Lausanne

Lausanne, Switzerland ~ High above Lake Geneva
at a local fondue restaurant, with windmill feature
A few weeks ago, I wrote to let my friend Jim Barnes know that I would soon be in Lausanne for a couple of days, my first visit to Switzerland! I wondered, did he have any have any tourist tips for me?

No matter what Jim writes, it comes out as poetry, as you can see from his reply:

More than you need to be burdened with! But do take the boat (four or more roundtrips per day?) across the lake to Thonon-les-Bains. Good relaxing half-hour ride, time for wine, tea, thinking. Have lunch in Thonon, away from the dock.

The local fish is (was, at least) excellent, right out of the lake, a little boney though. While you are in Lausanne, drink all the chocolate you can hold. It's the world's best when drunk by the cup thereabouts (un grand chocolat, s'il vous plait! will get you a Large Cup).

Walking Lausanne is a challenge. Best to take the metro up. Great museum at top, on the grand plaza, which had a collection of Nabokov's butterflies when I was there in 1993. Great shopping street, the shopping street for sure, is rue de Bourg, and halfway up the rue, on the premier, above Barnes Realty (no damned kidding!), is a great piazza place. Don't let the graffitied walls fool you. Good food!

If you have a car, do take a drive along the lake to Montreux and there walk along the lake to Chateaux de Chillon. It's a good hike there and back, lots of flowers and villas. If you get to Montreux before noon, your first stop must be for pastry at the Zucher (sit in the back and look out over the lake to les mountains). The pastry is usually well gone by noon.

There is so much I could tell you, Kitti! If there's something particular you are interested in in la Suisse and Lausanne, just ask. We were there last four years ago. There is a great surviving Roman amphitheatre in Avenche (a very small bourg), a nice country-hour's drive from Lausanne or Montreux.

Thanks to Jim for helping me prepare for this amazing opportunity! With only forty - eight hours to spend, I wasn't able to do it all, but I did as much as I could. Hopefully, I will have the good fortune to go again one day!

For more poetry from Jim Barnes

see my recent post:

"With or Without an Epitaph"

@The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A literary blog of connection & coincidence;
custom & ceremony

At Pere Lachaise

Read more about Paris & Pere Lachaise on my
latest Fortnightly blog post,
one of several Summer Travelogues . . .

At Pere Lachaise ~ Steven, Victoria, Kitti, Gerry

Click to see more photos from Steven's album:
Paris Graves

Oscar Wilde's Grave
Thanks to Victoria Amador for Parisian travel tips!

************************

Two Poems by Jim Barnes
from his book ParisVandals

Sitting beside Wilde's
solid block of sandy stone,
I recall two things:

he was earnest and Gide would
not stay where he once had stood.

Flowers at the tomb
are never fresh: today there's
graffiti I see

the first time in all the years
that I have been coming here.

Down and to the right, there Gertrude and Alice lie,
a date and place cut

wrong, another graffitied stone,
and I recall other wrongs

too many artists,
dead, still suffer from; the words
that fools have sprayed on

stone not so much as the words
from the learned living dead.

***********

Finding Oscar Wilde

After the riot in Pére Lachaise, streams
of teenage tourists flood the gates. Shadows
of the plane trees gray their faces. It seems
as if they want to mourn but cannot go
beyond the nervous laughter of rock dreams
and Coca-Cola days. Few drink Nouveau
Beaujolais now: it's just not chic enough.
Two green-haired girls smoke Gitanes and act tough.
We see two others writing Morrison
lives beneath Balzac, in chalk. Our map takes
us past more famous lines and past the sun,
where we pause to grab our breath and then shake
the summer sweat from our hair. Somewhere down
the hill, Abélard and Héloïse wake
again to try to free themselves from the stone
bed they have lain in centuries too long.

