Sonnet and Trace

A year should seem busy to a writer, as a writer — or so one might judge from reading short biographies that appear in poetry magazines, such as the issues of POEM that have come to me this past year thanks to my contributions to those pages: a syllabic sonnet in issue 117, and a traditional one, in 118.

I remember that when the May issue arrived it surprised me yet came as a relief that some familiar names appeared alongside mine: for so often in these rushing years hard-won familiarities vanish — in the snow, it seems to me at the moment, having come inside after following a stray cat's solitary trace in light snow, down front sidewalk and along backyard paths and then away.

"And binding all is the hushed snow," Frost says in a poem about a place that one thinks has no snow, being always "verdured pasturewise." Heaven, that is — the heaven, perhaps, of Wordsworth. Yet Frost's line, even though it comes to mind, must point elsewhere than a trackless fresh snowfall: "And binding all is the hushed snow/ of the far-distant breaking wave." And that breaking wave — perhaps the wash of souls into Frost's heaven, or out from it.

And I remember the term "chicken scratchings" to describe writing — so that any collected poems might be named, Thus, My Chicken-Scratchings — to convey vitality or insignificance, but at least humility and humor.

This morning, in clearing the sidewalk, I pushed away traces left by boot, junco, Scottie dogs, bicycle, and the cat. The junco tracks delighted me, but went the way the other lighter ones did. The bicycle tracks surprised me, here in December, and remain despite my idle snow-pushing. I disliked seeing that a cat was going loose again in the yard, and so followed those traces. Such a busybody I was being, without planning to do more than stretch my legs and breathe fresh air after some reading.

None of which I set out to write — although all I set out to do was to say something about appearing in POEM again after going twenty years absent.

What I have said may as well stand in, though, for all the things unsaid.

Cheers ...

Bottling Bitter, Part I

It is a true statement that last night, as I write this, Martha and I were bottling her new batch of British Bitter (and to judge from my sips of the leftovers at the end of bottling, I believe it will be a little bit of all right, indeed ... ) -- a true statement, in a literal sense.

When I thought this morning of the phrase "bottling bitter," though, it struck me as a portmanteau expression for what a writer learns to do. You are often provoked into funks and rages and dumps and sournesses and embitterments by the inability of the world to deal even vaguely equitably with the efforts you expend in trying to make your society a more interesting place to be; and yet you learn that the naked expression of those effs, arrs, dees, esses and ems tend to diminish your public's receptivity rather than augment it or encourage it; and so, by and bye, you learn the Wordsworthian trick of absorbing, containing, and meting out. And maybe it is that you must learn this trick in order to succeed in your expressive, creative business of choice; and maybe it is that you must learn it in order to succeed in finding any ease of mind at all, when you have chosen a vocation (or a set of vocations, as I ended up doing) that consist of mainly batting your head against a wall (or walls).

And so maybe what it is that we learn, in emerging from our hot-headed youths and our flat-headed younger-middle years, is how to bottle bitter.

Bitter offers you moments of pleasant drinking -- if bottled and put away for a time.

How interesting, then, the thought -- that you get your bitter's full worth by proper preparation or bottling or aging; and you get your words' full worth by similar preparation or bottling or aging, not by their instant expression ... which is the approach to writing most associated with Wordsworth. Did Wordsworth like his bitter? No doubt -- but probably draught-style. Flowing from the keg, liberally -- but at the proper length of time after its first concoction.

Cheers ...