Interlude: The Metsiness of Picking our Heroes

That's Rusty Staub, Phil Pepe, and me. I'm the one who doesn't look like he's been part of professional sports for forty years.

For those of us who were Mets fans in the 70s, it's sort of a credentialing process to list all the horribly lopsided trades that define the beginning of the dozen years of downtime that ended only as the bad boys of the 1986 World Champion team began to arrive. I did eventually adopt Steve Henderson's batting stance in pepper games, though I never stopped rooting for Tom Seaver, even against my Mets. But I never warmed up to Mickey Lolich. No, he didn't pitch all that badly in the hour-and-a-half he was a Met, but he came in exchange for Rusty Staub.

I can't tell you exactly why, but I've always been partial to The Big Orange. I think it's because he was a very good player at a time very good players were understood to make a difference in team's fortunes. We're completely star-driven in sports today. I don't know that a Rusty Staub would receive the same respect in today's baseball.

My favorite story of my own rooting for Rusty Staub was very late in his career, in a long (16-inning?) game, when he was pressed into service as an outfielder (once a good defensive RF, Staub was at this point a pinch-hitter and occasional 1B). With no one left on the bench, the Mets switching positions after every batter to keep Rusty and his limited range in whichever outfield position was less likely to be hit to. Naturally, therefore, Rusty got to make great catch* late in the game - which the Mets did, of course, win. Everybody in my dorm who had their windows or dorms open that afternoon knew something great must have happened somewhere when Rusty caught that ball. There's a reprint of a columnists' take on that game here.

Another reason I'm a fan of Staub's is that he became what his teams needed when they needed it. When he came back to the mets for the end of his career, he made himself a premier pinch-hitter and mentor. I wouldn't mind if I could look back over my career - as an engineer, a husband, a project manager, a father - and have someone say about me that I became what I needed to be when it was needed.

Who knows exactly why our heroes are our heroes? For whatever it means, Rusty Staub is one of mine.

Which is why I've gotten so adrenalized and tongue-tied the two times I've met him that I could barely speak... but that's a story for a different time.

* - I imagine it was great - all the reports at the time seemed to think that, but I was listening on the radio.

Contribute Your Instrument

"I regard myself as a beautiful musical instrument, and my role is to contribute that instrument to scripts worthy of it," [Ed Asner] says, sounding -- briefly -- almost peaceful. "And hopefully the music we play will be about decent human beings fighting against disease, fighting against corruption, fighting for the truth. and fighting for a day when all our jails are empty, and all our schools are full."

From an interview with Stephen Whitty. Whitty is one of four reasons I continue to receive the Star-Ledger at my house. I know I could read it online; that's OK for the dailies, but for Sunday features, there's nothing like newspaper. Even without James Brady.

(PS: Yes, I think Asner's loopy in real life. Yes, I think he's right about his art.)

Portrait of Life as Rob Petrie's Ottoman

Ugh. Terrible how life sometimes chooses to remind us that it is in charge. My streak of 6 weeks of 3+ posts per week came to a crashing halt in May. I could have predicted it, could have warned of it in this space but I remained optimistic.

Won't let that happen again.

News from around this vicinity:

• Great time at the Project Management Institute of New Jersey's annual symposium. Made to feel enormously welcome by audience and staff. The proceedings, including my presentation, are now available for your perusal in the chapter presentation archive.
• My town now has a poet laureate. And a fine one, at that.
• It's recital season for my kids. I am a lucky, lucky man.
• My Linked-In profile is currently 90% technologist colleagues, 9.8% artists, 0.2% other. That makes a great deal of sense, actually.
• The Spoken Word Series survived the downturn and will return for a 9th season. More on that in a few weeks.
• The New York Mets are a downturn all their own. And yet I watch and I watch and I watch.
• To the Ones is out there again. Didn't I say I was done with that? Are we ever really "done with that?"

Let's see if I can get back here before the end of the month with at least a few of the bullets my internal editor got to before I could post them. Early line in Vegas is 12:5 against.

