"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]


Tuesday, December 7, 2021

Poet Margaret Atwood






POET MARGARET ATWOOD


Crow Song
by Margaret Atwood

ln the arid sun, over the field
where the corn has rotted and then
dried up, you flock and squabble.
Not much here for you, my people,
but there would be
if
if

In my austere black uniform
I raised the banner
which decreed Hope
and which did not succeed
and which is not allowed.
Now I must confront the angel
who says Win,
who tells me to wave any banner
that you will follow

for you ignore me, my
baffled people, you have been through
too many theories
too many stray bullets
your eyes are gravel, skeptical,

in this hard field
you pay attention only
to the rhetoric of seed
fruit stomach elbow.

You have too many leaders
you have too many wars,
all of them pompous and small,
you resist only when you feel
like dressing up,
you forget the sane corpses ...


* * * * * * * *


Carrying Food Home in Winter
by Margaret Atwood

I walk uphill through the snow
hard going
brown paper bags of groceries
balanced low on my stomach, 
heavy, my arms stretching
to hold it turn all tendon.

Do we need this paper bag
my love, do we need this bulk
of peels and cores, do we need
these bottles, these roots
and bits of cardboard 
to keep us floating
as if on a raft 
above the snow I sink through?

The skin creates
islands of warmth
in winter, in summer
islands of coolness.

The mouth performs
a similar deception.

I say I will transform
this egg into a muscle
this bottle into an act of love

This onion will become a motion
this grapefruit
will become a thought.


* * * * * * * *


February
by Margaret Atwood

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.





Reference Sites











* * * * * * * *


More Poems by Margaret Atwood


* * * * * * * *




Margaret Atwood Quotes

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

 

If a stranger taps you on the ass and says, "How's the little lady today!" you will probably cringe. But if he's an American, he's only being friendly.


I feel that the task of criticizing my poetry is best left to others (i.e. critics) and would much rather have it take place after I am dead. If at all.

 

Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that is wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

 

The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not "Am I really that oppressed?" but "Am I really that boring?"


We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?


I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.



* * * * * * * *


Talking Volumes: Margaret Atwood reads "Night Poem"
Oct 4, 2013


Biography of Margaret Atwood


Regarded as one of Canada’s finest living writers, Margaret Atwood is a poet, novelist, story writer, essayist, and environmental activist. Her books have received critical acclaim in the United States, Europe, and her native Canada, and she has received numerous literary awards, including the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Governor General’s Award, twice. Atwood’s critical popularity is matched by her popularity with readers; her books are regularly bestsellers and her novels have been adapted into popular movies and television series.

Atwood was born in Ottawa and earned her BA from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and MA from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She first came to public attention as a poet in the 1960s with her collections Double Persephone (1961), winner of the E.J. Pratt Medal, and The Circle Game (1964), winner of a Governor General’s award. These two books marked out terrain her subsequent poetry has explored. Double Persephone dramatizes the contrasts between life and art, as well as natural and human creations. The Circle Game takes this opposition further, setting such human constructs as games, literature, and love against the instability of nature. Sherrill Grace, writing in Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood, identified the central tension in all of Atwood’s work as “the pull towards art on one hand and towards life on the other.” Atwood “is constantly aware of opposites—self/other, subject/object, male/female, nature/man—and of the need to accept and work within them,” Grace explained. Linda W. Wagner, writing in The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, also saw the dualistic nature of Atwood’s poetry, asserting that “duality [is] presented as separation” in her work. This separation leads her characters to be isolated from one another and from the natural world, resulting in their inability to communicate, to break free of exploitative social relationships, or to understand their place in the natural order. “In her early poetry,” Gloria Onley wrote in the West Coast Review, Atwood “is acutely aware of the problem of alienation, the need for real human communication and the establishment of genuine human community—real as opposed to mechanical or manipulative; genuine as opposed to the counterfeit community of the body politic.”

Suffering is common for the female characters in Atwood’s poems, although they are never passive victims. Atwood’s poems, West Coast Review contributor Onley maintained, concern “modern woman’s anguish at finding herself isolated and exploited (although also exploiting) by the imposition of a sex role power structure.” Atwood explained to Judy Klemesrud in the New York Times that her suffering characters come from real life: “My women suffer because most of the women I talk to seem to have suffered.” Although she became a favorite of feminists, Atwood’s popularity in the feminist community was unsought. “I began as a profoundly apolitical writer,” she told Lindsy Van Gelder of Ms., “but then I began to do what all novelists and some poets do: I began to describe the world around me.”

