the white bicycle part II

POETRY DISPATCH No. 371 | May 5, 2012

The Best Prose Piece plus Selections from the Second Wave of Poems

EDITOR’S NOTE: I neglected to include the best “White Bicycle” prose piece in Friday’s posting which featured the three poems which best captured the image.

Part II leads off with the story by Jean Casey, followed by an at random selection of good poems which fell into a category the other judge and I saw as ‘the second wave.’ None of these selections are in any kind of order, they’re just good poems—which didn’t quite make the final three for reasons I previously mentioned. (And there are more, which I may or may not get around to featuring sometime.)

I would add one thing to the poetry finalists who were chosen and the prose writer. The other judge is an excellent reader, writer, editor who resides some distance from Wisconsin and would not have known any of the writers had I included their names—which I did not. I certainly expected there would be some disagreement over our choices, and we would have to work this out.

Once the noon deadline was reached, I made my final choices, in no particular order, just three poems and the one story I liked best, then awaited an e-mail from the other judge. There were no phone calls, no e-mail discussion between us. When the e-mail from the other judge arrived later in the day, I was beyond astounded to discover we both picked the exact same works! This almost never happens. –Norbert Bleib

The White Bicycle

by
Jean Casey

He had never won anything before, not a single thing, and now he had this amazing jackknife with all sorts of important attachments which made an important and heavy weight in his pocket. And all because of the Old Ellison Days parade. Oh, he knew it wasn’t a grand thing, but it was a yearly event with fire engines, some folks on horseback, an honor guard of veterans, a few simple floats, and a bunch of kids on decorated bikes and some politicians in shiny cars. This year they announced prizes to include the bikes. He didn’t give it much thought, because he was never a part of anything like that. Fat and slow with a hampering stammer, he hung around the edges of life. His 6th grade teacher tried, because she knew he was bright inside, but he avoided her help.

But this year, before the parade, he felt an urge to enter, especially knowing about the grand prize for bikes, that knife! It came to him one moonlit night when he lay in his bed before sleep that he could avoid somehow being seen as his lumpy self if he…yes! If he went covered up…yes, indeed! As a ghost! Everything must be white! His old bike was a dark maroon, rusty, tired. But, if he painted it…!

No way could he get by with this unless he consulted his mother. In the morning he found her with her mouth filled with clothes pins hanging a wash on the outside lines. She listened, fastening some socks with the stored pins. “The only white we got around here is flat wall paint left over from the living room, but you can use it, and you’ll need an old sheet to wear. I have one. We’ll have to cut eye holes in it, but that’s okay. I’ve got a chain link belt, come to think of it, that ought to help you cinch it in.”

He said, excited, “I think I’ll ask dad for his old straw hat! If he let me, I could paint it white too! I think a ghost should have a hat!” He didn’t stammer, she noticed.

Parade day, he said not a word to anyone, played his part, accepted his prize from the puzzled judge who asked for and didn’t get his name, because this ghost never talked. And now, the bike was propped up in back of the barn, and he would redo it bright red. His dad gave him money for the paint. The prize would stay in his pocket, unless he was at home whittling.

…remember the rides
all the bikes in my life
now white as ghost shadows.

Bonnie Hartmann

THE WHITE BICYCLE

by Sharon Auberle

when everything is falling apart
my friend, when you’re stuck
in the horse latitudes
mired in a dark
night of the soul
when you’re no longer sleek
sexy and smooth

find the white bicycle
climb on that
fat-tired slow beast
pedal and huff and
laugh like you mean it
whistle sing shout
and cuss use words
your mama told you never to

push that bike up a mountain
when you get to the top
when you’re near
to over the hill
when night is falling fast
jump on whoop and holler

ride that old bicycle down
no brakes allowed
fireflies and stars
your only light
and when you wipe out
(and yes, honey, you will)
darkness like a big pillowy woman
will come along and wrap you up
whisper everything’s gonna be allright…

no worries, baby,
she’ll carry all
your broken pieces home…

A WHITE BICYCLE

by Chris Halla

Parked here by an old man
shaped like a question mark

Hoping a young girl in a yellow dress
would eventually steal

his white bicycle away
on a green, spring afternoon

The White Bicycle

by Alice D’Alessio

I dreamt I saw it standing all alone
beside the blue barn wall.
Ghost, what are you doing here?
I asked, recognizing every
feature – the torn seat, the gash
in the front tire from the time
we hit the tree; the dented fenders,
handlebars minus their grips
minus the bell that Mickey Loman stole;
and best of all, the fancy chain guard –
to keep my pants from catching on the chain
and getting greasy. My first bike,
bright and shiny blue it was
and trimmed in red.
It meant the war was over.

The shadowy background
made the bike seem luminous.
You’re lookin’ pretty good, I said,
for an old guy. And then I thought
I heard it whisper, You too.
Let’s go race down Kaiser Hill,
shall we? There’s still time.

