But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

Can you find Icharus's two little legs?

Musee des Beaux Arts (1940)

--W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

After a horrible night of struggling with my laptop—streaky screen, corrupted files, RAM grinding to a halt, it is on its last threads and me with it—I am finally updating today with a month of backlogged entries. These are all things that I have been thinking about and working on for weeks, even though I have been silent here. Chock it up to my compulsive editing, if you wish.

Also, according to Megan K, April is poetry month! (I can’t help but wonder, is there a month for everything? Support Your Local Florist Month? Shoelace Appreciation Month?) All the more reason to get back into this…

In the last few days I have realized that I hate when people talk about someone “battling” cancer or anorexia or depression or alcoholism. There are no broadswords or crossbows; no armored warriors on horseback; no flags flapping in the breeze, bearing the crest of a red dragon or white lion. Instead, there are a lot of quiet moments, wasted sunny days, and friends and family members who don’t quite know what to do or say. And as for everyone else, they are on the “expensive delicate ship,” sailing calmly by.

I have always been captivated by the motif of Icharus—the golden boy who dared to fly towards the sun and then came crashing back to earth in a mess of hot wax and feathers, his father’s warning ringing in his ears. There is this fine balance for our parents, and for us: They want us to reach farther and achieve more than they could, but they are also wary; they don’t want us to fall from grace and have to fish us out from the depths of the green sea.

Ever since I came back from The East—both the East Coast and the Far East—I have felt not like Icharus fallen, but like Icharus grounded. I remember saying to Emily last month, it’s like someone has clipped our wings, and she heartily agreed. Yesterday, at Baja Fresh, I couldn’t talk to one of the employees in Spanish, even though I knew I could’ve communicated to her what I wanted to say and what she didn’t understand in English. Last summer, I wouldn’t have batted an eye at trying to order dinner or “chatting” with a taxi driver in my minimal, nonexistent Chinese. Fake it ‘til you make it or, as Jules wisely said, “just screw it and do it!”

What I like about this poem—and about Breugel’s painting—is that it illustrates the simple, mad indifference in this world. (Maybe it is particularly rampant here in the Midwest, as Michigan-expert Charlie Baxter muses in Saul & Patsy. Indifference is something to bask in when you’re exhausted from the excitement of the world and something to despise when you’re craving that excitement.) No one much cares, at any given moment, what’s happening in the world or what anyone else is really doing or if they’re falling out of the sky. A mild, cloudy Tuesday is just as good a day for tragedy as it is for epiphany.

with strong voices, passions, pageants

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once but leave before it makes you soft. --Baz Luhrman.

Over the last three years, I have acquired many big-city homes—London, Beijing, Qingdao, and DC—with DC being the smallest at half a million and Beijing the largest at 14 million. Even the streets of Manhattan felt a bit like home when I visited in August and was comforted by the sight of a bagel shop, a sushi restaurant, a BBQ joint, and a Korean grocery store all on the same block across from my grandma’s apartment—a kind of homecoming after 6 months in more-homogenous China. New York is my dad’s rejected homeland, after all; “I’m Midwestern by choice,” he says. It is a place I come back to, again and again, and I feel wrong if I don’t visit once a year, maybe to remind myself that it’s still there. But my dearest home--not a city, at all--remains little Ann Arbor, with her wide streets and green trees arching overhead, with bookstores and bars and a world of restaurants... Home is the place you go away from and come back to.

Last March when I was living in Qingdao, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, an intensely beautiful, epic story, full of weighty words that paint a vibrant picture of life in Latin America. While sitting in my 14th floor apartment overlooking Fuzhou Beilu and barges on the distant horizon, I found something comic and strangely wonderful about reading Marquez—surrounded not by parrots and palm fronds and Spanish, but by gingko trees and cherry blossoms, emerging infrastructure and mounds of rubble, the weight of sharp Chinese tones and of filmy pollution being blown away by the hazy mist off the sea.

Now, on the other side of the world, I find myself amongst a mildly similar contrast—reading Charlie Baxter’s Saul & Patsy and Fuchsia Dunlop’s chili-soaked memoir, Shark Fin & Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet & Sour Memoir of Eating in China. These two books, as profoundly different as they are, bring out a sense of “home” for me like neither could on its own.

Dr. Baxter was my mom’s professor at Wayne State before he began his career at U of M and is the Garrison Keillor of Michigan, arguably our poet-laureate (even though he recently retreated to Minneapolis). He writes about Michigan’s landscape, people, and nuances with dexterity, thoughtfulness, understanding, and a sincere reverence for the beautiful peculiarities that make this place inimitable.

