The Road Jack

So many thanks to B., L., and the-spirit-of-A.C. for hosting me for the last three weeks in Lenox! In two hours, it'll be time to catch a train -- and, four days later, a plane back to the Middle East. I'm returning with six finished drafts, three revisions, the foundation for the next essay (due late spring), and some groundwork for the anthology project. All in all, not bad given that I've been ill most of the trip. Although I told myself I'd study Arabic daily, I didn't live up to that promise. No doubt, I'll regret that once I return to Amman!

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Danielle Cadena Deulen's "Lemon" is up at Poetry Daily. Go on, take a bite!

February Work Space

lenox, mass: afternoon light

There & Here

I've traded sand for snow -- and lots of it. Dusk and dawn: in changing light, the white drifts go gray.

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Yesterday: early to rise, new draft, essay notes, p.m. yoga, homemade soup, Ethan Frome, early to bed.

Today: early to rise, restlessness, drafting to nowhere, afternoon queasiness, two rejection slips. In other words, bad news Berkshires.

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Cairo, Cairo, Cairo. All the news is Cairo. In Jordan today: two demonstrations (I doubt will receive any coverage in light of Mubarak's resignation); the first, to express solidarity with the Egyptians; the second, in support of the kingdom's Hashemite rule.

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The cancellation of Nile cruises is hurting more than Egyptian tourism. The local economy is suffering in Petra, Aqaba, Wadi Rum. I wish more Americans would visit the country.

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Currently reading:

Selected Poems (Amy Clampitt, ed. Mary Jo Salter)
Love Amy, The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt (ed. Willard Spiegelman)

You Must Read This

"I don't like using the word racist...," she begins. For thoughtful consideration of Tony Hoagland's "The Change," please visit Claudia Rankine's web site.

What I Missed by Missing the Conference

As recollected by Sara Jaffe at "All Hook, No Chorus" (click to read the entry in its entirety):


Hoagland wrote, “Dear Claudia.” He wrote that he felt Rankine was “naïve about American racism.” He said, essentially, that everyone in America is racist, that it’s something we learn and are taught everyday. He said that too many white poets are afraid to deal with this reality in their poems, that almost all poems about race come from a person of color’s point-of-view. He also suggested that it was facile for Rankine to assume that the speaker in the poem is the same as the poet. He called her remarks “underconsidered.” He made a list of declarative statements, which I wish I’d written down: “I am a racist. I am a misogynist. I am a man. I am a lover of women. I am a single mother.”

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Tony Hoagland's "The Change"

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And here's an excerpt from Peter Campion's "Rhetoric, Music, America," a critical essay I mentioned at Inns last spring:

"Hoagland’s ability to match formal challenges with serious social concerns should make for strength and subtlety in the poetry. So why do whole swathes of this new book fall flat? Sometimes the biggest flops occur when Hoagland addresses those social themes most explicitly. Consider the opening of “Hinge”:

Last night on the tv the light-brown African-American professor
looked at the printout analysis of his own dna
and learned that he was mostly Irish.

I can’t go back to Africa now, he thought,
controlling the expression on his face,
his big moment onscreen already turning out
different than he had imagined.

Nor would he ever be able to say the sentence,
“I be at the crib”
with the same brotherly ease as before.

The first three lines work as a fine lead-in. But then the poem takes such a wrong turn, that it would be offensive if it weren’t simply absurd. The idea that a light-brown African-American, and a professor to boot (readers will recognize Henry Louis Gates, Jr.), might be surprised by having European ancestry, and might consider a dna readout as the ultimate verdict on racial and cultural heritage, is dubious enough for starters. But the sudden move into the omniscient third-person, conveying the presumption that the poet knows exactly what the man was thinking, is the real trouble here. The professor’s thoughts turn out to be cartoonish at best—has anyone, other than a white teenager, ever uttered the sentence, “I be at the crib”? These thoughts read less like interior monologue and more like gags, at the expense of the professor, whom Hoagland makes not only gullible but affected: “his big moment onscreen already turning out / different than he had imagined.” The problem is not simply that Hoagland has made some political blunder. The riskiness of addressing race in America, and of inhabiting seemingly “incorrect” tones or attitudes, might actually have been refreshing. The real snag has to do with rhetoric. The narration operates at a supreme distance from the material, so that the true subject turns out to be Tony Hoagland’s performance of a joke at the expense of a famous intellectual, who becomes little more than a “personification of an abstract idea.” Such reduction occurs throughout the book. When Hoagland writes in another poem that Britney Spears “looks a little chubby in a spangled bikini” as she dances before “fanged, spiteful fans and enemies,” he turns people into types, images that may have particularity so far as the poet’s phrase-making is inventive and amusing, but that exert no pull of their own against the rhetorical plotting of the poem..."

One Hundred Trembling Candles

Poet in 1916 (by J.E. Sponagle)

Those born this day are lucky to keep such company:

"We called her Miss Bishop. She was the only teacher I had in four years of college who invited a class to her house—a sunny, rather bare apartment on Brattle Street, I think it was, where she showed us a Joseph Cornell-ish art box she had made that she said drew on the folk art Brazilians made to memorialize dead children..."

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THE BIGHT
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
 
[On my birthday]

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.

And Miles to Go Before I Sleep...

After more than 24 hours of travel (flight overnight, taxi, train, and car) I've arrived. New England feels very much like New England.

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New York is quiet at six in the morning. I sometimes forget that. Sunday morning, I had Penn Station almost all to myself.

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Amtrak rushed upstate. The Hudson was moving; then, it wasn't. Water turned to ice floes with the tide. Near Poughkeepsie, the river seemed to flow both ways...

