The Epic of Gilgamesh

One of the earliest known poems in human history is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which originated in ancient Mesopotamia around 2100 BCE. 

This epic poem (author unknown) recounts the adventures and exploits of Gilgamesh, a legendary king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk. 

The poem is composed in ancient Sumerian and Akkadian languages and is one of the earliest works of literature known to humanity. It predates many other ancient literary works, including the Homeric epics of Greece (such as the Iliad and the Odyssey) and the ancient Indian epics (such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata). 

It consists of various episodes and narratives, including Gilgamesh's quest for immortality and his friendship with Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods.

I read Gilgamesh in college where it was presented as both a poem and a discovery that provided valuable insights into the culture, beliefs, and storytelling traditions of ancient Mesopotamia. It remains a significant literary and historical artifact, showcasing the enduring power of storytelling and poetry throughout human civilization.

Neo-Assyrian clay tablet. Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 11: Story of the Flood.
Known as the "Flood Tablet"
From the Library of Ashurbanipal, 7th century BC

Hammock

I was visiting a friend who has a hammock in his backyard. I have never mastered lying in a hammock. I find it hard to get into, harder to get out of and uncomfortable in the time between. But I must be an exception.

Hammocks are an easygoing symbol of relaxation. Sailors slept in them so the rocking ship didn't throw them from bed but just rocked them to sleep.

What do you associate them with - leisure, escapism, luxury, nature?

An article on atlasobscura.com tells us that:

Just about all of the major early European expeditions to the New World talked about the hammock. Columbus described it in his journal: “Their beds and bags for holding things were like nets of cotton.” Bartolomé de las Casas, the first real European historian to go to the Americas, went on at length about them. In his book Historia de las Indias, written between 1527 and 1559, de las Casas described beds “like cotton nets,” with elaborate, well-crafted patterns. The ends, he wrote, were made of a different, hemp-like material, to attach to walls or poles. 

The early days of the hammock are not well understood, but they certainly did come a long time ago. Woven of organic materials that eventually decompose in tropical environments—where pretty much everything decomposes eventually—hammocks were well established in the Caribbean when the first Europeans landed there. The English word “hammock” derives from the Spanish hamaca, a direct loanword from the Taíno languages of the Caribbean.

I wish I could sway comfortably in one and daydream or read or write a poem. The poem that comes to mind is -

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota  by James Wright, from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose  

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

This end of summer lazy day would be a good one for hammocking. But besides my fear of falling out of a hammock, I'm afraid that I view hammock time as wasted time. That's a shame. I need to work on the art of not working all the time. Labor Day, indeed...

A depiction of Amerigo Vespucci landing in America and encountering an indigenous woman on a hammock.
by Jan van der Straet, ca. 1587–89. THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART / PUBLIC DOMAIN

A Winter Walk

Henry David Thoreau advised in his journal that we should “Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”

I am a fan of winter walks and I especially like going out after a snowfall. The woods are whitewashed clean, and the snow muffles sounds. I like to follow the tracks of animals who have walked there before me that day.

Adam Gopnik's book Winter: Five Windows on the Season  is a meditation on the season via artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who have created our modern idea of winter. It goes to unlikely places, such as thinking about how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world.

Do I love the winter season? No, it is my least favorite season. (Autumn is my favorite.) I often say that i want to retire to a place without winter, or at least with a much milder winter than my New Jersey ones. But I suspect i would miss winter after a time.

The Brain Pickings blog had a post about Thoreau finding inner warmth in this cold season, but here is a section from his journal that isn't about going for a walk in the snowy woods.

The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The meadow-mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls. The earth itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when some street-sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked upon its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work, — the only sound awake twixt Venus and Mars, — advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together, but where it is very bleak for men to stand. But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields.

I identify with Thoreau's suggestion to walk in winter, but I also identify with curling up under a blanket inside and just observing the winter outside.

Here is Hank expanding on that winter walk:

There is nothing so sanative, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it, — dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in distant woods or fields, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.

Poets have had much to say about winter. Mr. Shakespeare wrote:

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
   Thou art not so unkind
      As man’s ingratitude;
   Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
      Although thy breath be rude. 

I feel more akin to the "Winter Trees" of William Carlos Williams.

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

I'm trying to keep my own buds safe from the season and sleepily waiting for spring.

