No Golf in the Kingdom

By Will Nixon

The delusion that is golf I can only explain by believing that it satisfies an atavistic yearning to walk again across the African savanna of our origins as the cleverest beast in creation. Why else would people find manicured turf so appealing, plus artificial watering holes? Why else would Americans bring golf clubs everywhere they go? Aircraft carriers. Death Valley. The moon. You can’t escape their obsession. Once on a roadside litter pick-up in the highest and wildest road notch in the Catskills, I found a golf ball nested in the damp silt beneath a maple tree miles from any golf course, a demonic egg that infuriated me to write a poem.

What Kind of Mind Invented the Golf Ball?
–Devil’s Notch, Catskills

Like this one buried up to its dimpled white crown
in damp silt between maple roots, so cocky
and clean, so perfect. All morning I’ve picked up trash
in this notch, where ravens broadcast from cliffs
and shadbushes hold smoke blossoms into May.
I’ve filled my yellow bag with the transparent brain
of a baggie submerged in a stream, Bud cans so faded
their words appear Russian, a paint can that burped
its last gob of white latex onto a stone wall—
the burial mound for bottle glass, burger clamshells,
a condom. The dead porcupine I boot-toed off the road
left a toothpick trail of quills. But a golf ball?
It doesn’t belong here! Not this alien probe
from manicured suburbs, where I served my youth
pushing mowers and painting garages. Only once
did I place my faith in my hands gripping
a golf club. At 17 I swung with fury and power,
topping weak grounders down the fairway,
or lofting grass divots I didn’t bother to replace.

What kind of mind invented the golf ball?
The same that invented the cover girl’s pout?
The perfect, unattainable sonnet? The insult
so clever and true it lives under your skin for life?

I lift the golf ball from its silt pocket,
dimpled eyes no different than dimpled chin.
I bounce it hard on the pavement, a bounce
it obviously loves, hopping over my head.
Even on Mars it would feel at home,
never lonely, hungry, or broke.
How can you make a golf ball cry?
How can you make it understand?

So I was adamantly opposed when, in the late Nineties, a developer proposed clearing a Catskills ridgetop for a golf resort. Wasn’t America already branded with golf courses? Why scalp a forest in a wilderness park to lay down perfect green turf like a skin transplant from the suburbs? Didn’t Canada geese already have enough grazing lands for themselves? No, I said, let’s save this ridgetop for the yellow bellied sapsuckers and other woodland birds.

So I hiked up there. Shangri-la it wasn’t. Heavily logged over the years, the forest was thin, runty, and sunny, a far cry from the wilderness protected farther up the ridge by the Catskills Forest Preserve with towering oak canopies and deep shade. But I did find something well worth preserving. Not one, not two, but three beech trees clustered together offering the mark of bear claws. In autumn the animals scampered up the trunks for the beech nuts in the crown. As it happens, the spread of bear claws is the same as our fingers, so I touched my fingertips to the claw scratches as my way of shaking hands. Americans may be golf maniacs, but I sided with the bears.

It’s a free country of course. No one will cure us of golf anytime soon. But I say, for a true adventure, try bushwhacking the Catskills, not golfing them. By bushwhacking I don’t mean donning a pith helmet and wielding a machete like a British character in a jungle movie. I simply mean leaving the trail to find your own way to the summit and back down again with a map and compass. As you go, you’ll discover a pride at navigating your way through the wilds, a pride as old as our ancestors out on those African plains. They didn’t bother themselves, chasing after little white balls. So why should we?

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The Mother Grouse Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges available on-line.

Lines Never Written by e.e. cummings

under a gray sky epiphanies linger like frost on the tongue
sparrows taste best when swallowed by the sea
moose live long lives without reading Leaves of Grass
schoolyard sandboxes never forget their tragedies
kerouac’s mother refused to suckle him while drinking brandy
e.e. cummings loved the way vowels shimmy their hips
walt whitman placed dancing girls on his dope scale
congress has outlawed house plants that grow the color of money
many people have tried to ruin the alphabet
but no one can stop us from writing with shadows

We followed an exercise from the January issue of Poets & Writers:

“Compose a poem collaboratively with a fried. Write one line and send it to your friend via e-mail, or by passing a notebook back and forth, inviting your friend to write another line that builds on the first. Continue composing the poem together, line by line, until you have at least twenty lines. Then, each on your own, consider the draft and revise it independently. Compare the final versions.”

