Crushing on Keats: What Spring can not sing, Autumn can

I’ve had a crush on John Keats and his assonance since 1995. And I have an earnest college essay to prove it. Keats was one of the first or the first poet (it’s a blur) to move me to tears. Last month I watched Bright Star. I bawled like a baby.

Some of my Keats crush is based in my own experience of growing up country – tv-less, quiet, slow days watching seasons burp, belch and sneeze the earth’s wildness, watching life sprout up around the edges of death. When I first read "To Autumn," the season, the poem that blows all seasonal poems out of the water, when I first read this I was just beginning to realize that sometimes the less said the better, and the more said with my ear to the sound, the better.

If I could taste the words like these... “Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn / Among the river sallows, born aloft / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies (27-29)”… if I could taste the words in my mouth, if I could feel them vibrating in the back of my throat, if my ears tingled without reading it out loud – this was good.

And his letters. I remember pulling the book of letters from the college library stacks and standing there – standing there reading until I had to sit. He knew so much. He knew too much.

What would he have said to Spring, not Autumn, being the official time to observe Poetry? What would he have said about urban bird nests threaded with plastic?
Coleridge and Keats and Whitman - the ménage a trois that held my hand and kissed my neck and stroked my hair – all in the name of lessening my fear of the blatant, lessening my fear of the sensual, lessening my fear of life.

Why do I keep naïve essays about long-standing crushes on dead poets? For the same reason I keep letters back and forth from my first “love” affair with a writer – to remind me that the urgency will pass, that words attempting to describe life and death and first kisses are never frivolous. We can only try to repeat in words what is felt in the chest when we watch a chrysalis split open. We can only try.

Ernest Rhodes: too many walk when they were taught how to fly

I take Ernest for granted. When I want to have an intelligent conversation at work, I turn to him. He never disappoints. Some of the most helpful conversations I’ve had about Music (heck – about Much More than Music) I’ve had with him. If I could designate a Music Guru for myself, that Guru would be Ernie.

How so?

Does one have to explain why one designates someone as one’s guru?

No. I willingly offer my services as a peripheral disciple.

Doing a lot less to prove that I am talented

I remember the 1st time I saw Ernest perform live. And I remember the 2nd time I danced to him. It’s high time there’s been a 3rd time for me… which will coincide with the Transistor CD release party scheduled for March 13th at Sauce.

Ernest Rhodes is worth far more than being taken-for-granted by Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Midwest. He’s a Wise Guy. He’s a Poet. He’s a Musician. He Inspires.

He is Aware and Awake.

LISTEN UP.

Ernest’s and Justin Staggs’ Transistor video is fantastic. And fucking awesome.

WATCH IT.

The Transistor CD release date in Minneapolis is February 23rd. Keep an eye on ernestrhodes.com for downloading info – or trot to Electric Fetus, Cheapo, Mindstate Distribution or Fifth Element to buy it in the flesh.

Give me all you can
I can handle it

Emily Dickinson Was God

At her most fertile moment - Emily Dickinson day dreamed me into life.

In my most fertile nightmare - sticky, pliable, inviting - I aborted her.

She never existed.

Now what?



Christine Vyrnon -2009-

derelict lyrics:reed llik

One of my goals
1. to live in an insignificant and pointless town
where people never pull the shades
and double breasted bankers are shot in cold blood
by horses on foot


One of my goals
1. to form a jam band of infinite eternal songs
and the die hard fans who breed in the open air
sacrifice their young to corporate headquarters
guaranteeing future record sales
in my old age


One of my goals
1. to sing battered lyrics
over the loudspeakers of factory outlet lingerie stores
in order to inappropriately interrupt at inopportune moments
the decisions of female warriors seeking asylum
from the persecution of natural lighting


One of my goals
1. to write a psychedelic book
detailing the shocking mendacity of my life thinly veiled in non-fiction
from which Oprah Winfrey will decode
the meaning of the universe
with the help of a scissors and a mouthful of apricot jam


One of my goals
1. to kiss the beautifulone on the corners of his lips
causing him to sink into the underground current of
mourning dove and killdeer birdsongs sung backwards
as we wait for a solar powered subway during a total eclipse



christine vyrnon © 2009

Bill Holm Uncaged

Bill Holm died this week. Years ago I wrote my first fan letter ever to him… and never sent it. While an undergrad, I attended Bill’s reading-recital. A big burly guy of Icelandic heritage from rural Minnesota, Bill wrote tender and caustic poetry about a landscape for which I refused to be homesick. He read a few concise words about the tundra and then meandered over to the piano to play precise Brahms.

The tundra poetry didn’t choke me up, but the music did.

I don’t think he cared whether or not we liked the music. The music was for him. The words were for us.

At the time I struggled to find a balance between music and writing. Until Bill, I didn’t know that writers could be musicians and musicians could be writers.

I had led a charmed and harsh prairie farm house life to a soundtrack of my sister's piano: Chopin, Mozart, Debussy, Beethoven, Bach, Haydn, Rachmaninoff. We were an unsettled family of musicians pulling the grass apart/ to place our fingers on God’s heart (Edna St. Vincent Millay's Renascence 201-202).

Underneath aborted fan mail to male writers with rural souls is my mother’s mantra: “Write what you know. Write what you know. Write what you know.”

What do I know? It’s just as difficult to find antonyms to music as to write synonyms for what I think I know.

Is writing about the logical loop of thoughts on a page or the pressure of the pen in a hand that cramps? Is piano music about concise precision or the bounce of the keys under the fingers, the bounce of sound in a house in the middle of nowhere? Is singing about vocal emotional prowess or the resonance of the sound vibrating through a living breathing body? Is all art, sound, word about manipulating the emotions of others or jolting and soothing one’s own psyche?