Margaret Atwood, 1984 | Harry Palmer Photographs

Atwood’s 1995 book of poetry, Morning in the Burned House, “reflects a period in Atwood’s life when time seems to be running out,” observed John Bemrose in Maclean’s. Noting that many of the poems address grief and loss, particularly in relationship to her father’s death and a realization of her own mortality, Bemrose added that the book “moves even more deeply into survival territory.” Bemrose further suggested that in this book, Atwood allows the readers greater latitude in interpretation than in her earlier verse: “Atwood uses grief … to break away from that airless poetry and into a new freedom.” A selection of Atwood’s poems was released as Eating Fire: Selected Poems 1965-1995 in 1998. Showing the arc of Atwood’s poetics, the volume was praised by Scotland on Sunday for its “lean, symbolic, thoroughly Atwoodesque prose honed into elegant columns.” Atwood’s 2007 collection, The Door, was her first new volume of poems in a decade. Reviewing the book for the Guardian, the noted literary critic Jay Parini maintained that Atwood’s “northern” poetic climate is fully on view, “full of wintry scenes, harsh autumnal rain, splintered lives, and awkward relationships. Against this landscape, she draws figures of herself.” Parini found Atwood using irony, the conventions of confessional verse, political attitudes and gestures, as well as moments of ars poetica throughout the collection. “There is a pleasing consistency in these poems,” he wrote “which are always written in a fluent free verse, in robust, clear language. Atwood’s wit and humour are pervasive, and few of the poems end without an ironic twang.”

Atwood’s interest in female experience also emerges clearly in her novels, particularly in The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1972), Life before Man (1979), Bodily Harm (1981), and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Even later novels such as The Robber Bride (1993) and Alias Grace (1996) feature female characters defined by their intelligence and complexity. By far Atwood’s most famous early novel, The Handmaid’s Tale also presages her later trilogy of scientific dystopia and environmental disaster Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013). Rather than “science fiction,” Atwood uses the term “speculative fiction” to describe her project in these novels. The Handmaid’s Tale is dominated by an unforgiving view of patriarchy and its legacies. As Barbara Holliday wrote in the Detroit Free Press, Atwood “has been concerned in her fiction with the painful psychic warfare between men and women. In The Handmaid’s Tale … she casts subtlety aside, exposing woman’s primal fear of being used and helpless.” Atwood, however, believes that her vision is not far from reality. Speaking to Battiata, Atwood noted that “The Handmaid’s Tale does not depend upon hypothetical scenarios, omens, or straws in the wind, but upon documented occurrences and public pronouncements; all matters of record.”

Atwood’s next few books deal less with speculative worlds and more with history, literary convention, and narrative hi-jinx. In The Robber Bride, Atwood again explores women’s issues and feminist concerns, this time concentrating on women’s relationships with each other—both positive and negative. Inspired by the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale “The Robber Bridegroom,” the novel chronicles the relationships of college friends Tony, Charis, and Roz with their backstabbing classmate Zenia. Lorrie Moore, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called The Robber Bride “Atwood’s funniest and most companionable book in years,” adding that its author “retains her gift for observing, in poetry, the minutiae specific to the physical and emotional lives of her characters.” Alias Grace represents Atwood’s first venture into historical fiction, but the book has much in common with her other works in its contemplation of “the shifting notions of women’s moral nature” and “the exercise of power between men and women,” wrote Maclean’s contributor Diane Turbide. Several reviewers found Grace, a woman accused of murdering her employer and his wife but who claims amnesia, a complicated and compelling character. Turbide added that Grace is more than an intriguing character: she is also “the lens through which Victorian hypocrisies are mercilessly exposed.”


Atwood continues to investigate the conventions and expectations of genre literature in The Blind Assassin (2000), which won the prestigious Booker Prize. The novel involves multiple story lines; interspersed with these narrative threads are sections devoted to one character’s novel, The Blind Assassin, published posthumously. Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times called The Blind Assassin an “absorbing new novel” that “showcases Ms. Atwood’s narrative powers and her ardent love of the Gothic.” Atwood’s next novels, however, return to the speculative terrain she mapped out in The Handmaid’s TaleOryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam form a trilogy about a world of fundamental environmental catastrophe. Reviewing Oryx and Crake, Kakutani in the New York Times wrote, “once again she conjures up a dystopia, where trends that started way back in the twentieth century have metastasized into deeply sinister phenomena.” Science contributor Susan M. Squier wrote that “Atwood imagines a drastic revision of the human species that will purge humankind of all of our negative traits.” Squier went on to note that “in Oryx and Crake readers will find a powerful meditation on how education that separates scientific and aesthetic ways of knowing produces ignorance and a wounded world.” Atwood’s most recent novels include The Heart Goes Last (2015), which she began in serial installments online, Hag-Seed (2016), a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the graphic novel Angel Catbird (2016).

