Archive for September 2009

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Subway Sonnet – Train Chemistry – Light That Cannot Be Broken Down For Parts

September 23, 2009

Molecules (poem by Karin Gustafson, drawing by Diana Barco)

I updated this post for the dVerse Poets Pub prompt for poems about trains and am also linking to Victoria C. Slotto’s blog liv2write2day relating to poems about light.     This poem is not a new one, but it was written on and prompted by the subway on a Monday, thinking about a beautifully sunny Sunday before.

This is a sonnet, a variation of the regular form 14 1/2 lines rather than the requisite 14.   I added the extra couple of words at the end to combat that “patness” that sometimes results from a sonnet’s final couplet.

Molecules

Yesterday in the dim fluorescence
of subway car, I thought of molecules.
They seemed, in that greyed light, the essence
of life.  I saw them stretched in pools,
sometimes seemingly limpid, other times
volcanic, fervidly swooping me
abubble, then mucking me into slimes
of laval woe, a test tube of to be
or not to be.  Today, I’m by the sea,
and water, vaster than pools, sparkles
under light so immense it cannot be
broken down for parts, yet its particles
raise up the non-molecular part
of me, what refuses to lose heart,
no matter–

(All rights reserved.  Karin Gustafson)

(The drawing above is by my dear friend Diana Barco, who illustrated my book of poetry called “Going on Somewhere,” available on Amazon.)

Check out 1 Mississippi at link above also.

Categories: New York City, poetry, Uncategorized
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Morning Subway Blog

September 23, 2009

Man opposite me on the train this morning wears denim overalls which half-cover a chartreuse t-shirt.  He is a powerful looking man, despite the fact that his bull-like chest is now both chartreuse and bibbed. Thick arms, both right and left, both inner and outer, are covered with tattoos.  One features a large, grinning, skull that wears a Valkyrie-type helmet.

As I look at these arms, I understand, for the first time, the value of tattoos:  anyone with so many of them can wear bib overalls in New York City with complete impunity.

He is not a crazy man, meaning that his eyes don’t catch mine, not even once.  (See e.g. my post re Mondays and the strange attraction that mentally disturbed subwayriders seem to feel for my gaze.)

Drummers now set up a performance space between the subway poles.  They do block out the screeches of a child down the way, but only at the expense of a throbbing ache in the ear on their side.    Even so,  I contemplate putting change in the hat that’s passed—that child can reach an extraordinarily high pitch—only they move the hat too fast, quick to realize that no one in this car is much interested in paying for loud morning drumming.

As the train moves on, I catch my face in the opposite window of the car, and remember the comment of a friend yesterday who’d not seen me for some time.  I’d put on a little weight, she said, that showed especially in my face.

Oh yes, she also said it looked good.

Oh yes…

Cringing, I look quickly for anything other than the mirror-like blackness of that window.  Surely there’s someone nutty whose eyes I can work on avoiding.  This is the IRT.

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Robert Pattinson’s Hair – This Blog

September 22, 2009

This blog was found by some unknown person today through the search term “how to do my hair like Robert Pattinson.”

I view this as a significant achievement.  (Not doing one’s hair like Robert Pattinson—that’s not just significant; that’s amazing.)  No, what I’m talking about is the fact that my blog would show up as the possible provider of an answer to a question of this kind.

My own hair-manipulating experience is pretty much limited to braids.  (So far, not Pattinson’s style.)

I’ve hardly even had my own hair “done”.  The only times I can remember are as a pre-teen (a member of the other age group so fascinated by RPatz.)  Hair was “done” back then for Junior High School dances.

The Junior High School “dos” were the coiffure equivalents of the corsages our pre-teen dates bought us for these events.  These were typically carnations (baby roses, if the guy was willing to shell out), which were wired together into a bunched but spacious array, gaps filled in with tangles of baby’s breath and leaf.  Green paper wrapped the stems in back; very sharp pins (with pearl tips) were used to keep the whole thing affixed to budding chests.

