I’ve been laid up, figuratively speaking, from a lower back issue which has made standing up problematic. Little good has come from this, but today as a bit of therapy, I took a perambulation around our yard and the near neighbors. Here’s what early autumn looks like in Raleigh, NC. The shrub above does its thing along our front walk. I’m too lazy to look up what it is.
Tulip poplars in our backyard. October 2023.
To give y’all perspective, about 75% of all leaves are still green. I know, this is different than Up North. The 2nd weekend of October always had the reputation for being the peak of leaf-peeping season when I lived in New York near the Massachusetts border. Here…it’s a little different. In the above photo, the two tallest trees which stand in front of the others, are two tulip poplars in our backyard. (The house roofline is visible at the bottom of the photo.) The one on the left is exposed more with no tall trees immediately around it. It starts dropping a few leaves in late July or early August because our heat stresses it (I guess). It starts dropping leaves before anything else, and at this point is 75% bare. The tree on the right sits further back, and is protected more as a result. It’s just now taken a decidedly yellow tone with most of its leaves. As you can see, many of the trees remain green. At the bottom of the photo are the upper branches of a dogwood. Not all of the trees remain in a green state, though….
Dogwood in autumn. October 2023.
This is what all of the dogwoods on the property look like. We have six or eight. If they aren’t this red, they’re a mix of dusky red and green. Some trees around us are a bit further along…
Neighbor’s tree. October 2023.Blue mistflower. October 2023.
Chrysanthemums aren’t the only fall flowers. The above is blue mistflower and blooms somewhere around Labor Day. It stays beautiful until a really good frost hits. Fortunately, that shouldn’t happen for at least a week, so we’ll usher in November with these lovelies still blooming. They’re ‘volunteers’ as near as I can figure: they don’t look as if they were planted because they grow in several of our flower beds. The ones above appear along the walk to our front door, appearing when I most lament the end of the purple coneflowers.
Sometimes autumn is just here and there…as are we…
I have posted one or two screeds in the past few weeks about poetry that I read online. By way of explanation, I will do something I have so far (to the best of my knowledge) refrained from doing. I recommend reading this blog: Ephemeral Elegies. Tiffany Renee Harmon re-publishes the poets who are being published online and in physical print. At least 80% of it is good (my opinion only), and all of it is better than anything I can write. The times I’ve written this and this, I’ve been speaking to poems read on her blog. This is what decent, modern poetry looks and reads like. This is the standard to which I hold myself and everyone I read.
This has nothing to do with the Rolling Stones except it’s stone–so there’s that.
I’m listening to Hackney Diamonds the new release by The Rolling Stones as fed to me by Tidal’s FLAC version. It’s stunning considering the age of the performers. I get a little bit of Black and Blue out of some of it, but several of the tracks just rock, straight ahead, ma’am, thanks. I hear a nice big fat and fuzzy bass on “Bite My Head Off” and whaddaya know? It’s Sir Paul McCartney on that one! I like that Keith Richards gets to sing “Tell Me Straight.” Lady Gaga joins them on “Sweet Sounds Of Heaven”…and Mick Jagger sounds just as good at bending a blues note as he ever did. (Reminds me a bit of JJ Grey & Mofro.) Look at the credits for this one! Stevie Wonder on piano? Ronnie Wood on guitar and backing vocals? Keith is playing bass? Oh HALE YEAH! And what a great tribute to their roots at the end of the album: “Rolling Stone Blues” by Muddy Waters, most of it performed with just an acoustic guitar and a harmonica.
When the album was announced, I read that this is the first studio album of original material since A Bigger Bang. “Surely that can’t be right,” I thought. “I listened to a new album in the last ten years or so.” Ah, but that was a bunch of blues covers, not original stuff (Blue & Lonesome, 2016). Shee-it. I was stuck in yet another unsatisfying job in 2005, the year that one came out. I had no inkling I was headed to North Carolina, that two more tension-producing jobs awaited, or that I would score a professional jackpot by entering the consulting world. Eighteen years is a long time, even for old people…like me and the Rolling Stones. (Maybe I should write a memoir called that–except I came to the Stones late.)
