En Route to Vermont

A small sojourn, of several weeks, down to the States ... taking, as usual, entirely too much stuff. We always drive down by way of the islands (North Hero, Grand Isle, South Hero) which takes a bit longer but the scenery alone is worth it.

A barrage of snowflakes cascaded into the windshield from just after the border on to almost Rouse's Point, and small parts of the lake remained frozen but by and large winter's pretty much gone here in northern Vermont. You no longer need a heavy coat and scarf and gloves and boots. What a contrast to back home in Trois-Rivieres where there is still at least four feet of snow in the back yard.

How wonderful to see the lake and mountains again, the farms and cottages and rolling hills--it's like a balm. We walked along Lake Champlain in the biting wind and popped into the new (at least it was new to me) creperie along the waterfront which was crowded, cozy and expensive. I just learned that one of my favorite used bookstores in town is going out of business. So many familiar favorite stores gone, now occupied by other, less interesting venues. It was a bit disorienting. On to Beantown tomorrow, but only as a stopping point on the way to Providence. I've unfortunately acquired even more items to add to my already burgeoning luggage--like books and gifts and fresh roasted coffeebeans whose delicious aroma leap out and remind me of those happy times in the Queen City when I used to live here. [Photo of Lake Champlain taken by Emily A. Cox].

Label it!

I got an email from Greenpeace today, saying:

By the luck of the Parliamentary draw, a private member's bill supporting mandatory labelling of GE food in Canada was randomly selected for debate in the House of Commons in April. The bill has a very good chance of becoming law. We have the power to persuade our federal MPs to support this bill and to choose us instead of Monsanto!

Bill C-517, presented by a Bloc Québécois MP, was debated during a second reading on April 3, 2008 . A second hour of parliamentary debate may take place in as early as two weeks, according to the House of Commons calendar. Following this second debate, the House will be called on to vote on Bill C-517 on mandatory GE labelling in Canada.

In the meantime, there is nothing preventing Canadian provinces from moving forward and adopting their own laws on mandatory labelling of GE food.

Write your MP if you support this.

Nitpickers Gone Amok

A retired professor and some colleagues exchange emails regarding their concern over what they see as a subtle deterioration of their spoken or written language. “I saw this in the newspaper yesterday, and it really disturbed me,” says one of them. “In this sentence, written by X, it seems to me that the subjunctive is not justified”-- after which he provides an example of the correct usage.

The slow creep of anglicisms into the French language in everyday discourse is alarming to some francophones. It's so pervasive, in fact, that even when I remember to use annuler instead of canceler, for example; or boycottage instead of boycott, other francophones tell me it's no big deal. ("People still understand you, right?")

In defense of the nitpickers and those annoying people who find themselves inadvertently becoming the grammar police, I must admit that I, too, sometimes exhibit similar behavior. Maybe it’s the editor in me, but when I see alot written as one word instead of two, or it’s with an apostrophe when it should be its (to denote possession), or hear people say “Walla!” when what they mean to say is Voilà--out jumps that cursed mental red pencil. (Ça me chicote un peu—mais pourquoi?!! ) It is why, I think, I can sympathize with the language purists to some extent. A little erosion is unavoidable. But look how many languages today have become completely extinct. The Melting Pot aside, the idea of One Language for All--if civilization ever came to that point--to me smacks too much of a numbing one-dimensionality.

Replacing words you can't spell or pronounce with easier-to-remember, substitute words reminded me of a friend I once knew from Czechoslovakia. His name was Vladimir. People at his workplace called him "Val" because, he told me, they found it too difficult to pronounce the consonants V and L together without a vowel stuck in between. So rather than try, they simply re-named him. Say your birth name is Josef (pronounced YO-seff.) How does that make you feel when you introduce yourself to someone and pronounce your name and instead of their repeating it, or at least attempting to repeat it, they say: "That's Joseph, right? In English your name would be Joseph. I'm gonna call you Joe (spoken as a fait accompli; i.e., your new name, to this person, is now Joe.)

How utterly arrogant a frame of mind that reacts to unfamiliarity with another culture or language, not by trying to learn something about it but by finding it necessary to ignore, redefine, or change it in order to deal with it. It shows a certain lack of interest and respect, I think, when one succombs to re-naming a person with a substitute name in one's own language, simply to make saying it "easier".

Not only native English-speakers engage in this unflattering practice, of course, and, to be fair, not all English-speakers do. (Perhaps more prevalent than anglicizing foreign names is the predilection, at least in the U.S., for nicknaming. If your name is Robert, for example, be prepared to be addressed and referred to, automatically, as Bob. If your name is Richard, who can guess what your preferred nickname might be? Dick? Rich? Richie? If you're a Barbara, you could be re-named Barb, Barbie or Babs; and if you're a William, it could be "Will", "Willie", "Bill" or "Billy". Take your pick.) (Bush's nickname for Vladimir Putin is "Pooty-Poot" . No comment, haha.)

In our French conversation class we are four. (Before, I would have said, "there are four of us. " The way I sometimes express a thing in English, I notice, has changed as a result of my living in Quebec.)

In class we all speak French with a “foreign” accent: Spanish, Russian, or in my case, "Murrikan". This is good for the ear because spoken French differs: Belgian French sounds a bit different from Algerian French; Parisian French differs from the French spoken in Quebec. Each French-speaking country has idioms other French-speaking countries do not use, much less understand.

When my Spanish classmates pronounce chaque as “chock” instead of “shawk”, or my Russian classmate trills her r’s (making prendre sound like “prrrrrrrrrrawndrrrah”, I learn something about the pronounciation patterns of their native languages as well. As my ancestors spoke Slavic, a rolling "r" is familiar, but Spanish pronounciation is not and it may someday come in handy to be aware of the how things are pronounced in Spanish. We all, in the class, somehow, understand each other when speaking French, though.

It’s the darn word contractions that continue to confuse! When I first arrived here, one day I heard my mate talking to the cat, murmuring something that sounded like “moan tee-CUR.” I recognized “moan” as the personal pronoun mon but the “tee-cur” was a mystery. I went to the dictionary and looked under the T’s. How would that be spelled in French? I wondered. Tikker? Ticur? Tyquer? What he was actually saying was mon petite Coeur (my little heart), but he somehow swallowed the “pe” part before the “t” and I heard the remaining portion, tite, as TEE. (What a delightful term of endearment for one's beloved pet: My little heart!)