I quit caring about small rural life. I suppress dreadfully poignant bullshit observations of what it means to grow up rural. Leaving rural life boils down to understanding what a caged wild animal must endure. I was on the verge of caged animal madness when I saw Bill Holm. His music calmed me.

Now I cage the music.

I live on a concrete island surrounded by a river of rumbling cars, as close to the heart of a City as I can stomach. Yet every day I look west and see a mirage of wheat and corn and grass and snow.

I know out in Bill Holm’s landscape there will always be a window open to a room with a piano… a concert of Chopin for an audience of combines and cows.





Bill Holm's Website

Kurt Vonnegut, Anne Sexton, and Cinderella walk into a bar...

In 1971 Kurt Vonnegut wrote a 4 page preface to Anne Sexton’s book of Grimm Brothers themed poems “Transformations.” It’s darn near the best 4 pages of Vonnegut I’ve read.

I know nothing about Anne. Perhaps this isn’t the best book to make a first impression. But this is the Sexton book that crossed my path first

Enough about Anne Sexton.

I respect books that come to me. I’m not much for forcing myself on a book. Sometimes I try. Usually these passes at incompatible books results in an awkward span of years and dust settling before I can throw it out or feel comfortable slipping my fingers between its pages again.

Sometimes I like books to court me. Sometimes I like making the first move on a book. Sometimes set-ups work. That’s how I first met Pynchon and Doris Lessing.

(end of love-life metaphor. deepest apologies.)

“Transformations” found me while I stood in front of the one dollar shelf at Arise bookstore.

If you want to avoid being watched closely for terrorist activity, don’t go to the Arise bookstore. Do go to the Arise bookstore if you don’t live a paranoid life.

So Kurt-baby wrote this perfectly irreverent and irrelevant preface, complete with a hand-drawn graph. Every inch of the preface is pure ___________ (fill in the blank).

While we're on the subject of filling in the blanks, I tell people I’ll teach again when I reach my 60s. Assuming my longevity genes kick in, I've extended the "someday-i'll-teach-again" deadline to my 70s. Vonnegut knows how to boil things down, as his preface does to one of my reasons for not teaching:
___________
How do I explain these poems? Not at all. I quit teaching in colleges because it seemed criminal to explain works of art. The crisis in my teaching career came, in fact, when I faced an audience which expected me to explain Dubliners by James Joyce.

I was game. I’d read the book. But when I opened my big mouth, no sounds came out.

__________

Why do we literary/artist people feel so inclined to review and explain works of art?

I’m not in the position to answer that. I’m the person reviewing reviews.

There was a time I collected Norman Rockwell books while secretly harboring an obsession with Francis Bacon’s “Pope Innocent X” series.

Take Danielle Steele: fuck her. But who am I to withhold Steele from the bus driver lady waiting for kids to fill her up?

Nobody.

Take half the white male dead chauvinistic authors out there: fuck ‘em. But if that’s all a person is ready for, am I in any position to deny dead white male authors a fair trial by jury of their peers?

No comment.

Speaking of dead white male authors, Vonnegut one-ups Sexton more than once in his smarty-pants preface. He throws us a trivia bone gleaned from an encyclopedia.

FYI: Originally “Cinderella” was written in French. In the translation from French to English, “the word vair was mistaken for verre so that Cinderella’s fur slippers become glass.”

Or so he says. We’re going to have to take his word for it.

All my life, I, and 75 percent of the female population, has been brainwashed by Disney and the Grimm Brothers that all a girl needs to attract forever-after male attention is the right pair of glass slippers.

Thanks to Vonnegut washing the scales from my eyes, I’m calling BULLSHIT!

I love calling Bullshit.

No, I don’t own a pair of Uggs. But from here on out, I will feel ever more justified to bitch and complain about the fucked up things women do to their feet for the sake of an ever-after.

All this time we could have been wearing fur-lined slippers. What a shame.

The other night I wore silvery heels to a party, danced in them well past midnight and nearly passed out when I took them off.

What did I hope to accomplish by wearing those pseudo-glass slippers? If you don’t call bullshit on me, I’ll call it on myself.

I know Kurt-baby would.

Koans: Poetic Pathways of the Mind

Koans: a common example is Hakiun Ekaku's "Two hands clap and there is a sound; What is the sound of one hand clapping?"

As a product of western logical and rational thought, I used to pat myself on the back, because I KNEW and could demonstrate the answer to the "one-hand-clapping" question.

You can do it yourself: Just slap your four fingers against the palm of the same hand.

Problem solved. Logic wins. What's the big deal?

The first time I heard this koan was from a buddhist writing professor. My answer to the-sound-of-one-hand-clapping exposed the pathways of my brain which didn't allow the absence of right or wrong answers. Ironically, those were the days I still threw logic out the window in favor of Christian myth and dogma. Such a logical answer revealed a mind that craved concrete, rational answers.

And that is the purpose of koans, whether used casually or during the practice of hard-core Zen meditation. They push and conjole the brain into new areas. The realization one settles on, or doesn't settle on, unveils the Present state of mind. Traditionally, if the answer matches the master's answer, one has gained a certain level of enlightenment.

For the purpose of Practice, I've left out the commentary that accompanies the following koan:

Goso said "A buffalo passes by the window. His head, horns, and four legs all go past. But why can't the tail pass too?" Case (koan) 38 from "The Gateless Gate"

O'Daly's introduction to Neruda's "The Book of Questions" suggests, "Neruda believed the inner quest was never-ending, that on some level what we learned was forgotten, so that we might learn it again.

Is forgetting the past in favor of the present a blessing or irony at its best?