At the same time, I’ve been reliving the three lazy, haze-filled days I spent in Chengdu last July, while I read Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuan food memoir. My former professor, Kevin Miller, lived in China for several years and recommended Dunlop’s books to me last fall. I think he understood, in his quiet, awkward way, that I was urgently, frantically, trying to hold onto something—onto anything I could from my time in China, even if I’m not planning on enrolling in cooking school in Chengdu like Dunlop did (in 1994, when there were even fewer laowai (foreigners) in China and there were certainly no laowai women at a Sichuan culinary academy.)

Reading Dunlop’s book in my carpeted bedroom here in Michigan, in Meiguo, makes my head rush with memories of faces and sounds and tastes of Chinese chaos. I can only read a few pages at a time before I am overwhelmed with a strange homesickness.

A similar power of contrast holds true for this poem by Walt Whitman. It is the differences between the language, the imagery, and the pacing of the first half and the second that brings out the beauty of each. And it is a beauty I have been toying with a great deal lately. Part of me is forever fascinated by the intensity of cities like Beijing, Hong Kong, and New York—with their passions and pageants—while the other, quieter part of me daydreams about owning a vineyard in Napa, about running off to Spain or New Zealand, where I will ride a motorbike and stare at fluffy sheep-clouds and harvest grapes all day long in the splendid, silent sun.

Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun

--Walt Whitman

1

Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling,

Give me autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard,
Give me a field where the unmow'd grass grows,
Give me an arbor, give me the trellis'd grape,

Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals teaching

content,

Give me nights perfectly quiet as on high plateaus west of the

Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars,

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can

walk undisturb'd,

Give me for marriage a sweet-breath'd woman of whom I should never tire,

Give me a perfect child, give me away aside from the noise of the

world a rural domestic life,

Give me to warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own ears

only,

Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal

sanities!

These demanding to have them, (tired with ceaseless excitement, and

rack'd by the war-strife,)

These to procure incessantly asking, rising in cries from my heart,

While yet incessantly asking still I adhere to my city,

Day upon day and year upon year O city, walking your streets,

Where you hold me enchain'd a certain time refusing to give me up,

Yet giving to make me glutted, enrich'd of soul, you give me forever

faces;

(O I see what I sought to escape, confronting, reversing my cries,

see my own soul trampling down what it ask'd for.)

2
Keep your splendid silent sun,
Keep your woods O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods,
Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards,
Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields where the Ninth-month bees hum;
Give me faces and streets--give me these phantoms incessant and
endless along the trottoirs!
Give me interminable eyes--give me women--give me comrades and
lovers by the thousand!
Let me see new ones every day--let me hold new ones by the hand every day!
Give me such shows--give me the streets of Manhattan!
Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching--give me the sound of
the trumpets and drums!
(The soldiers in companies or regiments--some starting away, flush'd
and reckless,
Some, their time up, returning with thinn'd ranks, young, yet very
old, worn, marching, noticing nothing;)
Give me the shores and wharves heavy-fringed with black ships!
O such for me! O an intense life, full to repletion and varied!
The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!
The saloon of the steamer! the crowded excursion for me! the
torchlight procession!
The dense brigade bound for the war, with high piled military wagons
following;
People, endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions, pageants,
Manhattan streets with their powerful throbs, with beating drums as now,
The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even
the sight of the wounded,)
Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus!
Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.

the lion of contentment / has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest

I am failing big-time at posting on Mondays. I was in Florida with the parentals for about a week and managed to avoid the internet most of the time and it was actually... really nice. I'll cut straight to the details: Juno beach littered with man o' war jellyfish; lots of Scrabble with Mom in the evenings; subs from a real, honest-to-god, New York-style Italian deli that would make Tony Soprano proud; and several amazing dinners involving too much of only the good things--brie, bread, shrimp, steak, and, my favorite, tangy sweet key lime pie.
Maybe it's the Italian in me, or maybe it's just everyone, but food is so important to my happiness. In the last two days, Mom made chicken soup with tortellini, Alex and I had our ceremonial Noodles & Co. lunch, and the three former ESL-teachers-in-Asia went out for a rousing round of "cold, exhilarating wine." In this case, savory and delectable pinot noir from Vinotecca. Yum yum.
Today, Mom and I ventured into my favorite place on earth--Le Petit Prince at 14 and Pierce. It has been there for over 28 years and smells like a petit French heaven. We bought too many chocolat et amande tuiles, palmiers, gougere, and tasty, buttery noisette cookies, and if that weren't enough... Alex, Emily and I are off, once again, to toast our love for Asia with pho and nom bo kho (spicy papaya salad) at Da Nang in Clawson, followed by some brews at Black Lotus.
All I can think of right now is Jenny Howard always laughing at me for making such a ruckus when we went out to eat in Beijing with GIEU. I had to try everything, exclaim "it's so tasty!" (I now know how to say that in Chinese--hen hao chi) and then insist that everyone try a bite of the strange foods before us. So with chopsticks and palmiers in hand, "the lion of contentment" has certainly placed his heavy paw on my chest--and on my stomach.
Enjoy Billy Collins. His words are a feast of tasty, verbal treats. I can't help but crave bone marrow as I read this, and think of the gan guo (dry pot) restaurant in Qingdao where I first fell in love with "the leg of an angel..."

