David McKelvie draws one of these every few days on his Stars Sliding blog, apparently. But they’re not always about Salt.
Me, I’m always partial to my portion of paté.
Tag Archives: poets
Craig Arnold is missing
I’m a bit late with this, as I never managed to get to it last night – or indeed during the day yesterday. The American poet Craig Arnold, in his researches for a book of “lyrical essays” on volcanoes, has disappeared on a Japanese volcanic island. He’s been missing for five days.
Craig’s friends and relatives organised a sweeping Facebook campaign yesterday morning (Or, I guess, Wednesday evening US time) to get the Japanese authorities to extend their search – which, by Japanese law, need only carry on for three days. But the island is covered with dense vegetation, and there are only 160 inhabitants, and helicopters have little visibility in that terrain.
The campaign has been successful, so far as that goes, with poets and bloggers (many with press connections) weighing in all over the place: I think the search is now confirmed to carry on till Sunday, and the number of news stories is growing by the minute.
But of course whether this means they will find Craig Arnold, and what shape he will be in, is another matter. I think the vegetation sounds like a good sign. Maybe he is managing to eat and drink something.
I’m inspired and sad at the same time, hearing this news and wanting to read this book of lyrical volcano essays; and also seeing how the poetry community is gathering round, holding a sort of worldwide vigil for our colleague, befriending him on Facebook and doing what they can to help.
Craig is the author of two collections, Shells (which was the Yale Younger Poets collection in 1998, chosen by WS Merwin) and Made Flesh – published last year by Copper Canyon Press. His poetry is lyrical, lushly textured, quiet yet full of wit, and extremely assured. I wish I’d read him before.
He was a runner-up in the 2006 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, run by Waywiser Press. Their site features two poems.
You can read Incubus slightly more easily in Poetry magazine, where it first appeared.
Craig was writing a blog, Volcano Pilgrim, about his researches and travels. It’s intensely interesting and I hope he is found and can resume it. I’ll link it in my sidebar.
The Find Craig Arnold Facebook group is the place to get official information, but the Best American Poetry blog, and the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog are both also relaying information as they get it.
Don Share is also updating with lots of info, including about congresspeople and embassies to contact to put the pressure on, on his own blog, Squandermania.
And there’s a review of Made Flesh here, with a funny, Donaghyesque story at the beginning of it. Who says poetry makes nothing happen?
And here is a vivid description from Mark Doty’s blog. Oh, dear, oh dear…
[Craig Arnold’s poem Hot is] the sort of complete, bravura poem that, appearing in a workshop, simply leaves everyone breathless, as if it were now up to us to “workshop” something operatic, artfully elaborated, and thoroughly achieved. Yeah, right. We did our best. The poem’s in SHELLS, and it’s one of Craig’s signature poems. I’m thinking too of Craig reading at Brazos Books in Houston, turning away from the audience between poems, then wheeling around and dramatically reciting each piece. He read like a performance poet, though his poems were anything but spontaneous; they were elegantly wrought monologues, the product of an exactingly formal intelligence. But how alive they sounded!
Craig’s last two blog posts, written on the day he went missing, April 26th, are both lyrical and quirky, and concern the bitter herb angelica.
He writes:
Angelica can grow immensely tall, nine or ten feet. In Northern Europe, the stalks are candied; in Iceland, they are eaten raw with butter; in Norway, the roots are made into bread. The herb has long held pride of place in folk medicine. In Earthly Paradise (1629), Parkinson extols the virtues of angelica to ease the stomach and “to expel any windy or noysome vapours.” It was also supposed to inspire disgust for alcohol – doubtfully, since it also provides one of the key flavors in gin, vermouth, Chartreuse and absinthe… The plant takes its name from the angel who is supposed to have revealed its medicinal properties to a dozing monk. Or from St. Michael the Archangel, around whose feast-day, May 8, it blooms.
Crushed in the hands, the fresh leaves are sweet, slightly musky – not quite mint, not quite juniper. It is a clean, windswept smell, the smell of meadow, of England, of green, the smell of a road after rain. It is the smell of a world in which there is nothing rotten or putrid or sulfurous, a world in which all of those things have been rinsed away.
