I’m back – it took 13 hours door to door Saturday (and Sunday, since I arrived home at 3:00 AM). Five beds in seven nights is a rough way to travel. I missed the best day in recent Phillies history – tho Krishna fed me the play-by-play of the last half-inning of the division-clincher over the phone – and just about all of the Phils short tragic run in the playoffs, getting to hear a little more than one inning over ESPN radio while I was stuck in Seattle traffic Thursday waiting for a train to go by. Then the signal went dead & by the time I was able to get it back, in the parking lot for the Bainbridge Island ferry, the 10-5 rout was complete. When I noted September 28, that

in recent years, wild card teams have had a better than average chance of taking the whole enchilada. That’s usually because they’re performing at playoff intensity for two, maybe three weeks before the playoffs even begin….

I wasn’t even thinking of the Colorado Rockies. Tho they had obviously had a good run, I just presumed that they were too far back and that there were too many decent teams still competing for the wild card spot – the Phils, Padres & Mets, even the Braves – for the Rockies to sneak past them all. But obviously, they have the hot hand right now, and in the playoffs that matters. Plus, once again the cliché held true: good pitching always beats good hitting.

America’s first poet laureate, Joseph Auslander

It’s worth thinking about this, five years later:

I have never thought of myself as an experimental writer, but this project is clearly a step into un- (or at least under-)charted territory. My idea is to write briefly from time to time mostly about my writing and whatever I might be thinking about poetry at the moment. Other subjects (music, politics, etc.) may enter in, as they do in life.

Blogs have been around for awhile now, but to date I haven't seen a genuinely good one devoted to contemporary poetry, so it may prove that there is no audience for such an endeavor. But this project isn't about audience. The fact that the blog has the potential to carry forward the best elements of a journal and seems inherently prone to digressive, if not absolutely plotless, prose gives me hope that this form might prove amenable to critical thinking.

Ron

That was my first blog, August 29, 2002.

Five years hence, the audience question appears to have been answered – by the size of my blogroll more than the number of visits I’ve had here. It’s no longer even remotely possible for me to keep my list of other blogs up-to-date. My presumptions – that this format was conducive for critical thought and (not clearly stated above, I see now) that there was a hunger among poets for the ability to discuss craft, books, trends, politics, whatever, outside of the funneling framework that is the academy – were correct.

Another unstated presumption – that I would be able to do what I wanted in notes no longer than the one above – has proven shakier, to say the least. I had during the previous year tried a few such notes, modeled after Adorno’s Minima Moralia, a book that’s haunted me for 25 years, but my sense of the “finished” essay had me polishing single paragraphs for weeks. Few were ever completed & I never published any of them, even here. The looser, more ad hoc template of blogging proved far readier to get across what I was after.

My world in 2002 was very different. My twins were just ten years old, for example, and we could vacation in a two-room cabin, a considerable change from the five-bedroom manse we had last week in North Carolina. Gil Ott, Robert Creeley & Jackson Mac Low were all around. All were poets whose wisdom I looked to as a guide for my own actions. The Iraq War referred to something that happened during Bush I. Bush II was saying bellicose things about the government of Iraq, but relatively few people actually believed he would be stupid enough to initiate another war without even catching Bin Laden. The governor of California was Gray Davis, the most aptly named politician ever. Few people outside of their immediate circles had ever heard of Barack Obama, John Roberts or Samuel Alito. The population of the city of New Orleans was 484,000, some 210,000 greater than it is today. Forbes in 2002 named Britney Spears as the world’s most powerful celebrity. Later that year, Senator Paul Wellstone & his family would die in an airplane crash. The San Francisco Giants would win the National League Pennant only to lose the World Series to the Angels. Barry Bonds hit 46 home runs and drove in 110 runs, the same number of homers & 13 fewer RBIs than he had during his first year with the Giants in 1993.¹ In 2007, Bonds, reduced by age to a part-time role (he has just 314 at-bats thus far), still leads the Giants in homers with 27.