Even so my long blonde hair was curled, teased, smoothed, and sprayed, shaped and volumized, until it ended up a combination of beehive and Marie Antoinette’s wig.  (Now that I think about it, it also looked something like Pattinson’s hair in the Prom scene at the end of Twilight. Only mine also had ringlets.)

Those days are long long gone.  (And there were only a couple of them to begin with  – the Valentine’s Day Dance, and later the Spring Dance.  Eighth Grade.)

Which makes it hard for me to believe that I could be allowed some small measure of authority on this subject:  the way to Robert Pattinson’s hair.

The magic of the Internet never ceases to amaze….

Check out  1 Mississippi on Amazon or at link above.

Categories: Blogging, Robert Pattinson, Uncategorized
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More on Unwinding – Sonnet

September 22, 2009

Yesterday, I posted about stressful Mondays, and the unwinding of that stress (or at least of some of it) by a view of sky and river.   That post was somewhat comic (I hope), but I realized I also had written a sonnet, Shakespearean,  of a slightly more serious nature on the same subject.  The poem doesn’t actually deal with Mondays, but it does describe some of the unwinding offered by the flow of sky and water.

Post-Eden

Before the sky, a lovely pale, a boy,
tall on glistening grass, tosses a ball,
and I wonder why it is that joy
is not simply inhaled.  Is it the Fall
that keeps us from feeling how it lines
the air we breathe?  Is it that first loss
that keeps us toiling within the confines
of our skins, unheeding unhidden cost?
A soft haze, like a blessing, nestles on
the sea, mutes the horizon, brings the far near.
So much within reach.  The brain wrestles on
its hardscrabble way, yet slowly fear
unwinds, diminished by sky, sea, view.
An inner hand makes the catch, more too.

(All rights reserved.  Karin Gustafson)

(I am linking this sonnet to Gooseberry Garden’s poetry picnic.  They have a very active and supportive poetry community.)

Categories: poetry, Stress, Uncategorized
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Monday – Ten Signs That Yours Has Been Stressful

September 21, 2009

Monday – Ten Signs that Yours Has Been Stressful

1.         You have gone through four sticks of gum;  three that you just put in your mouth on the subway platform, one that you actually chewed earlier in your office.  Your office!

2.         Your eyes keep catching the eyes of the crazy muttering man sitting opposite you on the train–swollen, hooded, troubled eyes.  Even when you finally just shut your eyes, pretending to sleep, you can’t help peeking to see if he buys your little charade.  He doesn’t.   (Maybe it’s all the gum-chewing.)

3.         You begin to deconstruct Twilight in your head.   (“Deconstruct as in Harold Bloom and Jacques Derrida.)   You focus, for example, on the fact that “Bella Swan” must be named for (a) Belle, as in La Belle et La Bête (Beauty and the Beast), and (b) the Ugly Duckling.   And Edward Cullen is a combination of….. (a) Edward Scissorhands (you guess, not having actually seen the movie), and (b) cull as in the culling a herd, as in Edward in his vigilante days.   Then you actually begin to wonder about the symbolism of Jacob being a wolf.  But wasn’t Esau, Jacob’s brother, the “hairy man”…?

4.         The train stops for a long time in the tunnel.  Your jaw is getting seriously overextended. 

5.         When the conductor announces that the delay is due to a sick customer, you are genuinely relieved that the sick customer is not you.

6.         You really do not chew gum, you never chew gum.

7.         You step off the train onto a platform where a man sings the Flight of the Bumblebee in falsetto.  You are very glad that you will not be sitting opposite this man.

8.         All thoughts of blogging about political, social, artistic or poetic issues fly from your head and you wonder whether you couldn’t just post a picture of your cute little dog instead.  (You realize sadly that you don’t have a picture scanned.)

9.         Before taking that same cute little dog out for a walk, you hurriedly eat several slices of a kind of cheese you don’t much care for.  In an effort to assuage displaced guilt, you tear off some of every slice to give to the dog.