The White Bicycle

By Don Fraker

Nearly an albino,
But for her leathery dark barnacle of a seat,
Tattered, betraying her age –
Paint no cure for that condition.

Mobya was my vessel,
Her now-departed basket ferrying books
From their orderly, patient moorings at the library
To the needy harbor of their offloading.

Got her in junior high,
Whitened her in unspoken tribute to the first teacher who credited me with adult capacities,
His brine-soaked incantations of albatross, and mutiny, and whale,
Setting me a-sail on new-seen old adventures.

Though now my daughter’s ark,
No more the carrier of tomes
Of late evanesced, ether-borne,
Her bleached carapace transports me still.

THE WHITE BICYCLE

by Ralph Murre

the way she rode it
as much on clouds
as on concrete

as much from as toward
on a pavement of dream

the way I saw or didn’t see
the way it didn’t seem
she any longer needed me
to run along beside

the way the ride then
circled back in setting sun

the thing about a cycle
is the way it’ll repeat

her white bike may come back
may lean up
again against my shack

who knows when a cycle
or circle is complete?

Resurrection

by Paula Kosin

Even though it is not Easter
My mother hauled her old bike,
Tired, rusty but full
Of fond memories,
Out of the depths of the garage
And in the cool shade
Painted it white
The color of the Risen Lord
Of new life
And alleluias
And once she started
She just spray painted the whole damn
Thing
Tires, spokes, chain, pedals, handlebars
Every nook and cranny
Figuring that if a little paint made it look better
Then a lot would make it look wonderful
And the dirt and scratches and rust disappeared
Before our eyes
Like a miracle
And now it stands outside
Starkly propped against the blue sky garage
Drying and poised perhaps
For her ascension into Heaven

the white bicycle

POETRY DISPATCH No. 370 | May 4, 2012

The White Bicycle

In the dream
of red balloons,

of circus tents,
pied clowns and

highwire artists;
a white bicycle

takes you there.

Alan Catlin

The White Bicycle

I’ve painted my old bicycle white.
It is the white of a childhood photograph,
the white of my sister’s first communion dress,
of an awkward smile missing front teeth
and ill-fitting gloves covering mudpie hands.
It is the white of my untucked shirt frozen in mid-laugh.

Now my bicycle is ready to receive the rain.

Peter Kron

The White Bicycle

It’s lurking there in the shadows
of a granary,
ghost of a gone era
when the first farm motors
arrived on tractors
and young girls still rode to town
on two wheels
to fetch supplies home in baskets.

Its basket long gone,
its handlebars like bleached longhorns
on a steer’s deserted skull,
it awaits the coolness of night
and its occasional riders,
dead writers.

Tonight it welcomes
its favorite,
the lady in white.

Come quietly after midnight,
watch Emily pedaling
straddling the worn saddle.

Ed Werstein

Editor’s Note: These were my original directions and suggestions:

Consider this another “Good Morning or Good Day Door County” photo… BUT for poets and writers out there (and others who may be interested), consider this a challenge, an opportunity, an invitation to write a poem (mainly) or prose piece (preferably short) titled: THE WHITE BICYCLE. Send it to me via e-mail only ASAP.  Deadline: Thursday morning (before noon) May, 3, 2012. I’ll print, not necessarily “the best” White Bicycle poems, but my three favorites on Poetry Dispatch, Friday, May 4, 2012 or this coming weekend. Now get on that white bike and ride!–if you have it in you, if the photo, the white bike, something speaks to you. –Norbert Blei

This was a much more difficult than I imagined. And though many have asked me to do this more often, I just can’t. The time factor is enormous.

There were close to thirty entries. I made two sets of master copies of everything (deleting the name of each writer in a way even I unaware of the writer) and forwarded one master copy to a qualified writer-friend with instructions to pick three, only three, which caught what I was after: good writing, originality, brevity, etc. This was not easy for the guest reader/writer/friend/judge—or me.

Whatever failed to make the final three, failed… No, ‘failed’ is not the right word for the majority of entries since there were so many fine pieces if work BUT…some of the poems were too long…some of the poems were soaring, only to crash with a poor last line, a trite final stanza, a poor choice of words from the beginning or image…or no image(s) at all, falling into heavy-handed prose. Some need just a little final tuning to make them hum. Some need to be re-worked, re-envisioned entirely. Many of these (with a little more thought and a bit of rewriting) would certainly find a home in various publications.

For the last 12 hours or more I kept trying to bend the rules a bit: Why not six favorites instead of three…for certainly another three…no four, are right on the edge?

Maybe a list (long) of Honorable Mentions…?

Or how about a category which, for want of a better term, I would call “The Second Wave”? I have close to nine pieces that would easily slide in there. ALL of them SO GOOD! But this would go on for pages and pages…

What about separating the prose pieces from the poetry, place them by themselves?

