Consummatus sum

My Latin, as much as I love it, has suffered a bit of oxidation during the last two years of studying Japanese, so if Consummatus sum does not lead exactly to I am finished, I hope you will not hold it against me.

I finished my first chapbook of poems yesterday, and sent it off, with a check for $15.00, to the Frank O'Hara Chapbook Contest. It is only 16 pages long, but it has taken me forever, plus Tuesday, to go through the manuscript line by line, syllable by syllable, image by image and edit everything so A is tied to B, and C, and D, for more than just alphabetical reasons. There is nothing drearier than writing sometimes. I will not even begin to discuss my whimsical way of spelling, some of which has probably seeped through into this blog.

It is the first time in a long time I have sent anything out for publication--at least since I had a few poems printed in this book, in 2004. Most of the poems here are really quite wonderful, and I have no idea why any of mine were eventually selected for inclusion. They are hardly Minshara Class, in terms of Life.

...

So, today, it is back to work. Back to the Moon, the Stars, Comets, and Mars. Back to blogging. Back to being librarial. Back to reading the news. I understand it isn't good. It hardly ever is.

Good News and Bad

I will begin with the Bad News.

It seems that our new friend on Mars, Mr. Dan Haggerty, better known to viewers of a certain age as Grizzly Adams, has ceased to exist. While I am happy to report he hasn't fallen into a ravine or been mauled by a bear, it saddens me to say that investigators at JPL have revealed that Mr. Haggerty is just an interesting outcropping of rock: an optical illusion.

I suppose, like Santa Claus, or Senator Fred Thompson, he was always too good to be true. Ever since learning that the Man in the Red Suit was a fiction, I held out the greatest hopes for Life on the Red Planet. I suppose the story of Percival Lowell should have served as a warning, or at least modified the initial rush of rapture we all felt when we saw his picture.

I cannot help it if I am a naturally optimistic person at heart. Fortunately, I am not easily discouraged by disappointment.

Although, I have to admit, it is becoming harder and harder to hold out hope for intelligent life on Earth, especially when it seems to be in such short supply down here, especially in Hollywood, the press, and at our major universities.

This is why, each night, before I lay me down to sleep, I thank Heaven for you. For the good sense you show in reading my blog. And for the patient, diligent efforts of fishermen everywhere. And for fish.

IFAQ: Infrequently Asked Questions

Last night's Japanese class was a little difficult (Kino no ban kurasu wa chutto muzukashi deshita), but I survived. I shall be adding another revolution to my list of New Year's Revolutions: 1 hour of Japanese verb conjugation everyday. God only knows where that hour is going to come from though. I may need to borrow against my future earnings.

...

I am not sure you noticed this bit of news yesterday, but it certainly took me by surprise. Just when we were getting used to being alone in the Cosmos, and Grizzly Adams turns up on Mars. How do you like that? If there is anything which convinces me of the existence of a higher celestial power (with a more sophisticated sense of humor) in the great chain of being, it is odd little snapshots of our psychology like this. It takes a talented eye to pick a bearded man out of a bunch of rocks.

...

One thing I am not often asked is: Why do you blog? What is the meaning of all of this drivel you have been posting lately? Especially the poems. Gorblimey! What are you, some kind of sadist. What gives?

I think George Orwell probably had the final word on why a writer writes, in general, but everybody's motivations differ slightly. I do not expect to earn money from blogging, or publishing poems, nor do I really feel that I have anything new to say that has not been said already, or will be said more eloquently by others.

I guess the reason I am here, typing, is more or less selfish. Writing helps me untangle my thoughts. The software at Blogger just makes it easier to embarrass myself.

The addition of rhyme and rhythm to ideas helps me to remember what I am thinking, or was thinking, at a particular juncture in time: allowing me to coordinate the decisions I make in the present with the past, and with the future.

I am not sure I have a particular destination in mind right now. I am just in it for the ride, as it were. But where one is going, after all, depends an awful lot upon where one has been.

And here we are.

Per Aspera

Today I return to my Japanese class, which has been in recess since Christmas, as Sensei has been visiting her family in Japan. Naturally, since I have wasted the last four weeks blogging, writing poems, and watching Star Trek, I have to catch up on homework today. But I am unwilling to abandon the celestial thread I started following yesterday. So, I will leave you with two Astronomical items.

Item 1.

Item 2.

I hope you enjoy them!

Ad Astra

Since it has been miserably cold here in New England, I spent much of this weekend sitting in front of the fireplace, sipping sake, and watching season 1 of Star Trek: Enterprise downloaded from iTunes. Hence the little hiatus from blogging.

I watched some of the series when it originally premiered on UPN. I found it more likable than Voyager or the Next Generation, neither of which I enjoyed all that much, since I found them a bit too preoccupied by the preachiness that seems to infect the future. (I plead ignorance to Deep Space Nine, having only see a handful of episodes of that series). But my schedule being divided precariously between work, the Y, and home to die (rinse and repeat) I was never able to keep up with Enterprise in its original broadcast run.

Being a child of the 20th Century, I have been and always shall be a fan of The Original Series, but it is nice to make some new friends. Watching Star Trek with my dad on our old brown Zenith color console (see above) was one of the seminal memories of my childhood. That TV was a wonderful, solid machine. It must have weighed 9 tons. But like many electronic organisms, it was somewhat fragile on the inside. It had tubes that would glow orange, and occasionally pop, with a fizz of ozone and insualtion, and need to be extracted and tested on the tube tester at Radio Shack, on Payne Avenue. My father liked to fix things for himself: cars, TVs, toasters, even watches. His father, my grandfather, was a jeweler, and he repaired watches for a living, in a little shop on Main Street, in downtown Buffalo, in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. I think this must explain my obsession with prosody--time.


...


And how does any of this relate to poetry? Only tangentially. In one of the episodes of Enterprise, Captain Jonathan Archer shows his Vulcan science officer an astronomy book he read as a child. I had many such books myself, thanks to my Aunt Janet, my father's sister, who always took an interest in my scientific education, and who did something mysterious, related to music, at Moog. Every now and then a microscope, a package of books, or a geology set would appear from Aunt Janet in the mail.

As I was drifting off to sleep on Sunday night, I thought about Johnny Archer's book, and I tried to recall all of the poems about astronomy I had ever read-- but I really couldn't come up with very many. There is this one, this one, this one, and this one. That's all I could think of, off the top of my head.

My favorite astronomical poem is the one called "Mayflies." The last few lines of the piece are a bit clunky, I think, but that word quadrillions in stanza 1 is worth the price of admission--absolutely breathtaking, isn't it?

Before encountering this poem, I had never heard such a number ever mentioned in a poem before, or in a science class, where large numbers (for the sake of convenience) are usually expressed in abstract scientific notation. It is nice to learn that in an advanced, technical society, such as our own, words have not entirely lost their powers of enchantment.

The truly wonderful thing about the word quadrillion, for instance, in the conext of Mr. Wilbur's poem, is that within that word another word, and a whole other world, dances. And this only becomes apparent through the poetry.


Kind of cool, huh?