Suburban Exile
My neighbors do not wish to be seen.
They have made it clear they prefer their lives mysterious
They drive hours and hours down paved parking lots
In giant cars that drink gasoline straight from the earth.
They go to their jobs in transparent buildings
Moving imaginary money from one place to another
From before light to after dark
While their invisible children attend
The finest schools their property taxes can provide.
The streets are deserted.
The yards are echoing and bare.
This ought not to surprise me as much as it does.
I ought to know by now
When people look out the bay windows
Of their million dollar homes
What they want to see is nothing but
Well manicured lawns from sea to shining sea.
Skylines
We posses clean cities, pretty cities, even quaint cities. But we do not have a city that is greater than its myth, a city that dangles in the imagination of the world. – Lorraine Monk, Canada with Love
The skyline of Tokyo looks just like Minneapolis but it stretches on as far as forever.
Fifty-two Americans, Canadians and Brits more or less
A deck of cards with the jokers removed
College students
Gai-jin
Our first night in Japan
Walked
to the bus stop
took a bus
then a train
then a subway
to some station
I cannot recall
Eventually we ended up
Great blob of pale foreignness
Pouring out of the subway station
Milling like sheep with no border collie`
At someone’s suggested stop
We walked together in search of food
Tiny fish in a big pond
Schooling for safety
Against
No one
Nothing
Everything was closed in this business district of Tokyo after 6 pm
Ants who’ve lost their trail
Lemmings at the edge of a cliff
It felt like we’d been walking for hours.
Who are we following?
I only knew I’d spoken this allowed
When 51 people more or less
Turned to me and said
You.
A Scene from Life with Owen
At Owen’s Early Childhood Family Education class (toddlers aged 12-18 months) in Wayzata there is a garden theme one day. At the sensory exploration table there are pans full of dirt and earthworms, mealworms in dry oatmeal and a plastic aquarium full of what I thought were tadpoles.
As I got to the table I read the sign, which was laminated: “Flatworms. Will latch on but not strong enough to draw blood.”
Apparently people who fish grow up playing with flatworms. I grew up thinking they were very disgusting and salted them off the hull of my rowboat whenever I took a turn around the pond in our back yard.
However, with such a young class where all the kids are still putting everything in their mouths I found this a ridiculous activity for our class. None of them moms had their kids play with the leeches.
Margaret Atwood -- the Cabin as home
After reading the Margaret Atwood essay about her family I wanted to write about my family and where home is.
Home when I thought about it went to The Cabin where I grew up spending 3 weeks every summer and every weekend with my family. My dad built it with his dad. I grew up hearing stories about the tricks they played on my grandma. When they were working on the roof, they put one of my dad’s shirts around a cinder block, stamped around a lot, shouted “Oh No!” and through the block off the roof past the picture window where my grandma was looking out at the lake. I’m surprised she didn’t kill both of them then and there.
The chimney was made with lake rocks that my dad and grandpa found in Green Lake. Above the mantel was a picture of the sailboat that my dad and grandpa built together—the Likki Tikki. It was named after Thor Hjerdahls Kon Tikki. Long before I was born, the boat was destroyed in a fire at the marina’s storage shed. There were also some dusty waterski trophies of my aunt Jan’s. There was no hint that my dad had an older sister as well.
In my mind this was home. And I have all these romantic pictures of my perfect Walton’s family singing out their goodnights. There was no air conditioning. There was a big fan on the ceiling. In the loft it got stiflingly hot and there was no privacy. But it was my favorite place to sleep. At night we’d go out in the lake, wading up to our necks and stand still until we started to shiver and our teeth were chattering. Then we’d run in and hop into bed. If grandma was there we had to dry our hair with a blow dryer first, which kind of spoiled the effect. She had this thing about sleeping with a wet head.
She and my grandpa moved out to The Cabin every summer to live there. They knew all the neighbors. They went to church outdoors across from the bible camp that some relative of mine started. Pete Bonde. I can never remember how he was related, even though I think it was a pretty direct line from him to me.
Here's a bunch of ideas for projects
Poems
1. Steal titles
2. Count words and write a poem with the same number
3. Write the poems of characters in novels
Letters from home
• where is "home"
• how far back do you go to reach "home"
Are you part of a huge related group of invisible people
• why are they invisible
• are you invisible too
Think about past versions of yourself
• how do they get handed off and who does the handing
• build a collage of past and present portraits
Who are the peripheral people in your life and what impact have they had on you?
