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Standout Reads of 2011

January 9, 2012 by Claudia Putnam

Once again these are the books that stood out for me among those I read this past year. They were not necessarily published in 2011; many of them appeared decades ago, in fact.

 

Fiction

  • Native, by William Haywood Henderson. Henderson’s gorgeous, delicate, but also ripping first novel explores some themes similar to those in “Brokeback Mountain.” This novel came out several years earlier. And it’s better, IMO. Not that there isn’t room for lots of this kind of thing in a big state like Wyoming. 
  • The Sojourn, by Andrew Krivak. So many American novels are about personal anomie, with characters suffering from what the DSM-III used to call schizoid personality disorder. I’m left wondering, why should I care about characters who don’t care? This main character has every reason to be in this situation. He’s an immigrant three times over, having come to America, returned to Austria, and ultimately coming back to America. That is to say, he has no home. Yet, he fights for the Habsburgs in WWI, among so many tribal groups it’s hard to say why they’re fighting. It’s a time in history when close personal bonds are not always present. However, there is no narrative distance in this story. Great trick, Krivak.
  • City of Light, by Lauren Belfer. A little soapboxy, or a lot, at times, but so interesting in terms of the industrialization of electricity and the social movements it either spawned or was coincident with. Take a trip to Buffalo, which once, like Pittsburgh, had a shot at being one of the centers of wannabe old-money American society (ie, robber barons aping blue-bloods…the ridiculousness goes on and on, but it’s worth reading about). What keeps this book out of mere book club classification is Belfer’s refusal to give her heroine a neat ending. She doesn’t wind up unhappy, exactly, but it’s a tough time in history to be a woman and there’s no real way out of that.
  • Collected Stories of Frank O’Connor. Yeah, should have read these a long time ago. Thanks to author Thomas Powers for pointing this out after I mentioned a book of his in my blog last year.
  • Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner. I’ve read lots of Stegner’s longer works, but am only now working through the stories.
  • The Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin. Actually I’m not sure I liked this one, but I recommend it so someone else will have suffered.
  • The Good Son, by Michael Gruber. I recommend anything by Gruber, no matter what’s wrong with it. His books are so interesting and engrossing that you come away satisfied even if the plot made no sense or the characters were slightly impossible. They’re supposed to be thrillers, but he takes his time building place and character, and it’s always worth it. His writing is pretty high-quality. Every once in a while, it’s as if he says to himself, oh, crap, I’m supposed to be writing a thriller, better stick in a sex scene on a kitchen counter. And so you have this awkward sex scene on a kitchen counter (nothing against kitchen sex, just awkward kitchen sex). In the end, though, you learn so much about whatever it is he’s writing about, plus the setting, that you don’t care. Okay, I don’t. The Good Son is about Afghanistan.
  • Sworn Before Cranes, by Merrill Gilfillan. I went back to this book after reading Great Plains (see below), to see if I liked it as much as I remembered. I had initially reviewed it for the Boulder Daily Camera backimage in the 90s. Yeah, baby, it’s still beautiful. This may be one of the most under-noted and –appreciated story collections of the last century. Maybe that’s because they’re almost more like long prose poems than stories. Today, this form would be welcomed, perhaps even elevated over a conventional story. But then it was fairly radical to call this a short story. James Galvin’s novel-or-whatever-it-was, The Meadow, was out, and people were excited, but they weren’t sure what to do. What I like about Sworn before Cranes is the way he’s unafraid to delight in what he sees down in the pockets and folds in the plains. He’s a magic man. Where Frazier is at pains to show the braided glory and seaminess surrounding Native Americans since the Conquest, Gilfillan as a poet and naturalists has interests in sound and imagery. It’s good to read them both in the same year.