Atwood is known for her strong support of causes: feminism, environmentalism, social justice. In Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), Atwood discerns a uniquely Canadian literature, distinct from its American and British counterparts. Canadian literature, she argues, is primarily concerned with victims and with the victim’s ability to survive unforgiving circumstances. In the way other countries or cultures focus around a unifying symbol—America’s frontier, England’s island—Canada and Canadian literature orientate around survival. Several critics find that Atwood’s own work exemplifies this primary theme of Canadian literature. Her examination of destructive gender roles and her nationalistic concern over the subordinate role Canada plays to the United States are variations on the victor/victim theme. Atwood believes a writer must consciously work within his or her nation’s literary tradition, and her own work closely parallels the themes she sees as common to the Canadian literary tradition.


Atwood has also continued to write about writing. Her lectures Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing were published under the same title in 2002. She has also released several essay collections, including Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982-2004 (2004) and Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing, 1970-2005 (2005). In 2008 she published the collection Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Examining the peculiar financial straits of the 21st century, Atwood also traces the historical precedents for lending, borrowing, and debt. Her collection In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011) explores the resources of science fiction as speculative thought. According to Nick Owchar in the Los Angeles Times, “Atwood explains how the genre fits into a continuum dating to the world’s oldest myths and continuing today with authors who use the genre to examine social ills, not run away from them.”

Although she has been labeled a Canadian nationalist, a feminist, a gothic and science fiction writer, given the range and volume of her work, Atwood both incorporates and transcends all of these categories.



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Poetry Reading | The Door | by Margaret Atwood

Sep 15, 2020  | starts 1:40



Caught in time’s current

The Guardian


Sat 7 Nov 2020

Last modified on Mon 7 Dec 2020


Margaret Atwood on grief, poetry and the past four years.

In an exclusive new poem and essay Margaret Atwood reflects on the
passing of time and how to create lasting art in a rapidly changing world.


I can say with a measure of certainty – having consulted my poor excuse for a journal – that my poem “Dearly” was written in the third week of August 2017, on a back street of Stratford, Ontario, Canada, with either a pencil or a rollerball (I’d have to check that) on some piece of paper that may have been anything from an old envelope to a shopping list to a notebook page; I’d have to check that as well, but I’m guessing notebook. The language is early 21st-century Canadian English, which accounts for the phrase “less of a shit”, which would never have been used in, for instance, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam AHH”; though something like it might have appeared in one of Chaucer’s more vernacular tales – “lesse of a shitte”, perhaps. This poem was then taken out of a drawer, its handwriting more or less deciphered by me, and typed as a digital document in December 2017. I know that part from the date and time identifier on the document.

The poem was composed much as described at the beginning of it. I was indeed making my way along the sidewalk, rather slowly. My knees were in poor condition due to my having recently spent five hours in a twisted position in the back seat of a car with a one-and-a-half-year-old, with a bunch of luggage piled on top of me. (Improved now, thanks. Or the knees are.) I was in fact carrying half a cup of coffee in a takeout cup with a regrettable plastic lid. (Better options are available now, thanks to the justifiable uproar over plastic pollution.) Slow walking leads to rumination, which leads to poetry. Park benches are my friends, and it wasn’t raining. Scribbling ensued.

Why was I walking alone, and not with Graeme Gibson – with whom I’d walked many hundreds of miles, ever since 1971, in places as diverse as Scotland, Orkney, Cuba, Norfolk, the mid-north mixed forest Canada, southern France, the Canadian Arctic, and the Northwest Territories? Walking had been one of our chief joys – that and canoeing – until his knees started to go, earlier than mine. So he was at the bed and breakfast in Stratford which we had been going to for some years, and I had hobbled out for supplies, fuelling myself with caffeine along the way.

We were in Stratford on our annual visit to see a mix of Shakespeare, musicals, and surprises. Was I also giving a talk? Probably, since I’d just published Hag-Seed, my modern-novel riff on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the year before – set, not coincidentally, at a festival that bears more than a passing resemblance to the Stratford, Ontario one. Watching Shakespeare, researching Shakespeare, writing about Shakespeare – it’s a short leap to the contemplation of obsolete words, words that are fading, the malleability of language, all language – “gay” used to mean “happy”, and it once referred to the demimonde – and from that to the slipstream of time itself. We’re caught in time’s current. It moves. It leaves things behind.

That’s the foreground. In the near distance, Graeme had received a diagnosis of dementia in 2012, so we were five years into it. “What’s the prognosis?” he’d asked at the time. “Either it will go slowly, or it will go quickly, or it will stay the same, or we don’t know,” said the doctor. In August of 2017 it was still moving slowly enough, but the clock was ticking. We knew the what, but we didn’t know the when. As it turned out, Graeme was to die in almost exactly two years – in September 2019, two days after the London launch of my novel, The Testaments, he had a massive haemorrhagic stroke, typical of vascular dementia – and bowed out at about the time and in about the way he’d wanted to. Quick, relatively painless, and while he was still himself.