I Love You Sweatheart

We all know that odors can generate powerful emotions. The odor, aroma or scent of bread baking, a smoker's pipe, lavender, a lover's perfume, vomit or a new car or bookstore will certainly elicit some reaction.

Take sweat. Probably not high on the popular scents list. But researchers have found (yes, someone did this as part of their work) that it can carry information about the emotions of the sweat producer and the person who get a whiff of someone else's sweat.

Surely, you have heard the expression "You could smell his fear."

The poet Thomas Lux has a poem about a man who mistakenly write the message "I Love You Sweatheart" to his love. The poem starts like this:

A man risked his life to write the words.
A man hung upside down (an idiot friend
holding his legs?) with spray paint
to write the words on a girder fifty feet above
a highway. And his beloved,
the next morning driving to work…?

It turns out that his sweat might actually have carried his message as well.

Human sweat seems to contain chemicals, “chemosignals”, that can carry information about emotional states. Researchers used the sweat of a dozen men that they collected after showing them movie clips to create an emotion. I love these movie choices: for happy sweat one clip used was the "Bare Necessities” scene from The Jungle Book; fearful sweat from clips of Schindler’s List and Scream 2; neutral "control" sweat from watching TV weather forecasts (probably not using sexy women weather forecasters).

Then they asked female subjects to smell the sweat samples, and measured electrical impulses produced by facial muscles in order to track the women’s facial expressions.

"Happy sweat” elicited happier expressions (including smiles). "Neutral" was, well, neutral. "Fearful sweat" elicited a fearful expression).

The article I read about this suggested that "to get a boost of happiness, just find the happiest person in the room and take a whiff!"

How can we generate "love sweat?"

Tom Lux ends his poem:

A man risked his life to write the words.
Love is like this at the bone, we hope, love
is like this, Sweetheart, all sore and dumb
and dangerous, ignited, blessed - always,
regardless, no exceptions,
always in blazing matters like these: blessed.

On a related olfactory note was an article about similar research to test ut the belief that old people have a particular scent. I know that when I would go to my grandparents' house an aroma would hit my nose as soon as I entered. But I have always thought this was combination of grandma's cooking, grandpa's pipe tobacco and the old furnishings. But maybe it was also my grandparents.

This study had young participants smell the body odors of young, middle-aged, and old people. They asked participants to try to distinguish between them. The old-people odors were perceived as “less intense and less unpleasant” than the young- and middle-age body odors. That goes against the "old people smell" stereotype. But the participants also had an easier time identifying the old-person odors compared to the other two categories. The old ones were more distinct.

The researchers surmised that “In everyday life, the old age odor is experienced in the context of an old individual being present. Odor valence ratings are highly dependent in which on the context they are experienced... it is likely that the body odors originating from the old individuals would have been rated as more negative if participants were aware of their true origin. This experiment suggests that, akin to other animals, humans are able to discriminate age based on body odor alone and that this effect is mediated mainly by body odors emitted by individuals of old age.”

Well, there is a case of age discrimination!

Here is Thomas Lux reading that poem. I love his comment on the poem after he reads.

A Laughing Matter

Today is for April fools and April is National Humor Month.  It is also National Poetry Month.

I suggest that you save time and combine both and read (or listen to) some humorous poetry.

May I suggest you might want to start with Billy Collins.

The Evening is Tranquil, and Dawn is a Thousand Miles Away

This evening poem came to me via a friend's post on Facebook who saw it on The Writer's Almanac.  It's by Charles Wright,from his 2009 book Sestet (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The Evening is Tranquil, and Dawn is a Thousand Miles Away

by Charles Wright

The mares go down for their evening feed

                                                              into the meadow grass.

Two pine trees sway the invisible wind—

                                                          some sway, some don't sway.

The heart of the world lies open, leached and ticking with sunlight

For just a minute or so.

The mares have their heads on the ground,

                                 the trees have their heads on the blue sky.

Two ravens circle and twist.

              On the borders of heaven, the river flows clear a bit longer.

Wright's poem "Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night" is another one from that site that I thought of too. It reminds me of when I am using the Star Walk app on my iPad that allows me to look up at the sky and actually know what stars, planets and constellations I am seeing. A planetarium in my hands.

