Thoreau and the publishing world

 A recurring theme: I’m trying to think about writing — not the craft of writing but the part that comes before it.

Imagine Henry David Thoreau at 25, being told by everyone that he really should find a career. He’s got a degree from Harvard, though he often wonders what it’s for. He’s tried keeping a school. There had been more spectacular failures, one can suppose.

He worked for Emerson for a while, and the great man got him a gig tutoring a nephew. Ralph Waldo’s brother William was a businessman on Staten Island, close enough to give Thoreau a gateway to the publishing world of New York.

The problem, in 1843, was there wasn’t much of a publishing world.

Poe was scraping by, barely, with poetry and short fiction. Longfellow was publishing poetry, but it’d be another decade before he felt he could leave his teaching job and focus on writing.

Can you imagine Thoreau trying to write for a market? Doing a knockoff or cover of one of Poe’s horror stories, for example? Or a long poem narrating the exploits of a Revolutionary War hero?

No one was writing the kind of thing that Thoreau wanted to write. He was interested in the question of the best way to live. He wanted to conduct tests and trials — to travel on rivers or hike across Cape Cod or maybe live in a cabin at Walden Pond — and report on the experiences. What could he learn? What could he convey to friends and readers?

That’s a vital bit of knowledge, finding out what it is that you want to do. Thoreau wasn’t clear when he left college.

He was clearer after seeing the glittering publishing world of New York. By seeing what was there, he got a better sense of what he didn’t want to do. And it wasn’t long before he began thinking about books that contained reports of his investigations and what he’d learned.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 128-49.

Panola Mountain, late August

 The forest canopy is thick, but the early turners have some yellow leaves. The early turners are mostly tulip trees, maples, sweetgums and hickories. But a lot of the yellow you see in the canopy is not from the trees but from muscadine vines.

The berries on American beautyberry are just turning purple — some are still green. Ivy-leaved morning-glory is putting out those lovely blue flowers.

We saw two big batches of Canadian geese — one near Alexander Lake and one resting in a clearing in the woods. In honor of the Current Occupant’s idea to call Lake Ontario “Lake America,” we are calling Canadian geese “Donald ducks.”

If Americans can’t appreciate idiotic ideas, idiotic ideas cannot be appreciated.

Rilke’s two pens

 Ulrich Baer says that Rilke had two pens. One was for poetry and fiction. The other was for other business, such as paying bills and writing letters.

This might be the simplest metaphor for the notion that there is more than one part or aspect to a person or personality. If the person is a writer, like Rilke, he must decide which parts will remain in the privacy of the notebooks and which will meet the public in published works.

I have been trying, without much success, to get a firmer grip on the notion that when we teach writing we usually start with craft of writing. As I’ve said before, the part of writing that interests me the most is the part that comes before the questions about craft.

What kinds of things come up before craft?

A writer has two pens. Which does he choose?

Which aspects of a personality are allowed to speak in tackling this piece of work? Which must remain silent?

• Ulrich Baer’s essay is in Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life, which Baer edited and translated; New York: The Modern Library, 2006, p. vii.  For another stab at this topic, see “The other part of writing,” Aug. 17, 2026. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-other-part-of-writing.html

Rabbit tobacco

 School has started, and rabbit tobacco is putting out loads of little white flowers.

I suppose I connect Pseudognaphalim obtusifolium and school because it’s one of the plants once used by little boys in Texas who were learning to smoke. We learned by rolling our own. We performed this top-secret ceremony at one of our secret hideouts. One of my early memories is getting a dose of discipline from my outraged mother, who had a gift for finding secret hideouts.

Rabbit tobacco grows across the eastern part of the continent. I’ve run across a Georgia gardener who managed to make himself sick by smoking the same plant as a boy.

The plant is in the aster family. The stems and the undersides of the leaves are coated with white hairs, so part of the plant appears to be light gray, almost white.

Checking up on Frank O'Hara

 Yesterday’s note should have come with an explanation. I was reading an essay on Frank O’Hara at 100 because I have trouble with this poet. I think of him as a poet I should like and am puzzled that a lot of his poetry leaves me somewhere short of liking.

But then there’s his poem “The Day Lady Died,” which gets to the point of how sudden, unexpected grief can hit you — grief about a famous person, a singer in this case, that you know through concerts or recordings. How you can feel grief for the loss of the artistry that was in a person, without, perhaps, really knowing the person. How that grief strikes in the middle of the everyday.

If someone did that better than Frank O’Hara, I don’t know about it. And so I read essays about a poet whose poems I struggle with, hoping to get a better grip.

• Source: Frank O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died” is at the Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42657/the-day-lady-died

‘We have a cultural life’

 Ryan Ruby’s essay for Poetry Foundation on Frank O’Hara has many wonders. One that surprised me was a quotation from George Kennan, one of the architects of the containment doctrine, the notion that the United States and its allies should stop the spread communism in places like Korea and Vietnam. Here’s Kennan:

We have … to show the outside world both that we have a cultural life and that we care something about it. That we care enough about it, in fact, to give it encouragement and support here at home, and to see that it is enriched by acquaintance with similar activity elsewhere. If these impressions could only be conveyed with enough force and success to countries outside our border, I, for my part, would willingly trade the entire remaining inventory of political propaganda for the results that could be achieved by such means alone.

 

I think that instinct is right. If this country supported its artists and the arts, its cultural life, we’d live in a different world. We wouldn’t have to make up a propaganda for the gullible about making this country great again. We’d be making a richer, better cultural life, one that people in other parts of the world would notice.

We haven’t taken Kennan’s advice. We’ve made ourselves culturally poorer than we need to be, and our propaganda doesn’t begin to cover that fact.

• Ryan Ruby, “Infinite Waves: Frank O’Hara at 100”; Poetry Foundation, Aug. 24, 2006. It’s here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1822640/infinite-waves

Come-outers

 Before there were hippies or even beatniks, there were come-outers. They hung out at Elizabeth Peabody’s bookshop of West Street in Boston in the 1830s.

The come-outers were people who had concluded that social institutions that were supposed to be moral beacons were colluding in an evil so awful they couldn’t be a part of these institutions. The churches of the day were accommodating to slavery.

The peculiar name of these protesters came from scripture:

 

Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you.

 

I wish more people knew about the come-outers. I suspect we have some around today. I’ve run across some young people who are progressive in their politics but have come out of the Democratic Party, largely, but not exclusively, because of its stance on Israel and Gaza.

I suspect there are more of these contemporary come-outers than the pundits allow — enough, I’d guess, to account for the bewildering problems in conducting accurate polls in Georgia.

• Source: The quotation is from II Corinthians 6:17. The “come out from among them” is a quotation from Isaiah 52:11.