Nonfiction

  • The Tiger, by John Vaillant. About a tiger who began stalking and killing some of the particular poachers who had wounded it. About Siberian Tigers in general. About Siberia. About the history of human-tiger interactions. About why poachers poach. About the few people in Russia who are trying to protect the environment and why. And about how not just dead tigers but also the whole Siberian ecosystem is getting smuggled to China and made into stuff we’re buying in Home Depot. With the personality and menace of This Particular Tiger on every page.
  • Great Plains, by Ian Frazier. I hadn’t got around to this for some reason. I remember Frazier sitting in the Boulder Book Store back when it was a one-storey, one-slot place. He wasn’t giving a reading, just sitting behind a table with his ponytail, waiting for people to ask him questions and ask him to sign his book. I didn’t know who he was, but I like guys with ponytails. I kind of felt sorry for him. I thought, Oh another guy who drove across the country and wrote a book about it. It’s a great book.
  • On the Rez, by Ian Frazier. Not sure who else could pull this off. At first you’re not sure who this book is about. Indians? Frazier? Frazier’s kids? The contents of his household? But Frazier is a good, entertaining writer and it’s no skin off your nose to keep reading, so do it. In the end it comes together with a big, WHOA, holy shit that was intense. Nose skinned.
  • The 4% Universe, by Richard Panek. It’s not even wrong, according to some reviews I read by math and physics majors! A user-friendly way to find out a little about dark matter by getting the dirt on how the scientists fought each other to discover it. I particularly liked learning about Vera Rubin, who did some of the important early calculations and pursued her Ph.D. (but not at Princeton, her first choice, because women were not admitted to the graduate school then) despite nursing four children. At one point concessions had to be made in a key telescope regarding the only bathroom…. For pete’s sake, as if we don’t all pee in one place inside our homes.
  • Murder in the High Himalaya, by Jonathan Green. Not the greatest writing but a gripping story. Tibet is the weirdest place to read about because you might as well be in the middle of the Lord of the Rings, the references are so medieval and mystical. At the heart of the book is a moral dilemma that should not have been one—a community of climbers witnessed Chinese border guards shoot unarmed refugees—mostly women and children. A 17-year-girl was killed. The event was filmed. The people who filmed it knew what to do—release it to the press. But most of the climbing community wanted to keep it under wraps so that they could stay on China’s good side and keep climbing in the area. The book digs into the story of the refugees, gives the official Chinese version, and explores the different climbers’ opinions. But overall you wind up thinking a lot about relative versus absolute morality. This isn’t even the Holocaust, where you might have to choose between your life and someone else’s, or between your child’s life and someone else’s. This is about whether you get a sponsorship for a being a jock.
  • Leaping Poetry, by Robert Bly. I saw this referenced in an interview with Bly in American Poetry Review and asked the library here at Phillips Exeter to get it. Bly argues, here and elsewhere, that American poetry has moved too far away from the great associative leaps that characterized romantic poetry as well as the work of many of the Spanish and South American poets, such as Lorca and Neruda. We’re too much stuck in our heads. He’s not arguing for the stream-of-consciousness stuff that we’re starting to see all over the place in MFA poetry now. Bigger leaps, more stream-of-SUB-consciousness stuff that requires a broader base of reading and experience.
  • The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, by Alexandra Fuller. Drawn to the beauty of Western Wyoming, Fuller moved to the area near Pinedale and found herself caught up in the conflict associated with the industrialization of that landscape for gas and oil development. In the life story of a young cowboy and roughneck, she epitomizes this tension. It’s not unlike The Tiger (above) in some respects. Fuller’s controlled but essentially gonzo journalistic style makes these characters sympathetic and gives the lie to narratives offered up by writers like Annie Proulx, which make the same landscapes look ugly and the same people bestial. One question is what are we going to do about the fact that we are turning our last wildernesses into grids full of drilling rigs, powerlines, switching stations, dusty dirt roads, and tanker trucks going up and down all day long? With little concern for worker safety as we go…
  • No Life for a Lady, by Agnes Morley Cleaveland. Memoir of ranching in New Mexico in the late 1800s. Interesting to compare her life with the one depicted in City of Light, above. Cleaveland went East for her schooling and it must have been a shock to deal with the routines and proprieties people in the East were bothering with. Something I’d never heard before: there was a messianic figure who came to Denver, walking out of the Mohave desert. Francis Schlatter was so charismatic that special trains were sent to Denver full of people who wanted to see him and be healed by him. He disappeared, only to show up on the Morley ranch in New Mexico, where he dictated his life story to Agnes’s mother. The title he chose is wonderful: The Life of the Harp in the Hand of the Harper. However, although she recounts this tale about Schlatter, I’m struck by how little personal reflection on God comes through in these memoirs I’m reading about life in the American West around this time.
  • The Victorians, by Thomas J Schlereth. Actually reads pretty well. Packed with interesting facts and figures about this transformative time in our culture. Good stationary bike or elliptical reading.

