Reasons this poem resonates with me:

1. Its quiet beauty: no wasted words, nothing overblown.
2. Its devotion to honesty: at the end, Roethke freely admits he doesn’t know how to feel.
3. Its content: as a teacher who’s lost students, I’m comforted knowing I’m not alone. Neither father nor lover, but still affected deeply.

Elegy for Jane
(My student, thrown by a horse) by Theodore Roethke

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

[from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke]

I am finally writing my blog on Slaughterhouse-Five, my favorite of Mr. Vonnegut’s books.  I want to explain why old books are worth looking at again; but maybe not for the reason you expect.  The blog will begin with Slaughterhouse-Five getting unstuck in my reading list and it will end how all blogs about Vonnegut must end: so it goes.

Slaughterhouse-Five got unstuck in its place in my reading list last month and I read it for the fourth time. It feels good for this little book to still have a few secrets I haven’t picked up on before.  The jokes still made me chuckle and I got a few strange looks while reading at Whole Foods.  I’m no longer laughing at poor Billy Pilgrim’s ridiculous appearance while he’s “fighting” during the war- now I’m laughing at the black, comedic quips about our morality.  Obviously, what has changed in the 12 years since I first read this book is me.

In Slaughterhouse-Five it could be argued that Billy Pilgrim never makes a single decision for himself.  He comes unstuck in his own life; jumping from one day to the next without any warning- always being forced to play along with whatever scene he finds himself in.  He never stops to think what he wants to do, only what he should do for the scene to end the way it always has.  This mirrors my feelings very clearly to what I felt in high school.  Now I relate more to the questions of morality and responsibility.  Each “scene” of my life now has many more threads of consequences tied to my actions: how it will affect me, my girlfriend, my job, my finances, my health, and so on. It’s a maddeningly dense web of responsibilities.  But, after this book I realized something very important- what I should do and what I want to do are very similar now.  I take this as an important sign I am headed in a good direction in my life.

Opening Slaughterhouse-Five I was looking for a familiar story and a book that made me laugh out loud every time I read it.  What actually happened was that I had an entirely unexpected reaction to a story I know very well, and that is exactly what I needed.

Looking at old book can be a great benchmark to measure our own change over the years. Seeing the exact same situation years apart and having a different reaction to it; I can think of no better way to measure my development as a person.  Skip the visiting old friends and crying at old betrayals- why don’t you try reading an old favorite to see how much everything outside of the book has changed since then. Come in a grab and a favorite and you might end up surprised at what you find.  Time changes everything- us most of all. So it goes.

Charles Simic always turns the familiar upside down; the poem is a coin flipped in mid-air, spinning over and over itself until you are no longer sure what is heads or tails. I return again and again to this poem when poetry becomes too serious; magic can live in the lines. So much of a story can be held in a handful of images.

Untitled by Charles Simic

Augusta Scattergood will be at Lemuria signing her newest book, The Way to Stay in Destiny, for middle-grade readers on Thursday, April 16 at 4:30!

What a fabulous book! It takes place in Destiny, Florida, 1974, but the story transcends time and place and will feel relevant for young readers today. There’s piano playing, baseball cards, and a girl who doesn’t want to go to dance class. At it’s heart, this book is about a boy who has been afraid to wish for much his whole life, and once he does, he realizes that maybe Destiny isn’t a place you can escape.

From the best-selling author of Glory Be, a National Public Radio Backseat Book Club pick, comes another story from the South, this time taking place in 1974. Theo, (short for Thelonious Monk Thomas), has just had his life uprooted. His uncle Raymond takes him away from the Kentucky farm where he lives with grandparents and drags him off to live in Destiny, where the welcome sign says, “Welcome to Destiny, Florida, the Town Time Forgot.” Uncle Raymond, a Vietnam War Vet and a grump, is none-too-happy that he’s been saddled with the responsibility of taking care of his long-lost nephew.

Theo and Uncle Raymond stay at Miss Sister Grandersole’s Rest Easy Rooming House and Dance Academy in a room above the tap studio where there is a grand piano, bigger than any piano Theo’s ever seen. Theo loves to play the piano—in fact, he lives and breathes music. That, and baseball. In 1974, Hank Aaron has passed Babe Ruth in the number of home runs hit. Theo finds a friend in Anabel Johnson who loves baseball just as much as he does. The mayor’s daughter, Anabel is always coming up with excuses to miss her tap dancing classes and enlists Theo’s help on an extra-credit project to prove the Atlanta Braves stayed in Destiny in their off season. Between piano lessons from Miss Sister and working on the “Baseball Players in Destiny” project with Anabel, Destiny starts to feel like home for Theo. Only problem is, Uncle Raymond doesn’t allow Theo near the piano, and is more concerned with how to get them out of Destiny just when Theo wants to stay there. In one of the best lines of the book, Miss Sister tells Theo, “That’s what happens. You start off dreaming one thing about your life. But you have to be ready for what turns up.” Will Theo make it to Destiny Day, the 100^th anniversary of the town’s existence, or will he be whisked away once more?

Destiny, it seems, has a hold on a person, whether they want to stay or not.

I’m sitting on my couch. It’s been a long day. I have a whiskey. I have my books. I feel stranded in a desert lately. I can’t seem to stop reading these bullshit philosophy books. I want a good story, but fiction just isn’t working for me. I do have this 900 page novel I’m currently reading, that I love, but no one else is liking it. I feel isolated in fiction. Sometimes this happens to me. I like the punishment of philosophy. I’m a masochist I suppose. Why else would I work all day to come home and read Kant? I need a break.

Adie recommended a graphic novel yesterday. It’s sitting on my coffee table by the whiskey. I pick it up. An hour later I’m halfway through it. It’s 500 pages of graphic novel. Needless to say, I’m loving Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor. It came to me in my final hour. It plucked me from the cruel wasteland that is Transcendental Ideality. Water in my mouth. Manna in the muscular hollow that lies beyond the hard knot of flesh that is my navel.

McCloud’s style is sublime. He has crafted a world so deftly enthralling that I find myself at once both freed and bound-bound in the sculpture.

In the words of the famous philosopher Kanye West: ‘I’m in it and I can’t get out.’

Let’s be clear here, McCloud’s world is a very good place to be stuck in.