Blogging, it turns out, has changed the world of poetry in ways that I don’t think we fully realize just yet. There are poets who have begun their careers through blogging, at least one literary genre – flarf – that has its roots there, more than a few collections of physical books that have grown out of blogs. Blogging embodies, more than any other phenomenon I know, the web’s ability to erase or otherwise transform the limits of geography. Poets are linking up on the basis of mutual interests, which is a great thing, especially if you live somewhere other than New York or San Francisco. That ultimately may be its greatest impact. The constrained model of national poetics with which I grew up in the 1960s has little bearing on what actually is happening now. Poets like Sina Queyras, Christian Bök, or John Tranter are not merely instances of Canadian or Australian poetry. A poet like Tsering Wangmo Dhompa can have an impact both as an American poet and in her homeland of Nepal. Of these four, I believe only Queyras has a blog – my guess is that no more than one in ten English-language poets have active blogs, which still means that there are at minimum 10,000 publishing poets in the language right now, a number I would contrast with the low hundreds of poets publishing during the 1950s.

Of the various concepts and phrases I’ve come up with here over the past five years, none has generated more wrath than the School of Quietude. Perhaps the two most common complaints are that the idea is too simplistic and that it describes poetry as it existed at some moment in the past, but not now. Both criticisms are largely correct. There is a project – one for which I have no stomach, personally – filling in a far more adequate mapping of the conservative tradition(s) of poetry, first in the United States and then more globally. The phenomenon means something quite different in the U.S., in the islands (not just England, Ireland, Scotland & Wales, but Jamaica & New Zealand as well) and in other parts of the world – I make a point of noting English-language articles about poetry from Nigeria & India, for example. The day is coming when we acknowledge that they’re as much a part of “English literature” as anything done in Amherst. And not just the writing that mimics what was being done in London in 1805 either.

I will, of course, continue to note the depredations of the School of Quietude where they seem apparent – every single American poet laureate, with the sole exception of William Carlos Williams in 1952 (who was appointed but never served, largely for reasons of health), has been a member of this same small coterie dating back to its creation as the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1937, endowed by Archer Huntington, the semi-legitimate heir to Collis Huntington, one of the railroad barons of the 19^th century. That sort of institutional oligarchy may not be as prevalent as it was, say, in the 1950s, but it has hardly disappeared. On the other hand, Huntington’s endowment has become less of a reward each year. $35,000 in 1937 would be worth $491,364 today, using the Consumer Price Index as our guide to inflation.²

 

¹ With the sole exception of 2001, the year he hit 73 home runs, Bonds’ numbers from 1993 through 2004 are absolutely consistent. The idea that Bonds suddenly “got powerful” outside of that one year is a fiction.

² Some other guides suggest a value as high as $5 million.

I’m going to be heading down to the Outer Banks for a few days, and, as always when I’m trying to take a vacation, I’m leaving the laptop tethered to its docking station. I may post while I’m gone, should I wander into a library or similar web-connected facility, but I’m making no promises.

A vacation from my QWERTY keyboard seems appropriate for this blog’s fifth anniversary, which comes up next week. I thought up this little venture on the porch to a two-room cabin on Brier Island, off of Digby Neck along the southwest corner of Nova Scotia, on just such a vacation. Who knows what’ll come to me this time?

This blog had its 1.25 millionth visit yesterday, which means that there have been 250,000 additional visits since it passed the million mark just last February. That seems amazing to me, also humbling, but as I’ve noted before, the real news this year has been the number of page views, which shot up dramatically last September as several classes added the blog to their reading lists. Still, the blog set a new mark for the most visits on a single day just last Thursday. And last weekend I got a lovely thank you note from a poet in Iran. The idea that I might be doing something useful for poets in such faraway places pleases me no end.

There’s a certain irony in being added to syllabi, given my existence well beyond the periphery of the academy. The days when I could easily say yes to a short-term visiting writer’s gig pretty much vanished with the birth of my kids – my stint last year at Naropa was made possible only by a sabbatical on my day job, and there’s no guarantee that will happen again in this lifetime. Over the past twenty years, I’ve turned down a couple of permanent, even tenure-track teaching jobs that paid a fraction of what I make in the computer industry, as well as a number of invitations for one-class or one-semester adjunct spots. If anyone offered a serious position, I’d seriously consider it. But it would appear that the chances of that happening are about the same as the Democrats ending the war in Iraq.

So I think what I’m going to do for the next week is just to put my feet up, slowly read my way through this stack of books here that have been calling my name now for some time, and then maybe go down to the beach & stick my feet in the water. See you in September.