And what to do with these illustrated works that came in out of nowhere???

After driving myself crazy with trying to make almost everyone happy, including myself, I decided to stick with the original idea of printing the three favorites. Plus only one prose piece. And wrap it up with the three illustrated submissions because…because I wish to share them.

I also promise to print some of the works online in the not too distant future.

Thank you all.

I have attached the poem and a photo of a “white bicycle” that is a few miles from my studio. Here in NM they call the roadside memorials markers to people killed in car accidents “descansos.” I don’t know what they are called elsewhere. But families or friends put up white crosses for pedestrians or car drivers who have been killed, or white bicycles for bicyclists who have been killed on the roadside near the scene of the accident. They remind you to slow down and take care. I do not know where they are made but they are well cared for and decorated with plastic flowers. Some are even decorated especially for Christmas and other holidays! -Kris Thacher

THE WHITE BICYCLE

No one depends
On

The white bi-
Cycle

Parked in the
Shadows

Behind the Descansos
Garage.

Kris Thacher

The White Bicycle | Photo by Daniel Anderson

arbor day | alice d’alessio | jim robbins

Photo by Norbert Blei

POETRY DISPATCH No.369 | April 27, 2012

Enter
………the Forest

Find the path where rain drips from beechlings
brightening their greenest green
trembling the twisted ties
of yellow moccasin flowers.

Pay homage to cedars,
robed in lace, their spongy
carpet a velvet dusk, breathe their incense;
lay hands on ironwood and linden,
each with its secrets. Come with me

I will show you the way. Here in this temple
we study the Druid fathers
learn to grow old proudly,
chant the psalm of the hemlock.
We will hold white limestone in our hands,
recite the only prayers we know.

Alice D’Alessio

WHY TREES MATTER

by
Jim Robbins*

Helena, Mont.
TREES are on the front lines of our changing climate. And when the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention.

North America’s ancient alpine bristle-cone forests are falling victim to a vora¬cious beetle and an Asian fungus. In Texas, a prolonged drought killed more than five million urban shade trees last year and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, two severe droughts have killed billions more.

The common factor has been hotter, drier weather.

We have underestimated the importance of trees. They are not merely pleasant sources of shade but a potentially major answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. We take them for granted, but they are a near miracle. In a bit of natural alchemy called photosynthesis, for example, trees turn one of the seemingly most insubstantial things of all — sunlight — into food for insects, wildlife and people, and use it to create shade, beauty and wood for fuel, furniture and homes.

For all of that, the unbroken forest that once covered much of the continent is now shot through with holes.

Humans have cut down the biggest and best trees and left the runts behind, What does that mean for the genetic fit¬ness of our forests? No one knows for sure, for trees and forests are poorly understood on almost all levels. “It’s embarrassing how little we know,” one eminent redwood researcher told me.

What we do know, however, suggests that what trees do is essential though often not obvious. Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.

Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of cleaning up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phytore-mediation. A 2008 study by researchers at Columbia University found that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with a lower incidence of asthma.

In Japan, researchers have long studied what they call “forest bathing.” A walk in the woods, they say, reduces the level of stress chemicals in the body and increases natural killer cells in the immune system, which fight tumors and viruses. Studies in inner cities show that anxiety, depression and even crime are lower in a landscaped environment.

Trees also release vast clouds of beneficial chemicals. On a large scale, some of these aerosols appear to help regulate the climate; others are anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-viral. We need to learn much more about the role these chemicals play in nature. One of these substances, taxane, from the Pacific yew tree, has become a powerful treatment for breast and other cancers. Aspirin’s active ingredient comes from willows.

Trees are greatly underutilized as an eco-technology. “Working trees” could absorb some of the excess phosphorus and nitrogen that run off farm fields and help heal the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In Africa, millions of acres of parched land have been reclaimed through strategic tree growth.

Trees are also the planet’s heat shield. They keep the concrete and asphalt of cities and suburbs 10 or more degrees cooler and protect our skin from the sun’s harsh UV rays. The Texas Department of Forestry has estimated that the die-off of shade trees will cost Texans hundreds of millions of dollars more for air-conditioning. Trees, of course, sequester carbon, a greenhouse gas that makes the planet warmer. A study by the Carnegie Institution for Science also found that water vapor from forests lowers ambient temperatures.

A big question is, which trees should we be planting? Ten years ago, I met a shade tree farmer named David Milarch, a co-founder of the Champion Tree Project who has been cloning some of the world’s oldest and largest trees to protect their genetics, from California redwoods to the oaks of Ireland. “These are the supertrees, and they have stood the test of time,” he says.

Science doesn’t know if these genes will be important on a warmer planet, but an old proverb seems apt, “When Is the best time to plant a tree?” The answer: “Twenty years ago. The second-best time? Today.”

