Narrative tangles

The other night I was reading a book about Kandinsky in Munich, looking at so many wonderful paintings. Also read about him making costumes for the theater. Some of his early works showed his interest in folklore, patterns and decoration. Hitler chose several Kandinsky paintings to be in his famous traveling exhibition of degenerate art. And I was reading about Kandinsky's use of "dots" or blobs, how he used them to fill out black figures against a black background. I was also thinking about the work of Vuillard, and Kathleen Fraser's poem about Vuillard and his mother, who was a seamstress. Somehow all of these threads (!) got tangled up in a poem I wrote. When I got to the end I realized I had made Kandinsky's mother into a seamstress. So I thought I'd better check the facts. Didn't seem likely. Kandinsky's mother left when he was 4 to marry another man, hardly the homemaker type. So I had to "adjust" the poem. Pulled in Jackson Pollock, too, and Mick Jagger, why not?

All this would make a good discussion about narrative ethics. Okay to have characters from different time periods in your poem, but making up a fact about one's mother, well that has to be out of line. You can have an imaginary tribunal, but not rewrite someone's childhood. So here's the poem.

Wassily Kandinsky’s Defense at the (Imaginary) Tribunal of Degenerate Artists

Yellow’s unstitching itself from the sun
— Kathleen Fraser


So you’d like me to connect the dots.

I was born too early to be a language poet, and I couldn’t have known Mr. Pollock.

Let’s take a look at one of my early works, “The Night,” from 1907.

The black that is not a being

backing up the black that is being

dots forming the outline, then filling in . . .

How do I know how close to come without re-entering the void?

The answer is simply that I had access to the seamstress’ muslins,

used her patterns to measure the torso, the waist, the width of the shoulders.

That said, all of this information internalized leaves me free to apply

the pigment in a manner you seem to find capricious, degenerate, even.

Mick Jagger, please meet Kathleen Fraser, I’d be happy to give you

pointers in your own presentations to the (imaginary) tribunal.

What part of black on black do you not understand?

Slip on a pair of glasses that magnify, perhaps you will find yourself in Paris,

on top of the Eiffel Tower surveying the city below, flashes of yellow on black.

Whether you find human figures or buildings, my dots are there to signify.



slopoet

The Ward/Harrison angle

A bit of space has crept into the blog. After I retired we went on a six-week-long vacation. We discovered a six-week vacation might be too long. Not the part in New Hampshire with the grandkids, long afternoons at the pond. One of the highlights of the second half, when we were on the go, was an eco-cruise of the Hackensack River. Another highlight was visiting Wendy and Allan in Middletown, and learning that Wendy and I are related. We are both doing genealogy and we were astonished one night to learn our lists of names were...the same! It's those Ward children, one winds its way down to Wendy, another down to me. The Wards came down to Newark with all their Puritan friends from Branford, Connecticut, looking for a purer settlement, perhaps that's where they got the word Puritan. On the eco-cruise we learned when our dear ancestors, the Wards, came down to New Jersey in 1666, the entire area would have been covered with white cedar. So we couldn't exactly re-create what their boating experiences would have been like on the Hackensack and the Passaic. They certainly wouldn't have seen the Empire State Building across the meadowlands. You can send money to the Riverkeepers of the Hackensack (see http://www.hackensackriverkeeper.org/) to keep the river clean and pure, make it more appealing for osprey and egrets than the occasional Mafia dump. Stay tuned on this blog for information about the whole eastern experiment, more information coming soon.

slopoet begins a new life

I still have one job, treasurer of the nonprofit known as Sixteen Rivers Press. Can't get too lax, now that I don't have to report to the library anymore. Should get busy juggling some books, not 16 Rivers' -- maybe my own. One could spend half a day traipsing between banks. My grandfather started out as a bank teller, but I never got the idea he amounted to much. I remember him boasting to me when I was a little girl that he dealt with "salvage..." whatever that meant. My grandparents were close friends of Hannah and Frank Nixon in Whittier, you know, the folks with two sons, one of whom had to resign his job at the White House. Here's a picture of me and the Nixons. They always promised me I could play with their grandchildren, Julie and Trisha, but somehow that never came about. Later I took a left turn, never looked back.