10.       When you finally take the dog out, you stop for a moment on the patio of a restaurant behind your building.  The restaurant has recently started playing elevator music, and before you realize what you are doing, your hips begin to twitch in time with the beat.

Agh!  You hate elevator music.  Worse than chewing gum!

Agh!

Feeling that all is surely lost—what’s happening to you?–you look out over the horizon.  The sky above the river is blue and pink and orange, the river below the sky is blue and blue and blue, a crescent of moon barely gleams through the spectrum like the most beautiful distinction possible, your dog’s eyes (you are carrying your dog through the restaurant patio) stare up at you in gratitude.   (Possibly for all the cheese.)

In less than a second, your hips let go of even the memory of those untoward twitches, and you walk straight and true out of range of the muzak, your forehead unwinding, your chest sighing, your tense jaw beginning, at last, to find peace.

Check out 1 Mississippi above for more about the peace of rivers.

Categories: Stress
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Speaking of Fireflies

September 20, 2009

I posted an earlier poem re fireflies, but here’s actually a nicer one:

Porch

The porch pulled them to its side,
invited nestling upon shaded planks,
recalled cool soft times, clover in fields,
the day she cut his hair, and then they picked
out smooth flat stones,
and lined them along its surface, thick with
years of knobby deck paint.  Against it,
the stones shone like perfect moons to plant upon
winter table tops, reminders
that nights sown by fireflies
were going on some where, some time.

(All rights reserved.  Karin Gustafson)

Check out 1 Mississippi at link above or on Amazon.  Review it if you have one!  If not, get one!

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The Burden of Childhood Specialness – Firefly

September 20, 2009

I really am almost done with writing about The New York Times September 14, 2009 article by Alfie Kohn, “Mind:…” about the hazards of parental praise and punishment.   (You may be sick of it too.)

However, one fellow mother and blogger recently commented on the issue of praise as discussed in the article and my posts.  She found it hard to think of praise for children as problematic.  (Sorry, I’m oversimplifying her comment.)   She worried that not praising children might cause them to feel bad, particularly in the context of praise given to others.

I didn’t mean to condemn all praise for children!  But I do think parental praise can become problematic when it conditions a child into a reliance upon a sense of specialness.

Yes, of course, every child is special.  (Unique, God’s creation, like a snowflake, etc.)

The specialness I am talking about is not a child’s uniqueness so much as his or her “bestness,” “gold-star-ness,” “very very good-girlness or boyness.”

A security blanket of parental praise, especially combined with precocity, can be a potent combination for a child.  While the parent, in praising, may mean simply to acknowledge the child, and perhaps, excite and exhort him or her into making continued efforts (and, unwittingly to continue being a great reflection of the parent), the child may confuse this specialness as a condition for parental affection, and even for his or her own validity.

As the precocious child grows up, the child’s sense of specialness can shift from glow to burden.  The world has many many many special people.   (Thankfully!)    Someone who is used to the repeated confirmation of their sense of specialness by well-meaning, compliant, eager parents may have a hard time achieving plain old contentment (i.e. sufficiency) as they move into a heap whose top can hardly be seen.  The failure to feel special may feel like failure itself.    (My fellow blogger, kindly commenting, suggested self-awareness could help with this;  but feelings are feelings; they are not always mitigated by rational thinking.)

Anyway!  I realized today that I had a poem about this very issue:

Firefly

As a child, I was told that I was a star,
whose brilliance would light up the world like a jar
filled with fireflies.  In the place I grew up,
we’d crouch in dark grass, catching them in the cup
of a hand that they quickly transformed into heart,
a roseate, luminescent, star part.
From palm, we would pour them into our glass,
so we could catch more, faster than fast.

Then, everything changed. Maybe it was the time
when the man I had loved would no longer be mine,
or when all the freedom I’d anticipated
could no longer be fully emancipated.
Jobs couldn’t be quit, hours must be put in,
the soiled re-washed, the fanciful shut in.
My erstwhile fresh talent now seemed like old rot,
I had to be happy with what I had got.

