Robyn Ryle's Blog, page 10

The sweet convergence of beer and poetry

Folks, it is both Day 7 of National Poetry Month and National Beer Day! The stars are truly aligned.

I wrote a poem about beer once, but I can only remember the first stanza. Could that be, in an ironic twist, due to the brain cells I lost from drinking beer? Who cares? It was worth every moment.

Here’s what I do remember of that poem:

Shiner Bock, earthy bottle

Brown and brown and yellow red

Ooh, I love the taste of you.

Yeah, it’s probably for the best that I don’t remember the rest of it. Thank you, beer! I wrote it after a weekend at a women’s studies conference in Furman, South Carolina, so I think the rest of it was about a girl I had a crush on. I feel certain the poem didn’t get any better than that.

I tried to find a better beer poem, but there is a sad lack of good poetry about beer. Someone should work on that. Not me. I’m off to celebrate National Beer Day.

Happy Opening Day!

Here’s a baseball poem for opening day from Hobart, a literary magazine that features baseball fiction, nonfiction and poetry every April, as anyone self-respecting magazine should.

BASEBALL’S CRUEL LEXICON
Nicholas Mainieri

Can you wield an ash club? Can you be dumb?

Crown the contrite in a golden sombrero—

We’re speaking of salvation, god damn it,

And only the incurious break slumps.

Hack away, conjure strength to punish

Five ounces of bound yarn, cork, and rawhide.

Four-six-three, crisp as a cracking whip.

Six-four-three: means, motive, opportunity.

These are recipes for double murder.

Sinking fastballs seek to saw off thumbs,

So choke up and bleed one through, set a man free:

He flees far-flung second and rounds third.

He comes close enough to see old spike scars

In pale exposed bone, his safety set in clay,

Before they gun him down in his own door.

To have come all this way, to still have died.

It happens just so each night of summer.

Don’t pray for mercy in this brutal game.

Nicholas Mainieri‘s work has appeared in various magazines, including several past Hobart baseball editions. He lives in New Orleans. Visit him at nicholasmainieri.com and on Twitter, @nickmainieri

Recipe for a Winter’s Day in Three Courses

Mr. Bear and Stumpy

Georgia Bellas, also known sometimes as Mr. Bear Stumpy, is both one of the kindest and most talented writers around. Along with stuffed animals Mr. Bear and Stumpy, she hosts the Violet Hour Saloon on Boston Free Radio, a show with music, poetry, fiction, interviews and more. Her poem from PANK Magazine (an online magazine which you should also check out) seems perfect for day five of National Poetry Month, as we get ready to sit down to an Easter day feast. Enjoy.

Recipe for a Winter’s Day in Three Courses
GEORGIA BELLAS




StarterSmoked meats,

nitrate free.

Local cheeses:

Peppered goat cheese

from Colrain,

Franklin County Camembert.

Good bread.

Pinot noir from southern France,

Languedoc region,

in 50-cent Goodwill glasses

etched with wild geese.

There are two birds

on each,

endlessly flying one

after the other

over tall grasses,

again

and again

as I turn them

in my hands.

***

Main course

We had an extra glass of wine,

the windows steamy,

snow falling

as in a snow globe

when we walked back

to find the vegetables

a little too mushy.

All soups have their own stories,

you told me,

and that makes this one.

Split pea soup is now

first snow, red wine, possibilities:

ingredients I wish I could bottle

and file under a new name –

one that could call forth

this particular moment,

bowl and bread and you.

Call it Auspicious-Friday-

Winter Night-Northampton

Bus Trip-Bad Picker-

Hopeful Dreamer-January

Soup. Words that mean nothing

to anyone else;

one of those recipes that never

comes out exactly the same

but is worth trying to get right again.

***

Dessert

The chocolate bar came with

instructions:

Look. Breathe. Snap.

It was Black Salt Caramel,

the salt from Hawaiian volcanoes,

which erupt

when I place a square on the roof of my mouth.

Hold it

there

with your tongue and

press.

The chocolate will melt in 30 seconds,

you read aloud

in a voice as smooth

as the cacao.

Listening to you is like

licking the burnt sugar caramel,

is music.lamplight.two bodies

on the floor

inches from kissing,

mouths sharing a taste

from an exotic place.

A vacation could last forever

in these endless minutes

but after awhile

we breathe again.

The Robin

An English robin looking very cold

A friend reminded me of this old nursery rhyme. My mom used to say it to me all the time. That, and singing “Rockin’ Robin.” It seems appropriate on a chilly Saturday morning for National Poetry Month.

