Still Noticing, Collecting (Detour 13)

We spent the third weekend in January at the coast, an extended family tradition--long walks, seafood, puzzles, wine. Walks remembered and compared; stones retrieved from tide pools, examined, mulled, returned-- dropped gently, perhaps, or absentmindedly; or flung full-armed into the further surf, that pitcher's arc none of us ever truly mastered. Remembered others' beach traditions (blue glass planted for future harvest, after it might be polished by a winter's waves) and thought about collecting, noticing-- why we bother, what it means.

From Detours (Burnside Review Press):


13

If you throw blue glass into a field, it disappears like a stone in water.
Waiting, if the edges are sharp, for the unsuspecting foot. If it's beach
glass, already closer to a pebble than to the bottle scrap it was, it
settles unnoticed between roots, slipped by a mower blade, perhaps,
months later, or left alone, a single rock that isn't, where you think
it's not. But if you hold it to your eye, you can't see through--it's not
a lens, only a piece of old glass someone picked up, on an island in
Maine, say, on vacation, or inadvertently with the treads of a shoe, or
somewhere in between: seen inadvertently, then saved.

I'll be reading from Detours at the third annual Wine and Word Celebration at Winter's Hill Vineyard on February 16.  The tasting room is open 11-5; we'll have readings and word tastings on the hour, starting at noon. Also participating are Karen McPherson, Micaiah Evans, Cole Danehower, Eric Lindstrom, Jim Gullo, and Pedro García-Caro. Books, wine, and good company!

Verbicide, the misunderstood crime

The word of the day (happy result of a dictionary detour) is:  

verbicide

1. the willful distortion or depreciation of the original meaning of a word.
2. a person who willfully distorts the meaning of a word.

Note the deliberation: verbicide is a sin of commission. This isn't malapropism, mistaken identity, well-meaning thought getting out ahead of vocabulary. Destructive of language, destructive of meaning, verbicide might be a form of lying. A cause of loss, occasion for mourning, for fury. 

But I especially like the second meaning, the thought that one might be a verbicide. What might a verbicide wear, how might she try to conceal her crimes? Is there a Most Wanted list?

Now, cross-checking this definition in the little electronic dictionary embedded in my word processor, no verbicide appears. The closest options are herbicide and vermicide. Worm poison, plant poison-- lots of poisons in the world. No human agents of destruction (think parricide, fratricide) in those definitions. Just substances, slick and dangerous and, one hopes, sparingly applied. But verbicide goes unmentioned, unrecorded--the forgotten crime, the silent killer.

Riffing on verbicide, it's true, might lead me down that slippery slope, that primrose path paved with good intentions to the hell of depreciated or distorted meanings, decapitated verbs, slaughtered adjectives. And what of the adverb, so frequently maligned by the authors of writing how-to books? Who will protect hopefully, quickly, brilliantly?

Verbicide: stop it, prevent it, punish it! You can't be too careful.

I have never said of anyone, "He is an unrepentant verbicide," but I will be looking for my chance to do so.

Translation Detours (more signposts)

Treman State Park

Earlier this month, I was in Ithaca to give a translation talk in the Latin American Studies Program seminar series and a reading from Detours at the Cornell Store. Naturally, I visited the waterfalls  and photographed a few detour signs. Then up to Rochester for the ALTA conference and even more translation fun--including the chance to read from Alicia Yánez Cossío's Beyond the Islands, to reconnect with old friends and be introduced to new ones.  

Since then, I've kept thinking about detours, travel, ins & outs and ups & downs, and the ways (here and elsewhere) we try to direct one another and to mark where we've been or hope to go. For example: 

In the Venice lagoon

No need to translate this one, perhaps, but there's a kind of spatial translation here of the customary work icon to an impossible medium; it brings to mind Bolívar's oft-quoted (misquoted?) lament, "I have plowed the sea" ("He arado en el mar"). But failure and inconvenience can be in the eye of the beholder. And some cautionary signs might serve as advice for living, not just staying alive.

Big projects, small nuisances (Mendoza, Argentina)

New Zealand

Detour in Spanish: rodeo, vuelta, desvío. Words that suggest circles, return, deviation, misdirection. Misread rodeo back into English and you have spectacle, cowboys, bronco busting. But something to be found "a la vuelta" will be just around the corner, close at hand. Or upon your return.

I have spent delightful hours looking up the semi-relevant, searching for a near allusion, learning words in English for greens I never knew existed. In Beyond the Islands, prickly pear expert Fritz and his traveling companions first glimpse the Galápagos from above:

            "From the air they could be seen emerging serenely from the water in a changing set of every shade of green: blue green, chlorophyll and olive green, sea green, verdigris and dark green, aerugo, greenish-yellow and glaucous green. The sea shone like a jade mirror splashed with the tiny white dots of the waves that appeared and disappeared between the gusts of foam snaking around the sinuous and indolent shorelines."

Detouring within English, I click the OED's thesaurus link and find "wrying," a new word for me, with the third meaning thus: "The action of deviating or turning from a course, etc.; straying. Obs." That obs. in itself is inviting, trippingly off the tongue reeling toward that untoward, unexpected usage that might yet be fun, might yet illumine, might yet draw us off course. Wrying sounds--and looks--a bit like wring, as if one might wring distance from an ostensibly short journey; and, for the rule bound ("do not wring or twist") a hint of damage, of disobedience to those disembodied dispensers of axiom and advice. But, again: Stop, Look, Live. Go down the latter backwards.