We’d talked about this a lot. We tried not to spend too much time under a pall of gloom.

We managed to do a lot of the things we wanted to do, and squeezed out enough happiness from hour to hour. Graeme was pre-mourned: all the poems about him in the book Dearly were written before he actually died.

At the same time, we were dealing with the MGM-Hulu television series of The Handmaid’s Tale – it had launched in April 2017 – and that in itself had been a blockbusting phenomenon. Its multiple wins at the Emmys were still in the future, as was the launch of the excellent mini-series made of Alias Grace – but both of them were still on my mind. Both were also backlit by the lurid glow cast by the 2016 presidential election, which I’d experienced like those nightmare movies where you’re expecting a girl to jump out of a cake and instead it’s the Joker. Had Clinton won the election, The Handmaid’s Tale TV series would have been framed as a bullet dodged. As things were, the viewership was not only very high but very horrified. However, few expected at this point that the efforts to undermine the foundations of American democracy – an independent, functioning media, a judiciary separate from the executive branch, a respect for the constitution and a military that owes its loyalty to the country as embodied in the constitution, not to some king or junta or dictator – would go as far as they were to go by November 2020.

Alias Grace, based on a real double murder of the mid-19th century, was also about to chime eerily, not only with the pussy-grabber-in-chief but also with the #MeToo uprising. The mini-series launched in September, the Harvey Weinstein allegations surfaced in October. But none of that had happened yet as I was limping along the street, meditating on the fading word, “dearly”.

What else was I doing in August 2017? I’d started my novel, The Testaments, about a year before – before the election, but in the lead-up to it. Having said for more than 30 years that I wasn’t going to write a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, and having thought that, in the 1990s after the end of the cold war, the world was moving away from dictatorships, I’d watched things turn around again after 9/11. Successful coups are staged at times of chaos, fear and social discontent, and by August 2016, we were already seeing a lot of that, not only in the US but around the world. We already knew, back in 1985, that the world of Gilead came to an end – otherwise it would not have been the subject of an academic symposium some 200 or more years later – but we did not know how. In August, I was in the initial or “mud pie” phase of exploring the possibilities, but I was not to send a one-pager to my publishers until February of 2017.

You can’t work easily on a novel while watching two plays a day. You can, however, scribble poetry. And so I did.

Here, then, is “Dearly”: a poem that’s part of its own zeitgeist, while claiming not to be part of it. It’s not exactly a memento mori; more like a memento vita.

To quote Ursula Le Guin (whose obituary I would shortly write, though that, too, had not yet happened), “Only in dark the light. Only in dying life.”

Poems – like everything else – are created in a particular time. (Two thousand BC, AD800, the 14th century, 1858, the first world war, and so on.) They’re also written in a place (Mesopotamia, Britain, France, Japan, Russia); and beyond that, in a location where the writer happens to be (in a study, on a lawn, in bed, in a trench, in a cafe, on an airplane). They are often composed orally, then written down on a surface (clay, papyrus, vellum, paper, digital screen), with a writing implement of some kind (stylus, brush, quill pen, steel nib, pencil, rollerball, computer), and in a particular language (Ancient Egyptian, Old English, Catalan, Chinese, Spanish, Haida).

Beliefs about what a poem is supposed to be (praising the gods, extolling the charms of a beloved, celebrating warlike heroism, praising dukes and duchesses, tearing strips off the power elite, meditating on nature and its creatures and botany, calling on the commoners to rebel, hailing the Great Leap Forward, saying blunt things about your ex and/or the patriarchy) vary widely. How the poem is supposed to accomplish its task (in exalted language, with musical accompaniment, in rhyming couplets, in free verse, in sonnets, with tropes drawn from the word-hoard, with a judicious number of dialect, slang, and swear words, ex tempore at a slam event) are equally numerous and subject to fashion.

The intended audience may range from your fellow goddess priestesses, to the king and court of the moment, to your intellectual workers self-criticism group, to your fellow troubadours, to fashionable society, to your fellow beatniks, to your creative writing 101 class, to your online fans, to – as Emily Dickinson put it – your fellow nobodies. Who can get exiled, shot, or censored for saying what has also veered wildly from time to time and from place to place. In a dictatorship, uneasy lies the bard that bears the frown: the wrong words in the wrong place can get you into a heap of trouble.

So it is with every poem: poems are embedded in their time and place. They can’t renounce their roots. But, with luck, they may also transcend them. All that means, however, is that readers who come along later may appreciate them, though doubtless not in the exact way that was first intended. Hymns to the Great and Terrible Mesopotamian Goddess Inanna are fascinating – to me at least – but they don’t cause the marrow to melt in my bones as they might have done for an ancient listener: I don’t think Inanna may appear at any moment and level a few mountains, though I could always be wrong about that.