Krishna & I took one of our kids up to summer camp in the northeast corner of Pennsylvania Tuesday & rather than drive close to five hours back, we headed over to a B&B along the Delaware Water Gap, a genteel-but-funky place on 162 acres of land. There was only one other couple staying there that night, whom we didn’t see until breakfast the next morning when they came over from their cabin on the far side of a little lake. We all got to talking & after this went on for awhile, I headed back upstairs to clear out our room. While I was thus engaged, Krishna mentioned that I’d been up since 4:30 writing poetry. “Oh,” sez the fellow, “my brother-in-law is a poet. Did you ever hear of Clayton Eshleman?” And that, in turn, led to a seriously long conversation.

ж

When I got back home late Wednesday, there were literally hundreds of emails waiting, one of which, from Kent Johnson, informed me of Dmitri Prigov’s death. There is something completely unsettling in the death of someone whom you think of as being “your own age,” as I do Prigov. In typing up that minuscule note for the blog below, I saved the file to the wrong name & thereby wiped out about three pages of links I’d plan to run today. If I had one that was important to you, please remind me & I’ll try to fit it in over the weekend.

 

 

A very nice review
of
The Age of Huts

Obviously I owe
Andrew Ervin,
of whom I’d not heard before,
some serious thanks!

Ron Silliman: Spring Readings

Philadelphia
Friday
May 11
7:00 PM, Last Word Bookshop, with Christina Davis, a Mad Poets Society event, hosted by Leonard Gontarek, 220 S. 40th Street (near Walnut),  215-386-7750

Baltimore
Saturday
May 26
8:00 PM, i.e. reading series, with Tom Mandel, at Dionysus Restaurant & Lounge, 8 E. Preston Street, 410-244-1020

Washington
Sunday
May 27
7:00 PM, Bridge Street Books, with Tom Mandel, 2814 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, 202 965 5200

Philadelphia
Sunday
June 3
3:00 PM, Gil Ott Poetry Event, Robin’s Bookstore, with Alicia Askenase, Julia Blumenreich, CAConrad, Ryan Eckes, Kristen Gallagher, Eli Goldblatt, Chris McCreary, Jenn McCreary, Bob Perelman, Ken Rumble, Joshua Schuster, Frank Sherlock & yours truly. Tim Peterson will be honored for winning the First Annual Gil Ott Book Award for Since I Moved In. 108 S.13th St., 215-735-9600

New York City
Sunday
June 17
7:00 PM, Zinc Bar, with Jessica Smith, 90 W. Houston, corner of LaGuardia Place, 212-477-8337

I’m going to be on the road for the next week. I hope to keep posting, but one never knows. At least the snow has finally melted here in Chester County.

It’s here!

I’ve been “tagged” by J.P. Rangaswami to reveal 5 little known things about myself, and then to tag five other bloggers. Here goes:

1)      I may be the oldest person named for the 40^th president of the United States. I’m older than Ron Reagan, Jr. Of course, Ronald Reagan wasn’t president yet when my mother latched onto the name, he wasn’t even the head of the actors union. My mother thought he was a non-starter as an actor & that all that would remain soon enough was this wonderful first name. She used to tell me (and everyone else) this tale regularly when he still hosted GE Theater and did Borax commercials in the 1950s. When Reagan ran for governor, my mother stopped telling the story. When he ran for president, she started denying it.

2)      On the morning of my second day on my first job post-college, I successfully negotiated the peaceful surrender of an escaped convict from San Quentin.

3)      I learned how to use computers (1982) before I learned to drive (1988). An everyday occurrence nowadays – my boys were gaming before they were four – but unheard of in my age cohort. [However, poets not driving, e.g. Robert Duncan or Jack Gilbert, or being slow to learn, like myself or David Bromige, is not as uncommon as you might think. When I finally took my first real driving lesson, my instructor had just come from a student named Ishmael Reed.]

4)      I’m the son of a cop. My father served on the Oakland and Albany police forces in the late 1940s & early ‘50s. Neither job ended well.

5)      My secret guilty pleasure is the TV series Mythbusters, which follows a team of special effects artists checking out such life-or-death questions as what is the role of nucleation in the effect of Mentos dropped into a bottle of Diet Coke. Among other things, Mythbusters’ need for safe places to wreck cars, explode any manner of items or pulverize the show’s cult mascot, crash-test dummy Buster, forces it to use the best locale shots of the Bay Area since the early days of Streets of San Francisco.

