Veterans Day gallimaufry--

A late addition to the medley here: Critic D. G. Myers with a list of 25 historical novels, including Catherwood.

It's the Veterans Day holiday, and I'm remembering with thanks the generation of my father, Hubert Lafay Youmans, who left life as an impoverished sharecropper's boy at 17 in order to join the Army Air Corps and ended up flying tailgunner in a B-17 in World War II. Lucky for me that he survived and came home to ride the G. I. Bill through Emory, where he met my mother, and LSU. His brother Dafford (bit of Welsh naming?) also served in Europe.

Meanwhile my mother's brothers were sprinkled around the world during the war: Louis, Martin, Leonard, James, and Hugh Morris. The last of them died recently, tucked into eternity. I'm also recalling their mother, Lila Eugenia Arnold Morris. People in the little town of Collins, Georgia said that she prayed all five of them home, on her knees every night, talking (wrestling, pleading, arguing?) to God. Miss Lila was quite the matriarch in her town, mother of nine children, eight of whom survived to adulthood.

My youngest played for the village parade and wreath-laying yesterday... That's a lovely thing for our children to do.

Tomorrow I am off to New York City with Rebecca, pleased to be meeting my fellow NBA judges for lunch on Wednesday. Then: the banquet and awards. It should be a day of great interest! Today I am getting ready and trying to boot the cold far away from me. If I have time, I'll do some tweaking in The Book of the Red King, as I've promised to send it on to Clive so he can be mulling art.

Upcoming: Thaliad appears to be on schedule for the tail of November or nose of December. Forthcoming poems in Mezzo Cammin and Books & Culture. And after that: two novels, both a bit unusual.

NBA glam? Luisa Igloria posted this link on facebook...

Quote for the day: I worry about a culture that bit by bit trades off the challenging pleasures of art for the easy comforts of entertainment. --Dana Gioia

About that quote: I know quite well that inside the mass culture is a band of people dedicated to making art of beauty and power--artists who attempt to work free of the reductive trends, fashion, and demands of the marketplace. The question is what happens when those people become invisible and no longer infuse the culture with their life. What does it do to them; what does it do to our culture?

"There and back again"

Rebecca Beatrice Miller

Still feeling worn from a lingering cold and travel, but I'm back from a day at The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont, where my daughter Rebecca and I attended Portfolio Day. (She is currently on extended leave after her sophomore year at Bard College, doing some writing and film jobs this month, and will probably finish up there some year in the future.) We stayed at the Coolidge Hotel for a week for one of their workshops five years ago, when she was a mere sprat of 15. Now she's turning in an application for a 2-year certificate.

We met faculty and staff, Rebecca enjoyed a portfolio review with Jon Chad, and we had a marvelous, jolly private tour with first-year student Josh. The students seem wonderfully pleased with their first year "boot camp" and more advanced work--there's a lovely mix of unleashed imagination and hard work on premises. Evidently they locked any angst-ridden students in the courthouse vault. (Maybe it was a bank once?)

The school seems to be in a fair way to transform the town and give it some much-needed support. Physically, it consists of three older, re-purposed buildings--right now they are housed in a grand former post office and later courthouse (or vice versa), Colodny's department store, and the Telegraph Office. The Charles M. Schulz Library had to move from a site by the river during Hurricane Irene (books not liking water), and now is housed in a wing of the Post Office.

I'll have to remember to put aside the graphic novels from this year's judging stint to add to the Schulz collection... (Yes, the National Book Award banquet is Wednesday, and I am taking Rebecca as my companion!)

That Which Snatches

There! You needed harpies today, didn't you? And harpies you shall have... And me? I have a dire need to dispose of a harpie-bug one of my children gave me, so I am going to rest up today and fiddle with The Book of the Red King and do some (alas) light house-drudgery. Tomorrow, White River Junction! Next week, New York City! I hope they will manage at home without me... No doubt they will.

Now you know why I give you a poem for today, rather than rattling on about the contents of my head. This one is from The Foliate Head (U.K.: Stanza Press), available via Stanza Press and elsewhere in Europe and via Amazon in the U.S.

If you're passing by for the first time, you might like to know that my other 2012 books are: A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, a novel inspired by events and people stretching over four generations of my paternal family line and set in the Depression, winner of The Ferrol Sams Award of Mercer University Press; the soon-out Thaliad, a blank verse post-apocalyptic epic from Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal. Right now the hardcover of the latter is on pre-order discount directly through Phoenicia. It will be available more widely at the end of the month. All three of these books feature exceptional design work, and two have profuse artwork by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, so I have pleasure in them as objects as well as records of what I have made "out of a mouthful of air."

This poem is about harpies, and it too is in blank verse. Wallace Stevens is to blame for interesting me in short blank verse. Or perhaps it is poet William Harmon, with whom I once had a chat about the blank verse of Wallace Stevens. It appeared first at Mezzo Cammin, where I have often published.

