patrickkanouse.com Blog

Sidebar: Beer

This is a non-poetry related event, but it is related to my hobby: brewing beer. My wife, for Christmas, purchased me a 10-gallon Igloo cooler, a bazooka screen, and a couple of other items to begin all-grain brewing, which I had never done before. So I brewed my first batch yesterday (an over-the-top IPA so I can send it to Uncle Doug in Gettsyburg and knock his socks off with hops). The process seemed to go just fine. The brew is sitting next to me now in the carboy bubbling away. The important question is what next? Bitter? ESB? Export Stout? What?

FreeRice.com

Check out this website, which I heard about on NPR. Basically, the more vocabulary terms you define correctly, the more rice is donated to the United Nations to fight hunger. A challenge that provides real benefits and does not cost you a cent.

How to Read a Poem, continued

Some more interesting quotes from Terry Eagleton’s book:

One might put it this way. Business executives, technologists and other practical types tend to gaze at the world through the clear window-pane of language; while poets are those strange, socially dysfunctional creatures who never cease to be fascinated by the minute warpings and convexities of the glass itself, its coolness to the forehead and slithery feel to the fingerpads. Yet the image is deceptive. There are indeed poets of this kind – formalist or symbolists for whom the point of their art is to investigate the medium rather than the meaning….Where the window metaphor breaks down is that the objects we see ‘through’ the pane, however apparently solid, are actually created by it. A poem constitutes the very things it is about. In this sense, every poem curves back on itself….

Actually, language is nothing like a window – for one thing because window clearly separates an inside from an outside, which is the last thing that language does. On the contrary, being on the ‘inside’ of a language is a way of being ‘outside’ it as well….It is the very essence of words to point beyond themselves; so that to grasp them as precious in themselves is also to move more deeply into the world they refer to. Not to see this is like claiming that you can’t use a spade to dig with because the iron bit at the end of the handle keeps getting in the way.

Aleatory Writing

While reading some more of Terry Eagleton’s How to Read a Poem, he mentioned aleatory or automatic writing. The term seems to relate less to putting pen to paper and letting what comes out come out than to “structured randomness.” The term aleatory is more often associated with music, at least in the contexts I’m familiar with. It can be as extreme as John Cage’s rolling dice and letting it determine the next chord to more structured pieces that allow musicians to choose from a set of possibilities. Because I had not heard the term aleatory writing, I looked it up and found this interesting bit:

Raymond Queneau wrote Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. This is a set of ten poems, but each line is separated and available for use (thus, 10^14 or 100,000,000,000,000 combinations). To get an idea of what this is like, go to this site.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen died on Wednesday. His obituary in The New York Times. No matter what you think of his music, he was a force in classical music in the mid to late 20th century. Rest in peace.

Evolution of a Poem: Finale

So here’s the state of the poem as we left it last:

After the rain, the elongated act
Of what is passed passing.
The humid breeze through the cracked window
Translucent madder lake curtains echo.

But what of her, her hand gloving
Crystalled pinot noir, her voice that hushed
Swirls upon my heart? In these clusters
Of sounds, will everything that we have hushed

Blossom in the mouth and
Settle in translucent, shimmering red?

Now, this is a bit of a distortion, for the poem never actually existed in this form. However, I talked through most of how I got to the first stanza, which is its current state (though, I’m still considering replacing “Translucent” with “Vaporous”).

The last two stanzas as they exist the last time I worked on the poem became one and is

But what of her? Her hand gloving
Crystalled pinot noir. Her words betraying
All that remains hushed.
After the rain, every word rushes forth from its silence.
So a few things: One, “Swirls upon my heart” sounded, to me, forced and borderline cliche, if not cliche. Two, I hijacked “translucent, shimmering red” for the first stanza, and I did not think that a reference back to it was warranted or what I was going after. Three, I wanted to push the poem into two stanzas. Those last lingering lines felt tacked on, as if I could not get my thoughts compact enough.

These last lines are the crux, in many ways of the poem. They hold the theme or meaning. So the question for me as I was reworking this stanza was, “What the heck am I talking about?” Recall, that the poem was really prompted by those first two lines; I framed the rest of the poem around it. Honestly, when I wrote those lines, I was not attempting anything lucid or logical. They were words that had a rhythm, had a mystery, and I wanted to explore it. And in the process of writing this poem, I wrestled with the meaning.

