When Herman Melville & Emily Dickinson Made Whoopee (on a prairie on the high seas)

First of all, due to circumstances beyond my control, such as fulltime work and wifi-connection issues at home, I have had to stuff the 3000 Loving feature "Foodstuff Friday" in the freezer. My freezer, known as "back burner" to some, is commodius and durable, so no worry there. 

Secondly, if Emily and Herman were to trample gender-inclination expectations (she being thought to veer toward the ladies and he toward the men, though the Kinsey scale is merely a scale and many of us are all over it), they well could have produced me.  (And I would be, and am, a production.) 
I just read Elizabeth Hardwick's beautifully written short biography of Melville, entitled, I believe, Herman Melville. His inclination to ponder the immortal was reinforced (should Moby-Dick and friends not settle the issue) by the following quotation she offered from Hawthorne's diairy.  Please note that I found the quotation online at the blog Hawthorne in Salem.

Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists-and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before-in wandering to-and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us (Eng NB, Vol II, 163).

Emily Dickinson ("Ma" to me) has reiterated her interest in Eternity and other malefactors not infrequently and so, when dashing off a bio statement for a book review of We Make Gardens by Jeanne Larsen, I wrote the following:

Sarah Sarai is the love child of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, who both thought frequently about death and its accoutrement and were each their own person. Her BlazeVOX-published collection, The Future Is Happy, was released in 2009. Loose Gravel Press will publish her chapbook later this year. Her poems are in (or soon will be in) reviews including Threepenny, Mississippi, Minnesota, Eleven Eleven, Pank, Boston, Gargoyle, POOL and Parthenon West. She has taught and does in fact hold an MFA (in fiction) from Sarah Lawrence College, (stories in ragazine.cc, South Dakota Review, Storyglossia, Stone’s Throw, Tampa Review, VerbSap, Weber Studies and more) but earns her living copyediting in ad agencies.

Well, you get the idea. I gotta copyedit (which is two words but I don't care). The picture is serendipity, pure serndipity.  I googled Mellville and Dickinson and not only found an image but it is attributed to Ron Silliman.  Providence is mine.

Rae Armantrout: a Californian in the infidel east

"Trying to read a book by Rae Armantrout in a single sitting is like trying to drink a bowl of diamonds. What’s inside is all so shiny  & clear & even tiny that it appears perfectly do-able."  Silliman's blog, January 27, 2009

I saw Armantrout, 2010 Pulitzer-in-Poetry prizewinner, last night at KGB Bar in the East Village. In the flesh she's shiny and pert yet unpreposessing. Small, appropriately aged for a woman of sixty-three and--it does show, it does--Californian.

Californian? She is open. She can allow insurgencies from the infidel east to settle on her intellectual landmass because they serve as, ultimately, mulch, nutrient digested and made new and freer than their Puritanical origin could dream of if an origin could dream. Californian? Her poetry is loose and tight, smart, beautiful..

Okay, what do I know. Well, I know she's sexy. Introducing a poem, she showed us, finger in seductive curl, how she can summon the previously disinterested--now that she's a Pulitzer Prize winner. She has adapted new-found power to her interests. In this case a top physicist consented to lunch with her so she could harvest motion in space and time for a poem. Armantrout didn't master top-level physics in an hour, but she dug her game and the joy that comes from telling the story. 

Back to Silliman. "But the stones are so hard & their edges so chiseled that the instant you begin they’ll start to rip your insides apart." Making the reader feel is a power no prize bestow. It's innate, hard-earned and a power Rae Armantrout owns.


Thing

We love our cat
for her self
regard is assiduous
and bland,

for she sits in the small
patch of sun on our rug
and licks her claws
from all angles

and it is far
superior
to "balanced reporting"

though, of course,
it is also
the very same thing.

_____________

Rae Armantrout, Next Life, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.