Later, I like to sit and look up
At the mythic history of Western civilization,
Pinpricked and clued through the zodiac.
I'd like to be able to name them, say what's what and how who got
where,
Curry the physics of metamorphosis and its endgame,
But I've spent my life knowing nothing.

I'm feeling like I know less and less every day. I suppose it's the old "the more you know, the more you realize that you don't know."

Teaching the Daily Practices

Daily practice is a part of many religions and spiritual quests. But the discipline of daily practices does not have to have anything to do with religion or spirituality. The self-discipline of having a daily practice is good for the mind, body and soul.

My writing online is a daily practice that is spread around in a number of places. It is the best thing I have done in my life to improve my writing. I have tried daily writing practices before. William Stafford and other poets are known for their daily poems.

It did that in 2014 with a daily poetry practice that I called Writing the Day. It helps that Stafford, when asked about how he could write a poem each day, replied that he lowered his standards. He didn't write a gem every day. But he did write every day.

This year, I still write poems and I still contribute weekly to that poetry blog, but my daily practices have changed.

Maybe your practice is yoga, meditation, working in the garden, painting, or making time for serious reading. The list is long with possibilities.

It takes discipline. I know that "discipline" has a bad bad reputation. It makes you think of school and getting sent to the principal's office for detention. But discipline is good and necessary.

As a teacher, applying what you learn is one of my top goals for my students. It's also a goal that we should have in our non-academic life.

When I was more seriously into meditation practice, it became important to me that the practice moved into some actions in my life. The idea of meditating peacefully on some hilltop or is some tranquil Zen monastery is very appealing. But it also seems very self-indulgent.

Buddhism is generally not taught in America as a religion. Buddhist teachings are offered in a very practical, nonreligious way, and students of any – or no – religious background can benefit from learning them and putting them into practice.

When I stumbled upon the European Institute of Applied Buddhism in Germany, that's what I was thinking about. EIAB has a mission to not only offer training but also "methods for using Buddha’s teachings to relieve suffering and promote happiness and peace in ourselves, our families, our communities and in the world. "

The institute operates under Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, the world-renowned meditation teacher, scholar and writer, and with Dharma teachers in the Plum Village tradition.

People apply Buddhist teachings in such a way as to release tensions of the body, reduce bodily stress and pains, and in many cases alleviate not only symptoms but also underlying causes of illness. Can you pass on that knowledge and teach others to have a daily practice? I think that is the ultimate point of gaining the knowledge.

The other place I see this happening is with yoga - a practice that I have very little experience with. (I took a 5 week class that didn't work for me.) But i saw a blog post about Yoga from the Heart by Seane Corn and she talks about a concept of "body prayer." She applies her yoga practice to her humanitarian efforts. (There is a a video excerpt of her demonstrating the movement of "body prayer")

I see yoga classes being offered everywhere from corporate centers to churches, hospitals, schools and storefront and formal fitness centers. It's a 5,000-year-old spiritual practice.

Healing yourself is good, but healing the world, or at least a small part of it, is better. I have been a teacher in schools for my entire adult life, but my sense of the "teacher" is not really connected to schools but to every experience.

I have posted on another site about contemplative practices. I posted something about a very simple and brief guided practice using a bell sound meditation. It takes five minutes to do. Everyone can do a daily practice that only requires five minutes. But that is still more time than many people seem willing to give to quiet contemplation.

Even a daily practice of five minutes a day requires discipline.

One of my new daily practices is taking a few minutes every night before I go to sleep to review the day and note what I am grateful for from the day. Honestly, when I started, for a few nights I couldn't come up with anything I was grateful for that day. That first saddened me, but then it bothered me. How could there be nothing that day I was grateful for? Sure, I could say I am grateful for being alive and healthy, for having a job, and for being married to someone I love and for my children. But that sounded corny, a bit of a cliche and too easy. I could use them every night. I am grateful for all those things every day, but it is harder and more important to probe deeper and

In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu says, "Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself? The master doesn’t seek fulfillment. Not seeking, not expecting, she is present and can welcome all things.”

At the top of this page is the Tree of Contemplative Practices, which is a nice visual of seven branches of practices, that I found on the website for the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.

You can see that it ranges from quiet practices for stillness (sitting meditation; centering prayer) to movement (walking meditation; pilgrimage). These practices can be done alone, but most of them actually involve others (especially work and volunteering or storytelling), Some of these practices can produce tangible results. That might be music, art, a house, a sacred space, a journal or a dialog with someone.