 

Poetry

  • Way More West, by Ed Dorn. I wanted to reread Gunslinger, but this was what was on my shelf here in my Exeter apartment, and it’s got parts. Never gets old.
  • Morning Poems, by Robert Bly. Okay, I’m on a Bly kick. The stuff that’s coming out right now from him just rocks. So I looked on my shelf and found this, which I hadn’t got around to reading for some reason. Lots of strong pieces here. My only real objection, and it’s a big one, to Bly is that although he means to honor the feminine it’s always as he defines it, and his definition is always in terms of the male. Boring. But almost any poem that stays clear of that stuff, I love.
  • From the Box Marked Some Are Missing, by Charles W. Pratt. Each quiet piece will make you think. Pratt’s had some airtime in 2011 courtesy of Garrison Keillor. Here’s a sample from my blog earlier in the yeimagear.
  • Three Russian Women Poets: Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, Bella Akhmadulina, by Mary Maddock. I was feeling so unsatisfied with certain Akhmatova translations by Kunitz and Kenyon that I thought I might have to try my own hand at them. Luckily, I went looking for other versions, and after reading what was in this book, I decided I could sleep. I also discovered Akhmadulina, who is possibly a better poet (gasp). While I was at it, I read Feinstein’s biography of Akhmatova. Sometimes it’s better not to know.
  • Perennial Fall, by Maggie Dietz. Just read it. If you find anything in there you don’t like, let’s discuss.
  • When I received my fellowship, the identities of the fellowship committee members were revealed, I found out about their significant publication credits and awards. So I went out and bought their books. What an enriching and humbling experience to read them:
    • Evidence of the Journey, by Ralph Sneeden
    • Cameo Diner, by Matt Miller
    • Strange Land, by Todd Hearon

    cameo 

Posted in Books, Literary Inspiration, Poetry, Reading, Writing | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

Is Menopause the Glass Ceiling?

December 5, 2011 by Claudia Putnam

The other day I had lunch with someone who is a mix of colleague, old friend, mentor, and teacher. I’m not sure how he sees me, but I look up to him a lot. That day, I had been spending time with my thoughts and my pages, but hadn’t spoken to anyone out loud. When I caught up with him, I found out that I was a little disorganized.

It wasn’t just that my hair hadn’t dried yet, or that I was some minutes late, which is something people seem to notice in the East, when it wouldn’t even register in my usual habitat. I just felt scattered, flustered, and sweaty.

Later I spoke with a friend who is about a decade older than me, a successful young-adult novelist who told me she is retiring from writing, at least for the foreseeable future. Does your decision have anything to do with menopause? I asked.

I told her some of the confusing cognitive effects I’d been experiencing. Oh, she said. That’s temporary. Your mind comes back. She added: You do get a few years between menopause and Alzheimer’s when you can think.

She was quitting, she said, because she had nothing to say to anyone.

That was the part, I said, that felt like menopause to me. I still had things to say, but I kept falling into these emotionally blank spots where I wanted the world to leave me alone.

An end to nurturing, she said.

Yes, I said. Look, I’ve even wondered if menopause isn’t stalling out the careers of all these women I know in their 50s. They just gradually get either disinterested or grumpy or both. They stop putting out the effort, or they grow unpleasant to work with. The frog in gradually heating water thing. So they don’t promoted, or they get put on the projects no one wants, including them.

Over time they get isolated, which makes them more bitter and more grumpy, and more unpleasant to work with. The next thing you know they’re fired, or they quit. And they can’t find the energy or the interest to go out and sell themselves. Plus they’re angry.

The thing is, this is something that would pass… in, um,… maybe ten years. But because what happened was so gradual and environmental and reinforced by so many feedback loops, they don’t even know what it was, and now it’s built into their sense of self.

I remember seeing a Tweet from an agent. I won’t take any crazy or rude clients, she declared. What about cranky menopausal women, I wondered. Was this agent so sure she would have perfect self-control when she hit, oh, say, 48?

My writer friend had to be tracked down by phone. I’d been wanting to talk to her for several months because my neighbor’s twins loved her last book so much they nearly came to blows over it. I wanted her to know this, how vivid she made the world she’d built for them. The easiest way to reach out, the most socially appropriate given the relationship she and I have, would have been via email.

