Snippets

  

Outdoors Nearby

 

Days are cool now, in the low-to-mid 60 degrees Fahrenheit, but nights are not much cooler (low 50s), so the transition from summer to fall creeps along thus far in small increments. In corners here and there, fall colors begin to sing, but for the most part the world is still green, even if (except for the brightness of rain-refreshed grass) a tired sort of green that seems to say it’s getting ready to give way.

In Swann’s Way, the opening volume of Remembrance of Things Past, Proust wrote of hawthorns in blossom, and the summer I first read those descriptions of the family’s walk alongside the flowering hedges, I was obsessed with hawthorns. Whenever the Artist and I went for an evening drive, my eyes searched in vain for hawthorns. Later, in another summer, I found one on the hill between our farmhouse and the neighbors’ house on the slope where our dogs used to meet for play. And now there are two or three closer to me, one in my meadow, another bearing its fruit closer to our south boundary.

 

“Hips and haws,” I muse, admiring the bright red berries and thinking of a character in The Borrowers, Homily, Arietty’s mother, so reluctant to leave their indoor home and take up a long outdoor search for fugitive relatives, imagining and mourning in advance the poor diet they might expect: nothing but rose hips and hawthorn berries. To my ear, that sounds as poetic as milk and honey, but the hawthorn berries are small, mealy, and tasteless, I find. Better to leave them for the wild things, although I do love seeing them.

Here, anyway, is a morning Continental breakfast of reading snippets, just small bites to go with morning coffee.

 

On Rereading

 

How can you be objective in the face of a book you love, which you have loved, which you have read at different times in your life? Such a book has a reading past. In rereading it, you have not always suffered in the same way—and above all you no longer hope with the same intensity in all the seasons of a life of reading. … The animus and anima quests do not yield the same riches at every age in the life of the reader. Above all the great books remain psychologically alive. You are never finished reading them.

 

-      Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

 

(Is life too short to reread books? Are there too many people in the world [and is life too short] to hold onto old friendships? In the past two days I have reread Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River and am now embarked, once again, on her Q Road. Her characters find much more sustenance outdoors than mere hips and haws.)

 

On Attention

 

Attention is not just another [cognitive] function…. Its ontological status is of something prior to functions and even to things. The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to….

 

So it is … with everything with which we come into contact. A mountain that is a landmark to a navigator, a source of wealth to a prospector, a many-textured form to a painter, or to another the dwelling place of the gods, is changed by the attention given to it. There is no ‘real’ mountain which can be distinguished from these, no one way of thinking which reveals the true mountain.

 

Science, however purports to be uncovering such a reality. Its apparently value-free descriptions are assumed to deliver the truth about the object…. Yet this highly objective stance … is itself value-laden. It is one particular way of looking at things, a way which privileges detachment….

 

Attention also changes who we are…. [B]y attending to someone else performing an action, and even by thinking about them doing so … we become objectively, measurably, more like them, in how we behave, think and feel.

 

-      Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

 

(Not only the company you keep socially, but the movies you watch, the books you read, the music in your ears, etc. is continually shaping and reshaping you [I/me; we/us]. As race car drivers say, “Where your eyes go, your car goes.” Similarly, where your attention goes, your heart and mind go. Do we live increasingly in a hall of distorting mirrors? I have ordered for Dog Ears Books the new book by Naomi Klein with her investigation of that idea, so stay tuned. And by the way, the left brain, which McGilchrist calls the emissary, rejects facts incompatible with what it already "knows.")

 

On the Comfort of Rocks

 

How can I convey the comfort I find in reading geology? Rocks don’t care. They have no needs or desires of their own and cannot suffer pain or hurt feelings, and neither do they heed ours. Rocks award no prizes, mete out no punishment. They have stories of their own but do not—cannot—clamor to be heard in their own voices, and that lack of argument is restful, even when the subject of an essay is volcanic eruption. There are eruptions, yes, but no wars.

 

      - P. J. Grath, “What I Like Is Sometimes (But Not Always) What Others Like,” Books in Northport, Dec. 27, 2012

 

 

And there you are, here we are, already into the second half of September, with Leelanau UnCaged coming up on Saturday the 30^th. Not only will my bookstore be open on Waukazoo Street, but we will have a special offering of our own that day: 

 

 

DOG EARS BOOKS PRESENTS:

“TWO POETS READING”

106 Waukazoo St., Northport

Saturday, September 30

(during Leelanau UnCaged)

4 p.m.