*Jim Robbins is the author of the forthcoming book “The Man Who Planted Trees.” [Source: New York Times, April 12, 2012

Planting
................the Trees

You came and planted trees!
Braving April drizzle, you cradled
your twigs, searched out
the colored stakes, dug holes
and firmed the mud around the microscopic roots.

Now three days past, I roam
the lumpy stream bed, where nettle
and angelica invade in ragged clumps,
admiring my young shoots-
thin embryos of trees, like miniatures
for a Lilliputian world, where thumb-sized people
plow their rug-sized fields.

These are my countdown years.
As tree cells grow--
patiently sending nutrients
up and down their sticky veins—
and mine deplete,
how can I say what joy they'll bring,
these simple sticks? Already a bug-sized leaf
unfolds its crenulated edge. Those that survive
to turn their juices into syrup,
or flaunt fall's banners
become the friends who placed them here.

Alice D’Alessio

[from: A BLESSING OF TREES, Cross+Roads Press #21, 2004, o.p.]

rebecca mead | love’s labour

Illustration by Gerald Scarfe

NOTES from the UNDERGROUND  No. 214 (& Poetry Dispatch) | April 25, 2012

BOOKS

LOVE’S LABOR

Monogamy, Marriage, and other menaces
by
Rebecca Mead

In 1643, John Milton published his “Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce,” an essay addressed to the members of the English Parliament, in which he de­plored matrimonial laws that impris­oned the unhappily married in “a droop­ing and disconsolate household captivity, without refuge or redemption.” But the “Doctrine of Divorce” is also the reverse of what its title suggests; in defending divorce, Milton offers a meditation on what a marriage worth the name might consist of. In his tenderest phrase, Mil­ton (whose own first, unhappy marriage must have been instructive in these mat­ters) writes, “In God’s intention, a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage.” Milton would have understood “conversation” in a broader sense than we do now. The word derives from the Latin verb conversari, which means to live together, with connotations of habitual proximity and cooperation. Milton is not referring to marital chatter about school districts or visits to the in-laws or the follies of the Bush Administration, or even the familiar, forlorn spousal inquiry “What are you thinking about?” The conversa­tion of true marriage, he suggests, is an intimate, easy, fruitful intercourse: not talk but life itself.

In a droll, overstated new book, “Against Love: A Polemic” (Pantheon; $24), Laura Kipnis describes a different kind of marital conversation. “As is true of all human languages, the language of coupledom is governed by a finite set of rules that determine what can be verbal­ized and how,” she writes in a section ti­tled “Couple Linguistics 101.” “Close observation reveals that this is a language comprising one recurring unit of speech the interdiction.” Kipnis spends the next ten pages of her book enumerating some of those interdictions, “a catalogue of strictures, commands and punishment so unending that you will begin to wonder why no one has yet invoked the Geneva Convention when it comes to cou­ple relations”:

You can’t leave the dishes for later, wash the dishes badly, not use soap, drink straight from the container, make crumbs without wiping them up (now, not later), or load the dishwasher according to the method that seems most sensible to you…You can’t not make the bed. You can’t not express appreci­ation when the other person makes the bed even if you don’t care. You can’t sleep apart, you can’t go to bed at different times, you can’t fall asleep on the couch without getting woken up to go to bed. You can’t eat in bed. You can’t get out of bed right away after sex. You can’t have insomnia without being grilled about what’s really bothering you.

In Kipnis’s characterization, the do­mestic captivity that is marriage is com­plete and relentless, with surveillance, repression, and prohibition built into its very structure.

Kipnis teaches in the department of radio, television, and film at Northwest­ern University, and an earlier incarnation of “Against Love” appeared in 1998 in the journal Critical Inquiry. In Critical Inquiry, her lively prose was buttressed by footnotes invoking names familiar from the nation’s cultural-studies curric­ula: Herbert Marcuse, Jean Laplanche, Fredric Jameson, Julia Kristeva, and, of course, Marx and Engels. Those refer­ences have been considerably pruned in the book-length version, though the germ of their ideas still informs the text. The result is a deft indictment of the marital ideal, as well as a celebration of the dissent that constitutes adultery, de­livered in pointed daggers of prose. In a typical flourish, Chapter 2 begins, “Adultery is one wav of protesting the confines of coupled life; of course there’s always murder.” Reading Kipnis is rather like sitting next to an engagingly acerbic guest at a dinner party—great run for an evening, if somewhat curdling to the digestion.

Kipnis, alighting upon the psycho-therapeutic bromide that relationships take work, asks, “When did the rhetoric of the factory become the default lan­guage of love?” It’s an interesting ques­tion, but she doesn’t answer it. Instead, she takes the metaphor of work at its word, characterizing ours as an age “when monogamy becomes labor, when desire is organized contractually, with accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labor from employees, with marriage a domestic factory policed by means of rigid shop-floor discipline.”