Despite the way the Romantics went on about timeless fame and writing for the ages, there’s no “forever” in such matters. Reputations and styles rise and fall, books get spurned and burned, then unearthed and recycled, and today’s singer for eternity is likely to end up as the day after tomorrow’s fire starter, just as the day after tomorrow’s fire starter may be snatched from the flames, extolled and embossed on a plinth. There’s a reason the Wheel of Fortune in the tarot pack is, in fact, a wheel. What goes round comes round, at least sometimes. It’s not called the Inevitable Straight Road Pathway to Fortune. There isn’t one.

That advance warning having been issued, I’ll quote the postman in the film Il Postino, who’s nicked Neruda’s poems and ascribed them to himself in order to serenade his love. “Poetry doesn’t belong to those who write it,” he says. “It belongs to those who need it.” Indeed, after the poem has passed out of the hands of the one who’s written it down, and after that person may have departed from time and space and be wafting around as atoms, who else can a poem belong to?

For whom does the bell toll? For you, dear reader. Who is the poem for? Also for you.



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Dearly
by Margaret Atwood

It’s an old word, fading now.
Dearly did I wish.
Dearly did I long for.
I loved him dearly.

I make my way along the sidewalk
mindfully, because of my wrecked knees
about which I give less of a shit
than you may imagine
since there are other things, more important –
wait for it, you’ll see –

bearing half a coffee
in a paper cup with –
dearly do I regret it –
a plastic lid –
trying to remember what words once meant.

Dearly.
How was it used?
Dearly beloved.
Dearly beloved, we are gathered.
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here
in this forgotten photo album
I came across recently.

Fading now,
the sepias, the black and whites, the colour prints,
everyone so much younger.
The Polaroids.
What is a Polaroid? asks the newborn.
Newborn a decade ago.

How to explain?
You took the picture and then it came out the top.
The top of what?
It’s that baffled look I see a lot.
So hard to describe the smallest details of how –
all these dearly gathered together –
of how we used to live.
We wrapped up garbage
in newspaper tied with string.
What is newspaper?
You see what I mean.

String though, we still have string.
It links things together.
A string of pearls.
That’s what they would say.

How to keep track of the days?
Each one shining,
each one alone,
each one then gone.
I’ve kept some of them in a drawer on paper,
those days, fading now.
Beads can be used for counting.
As in rosaries.
But I don’t like stones around my neck.

Along this street there are many flowers,
fading now because it is August
and dusty, and heading into fall.
Soon the chrysanthemums will bloom,
flowers of the dead, in France.
Don’t think this is morbid.
It’s just reality.

So hard to describe the smallest details of flowers.
This is a stamen, nothing to do with men.
This is a pistil, nothing to do with guns.
It’s the smallest details that foil translators
and myself too, trying to describe.
See what I mean.
You can wander away. You can get lost.
Words can do that.

Dearly beloved, gathered here together
in this closed drawer,
fading now, I miss you.
I miss the missing, those who left earlier.
I miss even those who are still here.
I miss you all dearly.
Dearly do I sorrow for you.

Sorrow: that’s another word
you don’t hear much any more.
I sorrow dearly.

- Margaret Atwood



Margaret Atwood's Top 5 Writing Tips
Dec 5, 2018




















Wednesday, November 24, 2021

R.E. Slater - T-SHIRTS I HAVE WORN IN LIFE

 


T-SHIRTS I HAVE WORN IN LIFE
MAY REFLECT ME OR MY HOPES


SOME CHEER FOR WILDERNESS, CLEAR AIR, CLEAN WATERS
OTHERS FOR ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATIONS WHICH MIGHT BECOME



T's I'VE PULLED OUT OF THE CLOSET
MEAN SOMETHING MORE TO ME NOW
THAN THEY ONCE DID


SOME T's SPEAK TO ACCOMPLISHMENTS


OTHERS TO INTERESTS AND ABILITY


SOME TO A LIFE LONG PROFESSION
HELPING OTHERS HELPING THEIR CUSTOMERS
CHURCHES, SCHOOLS, AND CLIENTS


SOME T-SHIRTS ARE SIMPLY,  P-R-O-F-O-U-N-D!