Whatever. It’s Rolling Stones Retrospective this afternoon. Streaming Aftermath which starts with these: “Paint It, Black”, “Stupid Girl” [the B-side to Paint It, Black if I recall correctly], “Lady Jane”, and “Under My Thumb”. There are signature movements in the music industry–Big Band, Rock N Roll, Hip Hop–and I’m glad to have grown up with one. Cheers, folks.
A Roman recipe from An Alphabet for Gourmets by M. F. K. Fisher from a collection of her works entitled The Art of Eating:
GARUM (400 B.C.)
Place in a vessel all the insides of fish, both large fish and small. Salt them well. Expose them to the air until they are completely rotted. Drain off the liquid that comes from them, and it is the sauce garum.
Kennedy Fisher, Mary Frances . The Art of Eating: 50th Anniversary Edition (p. 901). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
Or perhaps it is the cesspool of death that it appears to be…
what my latest poem looks like on my desktop computer monitor. October 2023.
Something perhaps has changed with WordPress. I’ve been irritated to see that choosing the “Verse” setting for a block, which I thought yielded the above, doesn’t even come close on some devices. Here’s what my friend received in his email:
what my poem looks like on an Android phone, as delivered in a Gmail message. October 2023.
I knew that WordPress converted poetry to a monospaced font, rather liked it actually, because I follow a couple of poetry blogs which deliver the entire poem to my inbox. I’m pretty sure in the past that I saw the same thing on the WordPress website when I used my phone. Ah, but now there is Jetpack, newly changed for the…better? This is what appears on my actual blog when using an Android phone:
What my poem looks like on an Android phone using WordPress/Jetpack. October 2023.
That’s not “verse,” WordPress, nor is it “poem.” That is called “paragraph” and “prose” and perhaps “simplistic crap” unless one makes a living as a stream-of-consciousness author, and even then one must establish a certain cadence and structure to ‘musically’ signal to the Reader that yes, this is something beyond prose. (Unless one is James Joyce, then nevermind.)
Canadian philosopher and communications theory god Marshall McLuhan invented the phrase “the medium in the message”. I’ve perverted what this means. He meant that content doesn’t really matter, that a children’s cartoon or a vicious slasher movie is all the same when broadcast identically on television. To me he meant the message of any communication effort takes its ultimate meaning from the medium by which it is delivered. Spoken words in a living room conversation take on new meanings when sung in a concert hall. More familiarly, books turned into movies tell a different story and cannot help do otherwise. Even if Peter Jackson had managed to control every reference in his Lord of the Rings movies, visual, aural, or what-have-you, the story still would have been just as vastly different than the books as they turned out to be.
For these reasons, it’s deeply unsettling to oldsters such as me to watch the different devices reformat and repackage the content of what purportedly is the same thing. I see this nearly every day as I follow Major League Baseball. MLB.com presents a side-by-side box score for both teams, but on the phone you must select one team or the other–never can you present them at the same time on your phone’s screen. Baseball-Reference.com displays a wonderfully useful tool when looking at any particular season for a baseball team: a histogram of green and red bars which tell the tale of the entire season, game by game, read left to right. Mouse over any bar and it tells you the date of that particular game, who this team played (and where), and what the score was. It also shows what the team’s Won-Lost record was when the game finished. On a mobile device (tablet or phone) this histogram tool disappears. It makes me wonder if certain features of a website are completely unknown to a majority of the younglings who stare into their phones for 90% of the time they’re awake.