Some Stuff I Thought About Once

Cleaning out my draft blogs folder, I've been finding it interesting what I seem to have found interesting enough to start writing about... but not interesting enough to finish the thought.

Among the incompletenesses I've accumulated over the past few years:

• Acrostics as a natural form for the poet with a technical education
• Homage poems after works by poets you see at the right, including Agodon, Lockward, and Pereira.
• A Top-10 list of Top-10 lists
• A discussion of the (first) cancer story line in Funky Winkerbean
• An observation that some of the subplots in my favorite works of speculative fiction are eerily close to reality today, and what genius that suggests in those writers

Also about a half-dozen Mets references, half that many Jets references, a couple medical device insights, and one insight about abominable snowmen.

Of course, the single obvious conclusions from this mishmosh is...

What, no accordion?

Boldly Go to the Cosmetics Counter

Have you seen the new Star Trek colognes?

Yes I want some.

No I don't care what it says about me.

Seriously, how can you not want a cologne called "Red Shirt" with the tagline, "Because tomorrow may never come."?

Confidential to Staten Island: Thanks for the tip. It'll be 29 years in September.

A From-the-Public Service Announcement on the NJ Gubernatorial

I know I don't usually get political here, but.....

Dear Competing Candidates: I will be voting in the NJ Republican gubernatorial primary. I have been attempting to sort through your respective credentials as available in the objective data of the public record so as to make an intelligent choice, representing the best potential for New Jersey.

But.

As of this moment, I have decided that the next one of you whose auto-dialing computers leaves a prerecorded three-minute diatribe about the other's shortcomings will officially be scratched from any future consideration on my part.

And.

Should the other of you follow up with a message of similar slant at any time between now and the primary, you will also be scratched from my personal slate.

So.

Please provide me with evidence of your qualifications. And let me decide. And be quiet until the debate. Please?

A Public Service Announcement on the H1N1

There are some scary elements of the current H1N1 virus scare. To take your mind off them, check out an engineer's take, and a preview of Alert Level 11. And if you live in the US and want to know what's really going on, there's really only one reliable source. Promise me you won't watch the 11-o'clock news for your H1N1 udpate. Please? Promise me?

Maybits (not Maybin)

Got to 12 posts in April. That's not bad. I wanted to reach my best best monthly total ever (14), and I even had three posts worked up that are still sitting in Drafts, but I didn't want to lower my already-low standards just to hit the number. But I'm spending more time with the words than I have the past year. That's good.

***

Want to have some fun? Try to borrow a supermarket hand-basket for a couple of days. Convince the store manager you're serious. What a great way to spend a Friday evening. Aside: Kudos to store managers like the one at my local Kings who actually took me seriously and tried to, creatively, help me out. Ultimately he couldn't help let me borrow one when I asked because his inventory was too low - because too many people take them without asking. And people wonder why my indignation levels are high sometimes: Nothing punishes you like following the rules when the rules are not generally followed.

***

Why did I need a handbasket? As a prop for this, of course.

***

Many NatPoWriMo participants are in the process of weeding their 30 drafts to the useful few. I didn't write daily in April (and won't in May - such is the schedule), but I completed 3 drafts over the past month, one of which has already been read aloud to strangers. So I got that going for me.

***

FYI, Maybin = Cameron Maybin, my Fantasy Baseball team's future starting CF. If he could just get his Ks down under 3 a game.....

Poetry Near Princeton

A great day in West Windsor, despite the heat. So many good poets in the audience! So many good moments....

... hearing Maria Gillan tell favorite and new stories about her life and her work...
... reading a poem about my daughter, which I've read in public before, and having the reactions of the audience make it a completely new experience...
... hearing people react with that strange unexpected recognition ("Oh, you're David Vincenti!")
... seeing a Met hat so close to Phillie country...