All Paris is stone, and there are those graves
everywhere as lonely as Oscar Wilde's
broad tomb. Rioting Morrison fans behaved
as a herd behaves, coming in droves to mill
round redundancy. No solitaire to save
the senseless crowd the agony of hell
showed up. There will never be a crowd round
the other slab where Oscar Wilde kneels down,

the tall wings booked by his writing hand.
Nor need there be. The legend of his life
is not his work. The work, the art, remains.
We lean relaxed upon his stone. At five
we hear the whistles blow for our return,
a prelude to the closing gates and evening
song of sparrows. Leaving we touch a fast
farewell to his high brow and what may last.

You can find more poems of Paris on my post:
"Paris: Ferlinghetti, Fenton & Forche"

And more poems by Jim Barnes on these previous posts:
Quinton Duval, Tomatoes & Gravy,
Missouri Poets, Parallax, No One With a Nose
Penelope, Shakespeare & Co.

Shakespeare & Co.

Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, Paris

I like the that way my friend Victoria is just casually strolling through Paris on a summer day, past one of the world's most legendary bookstores. (photography by Steven La Vigne)
To accompany the ambiance of Steven's photograph is an autumnal poem about the same bookstore, written by my friend Jim Barnes who lived in Paris for awhile:

Shakespeare & Co.

St. Julien le Pauvre stoops in shadows that lean
toward Notre Dame. The park grays in the rainy
twilight. Next door George Whitman's crumbling store

is the color of ashes and carded tomes thumbed
into oblivion. Two pigeons come
to the door, their bookish eyes red and sore

in the November rain. Humble they move aside,
as if we were masters here to provide
their daily bread. George stamps "ground zero"

inside the Gertrude Stein we pay too dearly for
and offers us a room for the night or
the week if we wish it. We do not go

upstairs. The recent fire has left a thin smell of
smoke everywhere. We hear the rattle of
teaspoons and cups. Small talk of poetry

tumbles down the steep stairs and hides under the lower
shelves, duller than ash. Outside the rain pours.
The pigeons trundle dead weight under trees.

It is not the best of times, yet we hold old books
with a joy beyond belief: we will look
through volumes to find what we hold no more.

from Paris ~ Poems by Jim Barnes

You can find more poems of Paris on my recent post:
"Paris: Ferlinghetti, Fenton & Forche"
on the
The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A fortnightly [every 14th & 28th]
literary blog of connection & coincidence; custom & ceremony

And more poems by Jim Barnes on these previous posts:
Quinton Duval, Tomatoes & Gravy,
Missouri Poets, Parallax, No One With a Nose, and Penelope

P.S. July 2014: At Pere Lachaise

******************************

These pictures are from my visit to one of the little
Shakespeare & Co. Bookstores in York City
(not affiliated with the Paris store):

137 E. 23rd Street


Storefront renovations in 2007


Bookstore Cat

Check out my Book Blog ~ Kitti's List!

Tomatoes & Gravy

Tomatoes on the Vine,
just moments after a summer rain

In his memoir, On Native Ground, American poet Jim Barnes has woven history, memory, and legend into a poetic retelling of growing up in rural southeastern Oklahoma, throughout the 1940s.

My family was a bit farther north: northeastern Oklahoma and southeastern Kansas. My father was born in 1923 in Drumright, Oklahoma; my mother in 1931 in Peru, Kansas; me in Coffeyville, Kansas (1957); and many hours of my childhood were spent in Caney and Independence, Kansas, where the grandparents lived. So I am very familiar with much of the territory and way of life that Barnes describes, if not entirely from my own experience, then from my parents' and grandparents' memories and stories. I especially appreciated his explanation of his family's Choctaw heritage, and the transplanted Mississippi Choctaw influence in Oklahoma, right down to the "chicken, gravy, baked sweet potatoes, and hominy grits" (40 - 41).

As my older sister Peg has been known to say, maybe we weren't really from the South, but we grew up far enough south to know about Southern Cooking and to qualify as G.R.I.T.S. (Girls Raised in the South). When I was living in Philadelphia, a number of restaurants specialized in a "Soul Food" menu; or the neighborhood might have a "Soul Food" fundraiser or consciousness - raising dinner, the idea being that these were "Southern American" novelty dishes that we Yankees couldn't possibly know anything about.