My five tags here go out to Jonathan Mayhew, Eileen Tabios, Jordan Davis, Joseph Massey and K. Silem Mohammad.

From an article in the New York Times about yet another bookstore closing:

There are currently about 2,500 independent bookstores in the United States, not counting stores that deal only in used books, said Meg Smith, a spokeswoman for the American Booksellers Association. In 1993 the number stood at about 4,700.

At this rate, which I actually suspect is still accelerating, the number of independent bookstores in another 14 years will be well below 1,000, maybe even less than half that.

Now let’s ask the next question. How many of these bookstores have a decent poetry section? And what do I mean by decent? That’s one of those questions like defining obscenity – you know it when you see it – but I think it tends to have a few obvious characteristics:

It’s not the furthest most back corner of the store.

It’s more than a single section of one book case.

Most importantly, a majority of the books are from small presses. University presses, by any definition, are not small presses.¹

And a sizeable majority of the books should be by living authors as well.

Beyond that, I think it becomes a question of taste, of which books as much as the mere presence of them.

So just how many of the 2,500 independent bookstores in the United States qualify as having a decent poetry section? Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee most obviously. It may be the only bookstore in the country that completely meets those four simple criteria.

City Lights in San Francisco certainly has a large selection, and it’s conceivable (tho I’d have to double check) that it fits the small press/living author criteria as well. But one could easily argue that the “poetry room” up the back stairwell – it used to be a storage area, I think – is about as far off the beaten path in that venue as you could find. I’ve never seen anyone up there, whenever I’ve been in the place, who had wandered into the poetry section by accident. Which pretty much kills the serendipity/seduction element of poetry, which is supposed to be one of the major arguments for an independent bookstore, rather than just buying your books from Amazon on the web.

I’m less certain that Open Books in Seattle fits the small press definition, tho it’s possible – it is one of the few bookstores in the country with a total dedication to poetry – and I haven’t been in Grolier’s in decades. Modern Times in San Francisco puts poetry reasonably up front, and always has a decent portion of small press materials, but it doesn’t have a lot of books, and it reflects the problem of what happens when you don’t have a lot – you become totally dependent on the interests of a single book buyer and his or her take on verse. That may have been pretty good at a store like Pegasus in Berkeley back in the day when Steve Benson ran the store, but people like Steve are as rare as good bookstores. I know that Bridge Street in DC does a brisk online/mail order business in contemporary poetry – strictly because Rod Smith is the book-keeper there – but I don’t know how much of this is available to walk-in traffic. Out here in the boonies west of Philadelphia, the Chester County Book Company is a large independent – equal in square footage to a Borders or B&N, and that’s not counting the Magnolia Café or the accompanying record store – with a sizeable selection of poetry, not tucked way in back next to the maps. But the poetry section focuses almost entirely on the trades & university presses. Which is fine if I’m looking for Elizabeth Bishop, but not if I’m looking for Elizabeth Willis. Actually, the Chester County Book Company once celebrated March as “National Poetry Month” and, when I asked why, the manager said bluntly, “No one will notice.”

So the only other store I can think of right now that comes close to fitting my definition of having a decent poetry section might be Moe’s in Berkeley, where it’s right in the center of the main floor, has a lot of small press materials & a focus on living authors. Andrew Schelling set that arrangement up originally, and tho he has long since departed they haven’t screwed it up since. You can even look up stock online. Pretty close to a miracle if you ask me.

I’m sure – or at least I hope – that I’ll get a lot of comments today from folks about other bookstores that fit my four criteria. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

I used to feel that authors who put links to Amazon on their websites for their own books were being somewhat traitorous to independent bookstores. After all, if poetry distribution were up to Amazon & the two big chains, we’d all be reading Garrison Keillor anthologies or swooning at the latest translation of Rilke. But the question really is which independent bookstores. I can’t direct readers to my books at Modern Times because it won’t have them. Woodland Pattern doesn’t sell books online & Open Books does so only on a token basis. Indeed, tho it has a lively enough website, targeted mostly at events, exhibitions and fundraising, I could only find one image on the web of the outside of Woodland Pattern at all, on Bob Arnold’s website, which I’ve put up at the top of this note. That’s Cid Corman on the left.