On a summer afternoon we sat down together at a table in Bruce’s backyard and wrote the following draft, trading the page back and forth. From this material I later wrote “Lines Never Written by e.e. cummings.”

The world looks more honest under a gray sky
especially the shades of reality pressed into a corner
Remember, e.e. cummings didn’t die for your sins.
He merely stood up for the freedom of the alphabet
Instead, you should write your name with the tree shadows
allowing them to escape into an infinity of grays
Oh, Walt, what did you do with your dope scale?
Did you leave it around the copies of Leaves of Grass
that you sold to the New England Society of ?
Those antiquarian genealogists of witches
and moose that scared Kerouac all the way to the sea
the night he decided to swallow a sparrow
with a glass of a brandy in an old school yard
the sandbox could never forget its tragedy
and Jack lived the long life of the road
even when living at the end with his mother
the old bitch who wouldn’t let him suckle during her soap operas
and when the grayness returned I beeped my horn
at least the geese were excited
they shimmied their hips like dancing girls
in the cafes at Bob’s All-Night Rendez-vous
where Congress had declared all house plants
had to grow the color of money
and the grayness of epiphanies
lingered on our tongues list frost

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The Mother Grouse Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges available on-line.

The Entrance to the Underworld

By Gregory Orr

A common enough mistake:
looking in the wrong place.
It’s not a fissure
in the earth, or crack
in a cliff face
that leads sharply down.

You were looking in the wrong
world. It was inside
you—entrance
to that cavern
deeper than hell,
more dark and lonely.
Didn’t you feel it open
at her first touch?

Reprinted from Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence by Gregory Orr.

Necessary Shadows

“Because it carries
the past within it,
language,
unlike mathematics,
draws backward.

This is the meaning of Eurydice.

Because the realness
of his inward being
lies at his back,
the man of words,
the singer,
will turn to the place of
necessary shadows.”

From the CD, Orpheus: The Lowdown, by Peter Blegvard and Andy Partridge, though this is, in fact, a found poem, a comment taken from George Steiner’s essay “A Future Literacy” published in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1971.

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The Mother Grouse Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges available on-line.

When asked to contribute something on the theme of the underworld for this year’s reading at the Widow Jane Cave, I was immediately excited. The theme, given the setting, is entirely appropriate. Caves, caverns, steep descents, water, mist and mystery fit the universal descriptions of the underworld, or night journey, as treated by the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, ancient Greeks and Romans. In addition, the cave has the best acoustics a poet or musician could hope for, something that would have pleased the first poet, Orpheus.

When deciding what to write for the occasion, I gravitated to Orpheus. He is a timeless figure. Not only is he the first poet, but he also made a descent into the underworld. His myth may be the creation of ancient Greek myth, but his story has been a favorite of artists throughout the ages. In the world of literature there are Rilke’s sublime Sonnets to Orpheus; as well as more contemporary retellings by poets such as Charles Olson, Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Simic and Alice Notely.

Then, too, there are the great cinematic treatments of Orpheus. The films of Cocteau’s Orphic trilogy, Blood of the Poet, Orpheus, and the Testament of Orpheus and Marcel Camus and Vinicius de Moraes’s Black Orpheus. The Cocteau films are set in Paris, while Black Orpheus takes place in Rio during Carnival. Because I’m a rather eidetic thinker, I was especially drawn to the films for inspiration, and like the filmmakers, I wanted to create a telling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth set in a contemporary location, in my case New York City. Beyond the films and the original myth, my other sources of inspiration were direct experience and a painting. The former was a recent trip to Governor’s Island, reachable by ferry, to read at the New York City poetry festival, the latter Arnold Böcklin’s famous 19th century painting of a shrouded figure being ferried to the underworld.

In addition to making Governor’s Island the underworld, my piece, The Way to the Underworld, takes other liberties. Orpheus is the one who has died and been sent to the underworld, and Eurydice is his poet-lover who travels to the depths in hopes of bringing him back to their apartment in lower Manhattan. Finally, after struggling to put write this story as a poem (I don’t do epics), I decided to write a short fiction.

This year’s reading at the cave may be the 20th in a series of annual reading, but it will be the first to emphasize themes and drama with four grouping of three poets each. I’m honored to have been paired Will Nixon and Chris Wheeling for this underground adventure.

–Janet Hamill
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The Mother Grouse Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges available on-line.