Unfortunately, the poet who conceived the event was (severely!) under the weather and unable to attend, so here's a poem from Catherine Magia, with my thanks for a terrific afternoon:

ECLIPSE

Somehow we had missed the eclipse
Slow thickening of shadow
Celestial molasses careening across
Smooth white dough, darkening and sweetening

To watch the moon close in my imagination
Curved silver eye; blinking, blinded, and reemerging
A survivor of the sky
A narrowing shutter unable to resist light

I don’t remember the sleeping,
Only the stirring, your isolated movements
How you position your body like a mummy’s
Indifferent as wood, unable to slumber with anyone touching

I dreamed of standing at the doorway
Perpendicular to the moon, elliptical light trickling
Through my bones, the momentary flickering
Of the earth’s silhouette, for a minute, swaying together
Like trees in the wind, an unlikely pair

It will be years before this happens again.

Go here to hear her read it.

Me A Poet

First the OSSP*: If you're thinking about coming to hear Maria Gillan and me read in the West Windsor Arts Council's Spring Poetry Awakening tomorrow, you can find directions here; it's not far from Princeton, NJ.

While preparing myself to read tomorrow, and to share the bill with one of my favorite poets, I happened to notice Bob and Margery at About.com reporting that Lulu has taken over the domain Poetry.com and that Watermark Media, they of the International Poetry Library and their regular Parade Magazine advertising , are out of business. This is interesting - an online version of Lulu's print service. I've been looking very hard at Lulu as an open of for the first manuscript... but more on that another in a week or two. Or eight.

For the record, I got over thinking ILP and its ilk were a scam a while ago. Sure, they extracted money from people who didn't know how pobiz works, but that was kind of the point. These folks were people who derived great joy from having a nice gold-edged book with their poem in it, who wouldn't care about any difference (if they noticed one) between a book from CavanKerry Press and one from Kinko's. When they stopped delivering those books because of poor cash flow, that became a different story, of course. It's not all that different from the people I used to see in my bowling league with the special bionic elbow contraption and the special spray for their sliding shoe, and the special glove with the Power-Angle Palm(tm). I know all that stuff was worthless and affected their score not an iota. But it made them happy and made them feel "like a bowler". If that's all they wanted, not to score better or be part of a better team, who am I, even as a reasonably accomplished bowler, to put them down?

There's a little buzz at Publisher's Weekly about Lulu and Poetry.com, which may interest you (and give you a brief insight into one of those bowlers - I mean, poets - I just talked about).

It's also telling that Lulu is aware that much of what they print is bad. But that awareness is part of what makes them legitimate. I have seen a couple of very nice self-published products this year. Given where the "real" presses endowments are going to be over the next two years, it's an option that more poets without bionic elbows may be considering.

Thus endeth the only comparison of poetry and bowling you will encounter today.

See you tomorrow?

*OSSP - Obligatory Shameless Self-Promotion

Confession

Kelli is much more thorough about her confessions, but every now and then an amateur can get a few things out in the open, right? So here goes:

I confess I purchased Valzhyna Mort's Factory of Tears entirely because she appeared on the cover of Poets and Writers with her accordion. Her ACCORDION!

I confess that I then dropped the book onto a pile and neglected to so much as crack the spine for months, reading more than a dozen other books before so much as taking the Copper Canyon reply card out of its original location.

And finally, I confess that upon reading the first two lines of "Music of Locusts", I resolved to finish the book before I read even the back of a cereal box:

what I wouldn't give

to be a small freckle on the wind's nose

Most of the poems have the Belarusian on the left face. And I confess, using the names in the dedications to sound out the phonetics of that alphabet and hearing those few words of Belarusian I can work out in my head is bonus fun for me in this book.

Here's the poem "Teacher", in its English entirety (the all-lowercase look is from the original):

if you are going to be my teacher
you will have to become a tiger
so that you can bite my head off
and i'd have to follow you everywhere
trying very hard to get my head back

Good stuff. Recommended.

