody, ellipsis was used of any word or term omitted but understood (1580s).”

The entry is from Etymology Online and describes, metaphorically, how I’ve been feeling lately. A bit absented from the world, full of gaps instead of (alas, that term) “content.” Missing the details, falling short, leaving out–not the same as feeling left out. I do not usually feel “writer’s block,” but…

maybe that’s what this is.

~

I’ve been thinking about a dear friend who often punctuated his letters to me with ellipses. He’d leave those three dots on the page to let me know he was thinking about more than he’d put on the paper, or that his mind was heading a direction he didn’t care to go just then, or to let me know he’d paused there and the next paragraph was likely to have been written later in the day, or on another day. An ellipsis could mean interruption, or it could indicate unfinished business. I would have to interpret.

I recall one letter that contained more ellipses than words. It was like a concrete poem, an irregular pattern of dots on the page.

Merriam-Webster says, of elliptical, a: of, relating to, or marked by ellipsis or an ellipsis; b(1): of, relating to, or marked by extreme economy of speech or writing; b(2): of or relating to deliberate obscurity (as of literary or conversational style).

I think in the case of his elliptical letter, the correct definition would be b(2). There are times people want to make connections with others or let us know they’re thinking of us, but they can’t quite make the full meaning clear, or don’t want to burden a friend with their problems, or feel they’ve nothing interesting to say. Or perhaps they deliberately obscure the reason for writing because of, who knows? Fear? Embarrassment? Pain?

But the desire to reach someone was there…

~

I want to get back to writing poems. But right now I have a few intellectual and emotional rifts that apparently I need to mend, as well as having another gallon of tomato sauce to make. My thinking is full of lacunae. Fragmentary. Not the best words in the best order, thank you Samuel Taylor Coleridge. More like the disturbed syntactical phrases my mother-in-law and my mother produced during their aphasia. Although there might be intriguing possibilities in such elliptical language that I may eventually stitch together.

Photo by HONG SON on Pexels.com

Hornworms

Late summer, and this year the tomato hornworms are out in force. I have mixed feelings about these creatures, because once they hatch into hawk or sphinx moths, they are wonderful pollinators for many plants, fascinating to observe as they hover like hummingbirds over the buddleia. But as caterpillars, do they have to be so damned voracious? Most years I can remove them to places far from the vegetables or snip them in half, but sometimes–like this year–I resort to spraying tomatoes with Bt.

We are having a wet August, however, which is a problem for Bt application: I have to keep applying it after every rain. Not to complain of rain in August–so much more welcome than drought. I always look for hornworms to remove them by hand, but they are so good at camouflage that I’ve only found three so far, and two of those were carrying parasitic wasp cocoons so were not going to live to do much more damage (I removed them anyway). Yet each morning I find further “pruning” of my plants. Sigh.

It’s not a big problem, really. My tomatoes have been going wild this year, with plants 7 feet tall, 8 feet in circumference, all of them loaded with fruit. I should not mind sharing with a few very hungry caterpillars when, after all, I’m loading my friends with tomatoes and making more sauce than Best Beloved and I can possibly consume in a year. And yet, it is rather annoying. So I was scouting the internet when I found this blog from Brie Arthur re hornworms. It’s a nice overview and shows “both sides” of hornworm invaders (though as she is in North Carolina, she has tobacco hornworms on her tomatoes).

Hornworms bring to my mind two very astonishing Stanley Kunitz poems written from the worm’s viewpoint. A tricky task, taking the persona of a non-human and still avoiding the more common issues of anthropomorphism. Kunitz, a master, pulls it off. Here is an excerpt from “Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation.”

~

All day, all night, I carry on my back
embedded in my flesh, two rows
of little white cocoons,
so neatly stacked
they look like eggs in a crate.
And I am eaten half away.

If I can gather strength enough
I'll try to burrow under a stone
and spin myself a purse
in which to sleep away the cold;
though when the sun kisses the earth
again, I know I won't be there.
Instead, out of my chrysalis
will break, like robbers from a tomb,
a swarm of parasitic flies,
leaving my wasted husk behind.