Now, when I think back to that life as a star,
I see less of the firefly, more of the jar,
the air holes on top we made with a pick
used to pry nuts from shells, a sharp metal stick.
It tore holes that were cutting, jagged beneath,
and could easily pierce an insect’s bright sheath.
I think of those holes, the sharp underside
that ceilinged that glow, that unreasoning pride.

(All rights reserved.  From Going on Somewhere, by Karin Gustafson – available on Amazon.)

PS – I am relinking this post to Victoria C. Slotto’s blog liv2write2day, to answer her prompt about singing one’s self.

PPS – for a much more lighthearted view of young adulthood check out my comic teen novel, NOSE DIVE.

Categories: parenting, poetry, Uncategorized
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Pa…Pa…Pa….

September 19, 2009

Looking at clips of the Papageno-Papagena duet from the Magic Flute.   (Here are some links:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz8suhKilcQ (poor quality tape, but Met production) and  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87UE2GC5db0.

I remember as a child watching the movie made by Ingmar Bergman, how amazed I was that an aria could have “pa” as its primary word, and be so joyously silly.   Ah Mozart.

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More on Conditioned Parental Love- The Magic Flute

September 19, 2009

Still thinking about the New York Times Article “Mind:  When Parent’s ‘I Love You’ Means ‘Do As I Say’, by  Alfie Kohn (published September 14, 2009) now in the context of Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute), by Mozart.  (I saw a dress rehearsal today of the Met’s wonderful production, designed by Julie Taymor.)

The story does not make much sense:  there is the romantic prince hero, Tamino, and the pragmatic everyman hero, Papageno, the conniving, deceptive, alluring, mother, the Queen of the Night, and the wise but endlessly testing father figure-cum-holyman-cum wizard guy (with a very deep voice) Sarastro, and too, the beautiful soprano Pamina who is a bit of a pawn swapped among them.

There is much that is supernatural:  the Queen’s helpers who in Taymor’s production sport oversized (almost Mayan looking) mask faces; the Three Spirits, little boys in underwear with bleached spiked hair and long wispy beards, who ride on a puppeteered flying bird, the birds themselves, dancers with flamingo heads, and ballet-slippered stilts.

There are slaves and betrayals and endless, seemingly arbitrary tests of character, meant (a) to purify the suitors, and (b) to separate the wheat from the chaff—that is, the strong, manly, silent types from chatty pragmatic everymen but more importantly from deceptive wiley women.  Wisdom and love, and some really great robes and headgear, are the prize.

While the story highlights the importance of steadfastness, bravery, self-discipline, the ultimate savior is music.  The power of music is represented by the magic flute given to the princely Tamino (oddly by the bad Queen of the Night), the magic bells or glockenspiel, given to Papageno, the pure songs of the Spirits.  But, overwhelming all of that is the sublime, beautiful music of the opera itself, composed by Mozart towards the end of his life.

This time, watching the opera, looking at the subtitles, trying (a teeny bit) to make sense of the story, I could not help but think of the New York Times article about parental love, and the effects of negative and positive conditioning, particularly, negative conditioning;  described in the article as parental withholding of affection to make children mind.

Die Zauberflote, which, of course, is in German, is a model of positive and negative conditioning (mainly negative).  Love is repeatedly withheld, both by authority figures, and even lovers themselves; punishment is meted out. Papageno, at the opening of the Opera, gets a padlock attached to his lips to teach him not to tell lies;  the Queen of the Night curses her daughter to make her try to kill Sorastro;  Tamino himself, must withhold affection from Pamina to pass his wisdom test;  the wizardly Sorastro says that vengeance does not live in the temple of wisdom, but also orders his bad servant, Monostatos, to get one hundred lashes; Papageno is threatened with a life of bread, water and imprisonment if he doesn’t give his hand to the withered old lady who is the disguised Papagena; Papageno is also nearly struck by lightening for chattering;  and even Tamino’s whole testing regimen is a bit of a punishment, arising from his original distrust of Sarasto and allegiance to the Queen of the Night.