SOME I HAVE NEVER WORN
AND INTEND TO NEVER WEAR, EVER


THOSE I HAVE WORN WERE EARNED


AND SHARED WITH MANY TEAMMATES
DRIVEN TO EXCEL


PERSPECTIVE IN LIFE IS KEY
SOME MORE THAN OTHERS


THANKSGIVING SHOULD BE ACKNOWLEDGED TOO:
WHETHER A WONDERLAND IN THE WINTER
OR A PARADISE IN THE SUMMER,
HOME IS ALWAYS HOME
AND LIFE IS WHAT YOU MAKE IT


SOME SHIRTS WERE HARD TO FIGURE OUT
BECAUSE SO MANY THINGS NEED MINDING


THAN THERE ARE THOSE SHIRTS
I WOULD PROUDLY WEAR
HAVING MET GOD-SENT MIRACLES
IN ALL WALKS OF LIFE


THIS SHIRT ALWAYS WAS HARD TO WEAR;
I SUSPECT OTHERS FEEL THE SAME


IN LIFE THERE ARE MANY BANNERS TO
BEAR AND WAVE; LET'S DO THESE TOGETHER


ALWAYS, ALWAYS REMEMBER:
EQUALITY IS ALWAYS GREATER THAN DIVISION;
AS IS DIVERSITY OVER MONOCULTURES


POLITICS IS ABOUT DOING THE RIGHT THING
BUT TOO MANY BELIEVE IT TO BE
A FORGOTTEN PRINCIPLE EXCISED
OVER FORGOTTEN PEOPLE


SOME T-SHIRTS JUST SPEAK TRUTH!


OTHERS TO THE EXISTENTIAL CONDITION OF MAN


NOT ENOUGH SHIRTS SHOUT THE NECESSARY,
THE NEEDED, THE MUST DO'S IN ALL THINGS


THAT IN ALL THINGS
WE ARE LOVED
AND ARE TO LOVE

IF RELIGIONS TAUGHT LOVE
WE WOULD NOT NEED RELIGION


AND WHEN I COME HOME AT NIGHT
FROM MY SEPARATE JOURNIES
I REMEMBER WHY I WORE ALL THE SHIRTS
WHICH I HAD WORN OVER A LIFETIME...

TO PREPARE THE NEXT GENERATION
TO CHOOSE THEIR SHIRTS WISELY
AND IN THE WEARING, WEAR THEM WELL.


R.E. Slater
November 24, 2021



Thursday, November 4, 2021

The Legends of Pecos Bill





The Sons of the Pioneers - Pecos Bill



THE LEGENDS OF PECOS BILL


Pecos Bill



The Birth of Pecos Bill

Well now Pecos Bill was born in the usual way to a real nice cowpoke and his wife who were journeying west with their eighteen children. Bill's Ma knew right from the start that he was something else. He started talkin' before he was a month old, did his teething on his Pa's bowie knife and rode his first horse jest as soon as he learned to sit up on his own. When he started to crawl, Pecos Bill would slither out of the wagon while his Mama was cookin' supper and wrestle with the bear cubs and other wild animals that roamed the prairies.

Yep, the whole family was expecting great things of little Bill; until they lost him in the drink. Seems they took the wagons over the Pecos River while Pecos Bill was taking a nap and he got bounced out of the back and swept downstream afore anyone missed him. If he hadn't taught himself to swim right-quick, he would have been a goner!

Right about the time Pecos Bill was drying out and trying to get a fix on where he was, a Mama Coyote came along and decided to adopt the poor waif and raise him with the rest of her pups. So Pecos Bill spent the first fifteen years of his life running around with the coyote pack, howling to the moon, chasing prey across the prairies, and having the time of his life.

Pecos Bill plumb forgot all about his real family, until the day he turned sixteen and his older brother came along. He was punchin' a herd of long-horn cattle and had brought them down to drink from the Pecos River. The ol' cowpoke took one look at Pecos Bill and knew he'd found his long-lost brother, on account of he looked jest like their Ma, who'd died of a broken heart after they lost little Bill in the river.

"See here, ain't you Pecos Bill, my little brother?" demanded the cowpoke of Pecos Bill when he came jumping over a giant log to run about in the field and howl at the full moon.

"Don't think so," said Pecos Bill. "I'm a coyote! Listen to me howl!" Pecos Bill let out a horrendous shout and scampered about the field on all fours. He scared the herd so bad that the long horns almost stampeded.

"You stop that!" Bill's brother shouted after he got the cattle calmed down. "And tell me this; how come you ain't got a long bushy tail if you're a coyote."

That was a tricky question. Pecos Bill thought about it for a long time.

"I got fleas," he volunteered. "And I howl at the moon!"

"Everybody in Texas has fleas and howls at the moon. That ain't no excuse," said his big brother. "Any how, you can walk upright like a normal person and you can talk too. That ain't what a coyote does."

"I guess you're right," said Pecos Bill.

"'Course I'm right. I'm your big brother and I outta know," snapped the cowpoke. "It's about time you stopped foolin' around on the prairie and became a cowboy like all the rest of us."

That made good sense to Pecos Bill. So he bid farewell to the coyote pack and went out west with his brother to learn to be a cowboy. Soon as he learned the ropes some, Pecos Bill began to realize that the cowboys needed some new tricks to help them cope with them stubborn longhorns. The cowboys kept getting the cows mixed up, which made the owners mad, so Pecos Bill invented the branding iron so they could put a mark on each cow telling everybody who owned it. Then he noticed that the other cowboys were having trouble making the wilder cows behave. Now whenever Pecos Bill saw a cow misbehavin', he'd jump on its back and ride it until it had bucked and kicked itself into behaving better. But the other cowboys weren't so skilled as Bill, so he invented the lasso to help them tame the wild cows.