When I was notified that I was one of the poets chosen for Spoken Aggregate 2012, I decided that I wanted to craft something special for the event. I think all of us in the Underworld segment wanted to do something new specific for this reading, and we have delivered.

In my quest for the future, I looked to the past. It was 2007, and I was attending the annual cave marathon, although I did not schedule myself as a featured reader. I signed up on the open reading list, despite not having any work with me that day to read. I made up two poems on the spot, one of which is the following.

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Pillars

Behold,
The pillars
The foundations of the world
Impure earthly waters snake through

Sheol
Not Hell in a conventional sense
Hell is a place where you can think
Hell is a place where you can think
Hell is a place where you can hear yourself think

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Fast forward to 2012. I decided this small on-the-spot piece would be the seed of a mightier project. Thus, I went about reading and taking notes. I drew inspiration from T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books, Umberto Eco, Tolkien, my own fellow local poets, and so many more. I filled page after page with fragments. The nine lines above blossomed into over 10 pages of first draft. However, many of my learned allusions and references had to be scrapped due to making the whole mess fit together, as well as fitting within my time allotment for the reading. Pointlessly indulgent lines, although sounding good, had to be cut out. Some of my favorite phrases, deleted from the draft. Ah well. That’s the world of revision. I will most likely tinker with it later on, well after Spoken Aggregate closes shop for this year.

I originally titled the work “A Residency in Sheol,” however, I will most likely be changing the name to something else. At this moment, it’s “Voices in Exile,” but that might change before the 26th too. I decided to follow in the footsteps of The Waste Land, and make the poem in multiple sections that aren’t immediately apparent as to their connection. Fellow Underworld group member Janet brought up Arnold Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” paintings and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, both of which provided further material for my Underworld poem. With Orpheus came the idea that it should involve love. With The Tempest and Prospero’s Books, a cloistered intellectual. Cave paintings, mines… a lot of ideas went into this. Maybe too many ideas.

The draft I’m currently staring at doesn’t quite resemble the grand artistic vision I had at the outset. Most of the fragments haven’t left the notebook. Half of the first draft has already been sliced away. But that doesn’t really matter, does it? The poem needs to be itself. I’m here to lend it a hand and bring it from the darkness of my mind to the daylight, only to shove it back in the cave on the 26th. Whatever it becomes is what it is. I am enjoying the challenge of writing a longer poem; I hope you enjoy what will be read at Spoken Aggregate this year.

–Chris Wheeling

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The Mother Grouse Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges available on-line.

Many of our walks have waxed nostalgic about Woodstock’s history as an arts colony, which is seen in the galleries, and as a Sixties mecca, which can’t be avoided, not with the tie-dye competition on Tinker Street. What I treasure about Janine is that she’s a historian of Woodstock as a real town, not just as a summer retreat of celebrated figures, but as a community where families have lived for generations, earning their livings by means that may have seemed ordinary at the time but seem extraordinary to us today, such as working in bluestone quarries or running summer boarding houses. In doing research for The Pocket Guide, I found Janine’s Woodstock history books invaluable. Her Mower family history has marvelous tales and details. (I’m still tickled by having read that “Albany ice cream” was once prized by youngsters in town. So there was life before Häagen-Dazs.) Janine’s two collections of historical photos, Woodstock and Woodstock Revisited, let us see more than words can convey. Yet when you talk with Janine, you sense that her passion for local history is more than a book project—it’s admiration for the many people and families whom she’s known.

Please join us for our final summer walk. The tour takes about an hour. The fee is a book purchase or $10.

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The Mother Grouse Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges available on-line.

Three subterrean poets appeared on WDST’s Woodstock Roundtable to share some poems on Sunday, August 19th: Glenn Werner, who is the chief organizer of the event, Rebecca Schumejda, and myself.

A graphic designer from Beacon, Glenn Werner blogs as the Mongrelpoet. Here are two of his poems:

The Angelus
(Painting by Jean Francois Millet)

He uses boards pulled from the shed,
cuts them without measuring, straightens
a handful of nails to make a small crate,
sets the box down in the larder, fills it.
The air is cool. Dissatisfied with the job,

nailing the lid shut is difficult.
His wife has gone to find a place
already tilled and easy to dig.
He loads the box onto a barrow,
follows her into the field.

Millet paints the image of their labor
interrupted by the call to prayer.
For reasons he gives himself
he buries the casket with his brush,
marks the spot with a shallow basket.

In time his deceit is uncovered,
the canvas’ secret revealed.
Artists alter their work – I erased
phrases, written behind these lines,
that despite their truth, did not fit.

