The Hollow Men

:::this is the way the world ends:::

Author: Shotts (Page 4 of 5)

Spring (and All) Poetry Post

March 23, 2007 / / 0 Comments

A necessary poem from William Carlos Williams for our first weekend of spring.

–Shotts

Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines–

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches–

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind–

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined–
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance–Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

Saint Patrick’s Poetry Post

March 16, 2007 / / 0 Comments

 200px_Irish_clover.jpg

Two poems for you this Saint Patrick’s Day weekend. The first from Seamus Heaney, his ars poetica. The second from Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, about her decision to write in the Irish language, followed by an English translation by Paul Muldoon.

Slainte!

–Shotts

Personal Helicon

for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

–Seamus Heaney

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Poetry Post

March 8, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Here’s a brief poem by one of my teachers, Mary Jo Bang. –Shotts

The Cruel Wheel Turns Twice

And tightens until language can’t bear this
Hollowing, crash cart, Please. In the silence,
A bus slithers by

A din. The aluminium morning moves like a train,
A metal rod
Exiting a tunnel, dropped in a gate groove.

Disappointment. And again The End gate
Opens and it’s, Please
Come back. Please Be. Then nothing. Only end-

Less night taking off from the tarmac black.
The potpie clock, its stock of twelve numbers,
A stew for the weak and the weary.

The small war of the heart made bigger
By far in the world.
And daylight a gift.

Small cog after cog slips into the hour
And razor thin minute slot without stop.
And daylight a gift tied with some tinsel.

Paging Peters

February 17, 2007 / / 0 Comments

I hope we hear from Jeff on his Mental Health posting, personality tests, and our group dynamic. Everyone has submitted their Meyers-Briggs test, and I think I speak for all of us when I say we’re excited to read the results and Jeff’s analysis.

No pressure but friendly pressure. I don’t want to lose that thread here on the site.

–Shotts

A Valentine

February 14, 2007 / / 1 Comment

Here’s a poetry post for Valentine’s Day. I recommend this one to give or read to your respective loves. Sadly, my beloved is in India for work, so we’re celebrating, as we can, from afar. I’ll be somewhere with a Guinness, remembering Galway…

Here’s to all of you and yours. –Shotts

Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Mitchell

I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving
but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

Nine Approaches to a More Ecological or Cultural Way of Eating

February 5, 2007 / / 3 Comments

28meals_600.jpg 

I read this (below) at the end of an article, “Unhappy Meals,” in The New York Times Magazine, January 28, 2007. It is by Michael Pollan, whose most recent book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, was chosen by the editors of The New York Times Book Review as one of the 10 best books of 2006.

This is just the very end of a much longer piece, but these are worth sharing and considering. Two things that struck me, as far as HM discussions have gone:

1. Peters had mentioned wanting to go back to caveman ways in terms of diet and exercise, etc. J. E. disagreed with that, saying we should take advantage of what we know now–because we don’t live (thankfully) like cavemen anymore. Pollan suggests eating foods that our great-great grandmothers would recognize as food. That seems an interesting rule of thumb. I have to admit, in my own case, my great-great grandmother would not recognize a vegetarian diet for the most part, especially the soy products that I eat fairly frequently now.

2. Ned had brought up not wanting to go to the farmer’s market or local food co-op because it’s too expensive. Fair enough: it is more expensive. Pollan responds interestingly, I think, on that point below, and makes the case that it’s worth the extra cost. Pay more; eat less. Unfortunately, for myself, I’m probably paying more and eating more. And that’s certainly the case when we go out to eat, rather than cook at home.

Some more thoughts on our continuing conversation about food and health. Here’s to all of you, from the very, very cold northlands. We have been below zero degrees for the last four days.

–Shotts

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We Are What We Eat: Conversation Continued

February 3, 2007 / / 0 Comments

I would say the most continuous discussion on this site has involved food, health, vegetarianism, fasting, etc. Kind of intriguing, so I thought I would add this to that conversation. In the January 22, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, there is an article by Steven Shapin about the history of vegetarianism. Here are a few interesting if not startling items:

“A recent report by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization reckons that at least eighteen percent of the global-warming effect comes from livestock, more than is caused by all the world’s transportation systems. It has been estimated that forty percent of global grain output is used to feed animals rather than people, and that half of this grain would be sufficient to eliminate world hunger if–and it’s not a small if–the political will could be found to insure equitable distribution.”

That’s just a bit of the article, so I don’t want to say this characterizes the whole piece, which also stresses some of the importance of eating locally, including local, free range meats. So it’s not necessarily a polemic on the virtues of vegetarianism, but I have to say the sentences quoted above stood out significantly, to me. I thought they were worth sharing, as we continue thinking about vegetarianism and our individual and collective global footprint.

Here’s to good eating–

–Shotts

Poetry Post: Carl Phillips

February 3, 2007 / / 3 Comments

Here’s a poem by Carl Phillips, one that I’ve especially admired, from his book The Rest of Love.

-Shotts

Custom

There is a difference it used to make,
seeing three swans in this versus four in that
quadrant of sky. I am not imagining. It was very large, as its
effects were. Declarations of war, the timing fixed upon for a sea-departure; or,
about love, a sudden decision not to, to pretend instead to a kind
of choice. It was dramatic, as it should be. Without drama,
what is ritual? I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhere
to be found. They come to me like strays, like the damaged,
something that could know better, and should, therefore–but does not:
a form of faith, you’ve said. I call it sacrifice–an instinct for it, or a habit at first, that
becomes required, the way art can become, eventually, all we have
of what was true. You shouldn’t look at me like that. Like one of those saints
on whom the birds once settled freely.