All languages do this—contract or eliminate words in daily use. My French grammar says the sentence “Je ne sais pas” ("I don't know") should be spoken like this: zhe-neh-say-PAW. But that’s not how people say it here. You’re much more likely to hear it pronounced "Shay-PO." Moi, je pense ... comes out sounding like "Mwashponse ..."

Bostonians do this with their pizza, ha ha. (It's pronounced PEET-za by the rest of the world, but PEET-zer in Boston). "Square" is SKWAY-uh, "park" is PAWK, "car" is KAHH. (Pawk ya kahh in Hahvid Sqway-uh"). "Barb" sounds like BOB and "Worcester" is WOOSTA. "Gloucester" is GLAWsta. "Revere" is Reh-VEE-uh. "Leominster" is LEMON-sta. "Peabody" is PEA-buddy. "Waltham" is WALTH-ham but "Chatham" is CHATT-um. "Medford" is MEFFA and "Woburn" is WOO-ban. (I’m allowed to make fun of this because I'm a former Bostonian!)

Hey, that gives me an idea for a short story! A guy--let’s call him Bernie--becomes an obsessive compulsive nitpicker re: spoken and written language. He forms a little club whose six members take it upon themselves to scan published articles and monitor local television broadcasts, making a note of the grammatical inaccuracies. They then email each other and pontificate on the correct usage. Of course they’re all preaching to the choir, so to speak, but certain members are more observant than others and the less conscientious ones are made to feel, well, less important. One day the group decides to have an election to choose who will be their president. A hilarious competition ensues whereby each member tries to top the others in locating and presenting ever more vigorous erudition about the day's offending texts or emissions. They pout and squabble and bicker and the group finally ends up disbanding. Bernie finds a new soulmate.

Well, that’s as much as came to me this morning just as I was waking up, thinking about grammatical nitpickers and the peculiarities of language, and all things strange and wonderful about the French and English languages.

Fear of Fear

I really have to get over this elevator thing. Fear of elevators, fear of flying, fear of high places--three long-time, debilitative personal phobias.

Pema Chödrön , in The Places That Scare You, on page 103, also wants to know more about "no fear."

"To the extent that we stop struggling against uncertainty and ambiguity, " she says, "to that extent we dissolve our fear." (How am I struggling against uncertainty? Are my fears because I don't accept or embrace uncertainty or ambiguity?)

"The synonym for total fearlessness is full enlightenment--wholehearted, open-minded interaction with our world," she continues. (I try to act wholeheartedly and open-mindedly with the world. I can't say, though, that that qualifies me as being "fully enlightened".)

"By learning to relax with groundlessness, we gradually connect with the mind that knows no fear."

Aha! There's the crux of the problem: relaxing with groundlessness.

Is that like stepping into an elevator en route to, say, the 57th floor, in a state of perfect calm, knowing the cables won't break and you'll go crashing to your death in a mechanical box, unable to escape? Or sitting in a plane, in a state of perfect calm, knowing the plane won't crash, sending you to your death in a mechanical tube, unable to escape except in small, scattered pieces? Or climbing the steps to some high, high place, in a state of perfect calm, knowing you won't get dizzy and fall and hit the pavement so hard you break and die? Even when I'm grasping onto a bannister or someone "holds" me or prevents me from falling, I still feel ungrounded being in high places (4th floor balconies, rooftops, stairwells).

"Connecting with a mind that knows no fear" -- what does Pema Chodron mean by that?

I can see where one might overcome the fear of the Fear of something. Say you were once afraid of flying but somehow overcame that phobia and now no longer fear getting on a plane. That's not to say that if you were in an airplane whose engines suddenly quit or you realized your plane was headed into the side of a mountain during a storm, that you would necessarily be in a state of perfect calm, or "fearless".

I guess if one can accept and feel comfortable in total groundlessness (such as being okay with the fact that your time is up on this earth and this is the way you're going to exit, so you just shut your eyes and accept that it might not be quick and painless), then that is what Chodron means by "connecting with a mind that knows no fear."

Ha, easier said than done.

I realize that I am still very far from this mindset. Because look at my collective fears--they all occur when I am in a situation over which I have little or no control. I'm not "outside" the elevator or airplane, or "grounded" (i.e., I'm climbing up AWAY from the ground). I seem to have to be both grounded and free, able to move about without constraints, not in a mechanical box or tube from which I cannot immediately exit, or on a catwalk where I can't immediately step onto the ground again--otherwise I get claustrophobic, dizzy, or fearful.

And it seems intimately connected with the fear of death. Death is like going under anesthesia (which I also don't much like). Because it's the end of consciousness. You slip into a big, black Nothingness.

How does one let go of the need to be grounded? Of the need to know? to see and understand? to Be?

I have finally come to the point where I think I can relinquish the need to know--that if I arrive at the end of life without having found the truth of something, or understood the why of something, it would not greatly disturb me, as the journey was interesting.

It's that final "letting go", that willful surrender of the need to be able to control (or negotiate) the circumstances under which certain events might take place, that is hard.

It's like leaping into the abyss, without a safety net. I've "lept" before in certain situations where uncertainty was paramount, and was glad I did. I've yet to do it, unfortunately, with leaping past the Fear Monster when it comes to elevators, airplanes and heights.

Why is this so hard?

The Unbearable Suffrage of Lucidity

A friend and I recently had a long email discussion about words and feelings, intellectual honesty and the unanticipated perceptions of others re: our writing. In the end we agreed to disagree about certain issues.

“You’re a Verizon and I’m a Sony,” I told him. “We’re just wired differently. Doesn’t mean we can’t connect, on some level.”

And then he said a curious thing. He admitted that he sometimes "suffers from lucidity. "

Now why would that cause anyone to suffer? To be lucid is to be suffused with light, have full use of one’s faculties, clearly understand something--to be in a state to be able to perceive the truth of something directly and instantaneously.[1]

This friend often encourages me to write, even when I sometimes don’t want to. Sometimes he gives me odd assignments, like during the 2006 World Cup soccer games, he said to watch a particular match and write a poem about it. Talk about challenging! I’m not a spectator sportswatcher though I like the game of soccer. He gave me three days to come up with a poem.