Pecos Bill's brother was right proud of him. "Not bad for a kid raised by coyotes," he told his baby brother. "In another couple of years, you'll be the toughest cowboy in the world."

And he was right!


Disney’s Melody Time (1948)
Beginning at Texas / Pecos Bill & Animals scene



Bear Lake Monster

If you travel to Bear Lake in Utah on a quiet day, you just might catch a glimpse of the Bear Lake Monster. The monster looks like a huge brown snake and is nearly 90 feet long. It has ears that stick out from the side of its skinny head and a mouth big enough to eat a man. According to some, it has small legs and it kind of scurries when it ventures out on land. But in the water - watch out! It can swim faster than a horse can gallop - makes a mile a minute on a good day. Sometimes the monster likes to sneak up on unwary swimmers and blow water at them. The ones it doesn't carry off to eat, that is.

A feller I heard about spotted the monster early one evening as he was walking along the lake. He tried to shoot it with his rifle. The man was a crack shot, but not one of his bullets touched that monster. It scared the heck out of him and he high tailed it home faster than you can say Jack Robinson. Left his rifle behind him and claimed the monster ate it.

Sometimes, when the monster has been quiet for a while, people start saying it is gone for good. Some folks even dredge up that old tale that says how Pecos Bill heard about the Bear Lake monster and bet some cowpokes that he could wrestle that monster until it said uncle. According to them folks, the fight lasted for days and created a hurricane around Bear Lake. Finally, Bill flung that there monster over his shoulder and it flew so far it went plumb around the world and landed in Loch Ness, where it lives to this day.

Course, we know better than that. The Bear Lake Monster is just hibernating-like. Keep your eyes open at dusk and maybe you'll see it come out to feed. Just be careful swimming in the lake, or you might be its next meal!


Pecos Bill meets Sue / Sweet Sue I Love You song



Pecos Bill and Slue-foot Sue

Now, Pecos Bill had a way with wimmen. No doubt. He had dozens of wives during his time. But his one true love was Slue-foot Sue. She was his first wife - and she could ride almost as good as Bill himself.

Bill first saw Slue-foot Sue ridin' a catfish down the Rio Grande. She was riding standing up and holdin' on with only one hand sose she could take pot-shots at the clouds with her six-shooter. Was making a right pretty pattern too. Bill jest went head over heels for her. Proposed on the spot. They was married the next day too.

Sue was dressed in one of them white jobs with the large hoops. Looked plumb beautiful. Right after they was married, Sue insisted Bill prove how much he loved her by letting her ride his horse, Widow-maker. Bill couldn't talk her out of it, so Sue climbed on that great devil of a horse.

Well, Widow-Maker bucked like a maniac, jest as you'd expect. Sue was thrown off - clear up to the clouds. Luckily, Sue was still wearing her springy hoop. When she hit the ground, she bounced up again. But we all soon realized Sue couldn't stop bouncing. She bounced so high she kept hitting her head on the moon. She was crying and crying buckets of tears, and throwin' kisses to her new husband. But even he couldn't stop her bouncing.

We waited three days and four nights. Finally, even Bill realized that she was gonna starve to death before she stopped bouncing, so he had to shoot her. It was a cryin' shame. Well, time heals wounds, and Bill finally got married again. And again. And again. But I'm tellin' you, he never felt the same about another woman as he felt for his first wife, Slue-foot Sue.





Pecos Bill Rides a Tornado

Now everyone in the West knows that Pecos Bill could ride anything. No bronco could throw him, no sir! Fact is, I only heard of Bill getting' throwed once in his whole career as a cowboy. Yep, it was that time he was up Kansas way and decided to ride him a tornado.

Now Bill wasn't gonna ride jest any tornado, no ma'am. He waited for the biggest gol-durned tornado you ever saw. It was turning the sky black and green, and roaring so loud it woke up the farmers away over in China. Well, Bill jest grabbed that there tornado, pushed it to the ground and jumped on its back. The tornado whipped and whirled and sidewinded and generally cussed its bad luck all the way down to Texas. Tied the rivers into knots, flattened all the forests so bad they had to rename one place the Staked Plains. But Bill jest rode along all calm-like, give it an occasional jab with his spurs.

Finally, that tornado decided it wasn't getting this cowboy off its back no-how. So it headed west to California and jest rained itself out. Made so much water it washed out the Grand Canyon. That tornado was down to practically nothing when Bill finally fell off. He hit the ground so hard it sank below sea level. Folks call the spot Death Valley.