Fleda Brown

 

Michael Delp

Spring Break Trilogy: Poetry, Dog, and Sunsets

another dawn

Until it does no longer more (an hour that comes eventually for us all), life goes on, here in the high desert and mountains as well as back in northern Michigan and everywhere else that that shelters family and friends. Sunrise, sunset, both moving north now that the equinox is past. Who knows how long we will be here or if we will be here again? But we are here now. 

 

Spring has played hide-and-seek this year in Cochise County, Arizona (as it always does back in Leelanau County, Michigan), and I see in my photographs of previous springs that wildflower blooms are tardy this year, compared to the last two. This is also the dustiest year we (the Artist and I) have ever seen here, though not necessarily the dustiest that has ever been. Dry, dusty, and very windy. I attribute late wildflower bloom and more frequent dust storms to a common source, drought, but that is not one of my three topics for today, so let’s move on. 

 

Poetry

 

Bone Rosary: New and Selected Poems

by Thomas Lynch

Boston: David R. Godine, March 2021

Hardcover, 256pp.

ISBN: 978-1-56792-701-6

$25.95

 

When a mature poet offers us “new and selected poems,” it’s cause for celebration, but such a best-of-plus album is not to be hurried through in an evening or two. Initially I wanted to publish a post about Thomas Lynch’s new book for St. Patrick’s Day. Then for the book’s March 23 release date. And now – well, here I am, still gratefully reflecting as I linger over pages and turn back and forth to re-read.

 

Reflection invades poems that first appear to be simple snapshots. All the “heaving, tidal pulses of creation” are here. Do they rise from quiet hours of preparing bodies (the poet a funeral director in the family business since 1973) or simply any Irish man or woman’s penchant for dreaming and regretting? Or, most likely, the gift of poetry itself, bestowed unpredictably, like grace and then refined and distilled by the earthly craftsman. Particular poems pull me back to church, to Michigan waters, and then across larger salt waters to the land of my mother’s father, land I’ve never seen,

 

                                          …the land

between hayricks and Friesians with their calves

considering the innocence in all

God’s manifold creation but for Man,

and how he’d perish but for sin and mourning.

two parishes between here and the ocean:

a bellyful tonight is what he thought,

please God, and breakfast in the morning. 

 

The Sin-eater fills his belly at the bedsides of the dead, consuming their various sins along with bread and beer provided by the family of the deceased, that their dear departed might not languish forever in purgatory. After he“feasted on Easter Duties missed,” along with more repulsive sins that upset his digestion and gave him bad dreams, from time to time he considered retirement (or raising his rates, at least) but feels his living to be a mission equal to that of the priests. Although the twenty-four pages of poems selected from an earlier collection, The Sin-Eater: A Breviary, initially struck me as longer than I wanted to spend with old Argyle, I find now that it is these poems that haunt me, much as Argyle himself was haunted by the dead whose sins he had consumed by their bedside.

 

Which is not to ignore new poems that stopped me in my tracks. America and Ireland; families and outsiders; landscapes, realities, and fantasies (the fantasy of “Casablanca”); the quick and the dead; cats, cows, dogs, and horses – not only the Bible-inspired but all Lynch’s poems are about “the spiritual life” as he understands it, which (he tells us himself) is faith in “the life of language and its power to make us known to one another and to ourselves,” a faith in the possibility of connection. And to a poet, more than the meanings of words matters in making connections with language. Vowel sounds matter, line lengths matter, enjambment or its absence, internal rhymes rather than an end-of-line rhyme scheme. There is so much here, so many levels, that the table at the rich ongoing feast is fuller every time one looks. Thus does art work miracles.

 

As I’ve already said, this is not a book to hurry through (no book of real poems is), and I salute not only poet Thomas Lynch but also Boston publisher David R. Godine. Thank you both so much!

 

 

Dog: Peasy Tales Continue

 

I’m not sure what to report about my rescue dog. “You’re a better dog every day,” the Artist tells little Peasy in all seriousness, and it’s true that my sweet Pea is much calmer and quieter in the mornings now (usually) ... and that we are able to take him with us in the car or leave him alone for hours at a time, as weather and inclination dictate ... and that the three of us adore our evening “pack time” cuddling and snuggling. Such a good dog in so many ways! But you know how some people will say, “I’m a people person”? Well, Peasy is not a people dog. He is in love with me and looks up to the Artist and is happy being part of a family and having a home but still very fearful and skittish of other humans. Not a take-anywhere dog like Sarah. So (words of my mother that I dreaded above all others), we’ll see. 

 

 

A Sunset Drive

 

Sometimes, if we have an early supper and don’t immediately sink into our reading chairs with current books, the Artist and I like to drive a few miles to the east and take quiet leave of another day with the long, open views down across the buttes of the Sulphur Springs Valley to the the Chiricahua Mountains and Cochise Stronghood in the Dragoons, driving back to the ghost town after sunset. I’ll let images tell the rest of the story and wish you a pleasant, restful, and safe spring break, however you will be spending it.

 

Round Two Goes -- Again! -- to Jennifer Clark

I’m so happy that poet Jennifer Clark contacted me this past winter about her new book of poems, A Beginner’s Guide to Heaven, and that she will be my first Thursday Evening Author of 2019, because Jennifer Clark is extraordinary. You think you know what to expect from poetry — and then you read Jennifer Clark. There’s the natural world, of course, in her work, a world traditionally mined by poets since poetry began, but from the heavens above to spiders close at hand, Clark’s eye sees nature anew, drawing connections and analogies as original as the ones she finds in ghastly newspaper tragedies or, to pull back to a happier scene, in the event of a young boy acquiring his first athletic protector. Is there nothing this poet fails to notice and give back to us in a strange and wondrous new light?

Original vision and an original voice are the gifts we receive from a genuine poet. That is, we experience writing that presents the world anew, in a voice on the page that is as individual as a face in a portrait. Clark paints pain wearing with a shock of humor, while in other poems the humor has its own sharp edge. 

Usually when writing about a book of poetry I give a few sample lines. Somehow with this work, I don’t want to take anything out of context. As each poem a unitary whole, so is the collection. As is always the case with the best poetry, each piece merits and rewards re-reading. Others demand it. There’s no way I could take in all the details of “Optimal Foraging Theory” my first time through, but my bafflement did not stand in the way of delight.

Poet and bookseller with poet's previous collection

But you don’t need to take my word for it or wait for June 27. Come in and pick up the book today, and then you will definitely not want to miss Jennifer Clark in Northport.

Her previous visit to Dog Ears Books

Another Beautiful Up North Day

Sunny Flower
Faces

I won’t dwell today on how the summer days are flying by, because you all know that. Instead I’ll say what a beautiful day it was here in the Leelanau on Thursday. Sunny and warm without being too hot. A light breeze, just enough to be refreshing. Hay being baled and stacked, people at the beach, gardens blooming the hearts out. 

For me, it was a noteworthy day in a couple of ways. First, I bought a new camera. Second, I hosted my fifth summer TEA event, with the ever-delightful Lynne Rae Perkins and Anne-Marie Oomen as this week’s Thursday Evening Authors. 

The camera is another Canon, this one the new Rebel SL2, and I highly recommend the Camera Shop in downtown Traverse City for all your photography needs, whatever they may be. Shopping there is a most satisfying experience. I enjoyed every minute of it. Thank you, Molly! Stopping back at the farm and proceeding on to Northport, I paused here and there to experiment with the new camera and its various settings, though it will take weeks before I become completely familiar with it. 

Chicory

Bruce at the helm

Mary Kent's flowers

An added bonus to the shopping trip was my purchase of new batteries and a roll of b/w film for a beautiful old camera bequeathed to me by a friend after her husband died. Back to film? Molly at the Camera Shop told me young people are going back to film, in the same way I have found young people going back to print books. Interesting parallels there.

Anne-Marie Oomen and Lynne Rae Perkins

TEA was pure pleasure! Anne-Marie and Lynne Rae had not planned ahead of time how they would share the stage and were, in fact, still working out the details as I was introducing them, but anyone who was there can tell you that they did a stellar job. It was as seamless as if they had done it many times before. Freshwater, saltwater, Lake Michigan, Atlantic Ocean, prose, poetry: readings and stories and answers afterward to questions were treasures added to my bookseller’s store of memories, as were the engaged and appreciative faces in the audience. It is such a treat to me to see friends gathered in the Artist’s gallery to enjoy my bookstore guests! There were several writers in the audience this week — Kathleen Stocking, Sarah Shoemaker, and next week’s scheduled TEA guest, Dennis Miller.

Michigan writers light up my life!

And afterwards — I slipped off my work treadmill entirely when my event guests invited me to have a beer with them at the Mitten. We sat at an outdoor table, and I had a dark stout and poached some of Lynne Rae’s poutine (they called it something else, but French fries, gravy, and cheese will always be poutine to me) and listened to stories of Iceland and vowed to read Independent People this coming winter, and I felt as if I were on vacation. Most of the day had been busy and productive, and I enjoyed zipping around getting other things done while Bruce tended the shop for me and David set up the gallery for the evening. The author event was a joy. Then to relax for an hour like a tourist without a care in the world? Ah! What an all-around rewarding day was my nineteenth of July!

Yum!

Anne-Marie Oomen

Lynne Rae Perkins

Bill Perkins

Busy and Challenged

Having murdered my camera by leaving it out in the rain (so maybe not murder, because not intentional), I am not 100% satisfied with the substitutes I’ve tried. Neither of the Artist’s little cameras nor my own new smart-aleck phone does what I used to do so easily with my Canon. Meanwhile, every week brings another Thursday Evening Author, which translates to another camera challenge. We did have a good time last week with poet Richard Gilmore Loftus, though, even if my photographic documentation leaves something to be desired. 

I’m camera-challenged in the outdoors, too. The baby robins with their characteristically hungry open beaks opening this post aren’t bad, but I would have liked a better, i.e., sharper, clearer image of their earlier sleepiness, seen here in less-than-optimal detail.

But on with the show, camera or no, because as bulletin board and counter attest, the summer beat goes on at Dog Ears Books, as it does everywhere Up North.

This Thursday will be very special, with not one but three authors joining us for TEA at 7 p.m. When Lynne Rae Perkins and Anne-Marie Oomen agreed to share the stage, it looked as if Anne-Marie’s co-author would not be available, but now poet Linda Nemec-Foster’s calendar has cleared, and she will be with us, too. (Linda was last here in 2014, when thirteen Michigan poets helped us celebrate the 21st anniversary of Dog Ears Books. How the last four years have flown!) So, two books, three authors — both books and all authors fabulous and pure Michigan! Please come if you can. You won’t be sorry!

Postscript 7/17: Now it appears that Linda will not be able to make the date, after all, but I know we will be sufficiently entertained and delighted by Anne-Marie and Lynne Rae, so keep that date circled!

Dip Your Toe in the Water!

Two beautiful and exciting new books this season for readers from ‘tweens through adult in age (and heart) come from northern Michigan writers. 

Newbery author Lynne-Rae Perkins, with her characteristic gentle but offbeat humor, introduces her young characters and readers to the ocean in Secret Sisters of the Salty Sea, capturing once again the wonder of first-time experience, as she does so well. Secret Sisters is a “chapter book” that also includes charming black-and-white illustrations by the author.

Linda Nemec Foster and Anne-Marie Oomen, for their part, decided that freshwater should have mermaids as well as saltwater, adding illustrator Meredith Ridl to their team, with most delightful results. The Lake Michigan Mermaid: A Tale in Poems offers a complex story in compelling verse and images and a wonderful souvenir of Up North vacation.

Secret Sisters of the Salty Sea, by Lynne-Rae Perkins. Greenwillow Books, hardcover with dust jacket, $16.99

The Lake Michigan Mermaid: A Tale in Poems, by Linda Nemec Foster and Anne-Marie Oomen. Wayne State University Press, hardcover with illustrated boards, $16.99

How to Say Good-By?

Searching in the dark for words

I find only memories and tears.

I didn’t know Jim Harrison in Hollywood meetings or Paris lunches of many hours and many courses. I knew Jim and Linda at home, in their old farmhouse down the road from Lake Leelanau, with their daughters and their friends, their dogs and cats and gardens and, long ago, Linda’s horse, later, her pet rescued crow. Also, memorably, at the Bluebird in Leland. 

When we first met, the Harrisons were driving a car missing one of the back windows, the glass replaced by cardboard held in with duct tape, a car that exemplified the phrase "winter beater," though they drove it in all seasons. This was before Hollywood money allowed the remodeling of the old house. Even then Jim told me proudly that he always kept plenty of good food in the refrigerator and pantry. He might skimp on other things but never on food. Years later, when a number of friends were assembled in the house for a dinner party during sweetcorn season, Jim gave the signal to a handful of us to run out and pick the corn only when the water in the pot had reached a full, rolling boil.

Was that the same year that younger daughter Anna was feeling somewhat under the weather and requested duck broth? Linda observed with a wry smile that the family food obsessions had “created a monster.” (Not so. Like her mother, choosing a lightly traveled road, Anna married a poet.) And was that also the same time – somehow they blend together in memory, mental snapshots from different years and seasons all jumbled – that I hauled my Correcting Selectric III from Kalamazoo to Lake Leelanau to type a sheaf of new poems for a book Jim was putting together?

It’s true that Jim Harrison lived a big life. What is missing in all the public obituaries, though, for me – and I realize the public at large might not care so much -- are the workman, the husband, and the father. I remember older daughter Jamie’s high school graduation party, with tables set out all over the front yard at the farmhouse. (Jamie also became a writer.) And I can see Jim, standing at the kitchen counter in the morning, barefoot, wearing shorts and a loose, untied bathrobe. There is a cat stalking the counter, and Jim is having his first cup of coffee and cigarette of the day while discussing the cat and the day’s menu for lunch with Linda. Soon he will get dressed and go out to the granary, his office, to spend hours at work, undisturbed.

The year I took the typewriter to his house to type the poems, we walked out to the granary together. It felt strange, accompanying the poet to his usually solitary hermitage. Besides, there were the poems.

“I feel as if I’ve been reading your diary,” I told him.

“You have been,” he said.

And then we worked. No goofing around. When Jim worked, he worked. Two new books out just this year, Dead Man’s Float (poems) and The Ancient Minstrel (novellas).

We heard on NPR this morning that Harrison told an interviewer once he was sick of irony in modern literature and that he would rather take the risk of being thought “corny” for exploring the full range of human sentiment than “dying a smartass.” He could be a smartass at times, in social situations, but his writing came always from the heart, undisguised.

And he got his work done.

Bless you, Jimmy! Our world was larger because you were in it and is smaller now without you and Linda.

Making Time, Taking Time

Years ago I found a birthday card for one of my sisters that said, on the outside, “Time flies....” Inside it said, “whether you’re having fun or not.” How many times over the years have those words come unbidden to my thoughts? It’s a good reminder, though. None of us has more than twenty-four hours a day. Sleeping and working and life’s little maintenance chores take up a lot of time, and if you let them, those activities could absorb all your time.

It had been almost two weeks since I’d spent any time “hanging around with” (as David says) my fictional characters, and I was missing the Wild Man and the Dog Wife, whose story has been evolving in my novel-in-progress since last winter’s sabbatical in the Southwest, so Wednesday morning I carved out some free time, and we got together again. Bruce opened the bookstore for me, and I did not go in until almost noon. That felt good.

But it also felt good later to be at the bookstore, especially on Wednesday afternoon, when a gratifying number of people made time for poetry. 

With my helper Bruce still on duty at the sales counter, I was able to take time myself to sit in the audience and enjoy the event. Jennifer Clark read work from her published book, Necessary Clearings, as well as a couple of the 56 poems she has written on John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) and that era of American history, but before her reading began, she was already in conversation with early arrivals over questions about poetry in general and her writing process in particular, and questions and discussion picked up again following her presentation. The questions were excellent, the conversation stimulating. Jennifer was happy, and so was I. Others were, as well. One e-mail I received this morning warmed my heart:

Pamela, I really enjoyed your event yesterday and thank you so much for presenting Jennifer Clark.  I don't know if I ever would have met her and her work without an introduction from you!  A delightful woman and a wonderful collection of poems.  I am now her fan.

Thank you, Deb, and everyone else who attended Wednesday’s event, for making time for poetry in your life this summer, and thanks from all of us to Jennifer Clark for being our lovely, lively guest! You can read more about Jennifer and her writing here. 

Then last night our intrepid Ulysses reading group gathered at the home of our Fearless Leader and his wife to discuss East of Eden. It isn’t easy for eight people to find room in busy summer schedules for an evening of literary conversation, but we managed it and, flushed with triumph, have agreed to meet again in August and to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin between now and then. It’s the first year we’ve tried to make time to get together between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Clearly, we all find the effort worthwhile.

This morning I took time to have my first cup of coffee outdoors, where I could sit back and enjoy my garden flowers to the accompaniment of birdsong. When I opened the front door, Sarah rushed out to chase a rabbit into tall grass but gave up the chase in less than a minute and contented herself with taking up chipmunk patrol in the shade near my lawn chair. Chipmunk patrol for Sarah is lying in the grass and watching, not obsessively but casually. Sometimes she doesn’t even bother to move when a chipmunk appears.

I think Sarah on chipmunk patrol is giving herself permission to take time out and soak up the delicious atmosphere of Michigan summer. I know that’s what I’m doing when I take the time to make the time for reading or writing or -- listening to someone else read to me. Ah-h-h!