So my links for my own books go first to the publisher if it has any kind of decent page for the item, and, if not, then to SPD. I’m always happy to support independent bookstores. But, frankly, if they can’t meet those four simple criteria, supporting independents bookstores feels pretty hollow. If they were all to disappear, we would have to get over any lingering delusion that poetry and “the book industry” have anything other than an incidental relationship with one another. And that might even be healthy.

 

¹ Think about it. There are at least 4,000 books of poetry now being published each year in the U.S. Of those, maybe 100 are published by trade presses. Some of these are collected editions by “crossover” authors like Allen Ginsberg, but most are no different from any other small press scene. Maybe 300 more titles are published by university presses. That means that, at minimum, seven out of every eight books of poetry comes from a small press.

Speaking of UC Press, you can now pre-order my next book, The Age of Huts (compleat), over the web. As you might imagine, I’m more than a little excited about this project, which is not only the first time that this entire project will have been in print in one place, but will also be the first time in 20 years that Ketjak will be available in its entirety in any form. Nor does it hurt that this is a press I’ve dreamed of having a book with ever since I was a student at UC Berkeley some 36 years ago. The book is scheduled to appear next April.

§

One place I am not this weekend is in Los Angeles at the Impunities conference. Apparently there is (or was) some printed literature that suggests otherwise, although I can’t find my name anywhere on the website. In any event, they did invite me but I never said yes, because my plans for this week were to be in Belgium. Now because of a family issue, I’ve had to cancel that trip as well. In any case, I apologize to anyone who attends the conference because they expect to see me at the REDCAT. In general, tho, it’s a bad idea for arts organizations (or anyone else, for that matter) to advertise people who have not agreed to appear at your event.

In winter 1947, my father, who had just turned 20, crashed a Cessna whose wings had iced up near The Dalles, Oregon, while smuggling alcohol from Portland to the “dry county” where we all lived in Southeastern Washington. He walked away from the wreckage, albeit with a broken back that kept him in the hospital for a few months.

In August 1965, while working as an electrician at a paper recycling plant in Charleston, South Carolina, he went into a utility building at the facility & flicked on a switch, not realizing that there was a gas leak inside. The ensuing explosion melted the pipes in the building. Again, my father walked to the ambulance, tho with third degree burns over 80 percent of his body. He lived for another eight days before his kidneys refused to process the poisons associated with all that burned flesh & he died. He was 38 and had been married three times, starting a family with each. Although I didn’t know it at the time, not having seen my dad at all since I was ten & then less than a half dozen times over the previous seven years, his death came on the tenth birthday of my half-sister Nancy.

Jack Spicer also died that week, just 40. Poets, like rock musicians & revolutionaries, have a rep for not living all that long. Over the years, I’ve gradually ticked off all the major poets who have had shorter lives than mine, a list that now includes Shakespeare (52 years old when he died), Dante (56), Chaucer (57) & Charles Olson (59). For me, tho, the real marker of age came some time back, in April of 1985, when I had thus outlived my own father.

So today I’m 60. I’ve been lucky. When my father was in the hospital with his broken back, I had a bad case of pneumonia, so bad according to my mother (I was all of six months old at the time & have no memory of this whatsoever) that the doctor had filled out a death certificate, leaving only the time of death blank. Fortunately, penicillin saved my life. That was just the first of a number of worst-case-scenario “could have beens” that I somehow sidestepped. Even in the past decade, the Department of Energy flew me to Seattle just to check out my thyroid – I was a “down-wind” baby back in the good old days when the Hanford Nuclear Reactor (the facility that built the bomb dropped on Nagasaki) took care of radioactive waste by putting it into steel drums buried next to the Columbia River. I made it through that one too.

I really don’t have a sense of myself being “old,” tho my twins may tell you I’m ancient & my knees might agree. I’ve been fortunate to finish the first three stages of my lifework – The Age of Huts, Tjanting and The Alphabet – and I hope in the next couple of years to have all in print at the same time, including the first complete version of The Age of Huts. I’ve come to understand that getting your work in print is one challenge – keeping it in print is a difficulty of a whole other level. Here too, I’ve been lucky & I know it.

Universe is getting started nicely, tho I can’t quite imagine how I’ll live long enough to finish it – the plan is for 360 booklength poems. So I’m building that eventuality into the form, or trying to. Or kidding myself that I can. In any event, the road ahead is clear. I have a great family. I enjoy my work. My health is not bad.I never saw anyone put this circumstance, or ones much like it, better than Bob Creeley: Onward!