Schwanengesong

I’m going to write a swan song for my last day on the job. This swan has been swimming around the same pond for twenty-nine years. Think of the old duck pond at Rickey’s Hyatt House, the one with the arched bridge. Now imagine they have opened up a channel out of there, straight through the baylands towards the bay, and then you pick up your wings and maybe fly over to New England, if you’ve got the legs. And the new habitat will take getting used to. Got to figure out what to do during the snow months. Compiling new genealogy charts could take up an entire winter (see how far back you can go...). Writing that biography of Catherine Raftor, aka Kitty Clive, will then take up the next big chunk of time. Add in a few trips to Europe. And to read books and actually finish them in a timely manner. Long before they are due back at the library. I imagine I could learn to cook up some casseroles and other tasty dishes to freeze and bring out to share with wonderful spouse, who has looked on as I heated up deli items for dinner night after night, what kind of wife did he marry, anyway? These goodies would go well with his homemade soup. Some discipline would be required for the computer time, some timeouts for walks up to the top of the nearest hill. Maybe a dog would help, nipping at my heels to remind me—out, out in the world. After a suitable time I could go back to work, that’s right. Maybe get those final three quarters I need to qualify for Social Security and Medicare. At a bookstore where my skills should come in handy. Work when I want to—could you take the afternoon shift? Sounds lovely! But when those three quarters are over, maybe call it quits for awhile. Start, stop, at will. This swan is psyched. Remember the old opera story, the actor playing Lohengrin watched as the swan boat that was to take him to heaven sped across the stage and off to the other side. He paused, turned to the audience and asked “When does the next swan leave?” Seems prudent not to wait too long. Start flapping those wings!

new poetic form

I think the blog may have influenced my writing, specifically my poetry writing. My latest poem is roughly the size and shape of a blog entry. It looks like this:

Approaching Retirement

The agricultural specialist has approved root removal and transplant
to one of the lower-scored hardiness zones as long as the difference
in number does not exceed three, or maybe four, which would require
transformation from poet to novelist, perhaps, or even biographer,
writing about subjects living preferably in the 17th to 18th century,
requiring multiple requests for archival material to be sent to the new
zone, work being done primarily in the hothouse Florida room, which
most zone six homes seem to flaunt, even though they are boarded up
much of the year, I was thinking this would necessitate covering bare
limbs with woolen material, and layers of down, a kind of mulch
for the brain, the heart of the plant raring to go, no distractions,
no excuses, nothing but the blank page to be filled, and time to do it,
the specialist has promised there will be time, though the growing
period has actually stopped, he suddenly reminded me, several
decades ago.

Perhaps my poetry will now be in this form, prose poetry in this nice
boxy shape. And here are the hardiness zones for the Eastern
seaboard, in case you were interested.

The door-fastener

One thing you need to know about my great-grandfather, Fillmore Condit--he
was persistent. If he wanted to know how something worked, he would study until he got it right. Never went to college, but he invented a refrigerator door fastener for meat lockers. Got it patented and sold lots of them, traveled to the Midwest (from New Jersey) and up to New England. Got him enough money to switch from being a grocer to a real estate developer. And later worked for Union Oil.

I kept thinking I'd like to see the patent he supposedly obtained, what it looked

like. After years of checking every once in a while with the U.S. Patent Office online databases--they never seemed to include Fillmore's year--I discovered today that Google has a patent search. It's very simple. I just put in Fillmore's name and there it was. Easy to download as a pdf. I like to imagine him waiting around, rustling up the lawyers and witnesses, what it must have been like to register this invention. Here's his diagram, take it straight to your local manufacturer.

lucy comes into the world

On May 5th, 2007, Lucy Margaret Rados came into the world. She is my husband Bill's granddaughter, his third grandchild. Of course, she is beautiful, as you can see. She will be three months old when we get to see her, hold her, greet her, coo.

