The other night someone asked if I had a blog.

The other night someone asked me if I had a blog, and I've been thinking about the question, off and on, ever since. I told him about this blog, but I as easily could have told him about the poetry blog on blogger, Ab Chaos Poesis, which is mostly for the daily draft poems during poetry month, but now is a warehouse for links to other poems I've written and published on the web. Or I might have told him about Ab Chaos Iter, the wordpress travel writing blog started when writing for Travel Weekly and other trade magazines, now mostly abandoned.

No doubt this fellow was only trying to be polite. He couldn't have cared that I have three blogs, four if you count the one started just after marrying that I can't even find any more. (How many abandoned, ignored blogs are also forgotten by their authors?) So I conflated them and told him about the poetry blog but told him its name was Ab Chaos Lex. Lies still come very easily to me. And just today, after wasting a lot of time on my phone with the news, I thought I should take a look at the blogs, since it's been a while.

In a perfect world, my three blogs would be one blog, this one. I still like the name, its lifting from Finnegan's Wake, its play off my own name, and it reminder of my old sneaking certainty that Chaos is not only the mother of this world (thank you Hesiod) but its substance, too. Particularly these days, when the most powerful man in the world (what a world) has a little problem with mood swings.

But mood swings are a cinch, compared to chaos. As Hesiod wrote:

Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, [110] and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honors amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus. These things declare to me from the beginning, you Muses who dwell in the house of Olympus, [115] and tell me which of them first came to be. In truth at first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all¹the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, [120] and Eros （Love）, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether²and Day, [125] whom she conceived and bore from union in love with Erebus. And Earth first bore starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods...

Still Chaos isn't what I was thinking of when I opened my computer today. All afternoon, I'd been flipping through my phone's Washington Post app, squinting at the news and thinking of the limits of love (fairest among the deathless gods). Hate is not generative, as everyone knows, whereas love is--that's agreed upon. Even though it "overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods." Or maybe because of that overcoming. Still, love is not much better than hate in the face of the world described by the Washington Post.

No, in the face of this news, we need poetry. Lots of poetry. So I scooted around the web and landed upon this recording of a poem by Charles Bernstein, "Ballad Laid Bare by its Devices." It begins:

Somethin’ ’bout sound

Repeatin’ in degree

        A voice not mine

Singin’ as a we.

I've heard him read the piece, written for the 2017 MLA convention, and found a fulsome pleasure in its full displeasure. This urbane New York language poet mockingly considers the ballad while creating one, dropping his gs all friendly-like, and using it to critique a little post election pain as well as the current disaster in the academy. He even references my very fave Malcolm X speech.

A ballot says, this is what we want.

A bullet does that too.

A ballad’s just lousy fantasy 

Goin’ out from an us to a youse.

The effect was painful, for this listener. Toward the end, he recites lines from "Lord Randall," an actual border ballad that pretty well sings his song (mine too):

I ha been to the wild wood; mak my bed soon; 

I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie doun. 

Oh, yes, I am poisoned; mak my bed soon 

I’m sick at the heart, and fain wad lie doun.

We are poisoned here, and maybe we always were, or maybe it's been rising like the temperatures, the oceans; the border ballad lines (from two different stanzas) fit well. In all, cycle of the poem somehow cradles the incredible exhaustion of this moment, verse and voice vexed. And though I recommend listening first, here is a text of the poem, located on Critical Inquiry.

(Maybe the reason I don't blog is that, when I do, I write about three blogs, politics, Hesiod, squeeze in the name of Malcolm X, conclude on a poem by a male poet and still feel like I haven't begun.)

It is said that TheCastle, while being an indisputably great book, seems pointless to read after a while. And I admit that, although I am officially reading it this week and am pretty delighted by it, I have not been driven to pick it up every day, as I recently was with The Goldfinch and The Son. It makes sense: Franz Kafka's story is one of incompletion, in which a man named K. (even his name is incomplete) arrives to a mysterious, unplace-able town dominated by an impregnable bureaucracy known as, of course, The Castle. A few pages in, it is painfully yet wonderfully clear that he is not going to reach his grail. Why should I finish the book if our hero’s hopes are to be brutally dashed?

All the more a reason to think about its beginning. In the beginnings, we usually find the ends. In fact, the first chapter is the only one from The Castle ever published by Franz Kafka. So let’s take a look at its first paragraph:

It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was deep in snow. The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village, K. stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him.

As the book goes on, the Castle above grows even more illusory and empty, and the gaze lasts a long time, but, oh, that gaze. That is the crux of it, this gaze peering into the mist and darkness. And what a great way to beckon us on to read and learn more.

