The Eve of the Eve

The time draws near,
the eve of the eve
expect visitors,
even tricksters . . .

The Last Chance

The myna bird speaks
of love. His whistle
cuts into the bone
ears of a whitetail's
head stuffed above
the bar.

Fifty miles the county's
dry. You stop here
to tell yourself
go home but hear
the black experience
of a goddamned bird

whose hello sucks
at the marrow
of your bones.
You wonder how a soul
can pass from
his beak and break

upon your face, split
the whiskers you grew
to be wise in. You wonder
at his avalanche of words,
the last drink you took,
the dance on your skin

you can't beat time to.
You wonder, but you
do not ask. You
listen hard with
your cracking eyes.
He asks about your life.

You tell him lies
while he preens
a feather, lets it drop.
Your life is sour
on the glass. Crow
made the earth and all

things therein, brought fire.
This bird's a ghost
you tell your sins.
Nobody is listening.
Outside the sun falls
into the brittle grass.

by Jim Barnes (b 1933)
in Sundown Explains Nothing, 2019 (p 139 - 40)
Additional posts: FN & QK & KL

Thanks Jan!
Crows and other tricksters!

Get Out of Town

Thanks to Jim Barnes ~ poet, teacher & friend
for helping me track down
this long-lost poem
by National Treasure
David Russell Wagoner
(June 5, 1926 - December 18, 2021)

Advice from a poet:
"Get out of town."

Wagoner graduated from highschool in 1944. "Valedictory to Standard Oil" was written 22 years later (published in 1966), and "Letter to An Old Poet" an additional 47 years later (2013). In the early poem, he thinks of those long-ago classmates, and in the later one he recalls a helpful English teacher and a grammar lesson from those schooldays in Whiting, Indiana. Thanks to Miss Clippinger, he realizes that his life task without ceasing is to consider every possibility and maximize his options:

Letter To An Old Poet

~Inspired by Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet

Do you still believe, old man, you are a poet?
If so, what you must do is so obvious,
you shouldn’t need reminding. You should keep trying
to do whatever you haven’t done or start
doing again what you didn’t manage to do
right in the first place. You should stay alive
as often as possible and keep yourself open
to anything out of place and everything
with nowhere else to go, to carry what’s left
of your voice out and beyond, into, over,
and under, past, within, outside, between,
among, across, along, and up and around
and to be beside yourself when the spirit moves you
and to thank Miss Clippinger for your prepositions.

David Wagoner (1926 - 2021)

Click here to read
more by David Wagoner

The Wide World and Real War

Illustration by Gérard DuBois
for "The Cost of Sentimentalizing War" *

Jim Barnes: " . . . I began to reshape a world
I hardly knew: the crumbly terrain became
theaters of the war. I was barely ten.

What I knew of the wide world and real war
came down the valley's road or flew over
the mountains I was caught between. . . .

All daylight long I imitated what I
thought I heard, molding sawdust into hills,
roads, rivers, displacing troops of toys,
claiming ground by avalanche and mortar . . ."

Read more on
"Sawdust or Stardust"
@Kitti's Book List
Ernest Hemingway: "I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. . . . Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

*******************
*From the article:
“We search for a redemptive ending to every tragedy.

"The terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001, supposedly launched a new kind of American war, with unfamiliar foes, unlikely alliances, and unthinkable tactics. But the language deployed to interpret this conflict was decidedly old-school, the comfort food of martial rhetoric. With the Axis of Evil, the menace of Fascism (remixed as “Islamofascism”), and the Pearl Harbor references, the Second World War hovered over what would become known as the global war on terror, infusing it with righteousness. This latest war, President George W. Bush said, would have a scope and a stature evoking the American response to that other attack on the U.S. “one Sunday in 1941.” It wouldn’t be like Desert Storm, a conflict tightly bounded in time and space; instead, it was a call to global engagement and even to national greatness. “This generation will lift the dark threat of violence from our people and our future,” Bush avowed.