While the my meaning may, in the end, not carry forth across to a reader (either because I have contextual references impossible for readers to know or consider or because I wrote it poorly), if I did not find the meaning for myself, I would have had no chance of writing a good poem. I am pretty sure I have stated it before on this blog: The act of writing for me is often a plummet into finding the meaning of images, words, rhythms, and metaphors. The act of writing – not always though – helps to clarify what it is I am responding to.

So, again, what does

But what of her? Her hand gloving
Crystalled pinot noir. Her words betraying
All that remains hushed.
After the rain, every words rushes forth from its silence.

mean? It opens with a question that is never really answered but prompts the image and the resolution of an idea. The first stanza: It has just rained and that end of the rain, executes an act “of what is passed passing.” I find this hard to summarize (which I think poems should often be) but it is essentially, to me, akin to seeing your life flash before your eyes. Now, no death is involved here, but the end of the rain has prompted a reference to a past that is gone…but in our minds passes before us again: hence, “passed passing.” The scene is filled with motion and color and the curtains weave back and forth with the breeze coming through the cracked window. All is calm and fleeting, much like many of our memories, though they can arise when we least expect it.

The narrator in the second stanza wonders about “her,” who we can presume is next to him or otherwise nearby. She holds a crystal glass filled with pinot noir. The crystal is indicative of finery, and pinot noir is a red wine whose aroma and flavors are often associated with cherries and black currants. But pinot noir, while producing some of the finest wines in the world, is often confusing in its aroma and flavors. People have a hard time classifying two pinot noirs as from the same grape because of its substantial variety.

She must be talking, for her words are “betraying / All that remains hushed.” She’s not talking directly about those hushed things, but what she says “unhushes” them nonetheless. Every one has thoughts and feelings that remain unreachable by any one else. It is not that they are purposely hidden or walled off (though they can be), but we as humans can only ever understand someone else so much. If you pinch yourself, I can only understand how it feels to you based on my context from when I pinched myself at some point in time. The point is that human connections are necessarily less than 100%, and one of the joys and mysteries to me is how we interact and get as close to 100% as we can. There are things in this world that often help to bridge the gap between people. Some have been remarked on endlessly throughout human history: religion, art, love. We find common bounds, ways of creating effective communication paths (i.e., finding ways to come to each other from shared perspectives). The power of these is indisputable (look at how we’ve butchered each other over conflicts surrounding religion, love, and art), but an overlooked one is what I will call “spontaneous” art. These are times when a set of events impels us to contemplate ourselves more thoroughly and deeply than normal. Natural events and places often provide these whether its the view from Delphi, comets appearing briefly only to disappear for years or centuries, or quiet, still moments after a rain when the world seems to have slowed and you rest and think and wonder and with or without words we find a human connection.

After the rain, the elongated act
Of what is passed passing.
The humid breeze through the cracked window
Translucent madder lake curtains echo.

But what of her? Her hand gloving
Crystalled pinot noir. Her words betraying
All that remains hushed.
After the rain, every words rushes forth from its silence.

John Adams: Hallelujah Junction

John Adams may prove, with hindsight, to be the great American composer. Copland and Ives instituted a respectability for American “classical” composition (my focus here is on so-called classical music; the intrinsic and inestimable contribution of jazz and blues to American music I’ll not address – John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme may be the greatest composition by an American in any musical genre), but Adams has developed a musical language that is compelling, varied, beautiful, and on and on. His operas, with the help of Peter Sellars and Alice Goodman, have brought a vitality to that genre by dealing with contemporaneous (or nearly so) events. His On the Transmigration of Souls has been, for me, the greatest art to rise from the horror of 9/11.

Last year I purchased China Gates, the CD released by Nonesuch in 2004. Specifically, I have listened to Hallelujah Junction, a three movement piece for two pianos. My musical knowledge is very limited so any description must bear that in mind. The first movement starts with one piano, followed by a second that sounds to me to repeat the first piano’s part but a slightly faster pace, bringing them inline eventually before letting them part ways. Sometimes they play together, but a single note one piano takes high and the other low. According to Wikipedia and other sources, the name of the piece comes from a truck stop at the junction of US 395 and Alternate US 40 near California and Nevada. It’s a mesmerizing construction whose beauty continues brings me back. Riveting.