And this, of course, is where Marx comes in: “If love is the latest form of alienated labor, would rereading ‘Capital’ as a marriage manual be the most ap­propriate response?” (One could charita­bly take that “rereading” to be a nice little joke about the preoccupations of cultural-studies academics, rather than an expression of it.) Pursuing the analogy of love and labor, Kipnis declares that marital fidelity inevitably evolves into what she calls, after Marx, “surplus mo­nogamy: enforced compliance rather than a free expression of desire.” Submitting to the repressive regime of marriage, then, is an enactment in miniature of a larger and more tragic social conformity.

Much of die book consists of an ar­gument against companionate coupledom, the condition to which—or so popular culture, legal systems, and reli­gious institutions insist—we all aspire. “Domestic couplceom [is] modern love’s mandatory barracks,” Kipnis says. “Do­mestic coupledom is the boot camp for compliant citizenship.” In support of her case, she cites the familiar divorce statis­tics showing that half of all American marriages end in divorce; the resigned verdicts passed upon the institution of matrimony by such authorities as Sigmund Freud (“One does not venture to declare aloud and openly that marriage is not an arrangement calculated to satisfy a man’s sexuality, unless one is driven to do so perhaps by the love of truth and eagerness for reform”); and the well-rehearsed argument that romantic love as the foundation of an enduring mar­riage is an invention of modernity, un­known to ancient Greeks, courtly lovers, or the centuries’ worth of marriageable sons and daughters who served as cur­rency in parental property transactions.

The structure of contemporary marriage, with its expectations of lifetime fidelity, belongs to the apparatus of state control. A population that willingly polices itself through the interdictions of married life, Kipnis argues, has given up any revolutionary strivings, and will submit to other repressive social orders— capitalism, say—without protest. “Let’s imagine that to achieve consensus and continuity, any society is required to pro­duce the kinds of character structures and personality types it needs to achieve its objective,” she writes.” What mysteri­ous force or mind-altering substance could compel an entire population into such total social integration without them even noticing it happening, or ut­tering the tiniest peep of protest? What if it could be accomplished through love?

The hero of Kipnis’s story is adultery. Conducting an adulterous affair amounts to a courageous insurrection against an inhuman social order. “Adultery is the sit-down strike of the love-takes-work ethic,” she says; it is, in fact, the “anarcho-syndicalism of private life.” And she has the revolutionary’s disdain for ameliorist measures. Addressing marital dissatis­faction through divorce and remarriage amounts, in her view, to a submission to cultural norms: serial monogamy, the ap­proved cultural therapy for the failure of monogamy proper, is “liberal reformism writ familial’1—the participant? change, but the institution survives intact. Kip­nis, who, unfortunately, feels the need to preface her book with the explanation that a polemic is inherently extremist and not to be taken entirely seriously, sug­gests that the structure of marriage might be rethought. “It’s generally understood that falling in love means committing to commitment,” she writes. “Different social norms could entail something en­tirely different: yearly renewable con­tracts, for example.”

Given the census data on divorce, Kipnis suggests, the reasonable thing to do would be to factor the likely de­mise of half of American marriages into policy decisions. Instead, the public has been subject to lectures on marital recti­tude by politicians like Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston, who have either transgressed their own nuptial vows or vowed marital fidelity successively to dif­ferent women. Kipnis devotes much of her book to the way that adultery, in the nineteen-nineties, burst out of the pri­vate sphere and into the political, cre­ating a new political style, which she describes ‘as spousal: “Would you want to be married to this politician?” Bill Clinton was hardly the first adulterous United States President, but his trans­gressions, she suggests, occurred at a mo­ment when the self-deception upon which the concept of monogamy is founded could no longer be sustained. The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal pro­vided an arena for the national ambivalence about marriage: “If there were a Starr Report on every American mar­riage, the institution would instantly crumble, never to recover.”

Kipnis is disappointed in Clinton for failing to embrace his inner adulterer and for capitulating to the ruling mari­tal order with his denials, apologies, and efforts to patch things up with his wife, ” now Senator Clinton. (Yes, he would want to be married to this politician.) A better role model, she thinks, is Steven R, Johnson, the ranking Republican in the Indiana state senate. When he was found to have committed “inappropriate” rela­tions with one of his interns, he ad­mitted to the affair, expressed regret, was removed from his committee chair­manship, and was ultimately separated from his wife. In the midst of all that, he issued a public statement saying that, “in a very strange sense,” he had been given “an opportunity to start my life again.”

