Panola Mountain, late May

 The woods are full of wild strawberries. Some are situated to catch the sun, and the berries are deep red. Others are in the shade, and their berries are pale green.

The walnut trees are heavy with nuts in green hulls. I saw fruit on a mulberry — red, but not yet black — and thought of the mulberry tree on the banks of Zarzamora Creek where a vermilion flycatcher used to roost.

We walked three miles under a blue sky, empty except for a half-moon. The midway point is a granite outcrop. I never get tired of seeing it.

Not one thing, but many

 It’s hard to think about Ted Kooser just once. If I think of him, I usually find myself thinking again.

Yesterday’s note made me wonder why I like Kooser’s work so much.

The answer is there’s not just one thing to like but many. 

One is his sense of contentment. All of us are torn by anxiety, fear and anger at times. If we’re not careful, that turmoil can dominate all our conversations. It’s rare to run across someone who expresses a deep sense of satisfaction with life.

Another thing I like is his appreciation for ordinary things. Kooser wonders what to do with old cookie tins. He likes living in rural areas and chuckles that the beauty-shop operator and taxidermist share the same building. He knows where the good cafes are. He marvels that bois d’arc hedges are pig-tight, as good as a fence. (Being from Nebraska, Kooser calls the bois d’arc tree an Osage orange.)

Jim Harrison said Kooser’s Local Wonders was “the quietest magnificent book” he’d ever read.

I’d say that’s accurate, though Harrison was biased. Harrison and Kooser were friends.

When Kooser was treated for cancer, he found himself unable to write. As he began to heal, he found he could write a little, so he made a point of writing a poem each morning. Day by day, he pasted poems on postcards and sent them to his friend. Harrison received 130.

As I say, there are many things to like about Kooser.

• Source: Ted Kooser, Local Wonders; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Voices heard in the tin shed

 The Day After Memorial Day was devoted to cleaning out the tin shed while searching for a cover for the Wise Woman’s car. The cover, last seen in Texas, was found.

Throughout the day I heard two voices.

First, the Wise Woman’s. She recently saw an Eastern brown snake on the trail at Yellow River and was sure the shed was infested. She invested in snake repellant, which the lower-ranking member of the partnership dutifully applied.

The other voice was that of the poet Ted Kooser, whose remarks about cleaning sheds have stuck with me. Kooser said sheds have a mysterious capacity to accumulate, then to encrust, and so become beyond cleaning. That’s why we clean sheds.

A day cleaning a shed should be a day lost to literature. But that was not entirely so. That’s why I read writers like Kooser.

• Source: Ted Kooser, Local Wonders; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002, p. 8. While Kooser is known as a poet, this book is a collection of essays. I’ve mentioned it before: See “A magnificent book tells what home is like,” Jan. 2, 2023.

An interesting part of the universe

 Muriel Rukeyser said:

The universe is made of stories,

not of atoms.

 

That implies that a part of the universe is made up of dog stories.

Montaigne, following Plutarch, tells the story of an Athenian dog that pursued a temple burglar all the way to Cromyon, between the Isthmus of Corinth and Megara. The dog followed the culprit, barking and refusing bribes of food. Plutarch says the guards finally caught up with the culprit by following the stories.

• Sources: Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “The Speed of Darkness” is at the Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56287/the-speed-of-darkness

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 531. The story is in the long essay “An apology for Raymond Sebond.”

Borrowing and creating art

 Montaigne imitated his teachers and borrowed heavily from them. The topic interests me because I think that borrowing is a common, normal, healthy part of creating art.

Antonin Dvořák and Charles Ives were among the many composers who borrowed folk tunes. You can find Internet threads on the best jazz versions of the Rodgers and Hammerstein tune “My Favorite Things.” I’m not sure the concept of hip-hop is viable if you rule out sampling.

I understand that the technological revolution has made theft and plagiarism tragically common. But if we eliminated imitation and borrowing from music, we’d eliminate most of the stuff I find interesting.

Montaigne sometimes wondered whether he’d written anything that wasn’t in Plutarch or Seneca. I enjoy Plutarch and Seneca. But I would choose Montaigne if I could read only one of the three. Similarly, I can become fascinated by what jazz musicians did with marginally interesting pop tunes.

I wish that our thinking would catch up with our technology and that we could find a more honest way of talking about how human beings create art.

One small point about the language we use in our thinking: Before the Internet, the word appropriation was part of my vocabulary. Without thinking about it, I just stopped using it. When I see the word now, I’m suspicious.

Trying to do what Plutarch did

 Montaigne’s Essays are a wonder to me. I would love to know how he wrote such a book.

Some scholars say Montaigne was trying to emulate Plutarch. Montaigne thought he could learn to write by imitating a master, but as he tried to imitate, he found something original.

Humans learn by emulation. That’s the way a baby learns to walk, by watching others and enduring the bumps. We can say that of people, in general. But the idea gets mushy when you consider individuals. Where do these spectacular individuals learn their craft?

I can see a young Mozart learning his scales by imitating his teacher. But that doesn’t explain the evolution of his piano concertos.

In looking at these creative geniuses, I’m stumped.

Incidentally, Montaigne said he had two masters, not one. He said he followed Plutarch and Seneca.

At times, he claimed his teachers’ good teaching was largely wasted.

 

I have fashioned no sustained intercourse with any solid book except Plutarch and Seneca; like the Danaides, I am constantly dipping into them and then pouring out: I spill some of it on to this paper but next to nothing on to me.

 

At times, he thought otherwise.

 

My book … is built entirely out of their spoils.

 

• Source: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 164, 817.

'This Is the Honey'

 I mentioned the new anthology This Is the Honey, which introduced me to Nicholas Goodly, an interesting young poet.

I think, but am not certain, that Goodly’s “R&B Facts” was my big discovery in this anthology. But there were others:

• Nikki Grimes, “Where I’m From.” The poem begins

I’m from fried okra, catfish and knish,

black-eyed peas, and pickles from the barrel …

If you are a child of a diaspora, you grow up with children of other diasporas.

• Nate Marshall, “Harold’s Chicken Shack #35.” His dad is teaching him the pleasures of fried gizzards with fries. The poem includes the memorable observation that “good sauce is equality/ among fowl.”

• Sharan Strange, “Mule.” The speaker is a 9-year-old girl watching her grandfather die. The poem beautifully contrasts a child’s innocence with the toughness — a virtue, but not a pretty one — that it took to survive Jim Crow.

• Chanda Feldman, “Demonstration.” A schoolgirl goes to the county extension office to watch her mother, a home economics agent, demonstrate the proper way to make preserves. This poem is quietly told. The image is sharp, photographic. The poem is a compressed short story.

The anthology includes famous poets: Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Rita Dove, Natasha Trethewey, Terrance Hayes. It includes famous poets whose work I particularly like: Yusef Komunyakaa, Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady. But the best parts of the anthology are these introductions to new poets. I read, marveled and felt better about the world.

• Source: This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, edited by Kwame Alexander; New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2024.