There are at least two kinds of vacations - the frenetic "let's do this, let's visit that" mode & the "get away from civilization & chill" one. The past 17 days have definitely been in the first category, as most days (save for two in San Diego visiting a friend fresh out of the hospital and three in Yosemite, where we seemed to trade vistas for acquaintences) have been a cycle of visiting one person in the morning, another in the p.m., another at night for dinner. Every one of the four of us hit a wall of exhaustion at some point, so there were some modifications to this agenda (involving, as a result at least two of them, trips to Superman Returns and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, both of which are quite a bit more enjoyable than their reviews suggest, so long as you're not expecting Eisenstein).

Still, my one major regret as we head home today is the number of people I couldn't figure out how to fit in, or with whom my visits felt far too brief. In 17 days, 12 of them spent in the Bay Area, I actually got to San Francisco exactly twice, both relatively brief excursions. (It's great to see that the new DeYoung Museum has acquired, through a gift, Jess' The Enamored Mage, his portrait of Robert Duncan. It's Jess' most important portrait and the best one of Duncan as well.)

I get back to the Bay Area every year or two, so the changes here architecturally and geographically sort of sneak up on me (I saw AT&T Park lit up against the South Beach skyline from atop the Berkeley Hills last night for the very first time). The most indelible one, on this trip, is the degree to which traffic and population growth are impacting geography here. Coming from Yosemite just past rush hour on Wednesday, we could see the caravan of traffic packed tight on highway 580 as commuters head to Tracy, Lodi, Manteca and even Oakdale (in Oakdale we saw signage complaining about the repurposing of agricultural water for residential use, as this town from the east side of the central valley tries to maintain its farming base against the onslaught of tract housing). It is clear, for example, that it is far easier to get to San Francisco from Berkeley either by BART or over the Richmond-San Rafael & Golden Gate bridges than it is over the parking lot that is the Oakland Bay Bridge. I found myself on the Richmond-San Rafael bridge ten times during this trip, and avoided the Bay Bridge altogether. It felt as tho the area where I had grown up had been reconfigured, and that a new geography is in place.

There is a moment in An Inconvenient Truth where Al Gore recounts the familiar story that says that if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will hop out, but that if you put it into a pot of lukewarm temperature and gradually increase the heat it will stay until ... you rescue the frog. Traffic-wise, people in the Bay Area seem not to realize yet just how hot their own pot has become.

The autumn before my boys were born, Krishna and I rented a small cabin in the Sierras for a few days. It was the first time in a relationship that was then 13 years old in which we had actually taken some form of an “ordinary” vacation that was not also part of a reading tour or a flight home to visit the in-laws, or some combination thereof – I’d even used a reading to finance part of our honeymoon. The other alternatives had been literally to hitchhike up to Point Reyes, hiking in perhaps after a night at a bed &breakfast in Olema, camping the next night, then spending the third in a motel in Stinson Beach after hiking out the south end of the park.

The arrangement always made taking a significant number of books along problematic. Hitchhiking with a backpack & camping equipment pretty much limited me to three – two books of poetry (I remember one time it was Wendell Berry & John Keats) – plus whatever novel I was reading, and of course my notebook in which to write. Reading tours and trips to the in-laws weren’t much better, tho in fact I might take along as six or eight books of poetry along.

But that trip to the Sierras in 1991 was different in that, for the first time, we were driving somewhere in our brand new two-door Mazda 323, which meant that our storage felt limitless.¹ I must have brought along a dozen books & quickly found that the timeless quality of days away from work made for a perfect reading environment. Since then, we have gone on any number of car trips, but have learned always took along a lot of books & to try to build in as many days with little or nothing to do as possible.²

Yet each time, especially on two-week trips, I’ve largely run out of reading material, or at least run painfully short. I really hate having just one or two books of poetry to read at a time – it feels unnatural to me, I’m often in the middle of dozens at any given moment. Finding worthy volumes of poetry on holiday has meant buying a copy of Evangeline in the gift shop of the Digby Ferry as it crossed the Bay of Fundy, or being ecstatic at coming across a George Bowering title in a quaint little tourist shop in Victoria, BC. And I’m sure I’ve bought more School of Quietude volumes on vacation under just such circumstances than at any other time.