But you can’t email her. She’s cut herself off from all that. She’s gradually been moving to a remote place that used to be her vacation spot. A very-off-the-beaten-path kind of vacation spot. Now, the only way anyone, including her editor, can reach her, is by phone.

If she chooses at some time in the future, to reengage, will she be able to? Isn’t this something you have to practice? What happens when a woman checks out for a decade or more?

(I don’t mean to mislead. She has friends and a husband. Still, she’s streamlined her life considerably over the years.)

The last time I saw this friend we were climbing in Eldorado Canyon, outside Boulder. When we finished our conversation this time and I clicked off the cell, I stood for a moment tracing the figure-eight knot in the air. I ran a rope through an invisible belay device. Belay on, I whispered.

She’s more an acquaintance—our connections have been infrequent but quite deep—than a close friend, and it took some energy for me to call her, much more than it would have for me to email or message her on Facebook.

But I’m going to try to stay in touch, if only out of selfishness. She spoke of windsurfing, gardening, and wayfinding on her mountainside. I need to do find my way, too.

Woman, you’re on belay.

Posted in Grief, Life Changes, Professional Choices, Relationships, Writing | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Pieces of Silver

October 11, 2011 by Claudia Putnam

 

No small thing, the shine

passing from one person

to another…

 

A poem I’m working on starts this way. It’s growing out of a conversation with a New York City taxi driver in which he offered small “advices” that wound up making a big difference in a terrible family crisis.

The other night I was hurrying to hospitalize a cat and had to stop to pay a toll. Generally I’m frustrated with tollbooths in the East—why do they have them? In Colorado they scan your license plate from under a bridge; you don’t even have to hit the brakes. And don’t say it’s because of antiquated infrastructure—there used to be tollbooths in Colorado, but when something better came along, they ripped the booths right out. People in the East just put up with stuff, I was thinking.

Anyway, the toll was 75 cents and as usual I’d forgotten about the whole stupid idea because back home they just ding your checking account and also parking meters are all credit cards now, so who needs actual money in your car? All I happened to have was this half roll of old dimes I’d been meaning to see about. Maybe some of them would fit into one of the collecting books I had. Somewhere. In one of the boxes packed up in the garage after the move. So that would be back in Colorado? Ish.

I handed over eight really silvery-looking dimes. Oh, hey! said the toll guy, lighting way up. What are these, old dimes? Give them to me.

Who could resist a gap-toothed grin like that? I handed them right over. All the forbearing Easterners behind me just waited while he happily counted them out. No honking or anything.

I’ll let you make some money, he said. Here’s $3 for $2.50 in dimes. This probably means the dimes were worth more than that, but here I’d neatly postponed the moment of reckoning with the boxes back in Colorado indefinitely. And I didn’t even pay the toll.

I was in a strange location with a sick pet. The dimes found someone who understood their worth. This random little exchange of money on the “free”way seemed to light the night for both of us.

I guess that wouldn’t have happened with a scanner.

Posted in Poetry, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments »

Dearly Beloved

June 13, 2011 by Claudia Putnam

It took 22 years to come to this.

I never knew what to do about letting Jacob’s ashes go.

But I am taking a creative writing fellowship on the East Coast this fall. My ex-husband is also moving, and our other son is in college on the West Coast. It didn’t seem right to put Jake in storage, or to drag him around the country.

It’s pretty hard for parents to design a memorial for their own child, especially when they have no religious community. When it’s a baby it can be even more difficult, because no one else knew the person or has any memories to share.

In the last few months I’ve been getting a strong sense that it’s time. And finally some ideas for how to go about it.

Return to the source, the place where he was made. Where both our boys were made.

Eldora1

Climb to an overlook on Spencer Mountain, where I used to hike, ski, or snowshoe nearly every day. Sometimes I was alone, sometimes with a friend, sometimes pregnant with one boy or the other, and sometimes with the second son on my back or at my side. (And always with a dog or several.)

Hold up the urn, a hollowed-out piece of an aspen branch, and show Jake the view he never got to see with his eyes.

SpencerView

Point out the house he would have lived in.

Houseview2

Kiss some of the ashes, taste them on my tongue, and offer them to the wind that slips out of the jet stream to help make Eldora such a place of power.