Also good stuff, and since I mentioned her today, Kelli posted some good learnings she recently acquired on presenting your own work in public. Also recommended.

Some Time With Where Time Goes

This evening I was in the audience at County College of Morris for a reading from Sander Zulauf's new collection Where Time Goes (Dryad Press, 2008). I've been sitting with my copy since last year's Dodge festival, waiting for an overlap between his reading schedule and a night I could finagle to be free, and how lucky for me that tonight was that night.

Sandy read with a jazz trio, perfect for the tone of his poems (especially when they broke into "Inchworm"!). I wish I could recreate the mood of it here - the humor and nostalgia of both the poems and the songs, the warmth of the room (a wide white space with students' art projects behind the performers). I'm hopeful that bootleg DVDs of the event will be available someday, but for now, I leave you with the last few lines of my favorite poem in the collection, "Uncertainty", a kind of meditation on the observer-effect measurement disturbance frequently bundled with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle with tribute to physicist-poet Natalia Zaretsky (who also wrote about it):

(I) wondered whether God is
Uncertain about us,
Whether everybody
Who looks at God
And claims to see God
Changes God
Makes God
Uncertain
To everyone else.

Cleaning Under The Couch

Preparing for Sunday's reading, and using the opportunity to do some overdue file cleanup, I've been sorting through a large (virtual) pile of writings that at one time or another I've regarded as "complete", and am fascinated to be rediscovering some of my own work. It's been interesting to me to become reacquainted with works that have been off my mind long enough to have somehow acquired some newness. Not always a good thing, of course, as without the benefit of "the moment" some of the works I thought were refined enough to be called a complete poem are a bit lifeless, pedestrian even. Worse, though, is finding something that I obviously though was a good idea, but not good enough to imbue the draft with craft. But those moments are a gift of sorts, as they remind me that it's not practical to expect myself to be objective about my own work, especially too close to its birth.

But there have also been moments where I find something I don't remember writing, at least not in that "final" form, and I see something I can see my handiwork in - or better, something that has potential but I didn't have the chops to do right when I started it, but feel like I have enough tools in the box to be able to finish today. That's probably the most exciting moment.

So I'm sorting into three piles:

• Completed Writings - works that have been published or have had credible independent review (not that your opinion isn't important, Mom), plus some that I'm confident about. This is about half the work so far.
• Writings to Revise - works that have something interesting -a couple of interesting lines, a good idea poorly executed (which in my case usually means it's too long). This is about a third of the work.
• Old Writings - works that appeared in those early, forgettable, Poet's-Market-big-white-circle journals and are OK enough, but aren't interesting enough for immediate investment and which I wouldn't include in a submission package today. Some of these are candidates for the Revise pile, when it gets low enough. About a sixth of the work is in this bucket so far, but I have a feeling the remainder of the pile, which I've been slow in purging, is mostly headed for this category.

We'll see where it all winds up, but it's a good learning for me. Sharpening both my lens and my scalpel.

Don't Tell Me You Can't

I don't talk about the day job much, and I'm not going to start now, but for the next few minutes you need to know this: A substantial fraction of my career has been spent in roles designed to dealing with situations that begin: "We may have a problem here..."

Thirty-nine years ago today, Apollo 13 ended its mission by splashing down into the Pacific Ocean. If you've somehow avoided the movie for the last 15 years, this was a moon mission on which an oxygen tank exploded, and a series of improbable improvisations were employed to deliver the three astronauts home against incredible odds. It's one of those movies I'll stop to watch whenever it's on, and one I frequently throw into the DVD player. The story is a perennial reminder that just about anything is possible if you just "Work the problem". It's a tale I feel a particular kinship with. Because I'm an engineer, because it appeals to my problem-management-professional resume, and because I'm a poet.

Hmm? How's that?