Kipnis considers this quickening newness to be adultery’s highest good; “It is at least a reliable way of proving to ourselves that we’re not quite in the ground yet.” She is extremely funny on the allures of extramarital romance, de­scribing the overdetermined encounter at the academic conference (“You slowly become aware of a muffled but not com­pletely unfamiliar feeling stirring deep within, a distant rumbling getting louder and louder, like a herd of elephants massing on the bushveld…. Oh, God, it’s your libido, once a well-known free­dom fighter, now a sorry, shriveled thing, from swaggering outlaw to model citi­zen, Janis Joplin to Barry Manilow in just a few short decades”) which leads to the secret phone calls, the elaborately concealed meetings, and the flushed ex­changes. She’s gimlet-eyed about the myriad self-deceptions of adultery—the conviction that one’s lover has the pow­ers of understanding of Socrates, the sexual technique of Casanova, and the capacity for sympathy of Mother Te­resa—and about the arrangement’s nar­cissistic rewards. “What really keeps you glued to the phone till all hours of the night—conversations sparkling with soulfulness and depth you hadn’t known you possessed, exchanging those search­ing whispered intimacies—is a very dif­ferent new love-object: yourself. The new beloved mirrors this fascinating new self back to you, and admit it, you’re madly in. love with both of them.” Though Kipnis is aware that adultery has its own con­tradictions (it couldn’t exist without mar­riage, for starters), she is won over by what it offers: a rekindling of sexual desire.

Indeed, for someone with such a skep­tical eye for the supposed eternal ver­ities, Kipnis gives lust a free ride. “We’re inherently desiring creatures,” she says. “And sometimes desire just won’t take no for an answer.” For all her insistence on the historical specificity of our no­tions of romantic love, Kipnis treats the kind of sexual desire that surfaces during academic conferences as if it were trans-historical and transcultural, rather than being conditional upon the ready avail­ability of a range of alternative partners and effective contraception, both of which are historical novelties, particu­larly for women. Kipnis is at her most incisive when writing about what she considers to be the desire-free zone of a long-term marriage. “Embarrassing, isn’t it, how long you can go without it, if you don’t remember to have it, and how much more inviting a good night’s sleep can seem compared to those over-rehearsed acts,” she writes. “Even though it used to be pretty good—if memory serves—before there was all that sar­casm. Or disappointment. Or children. Or history.”

“Against Love” Invariably depicts the diminishing of sexual desire as a loss, and although it is a taboo of contempo­rary culture to admit to feeling other­wise, this was not always the case: it isn’t hard to see why women exhausted by years of dangerous childbearing might happily have greeted the ebbing of sex­ual desire, particularly that of their part­ner. Kipnis does pay lip service to the functions of marriage beyond the sex­ual—”Companionship, shared housing costs, childrearing convenience, reassur­ing predictability, occasional sex, insur­ance against the destabilizing effects of non-domestic desire”—but her enumer­ation seems delivered in the spirit of those legally required disclosures of pharmaceutical side effects. Unfettered sexual desire, for her, trumps all other inclinations. That view, as it happens, puts her in the company of the con­servative churchmen against whom Mil­ton railed in his divorce tract, since just about the only ground on which a divorce could be granted in the mid-seventeenth century was that of adultery. To Milton, this amounted to a sacrile­gious reduction of marriage to nothing bur avenue for sexual relations: “What is this but secretly to instruct us, that how­ever many grave reasons are pretended to the married life, yet that nothing indeed is thought worth regard therein but the prescribed satisfaction of an irrational heat?” Kipnis’s celebration of this irra­tional heat leaves no room for the notion that the first achings of desire might evolve within marriage into less thermal satisfactions.

Falling in love is the nearest most of us come to glimpsing Utopia in our life­times (with sex and drugs as fallbacks),” .she writes. But what if Utopia was not merely glimpsed in the heady, vanishing moment of falling in love but was actu­ally the project of enduring love? What if the expression of that love was the ongo­ing construction of a better world in do­mestic microcosm—of Milton’s meet and happy conversation? Rather than seeing each individual marriage as a cog in a tyrannical industrial machine that manufactures large-scale social docility, we might re-reread Marx to come up with an alternative understanding of how the language of work might relate to the language of love. Perhaps love isn’t nec­essarily the alienated labor of the factory floor. Perhaps it can be the kind of work mat Marx argued was displaced by the inhuman character of industrialization: the meaningful, satisfying work of the farmer or the artisan who remained or­ganically connected to the fruits of his labor, and who was ennobled by this ef­fort. Conducted with imagination, the labor of this love might be so gratifying as to be indistinguishable from play.

[from: THE NEW YORKER, August 11, 2003]

Hoy No Tengo Tiempo | Painting by Norbert Blei

xi chuang | exhortations

POETRY DISPATCH No. 368 | April 18, 2012

XI CHUAN

Exhortations

Struck down a shadow, stood up a man.

Trees eavesdrop on trees, birds eavesdrop on birds; when a viper stiffens and attacks a passing human it becomes human.

You examine your face in the mirror, affronting a stranger.

The law sayeth: any man to loot a burning house shall be put to death, any man to sell dogmeat as mutton shall meet with retribution, any man to cast glances east and west shall find a snare at his feet, any man of chicken gizzard pettiness shall be spit upon. But I must supplement this, as I have seen monkeys on the fast track just as capable as men on the fast track, their muscles equally developed, their methods equally unscrupulous.