Then lead my ex-husband and my living son back down the mountain to “the rock,” a boulder jutting into the rapids in North Boulder Creek.

P6120417

When I was depressed and drained I would lie there and draw on the heat of the rock, the roar of the water, and all that melting light from the glaciers above. I did this when pregnant with one son and then the other and after Julian was born I brought him here for picnics in the summer. I took him snowshoeing here in the winter, when the hurl of the wind supplanted the thunder of the melt. “Icy ri-ber” was one of Julian’s first concepts.

As the three of us approach the rock, there are many shared ah-ha’s and remember thises and remember thats. But also some shocks as a treasured memory turns out not to be shared by the other.

For years I’ve had a hard time revisiting this valley because its beauty pains me. I hate that I don’t still live here, that I couldn’t hold on to the magic for the sake of my living son.

And that’s part of why this ritual needs to happen, and why Jacob needs to go now. He doesn’t need to be tangled up in this confusion and regret any longer. This is a farewell to a marriage, a segment of motherhood, and a childhood, as well as to a little son and a brother.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

All this source water. Jake may never have seen this place, but he certainly heard and felt it.

  OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

One of the most challenging moments comes when the box is empty. We’ve talked about burying it nearby, but I’ve forgotten to bring a trowel. Julian dangles the box over the river, stroking it. Should we just drop it? his dad and I wonder. It feels right. But when we do, we all are shaken by the violence with which the water grabs it away. 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

“I guess you’re never ready,” Julian says later.

No. You never are. Not for the final good-bye.

So I think of Charon and his boat on the River Styx, Moses and his basket of reeds. This valley was once a container for all of us, and now we’re all taking different paths. It wouldn’t be right to leave Jake behind, rooted.

Jake&John

Well, little boy. We’ve kept you close for so long. Travel far. Stay safe. Please, please check in. Our hearts are always open to you.

Posted in Bereavement, Death and dying, Grief, Life Changes, Parenting, Relationships | Tagged , , , , , | 11 Comments »

In Progress

May 18, 2011 by Claudia Putnam

Positive discipline, like going for a run, or studying, or writing a first draft—THAT I can do.

But negative discipline: NOT eating the chocolate, or having the second martini, or sleeping with the guy on the first date. That’s harder.

Then there’s accepting, moving on, whether it’s positive or negative. Integrating things I didn’t want to have happen and letting them change me and take me in new directions. The death of a child. A divorce. Like a lot of people, I’m not so good at that.

What I suck at most is allowing the good stuff to happen. What if it turns out I didn’t mess up my kid? He’s at college right now and apparently doing fine. He just got a National Science Foundation scholarship. He’s composing interesting techno music—a former perfectionist, he’s not afraid to put works-in-progress out there for the world. Not to brag; these are his achievements. However, it seems they might be at least partial evidence that he’s alive and well.

What if he’s all right in spite of the fact that I wasn’t the perfect parent, or the perfect wife?

I know. It’s a banal realization—there have been whole novels and movies on this topic—but there it is. I’ve been sitting stunned in my house since my son drove off to school last fall.

What if it’s okay for me to move on, too?

Posted in Life Changes, Parenting, Relationships, Writing | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments »

Broken

April 26, 2011 by Claudia Putnam

Walking nurtures an open mind… The sky is like an upturned plate—a big platter of openness filled with thoughts.” –Liz Caile, A Life at Treeline

 

Deep SurvivalIn Deep Survival, Laurence Gonzales writes that people who are lost in the wilderness and survive often have in common that they prayed. Those who are found but only in the nick of time and only by good luck have in common that that they failed to recognize or refused to admit that they were lost.

Whether or not one believes in God or a god, exactly, it seems to me that the act of praying is, fundamentally, admitting that you’re lost. That you’re a small person in a big landscape and you don’t know what the hell you’re doing there. You don’t have to be a literal believer to recognize that.

According to Gonzales, the mere fact of acknowledging this existential reality can be the difference between life and death.

In one of her more recent posts, the eloquent blogger Andi O’Conor wrote about the woo-woo factor in her life, and how her intuition had guided her to pack her birth certificate and a couple of other key possessions before she took off on a vacation. While she was gone, her house was destroyed in a wildfire.