Osso Bucco
--Billy Collins
I love the sound of the bone against the plate
and the fortress-like look of it
lying before me in a moat of risotto,
the meat soft as the leg of an angel
who has lived a purely airborne existence.
And best of all, the secret marrow,
the invaded privacy of the animal
prized out with a knife and swallowed down
with cold, exhilarating wine.

I am swaying now in the hour after dinner,
a citizen tilted back on his chair,
a creature with a full stomach--
something you don't hear much about in poetry,
that sanctuary of hunger and deprivation.
you know: the driving rain, the boots by the door,
small birds searching for berries in winter.

But tonight, the lion of contentment
has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest,
and I can only close my eyes and listen
to the drums of woe throbbing in the distance
and the sound of my wife's laughter
on the telephone in the next room,
the woman who cooked the savory osso buco,
who pointed to show the butcher the ones she wanted.
She who talks to her faraway friend
while I linger here at the table
with a hot, companionable cup of tea,
feeling like one of the friendly natives,
a reliable guide, maybe even the chief's favorite son.

Somewhere, a man is crawling up a rocky hillside
on bleeding knees and palms, an Irish penitent
carrying the stone of the world in his stomach;
and elsewhere people of all nations stare
at one another across a long, empty table.

But here, the candles give off their warm glow,
the same light that Shakespeare and Izaac Walton wrote by,
the light that lit and shadowed the faces of history.
Only now it plays on the blue plates,
the crumpled napkins, the crossed knife and fork.

In a while, one of us will go up to bed
and the other will follow.
Then we will slip below the surface of the night
into miles of water, drifting down and down
to the dark, soundless bottom
until the weight of dreams pulls us lower still,
below the shale and layered rock,
beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure,
into the broken bones of the earth itself,
into the marrow of the only place we know.

because life is short and you too are thirsty

I have realized two things in the last year…

Realization 1: People write blogs.

There appear to be two main kinds: topical and personal. Topical blogs connect us with issues, ideas, information, and with strangers who share similar interests. (Check out a couple of my favorites on the left.) Personal blogs, on the other hand, connect us to people we love when distance or circumstance get in the way. (I have somewhat filled the void left by BSG marathons and three-hour Xinjiang lunches in Qingdao by reading Stella’s blog about life in NYC; I catch up on my roommate Megan’s page when, because of our divergent sleep schedules, I haven’t seen her for days.) Both kinds enrich our increasingly distracted and distant lives--for the reader and for the writer.

Realization 2: I miss the constant flow of new projects and ideas present in a university setting.

I knew that would happen post-graduation and post-Chinese-cultural-immersion, but I didn’t realize that one of the specific things I would miss would be the exposure to thoughtful quotations and striking words—frequently in the form of poetry. I have always sought out poetry on my own, but I miss having someone who is an expert in his field, whose opinion I value, presenting his students with a piece of writing that he particularly likes. A professor is like an aggregator of words.

All that being said, I am beginning a new project—The Poetry Post.

Each Monday around noon, for as much of 2010 as I can sustain it, I will post a famous (or infamous) poem for your lunchtime-reading pleasure. Most of my favorite poems are fairly contemporary, but my love for haiku from the Japanese masters throws a samurai sword into your V-8. (The engine, not the juice.) I will try not to repeat any writers during the course of the year, but that may prove impossible with Basho, Billy Collins, Mary Oliver... Yes, word-nerd I am!

If you enjoy a poem, leave a comment or “like” the post on facebook. If you’re also a fan of a poet whose work I highlight and you have another favorite by said writer, feel free to leave a link or the poem's text for others to read. I share with you, you share with me, that’s what the internet is for, right?

(P.S. Future posts will include less words from me and more from the actual writers... Enjoy!)

To start off The Post, here is XIII (Dedications) from An Atlas of the Difficult World by Adrienne Rich. We read Dedications on the first day of SWC 300, which will go down in history as Hell Fox’s horrible, festering waste of class. (Snapshot: A bunch of English majors hating a writing class. Something is WRONG here.)

Encountering this poem, however, was worth all of it.

XIII (Dedications)

--Adrienne Rich

I know you are reading this poem

late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a gray day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plain’s enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running

up the stairs

toward a new kind of love

your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the Intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.