I liked Jenny's (Jenny is Lucy's mother, and Bill's daughter) comment: "She is the most easygoing of our babies so far--though maybe we just finally have a vague idea of what we're doing!" A few weeks later she said, "We can't wait for Gilmanton [N.H]. Am thinking we need to instate the 5pm cocktail hour!" So that's it, and Drew Farm will have to participate.





Years ago when there were no grandchildren Jenny and I (with help from others...) gave a cocktail party at Green Pastures, a place where we stayed, that was "in the family," because Drew Farm was being rented. We endured strange evenings there listening to the high-pitched songs of the skunk litter in the basement. Anyway, Jenny and I rustled up prosciutto and melon (we were ahead of the curve) and my mother's cheese puffs hot from the oven. A good time was had by all. Now we have our own recently remodeled bee-yoo-tiful kitchen at Drew Farm. Should be a snap. Let the word out, 5pm, come up to Drew Farm. You won't be disappointed. And Lucy will be on display, fresh from her nap!

slopoet meditates on the saltbox

Nice saltbox for sale in Guilford, CT. [This isn't the "saltbox"--it's a historic house in Guilford, the Whitfield house, very near the Village Green]. Back to the house for sale--vintage 1970s, so it wouldn't be an ancient structure with low counters for Revolutionary War-vintage short people. Don't want to be hunched over stirring the pot on the stove. Pond on the property. Brings up the mosquito issue. How do you ask people politely how the mosquitoes are, well, year-round. Only bad in the summer? Only at dusk? Can you spend time in the backyard between May and October?

Houses in the East seem primarily to be 2-story. All the nice ones, at least. Some ranch houses. Who likes a ranch house. Too Californian. Then again, what do we do about our knees? Can they be trusted to behave? For me, the left one keeps giving way, all of a sudden, halfway up or down the stairs. The other knee gives me grief when I sit down. They are feeling better this week, not sure what to think. When will the "giving way" start to manifest itself?

We'll just have to save up money to install an elevator in whatever charming house we decide we have to have. It'll be a two-story one, I guarantee it. Maybe we can find one where our predecessors were old, too, and lame. House comes with...elevator.

slopoet visits plymouth church

We'd crossed over from Hoboken to Manhattan by ferry, a gorgeous, clear day. Then we descended to the subway, zipped over to Brooklyn Heights. We were going to visit Plymouth Church, where Henry Ward Beecher preached for many years, also an important stop on the Underground Railway. Glad to find the station had an elevator, shaky knees. Imagine our delight rounding the corner in the station and finding this lovely tile representation of Plymouth Church, our very destination.

When we got to the actual church, it was locked, but we could see into the courtyard we had first viewed in the "tile" version. We rounded another corner, saw the church office door, also locked. But we buzzed. The woman who answered the buzz not only let us in, but gave us an impromptu tour of the sanctuary.

slopoet contemplates moving to the East coast

Going to turn in my retirement papers soon, by the end of the month.

Next step, get an apartment, sell the house, figure out where we're going to move.

Why not swap one university town for another? Princeton and Charlottesville are both very appealing. Full-strength coffee bars, vegetarian food markets, excellent public libraries and bookstores, all the basics. Well, Princeton just lost a first-class independent bookstore--the university bookstore might have to do.

We found great bookstores in Philadelphia (Joseph Fox and Big Jar Books). And there's always NYC.

slopoet tells terry about the new blog

This is a special message for Terry, who wants to create a personal website. I've never actually done that, but if you go to Google and register with them, you can set up a blog, through blogger. You could certainly have a journal, with pictures. Or you can create Picasa picture albums (you've seen mine). Each album can have a long introduction, which could be part of a journal, and each picture can have captions.But this is the blog. Your friends and family could write responses to your blog entries. I just set this up tonight, never have done it before.

Signed, slopoet

By the way, the photo is of the Fulton Ferry Landing under the Brooklyn Bridge.

slopoet goes to the presbyterian burial ground