When you live in a place like Boulder, CO, you become familiar with stories like this, and you don’t feel that self-conscious talking about “the woo-woo.” In fact, it’s only when publishing, say, blog posts for a broader audience, that you would even refer to it by something as facetious as “the woo-woo.”

But as Andi was pushing her post live, I’d been struggling myself with a post on my own relationship to the mysterious, and have only now got around to writing it. Because it’s painful for me. I used to live fairly well immersed in the woo-woo. But for several years now, I’ve felt like my connection to it has been broken. Like I, too, have had to refer to it facetiously, because what I used to see as patterns and significance now seemed possibly random.

This winter I’ve been laid up with a broken ankle and I’ve had a lot of time to think. Also, no ability to walk. But really, over the past few years, I haven’t had a lot of time for walking and reflection in general, due to a lot of factors. And I realized for me, walking really is praying. As a child I wandered around in the woods, exploring Indian trails and roads established by American colonists. After college I found myself in Eldora, CO, hiking mining roads and Arapaho pathways, and something settled in me, a recognition. We know these ways, my body said to my soul. I’m a small person in a large landscape. As long I know how to be lost, I’ll know how to find my way.

Once, when I was housesitting for the singer-songwriters Cosy Sheridan and TR Ritchie, I hiked up on the Moab Rim Trail. It was later in the afternoon and I misjudged how quickly night would fall in the desert. It was stupid of me. I didn’t have a warm enough jacket, a headlamp, or matches. I was the last person out. Because it was a slickrock trail, it was hard to tell where the path went. As the twilight bled into night, I got lost. I picked my way across a couple of ravines to peer over the cliff to the Colorado River. There was a shelf below me and I thought that might be the trail. But if I climbed down to it, I wasn’t sure I’d get back up, if I was wrong. It was getting cold, and darker by the minute. I knew that if I tried to get back to where I’d been earlier, I might fall into one of the ravines I’d passed. I called out, but there was no one to hear.

I prayed. I am not exact about God. Assuming the term “woo-woo” is a little too loose, let’s call God the numinous, for now. I decided to try to reach a promontory outlined against the stars. Just as I attained it, a car was backing out of the trailhead parking lot below me. Its headlights illuminated my own car. I could then estimate the angle of the trail and tell that it was above me. I was able to climb to the trail and carefully make my way down.

Had I not reached the outcrop exactly when I did, the car would not have have backing out just then, and I would not have had the orientation I needed. Was it my prayer? I don’t know. I asked for help.

I was a small person in a large landscape who found a way.

I want to end this post right here. But I can’t. Because for the past few years I haven’t been able to feel this connection, to feel that there was anyone or anything paying attention, that if I prayed, or was lost, it would matter. Everything felt drained of significance. Even if I had an intuition or felt guided, it just seemed like it would add up to nothing in the end. So what if I packed a birth certificate? My house would burn down with many things I valued more inside. Last week I was talking to a trauma specialist about how it felt to watch the Highline—this special trail where I would jog and hike several times each week before the broken ankle—about how it felt to watch it burn during the Fourmile Fire. I said it felt like a psychic attack.

Perhaps, though, it occurs to me as I write, feeling attacked by nature is still a way to sense a connection. And I know fires are part of the landscape. I know they’re natural. But there will come a time when I will get lost and there will be no way out.

ButalaIn her stunning memoir, Perfection of the Morning, the otherwise stolid Sharon Butala writes of mystical experiences that occur while walking around on her ranch in Saskatchewan. In To Kill an Eagle, members of the Lakota tribe describe sacred visions as rising out of the land.

That’s what usually happens for me, with my writing. Creativity comes from being outside. From moving in landscape. This ability to easily tap into the sacred, the mysterious, is what I’ve been missing. I don’t know exactly what broke my connection to the woo-woo, but I hope some walking around brings it back.

Posted in Books, Boulder Fire, Literary Inspiration, Outdoor activities, Wildfire, Writing | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Pushing Through to Find the Story

March 3, 2011 by Claudia Putnam

Today I’ll just link to Andi O’Conor’s New York Times interview about the Four Mile Canyon Fire. Apparently she talks to people as beautifully as she writes. I wish she were building her new home right next door to mine.

A Colorado Blogger on Losing Her Home to a Fire

In the article and in the blog, a poem of Tony Hoagland’s is referenced. It’s called “Voyage.” The poet says:

We had to go on finding out the story
by pushing into it—

Well, I’ll let you read the interview, and more of Andi’s posts if you’d like, to discover the context. It’s worth thinking about.