The premise - assessing, deciding to, then doing - applies when there is no problem, too. If you have the tools and the desire, you can. Two areas where defeatism irks me greatly are poetry and music. Too often I hear people talk about how they "can't understand" poetry. Or when I produce my accordion, how they "could never" learn an instrument "at this age". Ugh. I had the good fortune one year to play alongside a 73-year-old man who had been playing the accordion for all of 2 years when he joined our accordion orchestra. He wasn't the most natural talent in the room, and he wasn't be best musician. But he was good - certainly good enough to hang with the rest of us amateurs - and he had by far the most joy in his playing.

Maybe it's not a direct analogy to writing poetry, but maybe it is. Maybe the energy that we B- poets bring to the band serves a purpose, feeds the soloists, keeps the literary tune lively, danceable, entertaining. One thing I'm sure we bring is a bit of knowledge, a bit of appreciation and a bit of dedication to the craft. Desire. An amateur's analysis, but a wealth of reading to inform our writing.

I don't know. Maybe it's a thin analogy, and maybe I'm too worked up about wanting to give accordion lessons again. But I see it this way: You can choose not to go the moon. You can choose not to get home. But if you want to do both, you may need help, but with that help will get you there and back.

PS: Three guesses who my hero in the movie version of Apollo 13 is. Hint: There's not even a close second.

Spring Poetry Awakening

Wishing you a Joyous Easter...

... and suggesting to you that now is just as good a time to make resolutions as January 1 was; maybe better. Do it for the holiday. Or for spring. Or for NatPoMo. But whatever's on your mind today, make it new. Yourself, too.

Things I've Been Doing Instead of Finishing My Taxes...

(1) Relentlessly refining for my PMINJ presentation in a few weeks. Check out the complete list of speakers who have been signed up; I'm in pretty good company!

(2) Flipping channels. There are some movies I'll always stop and watch, and I keep discovering new things to distract myself with.

(3) Organizing my material for the Spring Poetry Awakening. There's a pretty nice article about the event at CentralJersey.com; guess it pays to have that website, after all.

(4) Paying way more attention to my fantasy baseball team than is justified in April. But you can't blame me for being excited about picking Daniel Murphy, can you, Mets fans?

(5) Working on the day job. Catching up on my [redacted][redacted][redacted][redacted][redacted][redacted].

Eh, there's still time. What's on ESPN Classic right now?

National Whattity Month?

Thank goodness for the lovely invitation I received to read for the West Windsor Poets and Poems event this month. Otherwise, this April like the last several, would be consumed by other activity.

I'm not complaining, mind you. Taxes are predictable, my upcoming PMI-NJ talk bodes to be great fun and a great experience, and mid-year events for work are generally my own doing. But I do have a bit of jealousy when I click through Shanna's PAD, or Kelli's, or anyone's. I've avoided going to Poetic Asides because I know I'm not going to do anything with them. That's whining of course. What am I actually doing with my poetry this month?

Well, sorting through my old and current projects for the West Windsor reading, and having not done so in quite a while, I'm pulling some "finished" work for editing, discovering some unfinished scraps, rejecting some work I used to think was done... I think this is a fairly usual routine for the amateur, no?

Also, I'm forming more specific opinions about my manuscript, and I have made a couple of key decisions about it.

But I won't have time to do anything with them until after the 4th of May, also known as National Tardiness Month. I'll tell you about them then.

Rothenberg and Tobin

Through Silliman's Blog, I found Jerome Rothenberg's online presence this weekend; a delight to find. Primarily, for me, to see the way Rothenberg excerpts from his own prolific output into discrete and digestible nuggets. I know I'm not up to that challenge.

Also found the poems Rothenberg wrote in response to visual art by Nancy Tobin for the last installment of the Visible Word, an ambitious project the Spoken Word Series hasn't mounted in a few years. If you read these poems and check out the visual artistry behind them, I think you'll agree that's a shame.

Witte and Kelley in Hoboken

Come to Hoboken this Sunday to catch the NatPoMo action of George Witte and Tina Kelley at Symposia Bookstore at 3PM.

Not sure you can fit this into your schedule?

Go here. And here.

OK then. See you there.