 

 

 

 

 

The Robin, or The North Wind Doth Blow

The North wind doth blow and we shall have snow,

And what will poor robin do then, poor thing?

He’ll sit in a barn and keep himself warm

and hide his head under his wing, poor thing.

Full fathom five thy father lies

Day Three of National Poetry Month–why not Shakespeare? There’s something about the last stanza of this song from The Tempest that sticks with me. I don’t know why. Can’t imagine the first time I heard it. In my head, this is the only part of Ariel’s song.

But then again, of course I know why it sticks in my head. It’s the beauty of those first six words-“Full fathom five thy father lies.” The alliteration of all the ‘f’ sounds. The internal rhyme of ‘five’ and ‘thy’ and ‘lies.’ The rolling sound of the iambic pentameter. All that, plus the imagery. Your father is gone, dead, buried deeper than deep beneath the ocean. His bones turned to coral and his eyes turned to pearl. It’s creepy and beautiful and sad.

 

from The Tempest

Ariel’s Song

Come unto these yellow sands,

And then take hands:

Curtsied when you have, and kiss’d

The wild waves whist,

Foot it featly here and there;

And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear.

Hark, hark!

Bow-wow.

The watch-dogs bark.

Bow-wow.

Hark, hark! I hear

The strain of strutting chanticleer

Cry, Cock-a-diddle-dow.

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Ding-dong.

Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.

Healing

Day two of National Poetry Month. A friend sent me a few quotes from this Wendell Berry poem a month or so ago and it was so reaffirming. Exactly what I needed to hear at the moment. We go away into solitude precisely so that we can better commune with others. The two are connected. And the point of art is that circle–that membership. If your art isn’t somehow connected to the idea of that community, then what are you doing?

 

Healing


I

The grace that is the health of creatures can only be held in common.

In healing the scattered members come together.

In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.

II

The task of healing is to respect oneself as a creature, no more and no less.

A creature is not a creator, and cannot be. There is only one Creation, and we are its members.

To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive in the Creation, to keep the Creation fully alive in oneself, to see the Creation anew, to welcome one’s part in it anew.

The most creative works are all strategies of this health.

Works of pride, by self-called creators, with their premium on originality, reduce the Creation to novelty, the faint surprises of minds incapable of wonder.

Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In loneliness one assumes a responsibility for oneself that one cannot fulfill.

Novelty is a kind of loneliness.

III

There is the bad work of pride. There is also the bad work of despair, done poorly out of the failure of hope or vision.

Despair is the too-little of responsibility, as pride is the too-much.

The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.

For despair there is no forgiveness, and for pride none. Who in loneliness can forgive?

IV

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health. It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it, we lose loneliness:

we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.

V

And by it we enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.

Only discord can come of the attempt to share solitude.

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.

One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.

In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.

One returns from solitude laden with the gifts of circumstance.

VI

And there is no escaping that return.

From the order of nature we return to the order and the disorder of humanity.

From the larger circle we must go back to the smaller, the smaller within the larger and dependent on it.

One enters the larger circle by willingness to be a creature, the smaller by choosing to be a human.

And having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness. For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest.

In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest.

In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.

VII

Order is the only possibility of rest.

The made order must seek the given order, and find its place in it.

The field must remember the forest, the town must remember the field, so that the wheel of life will turn, and the dying be met by the newborn.

The scattered members must be brought together.

Desire will always outreach the possible. But to fulfill the possible is to enlarge it.

The possible, fulfilled, is timely in the world, eternal in the mind.

Seeing the work that is to be done, who can help wanting to be the one to do it?

But one is afraid that there will be no rest until the work is finished and the house is in order, the farm is in order, the town is in order, and all loved ones are well.

But it is pride that lies awake in the night with its desire and its grief.

To work at this work alone is to fail. There is no help for it. Loneliness is its failure.

It is despair that sees the work failing in one’s own failure.

This despair is the awkwardest pride of all.

VIII

There is finally the pride of thinking oneself without teachers.

The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.

In ignorance is hope. If we had known the difficulty, we would not have learned even so little.

Rely on ignorance. It is ignorance that teachers will come to.

They are waiting, as they always have, beyond the edge of the light.

IX

The teachings of unsuspected teachers belong to the task, and are its hope.

The love and the work of friends and lovers belong to the task, and are its health.

Rest and rejoicing belong to the task, and are its grace.

Let tomorrow come tomorrow. Not by your will is the house carried through the night.

