The Poet Tessellates
I hate my kitchen floor. It's composed of these faux hardwood strips that yearn to be real oak or something, but which buckled and bulged the first time my dishwasher overflowed ten years ago. If I were married, or domestically inclined, I would have had it replaced a long time ago. I spend a reasonable amount of my free time in the kitchen and who wants to look at these posers? Now that work has slowed down a bit, I got a bug up my nether parts, and while having my nightly call with Sweet Junie, decided to start ripping up the old slats. This was sufficiently noisy and I was sufficiently distracted that Junie noticed. "What on earth are you doing?", she asked or something to that effect. "Ripping up this stupid floor while we're talking", I said. That was last week. I spent the next night ripping up the rest of it, and the next three nights pulling the thousand staples out of the subfloor which had anchored the strips. It took me a while to evolve to the correct tool, which was this snipper kind of thing with a rounded face that would grip the staple and then let me rotate it out of the subfloor. OK, so now I had a bare subfloor. Immediately I ran to Home Depot and bought a book on "Flooring - 1-2-3", and decided on tile. After consuming that volume, I watched a half-dozen videos on the Internet and read another half-dozen descriptions of "How To Lay Tile". All of them advised putting down "backerboard", such as Durock (which I swear is the city the Duke in Shrek reigned over) and Hardieboard. I read extensively about that. The problem, apparently, is that tile isn't really cool with the idea of stress. So you need whatever's under it to be really, really flat. There is even an index of this, the name of which I forget, but it's like Moh's Scale, advising you about the degree of level-ness of your floor and whether you really should be contemplating natural stone. I drove over to Lowe's which is closer nowadays, and the Nice Young Man told me to get half-inch Hardieboard and "acrylic-enhanced thinset" to attach it to the subfloor, assuming that my subfloor's supporting members were no more than 20 inches apart and somewhere in there was another metric for the strength and virility of my joists. I used to be able to look at my joists but that was before I had my basement built out, so I had to guess. I thought I probably had 3/4 inch subfloors made of composite. The Hardie site said all I needed was 1/4 inch Hardieboard and that 1/2 Hardieboard actually provided no additional stiffness as their 90% Portland Cement and 10% Something Else composition has compressive strength but not sheer strength, or something like that. But, I had already ordered the 1/2 inch boards, and here they were in my garage. I had incurred multiple bruises and a day of fatigue ripping out the damnable wood strips and it was now time to Move The Appliances. The fridge actually worked its way pretty nicely over a spot behind the couch in the den. I had, of course, undone the hose that connects to the ice machine, but I don't drink Campari anymore so what do I need with ice? Likewise the range, which was really light and almost walked itself to the living room. Dima went upstairs for coffee and saw all of this and decided, as he had tiled his bathroom, that I really needed help on Saturday and he's coming. I've conquered my fear by buying lots of tools: power drills and chalk lines and floats and serrated trowels. Meanwhile, I have to figure out what to eat that only requires a microwave. I settled on Salad Nicoise, as I have an old can of anchovies somewhere. I had to make some hard-boiled eggs, but I found that if I dropped two of them in 3 cups of water in a Tupperware affair, they come out OK. I won't be eating pasta for a couple of weeks unless I figure out how to boil enough water in a microwave to suspend the pasta in small portions at a time, or maybe I should just try suspending bowtie pasta in water in the first place and see how the microwave zaps the whole thing. And, of course, there's the actual tiling. I've written a poem called "Tessellation", so as you can imagine, I'm sort of an expert at this kind of thing. I just have to decide between ceramic and porcelain and colors and such. It's a decision I would much prefer to have Sweet Junie in on. Well, I have to go. My eggs-in-Tupperware are threatening to explode in the microwave.
The
cover of Poets &Writers is adorned with a picture of Valzhyna Mort (leaning on
an accordion?) staring back at you with blue eyes, turquoise earrings, and an
elfin grin. If I handed the magazine to my mother, I'm sure she would say
"cute as a button". And yes, I called my mother today and even sent her a
bunch of tulips last week. Ms. Mort is a poet from Belarus, which
coincidentally is also where Dima's parents are from. Copper Canyon Press
has published Ms. Mort's Factory of Tears, which includes the originals
in Belarusian along with translations by Franz Wright (now there's an
interesting combination). I like looking at the Belarusian originals
of the poems, which look like what I get when I accidentally pound out an email
on Dima's machine (for which he occasionally turns on the Cyrillic option).
Wright's translation of "Cry Me a River" starts off: "her body trapped in
a voice / as if it were a cage / and roses thrown on the stage / like pieces of
red meat". Page One notes that Mark Yakich's The Importance of
Peeling Potatoes, his second poetry book, has been published by Penguin.
It's not an all-Slavic issue, however. Other items: Small Press
Points asks whether "poetry-only" presses are a dying breed, pointing out
that BOA lost its standing as an IPOP (independent poetry-publishing
publication) by releasing a story collection, as did Four Way Books, Wave Books.
Anhinga Press will be publishing a book of essays and Copper Canyon Press has
published (Poetry editor) Christian Wiman's prose work. Literary
MagNet mentions Ninth Letter, Oxford American and Literary
Review. Rebecca Wolff's Fence enterprise is ten years old, and
I laughed at her response to the question about the "booby issue". Stephen
Morison writes about the Chinese literary scene (very interesting). There
are a number of articles on fiction, fictioneers, and agents
− which I don't tend to read. I actually find the whole agent
thing kind of comical. It's not that poets don't have agents, of course.
Visit the Steven Barclay Agency and you can sign up for speaking gigs with Billy
Collins, Louise Glück,
Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Jane Hirshfield, W. S. Merwin, Naomi Shibab Nye,
Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Robert Pinsky, or Adrienne Rich. SBA doesn't
represent their poetry, of course. They still have to lick stamps and send
in their submissions and submit their manuscripts for consideration without
benefit of agent, right? I'm only kidding, of course. The combined
solicitation letters from litmags to these folks would probably fill a boxcar.
On the other hand, a mediocre Tom Wolfe book may only sell half a million copies
in its first year, which is probably the total sales of all books over their
lifetimes of all the poets just named. I really liked Katrina Vandenberg's
article on how to arrange the poems in your manuscript. I just don't
believe it. More on that later. Her advice is an 11-step program,
which takes its inspiration from popular sources (Elvis Costello, Jr. Walker and
the All Stars, Tom Waits). My problem with this whole
arrangement-of-poems-in-your-manuscript thing is that I don't know how to do it
(OK, at least I'm being honest about my failings) and that I don't read any
poetry book anything like front-to-back. I also don't read magazines that
way. Or technical manuals. I admit that I do read murder mysteries
that way, but it's an exception. But, I digress. Amy Rosenberg
discusses Melissa Delbridge's debut collection of personal essays about the
South in Family Bible (OK, it's fiction but it was interesting).
Everything else was ads and the usual. You have a nice Sunday.
