Pantoum!

Hi Fonz,

Are you in the mood to talk about form? I just finished reading The Anthologist, having had it recommended to me by the flawless Amy Lawless, and it has moodened me to offer my own toot oriel, in verse, by example.

Let us begin just left of the beginning, with the Pantoum. What the? Did she say Pantoum? My frikken spellchecker never heard of it! It's underlining it in red as if to say, Give us a sonnet! Give us a villanelle! [Go look at the Pantoum on wikipedia. No Don't! Unless you want to kind of laugh. Read the first paragraph it is all hinky.]

I'll just explain the Pantoum:

Four-line stanzas with abab rhyme.

Every line in the poem is said twice.

Last line of the poem is the same as the first.

Sounds nice right? The pattern is wacky, though, it’s this:

After the first stanza, the first line of each stanza repeats the second line of the preceding stanza. And the third line of the stanza repeats the fourth line of the preceding stanza. Also, in the last stanza, the second line repeats the heretofore unrepeated third line in the first stanza, and its last line repeats the first line of the first stanza.

Fonz, the truth is, the spellchecker is right, it's not the greatest form. Some forms have their device just right, and the Pantoum, like the sestina in my green-house opinion on the subject, is a B class form. But that's what makes it such a challenge, especially here in the twilight of our ridiculous youth and the bright dawn of something grayer. I meant to say, especially here in the sticky-wicket of a new century. Can we pretend sticky wicket means dense Dantesque forest, out of which one wonders, am I ever to be delivered?

Here's what it is. Here's one from me to you. Where did you come from Fonz? It must be hard. So much pressure, so many expectations. Living with someone else's family. Banging on things to make them work. Urinals in your office. (Thanks for that insight Joelle.)

Right, well, back to the poem. It was first published in McSweeney's 31. Actually, I change my mind. I love the Pantoum. It floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.

Circus

My people were existential thugs.

At circus, monkeys in derbies rode us.

Muttering, Life, in a full-bodied shrug,

at circus we swept up the sawdust.

At circus, monkeys in derbies rode us,

while the great rode feathered horses.

At circus we swept up the sawdust,

the dove’s debris and patrons’ losses.

While the great rode feathered horses,

humming to Pegasus, Oh Peggy Sue,

we’d unglove, debrief, and pocket losses.

Tanneries are what my people knew.

Brushing Pegasus to strains of Peggy Sue,

catching acrobats. Shadow of a big top,

tailor’s tales of what the ball-gown knew.

Sequins and confetti on a rag mop.

Catch an acrobat’s shadow on the big top

muttering, Life, with a bruise. Shrugged

sequins; drooped confetti like a rag mop.

My people were existential thugs.

--

Next up... the Larch. The Larch.

Love,

Jennifer

Further adventures of "Forget about gym guilt, says poet"

Dear Fonzie,

The cherry tree is bloomin' blooming.

Here in this just up BAP post below I talk about our culture's weird relationship to physical exercise. In my book the Happiness Myth (which I mention two times below, no wonder when i took Amy Lawless's animal personality quiz I turned out to be a hawk), I also talk about our culture's weird relationship to sex, and you, Fonzie, figure prominently in the discussion. Maybe I'll write about that here sometime.

Anywhich, read this, tell me what you think. Stay cool.

Jennifer

A Short, Packed, Serious Argument Against Gym Guilt [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Darlink Bleaders,

Today I'd like to be less fanciful than I usually am here and deliver what I hope you will agree is a short, packed, serious argument against gym guilt. I've touched on this issue here before, largely as a way to train our minds to see our own culture with some historical perspective. But it is a very important subject in its own right, and I'd like to take a moment to give it a decent hearing. I've spelled out some of this before in my book The Happiness Myth, but I like how things turn out when I write them up just for you, dearest Bleaders, so here goes. Please respond with any thoughts, questions, or comments, either here, on facebook, or by email. k thnx.

Against Gym Guilt

Through studying history, I came to believe that gyms are occupying precisely the role they did in Ancient Sparta and in Fascist Germany. Being obsessed with bodies is actually a pretty rare thing in human history and we’re in lousy company.

Let me show you what I mean.

Why do we go to the gym, according to us? We want to look good. We want to feel good. We want to live longer.

Wanting to look good is pretty universal, but meaning “gym buff” when you say “good looking” is a very historically specific choice, almost as weird as the bustle or hoop skirt, and requiring a lot more effort.