So the sunflower really is a flower!

Why have cats and not tigers become our pets?

Small little pain, a feeling like sand gushing into the eye—who will compensate me?

A book will change me, if I want to grasp ii; a girl will change me, if I want to praise her; a road will change me, if I want to go its distance; a coin will change me, if I want to possess it.I change someone living beside me, and I am changed; my single conscience makes us both suf­fer, my own selfish distractions make us both blush.

The truth cannot be public, echoless thoughts arc hard to sing.

Wrath makes incantations malfunction.

Why give a compass to a sailor in distress on the seas?

Don’t demand too much of the world. Don’t hold on to your sleeping wife while dreaming of high-yield margins. Don’t light lamps in the daytime. Don’t smear people’s faces. Remember: don’t piss in the wild. Don’t sing in a cemetery. Don’t take promises lightly. Don’t be annoy­ing. Make wisdom something useful.

Static shadows can be scorned but veneration for shifting shadows must be maintained.

Sunbirds strive to fly, but who’s chasing them away?

What kind of good luck can end your left eyelid’s incessant flitting?

[from: NOTES ON THE MOSQUITO, Selected Poems, New Directions, 2012]

SEE ALSO: http://bashosroad.outlawpoetry.com/xi-chuan-answering-venus-45-fragments-excerpts/xi-chuan/haiku/

bob edwards | a voice in the box

NOTES______________________from the UNDERGROUND No. 213 (& Poetry Dispatch) | April 9, 2012

RADIO LOVE

Bob Edwards: A VOICE IN THE BOX

Editor’s Note: “Radio Love” … I don’t know what else to call it, this feeling. It attracted my attention as a young child…the kitchen radio on top the refrigerator where my father listened to the news…Gabriel Heatter: “There’s good news tonight!” and Walter Winchell: “Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press.” Talk about drama! That little wooden radio…which my mother tuned to an ethnic music station on Friday evening and sang along in Czech…where I listened to the Shadow, the Lone Ranger, Superman, etc. Where Arthur Godfrey was always on the air singing: “It Seems Like Old Times…” Where I first heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

And that large living room console where the three of us listened and laughed in the dark to Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos and Andy, Fred Allen, and Bob Hope.

Those were the days, my friend…

Yes they were. And so they continue into the present, thanks to the gods of the airwaves who refuse to be silenced in our high-tech times. Television never did kill radio. Never will.

I must caution myself at this point from writing a full-blown piece on my radio love affairs. There’s so much to remember. So much to praise. All those voices which resonate within me to this day.

I still see myself as a young boy in my bedroom…fiddling with a crystal set trying to bring in a station! That’s how far back my initial love affair goes. Followed later in my Chicago life by a more gown-up, more cultural, in some ways more exciting new love affair with WFMT, the voice and passion of Studs Terkel, “The Midnight Special” every Saturday night…classical music, the knowledge and comforting voice my friend, Marty Robinson, brought to the airwaves. How thankful I remain today in Wisconsin, forty plus years later, for the role radio still plays in my life, 24 hours a day—tuned to Wisconsin Public Radio and NPR. How appreciative I am of one voice alone, the many hours of program pleasure and thought the recently retired Jean Feraca brought to us lucky to share her interview skills, her thought and laughter. (Scroll down.)

But let me introduce you to Bob Edwards–who needs no introduction if you listened to NPR faithfully and followed his voice past and present.

His book: A VOICE IN THE BOX, My Life in RADIO is a history, a memoir, a romance with radio—a testament to the beauty of communication that expands our minds and imagination by the simple art of lending an ear, listening in a way

one’s life depended upon it. Which in some ways, it always has.

A few excerpts. The voice of Bob Edwards. Stay tuned… –Norbert Blei

REDEMPTION

November 6, 2004. Another cold, crisp night in the Windy City, but it’s warm inside the Grand Ballroom of the Renaissance Chicago Hotel, where hundreds of radio royalty have gathered. Men in tuxedos and women in beautiful gowns or sexy cocktail dresses are clustered at thirty-four tables, each adorned with flowers and a burning candle. At one end of the ballroom is a bandstand, where Mickey and the Memories will entertain for everyone’s dancing pleasure. That will come later, after dinner, many speeches, and a ceremony that is also a live radio program carried by the Premier group of stations.

The announcer is Jim Bohannon, one of my oldest friends in radio. He has alerted the diners to the Applause sign behind him and has let it be known that great audible enthusiasm is encouraged. At exactly 8:00 PM, we hear some upbeat theme music, and all respond to the sign’s insistent demand for applause. A floor director cues Bohannon, who says, “Live, from Chicago, it’s radio’s biggest night—the 2004 Radio Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Tonight, the Radio Hall of Fame inducts XM Satellite Radio superstar Bob Edwards.”