Well, I'm sure you can guess the items on the menu! I have to say, I never saw okra (for more about G.R.I.T.S. & okra, scroll down to previous post) but everything else is exactly what you would expect: fried chicken, spinach, black - eyed peas, cornbread, and the like. My dad and his brothers loved cornbread and milk for breakfast, my mom was only too happy to make fried cornmeal mush for us kids, and a dish of deep-fried hush puppies bursting with whole kernel corn and covered in syrup was a special treat.

To this day we all crave tomatoes to go along with our biscuits and gravy -- better yet, just skip the biscuits and put the gravy right on top of the tomatoes: a meal in itself, good for breakfast, lunch or dinner! My younger sister Di has even been known to take along a fresh garden tomato when going out for breakfast, order biscuits and gravy, and then suddenly produce the tomato from her purse! Surprise! We love her for that! I think this kind of menu planning pretty much locks in our status as G.R.I.T.S. In fact, when a friend of hers saw Di spoon the gravy over the tomato, she said, "Southern Girl!"

Even so, on "Soul Food Day," the moms at Ben & Sam's inner - city grade school seemed astonished that a white Anglo - Saxon such as myself knew how to make cornbread using bacon grease or that our family ate black - eyed peas for good luck on New Year's Day. I guess some consider those dishes to be "Soul Food," but as I told my neighbors back in West Philly -- where I come from (Kansas and Missouri), we don't call this stuff "soul food," we just call it "food" and everybody eats it -- no racial divide. Sometimes I think they didn't even believe me! But it's the truth! If you don't believe me, just ask my sisters!

G.R.I.T.S. -- Di, Kit, Peg

Quinton Duval

Take a moment to scan the above header and the QUOTIDIAN column to the right, and you will see that this blog is inspired by three governing epigrams:

Thornton Wilder's "every, every minute"
Virginia Woolf's "what is commonly thought small"
Quinton Duval's "black bread of day after day."

[Click here for further explication and explanation
of why I chose these passages: "What's the Big Idea?"]

The Quotidian Kit has been up and running for a year now, and I have yet to share with you the entire text of Duval's poem. Time to rectify that omission:

Day After Day

Each of us, alone on the way,
picks up the grip of his life
and goes.

Mama says the stars took us home,
all the porch lights up there
at night around the body of the moon.
Black stars that are invisible
are there too.

The coffee cools down. The car changes
gears in the garage and
the pen sleeps with the paper
on the white tablecloth.

When it is like this, you go
out and cut the roses back.
Clip until the thorns turn into the bush.

The car knows to stay in neutral
a little longer.
The big ideas huddle
in the jar together. You spread them
over the black bread of day after day
and swallow them.

Quinton Duval, November 6, 1948 - May 10, 2010
American poet and teacher

I have loved this poem since my first semester of college at Northeast Missouri State University (aka Truman). I discovered it in a literary magazine The Chariton Review (Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 1975) that I was assigned to read in Creative Writing. Don't ask me how I ended up in that class, the only Freshman, with a roomful of Juniors & Seniors. My guess -- some casual admissions officer put my name on the roster after seeing "Creative Writing" on my high school transcript. But of course this class was much more advanced than that, more like a writers' workshop. It was daunting but I stuck with it. I'm not so sure that I wrote anything substantial, too young really, but I do remember everything we read, many unforgettable stories and poems.

As the above dates indicate, Mr. Duval died only a few weeks ago, though I did not realize this until I googled his name just this morning to see what else of interest I might learn about the author of one of my favorite poems. You may recall that I had a similar experience last spring (2009) when I googled the name of a former professor, Jim Thomas, only to learn of his death the week before. Funny how that happens, just a little tap on your shoulder from the Universe.

There were a number of good poets at Northeast during my time there: Jim Barnes, Andrew Grossbardt, Jim Thomas. Lucky for me, I was able to take classes with each of them.

P.S.
Jim Barnes wrote the following for Andy, who died young:

Autobiography, Chapter 19: For Andrew Grossbardt, In Memoriam

Heading East Out of Rock Springs
for Andrew Grossbardt, long gone