In every painting there lies a question
that every painting needs us to answer,
to be resolved, to be complete –
For what do these peasants pray
when the bell declares they must.

(Published in “A Clean Well Lighted Place”, Danville, Kentucky, ?http://www.lightedplace.com/the-angelus.html loose affiliation with Centre College)

Winter Harbor, Maine

My daughter, who lives with her mother, wanders
Schoodic point with my sister-in-law, and me.
Mist surrounds us. Spruce and jack pine recede behind
the weathered air. They don’t grow on the ledge, but warn us
against being fooled by breakers who’s song will distract us
from our footing on those pink granite dunes.

My daughter, who lives with her mother, forages
above the sea’s edge. Steps over pools collected
in shear rock spoons. Balances herself on basalt blocks,
volcanic dikes that divide the stumbled granite leviathans.
Fractured millions of years ago, lava filled their cracks black.
Bound them apart.

My daughter, who lives with her mother, perches
on the far end of a pink and black bevy of stone pedestals,
her arms outstretched. My sister-in-law holds the camera,
waits for a rogue wave to hit the broken crags below.
Sprays of froth and brine smash into the soft sky,
complete the scene.

My daughter, who lives with her mother, poses
for my sister-in-law. She will not pose for me.
For me she will clown and gawk, or blush and hide.
The basalt dikes, crushed by the granite
they divided, crumble into steps that span
old fissures between the worn monoliths.

My daughter, who lives with her mother, smiles,
elevated from where I stand, crowned by stolid haze.
Peering down at me, one arm raised higher than the other,
like a ship’s signalman in need of flags, she pierces the fog
collected above the stone, the pools, the dikes,
Message heavy on her arms.

(Published in Chronogram Magazine)

Rebecca Schumejda lives in Kingston and teaches at an alternative high school. Her new book, Cadillace Men, will appear in the fall. It’s inspired in part by her experience of owning a pool hall. Here’s a poem of Rebecca’s:

Husks

After the wind snaps the cornstalks,
you hold my hand on the back porch,
we watch the storm’s lungs expand
and contract like wanting and waiting
and wanting and I think about the corn
as if they were newborns dropped
on their soft skulls and abandoned.

You push your shoulder into my face,
a manly way of passing me a tissue.
The thunder isn’t a thank you or an apology.
When the rain stops, we will pick up
the pieces, rinse them off, tear off the husks,
and place each ear into boiling water
one at a time. We will slather
them with butter, cracked black pepper
and sea salt. You will tell me they taste
like the Minnesota of your childhood—

and having never been there,
I will hate what I have seen:
your mother’s gaudy costume jewelry
and the way she only calls when she needs.

For my part, I’ve been collaborating with Chris Wheeling and Janet Hamill. Here are two poems I’ve written from our shared musings.

Collecting Fireflies

Let the fireflies in the jar make their own constellations.
Enough already with Orion sheathing his sword.
Enough with our secrets about love.
Let the fireflies tell their own epic stories.
Let the luminous jar be a playground without tongues.
Unscrew the lid of your skull to try this new light in your eyes.
The damage you do will improve the rest of your days.
There’s enough dew on the hay to feed everyone.

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Drown Your Mirrors in the Subterranean Waters

For good luck, carry a coin under your tongue.
You never know what Charon might charge.
These stalactites have never seen moonlight.
These waters never been brushed by a breeze.
But even pebbles have roses in their hearts.
She may not know your name, but so what?
She waits by the green pool of memory
with book in hand, this woman in white silk.
You must be prepared to drown for a second time.
To steal the wife of the dead is an act of great cunning,
but the Sirens, they will never sing for you again.

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The Mother Grouse Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges available on-line.

Sorry. That’s a graveyard joke I should have outgrown at 17, but obviously haven’t.

But did you know that the name came not from the founding family, who didn’t establish the cemetery with artists in mind, but from local residents who saw the place as a snobbish affront, a cemetery for the summer elite who fancied themselves too highly to lie for eternity among the common folk in the Woodstock cemetery across the street? Over time this insult has been forgotten so that we now take pride in our Artists Cemetery, for it does indeed hold the headstones for a Who’s Who from Woodstock’s illustrious history as an arts colony. The original founders lie here, Jane and Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, plus Hervey White, as do dozens of others. If graves could talk, the stories you’d start to hear on this quiet lawn…

One of my favorites concerns the founder, an amateur mushroom hunter. At dinner parties he served guests his prized specimens and dimmed the lights for a moment so that they could fully appreciate his wild mushrooms glowing green with bioluminescence on their dinner plates. Sounds yummy, right?

