If only I could do this on demand

Uploaded by jenny downing

Over on my other blog I have a little piece on how sometimes impassable writing problems can be solved neatly and easily while one sleeps.

God-cursed brutes

Baboon,
originally uploaded by milkfish.

The illustration of the musculature of a snarl is from a book of gross anatomy of primates (baboons, chmpanzees, and humans) and makes me think about the Beowulf story and the first of the monsters in it, Grendel. From Seamus Heaney's translation:

Suddenly then
the God-cursed brute was creating havoc:
greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men
from their resting places and rushed to his lair,
flushed up and inflamed from the raid,
blundering back with the butchered corpses.
Lines 120---125

Maybe Grendel could have been an enormous baboon larger than a man, his fangs and claws used to grab and carry off his prey, for some reason impervious to edged weapons but susceptible to Beowulf's might in their one and only fight, at the climax of which he has his arm and hand torn off. I could imagine that. Then Grendel's mother would be an even larger sort of baboon wreaking vengeance on the Danes on account of her loss then retreating to her marshy lair, where she too is confronted by the hero:

Quickly the one who haunted those waters,
who had scavenged and gone her gluttonous rounds
for a hundred seasons, sensed a human
observing her outlandish lair from above.
So she lunged and clutched and managed to catch im
in her brutal grip; but his body, for all that,
remained unscathed: the mesh of the chain-mail
save him on the outside. Her savage talons
failed to rip the web of his warshirt
Lines 1497--1505

So perhaps an amphibious, part-human, part-baboon enormous monster race of super-mandrills or the like, able to wield a knife (line 1546) and adapted to live in frigid northern waters. I think that would make a pretty good spectacle, in a graphic novel format or in CGI video.

Nursery rhyme

Winkin', Blinkin', and Nod, one night sailed off in a wooden shoe;
Sailed off on a river of crystal light into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going and what do you wish?" the old moon asked the three.
"We've come to fish for the herring fish that live in this beautiful sea.
Nets of silver and gold have we," said
Winkin',
Blinkin',
and Nod.

Pen, no flash

At the Dodge Poetry Festival I attended one day this last weekend we were enjoined from taking flash photos in the main tent during the readings. Besides being distracting to the poets and musicians on stage, it was bad for the video equipment recording the event. (Oddly, there was no accompanying warning about cell phone ringers, and it was a credit to the attendees that there were few breaches of those sorts of etiquette audible.)

Instead, and even before the advisory was made, it seemed to me to be more in keeping with the surroundings to take out my small sketchpad instead and do a few drawings.

• 
  Lucille Clifton


• 
  Ko Un


• 
  
  Andrew Motion (who mentioned his "poet's stoop" during his remarks)

Although it isn't exactly as easy to concentrate on the reading at the same time one is drawing, it isn't much more difficult than pointing and shooting a camera, especially because the readers were relatively confined to one location and pose. It is actually a lot easier than trying to do a drawing of someone on a television screen, because of the way camera people always like to move around and cut between views. Perhaps organizers of poetry readings should consider handing out drawing materials to their audiences, with the bonus that one might be able to get the author to sign the completed drawing afterwards.

It would have taken a more talented artist (and speedier) to capture Anne Waldman's more kinetic performance style this way. A professional graphic artist would be more up to the task, maybe using a laptop computer and a tablet, the way Robh produces his amazing works.