Think about the role of concealment in family stories
• what have you submitted to conceal
• who is the master of concealment
• who is wide open and transparent
Is there someone in the family who is not vivid but you (as a writer) could make him vivid?
Who remembers what you said of yourself as a child?
Who in your family have you Romanticized?
Anne Hébert Part 2
After discussing Anne Hébert in class today I feel a little less stupid. Two things mentioned made me feel better:
1. She was closely tied in with the surrealist movement. So I was trying to read things literarly while she was planting severed hands in her garden.
2. She was very influenced by visual art; Reading the poems with the idea that she was describing a painting made things less frustrating.
I love this one.
Minor Despair
The river's reclaimed the islands I loved
The keys of silence are lost
The hollyhock's not as sweet as I thought
The water has more secrets than it sings
My heart collapses
The moment no longer supports it.
Petit Désespoir
La rivière a repris les iles que j'aimais
Les clefs du silence sont perdues
La rose trémière n'a pas tant d'odeur qu'on croyait
L'eau autant de secrets qu'elle le chante
Mon coeur est rompu
L'instant ne le porte plus.
Here were some other things that came up in class:
Images that kept coming back - death, the sea, shells, bones, birds, hands
The idea of containment.
Anne Hébert Selected Poems
I am hopelessly lost in Anne Hébert's poems. Most of them make me feel stupid. They seem very clever and laced with symbolism that I should get, but don't. They feel very poety and I'm just not that much of a poet. Too many things need to be intuited. And I don't think it's the translation-- I had my husband read the French and he agreed that the translations were fairly tight. So it's just me.
I need a road map. I need a key. What do hands symbolize? When she talks about planting hands in the garden-- severed hands-- what is that about? Closed rooms? Castles? Algae?
And here's the really sad thing. The poems from Tomb of the Kings were the ones that
almost made sense to me. When we get to The Mystery of the Word, the word is so mysterious I haven't a prayer of keeping up.
I am dreading class tonight where I will be swimming in a sea of poety people who understand the brilliance of these words.
Time Article on Anne Hébert
Canadian Lit: Danger Tree
MacFarlane's
Danger Tree memoir is constructed in these fantastic spirals. It feels like stepping into someone else's oral history. It's a great way to learn the history of Newfoundland through several generations of one family.
In any family, stories are told and retold and they change shape and they aren't told in any particular chronological order. One story leads into another and then is interrupted by a third story and only at the end do you understand why they are connected.
I want to read the book two or three more times because I know I will catch things that I didn't catch the first time. I want to plumb the depths for who exactly all these people are and what happened to them and why.
When I went to Africa to stay for a month with two other friends from Minnesota, we posted daily comments about our experiences. We were staying with my friend's aunt who had been working for 12 years in Kenya as a doctor after retiring at age 60 from her practice in rural Missouri.
When we started writing, we had no way of knowing which people would play prominently in our stay. We had a confusing cast of characters that marched through our posts: Magdalene, Joseph, Mrs. Shaw. Relatives suggested on our return that we should have posted a cast of characters at the beginning. It would have been impossible. Only at the end could we look back and see who shaped our experiences there.
Much of MacFarlane's book felt the same way. The characters slipped in and out and we gradually understood their connections to one another. There were fantastic revelations that happened only after people died.
An uncle who seemed to have no connection to the family business was discovered to be the
president of the company. There was a famous last letter home from a fallen soldier. It turns out it wasn't the last letter. Long after his death, the family found another letter from the soldier dated several weeks later in which he says he's alive and they don't need to worry about him. He's hun-proof.
I first met my husband's grandfather at his funeral. And it was only in planning that funeral that the family discovered he'd been messing with everyone for years. He had a hole in his thumb. He told everyone in the family a different story and kept the stories straight for his whole life. Some thought it was a war injury, some were told a squirrel chewed off his thumb and some were told he got it stuck in a lawnmower. Even his wife didn't know what the real story was. The truth was buried with Tom along with his cribbage board and a newspaper.
Reading Group Guide of The Danger Tree