Ealier in the day, though, he wrote:
In the parking lot of the restaurant, the island’s only restaurant, a crow is perched on the hatchback of a pickup truck. A cat leaps out from under the truck, makes a grab for it, but the crow is too quick, launches itself into the branches with two flaps of its enormous wings. As the crow is almost as big as the cat, with a wicked sharp beak, it is not clear which has been luckier to escape.
Your lunch arrives. You have no idea what you ordered, as you cannot read the menu, and neither of women working speaks any English, so you pointed and grunted and hope that you haven’t ordered entrails or sea cucumber.
Afloat in my soup
sweetbitter leaves – a flavor
I’ve never tasted
The same leaves have also made their way into the tempura. You have eaten deep-fried flowers before, but never a deep-fried leaf. What is this? you ask. The server smiles, pleased at last to have been asked a recognizable question. Ashitaba. Your phrasebook is entirely useless for conversation, but it does have a good glossary of food terms, and there you find it – ashitaba, angelica. It seems like a fine thing to eat in spring.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed and think of Craig managing to find something to eat and drink in the place where he has fallen and is, we hope, about to be found and brought out.
NOTE: editing in on May 9th. Craig’s partner Rebecca Lindenberg writes:
Though Craig himself has not been recovered, the amazing expert trackers of 1SRG have been able to make themselves and us certain of what has become of Craig. His trail indicates that after sustaining a leg injury, Craig fell from a very high and very dangerous cliff and there is virtually no possibility that Craig could have survived that fall. Chris will pursue what he can about getting specialists to go down into the place we know Craig is so we can bring him home, but it is very, very dangerous and we are not yet completely certain what that will require. The only relief in this news is that we do know exactly what befell Craig, and we can be fairly certain that it was very quick, and that he did not wait or wonder or suffer…
And read, if you want to, my post about the end of the search for Craig.
Filed under poetry
a fate worse than death
Edith Sitwell, 1927, by Cecil Beaton
Oh, to be a poet, now that April’s here! I have been a-wandering in Merrie Stratford-Upon-Springtime, just me, the locals, and five hundred million sixty-something tourists.I visited the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, inside which the Bardic One is buried; but I resented getting 2/3 through the sanctuary and then being hit up for £1.50 to go into the chancel and see the tomb. I don’t know: it was like a peep show. And I’m not enough of a tourist to care. So I left.
I sat by the river Avon and watched the sixty-somethings disport themselves for a bit, then walked about taking pictures with my phone – as you do – then walked about the town for a long time till my feet started to hurt, and then realised THAT’S what’s been wrong with my right foot lately! (Even with Don Share worshipping it, which he has assured me on Facebook he does. You know, only the most profound declarations make it onto Facebook.) My shoes! Clearly what is needed is something with a bit of a heel, a bit of a platform, some arch support in the form of – well – being a bit, though not too, high – and maybe rope around the heels… but black or brown? Black, obviously, with the dress; but then, further, why is the only pair of such a shoe in this town priced at £159? (And don’t say it’s because they are ineffably lovely and handmade and Italian. We knew that.) (The real answer is that we are in Chocolate-Box-Upon-Avon.) (There’s nothing in H&M.)
I bought two books from the pleasingly named Chaucer’s Head bookshop, and the bookseller (who bought it as a running concern) agreed that he thinks the name of the shop is delightful. I’ll wear one on each foot.
A tiny roll and a half of Adnams in a pub, where I read parts of Shakespeare of London, by Marchette Chute – one of my new shoes – a delightfully readable account published in 1951. What a find! Reading about the building of London’s first four theatres – Burbage’s Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose, and the Swan – I honestly got a bit choked up. I had to stop reading. It’s just as well, too, because I’m meant to be writing a poem about the City of London for my bit of the St George’s Day reading in Camden tomorrow night, and I’m trying to focus on a Shakespearean theme… I know! I know!! I do have an idea. It’s just doing it.
And first there’s this reading… (Well, first I’m going to have a shower. Right now I’m lying on my bed in the Hamlet Guest House eating treacle toffee out of a bag and typing this out.)