Posted in Literary Inspiration, Wildfire, Writing | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Unpreparing

March 1, 2011 by Claudia Putnam

A further post on the matter of mentally preparing for death. Or un-. Not sure why I’m on this kick. But as I was in the middle of all these thoughts, a high-school English teacher of mine, David Weber, sent me the gorgeous poem below. It was written by another former teacher at Exeter, Charles W. Pratt.

The poem takes the opposite angle from my last post, where I was saying that I would want a little bit of time to meet my own death. Not enough to linger, but enough to say my goodbyes, to express gratitude, and to beg forgiveness where necessary. To get the kind of footing under me that Jane Kenyon seems to have found in her famous piece, “Let Evening Come.”

Let me be immersed in life when it happens, Pratt says in his powerful poem. I hope you’re as moved as I was.

 

Resolution, by Charles W. Pratt

 

When the tsunami draws back its fistful of waters

And crushes the city, let me for once be ready.

Let me be washing the dishes or patting the dog.

 

When the great windstorm angles across the flatlands

Hungry and howling, let me be patting the dog.

Let me kneading the bread or picking an apple.

 

When the ground shudders and splits and all walls fall,

Let me writing a letter or kneading the bread.

Let me holding my lover, watching the sunrise.

 

When the suicide bomber squeezes the trigger

And fierce the flames spurt and wild the body parts fly,

Let me be holding my lover or drinking my coffee.

 

Let us be drinking our coffee, unprepared.

 

“Resolution,” ©2010 by Charles W. Pratt. Used with permission. In From the Box Marked Some Are Missing, New and & Selected Poems, Brookline, NH: Hobblebush Books, 2010. www.hobblebush.com

 

PC250309 (2)

Julian and Tony on The Ridge at Loveland Ski Area, Christmas Day, 2010.

Posted in Bereavement, Death and dying, Grief, Literary Inspiration, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Massive

February 21, 2011 by Claudia Putnam

At the end of last year I posted about some “night terrors” after I met an older man contemplating his impending death. A high-school classmate responded by telling me of his heart attack a few years back. His comments are included at the end of the blog post; he says he felt an overwhelming sorrow at the thought that he might not be able to say goodbye to those he loved and express his gratitude for what they had done for him.

I spent some time thinking about this. Around 12 years ago, my father died. Although many people admired him for his athleticism and charisma, he was your basic deadbeat dad. A violent, manipulative drunk, abusive in every way.

I don’t hold all of it against him. He suffered from at least some combination of these, all untreated: alcoholism, narcissistic personality disorder, ADHD and/or manic depression, post-traumatic stress disorder from World War II, and multiple concussions. God bless the shrink today who would have to deal with that differential diagnosis.

His brain was sclerotic from the alcohol and maybe from bipolar’s kindling effect, and his thinking had grown rigid over the years. Nevertheless, he had the phenomenal memory that ran in his family and that was as legendary in the local bars as his physical strength. He could recite historical names and dates, or your telephone number. At 73, he was still building docks and boathouses, singlehandedly hoisting pressure-treated beams, and competing in triathlons despite his vices.

He was also hilarious, thanks to the kind of reverse empathy the sociopathic and utterly despairing can deploy.

He and I shared an abiding interest in history and a passion for Crazy Horse, psychopathic dictators, European-theater World-War II machinations, and the Revolutionary War. I owe my retention capabilities, my critical thinking skills, and my doggedness to him. If I was never successful at connecting with him, I can hardly regret where the quest has taken me.dad

We didn’t talk often, because I didn’t often have several hours in which to converse about history and politics over the phone. But one day around 12 years ago I had LASIK surgery. I was sent home and told not to open my eyes for a day or so except to go to the bathroom.

Okay, I thought. Why don’t I catch up on my phone calls?

I called up my father and talked to him for around three hours. History. Politics. But also some personal stuff. He’d been working on his issues, or so he said.

He said, “I think I’m finally able to love.” He said that he recognized that for his entire life, he’d been incapable of loving others.

He didn’t come right out and name narcissistic personality disorder, but isn’t that what not being able to love anyone is? One of the defining aspects of the disorder is that someone who has it almost never can have the insight that they have it. For all I know it was his latest con, or self-con. But I think he really hoped.