Anyway, that's how rodeo got started. Though most cowboys stick to broncos these days.





Pecos Bill finds a Hard Outfit

Well now, Texas jest became too tame for Pecos Bill once he killed off all the bad men, so he struck out for New Mexico, looking for a hard outfit. He asked an old trapper he met on the way where he could find a hard outfit, and the trapper directed Bill to a place where the fellers bit nails in half for fun. It sounded like a promisin' place to Bill, so he set off. But his durned fool hoss got its neck broke on the way, and Bill found himself afoot.

Bill went a walkin' with his saddle on his back. Suddenly, he come face to face with a rattlesnake 'round about fifteen feet long and lookin' fer trouble. Now Bill wanted to be fair to the rattler, so he let it get in a few jabs before he beat the stuffin' out of it. Being a kind man, when the snake was beat, he picked it up, wrapped it around his neck and carried it along with him.

They was a headin' through a narrow canyon when a cougar thought he'd have a bit of fun and jumped them. Bill never turned a hair. He jest put down his saddle and then whipped the tarnation out of the cougar. Hair flew everywhere, blocking the light sose the jackrabbits thought it was night and went to bed. Finally that cat were so beat he cried like a lost kitten and jest licked Bill's hand.

So Bill saddles him up and they tear off across them hills like forked lightening. Whenever Bill wanted to calm that cougar down, he'd just give him a tap with the rattlesnake. They set such a pace that they soon rolled into the hard outfit the trapper'd told Bill about. Quick as a wink, Bill jumps off the cougar, helps himself to some beans and coffee, wipes his mouth with a prickly pear and turns to look at the toughs sittin' around the fire.

"Who's the boss around here, anyhow?" he asks.

"I was," said a big mountain of a feller about seven foot tall and wide, "but you are now, stranger!"


Pecos Bill -Why Coyotes Howl at the Moon



Death of Pecos Bill

Now, Pecos Bill didn't live forever. Nope, not even Bill could figure out how to do that. Here's how he died.

When Bill was gettin' on in years, a Boston man came down to New Mexico for a visit. He fancied himself a bit of a cowboy. Got himself one of them mail-order suits, don't ya know. The ones with the lizard skin boots, a shiny brass belt buckle, a new pair of blue jeans and a huge ten gallon hat with not a speck of dust on it. Well, when Pecos Bill saw him trying to swagger into a bar, he jest lay down on the sidewalk and laughed himself to death!


Pecos Bill - Part 1 - inactive



Pecos Bill - Part 2



Pecos Bill - Part 3









Monday, November 1, 2021

R.E. Slater - Hail to the Ballplayer




Hail to the Ballplayer

by R.E. Slater


“Ah, youth, fair mistress maiden never held for very long -
Would’st thou be mine but for a little longer!”

To have, to hold eternal, t’would be blessed eternal bliss –
Living final days in youthful play by grace’s fiery augur.

Boldly running dusty bases with feet still sure and swift,
And glove again knuckling grounders in agile pounce and stride,

To hotly line a wicked pitch ripping through stiff defenses,
And collapse again a team’s fading heart with savage glee and pride!

Pray, by thy coy mistress’ fleeting deign and wanton pleasures,
Thy joyful mirth lessen not come rain or shine, colds or heat,

Upon a sweltering July’s infernal infields hot and dusty,
Lying across the enchanted Elysian fields of lore and legend,

Where teammates on forgotten yesteryears be united once again,
Who, cursed or vexed, played steady on, redoubtable the strain,

Battling together hardy foes and teams without relent,
Neither bowing to pressure nor surrendering field or base.

To play on misty morning’s early dews and wispy breezes,
Late into summer evening’s dusky, droning reprises,

Listening addled fans shouted jeers and adulations…
“Ah, youth, be my mistress, for but a little longer!”

Give strength to my aging hands and feet, my aching body,
Revive my failing spirit to valiantly strive and compete,

Refusing body’s relent, deigning defeat’s disgrace,
Rebuffing time’s withered reach upon last euphoric dance.

And when I grow old and fall from favor,
Please, dear, coy mistress, tell me not ’til later,

Bless all my final games by thy fair grace and spirit,
Granting one last season on fabled fields of unsung honors.

Then give to all your beaus and cherished sweethearts,
A bittersweet kiss with one last parting embrace,

Harkening back to days of yore of lost youth divine,
When ballpark’s sounds and fury once were mine to hold,

Where rousing rants and cheers filled fulsome airs with glee,
As fierce swings lifted home crowds up to frenzied heights,

Remembering blessed days played fair pastoral fields of green,
In heavy heart, place dusty spikes away, tipping ball cap in adieu.



R.E. Slater
January, May 2009; August 2010;
rev. November 2021
From “Batter-Up!”

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved