Instant Poems for Little Fairies

As dusk settled, so did the fairies, little girls in tights and wings, old ladies in togas and wild hats, men and boys dressed as pirates. It was Faerie Fest  in McArthur, Ohio. Children roamed the village park in costume or not, blowing bubbles, facing wicked trolls under the bridge, meeting the still fairies who would only move if you dropped a coin in their treasure chest, being painted with elaborate designs in paint or henna. The fest stretched across the park and I was most reminded of the July 4th celebration in The Music Man--a community out for a stroll and encountering wonders of art, music, food, dance, and poetry.

I did not see most of these wonders because I was the poetry fairy, Doleta (from Department of Labor Education and Training Administration, to whom I submit data in my day job). I was busy, writing 28 poems in about three hours, nine poems an hour. I never left my chair. In the paragraph above, I describe only the things I could see from my perch by the old stone drinking fountain (now only a seep)--much more was happening out of my awareness.

This is me in the hat...sorry the train doesn't show.
The girl being written for was much better dressed for
Faerie Fest.

I was adorned in a magnificent hat that looked most like a floral chandelier draped with Mardi Gras beads, wearing a dress with a train (a lace tablecloth pinned to my dress), and gold glittery sandals (ouch). On my gold and purple draped table (an old sheet and a discarded curtain) were my trusty clipboard and an assortment of pens.


I wrote poems on such a range of topics it made my head spin, from dogs and cats to chameleons; from peace to love to god; from pickles to drawing to...gosh, I can't even remember them all. I wrote a poem shaped like a spider. I wrote poems in which the first letters of each line spelled something. I would invite children to come over and get a poem of their very own--for free! Children are intrigued by poetry. Their curiosity overcomes the discomfort with poetry that has already taken root in their little souls. And no children can resist something that is specially just for them, one of a kind, on a topic of their choosing.


The child getting a poem sat in the special painted chair while I wrote, or sometimes ran along to another event and came back later, but when she heard the poem read for the first time ever, the magic happened. Eyes widened. People standing around grew quiet. The poetry time came over us all. And I folded the poem and handed it to the child. No copies made, no "I'll mail it to you." A special poem for each special child.


I didn't think this instant poetry thing up, although people think I did. I read about it in a book called Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg, a book recommended by my high school English teacher Tom Romano, now a professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The book advised journaling profusely (it was the first time I'd seen the word journal verbed), which I had already done for years as an adolescent, and I have forgotten most of the writing suggestions, but Goldberg's idea of instant poetry stuck with me. The poem must be spontaneous, and you must give it away. No take-backs or keepers. The choice of topic must belong to the recipient. Goldberg saw it as an exercise in really getting the words out, taking risks, letting the writing flow.


I see it now as an exercise in letting flow, but also in letting go. It's a way to train myself to be in the now in an intense way and to prevent stockpiling and hoarding. Everything goes away...even our dear Earth will burn to a cinder and our beloved star will burn itself out. I must practice and practice this nowness of the universe. A gift freely given. Take this and fly, little fairy. Spread those glittering wings and get a glimpse into magic--the magic of language, of image, of rhyme, of nonsense, of humor, of love, of now, of time.


I wrote a poem for a boy on the topic of drawing, and I ended up goosing his active intelligence (very alive eyes) by writing about what makes something real. If you can draw it, is it real? Does that mean unreal things are real? By drawing, do you actually create reality? And what does that say about writing poems, right now, on the spot? I often felt like I was writing windows into other perspectives. What is the dog really thinking? What is truly great about pickles? How does something become real? I could see the click when a kid really got it, saw something from a different angle for the first time. I love that. That's my pay.


So, writing instant poetry makes me insanely happy, and exhausted at the same time. What better way to get tired than by working your words, by letting the child choose the words and then the words choose the child. Faerie Fest was a wonderful venue for instant poetry, because the children were already primed for magic, for wonder. I was concerned though, that the belief is abroad that poetry is for little girls. I love doing instant poems for adults, but they must be coaxed, even though I can see they want one. This concerns me and amazes me, that poetry has been minimalized and is only safe if it is for the very young. And I find it funny that my poems really are little IEDs, with little explosions for the child, if the poem works. Not safe at all.


A Sample Poem
Here is the instant poem I wrote for my friend Lynn Royer, on the topic of sisters. I wrote this in under five minutes and it fills one sheet of paper. I grabbed whatever images popped into my mind and then did a sort of rapid development. It's not edited, but it serves...it communicates...and if you have sisters, it makes sense. I copied it because I have sisters and I wanted to give it away again to them.


Sisters
If parents are the foundation of a life
Sisters are most certainly the framework,
Building walls, making room for rooms,
Holding up whatever becomes the roof of your life.
Sisters are windows through which to view yourself.
Sisters are doorways for going in and out.


Without sisters, life is just a shack
Leaning a little to the left
And sometimes with a small opening in the door
Shaped like a waning third-quarter moon.


Caution to those who want to try it
Wear comfortable shoes. I think my creativity was a bit off at Faerie Fest because those damn gold sandals were pinching and grabbing and itching. Please, poets, leave vanity behind and be as comfortable as you can when you try this. It's hard to go with the flow with your dogs barking.

Bad sandals

Explosive 18 by Janet Evanovich

Note: The film stills in this blog are from the movie "One for the Money," the first Stephanie Plum book.


Evanovich's phenomenological approach to the symbology of post-feminist existentialism undermines the classical structure of the modern comedic text. Responses to her lexicon are decidedly combinational; analyzing only for classical structure of the comedic text alienates the reader-responder from a deterministic experience of the ambifocal narrator. Does the book succeed? Only a determinist could process the imagery of comedy. Only a post-feminist analyst could process the extential classical structure. Only a post-hedonist could properly interpretize the sexual ephemera.

There! Just wanted to see if I could still write a paragraph like that! Let's start over.

Explosive 18, by Janet Evanovich, is, you guessed it, the eighteenth novel in Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. It is highly readable and, as always, surprising. But Explosive 18 has more of a Laurel and Hardy feel to it than the previous book (you guessed it, Smokin' 17) by this author that I reviewed. Smokin' 17 had a unity to it, a set of repeating images, and no extraneous stuff. Explosive 18 is full of extraneous stuff. I questioned why the sidekick Lula was even present, aside from comic raunch-relief. She didn't make the plot happen. There was an icky sequence of Lula falling in love with an idiot that I never did really relate to the rest of the plot. It was funny, sort of. And I'm tired of Stephanie Plum's ongoing and ongoing and ongoing relationship crisis. Get off the fence, sister!

Don't get me wrong. I loved this book and enjoyed reading it, but it didn't have much impact. I guess it is really one of those "summer books." The funniest bit involved a shoulder mounted rocket launcher--and I wish the author would have integrated it into the entire plot. It was hilarious to picture the short/large Lula with the launcher resting on her bosoms.

Plum's plums: Joe Morelli (Jason O'Mara), left;
and Ranger (Daniel Sunjata), right.

First paragraph aside, I do think Stephanie Plum is the poster girl for post-feminism. She has a traditionally male job (bail-jumper hunter) but isn't all that great at it. She carries a revolver and a stun gun but frequently forgets to load/recharge them. She sleeps with whomever she chooses but tortures herself about it. And, her man Ranger runs in like a deux ex machina to rescue her whenever events get too hot to handle. She's tough and practical, pragmatic even. There is not much room for beauty in her life or these books.

This book (and all the Plum novels) have three saving graces. The first saving grace is Stephanie's family, which serves as a consistent background to this entire series. Her sluggard dad, tippling mom, and go-go grandma are just plain funny. In this book, they provided most of the laughter. The family is sort of a Greek chorus to Stephanie's life...they stand in for us, the readers, the wacky readers.

The second saving grace is the amazingly funny action scenes and the wry humor that infuses them. Stephanie is such a klutz that luck is a better ally than a gun. She has several run-ins with a thug named Razzle Dazzle and always comes out ahead, somehow, and I ended up laughing at every single injury inflicted upon him.
 

Stephanie, center, with Lula, left, and
a former colleague of Lula's.

The third saving grace is the wonderful character description of the people Stephanie comes across in her work and in her world. This a book set in a very specific place in New Jersey and the details are rich and alive. Right down to the gossip at the bakery counter, the crazy man who camps out in the cemetery, Lulu and the whole gang at the bail bond agency. It's wonderful to have them in my world, too.

Notice how I haven't hardly mentioned the plot? In this book, the plot was sort of an excuse for the interaction of a set of characters in a place and at a time. Plot just wasn't that important. Smokin' 17 was a roller coaster that brought you back around to the beginning. Explosive 18 is a roller coaster that just keeps on rolling--you can jump off, but who would want to?

Please note: If you want to protect the purity of children's minds, keep them away from this author until they're ready for some non-love-related sexual content. Yep, the unmarried Stephanie likes sex and tries to have it whenever she can fit it in. And she has two different but equal male partners. And her sidekick Lula is a former hooker (reformed).

SIDEBAR: Stun guns

Stephanie Plum's weapon of choice is the stun gun, and in the hands of author Evanovich, this weapon is hilarious. And it's as funny when it doesn't work as when it does. Its pervasiveness in this series of books makes me think that private use of stun guns is much more frequent than I could imagine. I like it.

Stephanie uses her stun gun offensively--she goes after someone and stuns them. I wonder how a stun gun would be as a defensive weapon. I can't imagine letting a criminal get close enough to me to stun him or her, but I like the idea of not having to aim (aiming is not one of my--or Stephanie's--best skills). I would truly prefer something like a Star Trek phaser, more of a point-and-stun weapon. I don't seek to kill or injure. I just want breathing space to call 911. Actually, I probably just need a remote 911-dialer, maybe a button that hangs on a chain around my neck. Like Life Alert for the elderly.

I have just talked myself into a weapon that is assoicated with the feeble. This is how it happens, folks...go get a stun gun. Really.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith

     Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. More bizarro literature from Seth Grahame-Smith. Wait, let's change the word literature to writing. I'm not sure how this book, or Grahame-Smith's Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, will hold up over time as literature or that they are literature at all. They are amusing novelties, for sure, but awkward and a bit profane, if the truth be known. What sacred cow will Grahame-Smith take on next, Sue Barton: Plague Spreader Nurse?
     Still, I have to admit that AL:VH was a fun read, blurring the lines between history and fantasy, and really goring it out with beheadings, axings, gunshots point blank in the face. I couldn't wait to see how the plot device would play itself out--turns out that the Civil War was started by vampires who wanted to enslave not just Africans but everyone in America to insure a steady supply of fresh blood. The scenes of vampires preying on enslaved blacks were among the most gruesome and profane.

     Young Abe, growing up on the frontier, comes across vampires early and often. He sharpens his wits along with his trusty ax blade while his career is shaped by divine and vampiric intervention in a giganto conspiracy of "good" vampires (northern) vs. "bad" vampires (southern).
     Imagine the staid and conservative Biographies of Great Americans you used to read in your elementary school library. Now imagine one of those books ripped apart and infused with vampires. That's this book. It's like the classic girl's biography of Abigail Adams turning out to be about a guerrilla abortionist midwife rescuing women from unwanted pregnancy or something. (Now we find out why she kept trying to get John to send her more "pins.")

Abe Lincoln's weapon of choice

     I found AL:VH funny and compelling for all the wrong reasons. The distortion of reality disturbs me, because I know Colbert's concept of "truthiness" by which the thing which seems most important or truthful becomes the accepted actual truth. I was laughing at the absurdity of the concept while worrying about this book being the only exposure to Abraham Lincoln's life and work that some people might ever get. And don't get me wrong, Lincoln is portrayed heroically; he is not lampooned. Alas. There is nothing I can do about it. I think this is a plague of middle age--to worry about people not getting the past right, wanting to carry the past along into the present and the future.

Front and back cover of the book--inspired!

     What I really like, though, is that Grahame-Smith has taken his concepts and run with them. He has asked the great "what-ifs" and insisted on answers. What if Hitler was a direct and secret descendant of Thomas Jefferson from his liaison with a Jewish-African slave? What if...what if. It's an outrageous game.
     I'm alarmed that the last several books I have read (the eight Redwall books and the two by Grahame-Smith) all involved incredible violence against dehumanized enemies. Once you call someone a vampire (or a zombie, or a fox, or a rat) you can do anything to them. And that dehumanizes you/me. We want the thrills of senseless gore and violent action, but we don't want the emotional baggage. I don't believe that this reading material necessarily would lead to acting out, but I just think it bears noting.
     But, hey, it's a puff piece. Read it at the beach and wonder about every single person who comes by wearing sunglasses. Have fun with it. I did.

Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier as
Elizabeth and Darcy. Now picture a zombie
face at the window!

     I loved Pride & Prejudice & Zombies and couldn't stand it. It failed in what it tried to do and succeeded in what it didn't try.
     As a piece of comic writing, this book failed. Grahame-Smith wasted an opportunity to really infuse Austen with zombies--the undead appeared infrequently, missing many opportunities to develop this book as a stand-alone work of comic horror. Really, zombies should have appeared randomly every few pages, but instead long passages of extracted Austen totally lacked brain-eating and bludgeonery. The zombies were more a novelty than anything else and did not contribute to the plot, which steadfastly followed Austen almost to the death (but not by zombies). It was a completely missed opportunity. I hope the impending film version of P&P&Z rectifies the failed courage of the book.

Warrior Elizabeth

     So, I was disappointed. I wanted a campy post-apocalyptic romp and got Austen more embroidered than anything else--and not embroidered with flowers, but with ghastly needlepoint body parts and gore. Lovely! Still, it was great fun and not at all serious--a great read for a summer weekend.
     I was heartened by the strength of Austen's story, even truncated as it was. I have read the original Pride & Prejudice maybe a dozen times and I know that story backward and forward. I have seen at least 10 filmed versions of the novel. And still, yes still, the story hooked me and held me. It didn't matter whether Elizabeth slayed with a glance or with a Katana sword or whether the carriage was  spattered with mud or with guts. The main point was whether Elizabeth and Darcy would find it within themselves to love each other, whether they could combat pride and prejudice in each other and themselves as efficiently as they slaughtered and beheaded the undead.

Zombies are everywhere, man

     In this book, Elizabeth and her sisters are trained zombie killers, warriors, really. The plague of zombies has overtaken England as the dead rise from centuries of cemeteries to menace both town and country. (London has been sectioned off into walled quadrants to better fight the unmentionables). These plot aspects are draped around Austen's plot in utterly silly ways. And hey, silly is OK. I liked it. If it brings readers even one step closer to appreciating Austen or voluntarily (Jake Shapiro) reading her books, I'm even more tickled.


SIDEBAR: Me and Austen

Books: My Life

     I knew I was supposed to like Austen, like I was supposed to like Dickens and James Joyce and Fielding, and so on. To be a proper English major, I must like them, to outstrip my high school friends in literariness, I must read them. But I just couldn't get Austen. It was so damned wordy! So polite! These books were politely written even when describing hideous social faux pas, wrongs, and sillinesses. I cleaned house for a professor while I was in college and one day she gave me a set of seven Austen novels and I took them gladly, if only for their symbolism.
     In the summer of 1980 (oh, those were halcyon days--NOT!) I went to England. And when I got home, I got Austen. I loved it. I dusted off the seven Austen novels and devoured them as eagerly as any zombie goes for brains; I redeemed those books from mere symbolism and they took on an amazing life in my life. And those books were no cauliflower (which zombies mistake for brains)! They were the real thing. Suddenly, the gorgeousness of Austen's writing shone through; her grammar, her perfect word choices.

Holden Caulfield (not cauliflower),
one artist's vision

    I think now that certain brain development (brains again!) and education needs to happen before a reader can appreciate certain literature. I see all the time that students are assigned literature to read that they cannot under any circumstances understand or appreciate. And you can see the fire light when a reader gets the right thing at the right time--like me reading Catcher in the Rye in 11th grade. As I consumed the book it also consumed me. I was irrevocably altered.
     One of the delights of the Eager Readers list I am working on reading is that I have revisited books that I read before I was ready. Dickens. I would've missed him but for this reading project. He's the best gift I've gotten. Rereading all of Austen was also an amazing pleasure. Neither of these authors ever intended for their audiences to be schoolchildren. These are adult works with amazing brilliance and scope. Coming to them as a mature reader and writer I again consume and I am again consumed. Wonderful! Very zombie of me.

Redwall Abbey Series, by Brian Jacques

Redwall Abbey: To mouse scale, so a mouse would be the size of a human
in this setting. The abbey is surrounded by Mossflower Wood

Color these books "Beatrix Potter Meets the Third Reich." I read the following eight books in the Redwall Series, by Brian Jacques:

• Martin the Warrior
• Mossflower
• Mariel of Redwall
• The Bellmaker
• Salamandastron
• Redwall
• Mattimeo
• Rackety Tam

     It has taken me ten weeks to read these eight books. I found them to be clever, but laborious--excessively detailed in all of the wrong places. Jacques wrote more of these books; I am thankful they were not on the list.

Legendary Martin the Warrior

     The Redwall books are set in a fictional forest called Mossflower Woods, which holds the magnificent and strong Redwall Abbey. The abbey is a place of health, help, and healing, occupied by monastical brother and sister mice, as well as numerous other small mammals. Badgers and wolverines are the largest sentient critters; field mice and "Dibbuns" (babies) are the smallest. Birds are sentient. Insects and fishes, no. You can't eat sentient; you can eat fish. Although the abbey is presented as a place of peace and its inhabitants offend no one, the abbey is constantly beset by evil. The abbey itself is attacked in every single book.
     All of the characters in the Redwall books are small mammals of the British woodlands. In the first book, a horse appears, but from then on no hoofstock appear. In two books cats are characters. Otherwise everyone is a squirrel, mouse, vole, mole, otter, badger, shrew, toad, rabbit, hare, fox, rat, and the above-mentioned wolverine. There are several kinds of birds. There is no chipmunk--is that an American animal? Also no skunks, although a skunk would be a formidable weapon. The wittle amuhmuls are just too cute, wearing little clothes and eating quaint foods.

The evil rat Cluny the Scourge

     I had a hard time relating to any of these little furry treasures, but I am definitely not the demographic for these books. I can imagine that if you feel overly small and powerless yourself you might identify with a mouse who becomes endowed with great warrior skills and powers and a magic sword and all that. I think that precocious skinny fifth graders with big glasses and no sign of body hair in the foreseeable future would lap up these books like an evil kitty-cat laps up leche.
     I was troubled by peculiarities of scale. If I stood next to Redwall Abbey, would it come up to, say, mid-thigh? Or is everything scaled up so that the mice people were really 5 feet tall and I could easily shake hands with them? How high were the trees of Mossflower Wood? They were not specified as tiny trees, yet the critters interacted with them as though they were scaled down oaks and maples and apple trees. Was there a human-sized world somewhere? What would happen if a human found Redwall Abbey? Finally, I had to just let go of anything related to scale, subsisting in a sort of logistical limbo. And, of course, I was overthinking everything because I was unengaged. I did not relate, so I tried to compute. And computing didn't work either!

Badger--good

     The plots and themes were utterly simplistic--good versus evil. Evil foxes and rats kept trying to take over the abbey. It was creepy how the slaughter of the good by the bad was portrayed as evil and craven, but the parallel slaughter of the bad by the good was somehow clean and necessary. The Redwallians never tried to mediate or convert. They resorted to violence and trickery to protect their abbey. The ends justified the means. Whoosh! Off goes a bad rat's head! Yippee! Score one for the abbey side. Characters were also all bad or all good. Redwallians might have quirks and foibles, but their hearts were gold through and through.

Fox--bad

    The villains, however, were evil incarnate. Every villain in the nine books I read was a carbon copy of the others--a brute who ruled by coercion and violence, the typical schoolyard bully. He or she was always portrayed as brilliant and cunning, but somehow good is smarter than evil (a common convention of science fiction and fantasy literature) no matter how smart evil is. The villains were quick to kill, slow to think. I suffered from reading these books so close together. It was like that bad guy with the deadly hat in Goldfinger or Gollum in LOTR who kept coming back from what you thought was sure death. These bad foxes, rats, wolverines just kept coming.

The squirrel hero Rackety Tam

     So, although these books were lush and long, they came across as shallow and stilted. Both the villains and the heroes were tedious, especially in light of the obviously foregone conclusion that the abbey would prevail. I can almost hear "Onward Christian Soldiers" in the background. Curiously, the abbey was absolutely not portrayed as Christian. The spirit of the great warrior Martin watches over the abbey, but even Martin is not particularly deified. Critters consult him, but they don't pray to him. The order of monks (male and female) who ran the place were nature-based and one of the saving graces of the books were the many ways to say grace in a nature-oriented way. Here is an example:

Fate and seasons smile on all,
From sunrise to the dark nightfall,
This bounty from both earth and tree,
Was made to share, twixt you and me.
To Mother Nature let us say
Our thanks, for life and health this day.

Verses, poems, and songs were plentiful and pleasing in all of the books, although I started skipping them after awhile, just to get the pages to turn faster.

Redwall food is so well-detailed that
you can cook it yourself at home!

     The abbey critters had an absurd interest in cooking, talking about, and eating food, and Jacques' imagination certainly had no limits. Huge feasts were described in excruciating detail and did virtually nothing to advance the plots of the books. I started speed reading through these, too, to somehow find some action. And when I did find action, it was always fighting and killing. These books are basically one huge neverending battle scene. And the detail is gruesome...heads rolling off...guts falling out...spear through the throat...and that's just the stuff the good characters did!
     I was troubled by the utter lack of compassion of the Redwallians. They felt little or no regret at taking lives in battle. They were unable to relate to the bad guys, to even imagine walking in their shoes. The bad guys were pre-labelled, their fates inevitable. This is how you gear up cultures for war--dehumanize the other side (and in this book, no one is even human to begin with!).
     In conclusion, if you like these books and they do something for you (or for the kids who read them), then I'm OK with that. I can see that they might assist in empowering the weak. But as an adult I found the Redwall series boring, simplistic, and slow. I don't particularly recommend them.

SIDEBAR: Is It Quest Literature?

     The Redwall books have most of the elements of quest literature--untried heroes and heroines going off to discover gifts and dangers, fighting for the right, and maturing into true adult warriors. (All true adults are warriors, I assert.) But the absolute lack of tension in these books makes one hero journey after another meaningless. We know exactly how the book will end from the very beginning.
     For the hero journey/quest to succeed, the element of peril must be full and robust. There should be some fair chance of defeat (have you seen "Rise of the Planet of the Apes"?) (were you worried that Luke might go over to the dark side?) (what about when Frodo turns to Sam in the belly of Mount Doom and says "No, it's mine, my own"?--that's a hero in serious peril). The Redwall books resemble video games more than they do quest literature.