Thus, we come back to my dilemma/consternation and the question posed in the headline. Have I delivered a poem at all when it looks like a short paragraph raising an offhand question? Does the trivialization effected by the mobile presentation indicate my poem lacked substance and can only stake a claim to poetry because of its window-dressed arrangement? (Believe me, I’ve thought some unkind thoughts about other’s postings which, if returned to a more prose-like arrangement, look like the musings of a teenager in a diary. Am I just as shallow?) Did McLuhan not go far enough? Does the message ultimately get defined by how the technology delivers it, even when it lives simultaneously in different media formats?
A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.
Marshall McLuhan from Understanding Media (as quoted in Wikipedia)
Ultimately I think McLuhan would argue each device configuration represents a medium. But I never signed up for this, WordPress! My understanding of the matter was this: you give me the tools to put my message together, and I pay for it by giving you ultimate ownership of my content (which I cannot believe I did, but there ya go). I expected a bit more, though. I expected a very nuanced difference to my content. Sure, I’ll accept McLuhan’s theory that those who read my stuff on a phone get a different message than those who read it on a big desktop monitor, but I would prefer to be left out of the “definition changing” part of the equation. You’ve made me a partner to it by changing my content not just the medium.
Which leaves me little closer to answering my question but has given me an excellent opportunity to rely on that first college degree and to prove yet again that old age clothes old men in curmudgeonly behaviors as surely as dogs become grizzled and oaks gnarled.
Mystifying things sprout in shadows… October 2023.
"You know why I poetry?"
[Excuse me?]
"I poetry because only there
unclamps my scheming, planning,
anal-fixated Self. It can't get
Here, this Here where I poetry.
It doesn't like it though, when
I'm Here. Can you
hear the screaming?"
Things that have been bouncing around in my head lately:
What’s wrong with these directions from a recipe I used this morning? “Sift before measuring: 2 cups flour.” Seriously, Joy of Cooking? How do I sift 2C without measuring it first? (The waffles were delicious, however.)
I’m trying to be on a stay-cation while my wife travels to Florida. This means I don’t want to do “chores” — but I reminded myself that “even on vacation, one has to pack the trunk.”
One of the all-time best blues-rock (Chicago style) performances is Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s “Dance For Me Girl” on Live in Chicago.
“Attaboy, Harper!” Jesus, don’t poke the bear, Arcia. That’s just basic Survival 101. As if Bryce needed more motivation!
I’ve realized recently my emotional IQ hovers around “special needs”. Unfortunately, my intellectual IQ makes me think I’m the smartest person in the room at all times. In terms of roulette, smart people think that just because it comes up red 98% of the time, it will always come up red. So, 2% of the time they’re wrong. Unfortunately, we never know if “this time” is in the 2% or not.
Getting old sucks.
I will need to be institutionalized if my wife dies before I do. There’s only so much crazy society can tolerate. (Our current politicians notwithstanding.) I’ve been alone for four days, and I remember how the internalized thoughts and lack of social contact distill the craziness. Not pretty.
Those of you with big families have no idea the paucity of having few (if any) relatives. I have/had one uncle, four cousins, and one brother. Grandparents died, the uncle died, one of the cousins has died. My brother had two children–one is estranged to the point of “whereabouts unknown”. My close family consists of a brother and a niece. My wife, meanwhile, has seven siblings, and 23 nieces and nephews, and her parents are still living. Those nieces and nephews have had a good handful of children. It’s night and day here in my house.
I daily lament not “getting to the important things” and then spend the afternoon reading, cruising the Interweb, and drinking beer. And writing posts like these. Not one important thing is addressed.
Johnny boy, he's always propping up the bar
He sees life crystallized through his jar
He says he only lives for beer
But deep in his heart is a cry of fear
Give me a heart to hang onto
Give me a soul that's tailored new
Give me a heart to hang onto
A heart to hang onto
--Pete Townshend, "Heart To Hang Onto" from the album Rough Mix with Ronnie Lane
if you’re going to post poetry as if you’re a poet, for God’s sake, learn the damn language! It’s pretty easy to do that and still write bad poetry, but it’s impossible for you to write good poetry without a basic understanding of grammar, usage, and mechanics.
all the voices in my head 