Wanting to feel good is universal too, but note that if many sane people don’t want to go to the gym and indeed, do not go to the gym, than any definition of feeling good has to be looked at very closely. Yes there are ways to enhance mental and physical health by going to the gym, but there are other ways in which the gym can stress our mental and physical health (consider guilt about going enough and pulled muscles). If it feels good to lay on the couch and read a book or listen to music, it is hard to argue that the choice of going to the gym is definitely the one that most promotes mental and physical health. Sure, you should take lots of walks, go for a swim or a bike ride, or, say, clean your own house and sweep your own leaves, but no, you don’t have to go to the gym to feel good.

Wanting to live longer is the weirdest of the bunch. Many cultures focus on birth or death and some work themselves up into quite a froth about one or the other. It’s penises, penises, penises, over here, and over here it is giant chambers fitted out for the afterlife. The idea of focusing a huge amount of attention on keeping individuals alive for as long as possible is very weird. Most people in most of history have lived in cultures that enmeshed the individual in a lively web of meaning so that each person’s own lifespan was just not imagined to be all that important.

As I have said before, it doesn’t really matter how long you live. This isn’t theater, there is no way to miss the end. All bits of it are about as good as all the others and it is fabulous that we all got in and that we are here together. There is an eternity on either side of our little lives. Billions of years. It just doesn’t matter how long we are here. Pay attention to now.

But I can prove the silliness of this “gym for longevity” idea from another direction (before I go on to discuss what gyms are really for). The gym for longevity idea gets awfully weak if you consider, for a moment, what really kills us. Americans die in car accidents. Car crashes are among the top three causes of death for Americans forty and younger, and they remain in the top ten across our whole lives. Yet how often do we nag each other to stay out of cars? We try to hedge our bets with safer cars and laws about speeding, phone chatting, and drinking. But the culture does not lay in a monumental guilt campaign about staying out of cars (there is one for drunk driving, but that’s all). Why? Well, no one is interested in it. People have figured out ways to make money from gym guilt, so there is a vested interest. Also there gym guilt is about something else, something hidden that is none the less very real to us.

So what is the real story with gyms and gym bodies? What does the cult of exercise really mean?

Whenever it pops up in history it means the same thing. It always means: We are strong even though the peons do all the real work for us. We have special arenas marked as leisure where we get muscled at play.

Friends, we take the escalator to the Stairmaster. Why? What could a culture be doing when it pours its resources into making two such extraordinary machines?

If you are an average middle-class person in our culture, you leave the house for work in clean dry clothes and come home at night with clean dry clothes. This marks us as well off. We have an underclass (in our case immigrants, teenagers, and machines) to do our grunt work for us. While the underclass shows the neighbors that I can pay someone to rake my lawn, I grab a special bag of sweat clothes, clearly marked for leisure, and I take the escalator to the Stairmaster.

Friends, we are in the middle of an epic energy crisis. Yet we frantically encourage every able bodied man and woman to drive cars to a gym in the center of town where they are to hop on a machine whose name is the very image of effort going nowhere, the treadmill, and work hard for an hour. Then we make the treadmill electric, so we are actually draining power to do this. (All while the gas we need for the car gets us in wars, pollutes, and costs money.)

When we see this behavior in Ancient Sparta (where the population of Helot slaves outnumbered the Spartans) and in Fascist Germany, and we see the art of those two cultures focusing on the beauty of the toned but clean and uncallused body, we know what we are looking at. It’s more than shallow, it is military, it is deluded, it is oppressive, and a bit grotesque.

So if you love going to the gym, go to the gym. If however it doesn’t feel like your kind of place, you don’t have to go there, and you certainly don’t have to feel bad about not going there.

If you’d like to know more about this, read some of the back posts on my blog here, Jennifer Michael Hecht’s The Lion and the Honeycomb, and check out my book The Happiness Myth: The Historical Antidote to What Isn’t Working Today.

Well, give this some thought and maybe let me know what you think. Enjoy this glorious spring day. Good work staying alive since last week, let's keep it going.

Love,

Jennifer

ps took the above picture last night

pps Hi Chris Shea who I've never actually met! Lets face facts, I wrote this post because you picked up my "Forget about gym guilt, says poet" post for the Boston Globe online Ideas section, "Brainiac" and I wanted to tell you some more things about it. wink. if i may. (yes i edited these last lines here, yet left it as was on the bap blog, liking both versions.)

Happy Days.

Swiftly Happy!

Swiftly Happy! [BAP rogue post by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Derlink Bleaders,

Spring has sprung! Not working for you? You a little ambivalent about pulling lilacs from the dead earth? Well this, as my five year old often announces, is your lucky day.