It’s hard to come up with the positive conditioning–it’s mainly there in the form of false promises, I suppose, the promises of the Queen of the Night in particular.  (Praise and offers of rewards which should not be believed.)

In short, the path to love and wisdom and truth winds in and out of punishment, withheld affection, and artful alluring deception.   It’s a path that can only be negotiated through discipline, and with the help, the wondrous, miraculous help, of music.

Okay, it’s a cliché.  (And yes, I did see Amadeus)  But I couldn’t help thinking of the young Mozart, practicing the harpsichord  under the stern eye of his father, then overcoming all obstacles in his path (the crowned heads of Europe, but also that very same father) with the marvelous music he played and created.

In the opera, there is a bit of an exemption from all the discipline for the less high;   Papageno, the everyman, who says he doesn’t need to inhabit the exalted halls of wisdom for happiness, but is content with a glass of wine and a little turtledove wife, has slightly lesser trial.  These are passed by energy, good humor, loyalty, and, of course, the miraculous power of music;  in this case, the magic glockenspiel.

I sure wish I had one.

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Spenserian Sonnet (Still Not Keats)

September 18, 2009

Last night (well, very early this morning), I posted an example of a Shakespearian sonnet, which is probably the most common form of sonnet in English.   Another variation is the Spenserian sonnet, named for Sir Edmund Spenser, (author of the wonderful wondeful Faerie Queene.)

Spenser (1552-1599) was born and died a little before  Shakespeare (1564-1616).   Although their lives overlapped, my very brief research has informed me that the group of Shakespeare’s sonnets were not published until 1609 well after Spenser’s death.  They were apparently without Shakespeare’s permission.   Two were published a bit earlier, but likely also after Spenser’s death in 1599 (also without Shakespeare’s permission.)  (And this was well before the internet.) 

Spenser’s form is slightly more strict than Shakespeare’s.  A more limited rhyme scheme requires the poet to stick to the second set of rhymes of each quatrain in beginning the next quatrain.    This makes for a series of couplets throughout the poem and not simply at the end:

A
B
A
B
B
C
B
C
C
D
C
D
E
E

 

The couplets interspersed in the poem can create a beautiful echoing effect.  However, as in the case of the Shakespearean sonnet, that darned couplet at the end can be a real problem.   (See yesterday’s post concerning the difficulty of ending a sonnet without sounding like you are neatly “summing up” all that came before.)

Even so, a sonnet is a fun, flexible, form. 

A couple of pointers:  (I pass these on, not as a sonnet expert, but as a sonnet lover.)  

The rhymes (and meter) make music.   I believe this music works best, however, if it subtle,  almost a kind of murmuring, rather than a series of “bada-bings.”    (Remember you are writing a sonnet, not a limerick.)

The subtlety can be achieved by using run-on lines; these are lines in which the thought or sentence does not end with the rhyme at the end of the line, but in which the thought or sentence runs over.  This means that these is no pause at the end of each line, unless it is called for by a comma or period.   

 The use of run-over lines requires that some care is taken with respect to punctuation.  (Readers! please follow the punctuation.) 

Additionally, I like NOT to capitalize each new line as I feel that encourages a kind of pausing at the end of the line, and to discourage a more flowing read.   

Spy Games

We played spy games galore in the basement.
Running spy games with the boys, our bent hands
guns, till sweating we lay down on cold cement,
shirts pulled up, chests hard.  Not much withstands
the leaching chill of earth, the deep down sands
beneath a childhood basement, except perhaps
the burn of nipple, the future woman’s
breasts.  Our spy games just for girls had traps–
some of us played femmes fatales, poor saps,
while the leader girl was Bond–0-0-7.
She hung us ropeless from the bathroom taps,
then tortured us in ways that felt like heaven,
the basement bed our rack, what spies we were,
confessing neither to ourselves nor her.

 

(All rights reserved.  Karin Gustafson)

 

 P.S.  Check out 1 Mississippi.  (It’s neither Spenserian or Shakespearean, but it will teach your child to count.)

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