That Which Snatches

Vulture-like, the harpies wheel on updrafts
Or settle in the grove of wind-whipped trees,
Their small, secretive faces looking out
Without sign of interest or passion,
As pinched and harsh as soul heads on a stone
Propped up by mourning Puritans on land
Unused to buried bone: winged skulls that glare.
One is singing, Turn away, my bonnie,
Turn away home, and yet there is nowhere
To turn, no home when such weird sisters sing.
In Cretan caves they hang like ungroomed bats,
Letting locks hang, letting the lice parade,
Their molting feathers like some nightmare bed
Where no man fancies lying—that’s a truth
That galls, for only breeze that glances here
And there and then is gone could bear to kiss
Their shriveled, wicked purse of privacies.

Bedraggled, murderous, entirely foul...
If they had hands, the fingers would be small,
As leathery as paws for throwing scat
At queens or prophets. No respect, no cheer,
No proper sentiment for the flawless
Horses of Achilles, their own offspring,
That wept to smell the battle-scent of death.
No sisterly devotion to Iris
Tricked out in sunstruck iridescent drops.
They’ll shriek the dawn awake and howl for flesh,
Heraldic frights so ignorant of evil
They could be us—so self-absorbed, so free.
On branches in the bleeding wood of souls,
They shift their talons, sigh in sleep like doves,
Dreaming of men like birds of paradise,
Of leaf-winged forests tumbling in a storm,
The phoenix burning on her nest of myrrh
Who found this harpied world worth dying for. 

Light heart, broken heart, child heart--

Olana - Matthew Six

Mineral Pigments, Gold on Kumohada
60 x 48"
2007-2009

This modest little post is dedicated to my friend Makoto Fujimura, who lost 20 major works and 50+ smaller ones in the flooding of Chelsea's Dillon Gallery during Hurricane Sandy. He has served on the NEA board, founded International Arts Movement and Fujimura Institute, and is well known worldwide for his nihongan paintings.

Yesterday afternoon the mail brought me the most delightful little book by royal mail. I now have a beautiful Godine edition of the late Charles Causley's selected poems, and I have a paperback collected poems that I wish were a bit higher quality, but this is a little charmer: a paperback of the Selected Poems for Children, the poems chosen by him not long before his death.

"Among the English poetry of the last half century, Charles Causley's could well turn out to be the best loved and most needed." --Ted Hughes

I dearly love Causley and can't fathom why he's not better known on this side of the Atlantic puddle. Editor John Wilson introduced his poems to me some years ago, and I've been very glad of it.

Writers and readers cast a kind of after-burial vote for whose books will last and whose words are worth reading, and I'm casting one for Causley. Charles Causley is one of those still-water-running-deep people one longs to have known, and I could feel a little envious of those who have, were envy not one of the seven deadlies... Invidia.

In this book, one meets elephants and mermaids and sea-lovers and tales of kings or paupers that make one laugh or crack the heart. I've just started to dip into it here and there, seeing poems I know (like the marvelous "Timothy Winters" or "Mary, Mary Magdalene" or "Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience") and poems entirely new to me, bright or sometimes uncanny or grim(m). Here's a poem to drive a child--or you or me--out of bed and into the blooming sun:

Early in the Morning

Early in the morning
The water hits the rocks,
The birds are making noises
Like old alarum clocks,
The soldier on the skyline
Fires a golden gun
And over the back of the chimney-stack
Explodes the silent sun.

And here's one of his lively tales in small:

Charity Chadder

Charity Chadder
Borrowed a ladder,
Leaned it against the moon,
Climbed to the top Without a stop
On the 31st of June,
Brought down every single star,
Kept them all in a pickle jar.

Here's a snip from a jolly, longish poem called Three Green Sailors. Causley was a sailor, and that was the source of many a grief-struck or lovely poem of his. But this one is a comedy for children and the child-hearted, and reminds us that Causley was a teacher of young children. I wonder if he once recited this poem to a class:

Three Green Sailors

Three green sailors
Went to sea
In a sailing ship
Called The Flying Flea.
Their caps were round,
Their shirts were square,
Their trousers were rolled
And their feet were bare.
One wore a pigtail,
One wore a patch,
One wore ear-rings
That never did match.
One chewed baccy,
One chewed cake,
One chewed a pennyworth
Of two-eyed steak.
One danced to,
One danced fro
And the other sang the shanty
Haul Away Joe.

And here's a little weather poem especially for Mako, with the hope that his every painting day is a sweet Saturday:

All Day Saturday

Let it sleet on Sunday,
Monday let it snow,
Let the mist on Tuesday
From the salt-sea flow.
Let it hail on Wednesday,
Thursday let it rain,
Let the wind on Friday
Blow a hurricane,
But Saturday, Saturday
Break fair and fine
And all day Saturday
Let the sun shine.

The book is illustrated by John Lawrence, who traveled to Launceston, Cornwall to meet with Charles Causley and make sure his work was accurate to the place. Small, vigorous vignettes decorate the book and add much pleasure and charm.