I asked a co-worker this past week if she sets aside any time each day for conscious contemplation. She said that it was those ten minutes that would sip coffee while waiting for the train every morning. "What do you think about?" I asked. "Nothing. I stare mindlessly at the tracks."

I know that many teachers of meditation will encourage you to empty your mind, but the "mindless" nature of my co-worker's practice make me think it's not a contemplative practice.

You can add another level to an activity that seems mindless or just relaxing. For example, gardening is one of my favorite activities and I consider it to be a contemplative practice when I am conscious of an intention of cultivating awareness. I know someone who gardens as a way of developing a stronger connection with God. That's different from just gardening.

You can do it while sitting quietly, walking in the woods, watching a fire, gazing at the ocean waves or resting on the couch, but you have to move beyond the experience and the moment.

The Two Updikes

I have been an Updike reader since high school when I started reading John Updike's short stories. I bought all the available collections in used bookstores.



I reread the collected The Maples Stories years later. It has 18 stories from across about 40 years of his career that together make a kind of complete story of one marriage and the American times it spanned. They were released in a paperback version (Too Far to Go) when a television adaptation was done.

It started back in 1956 when John Updike published the story, “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. For the next couple of decades, he occasionally returned to those characters. Raising children, some happiness, some unhappiness, finally infidelity and estrangement.

I read many of these stories in The New Yorker. I would check the index of new issues at the library to see if he had a new story. I also looked at what poems were in the issue - sometimes he published poems too.

The collection added a later story, “Grandparenting,” that I had never read which takes place long after their divorce.

I started reading his son, David Updike, when his book of stories, Out on the Marsh, came out (1989). It's a good collection that seems to be out of print.

It has to be a tough job being a writer when your father is already about as big as they get in the writing world. David is about my age and did some teaching, so I felt some affinity for him. I liked what I read of a eulogy that he delivered for his father at the New York Public Library’s tribute back in March.

He published several young adult and children's books that I was able to find at bookstores over the years. A Winter Journey, An Autumn Tale, A Spring Story, and The Sounds of Summer make a great seasonal suite for young readers. They follow a boy named Homer and his dog Sophocles through the seasons. Unfortunately, they seem to be seem to be out of print.


His second collection of stories is Old Girlfriends.

"Love Songs from America" might be a somewhat autobiographical tale of an American father bringing his biracial son, Harold, to his wife's Kenyan homeland.

I liked "Adjunct" right from the title since I have been an adjunct instructor. David has taught English and Creative Writing at MIT and Roxbury Community College in Boston.


Old Girlfriends shouldn't be read to be compared with his father's stories, though I imagine most reviewers will point out similarities like the New England settings and themes of marriage, relationships, affairs and such. David's stories seem simple and more about everyday life, but they do deal with family and love and race that his father also explored.

I like that he seems to like his characters, even the ones that he and we probably shouldn't like as much. If writers don't like the characters, readers never will like them.



I know of one book that the two collaborated on - A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects - a picture book for children consisting of 26 short poems on the letters of the alphabet by John Updike with photographs by David Updike.

At the beach, after the storm...

The Beach
 
Now this big westerly's
blown itself out,
let's drive to the storm beach.
A few brave souls
will be there already,
eyeing the driftwood,
the heaps of frayed
blue polyprop rope,
cut loose, thrown back at us—
What a species—
still working the same
curved bay, all of us
hoping for the marvellous,
all hankering for a changed life.

Kathleen Jamie



The Overhaul, Picador


via Poetry Daily

The Real Work

I have been wondering lately about what to do next when it comes to work. So, I was glad that serendipity or synchronicity brought the short poem "The Real Work" by Wendell Berry in front of me.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

I hope he is correct that when you no no longer know what to do, you may have arrived at the place where you find your "real work." I like the poems optimism about being lost, baffled and impeded.

"The Real Work" by Wendell Berry, from Standing by Words
 

Charlie Sheen Poet

Charlie Sheen has been reading from A Peace of My Mind, a long out of print book he self-published 20 years ago, on his webcast, "Sheen's Korner."

A sample verse from the poem "A Thoughtless Soul"

A night of drink
A night of hate
A night as dark,
As last night's date.

 

I have Tiger Blood and Adonis DNA T-shirt
suitable for reading his poems.