The other beginning I’m thinking of this week is from our textbook, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. In “The School,” Donald Barthelme begins:

Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that . . . that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems . . . and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the bet. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant, and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.

With Barthelme, as usual, I enjoy him too much to make critical sense. But it’s safe to say that we are meeting a man through his voice, we are hearing a story through a man. And though a man isn’t telling us about his day, his life, we are learning all sorts of important things about him.

This is especially a speaking voice, one that repeats itself a bit, that doesn’t quite end, and that is depressed by the death of trees but this depression, well, maybe . . . (it’s hard not to mimic the rhythm in part) maybe that’s not the most adult response to take to the blight. So we worry a little for the children, and wonder if he, their teacher presumably, knew anything about trees before handing out thirty of them. I at least am curious to read on, to see what other disasters follow at this poor school. 

New Semester, New Class of Advanced Creative Writers

This semester I've assigned a totally new book: Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. By Virginia Tufte, it was strongly recommended to me last summer, and I thought it would be a strange but fun treat for the class. Advanced writing classes are good places to examine the sentence, the basic unit of communication.

Besides ughs, grunts, and eye-rolls, that is.

And besides gerund-filled invective and hair-twirling.

So, let's call it one of our basic units of communication. Fine. Still, in a creative writing class, it's pretty crucial to truck in sentences. Better still is the ability to really manipulate them. We want to know when a short, emphatic sentence is going to give a kick to the paragraph, or if the form is just going to belabor a point already made. Will a winding, langorous Henry James-ish sentence seduce your reader into the narrative scene or will it merely make her impatient for the point (or the period)? These choices are generally unconscious for writers, at least at first, and they remain largely unconscious for me. Yet our ability to think about them surely enlarges the project here, this semester. This semester we'll take a step back from the sentence, and from our sentences in particular, to see what they are doing for our work as a whole and to learn what a few alterations and adjustments might do.

A Personal Blog is Art

A Personal Blog is Art, or so says Lani Geison of Blogging Personal.

The matter has been hotly debated, but I'll say that it's art, as well as practice, process, and personal expression. It's by nature a multi-media art, linking illustration and writing, or photography and poetry, or sound to text. (Has anyone experimented with sound? I'm waiting!) And that is why I'm so pleased with the results here with my Advanced Creative Writing students.

Recently I've been talking to a couple friends about how to publish their blogs. This is a strange concept because of course a blog is already published! The blogger command options are either "Save Now" or "Publish Post"--make it available for the whole wide world to see. But we're definitely in new territory, new territory brought about by our new age of Aquarian brotherhood and instant communication, courtesy of the cool technology. In this way, this semester we've created a community of published authors.

For the past two weeks, I've encountered a little techno-jam to the effect that sometimes my notes to students cannot be sent. Blogger Bleak Down. So I've gathered the wholly random notes and some links to help you all in exploring and getting a handle on each other's work.

To begin, in Reviving the Forgotten, Kally did something I wish everyone did more often. She opened a dictionary. Her post begins:

"The word prompt is defined as: "to move to action, to assist by suggesting or saying the next words of something forgotten or imperfectly learned." I find this Merriam Webster definition to be extremely relevant to the context within the poetry prompts. These are in fact exercises used to revive images stored in the memory, in order to complete a work."

Great points, I took it a step further and investigated the etymology of the word prompt. (Etymology is about all I use dictionaries for lately.) According to the Webster's New Universal here in the adjunct office, the roots range from "to incite" to "to distribute" -- both of which seem wonderfully relevant. For doesn't a prompt act to incite us to ideas, to writing? And isn't writing a sort of distribution--of mental materials and sparks?

Jezmarie, in her blog, First Timer...Be Gentle, has posed a crucial question re: description: This is truly the question of the class. I have a few ideas naturally, but I would love to see a few more responses from the rest of the class. (Okay: I would say that it's really important to slow down. Often, my first thought about a person or place is a cliche--and that is not helpful. So I need to think past the cliche and really look at the situation--the person, the problem. Also, I want to make sure I've got the senses included. The tangibles such as smell and taste and temperature along with physical description. Those help to guide me to a fuller, richer picture, which is what I'm trying to convey--desperately trying to get the images out from my mind into your mind--the magic process of imagination.)

That's enough for now, I suppose--though of course it isn't, it's never enough. I trust you are all reading Joyce and re-reading, too. Rereading is the only way to rejoice over Joyce....