Just clink this lick, or click this link, and start from the bottom of the page, about one entry up, where he explains Face off Friday, where he asks people to send in righteous home versions of a chosen pop song. well, frankly, i don't know the rules, i was just one-horse golden sleighing around the internests when i found this among my many new and old friends' odd offerings. in this case David Rees. it is Awesome. it is the cure for what ails you. (if your not seeing this on april 2, 10, try this way in David Rees at mnftiu.cc)

just give this the 15 minutes it'll take, at the outside, in bits or all at once, and tell me you don't feel fine. it's the project people, and the project, and Rees' prose that makes me run to show you. go have little fun. gather the family. i command thee.

Love,

Jennifer

gotta do the thursday puzzle. however measured.

Dear Fonzie,

However Measured [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Darlink Bleaders,

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,
or bends with the remover to remove.
 If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer, an ever-fixèd mark, that looks on tempests and is never shaken.
Why?

Should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
within his bending sickle's compass come,
love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
but bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured and far away.

Let me not, to the marriage of true minds. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises. Let me not admit impediments. Love is a product that follows from devotion. Love is not love -- you’ve got the wrong word there -- if what you call love alters when it alteration finds.


If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer, an ever-fixèd mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. By definition it is the outcome of devotion. That’s why it is an ever-fixed mark.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
within his bending sickle's compass come;
love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
but bears it out even to the edge of doom.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises.

Bear it out even to the edge of doom. Let us step to the music which we hear, however measured and far away. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

But he did writ and so did I and they (bard and Walden's warden) did love and so do I.

Love,

Jennifer

ps more soon xoxjmh

and that's all she wrote. more classic sonata crash-ups by jmh jenny to come. watch this space.

pps excellent work staying alive since last post, most of you. stay. stay tuned.

hey. whoa. okay stop typing genifur time to get dressed for therapy. gotta ride to the uppa wesside. do the thursday puzzle.

free your mind and the rest will follow

Think drugged happiness isn't real happiness? It is. Drug happiness is among the varieties of real happiness, especially for the walking wounded. Read The Happiness Myth and let me know if you remain unconvinced. Thank you. That is all.

Homaha

Dear Bleaders,

I’m supposed to be cleaning! I was given a specific task: straighten up the kid’s bookshelves for Jessie’s birthday party this weekend. But then my husband, who suggested this task, took the kids and went to Goodwill to get rid of some of the heaps of stuff of which we’re getting rid, leaving me alone to sneak like a thief back to my computer to write you guys a quick post.

I figure as long as I finish by the time he’s back, I’m good. So. What I want to tell you is pretty important. I spent the weekend in Omaha and now have another Homaha in these United States. What great people I met. Ridiculously cool people. Ridunkulous. And they gave me roast beast, and took me to hear Yo Yo Ma, and made jokes about Exit 420. If you don’t get it, don’t pay it no mind, but if you do get it, you get that it is good to know. I gave 6 talks in four days! One to a synagogue full of clergy, mostly Catholic priests, collared and mostly grey-haired. Some rabbis, some ministers, some visitors, a lovely woman who said she’d driven six hours to see me.

I told them that I’d come to tell them about Poetic Atheism. There is no God, but as Durkheim said a hundred years ago, what we thought was God, was the community. What we feel when we are gathered together, that there is something larger than us, that feeling is true. It’s us.

We can add to it that what we thought of as faith is love. We have to try to believe in each other, in our mutual misery and compassion.

The solace we have to offer one another is sufficient to our wounds.

Our feelings of meaning are sufficient to the definition of meaning.

There is no hidden world of meaning. The feelings of meaning are the meaning. It’s all true.

Human beings need community, meditation, and ritual. We need to come together and pray that we will do the right thing, that we will help each other, and that we are capable of helping one another. It’s a long shot, but it’s better than trying to believe in some third party and hoping that he will do the right thing.

Am I telling you that all this time you’ve been alone in the dark? Yes. Come sit with us. We're right here. Turn on the light.

We must look after one another. There is no heaven. We are all going to die, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe two years from now, maybe forty years from now, maybe sixty. It doesn’t matter all that much. There is an eternity on either side, an eternity, so who cares? Life is not theater, you can’t miss the end. You are here. It’s wonderful. We made it into existence together.

We have to start coming together and singing, celebrating. Health Care, people! Gorgeous African-American president and presidential family! Now is the time to lift our voices up. We are all there is. We don’t have it for very long. We have it right now. America is a lot of things. I know. Tea party. I know. Beck, and not the good kind. But it’s okay.

We are here together. We can keep each other company. We can see that if this is the world, if our consciousness is what we have of consciousness, than what we feel and what we make is very important indeed. You’re sacred because you are, and it’s my job to support your awareness of the true and glorious reality that is. It’s your job to support this awareness in the rest of us. We are getting better at this. We are going to get even better. That's why everything is going to be okay.