~

I encourage you to read the entire short poem. So layered. And it gave me new respect for the animals that eat the same things we want to eat, who can blame them?

Photo by Chris F on Pexels.com

Comfort in words

July was a tough month and August is busy, so I won’t be reading 31 poetry books for the Sealey Challenge this year. I have managed to read two lovely collections from Jacar Press, however, that will stay with me for awhile. And Kudos to Richard Krawiec for establishing Jacar and its fine catalogue of books.

When my Best Beloved saw the title of Tina Kelley‘s latest collection, he thought it was a sort of dictionary-field guide and was slightly disappointed that it is poetry. There’s nothing to disappoint in this collection, though, and it really is something of a field guide–it’s full of interesting words that describe what we didn’t know there were words for, and full of speculations about meaning and inquiries into etymology, and a few puns and other sorts of wordplay. Kelley has written more prose and journalism than poetry, but her poetry never overplays the cleverness of her thinking; the balance of thought-provoking and incisively intelligent observations in her work impressed me. It’s the kind of collection that makes you want to review some of the poems again after you’ve finished the book, to go back and see what you might have missed on the first read.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick‘s book Creature feels entirely different but also masterfully achieved. I enjoyed reading each poem twice, which slowed me down a bit but helped me to savor the subtle way she employs rhyme and alliteration, or verse forms, and varieties of said, into her work. What stands out most, however, is an abiding sense of compassion for the world and its beings. I felt very…embraced by these poems. True, too, that the middle of the collection contains beautiful pieces about her mother’s death, which right now hits close to home for me. In “The Bath,” Kirkpatrick writes:

I fall asleep, then startle in
the warm water, or groggy, lift

awake, away from full immersion
as when at night, the memories
come on, and I'm awash again

in grief, not your absence so much
as your going, the last laps of 
it, you making a clean start each

living day, up for it, the past
washed clear away...

...
Now that I never hear it, I
want to bathe in your voice.

~

I have found real comfort in the words of these poets and am grateful I happened to read them just now, when I’m not writing much and just kind of getting through each day with the garden and yoga and housekeeping and reading, though I will be going back to my hospice volunteering this week (I took a month off when my mother was dying). It is important to stay connected to the world and the creatures in it. Even those who are in the process of leaving it, like the patients in hospice, and the lightning bugs that are near the ends of their summer lives.

Imaginary travels

We recently entered a lovely, small, independent bookshop with our youngest niece (13) and nephew (10), both of whom enjoy reading books. The bookseller had taken wise advantage of the release of Christopher Nolan’s movie “The Odyssey” and, in the poetry section, featured a whole shelf of versions of the Illiad and the Odyssey: different formats, translators, paperback, hardback, illustrated, limited-edition–quite a range! Our nephew’s at the age where paintball and nerf-gun battles, fantasy graphic novels, swords, guns, and fireworks interest him. He’s heard about The Odyssey and was curious about it. “Is that the one where all the gods get together and make more gods?” he asked. *

“No, it’s the one about the man who leaves on a ship at the end of a long war and can’t get home because the gods keep intervening and sometimes he makes questionable decisions,” I said. “It’s the one with the Cyclops.” He knew a little about the Cyclops. He wondered if it was too advanced reading for him. But he has been reading the Harry Potter books on his own, so he is used to unusual names and words for things and persistent enough to keep on with a long book. I said he could probably get through it, though he might need a dictionary sometimes. We chatted a bit there in the store, with me telling him about how old the poem is (and it is a poem, I said, though some translations are written in prose) and how it was told out loud for many years but written down into books (and you know, of course, what books were like back then? “On, like, scrolls, right?”). Twenty-four books!