Superstar? We do love our hyperbole in radio. As of that night, my show on XM was just four weeks old. I doubt if the fellow who, months earlier, fired me from my previous show at NPR regarded me as anybody’s superstar. But no matter—I was in the Hall.

Radio is closing in on its centennial, and its Hall of Fame includes the scientists who invented it, the hucksters who made money from it, the journalists who informed, the smart people who enlightened, and especially the enormously talented entertainers who came into our homes and cars and offices and made us laugh, cry, wince, fear, dread, guffaw, and enter worlds we could not imagine on our own. So here I am with Marconi, Edward R. Murrow, Arthur Godfrey, Alan Freed, Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos ‘n’ Andy, Orson Welles, Paul Harvey, Wolfman Jack, Bing Crosby, Gordon McLendon, Studs Terkel, Ma Perkins. Cousin Brucie, Red Barber, the Lone Ranger—just a stew of people, programs, and genres spanning generations and having nothing in common but the microphone and an audience.

My induction ceremony was a watershed event—the last in a series of traumas and triumphs that had kept me in a state of emotional whiplash for most of the year. So this night in Chicago was the end of something but also the beginning of something. It symbolized my passage to a new radio home and an environment in which I could do what I regard as the very best work of my career.

Induction really recognizes a much longer journey—the span of a career. So let’s go back to the little burg where my radio journey began in 1968, when I had no notion of a hall of fame—only a burning desire to be a voice in the box.

LAUNCH

…As the ABC anchor cued the station break, I flipped the switch and spoke the first words of my broadcast career: “This is WHEL, 1570, in New Albany, Indiana.”

There were no fireworks in celebration and my debut escaped the notice of the local newspapers, but there’s nothing bigger in a young man’s life than realizing his dream. Never mind that I was working at the tackiest, most miserable little outpost in American broadcasting; I had crossed the threshold and joined the profession of Edward R. Murrow, Arthur Godfrey, and Red Barber.

Why wouldn’t I be thrilled at joining the club? For nearly fifty years, broadcasters had informed and entertained Americans in ways that newspapers, magazines, theater, and motion pictures could not. They had made it possible for citizens to feel present at events occurring far away. Murrow’s rooftop broadcasts during the London Blitz brought World War II into the living rooms of Manhattan apartments and Iowa farmhouses. Earlier, people short on hope during the Great Depression heard reassuring words from their president on the radio, and radio performers offered the only professional entertainment most Americans could afford. Baseball fans no longer had to gather at the local newspaper office to be relayed telegraph reports of the World Series. Graham McNamee in the twenties and Red Barber in the thirties magically transported fans in the bayous and the Rockies to the ballparks of New York, Chicago, and Detroit. Arthur Godfrey, on radio and then on television, brought a folksy personality to the airwaves and made his audience comfortable with the entertainers he introduced.

VOICE

Little boys want to be firefighters or athletes or rock stars. I wanted to be on the radio. The radio in our house was a handsome mahogany Zenith purchased by my parents when they married in 1939, Now decorating my living room, the Zenith Long Distance Radio remains a marvel to me. It’s more than three-and-a-half feet high, more than two feet wide, and a foot and a half deep. It doubles as a piece of furniture, the perfect pedestal for flowers in a vase next to a framed portrait of Grandma. As a toddler, I ran my fingernails across the fabric covering the huge speaker at the base. Reaching high and to the left, I could touch the knobs and buttons (voice, normal, treble, alto, bass). To the right were the push buttons labeled with the call letters of stations that don’t exist today. Frequencies were listed in clock-face fashion, shortwave stations forming the upper arc, the AM band on the lower arc. At “noon” on the clock face and out of my reach was the mysterious green light that peered at all in the room.

With a tall outside antenna, our radio could pick up foreign broadcasts, ships at sea, police calls, and ham operators, but we didn’t bother with that. We listened to the network programs that had yet to make the switch to television. Soap operas were still on the radio; Our Gal Sunday and The Romance of Helen Trent were my grandmother’s favorites. I remember hearing President Truman talk about the war in Korea, Just before suppertime, a local priest would lead the rosary and Mom would insist that I pray along.

So many voices coming out of that box fascinated me. It didn’t matter what the voices were saying; I longed for mine to join them. In time, I learned the formats of all the local stations and knew the schedules of all the announcers. At night, I heard other voices on stations in Chicago, Nashville, New Orleans, and Cincinnati, and I’d dream of seeing those places someday. Everything said on the radio had my attention in those days, not just the news. I would have been perfectly content to be the fellow who said, “You’re listening to the music of…” or “Tune in tomorrow for another thrilling adventure of….” I just wanted to be one of the voices in the box.

[from: A VOICE IN THE BOX, My Life in Radio, the University Press of Kentucky, 2011]