Order is the only possibility of rest.

–from Wendell Berry’s

What Are People For?

“America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel”

No April Fool’s Day here. It’s National Poetry Month and I am not a poet, but if you write, you owe something to poetry. So here’s a good poem for today in Indiana, one of my favorite poets. A man who was much better than the Beat writers he gets lumped in with–Allen Ginsberg. Read this poem or even better, listen to Ginsberg read it here and understand, this shit is supposed to be funny. Laugh out loud. Go ahead.

America

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January
17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I
need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not
the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back
it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical
joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday
somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid
I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses
in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle
Max after he came over from Russia.
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by
Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner
candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Business-
men are serious. Movie producers are serious.
Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of
marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable
private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour
and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of
underprivileged who live in my flowerpots
under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers
is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that
I’m a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly
mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as
individual as his automobiles more so they’re
all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500
down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Com-
munist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a
handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and
sentimental about the workers it was all so sin-
cere you have no idea what a good thing the
party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand
old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me
cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody
must have been a spy.
America you don’t really want to go to war.
America it’s them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen.
And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power
mad. She wants to take our cars from out our
garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers’
Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.
Him big bureaucracy running our fillingsta-
tions.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read.
Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us
all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in
the television set.
America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes
in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and
psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

- Berkeley, January 17, 1956

Madison Monday: #WeAreIndiana

Needless to say, a lot’s been going on in Indiana the past week or so. And a lot’s been going on in our own little neck of the woods. I’d like to tell you just a bit about what I’ve seen, here on the ground in the Hoosier state, where we don’t have the option to boycott Indiana because this is home.

- 10,000 Hooosiers signed a petition asking the legislature not to pass SB 101 and then asking Governor Mike Pence to veto the bill. Neither the legislature nor the governor paid any attention to those voices.

– Thousands of Hoosiers showed up on the steps of the state capitol building in Indianapolis the Saturday after the bill passed to protest SB 101. Similar protests happened in Bloomington.

Let me stop here to say, neither of these things are surprising to me. There is nothing freakish about the people of Indiana. Like the rest of the country, we are generally supportive of LGBT rights. Eighty percent of Hoosiers agree that gay and lesbians have the same civil rights protections as others.

If Indiana is freakish in any way, it may be the degree to which our legislative districts are gerrymandered, and this gerrymandering is, not surprisingly, controlled by Republicans. In addition, Indiana had the lowest voter turnout in the 2014 midterm elections. Why did Republicans in the Indiana legislature go against the wishes of the majority of their “constituents”? Because the majority of Hoosiers, either through gerrymandering or not showing up at the polls, didn’t actually elect them. If the majority of Hoosiers are to be held accountable, it’s for allowing democracy to fail in this way in our state.

– Seven major universities and colleges in the state have made statements condemning SB 101, including my own institution, Hanover College. This last statement from Hanover is especially damning, given that we have the unfortunate distinction of being Governor Pence’s alma mater and having given him an honorary degree.

– Individual cities and towns like Indianapolis and Valparaiso have organized to defy and refute SB 101.

– Writer Erik Deckers quit his job working for the state tourism board in protest over RFRA.

– Locally, Hanover College professors are signing an open letter that even more strongly expresses our outrage at Governor Pence and the Indiana legislature.

- Also locally, Madison residents are assembling a list of businesses to promote Madison as a destination for gay and lesbian weddings to demonstrate that we are more than open for service.

– Day after day what I see among my fellow Hoosiers is sadness and shame. Outrage and bewilderment. How did we let this happen? How can we un-do it?

Even with all this good news, it’s been a hard week to live in Indiana, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a Hoosier. I wasn’t born in Indiana. But I’ve lived here a total of almost eighteen years now. Soon, I’ll have lived in Indiana longer than I’ve lived in any other place. I’ll always be from Kentucky, but I don’t believe in hating or despising or condescending or disdaining the place you live. If you’re going to live somewhere, you sure as hell better try to love it, the good with the bad. Then commit to making what’s bad a little bit better.

No place is perfect. If you think it is, well, I don’t know how to say this gently, so I’ll be blunt–you’re full of shit. If you live in New York City, you voted in a mayor whose administration instituted stop-and-frisk, a policy that has been shown to discriminate against black and Latino youth and which some say is probably unconstitutional. In California, you passed Proposition 22 in 2000 which banned same-sex marriage, and then in 2008, Proposition 8, which also banned gay marriage for a short period before being ruled unconstitutional. I sincerely wish Indiana had a monopoly on ignorant, discriminatory legislation, but unfortunately, that is not the case.