Excellent work staying alive since last week, most of you. Let’s try to do even better next week.

By the way, on my way home from the airport we got stopped on the Brooklyn Bridge and there we stayed for two and a half hours, my whole little family and me, from around 12:30 am to 3 am, when they finally backed us off the bridge. Meanwhile we got out of our cars. We heard someone had jumped and saw boats and helicopters shining lights. Then we heard there was a woman who had climbed up into the bridge girders and was going to jump. John encouraged me to walk down to where it was all happening; given what I’d been writing about lately, I should just go down and see. So I did, there was a woman up there, a cop up there near her, I saw him hand her a cigarette, I saw him light it for her, I saw her talking to him, I saw her move her long, brown hair behind her ear.

Like I said, she hadn’t come down when we left, they’d turned us around to get out, but I felt sure she’d come down, she was talking calmly for hours, there were tons of people everywhere. We googled it when we got home but saw nothing of it. Then yesterday saw a report. She’d jumped. After we were home in bed. She’s in critical condition. A 41-year-old woman from Long Island. Like so many of us, or thereabouts. So forgive me, bleaders, for repeating myself. Stay, everybody. No more going off the deep end. Stay. Let’s all give up together, right here, right now, and have chocolate cake. But don’t give any to the dog, because chocolate isn’t good for dogs.

Concentrate

Dear Fonzie,

I just posted this on the Bap site. Sorry I don't have a systematic approach, either always double posting or cross posting or whatever. Just felt like putting this here too.

Stay cool,

Jennifer

Concentrate [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

I got the idea for this post while playing Bejeweled Blitz.

Have you ever tried meditation? Of course you have, right, if you’re sufficiently inclined towards transcendence as to read a poetry blog, you have in your life, sat quite still and tried not to think.

There is a great Eastern description of meditation, and here I liberally paraphrase, that says asking the mind to stay focused on one thing is like asking a monkey to stay perfectly still, if the monkey has been given coffee and vodka, is being menaced by a bee, is surrounded by good-looking jumping monkeys, while AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” is being blasted at the monkey enclosure.

It is downright hilarious how hard it is to get the mind to settle down. Give it one minute, right now (at the end of this paragraph). Think only of your breath and count, with each exhale, one number. Count from one to ten and back again. As soon as you notice you are not thinking about your breath and one to ten, go back to one. Look at the clock where you are sitting, add two minutes to the time, whatever it is, then close your eyes and start counting breaths and thinking of nothing else. If you think it’s been about two minutes open your eyes and check – go back in if it’s not time yet. This way we’ll get you to stay in for at least a minute. Go. Okay, we’re back. Hard wasn’t it?

It is equally hard to remember, for a full minute, that you are playing Bejeweled Blitz. Matching the shapes is easy. There’s always a match on the board to be made and usually two or more. They are easy to see. The only difficulty is remembering to keep doing it, as fast as you can. A few matches in, you fall into a rhythm and the rhythm generally runs down. Every once in a while an accidental cascade puts a very fast rhythm in your head and you are able to match shapes fast for a good few seconds before again a part of your mind simply gets up to go check the fridge.

If you could remember you are playing, you’d win. If you could keep thinking of only the game.

At the end of each game, whatever your game may be, when your game ends, ask yourself immediately: What am I thinking about?

It will be something other than the game.

Ask yourself to put your whole attention on the game. If your lucky you’ll do it for the first three shape matches, then off most of your brain will go. There’s you landing wet at the end of a minute, laughing, having been treated by your brain to a short conference on what to bring to the PTA pot luck or the derivations of Pi.

We have developed in such a way that our brain’s default setting is multitasking. If you would like to do something well, all you have to do is learn to focus on that one thing. Stop thinking of other things while you are doing it. I showed a few lines of this post to my husband John Chaneski while I was just hashing this up and he said, “It’s like acting.” And I was like, wow yeah, it’s true. Good actors are just people who can remember, for a sustained period, that they are supposed to be being someone else.

Well, go concentrate on something. Let me know how it goes.

How do I love thee? I love the to the breadth and depth and height my soul can reach when feeling out of sorts with the ends of being and ideal grace and posting out of turn, on a Tuesday.

Love,

Jennifer

ps. Perhaps you'd like to read a book? The Happiness Myth.

pps Stacey I love when you talk to me in the comments! I'm not sure why I don't always manage to respond, but I just wanted to say I like it and am mulling over any questions you put to me there.

ppps I'm doing this this week. It is going to be fun. If you are in Omaha, come talk with me about the meaning of life, k? And come up and say hi.