Suitable attire if you are auditioning

for the Charlie role on Two and a Half Men

Sheen poetry, lean and mean, hot on eBay - Washington Post

World's Greatest Dad

I got one of those "World's Greatest Dad" t-shirts and a mug too back in the early days of fatherhood. There were a few years when it seemed like I was deserving of the title - especially on those days when I walked in the door after work and the boys ran to me yelling, "Daddy's home!"

Now, there is a movie out called World's Greatest Dad. The dad is a high school English teacher. (Well, it says "high school poetry teacher" but I can't imagine him having 5 or 6 classes of just poetry.)

So, they got me with the film's basics: he is a teacher (I have been doing that a long time); poetry (check); he's depressed at least partially because he writes but doesn't get published (check on the bummed out and check on the not getting published); he has a son (check times two).

It stars Robin Williams, who I really like, but even I will admit that he has made some bad script choices over the years, and when he gets really hyper, he can be pretty annoying.

Maybe he needs a strong director and tight script to show him at his best. I love Williams in a bunch of films, some hits, some not: The World According To Garp, What Dream May Come, The Fisher King, Awakenings, Good Will Hunting. I even like some films where Williams is allowed to go crazy and does it well - Aladdin fits that category. And Robin has played the high school English teacher well before - in Dead Poets Society.

So who directed this film? Bobcat Goldthwait. Uh-huh, Goldthwait, the once-crazy, screeching, standup ­comedian-now-turned-filmmaker. You know how they give kids with attention deficit disorder (ADD) amphetamine-like drugs to calm them down? Counter-intuitive, right? But it seems to work. Williams + Goldthwait. It might work.

Actually, the have worked together before. That film is a cult fave called Shakes the Clown. According to the reviews I have seen of the new film, Bobcat seems to keep Robin pretty much in control.

The film's title (and the trailer too to a degree) unfortunately makes you think it's a "family comedy" (let's not mention Williams' Fathers' Day and RV), but I think the film is trying to be something else.

The story centers on Lance Clayton (Williams), high school poetry teacher, and his equally (maybe more so) bummed-out son, Kyle.

The film begins is back and forth between the two. It sounds like the second half shifts into something more surreal and the mask of tragedy comes out. (I have read reviews that compare it to a weaker Donnie Darko and that say the film's plot transition goes "faster than you could page Patch Adams." )

Now, this post is not a REview but a PREview. It's what I am thinking before I enter the theater - or if things really seem grim before I add it to my Netflix queue. But I am curious about the film.

If you saw it, feel free to post a comment - but no spoilers.

Basic Heart

Basic Heart by Renée Ashley is a primer on the emotional topography of the human heart, its complexities and fluctuations, its nuances and metaphors. From tropes grounded in the fantastic landscapes of awareness, of desire and despair, Ashley draws us a map of a world and shows us just how that "world is turned like a pig on a spit." She brings us back to the recognition that we are all ordinary, that sometimes we need saving, and that "what is saved just might turn beautiful."

The Life Before Our Eyes

I read a review of the book The Life Before Her Eyes by Laura Kasischke back in 2002.

That was almost 3 years after the April 20, 1999
Littleton, Colorado school shooting. 12 innocent students and one teacher killed, 23 others wounded at Columbine High School.

It was just after the October 28, 2002 Tucson, Arizona incident where a 41 year old student at the nursing school at the University of Arizona, shot and killed three female professors and then himself.

I had spent 25 years teaching in middle and high school classrooms and had moved to a college in 2000. My wife was still teaching in a high school then, but she left a few years later and the shootings were part of the reason.

We didn't teach in tough inner-city schools. But the school shootings seemed to be happening in the suburban settings where that kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen.

When the tragic shootings occurred at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, I was working at NJIT, the tech university of New Jersey. My wife was at home. My oldest son was headed to Norris Hall on the Virginia Tech campus to meet with his senior project advisor, Professor Kevin Granata, to work with his team on their biomimetic walking robot.

My son had received an email at about 9:30 saying that there had been a shooting on campus, but that classes were on. He was waiting for a phone call from his girlfriend who had gone on a job interview. He decided to wait to go to class.

By the time he read that email, two students in a dormitory were already dead, and the shooter had moved to Norris Hall.

When the news picked up the story, he called his mother and they watched CNN together as he saw people he recognized running from the building.