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As B. navigated the Berkshires' ice-slick roads, I couldn't help but think about the year I lived in Hamilton:
how peculiarly / particularly time passes in a wintry village.

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By seven, I needed a nap.

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L. made the loveliest pasta topped with spinach, proscuitto, asparagus, grape tomatoes, red onion, and shaved cheese. We laughed and talked past midnight.

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Spotted this morning from the kitchen window: a half dozen wild pheasants pecking at the snow.

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Work. More work. Fewer than three weeks to go...

Right About...Now

I should be in Washington D.C. at the AWP Conference delivering a talk for this morning's "Strategic Thievery" panel. Thanks to the massive snow- and ice-storm that swept the states, I'm sitting in my office in Amman. My paper on the anxiety of lyric assertion as demonstrated by Brigit Pegeen Kelly's "Dead Doe" is locked in its file for safekeeping. May it see the light of day...someday.

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Friends and family continue to contact me about reports they've heard linking the Egyptian uprising with Jordan, Yemen, Tunisia, etc. Even as I try to assuage their fears and make clear the social, political, and historical differences between Jordan and its neighbors, the media draws additional connections. One of today's headlines, for example, connects Jordan-Yemen-Egypt as if it's some sort of three-headed dog; the contents of the article that follows, however, only cover events in Cairo. I've also noticed that many of the journalists discussing Jordan aren't here on the ground, but writing their reports from other Middle Eastern countries or even the U.S.

Here's what Jordanian blogger Naseem Tarawnah of The Black Iris has to say about what distinguishes the motivation behind Jordan's political rallies and demonstrations from those in surrounding areas:

"What Jordanians are looking for is not a revolution but an evolution of the state. People are looking for reform that is not macro and philosophical, but is tangible - as in, food-on-the-table tangible. Better jobs, higher wages, better education for the kids, good schools, safer neighborhoods, lower prices, lower taxes, better modes of affordable public transportation, etc. These are the things that matter to the average Jordanian and to the ordinary protester. This is what we see written on signs and chanted by the crowds."

In another post on King Abdullah's recent appointment of a new prime minister Tarawnah goes on to say:

"There needs to be recognition that this isn’t about Tunisia and this isn’t about Egypt. It’s about what comes next. Not for them, but for us. The state needs to realize that no one protesting on the streets of Jordan have been calling for regime change but rather a change in government and real reforms. And that is an opportunity..."


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But King Abdullah just sacked his cabinet, say some of my American friends (quoting the latest radio report). Such dismissals seem obvious evidence of unrest. That swift political change is a common practice in Jordan (the King has fired many government officials on charges of corruption during his tenure) doesn't seem to matter. They see King Abdullah's appointment of a new prime minister as evidence that the entire political system is buckling to the demands of Democracy-demanding protesters. Not true. Not even close.

On the other hand, I've had several discussions with Jordanians who feel that American leadership (examples have been both Republican and Democrat) is weak and ineffective. Why doesn't the President just do something? they ask, citing examples of action taken by the late King Hussein and his son current King Abdullah II. How to explain -- because it's not that simple?! Our President doesn't have that kind of power...

My point is that it's very easy to reach reductive conclusions about particular places from a distance. If I still lived in the states, current news coverage would lead me to believe that half the Middle East is experiencing revolution. Perhaps that's a narrative the West wants to believe. I don't pretend to know what's going to happen in Amman tomorrow (Friday, Feb. 3, the holy day, and in recent weeks, a day peaceful demonstration). However, I can say that as of Thursday at 6:13 p.m., the city is rolling into the weekend without incident.

Happy Anniversary!

It's been more than six months since we moved to Amman. Six months! In December, K. and I traveled to Italy for Christmas. In January, I met a friend for an almost two-week adventure to France. Both trips were memorable, magical. At the end of each, I was ready to come home.

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Home is now Jordan. I've lived in so many places, moved too many times. A house isn't necessarily a home. I had a dream house -- a historical beauty -- with a wrap-around porch, matching swing and shutters. For two years, I watched the townspeople pass by on bikes, in cars, by foot, riding skateboards and paper-decorated floats. I saw neighbors watering their laws, and kids from the local high school laughing and spitting and wasting their days. People must have seen me sweeping that porch and thought I was home.

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Moving here, we lost square feet. And a garage. Regular contact with stateside loved ones. Our dog lost her park and a big yard in which to chase the birds. I can't make my favorite chile verde -- the tomatillos have all gone missing. Two thirds of my poetry collection is in storage. I'm managing.

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Not many of our friends and family know much about Jordan. I'd bet the average American doesn't know much about Jordan. Most of the tourists I meet here are French. Or Japanese. Or Australian. Or British. Some have dreamed about seeing Petra. Others arrive at Aqaba on cruise ships whose featured destination is Egypt: cruise the Nile, see the pyramids, stop off in Jordan to catch sunset at Wadi Rum, then fly home from Amman.

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Egypt. Although it's true that while standing on a hotel balcony on Jordan's southern shore I once saw -- there, hazy in the distance -- Egypt, the fact remains: Egypt is not Jordan.

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I lived in San Francisco, a city that is good and bad, beautiful and sometimes ugly. It's there I still feel most at home. In the grand scheme of things, Las Vegas is near San Francisco. Still, California is not Nevada.

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Amman, you are difficult and exciting, and sometimes hot and foggy. I love your hills. At night, your flat-faced buildings remind me of those in a certain city in northern California. Your people are generous and intelligent. I love the rhythms of your language and am learning to love your noises -- the water and gas trucks that circle my neighborhood blaring advertisements in Arabic, the traffic circles' blaring horns, riotous outbursts to celebrate victories in soccer.

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Six months. How is this possible?

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Nevada is not California.