We looked at the various books…some in prose, some in poetry, some in prose but broken up into lines like poetry for academic reasons, some with footnotes. The proprietor was eavesdropping, amused, I think; he leaned over to show us a copy that had Greek on one page with the English verso, so that my nephew could see what the Greek looked like. He thought it was pretty cool. He chose a modestly-priced copy in flex-cover (see above left) because he liked reading the excerpts on the cover and because this one–the Butler translation from 1900–was written in prose. He thought he would find that more familiar, like reading a novel or a history. I said it might seem a little old-fashioned in style, but he’d probably be fine with it. “Old-fashioned like Shakespeare, or old-fashioned like ‘The Turn of the Screw’?” he asked. Precocious little fellow, no? More like Henry James than Shakespeare, I assured him. So he went home with a new book thousands of years old.

* If you happen to know which book is about the gods getting together to make more gods, let me know! 😄

~

The journeying trope is so ancient and always seems relevant. It must be we are nomads right through our genetic inheritance to the earliest human days. That reminds me of this poem, which is imagined but foretells a trip my siblings and I have a duty to make, probably in the coming spring. Now that both of our parents have died, we’ve promised to make this final journey with them.

~~~
Driving to Northeastern Indiana with Our Parents’ Ashes

I’m lazy, worn flat by August’s heat haze 
with a feeling of impending grief, unable to sleep, 
and I find myself imagining a last road trip 
with my sister and brother, carrying our parents’ ashes 
to a Midwestern graveyard.
My sister will compulsively update 
our calculated arrival time and our brother, 
who appreciates geography, will remind us
how many rivers we’re crossing, how many wetlands lost.
There will be a few remaining barns painted 
with Mail Pouch Tobacco logos, but will we pass
Sinclair stations, cows pastured beside the highway? 
More likely the rabble of off-ramps with their 
abundant franchises, gasoline $3.29 a gallon. 
It’s easy to imagine us driving I76 west, 
Sheetz, Stuckey’s, McDonald’s, as we pass Akron, 
Lima, Van Wert, our parents nestled together 
in boxes beside the luggage. 
I think of them shifting quietly there.
They’ve only briefly been apart, and it is time now 
to intermingle them again, at their request, 
which is why the three of us, in my imagination, 
traverse the backroads of our shared childhood, 
cross the new bridge and pass our grandmother’s 
old house on the riverbank. 
We’ll head for the municipal cemetery, 
singing “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain”
at the tops of our lungs, as the five of us
used to do, laughing until we cry.


~

photo by Joshua Buckmaster

Endeavoring

When I start on a project, process, garden, or trip, I tend to think of it as an endeavor. I have my own understanding of the word, but I thought it might be wise to see what its background is. According to Etymologyonline, endeavor appears in English in the 15th c:

early 15c., "pains taken to attain an object," literally "in duty," from phrase put (oneself) in dever "make it one's duty" (a partial translation of Old French mettre en deveir "put in duty"), from Old French dever "duty," from Latin debere "to owe," originally, "keep something away from someone," from de- "away" (see de-) + habere "to have" (from PIE root *ghabh- "to give or receive"). One's endeavors meaning one's "utmost effort" is from late 15c.

~

Okay, I tend to think of the word as meaning not so much a duty as the effort, or “pains one takes,” needed to pursue an objective or result of some sort. It is currently my duty to act as executor for my mother’s modest estate; but what I’m endeavoring to do is come to terms with being an orphan so late in my life, and to allow myself some minor mood swings, and to continue my daily activities–including writing. Because writing is so valuable when one is grieving. This is true even for people who are not writers, as James Pennebaker’s (and others’) research shows. [Here is a podcast from the APA as an introduction, if you are curious: https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/expressive-writing]

This doesn’t mean that writing while grieving is easier for writers. It isn’t. We may be more disciplined about doing the writing. Or we may not.

And endeavoring differs slightly from trying. For me, trying is sort of experimental or exploratory. It need not have some sort of object, beyond the goal of gaining a new experience. I’m not trying to get over my sorrow or trying to get up and do what has to be done. There’s purpose to my activities around facing the day, weeding and watering the garden, and sitting down to think and write. Maybe the purpose is just to be a human in the world. Maybe writing is just part of my particular process.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this post. The object today is just to put words on the page, thoughts into my brain, and to write.

today’s light breeze
I remember
hearing her laughter
~