There's a Poetry Salon Today, At an Undisclosed Location

Consider it speakeasy art. I can obtain entrance for selected friends. The theme is music.

Say Groucho sent you.

Send in the Cows

Image by Wisconsin Historical Society via Flickr

Quite a successful P. Finley Memorial Poetry salon last night, I think.

Pawler hosted it at a spacious quintessential Berkeley house where she was pet sitting -- by quintessential I mean same-sex couple, three cats, a dog, lots of original architectural touches (including picture molding) that settle one down, as if the past is something which one need not flee just because we are locked firm in our embrace of the future.

The usual suspects shone -- The Wieder's "dumb superman" bit; McKenney's double whammy of Wallace Stevens and John Keats; a D-Hard poem from his Dylan Thomas' period. And speaking of Dylans, Newblood Mort read the lyrics to Desolation Row to great effect. (From such mash we brew our potent joy.)

There was more of a goodly nature, but let us cutteth to the chaseth, to the surprises. Pawler finished off the evening with a very effective personal essay involving the 303 books that were listed in the inventory of her father's estate during the time she duelled with sibs and established a conservatorship for his drifting self. (Ancillary point: The lawyers ripped off the estate by producing such a detailed inventory.)

The books were bookends for her essay -- and the spine of it, too -- as she paid tribute to the old man and the churn of love and hate we call family. It was touching and well done, and I suppose that was no surprise at all, Miss Pawler, but you never know what will happen when you toss someone into the cleanup slot at a salon. Lovely writing and lovely telling.

So the *real* surprise was David's telling of what it was like to do real harvesting on a real farm, a dairy farm in Wisconsin, somewhere East of Eden (Green Bay, actually). The declared salon theme was harvest, and people stuck to it to a startling degree. (I was startled. Salonistas are loathe to be told.)

David's reminiscence was short and detailed, about all the planting and reaping that milking 30 cows entailed. The *surprise* lay in the reaction. Let me tell something to my disadvantage. As emcee, concerned with nothing more than pace and none with joy, behaving as one might do running a chain gang, I was ready to give a quick back pat and move on. But Big Pat intervened, asking David about the smells of harvest and of the storing of the sweet, sour, flammable product.

And suddenly, and almost without precedent, we had a discussion of the details of farm life and of the possibility of city agriculture. I don't recall such a moment of real connection at a salon before. Oh sure we will ooooh and ahhhhhh at beauty, giggle when startled, wince when offended. But such give and take!

I call it Salon 2.0.

Well.

If Pawler steps up into the salon rotation and Lyle and Matt step up after Lyle's return from New Mexico, maybe we can jump start yet another cycle of salons, with me and E. doing our share but not making it our show. Pawler's was the first salon in mygod two years? I do love the salons. They mutate, it seems. Who would have thought we would find such pleasure in silage?

Postscript:

E. said hey boyo. Why you dint mention Susana's tribute to Sukkos, Gayle's beautiful Mary Oliver's, Daniel's autobiographical evocation of pain and connection and Kate's tales from a doomed garden?

And I said: oops.

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• These words are from a REAL dairy farmer. (timesunion.com)

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Most Anthologized Poem in the World? So I've Read

Keats

TO AUTUMN.

1.

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

2.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Coming Soon: A Poetry Salon! (Give Me Some Zombie Fries and I'll Get You In)

Go left and down and hit Salonista Central if you're curious. It's a wiki. I posted this today in the "memories of the salon" section. When it comes to words, I like to multipurpose.

MR: Just to start the ball rolling, I'll recount a fairly recent salon moment burned into these old retinas -- and into the old stirrup and anvil, too. It was a salon hosted by Lyle and Matt to which Lyle had invited some of her classiest musical friends, those interested in your classical music of equal amounts beauty and obscurity, a wonderful ride on the wayback machine, don't you know?

But these delicates did not know much about the salons and (I assume) assumed there would be a certain daintiness about the proceedings.

*Then came Wieder.*

He did a where-are-they now bit in which he managed to defame the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and all the Kennedys. Ah, the moment dances in memory, as half of us howled for the wit of it but also for the *Wieder* of it. But some of Lyle's guests physically recoiled, having come to the zoo to enjoy the peacocks and prairie dogs only to see the monkeys F**K.

You see, you have to earn the right to be at a salon. Wieder plunges you into an acid bath. When it comes to Wieder, that which does not destroy you, makes you laugh.

Don't Trash the White Trash

Smart piece in Salon today on the fact white Southerners -- particularly white men -- are about the only group liberals (my own proud affinity group) can reflexively trash as the Brain Scum of the earth. God knows I do it myself even though when my California brethren hear my accent too many of them want to slap me across the face to hear me say, "My daughter, my sister; my daughter, my sister."

And writer Michael Lind says;

Here's how I see it. Liberals should respect and promote the interests of working Americans of all races and regions, including those who despise liberals. They are erring neighbors to be won over, not cretins to be mocked.

The Word 'Miracle' is Also a Cancer

From 'Ask the Pilot' in Salon.

My gripe was with the media -- for its refusal to acknowledge the existence of first officer Skiles, for its "O, the humanity" histrionics, and for its gratuitous use of the words "miracle" and "hero." On the whole, news coverage served to trivialize the event rather than shed useful light on what actually happened. And at a time when the media has become unbearably superficial, is it so wrong to hold it accountable? Perhaps we need more cranks, not fewer.

For what it's worth, although lay readers tended to disagree with me, I also received several letters from airline pilots, unanimously thanking me for the piece. (I have, many times in this column, detailed the challenges of flying planes for a living, from the often lousy pay to the stresses of simulator training. I've done a good job, I think, of presenting this odd profession with respect, dignity and a degree of insight you aren't going to get anywhere else. Call it a conflict of interest, but I have spent thousands of words sticking up for pilots and the business of flying planes.)

To some extent, my complaint was a semantic one. There's little harm in celebrating the unlikely survival of 155 people, and we needn't quibble over the wording. But terms like "hero" and "miracle" shouldn't be thrown around lightly.

A miracle describes an outcome that cannot be rationally explained. Everything that happened on Jan. 15 can be rationally explained. That nobody was killed is due to four factors. They are, in descending order (pardon the pun): luck, professionalism, skill and technology.

A hero, to me, describes a person who accepts a great personal sacrifice, up to and including injury or death, for the benefit of somebody else. I never suggested that pilots were merely "doing their job," as several letter writers accused me of suggesting. It was considerably more than that, and nothing about it was easy. But I didn't see heroics; I saw an outstanding execution of difficult tasks in the throes of a serious

A Gift to the Nation