Poetry Post: The Buried Life

January 21, 2007 / / 3 Comments

Just back from a tremendous week in the Caribbean. By way of a Poetry Post, here’s a review of a new book on T. S. Eliot that seems relevant and interesting. The idea of “the buried life” seems central to Eliot–perhaps, in some ways, to all of us in the Hollow Men. –Shotts

Books of The Times
A Devoted Tour Guide to a Desert of a Soul

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: January 16, 2007

T. S. ELIOT
By Craig Raine
202 pages. Oxford University Press. $21.

In a culture that now seems long ago and far, far away, T. S. Eliot was a rock star. The poet made the cover of Time magazine in 1950, and several years later, 14,000 people turned out in Minneapolis to listen to him talk about “The Frontiers of Criticism.” Modernism was the ruling aesthetic inside and outside academe, Eliot was one of its high priests, and his most famous poem, “The Waste Land,” was hailed not only for its groundbreaking technique and glittering shards of language, but also for its difficulty — its density, its allusiveness, its recondite knowledge.

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Poetry Post

January 10, 2007 / / 2 Comments

Here’s an appropriate first poem to start the New Year. It starts with a muzak-version of Dylan and ends on a Dear Abby letter, and in between gets at our present moment.

–Shotts

Hard Rain

After I heard “It’s a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood there’s nothing
we can’t pluck the stinger from,

nothing we can’t turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people

quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.

“You can’t keep beating yourself up, Billy,”
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage murderer,
“about all those people you killed—
you just have to be the best person you can be,

one day at a time”—

and everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.

Dear Abby:

My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood–
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present.
Should I say something?

Signed, America.

I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,

but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth—

whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.

–Tony Hoagland

2006

December 30, 2006 / / 1 Comment

The last couple of days, I’ve been repairing a hole in our dining room ceiling, sanding, priming, and painting. Meanwhile, I’ve had on Minnesota Public Radio and occasionally CNN. Everything is abuzz with list of “The Top _________ of 2006” (fill in the blank with “celebrities,” “movies,” “songs,” “albums,” “newsmakers,” and so on). Most of these, I have taken some issue with–either because I find the selections mundane or because I realize I haven’t digested enough of the music, film, and general culture of the year.

But, this leads me to ask: any “tops” of 2006 you’d like to share and comment on here?

Here are a few, from me:

Top novel: Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (actually out in the U.S. from Graywolf Press in 2007).

Top poetry collection: Averno by Louise Gluck

Top movie: The Prestige

Top documentary: An Inconvenient Truth

Top song: “Hamburg Song” by Keane

Top political event: Democrats regaining Congress in November elections. Rumsfeld “resigns” shortly thereafter.

Top global events: Lack of global resolve over Darfur, Sudan. Continued unavailability of clean water to millions.

Top Minnesota event: The state sends first Islamic member of Congress to Washington in November election.

Top celebrity: Bono

2007

December 30, 2006 / / 3 Comments

And now, looking ahead, it must be asked: what do you foresee in 2007? This can either be predictions of important events or people, or it could take the form of personal New Years resolutions. It’s always such a reflective time. I’m reminded that the month of January comes from Janus, the Roman god of endings and beginnings, with a face looking backward and a face looking forward.

So, looking ahead now, here are a few thoughts and resolutions from me.

In 2007, I expect:

  • to see Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain, and Rudy Guliani in the spotlight for the Presidential elections of 2008, as they all announce their candidacies. (I’m already surprised to see John Edwards announce his candidacy, and so early.)
  • a withdrawl plan from Iraq.
  • peacekeeping efforts deployed to Darfur, through a renewed United Nations.
  • the biggest seller in books, by far, to be the new and final Harry Potter.
  • the biggest movie, in terms of blockbuster status, to be the new Harry Potter movie.
  • to be exhausted by Harry Potter by this time next year.
  • additional evidence for global warming.
  • one of us to announce a child on the way.

Some of my personal resolutions include:

  • to eat vegetarian as much as possible, with only occasional fish when eating out.
  • to eat less, eat more healthy foods, drink less alcohol, and drink more water daily.
  • to exercise at the Y at least 12 times each month.
  • to post and comment regularly on the Hollow Men site, including a weekly literary/poetry feature.
  • to work to organize our house better.
  • to begin more sustained writing.
  • to be in better touch with family and friends.

–Shotts

Warning

December 1, 2006 / / 0 Comments

I just received an email from Staci (Shoemaker) Schmid, who has informed me that a Fifteen-Year Class Reunion for the MHS graduating class of 1992 is planned for August 2007. She has asked me to provide her with any emails or mailing addresses for classmates.

You heard it here first.

–Shotts

There…But Back Again?

November 28, 2006 / / 2 Comments

Perhaps you’ve all heard the brouhaha between Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema. It looks dire about Jackson directing The Hobbit, which would be a big disappointment after the brilliance of The Lord of the Rings films. I read about this this evening in The New York Times, so it’s certainly getting some attention. Go to thehobbitfilm.com to see more, and to read Jackson’s letter about his troubles with New Line Cinema.

As you can imagine, there are already fans pledging to boycott The Hobbit if it is directed by anyone other than Peter Jackson.

In other LOTR news, a great independent theater not far from our neighborhood in Minneapolis is playing all three LOTR films back to back to back on December 28th. I have to admit, I’m considering it–11 hours straight. It’s become part of the holiday tradition.

–Shotts

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