This year, however, I’ve tried something different, bringing along not one but two large backpacks filled with books, 37 in all, ranging from chapbooks to Shakespeare’s sonnets to a recent (but not the latest) Anselm Hollo “selected” & the big Lee Harwood collected that I’m still working my way through. A few books I’ve read before – Rae Armantrout’s Up to Speed, David Melnick’s Eclogs. And two have prerequisites, one a novel by Roberto Bolaño I won’t begin until I complete Marjorie Perloff’s memoir of coming to America, the other being the second big volume of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts, an incentive to completing the final sections of the first.

By the trip’s end I will have finished some 17 books, gotten more than halfway through Bolaño’s Distant Star, and read major portions of all the others. I’ll make note of some – not necessarily all – of my reading over the next couple of weeks.

 

¹ That sense of infinite space within a two-door hatchback disappeared quickly enough once we had twins to wrestle into car seats in back. This Mazda is still the car I’m driving most of the time, having gotten over 120,000 miles on the original clutch.

² Save for four travel days, that was our modus operandi this year as well. Our only other busy days consisted of one spent at Antietam followed by watching the recording of a show of Moutain Stage, and another spent partly birdwatching, partly being on the beach & finally watching The Brothers Grimm at an Ocean City cinema.

Hanford Nuclear Site

I was born just two hours too soon to have arrived on the first anniversary of Hiroshima. That I was born in Pasco, Washington, was itself a consequence of the Manhattan Project – there was housing nearby in Kennewick for military families, since the bomb that was to be dropped on Nagasaki was being constructed on what is now the Hanford nuclear reservation nearby. My paternal grandfather was the mayor of Kennewick for a time – the family still owns Farmers Exchange on Canal Street – & my father was a radio operator on the USS Meriwether, so it was convenient arrangement. After the Japanese surrender, the Meriwether ferried troops home from Hawai’i to the mainland. Only commissioned at the end of 1944, the Meriwether had seen a short war.

The “victory babies” of summer 1946 were the first burst of the baby-boom generation – it’s the one thing I have in common with both Bill Clinton & George W. Bush – we were all born within weeks of one another. As was Arkadii Dragomoshchenko – “same victory,” he once told me, “different army.”

Wars & governments have enormous impacts on the lives of people. My parents would certainly never have met had my father not enlisted at 16 & thus arrived one evening at a USO dance in the Bay Area. My mother’s family had been in Berkeley & Oakland since the early 1890s, but my mother was anxious to put a little geography between herself & her own mother. So there I was, an infant just over the river from a facility that was building nuclear weapons at a time when they didn’t even know about the possibilities of radiation.

My father had seen the devastation at Nagasaki first hand – the Meriwether sailors had taken relief supplies to the city in the days immediately following the surrender – although I didn’t know this for another half century, when I finally met my half-siblings in South Carolina & saw my father’s own photographs of the flattened, charred landscape.

The arrogance of power is a feature of power itself. In choosing to “deploy” the bomb on Hiroshima & Nagasaki, Truman was not behaving qualitatively differently than any of the other leaders during the Second World War. That is, to my thinking, perhaps the very worst thing about it – any of those men, given the opportunity, on either side, would have done exactly the same thing.

In 60 years, only one nation has ever used nuclear weapons on another population. Yet now the capability to do so is becoming widespread. Indeed there is a legitimate concern that this capability no longer is necessarily limited to states. There is a side of me that feels a gut certainty that the poor people of Hiroshima & Nagasaki were the not the last who will experience this terrible fate. Just as, after the Second World War, the refrain “Never Again” was coined, while one genocidal event after another have continued onward to this very day. Try that phrase out today in Darfur, for example.

Hiroshima Day demonstrations have been a feature of my birthday week my entire life. When I turned 18 on the day after the Gulf of Tonkin incident & was told that there were no draft counselors on the East Coast except in Philadelphia, I hitched down here on August 6^th and immediately set off for the Federal Building, certain that I would find a demo & people who could put me in touch with Coordinating Council of Conscientious Objectors. I was right.

Take a moment today to think about the people of Hiroshima & Nagasaki. And of Iraq. And pay a visit to the War Resisters League, the senior organization in the field of peace activism.