Now, Laura commented the other day, apropos my self-declared fatness and my understated black jersey frock, that “the great thing about being a poet is that you can wear what the hell you want, and people just put it down to artistic eccentricity, especially if you add in big dangly earrings and a couple of chunky, clinky bracelets.” This comment is to the fore today, really, especially what with my new book-shoes. (As it goes, I have a prejudice against huge dangly earrings. As to the bracelets, I already clank too much; I usually take some off before a reading so it won’t annoy the audience!) I really think there is no more tragic sight than some female poet taking the stage in frumpy clothing accentuated with enormous earrings; or looking too spangly because, hey, she’s a poet (and possibly a Wiccan as well); or wearing anything at all made of velvet, especially crushed velvet, or anything purple or self-consciously flowing; or trying to look like that but in chain-store clothing.
In short, I think we’ve lost the knack. I include myself in this. Is it because we all shop in chain stores? Is it because a well-cut suit is no longer the universal panacea? (I do favour little suit jackets, in fact, with jeans. I buy them in the old lady section of the department store.) Where is the woman in the clothing that swirls imperatively about her like a wave? Whatever happened to turbans, and brooches like tigers? The look so integrally strange that it is absolutely unassailable? Is it because we all have to hold down a steady job and fill in forms all the time now?
Edith Sitwell for example would never have worried. To have worn middle-of-the-road clothing with accents from Accessorise would have been for her a fate worse than death.
Anyway, I bought a book by her at the Chaucer’s Head this morning! Facade and other poems, 1920-1935. A delightful thing which will help me along my way very well, I think. Here is the passage which, opened to at random, made me buy it – the beginning of a poem called The Avenue:
In the huge and glassy room
Pantaloon, with his tail-feather
Spangled like ther weather,
Panached, too, with many a plume,
Watched the monkey Fanfreluche,
Shivering in his gilded ruche,
Fawn upon the piano keys,
Flatter till they answer back
Through the scale of centuries,
Difference between white and black.
The echo of Gérard de Nerval’s suicide note is chilling there, eh.
Now here’s a funny story, which Laura’s comment reminded me of. One day I was getting read to go out to a reading. My oldest kid, the one I refer to as the Urban Warrior, who has an impeccable eye, was then around 13 or 14 I guess. On my way out we had this exchange:
Me: Okay honey,I’m going… how do I look?
UW: (Looking me up and down) Like a poet.
Me: Oh my God, really? (Frantically investigating all my garments) What, is it the shoes? Should I change my shoes?
UW: It won’t help.
And now into the shower – maybe more coffee – and thence to the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Shop, where I hope to buy an enormous ballpoint quill pen and possibly some more toffees (for the kids).
Filed under books, clothes, London, Shakespeare, Uncategorized, writing
gashlycrumb poets: a fate worse than death
Or: Perishing to be a poet
Academics are so cold-blooded, don’t you think? Jeffrey H Gray writes gleefully of the obscurity and critical neglect that befell most poets in times past (which, let’s face it, we will soon enough be). Don Share on Squandermania quotes some of the modern-day identity politics hype and puffing from the later part of this article; but I was touched by these poor things, like Edward Gorey’s little “George, smothered under a rug”:
Nathaniel Evans (18th century) is “noted by most historians as a ‘fledgling versifier’ whose occasional verses were wholly ‘unremarkable.'” Elizabeth Akers Allen (19th century) “was considered a minor Victorian poet even by her contemporaries.” Her sentiments were “expressed competently, but with no attempt at innovation in style or content.” William Byrd’s (18th-century) “contribution to poetry is not at all significant.” Indeed, “he published merely a few short, uninteresting poems.”
In our present-day culture of inflation, such humble assessments are appealing. Faint praise is sometimes appropriate. Charles Henry Phelps’s “Love-Song” (1892), a political overture to Canada, makes a poor bid for immortality:
Why should we longer thus be vexed?
Consent, coy one, to be annexed.But even William Cullen Bryant (n.b., pictured above, slaving away that we might have something to read), surely a bright star of 19th-century poetry — the prodigy who, at 17, wrote “Thanatopsis” — is treated with disdain: “By the end of the 20th century, most critics pronounced him ‘minor’ when they took note of him at all.”
My own favorite entry, on Gertrude Bloede (19th century), sums up a poet’s bad dream of posterity: “Interest in her work, always limited, declined after her death.”
Filed under America, death, Living With Words, poetry
Baroque in Hackney 