SB 101 is a direct response to the legalization of gay marriage in Indiana. Make no mistake about that. It’s sole purpose is to condone discrimination. I hate that it exists. I hate that it happened in the state where I live. I don’t hate Indiana, because that would mean hating all the good people who find this bill deeply offensive. If it’s possible for there to be one good thing that’s come out of all this, it’s seeing all the people who are really done with this kind of idiocy and hopefully, willing to take back this state.

Update:

Just since yesterday…

- I saw this Open for Service sticker in the window of Red Bicycle Hall, our premier event/music venue in Madison.

– The IndyStar ran this full-page editorial in Tuesday’s edition calling for Governor Pence and the legislature to enact a law that will make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. As my friend Cathy Day pointed out, this is a newspaper that when she was growing up, ran a Bible verse at the top of each edition.

Madison Monday: Arts Here Now!

Just in case you missed it, last week the Madison Area Arts Alliance received great news from the Indiana Arts Commission that Madison has been named to the State Cultural Districts Designation Program. This designates us as an official cultural district, joining cities like Nashville, Bloomington, Carmel, Columbus and Lafayette. We all know we more than belong on that list.

As a board member on the Madison Area Arts Alliance, I was able to read the amazing application for this designation put together by Kim Nyberg and other members of the board. If you’ve lived in Madison long, you’ve probably noticed that per capita, we have quite a lot of creative people around. You can’t walk down the street without bumping into an artist of some sort. The application meticulously catalogs that creativity and reading it kind of blows you away.

The Madison Area Arts Alliance (MAAA) and the cultural designation include all kinds of artistic expression: fine arts, culinary arts, theater, writing, photography, music, writing and artisan/folk art. One of the goals of MAAA is to help artists in the area connect, network and foster community, so we’ve been hosting roundtables with artists in these eight different areas. I went to the writer’s roundtable at Village Lights and it was so great to be able to sit in a room full of local writers. We talked about the writing life in general, but also about what might be helpful to folks in the writing community here in Madison and the surrounding area. As a writer, building community is sometimes hard, and it’s great to have an organization helping to facilitate that.

MAAA is a relatively new organization, but when you think about all the creativity in our town, the possibilities are endless. I’m excited thinking about the places we might go and proud to have our community officially recognized for just one of the things that makes it great.

The website for MAAA is still in progress, but if you’d like to get involved, you can find their e-mail and phone number, here. Also, follow them on Facebook to keep up-to-date on art events in Madison.

 

Closer

Lately I’ve been writing things that are a lot closer to my real life. My life, as in things that happened to me. Stories that dance just at the edges between fiction and nonfiction. I call them stories, but they could be essays. I find the only way I can really much sit down to write something called an essay is to first tell myself that I’m writing a story. I have to trick myself that way.

Like this story at Wyvern Lit, “Your Life in Other Places.” I submitted it twice as an essay. Then as a story. I guess it’s hard to say what’s true when you’re writing about how you imagine your life someplace else. But I did want to live in a little house right down the street from my parents in Kentucky. There was a house I had picked out in Jackson, Mississippi, down by the railroad tracks. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan really is too cold for me. I do love how my hair looks when I’m in Florida. That’s all true.

There’s another story I’m sending around and one of the editorial comments I got (along with a rejection–drat!) was that they loved the voice. Which is good and interesting, because it was pretty much my voice. It was me talking. Then there’s the story I’m working on now that’s based on a letter my sister wrote to me when I was in high school and a boy, I think his name was Jefferson, she met at summer camp. All true stuff dressed up a little bit, so that the character is not really my sister, but something of that letter remains.

It’s interesting to stick so closely to the path of my own life. You can tap into a whole reservoir of feelings, like hitting a gold mine of energy. You don’t have to ask yourself what this character was feeling. You know. You remember.

Then I wonder if it’s so easy, why didn’t I do it more in the past? There’s always a tiny grain of truth somewhere in the stories I write. A real person or situation lurking behind the words. But before, I didn’t usually sit down and think to myself, “I’m going to write this pretty much the way it happened.” Maybe I lacked the courage.

Maybe it’s something I had to sneak up on. I had to take a long, leisurely walk before I could come back to this particular place. I had to pretend disinterest. I had to get my footing before I could step  onto this particular stone, slippery and unstable in the middle of the stream. Even now, it’s a little precarious, balancing here.