"Elizabeth D. Samet finds such familiarity endlessly familiar. “Every American exercise of military force since World War II, at least in the eyes of its architects, has inherited that war’s moral justification and been understood as its offspring: motivated by its memory, prosecuted in its shadow, inevitably measured against it,” she writes in “Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A professor of English at West Point and the author of works on literature, leadership, and the military, Samet offers a cultural and literary counterpoint to the Ambrose-Brokaw-Spielberg industrial complex of Second World War remembrance, and something of a meditation on memory itself. It’s not simply that subsequent fights didn’t resemble the Second World War, she contends; it’s that the war itself does not resemble our manufactured memories of it, particularly the gushing accounts that enveloped its fiftieth anniversary. “The so-called greatness of the Greatest Generation is a fiction,” she argues, “suffused with nostalgia and with a need to return to some finest hour.” Those who forget the past may be condemned to repeat it, but those who sentimentalize the past are rewarded with best-seller status."

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

Wishing you an introspective Memorial Day
and a long, thoughtful summertime.
See you in October!

The Door Stands Open

Interior, Open Door at Etretat, 1920
by Henri Matisse, 1869 – 1954

"The door stands open in that home,
the special chair for us reserved."

You Know Who You Are: This Is For You My Friend

You went west to where mountains stop,
and did not stop but built a home,
a whole new life that was not new
to you but real as Kansas loam.

Always in your mind was that far
place whence you came and that far place
where you were. Distance you would bridge --
root, trunk, limb -- all the ways

you could say Friend and mean it such
a way no stream could be denied.
The door stands open in that home,
the special chair for us reserved.

Friend, take this small token, if you
will, as tribute from all of us
who have too long remained silent
about your heart and human trust.

by Jim Barnes ~ American Poet ~ b 1933
in The Sawdust War: Poems by Jim Barnes

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

Additional Jim Barnes on QK & FN & KL
Additional Henri Matisse on QK & FN

I picked this painting and this poem for today
in cherished memory of my lovely friend Celine,
fellow Kansan and luminous litterateur
~ 55 years of light ~
August 29, 1942 ~ April 24, 1997

Can it be 25 years gone already?

Additional Celine Carrigan on QK & FN & KL


P.S.

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”

by Norman Maclean (1902 - 1990)
from A River Runs Through It

Coronavirus: Our Plans Died

Coronavirus ~ Franklin Institute
The highly contagious coronavirus is killing not only our fellow - citizens but also our plans: travel plans, family reunions, Spring Break, Passover, Easter, weddings -- even those scheduled months from now. Going back to late February, a few towns (Venice but not New Orleans) cancelled Mardi Gras; nearly a month later, St. Patrick's Day celebrations were cancelled the world over. Even just hanging out has been cancelled. With cancellation comes loss, and with loss comes grief. As Scott Berinato explains,

"The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air."

I am also thinking of one of my long - time, tried and true poetic standbys, "The Nose Poem," in which poet Lee Perron highlights the significance of plans:

"your mate dies, or parents
or one of your other friends
there is nothing fearful in the death
the deadman is not the problem
his letters perhaps
some phrase he spoke that rings every after
the way he died, what the surgeons did to his brain, or kidneys,
or heart
what you & he would have been doing now
next week, all summer long as you always did
the deadman did not die
your plans died
and this is what is so upsetting
this makes us so sick we cannot even think . . . "
[emphasis added]

Plans, glorious plans! Remember Adela Quested (from E. M. Forster's A Passage to India)? "She loved plans." It's funny how just a couple of weeks ago, we thought our plans were up to us -- whether we went out for lunch or maybe dinner. But no! Turns out we don't get to decide after all.

During this season of social distancing, Perron's final stanza seems more pertinent than ever. We may shake one another's hands, or not:

". . . in this beauty the car stops
the arm reaches for the doorhandle
and there is nothing left to it but the pulling up on the handle...
and one of you looks back through the car window
you may touch one another's lips, or not
it hardly makes any difference, so beautiful is desire"

Passages from "Desire a Sequence" by Lee Perron
Published in The Chariton Review, Fall 1977
Editor, Jim Barnes

Continued thanks to Jim Barnes for teaching me this poem back in 1977; and to Lee Perron for befriending my family back in 2003 after receipt of our fan letter.

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

So group hugs are temporarily
cancelled, but all is not lost.
We can all adopt this gracious custom:
Understanding The ‘Wai’ Thai Greeting!

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