What they couldn't see inside included Professor Kevin Granata bringing 20 students from a nearby classroom into his office on the third floor and telling them to keep the door locked. He went downstairs to investigate and was shot and killed. None of the students locked in his office were injured.

I came home from the college. It was terrible to watch, but we kept watching, until we could watch no more.

_____________

Last month, I saw the film version of the novel on my Netflix DVD list. I had added it to the list, but kept pushing it down to the bottom.

In the film, The Life Before Her Eyes, directed by Vadim Perelman, Uma Thurman plays an art professor who was witness to a school shooting in her high school when she was a student there. The film switches back and forth from the adult professor to her teenaged self (played by Evan Rachel Wood).

My wife and I did finally watch it, and I'm glad we did.

Since then I've read reviews of it and some are quite negative. They criticize some of the same things I appreciated in the film - the complex structure, beautiful cinematography, and psychological and imaginative direction. It's a movie you should see with people and talk about afterwards.

The film was released for the Toronto Film Festival in September 2007 and I suspect that the events of that past April made the release seem like the wrong thing to do. It was held back and then given a limited U.S. release in April 2008. That timing also seems wrong.

The strongest performance is by Evan Rachel Wood as the high school senior who witnesses a Columbine-like massacre. She is Diana, the wild side of a pairing with best friend Maureen (Eva Amurri), who is an evangelical Christian.

Diana wants out of her hometown to a place she doesn't even want to imagine yet. Maureen wants a husband, kids and the life that she has already planned for herself. Still, they are best friends.

The script for the film is by Emil Stern who adapted Laura Kasischke's novel and it's good at hinting at things that the novel can develop, but that can only be hinted at in the film by a few words, a shot, a look by the actor.

Diana fifteen years after the school shooting (Uma Thurman) can't seem to let go of what happened to her. Diana's eyes are lifeless, especially as contrasted by her younger self. She has a husband and daughter, but things are not right.

Some viewers are probably put off by the alternating adult/teen stories, but it worked for me. The director, Perelman (who also directed The House of Sand and Fog) uses montage to take us from memory to imagination and slow motion to hold on to moments before her eyes. The past, in the acting, photography and dialogue is more "real" than the present dreamwalking life Diana steps through.

I want to read the book in a few months. Not right now. But I did look up some information on Laura Kasischke who I knew as a poet before I knew she had written the novel.

I found this poem in her collection Gardening in the Dark. (The poem is available online.) I don't know that you'd see it as any companion to the novel or film, but it was the one that caught me after seeing the film and starting this little essay.

Sacred Flower Watching Me

Deep in the ground, in the center
of a bulb, in the scarlet
darkness wrapped in crackling

there is a pinprick
of light. It's hot. It stirs. It's spring—
pitiful and sweet as a small girl spanked.

My love, all of it, a life of it, has been
too little. Nor has my rage ever forced any diamonds
out of the blood through the skin.

How awful
resurrection
for someone like me will be. The teenage
girls are being dragged

out of the earth by their hair.

Tongues, testicles, plums, and small hearts bloat
sweetly in the trees. And then

a silence like water
poured into honey—

the silence of middle age.

But there are nights I feel a sacred
flower watching me.
Such affection!
Even in my cradle, it was waiting
warmly, its soft

white gaze

steady on my insufficient face.

On the Book Wish List This Season

There's a blog post that I wrote on my Poets Online blog about a gift wish list for poets. The idea was that poets might like certain kinds of gifts, but I guess the obvious choice is books. Then, I found this neat little widget at Amazon that shows you a ferris wheel of the most requested books by Amazon users that they have added to their Wish List.

The 12th Dodge Poetry Festival

One week to go...

My 11th time attending. Wordstock. Poetry Heaven. A gathering of the tribe in New Jersey.

dodgepoetry.org

Audiences of up to 20,000 expected for the 12th biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, which will run from Thursday, September 25 through Sunday, September 28, 2008.

Join poets Chris Abani, Coleman Barks, Coral Bracho, Billy Collins, Lucille Clifton, Mark Doty, Martín Espada, Joy Harjo, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Linda Pastan, Charles Simic, C. D. Wright, Franz Wright and dozens of other accomplished poets, musicians and storytellers for four days of poetry and music beside the Musconetcong River and among Waterloo Village’s lawns, trees, and landmark historic buildings.