Five days later, his heart failed.

Coincidentally, this death occurred at a place that was at the center of our childhood summers. He just happened to be working there. And my brother happened be nearby and heard that someone needed help. He rushed to the scene, not knowing that it was our father.

To be sure, heart disease and strokes run in my father’s family, and given the way he abused his body, it’s probably amazing that he made it to age 73. Still, the metaphors are pretty darn glaring.

Despite the overwhelming nature of the heart attack, my father fought it hard. His coworker saw his paroxysms and ran for help, leaving him lying on one end of a very long dock. When he returned with a police officer, my father had reached the other end, climbed up a ramp, and was in the parking lot, where he was having more convulsions.

Maybe this is just what the body does when it dies, and there was nothing conscious about his struggle. Some people said, At least it was quick. But would you want it to be quick? Would you want to be overtaken by death, without a chance to say goodbye, clear things up, offer your thanks?

I think that’s part of my “night terrors” thing. I had a pulmonary embolism in 2004. For about a year afterwards I’d wake in the night grappling with the immediacy of death. Statistically it’s likely that another clot is how I’ll go. And I would think: please, no. I want to know in advance, a little. Not to linger, not to suffer. But to have a chance to make my peace, express my gratitude, say what needs to be said.

In Who Dies?, Stephen Levine suggests that we all, at the very least, try to become comfortable enough with the idea of death to ensure that our last words/thoughts are not OH SHIT.

For all the warnings and signs I’ve had, I’m not sure I’m there.

Are you?

 

Massive

 

I.

You could say he died of a full heart.

It burst with the overturned blue

of the lake beneath the tree-limned

sky. His last meal: hot dog, onions,

Pepsi, thou shalt eat ice cream and chips

in memory of Me. He munched

in the new truck above the harbor

of our childhood, those years of blue-lipped

lessons in heaving, leaf-murked water.

Somewhere there is a steamer sunk

too deep for anyone to find.

 

The waves tugged the ice-mangled dock.

He was about to fix everything,

he had the wet suit on, the muscles

in his back good and strong.

At seventy-three, the muscles

still so impossibly strong.

Ironman, Olympian, no one

rises up in a massive attack

of the heart. Though you tried.

You staggered and you crawled.

 

Is it fullness, or emptiness,

if a father says, five days before his death,

finally he is ready to love?

 

II.

You could say his heart was full

of never having been ready to love.

 

III.

You could say it was cholesterol,

alcohol.

 

IV.

There are so many ways to love a father.

Seven years old: ski black diamonds, never

letting him out of your sight; eleven:

sneak gulps of his manhattan; thirty-seven:

come upon the scene too late, the giant

purpling before your eyes.

Leave one rose floating near

the far, deep end of the tilted pier,

artery-colored in the lungless lake.

Lonely, beautiful, begging for rescue

from the tourists ever coming to this place,

this harbor of learning to swim.

 

Originally published in Vermont Literary Review Summer/Fall 2008.

Posted in Bereavement, Death and dying, Grief, Life Changes, Relationships, Trauma | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Resolutions I Know I Can Stick To

January 3, 2011 by Claudia Putnam

Last year I set goals, and I made a lot of progress. But I realized that I didn’t always have control over how far I could get. I mean, I avoided things like “win the Nobel prize,” but even targets such as “send out a set of poems every week” weren’t always doable. I got sick, or something else external intervened.

I still sent out a lot of material and completed a lot of projects. I’ll keep working on that.

But I’m committed to making 2011 the year of minimal bummers.

I expect 100% accordance with my New Year’s resolutions.

Here they are, not necessarily in order of importance:

  • Ski
  • Eat chocolate as much as I want
  • Drink as much as I feel like
  • Bake more of the stuff on dj davisson’s blog, such as these incredible cookies
  • Play with my friends
  • Also the dogs
  • Add a few more junk books to my reading list
  • Attend at least two concerts
  • Go clubbing with my kid at least once
  • Find more playful and lighthearted moments in daily life with my partner

I’m not saying there won’t be any major pushes, writing-wise. Or that I won’t volunteer or try to do something less selfish. I’m just not committing to anything that isn’t fun or tasty.

There. That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?

Posted in Life Changes, Literary Inspiration, Writing | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

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