What's your favorite word for detour? 

Revision Detours

The beginning

Directions were meant to be changed.

   One definition of a detour, from the OED on line:  A turning or deviation from the direct road; a roundabout or circuitous way, course, or proceeding. That's certainly the kind of trip described in Detours. 

"Detour" can also describe the revision process. Revision often means reaching the intended destination by an unexpected route. It means keeping the end in sight while allowing for change, serendipity, or that harsh-sounding alternative, deviation. As if there were a clearly marked path that must be followed without fail; deviation brings punishment (shades of Little Red Riding Hood). 

Go back!

Try again.

   Revision might be avoidance: skip the pothole, the puddle, the flagger ahead, the expected delay--a roundabout evasion that can be a time-saver, or just the opposite. 

Diverge, converge, diverge

   But destination is another of those fungible categories. To a point. Rewriting, reworking a piece can be a means to a different end. It can be a long and complicated route back to the beginning, trying to say what I thought I knew I was saying all along, or a circuitous route that leads somewhere else--a longcut, not a shortcut, to a place I didn't initially understand I needed to go. 

Are we there yet?

Go left. No, right. Go another way.

     As I've been collecting detour signs, I've noticed the designers of those alternate routes are revising as well. Maybe not quite making it up as they go along, but reconsidering, reusing. Stockpiling against future need. There are models everywhere of ways to write, ways to think. As the traffic engineers responsibly recycle last project's sign, I might joyfully find a place in this poem for the glowing line that wouldn't fit in the last. 

Summer possibilities

Past or future route?

Here, again, is one of my favorite detour signs, an evident work in progress: 

"Path" may have been "route"? Ahead or behind? This way or that?

Detours can be ordered from Burnside Review Press. 

Detours (and Signs)

Some signs are more directive than others

Ordinarily, I grumble as much as the next person at the prospect of road work and its concomitant delays. But not lately: in preparation for the release of my chapbook, Detours, by Burnside Review Press, I've been collecting detour signs. Pictures of signs--I haven't stolen any yet. I pick out those orange signs in the distance and think not, oh, dread but oh, goody. My family laughs at me, but they help me look; strangers ask questions and I tell them, "Working on a little art project," that little meant to keep my activities just within the bounds of normal. I've gathered quite a collection, and snapped more than a few blurry smears out of moving vehicles.

Detours began as a detour from what I was supposed to be writing: my dissertation. More than a temporary variant on a routine route, it was a return of sorts--I started out writing poems and stories, not literary criticism. It's a side route I've maintained, sometimes in parallel, sometimes intersecting, as I've continued to write scholarly prose (I did finish that dissertation).

One way--only?

I think of Detours as a kind of journey. Fragmented, interrupted, but circling back on itself from time to time, the fragments interconnected. I'm interested in collecting, in splashed images and unexpected lights, in words that sound different in different places, and places that look different in different words. Roads taken and not taken, by chance or by design. 

Detours can be ordered from Burnside Review Press.

Rain or shine

So, what is a chapbook?

My brother just asked. And before I fired off something snappy, I checked the hefty  Random House Dictionary of the English Language that I keep on the dictionary stand in my study. According to which, a chapbook is:

1. a small book or pamphlet of popular tales, ballads, etc., formerly hawked about by chapmen. 2. a small book or pamphlet, often of poetry.

A chapman, if you're wondering, is a  peddler.

Not too long ago (okay, probably longer than I think--I'm always losing track of this kind of thing) Poets and Writers ran a feature or two on DIY chapbooks of varying sorts. I was tempted, and I kept the magazine issues on the bottom shelf of that dictionary stand, but I haven't made one yet.

I might, though. In grade school, we had a Young Authors Fair when we all made books. Each kid wrote her stories or poems, illustrated as necessary, and then we made the covers, sewing the pages together (probably stapling, sometimes) and folding fabric or red-flocked wallpaper out of one of those heavy sample books over the cardboard. It was the best. I loved the whole event. All our books would be laid out on tables in the gym, and our parents would file through to ooh and aah. It felt totally real--we had made real books.

I kept making books long after grade school, though I haven't done much for a while. Still, I've been thinking about a bookbinding class. Just as art supplies lure me with their ranked rainbows in open boxes--just take one new colored pencil, or maybe two; just like candy--the bookbinding supplies on the next shelf sing out, You, too, could do this. Use your words this way.

I never developed much patience or skill with fabric crafts or wood. I couldn't build a dictionary stand like the one my grandfather made. But I do like paper. I like the juxtaposition of the handcrafted and the high-tech. Even as I type this on my snazzy laptop, I'm thinking about the gorgeous paper scraps I've been hoarding all these years, waiting for a project. Perhaps we can have both, at least for a while--the e-book and the pamphlet of handmade paper sewn with spider silk.

There won't be spider silk, but my chapbook, Detours, I'm happy to say, will soon be available from Burnside Review. More on that to follow--detour ahead!

Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Contest

The official notice is up on the Burnside Review website, so I can spread the word far and wide myself: my sequence of linked prose poems/flash fictions, "Detours," was chosen by Blake Butler as winner of the 2011 Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Contest. I've been detouring with these words for a good while; winning the contest is immensely gratifying. I'm grateful to the literary journals that published portions of the manuscript in the past (Southern Poetry Review, Permafrost), and to friends who listened to or read all or part. And I'm looking forward to thinking about cover art, and planning a reading and release party for later in the year--with, I hope, some good wine and lots of friends. Cheers!