So I sat there, glued to the television set, pen in hand, waiting for inspiration to knock. It was raining and the field was muddy, the players were soaked. Their wet hair dripped, they brushed the rain out of their eyes, it was a mess. A sea of fans in the bleachers, all wearing red, simultaneously waved and undulated to shouts of victory for the underdog team. The sound, the movement, the colors, the tension, the rain, the whole atmosphere formed an impressionable image that spoke to me, and the words slowly trickled from my head to my pen. I drew a parallel between what was going on in that soccer game and an event that had taken place earlier that week in Iraq. I later sent the poem out and somebody actually published it. So I am grateful to my friend for sometimes urging me to push the envelope, so to speak, to get out of the box of self-limitation and find, in a contemporary event, the link to something bigger, something universal.

Anyway, when I commented on the weirdity of the idea of lucidity being burdensome, and said maybe I would write a poem about it, he said: Yeah, do it.

Well perhaps it’s not all that weird, come to think of it. How many times do we know something we would prefer not to know? (Ignorance is bliss, and all that.) Or maybe it’s sometimes a question of quantity, like with information overflow. Too much truth can sometimes wear you down. (Not that I would choose ignorance over knowing.) I’m just saying, sometimes it can just get a bit... heavy.

I think that’s what he meant by the suffering part of it. Sometimes you just want to turn it all off and go blank, go to an empty space where everything disappears and you can mentally breathe again. So the suffrage of lucidity can be looked at from many different angles. Now if I were to write a poem about that, how would it go?

THE WEIGHT OF LUCIDITY

I understand what this all means but not my part in it.
Everyone’s got an opinion; the more articulate of them
form schools of thought whose theories we accept,
reject, or are simply unaware of.
Who cares.

Life is like a playground filled with pretty toys
Sorrows, joys,
fun-filled rides and crushing tides
and everyone sometimes thinks about it, talks about it,
maybe even obsesses over it
(or just plain doesn’t give a damn).

We judge one another, call a man “brother”,
betray our friends, sit at the bed of a dying loved one,
trudge off to war, hide from ourselves, hug our children
like there's no tomorrow.
We know what we know, we fear what we don’t,
and sometimes our little boat capsizes,
hurtling us into the murky waters of
unbelief.

The flow of fluidity, jammed by stupidity,
rescued by hope. Things go off course,
nothing is as it seems, nightmares mix with dreams,
a kaleidoscope of perception, and …
there’s no key.

Sweet clarity, when the swirling subsides,
when you finally understand
or think you understand
even as you sense that it may not be the all of it--
that you may die and never know
the All of it.
But that’s okay.
It really is.
You’ll see.

-- Annie Wyndham (my pen name)

No writing today

Today's the anniversary of the fifth year of this war in Iraq. I remember the day it started, in 2003, and the dark feeling that suddenly engulfed me, and the numbness that followed.

I've been re-reading some Russian poets and came across this line today:

"This cruel age has deflected me, like a river from its course..."

Of course, Akhmatova was speaking of a different time and from a different place when she wrote that. For every situation, no matter how awful, someone can always name a worse time. (Can one blame the madness that prevails on one's century or particular decade?) But I can relate to her words, nonetheless re: deflection, where it bumps you off track, never mind the reason. Is that why when I sit down to write lately, I don't know where to begin?

And how many verses have I failed to write!
Their secret chorus stalks me
Close behind. One day, perhaps,
They'll strangle me.

-- Anna Akhmatova, Leningrad, 1944
[Excerpt from: "This Cruel Age Has Deflected Me," in Poems of Akhmatova, trans. Stanley Kunitz w/ Max Hayward, 1970]

Imagine being stalked by your unwritten words. "Now see," they nag, "if you had just let us out..."

An even more absurd scenario--arguing with your cerebral archives! They don't so much strangle as clamber to be released. You've kept them in mental storage for so long that when you finally go and sort things out, you need about another 20 years to finish. (And this is for who, exactly? Who will ever read it?)

Akhmatova on writing verse:

I have no use for odic legions,
Or for the charm of elegiac play
For me, all verse should be off kilter
Not the usual way.

If only you knew what trash gives rise
To verse, without a tinge of shame,
Like bright dandelions by a fence,
Like burdock and like cocklebur.

An angry shout, the bracing smell of tar,
Mysterious mildew on the wall...
And out comes a poem, light-hearted, tender,
To your delight and mine.

Click here to hear her read it in the original Russian:

Мне ни к чему одические рати
И прелесть элегических затей.
По мне, в стихах все быть должно некстати,
Не так, как у людей.

Когда б вы знали, из какого сора
Растут стихи, не ведая стыда,
Как желтый одуванчик у забора,
Как лопухи и лебеда.

Сердитый окрик, дегтя запах свежий,
Таинственная плесень на стене...
И стих уже звучит, задорен, нежен,
На радость вам и мне.

-- Анна Ахматова,21 января 1940
[From The Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse, at this web site.]

March 19 -- In Quebec, this is the day most people who have summer veggie gardens start their seeds indoors (feast of St. Joseph). I have a feeling we won't be able to transplant to the soil until mid-June this year, though, as two months may not be enough time to melt all this snow!

March 19 -- Cinq ans de guerre en Iraq. What a complete fiasco that's turned out to be.

The Many Voices of No

Saturday, March 15:
I'm sitting in a clunky yellow schoolbus (along with 29 others), looking out the window at the passing fields of white. Cars and lawns and porches and fences are still buried in snow as fluries slam into the bus's windshield. We are traveling an hour and a half by bus, in this awful weather, to march for two hours in the frigid cold, to just say No.

The manifestation in Montreal yesterday representated a myriad of voices saying No to the war in Iraq--now in its fifth year--No to Canadian soldiers being sent to fight in Afghanistan, No to the killings in Gaza, No to the occupation of Tibet, No to injustice and genocide and terrorism in all its guises.

The march was peaceful and orderly. Bystanders took photos, people in apartment buildings watched from their windows, cafe patrons briefly glanced up from their coffee, then returned to their conversations; those passing by on the sidewalk glared, or smiled, or laughed and pointed--or ignored and continued on with the morning's business or shopping, indifferent. A few joined in--a student on his bicycle, a young father pushing his toddler in a stroller, an old woman with a shopping bag.

Year Five, and little has changed. Why even bother? That's the unspoken question from at least one of the passersby, who, from the expression on his face, seemed to believe it was a complete and utter waste of time. "You are preaching to the choir. Who even listens anymore. Go home and shut up. You are irrelevant," his eyes seemed to be saying.

How frightening a world in which no one says "No!" anymore. Where everyone just accepts, acquiesces, allows certain madnesses to prevail. What does it matter what goes on millions of miles away in another land? I mean really, what does that have to do with me? I don't know any of these people personally. Why should I care?

When you're from one country but live in another, and feel affinity with yet a third or fourth that you have never even visited, and someone asks you, "What are you?" (meaning, "With which nation do you ally yourself?"), it's sometimes difficult to answer. Culture and ideology cut across boundaries, and no one label expresses the entirety of one's personal affiliations. "Citizen of the World" seems a somehow more inclusive, more accurate description.

On the march I noted the apathy, but also felt the anger and frustration. Both coincide amid the swirl of events across the land, here and "over there" and everywhere, and these disparate forces seem juxtaposed or meshed into one big, gray, ominous cloud moving back and forth through time. This is nothing new. Just when some things get better, other things turn worse.

What is it that makes some people indifferent, and others passionately vocal? Why are so many silent and complacent, and others so bothered by the exact same events? Why do people keep marching and protesting when nothing seems to change?

I can only answer for myself. Because I can't not participate, somehow. When you occupy a land and burn the monasteries and imprison the monks, as in Tibet, and beat and kill people who are simply voicing their protest, as in Burma, do not expect the world to be silent. When you go to war for one reason but change the reason and extend the war for yet another, and another, and then another, different reason, as in the debacle in Iraq, do not expect the world to be silent. When you little by little, take away a people's rights or commit atrocities in their name, do not expect those people to be silent.

Well, okay, many will be silent. A large percentage of the world's population simply doesn't give a damn. Or maybe they do, but there are so many other things to worry about these days--like jobs and rent and food and can I afford gas this week? And maybe not everyone who cares can articulate it, much less act on it. We shouldn't judge one another.

A lot of voices screamed out this weekend, for Iraq, for Burma, for Palestine, for Tibet, for an end to the madness in general.

Is anybody listening?

---------------------
[Photo 1: Manifestation in Montreal, Mar. 15, 2008; Photo 2: Tibetan exiles in a protest march in Dharmsala, India, Mar. 16, 2008. Tibetan exile communities, the public voice of a region now largely sealed off from the rest of the world, ramped up their protests on behalf of demonstrators inside Chinese-ruled Tibet. (AP Photo/Ashwini Bhatia).]

Winter Soldier

Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan kicks off in Washington, DC today, with hundreds of veterans of the two wars descending on the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland to talk about what they saw, and did, in the name of America.

About the Broadcast

From March 14th to 16th, Pacifica Radio will suspend regular programming to broadcast the historic Winter Soldier gathering in Washington, DC. The three day live broadcast will be co-hosted by Aaron Glantz and former Army medic and KPFA Morning Show host Aimee Allison. A live web-stream of the broadcast will be available through the War Comes Home website, as well as at KPFA.org.

-------

Le collectif Échec à la Guerre et l’Alliance canadienne pour la paix organisent une mobilisation pancanadienne dans le cadre d’une journée mondiale d’action pour en finir avec les occupations de l’Afghanistan et de l’Irak. Cette manifestation aura lieu à Montréal, le samedi 15 mars 2008. Le rassemblement est à 12h30 au Square Dorchester (coin Peel et René –Lévesque).

The Day After ...

Two Little Quotes and Another Snowstorm

Eggplant is a particularly good source of an antioxidant called chlorogenic acid, which is among the most potent free-radical scavengers ever discovered.
-- Dr. Weil

"Why is it that these monstrous triviliaties are so engrossing?"
-- George Orwell, in "Inside the Whale"

It is 8-pm-ish. We are in the middle of a raging snowstorm. Actually, a blizzard. I went outside to try and find Blackie, the stray cat we've been harboring the past week, nursing him back to health from a bad ear infection. Never mind that it's already like Siberia outside, the snow out back is four and five feet high in places; the "mound" out front, covering the entire length of the yard, is almost eight feet high. If you were to step out my front door, you would encounter a hill of the stuff and in order to reach the road you would have to climb up and over it and then jump down, but more than likely you'd sink in up to your hips and be stuck, which is what happened to me last month, out back. (Thank goodness I got rescued, thanks to an observant neighbor who happened to be looking out her window when I fell in.)

Anyway, about half an hour ago I walked out from the back door to the road from the carport but the wind was so fierce and visibility so poor and the snow blasts almost blinding, that I gave up my search. We're going to have to do some serious shoveling tomorrow morning. I hope Blackie's not buried somewhere, unable to get out. I have never seen this much snow in my entire life. This is March 8th. And it just keeps coming, and coming, and coming. And we are running out of places to put it.

Eye of the Beholder

Something one of Iris Murdoch's characters said has stuck with me because I have often wondered the same thing: I can't remember the exact quote, but it was something along the lines of: What makes a person love A but not B?

Remember those old sayings, "Love is blind" and "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"? Regarding the latter, a poet from down Boston way (Somerville, actually) has written a poem expressing the opposite sentiment:

Repulsiveness Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Let’s get over the hump.
Walk along with the stump.
The pimple, the pustule
The blatant stain
On the nape of
A crippled neck
Kiss it like a lovable
Heretic.

Lay in the shade
Of a sagging breast,
Caress the flesh
Of a withered and spindly thigh
And look at me
With an unjaundiced and loving
Gimlet eye.

-- Doug Holder

[With permission of the author. First published in Best Poem: A Literary Journal, Dec. 10, 2007. Doug Holder’s work has appeared in Poesy, Word Riot, Underground Window, Poetry Bay, Main St. Rag, Sahara, Iodine, and many more. He is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press]

Walking along rue St. Jean-Baptiste

You barely meet anyone on the road these cold mornings,
someone out shoveling snow or walking their dog,
or walkers, like the elderly gentleman round the corner,
limping along for his daily constitutional,
twice around the block,
"pour la santé".

We pass, exchange nods, & hurry along,
braced for the wintry blast that slices by,
whipping into our faces and bones,
a subtle reminder that physical vulnerability
to these absolutely predictable elements,
won't necessarily deter us.

What I like most, though, is the quiet. The absence of distraction.
Everything is as it should be.

~~~~~~~~

I know I said yesterday that I was getting sick of it--the snow, the cold, the long, bleak winter afternoons. Last week we had a reprieve of sorts and it turned warmer and I actually saw a patch of mud--and in the lot behind the school, a bit of grass (not green--it was brown and still frozen, but at least some "earth" was visible besides nothing but snow, snow, and more snow).

I AM anxious for Spring, ready for the flowers and little perennial herbs to begin inching their way out of the ground and start blooming again in my garden. It's also true that I absolutely cannot imagine living anywhere where it doesn't ever snow. Go figure.

Where to Put it?!!!

Ah, Spring! Will it ever get here?

This is what it looks like now here in sector Cap-de-la-Madeleine.

Yes, it snowed again. And we are running out of places to stack the darn stuff. The "mound" outside my front window, at its highest point, is over six feet high.

Truly, I have never seen so much snow in my life! It is EVERYWHERE.

This is the view from my back door and that's my garden shed, at the moment buried. (Good thing we took out all the snow shovels before all this started!)

What happens is, the plows come around in the wee hours of the morning and do the roads, but in the process leave a trail which amounts to yet another shoveling job just so you can get your car out.

Everyone's a bit weary of it now, longing for Spring. Me, too--and I'm already assembling my seed packets to start the indoor planting on March 19th, which is when most people here start theirs. Last year I think it was mid-June before it was safe to put the tomato plants directly into the earth. There were still little clumps of snow around in May.

Ah, Quebec, you gotta love it!!

Trains, Trips, and Rule Breakers

Last night, bored with television but finding it a bit too early to go to sleep, I looked around for something to read. I grabbed a 20-year-old copy of Paul Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster, an account of his travels by train through China.

"How does Baudelaire put it? The real travelers are those who leave for the sake of leaving," he writes. How many of us go on a trip, not so much to go TO somewhere, but to briefly get away FROM somewhere?

Now what possessed me, after having gotten only to page seven, to abruptly skip to the last page to read the final sentence? ("When I left Tibet some days later I lifted my eyes to the mountains and clasped my hands and invented a clumsy prayer that went: Please let me come back.") Ah, Tibet, whose culture is slowly being China-ized. So he eventually makes it to Tibet!

Aquarians, it is said, don’t particularly like following rules. (Like the unwritten one that says you should maybe wait until you actually read to the end of a book to find out how it ends.) Some people get really upset if you tell them the ending of a story (or film) before they've had a chance to read (or see) it. These are also often people who follow instructions to the letter. Aquarians--at least the ones I've known--don't fit easily into this category, myself included. If the laundry detergent instructions say "1 cupful", I put in 1-1/4. If the cookie recipe calls for, say, 1 cup of sugar, I add only 3/4 of a cup. I don't know why this is... it just is.

I also don't much like having to stand in roped "lines" (like those in banks or bureaucratic government offices) where you're lined up in maze-like "people partitions"--they remind me of the stalls they use for livestock. I understand the need for order, but that's like saying they don't trust people who stand randomly around or are in "groups"--they feel compelled to separate and line them up, one behind another, so they can see everybody individually. It's not the method so much as the mindframe that grates.

Of course, people who balk at conformity have no business raising an eyebrow at other non-conformists--for example, at someone who wears socks of two different colors, ha ha. But I digress.

I like reading travelogues. My absolute favorite is Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a deliciously detailed and highly interesting 1,181-page book about her travels in the 1930s through the former Yugoslavia. I concur with a fellow blogger from Germany, that this book is "less a timeless guide to Yugoslavia - but more of a portrait of the author’s soul and of European thinking on the brink of war," and like Balkan history, "digressive and meandering." Besides being a "vast, ambitious, brilliant" book, it contains "a great flood of ideas, at times completely undisturbed by factual limitations." (You can read his complete review here. (This blogger's other posts, by the way, are generally quite interesting and worth reading.)

How wonderful to be able to go to faraway places I’ll likely never get to visit, through the eyes of articulate, reflective writers who not only manage to take me there with their words, but do it in such a way that their observations and reflections immediately resonate. What greater tribute to a writer, eh?

Thank you, Paul and Rebecca.

Piaf

LITTLE SPARROW
One grasps at love
in desperate leaps,
clinging to life like a barnacle
on a doomed vessel,
destination unknown.
From a ravaged body,
the defiant thrust
of one mighty voice
still pierces the airwaves.
La Môme Piaf
ne regrette rien.
--Annie Wyndham


--Collage courtesy of Vermont artist, Luis L. Tijerina--

Humor and the Reality Disconnect

Sometimes the world is just too, too crazy. A Bush photo-op during his recent visit to Saudi Arabia has the blogosphere abuzz—at least this video portion does.

Here’s the original video, showing Bush swaying to the music of a cultural dance, sword in tow, locked arm in arm with a Saudi prince.

Here’s a You-tuber’s spoof, substituting a song that suggests a different take on the matter.

Now, now, let’s not be disrepectfull, shall we? ha ha. Humor has not, as far as I know, been banned. Yet.

Speaking of humor, in a 1999 interview with Tucker Carlson, Bush mocked Karla Tucker, then death row inmate later executed in Texas (he pursed his lips and mimicked, “Please ... don’t kill me”), and at a 2004 press corps dinner, peeking under his desk pretending to look for weapons of mass destruction, he laughed when he couldn’t find any—in both cases, apparently finding the subject of death a matter of great amusement. (The audience laughed, to0, at the "no WMDs." What does that say about us?)

Poking fun at the Bumbler-in-Chief doing his little sword dance on his trip abroad is one thing. Joking about someone dying, or massive numbers of someones dying, is quite another.

Bob Cesca, in an article today, titled "President Bush Shouldn't Play with Sharp Objects", noted Bush’s record for having the most executions on his watch as governor of Texas—152 in one and a half terms—and that the House of Saud last year conducted 136 public beheadings in the so-called "Chop Squares". The article includes a link to a video interview with a Saudi executioner, sitting on a couch with his three young children, talking about his job of beheading people.

The little sword dance, the constant smirking, the hypocrisy; the thousands of deaths--on all sides--of this insane war; an executioner calmly detailing accounts of beheading in front of small children-- THAT is what I mean by Reality Disconnect.

I sometimes feel like we're living in a nightmare, orchestrated by comedians; the universe shakes its head in disbelief at the absurdity of it all.

Wake me when it's over.

People Who Never Go Anywhere

We all know somebody like this--people who have rarely, if ever, travelled very far from home, not even to the next town over. Some briefly leave but then return--or they've never left and don't really want to. How dull! To never have gone anywhere and "seen the world". And how pathetic, having seen a bit of the world, to choose not to anymore. This is the type of comment that'll be flung at the "prefer not to" people who opt to opt out of the "Expand Your Horizons!" caravan.

Now, suppose you're a writer and you're one of those "prefer not to" people. Of course, one of the most famous of the opt-outers was Emily Dickinson:

She lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life.... Throughout her adult life she rarely traveled outside of Amherst or very far from home. Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence. [1]

Today, thanks to the Internet, we no longer have to hand-write letters and wait for the postman to deliver them. We can log on and "go" anywhere in the world, look at other people's travelogues and photos, watch international videos and hear the music of places we could never afford to visit personally. Granted, it's not the same as being there, but for a reclusive (or poverty-stricken) writer, it's the next best thing.

Another interesting thing about Dickinson was that she deliberately chose to publish less than a dozen of the almost 1,800 poems that she had written.^[2] Why only those few, and what made her choose those particular poems over others? Imagine if she were alive today and assembling a chapbook of her best poems. Most poetry contests or publishers seem to want at least 40 poems. If you only had a dozen, it might not qualify.

And, of course, there are the Rules. One must always follow the Rules. For example, you cannot submit a poem today without a title. If you do, they'll slap on a mandatory one: "Untitled."

The work that was published during her lifetime was typically altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson's poems typically lacked titles ... and often utilized ... unconventional capitalization and punctuation. .[3]

Excessive capping is frowned on nowadays, and "the rules" for submission tell you to edit for punctuation and grammar before you send in your writing. Only the more famous among us (like e. e. cummings) can get away with deliberate, unconventional orthography.

But this is getting off topic a bit. I've sometimes found that people who never go anywhere are often better informed, more open-minded and at times infinitely more interesting than people who have "been there, done that" so often that they've become inured.

If you're a writer, though, and commiserating about a lack of material on which to base your next story or poem, remember Emily Dickinson. She wrote eighteen hundred poems and basically never left her house. Contrast that with the world traveler, coming back from having spent, say, eight months living among fifteen different cultures and all he can think to talk about is the joy or discomforts of his lodgings, or the fabulous or inclement weather, or the food.

Okay, that's unfair. Not everybody who travels is a writer and not every tourist comes back from a trip with a life-changing insight. I'm falling into the Apples and Oranges bin again! I'm just saying that people who never go anywhere may have been to more places than you can ever imagine--depending on how literal your translation of "been to" is. And those who've been "everywhere" (twice) may come back not having had a single reflection, sense of awe or concern, or anything other than "Been there, done that."

The writer, though, would probably milk it for all it's worth. I can see it all now. Everyone's out taking pictures of the magnificent sunset, and he's distracted, haunted by the eyes of the barefoot beggar, who would have gotten a quarter had it not been for his foul mouth and smelly clothes.

What is it you remember about trips you have taken, places you've been to, people you've encountered? It's how that information impacts you, stays with you, maybe changes you, that separates the Apples from the Oranges. (And that's not saying Apples are better than Oranges; only that some writers have a little inner antenna that hones into particular scenes and memories that non-writers may not consider noteworthy.)

It's all in what a writer does with what he has, I guess--and why he does (or does not) feel it necessary to go to (or leave) a place to write about what he "sees".

The Incredible Blockage re: the Impeachables

This week, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) took to the House floor to urge the House Judiciary Committee to begin impeachment hearings against U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney for 'high crimes and misdemeanors.' Wexler has the signatures of nearly 190,000 citizens who agree. [To see a video of his presentation, click here.]

People have been calling for the impeachment, of both Cheney and Bush, for YEARS. The blogosphere is full of empassioned rhetoric and emotional diatribes, begging for some sort of action by those who can actually institute such a process. How come it never goes anywhere?

Now, before I'm accused of "Bush bashing" or harboring lefty-type sympathies (in lieu of examining the evidence, it's so much easier to hurl a label), I want to know myself: (1) if there actually is a legal case for impeachment, and (2) are there verifiable facts to back it up.

Okay, what are the alleged charges? "Warrantless surveillance, misleading Congress on the reasons for the Iraq war, violating laws against torture, and subverting the Constitution’s separation of powers"--let's start with those four. Can a legal case be made against either Bush or Cheney? Yes, according to Michael Ratner, Bill Goodman and other experts at the Center for Constitutional Rights. [See Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush]

Oops, sorry, folks, you gotta buy their report. But here're some freebies. These people did all the work of assembling the information and laying it out (and quite convincingly, I might add. You kind of can't really argue with facts or claim you didn't say something when proof exists that you did):

The Bush Administration's Public Statements on Iraq
The Case for Impeachment: A Bill of Particulars
Laws Violated by George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney--Impeachable Violations Documented
Synopsis of Articles of Impeachment Against Richard B. Cheney, H.R. 333, with supporting documents.

So I guess my question is--if it's true, if it really is true, that Bush and Cheney have indeed broken the law and committed what appears to be impeachable offenses under the U.S. Constitution--why are they being allowed to get away with it?

Notice I said "allowed." Sometimes people stay in abusive relationships and "allow" certain circumstances and situations to continue because they can't do anything about it, or because they fear retribution, or because they stand to lose everything (a job, their reputation, a way of life), or simply because they feel they have no other option. Granted, the downtrodden, the habitually marginalized, and those weak and physically or mentally abused, whether individually or as a group, may truly be incapable of affecting immediate or meaningful change but we're talking about a whole country here--the U.S.--that for whatever reason, is allowing its president and vice president to usurp the power and certain influential entities to dictate how things are going to be. The constitution begins with the words, "We the People." That's "We, the PEOPLE." Not, we, the Prez and VP. Not we, the corporations. Not we, the military-industrial complex. Not we, the pharmaceutical lobby. Not we, the "haves".

It would appear that the majority of U.S. citizens are completely powerless. They allow others to make their choices for them--including the FDA (which frowns at the idea that a product should actually be labeled to indicate whether it's been genetically modified or not); the mere struggle for economic survival leaves little energy for examining government policies, or making sure laws are being enacted for the benefit of the country and not a few dozen select corporations. Meanwhile, the media steps in to distract and entertain a weary populace still fighting old feuds of class and race. One is content to leave the running of the country to the experts, the "elected" ones.

It's not that nobody cares. It's not that people don't try--to change things, to call for accountability. It's just that, for whatever reason, certain entities are being "allowed" to ransack the coffers and trash the laws and no one seems able to stop them. Individually, you can't diss the prez cuz that invites the basher label. If you group together publicly to profess concern, access to those who make the decisions is strictly controlled and you're likely to be rounded up and secured in specially designated "zones" (cowhands this way; cattle... to the pens). You can call for accountability but hey, good luck in getting anyone to listen or actually open hearings on it. And even if you do, a multitude of those opposed to upsetting the status quo will quickly quash your most earnest efforts.

So what's a person to do? Wait. Multiply that by 190,000 persons. No, wait, multiply that by several million more. Impeach the vipe? Impeach the prez? How DARE you! Not a chance. Won't happen. "They" won't let it.

(What if some of the theys are us?) And we allow this because ... because ....

If somebody figures out the answer to this, I'd like to know. While I may be the citizen of one country, living in another, this issue should be of concern to all citizens of the world, no matter where one is, because we civilized humans supposedly enact laws to protect and regulate ourselves, and governments should not be telling us: "Do as we say; never mind what we do."

Update - 1/18/2008: Bush Pardons Himself Against Potential War Crimes.
Update - 1/23/2008: Kucinich Plans to Introduce Articles of Impeachment Against Bush Jan. 28

Sugar Invasion

I ran out of breadcrumbs and went to buy some the other day. Now, what possessed me to read the ingredients on the label? Perhaps it's that I've stopped buying any foodstuffs made in China, no matter how cheap. In any case, I did, read the label, and learned that the second major ingredient, after wheat, was sugar. Sugar in breadcrumbs?! Why would they add sugar to breadcrumbs? I mean, say you're having breaded fish. Do you really need sugar in there? Would you buy them if the label said: "Sugared Breadcrumbs"? If there's not enough sugar so that you can actually taste it, why add it at all?

Needless to say, I've stopped buying commercial breadcrumbs. Pssst. Here's a secret. You can make your own! That baguette you bought on Saturday to go with your spaghetti dinner ... fresh, without preservatives ... it's now Tuesday and you forgot and left it in the bread drawer still encased in its paper wrapper, and it's now as hard as a rock. Do you throw it out? Break off chunks and toss it to the birds? Here's a better idea. Get out your veggie shredder, place it on a plate, position the hardened bread against the shredder, and scrape--vigorously. Voila, instant breadcrumbs, uncontaminated with additives. Plus, it's good exercise for the arms. (Hey, how come I've never thought of this before!) Well, wait.--the "uncontaminated with additives" bit--that's only if the bread you use doesn't have them. But, hopefully, the next largest ingredient after flour wouldn't be sugar.

On another aside, Michael Pollan has come out with a new book in which he advises anyone who's interested, on what to eat, what not to eat, and how to think about health: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." (I can hear the snickers now, ha ha. But he has a point.) Under the What-Not-to-Eat category falls "anything that your great-great grandmother would not recognize as food." We should buy better, well-grown food, he says--which of course is more expensive--but buy less of it . Makes sense to me. But I can understand how people might balk at this. Except it's not all that difficult if you think about it. Just chuck the chips and soda and cookies and use the money that would have gone for THAT to buy more organic.

Go on, preach at me some more, ha ha. (You don't of course, have to preach to the choir.) So why mention it at all? Dunno exactly, except that I like the: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" bit. Short. Simple. To the point. And incredibly good advice. I should paste that on my refrigerator. I included that today to remind myself (having just had a few cookies, not to satisfy hunger, but just because they were there.) Which shows that even the most conscientious eater slips up sometimes--and in my case, frequently enough to need reminded.

Flaming Droplets from the Sky

I had the most bizarre dream last night. The sky was falling--literally. Pieces of hot, molten material, on fire, plunged randomly out of the heavens onto my street. People were running about in chaos; others sat huddled on couches on the sidewalk, numb with fear. Then the lights went out.

What does this mean? I woke up with an overwhelming sense of dread, and the thought: "You can't do anything about it. Prepare for the worst."

Maybe this is an after-effect of reading about Nibiru sometime last week. Who knows. But last week there was a UFO sighting in Stephenville, Texas and MUFON investigators scrambled to interview multiple witnesses, who seem credible. William M. Arkin, in a 1999 article in the Washington Post, titled "When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing", described the military's interest in "looking into the hologram idea" and that "the feasibility had been established of projecting large, three-dimensional objects that appeared to float in the air."

What's the connection?, you ask. Well, none, probably, except that an idea came to me for a modern sci fi story involving the use of holographic images projected by certain government entities (the government within the government) using advanced technology to convince the civilian population that a particular event had occurred--in this case, the sudden appearance of a craft from outer space. Now, UFO sightings are nothing new. Thousands of people have seen unidentified flying objects. The U.S., the French, the Brits and the Canadians (not to mention others) have investigated them, some more vigorously than others, but nowadays, if you say you've seen a UFO, you're still likely to be labeled a nut case. The subject itself carries with it a kind of built-in lack of credibility.

But what if ... what if the reason investigations have stopped, and the public still knows little more than it did before (which is to say, not much)--is that (1) a government's acknowledging the phenomenon to be real would cause widespread panic (not to mention anarchy and the collapse of certain deeply-held religious beliefs); or (2) those in power haven't a clue what these ET visitors want or what to do about them and don't want that fact discovered.

Which brings me back to the subject of holographic projection and why a government might want to engage in it on non-battlefield terrain (i.e., not with an enemy but with its own populace). Not just the timing--but the reason. That aspect is even more intriguing than their knowing but pretending they don't. And as to whether UFOs are "real" or not--either they are--or they're not, and somebody ("them" or "us") is messing with our minds. And the question, again, is: Why?

Suppose the Texas sighting last week were, in effect, some kind of a hologram. (Would the Air Force scramble jets to chase a hologram?! Witnesses say they saw fighter jets following it, which the AF denies. How hard is that to check on? Forget the jets. Stick to the projection.) Okay, maybe that was just a test run. Maybe the "big one" has yet to occur. The big event that signals the beginning of the end (of life as we've known it). This would be my first chapter--first they do a test run to gauge believability.

Back to the timing. When do they plan on orchestrating "the big one"? To coincide with what? To distract from what? Where will it be engineered (locale)? How many technicians involved, and how does one guarantee that no one leaks the plot? Bribery, threats? Disappearing those who know too much? Plausible deniability? Or, as with 9/11, just ignore the conspiratorial babblings, perhaps even contribute to them, in a psyopsy sort of way, to muddy the waters.

Okay, so I have the plot. Sort of. The real stickler is ... why? What are their motives? What do they hope to accomplish? And, last but not least... who's pulling the strings? Who's directing the show? Who ultimately benefits? (Follow the money, uncover the power.)

Science Fiction is not my forte. Philip K. Dick, help me out here!!

Anyway, back to the dream. Maybe it's not aliens we have to fear, or even Planet X. We always have to have names for things. Reasons for why something happens or doesn't happen. In any case, not much we can do about it, is there? Flaming droplets from the sky, people huddled on couches on the sidewalk, what bizare imagery! End Timers, take note. There may be no escape. Just the end of Time. If there could be such a thing. (Define "Time".)

Not getting much writing done this week. And the cold has returned, with a vengeance. (Not that that's any excuse!)

When Fellow Poets Pan Our Poetry

Oh the pressure of being an ikon! Once you're written something (or a series of somethings) termed "brilliant", broken new ground, so to speak, gained a worldwide audience, your books have been made into films, and you've become a household word (at least in writers' households), any subsequent publications will inevitably be measured against past glories. And if they're not perceived as being of the same calibre, you sometimes hear the equivalent of: "Hey, what happened? You're not YOU anymore!"

Margaret Atwood has published over 40 books of fiction, poetry and literary criticism. Her thirteenth book of poetry and first collection of poems in over a decade, The Door, was recently reviewed by Montreal poet Carmine Starnino in ARC #59 Winter 2008. Atwood is one of my favorite writers, and I admit I've read more of her fiction than her poetry. But the very title of this review jarred me a bit: "Knock, Knock, Is the Real Atwood Still There?"

The "real" Atwood? What Starnino seems to be saying, at least to this reader, is: "She doesn't sound like Margaret Atwood anymore." Hmmm. But his criticisms seem more personal than that:

Workaholic tendencies, merchandising savvyness, nagging status anxiety: whatever her reasons for publishing a new collection, Atwood’s expectation of a large audience has caused her voice to move far up into her head. Her words sound official, high-minded, free of complexity—where, wanting to show us something, Babbittlike nouns and verbs are used to precisely track our sightlines.

Ouch.

Given what we see when the The Door first swings open—curt descriptiveness, sharp-cut diction, in extremis narratives—it would be easy to think we’re in store for the usual Atwoodian magic. Passages still carry the old bite .... but too often the heart of the matter turns out to be some tough-sounding boiler plate.

Double ouch. Sounds like a bit of "the usual Atwoodian magic" has somehow worn off here.

Starnino admits, in an interview given at Concordia, that "I am, at heart, simply a reader of Canadian poetry who is unhappy with the chronic overestimation of certain poets." (Could Atwood be one of them?) He further added that he hoped the reviews he writes "are able to persuasively advocate their bias", and that "poetry criticism is, principally and overridingly, an exercise in skepticism." He further opines that what "real" poetry is or how one recognizes it is "ultimately unanswerable."

In all fairness, I only read a portion of Starnino's review, on line (you have to buy the printed version to get the complete review), and I have not yet had the opportunity to read The Door, so I can't comment on whether Atwood has indeed, in this, her latest book, lost her usual magic. But I'm always uneasy when one poet criticizes another. Especially one who admits to writing reviews that advocate a bias.

Rob McClennan, author of 12 books of poetry, reviewed Starnino's book Credo in The Antigonish Review , stated: "I haven't yet decided if his [Starnino's] writing is strong enough to support the kinds of arguments he makes about other people's work. I'd lean towards not."

Not to play the "critique the critic" game, but Geoffrey Cook in The Danforth Review, in assessing Starnino's Credo, says it speaks of "a talent centering itself", and of Starnino's "maturation" as a poet; it's largely a positive review. Well, then I got sidetracked a bit. Because what Cook said (in quite another context) struck me as more in line with my earlier comments about poets being who they are (or not) ( "Knock, Knock, Is the Real You Still There?"):

Every serious artist has, I suspect, the sense that their art is ahead of them, impatiently awaiting the artist to catch up, to drag life into line and up-to-date with the art, which has always already achieved an ethical clarity and coherence usually denied experience. For the committed artist, art seems to know where it is going, and because the artist identifies his/her own destiny with that of art, art seems to have a prophetic power.

While the artist must begin, as the truism says, with what he or she knows and strive for “self-knowledge”, that “self” is, at the very and at every moment of recognition, obliterated again before the larger picture: what the art has brought into focus, what art wants known. And so, because the gap is never closed but the artist can only attempt such closure, the self is constantly re-written and art sets out again on a new bend in a old road...

The successful work of art is Art’s insight, not the individual artist’s (who has merely caught up for the moment), and the vision is universal and impersonal. That an audience (the reader, viewer or listener, AND the artist) can identify with the emotions or characters of an aesthetic work is a paradoxical and graceful act of the educated imagination - we are admiring aesthetic and ethical coherence: meaning.

There appears to be a genuine disconnect in how we view one another's writings. (This goes for fiction, as well as poetry.) "It's brilliant! It lacks meaning. It's insightful! It's Babbittlike. It's lucid and stunningly lyrical! It lacks complexity. It's magical. It's shit." Take your pick.

What one finds uplifting and meaningful, another considers saccharine or irrelevant. What one finds shocking, another sees as innovating. A book you read 20 years ago with relish and amazement now bores you beyond comprehension. The same can be applied to things you wrote decades ago and now want to disavow. Who wants their earlier self to be compared to their current self? But Cook hit the nail on the head, I think. What we should be looking for in each other's poetry is "aesthetic and ethical coherence." What we should be looking for is MEANING.

The operative word here is meaning. It's the single most important element--for me at least--in reading, writing, or assessing a poem, including my own. Does it MEAN something, does a window of insight open up for whoever reads it, do the words resonate?

What utter power words have! I think we should stop analyzing each other's methods and motives and imperfections and idiosyncracies and stop hurling ad hominums and look at the words. Only the words. Either they are "poetry" or they are not. And what we call a thing may be so far distant from what the thing is in itself, that this whole matter may never be resolved.

So I take most poetic reviews with a grain of salt and leave the slingers and accoladers to bash it out amongst themselves. The point is, poetry still matters. We constantly argue about what poetry IS and what it's NOT and endlessly pour our souls into the crafting of it. Which is how it should be. That means it'll still be around a hell of a lot longer than we will. In the crunch and chaos of our current collective disenchantment and the desire to transcend the prevailing mediocrity--that's somehow a comforting thought.