On Saturday, August 18th, our Pocket Guide to Woodstock Village History Walk will pay a special visit to the Woodstock Artists Cemetery led by Emily Jones, whose grandparents, Jane and Wendell Jones, were prominent artists at the Maverick and now lie side by side in the cemetery, as do several other family ancestors. Emily works as the archivist at the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, so she’s a budding art colony historian in her own right. We’ll start at 10 am at the Golden Notebook at 29 Tinker Street in Woodstock. The tour fee is a book purchase or $10.

Join us. No zombies, I promise.

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The Mother Grouse Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges available on-line.

On Saturday, August 11th, Reverend Josh Bode will be our guest for a Pocket Guide to Woodstock Village Walking Tour, starting at 10 am at the Golden Notebook at 29 Tinker Street. He’ll treat us to a tour of the church. Who knows? He might even let a youngster ride on the bell rope. The fee for the history walk is a book purchase or $10.

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The Mother Grouse Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges available on-line.

After the War was Over: Post WW II Woodstock and the Building of a Community
The Historical Society of Woodstock’s 2012 Summer Exhibit

By Richard Heppner

Fundamentally altered by their experiences, the men and women who returned to Woodstock at the end of World War II found a town that had also changed during their absence. Like them, Woodstock had been shaped, it’s path redirected, by the war as well. Fading were the differences and past antagonisms between “old” and “new” Woodstockers. Finally, the lines of division put in place with the arrival of the first artists were beginning to fade. Woodstock was a town eager to move on; eager to explore a new-found sense of community resulting from the shared experiences of the Great Depression and a World War. In the years that followed World War II, Woodstockers would embark on building a new Woodstock, a town that would attempt to merge the small town roots held by many with the new ideas the most recent wave of “immigrants” brought with them.

Beginning with a demonstration of unity through the building of the Woodstock War Memorial on the Village Green, post-war Woodstock entered a period of growth in spirit, accomplishment and size. In the fifteen years following the war, Woodstock’s population would double. Business and property values rose. Rotron, IBM and a newly constructed elementary school also rose as symbols of that growth. Tourists began arriving and, while their money was good, so too was the debate as to what type of community Woodstock would become. Would/should Woodstock actively court “trudgers” as Holley Cantine labeled Woodstock’s weekend visitors or should it remain the quiet mountain town it had always been?

Artists who once shunned and were shunned by local political leaders began to make their entry into local government with Marion Bullard and John Pike leading the way. In addition, a new wave of artists had hit town including, Fletcher Martin, Edward Chavez, the Magafan twins, Manuel Bromberg, Reginald Wilson and more. Folk music also arrived at Woodstock’s door in the form of concerts at the Maverick and Town Hall, with the former led by Pete Seeger.

Change, it seemed, was becoming inevitable. Even the word “zoning” was being whispered. Not to be left behind, Woodstock’s “nightlife” redirected itself to become an integral part of the new Woodstock. Eager to put the past behind and celebrate the new spirit of Woodstock, the town offered a host of venues where locals and artists came together. Dick Stillwell’s S.S. Seahorse and the Brass Rail held forth along Rock City Road. The Irvington occupied its central location in the village while the White Horse Inn brought patrons to the corner of Maverick Road and Route 375. And yet, no matter where you began your evening, most Woodstockers would eventually find their way to Deanies on Mill Hill Road. There the local plumber, artist, off duty constable, craftsman and politician could be found huddled together over one more drink before the piano played them home for the night.

It was both an exciting and challenging era for Woodstock and the Historical Society of Woodstock has captured those times in it’s 2012 summer exhibit: After the War was Over: Post WW II Woodstock and the Building of a Community. Through photographs, art work, newspapers, documents, and other ephemera and artifacts, the Historical Society has pieced together a number of the elements that shaped and moved Woodstock during the post-World War II years.

The exhibit continues each and every Saturday and Sunday throughout the summer from 1:00 to 5:00 PM. As always, admission is free. The Historical Society of Woodstock is located on lower Comeau Drive in Woodstock (directly across from the Woodstock Town Hall and old firehouse on Tinker St.). For more information on the exhibit, contact: 679-2143.

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The Mother Grouse Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges available on-line.