I love these lines . . .

from one of my favorite poems.


The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

July 4 in Poland, Ohio

You never know when July 4th will happen here. Except you can be sure that it won't take place on July 4th. This year it happened on June 26th -- and came with the added pleasure of a Civil War re-enactment. I'm not exactly sure why this brigade of middle aged men and women moved into town, pretending to be Civil War folks. But they camped out in white tents on the town square for two nights, talked on their cell phones a lot, drank Cokes, and planted a line of porta-potties next to their tents. They marched up and down the streets at various times during their stay, sweating profusely and waving at the cars driving by. I made the mistake of asking one of the Civil Warriors what July 4 had to do with the Civil War. He just blinked a few times, took a bite of a hotdog, and said people like to learn about history.

The Price of Poetry

I started 3 new poems this week, and I feel completely wiped out by them. I find it so strange that writing a silly poem or two takes so much out of me. I can run ten miles with greater ease and less physical pain than composing half a poem. That said, I still think the hardest job is farming. So many of my writer friends talk of my childhood on a farm as somehow merely bucolic. They seem to picture the act of farming as watching the alfalfa grow. What I remember was the feeling that the work would never be done. And unlike a poem, you can't just abandon the farm . . . And there was not much profit involved.

Maybe as a result, I tend to look up the news about the American dairy farmer. The independent small farmer, not the CAFOs. The news is never good. (It might be worse than trying to make a living as a poet.) The more we rely on CAFOs of course, the greater the environmental damage. I can't imagine why anyone would want to operate a factory farm. Ah well. Here's the latest:

"According to the USDA, the average cost of production for milk is $24.08 per hundredweight (cwt or 100 pounds), while the price dairy farmers were paid for their milk in April sunk to $10.78 cwt.

This means that dairy farmers are earning less than half of what it costs to produce their milk. Imagine having your salary cut in half and still trying to cover the same monthly bills. Even worse, feed and fuel prices are starting to go up in the past few months. For farmers, most of whom work too long of hours and are paid too little money, this is the perfect formula for a final liquidation of one of the last remaining independent segments of ag production. For years, small and medium-sized farms have relied on their dairy cows to stay relatively free from domination by factory farms and corporate agribusiness. But no longer. " (from Grist)

Of course, there aren't any reports on the average production costs for poets and writers. How much per weight in pages. And whether it costs more to produce than to write. Evidently if we could eat or drink poetry, it probably wouldn't help much--unless we could churn them out . . . and not worry about the quality. Who would know the difference? we might reason. One poem is as good as another. The more, the faster, the better. Sometimes when I have a glass of milk these days, I have to remind myself that this is milk I'm drinking. Not some cold white drink with a flavor of liquid white noise. No, this milk from a carton is nothing like the milk I drank as a child, the fresh milk with a taste of sunlight and grass and TLC.

The Font for the Most Readers

I actually found an article in the bookstore last night on different fonts! Who would have thought! The article (from a marketing text) explained why one should use Times New Roman. It said that the choice of typeface can affect a reader's comprehension. Roman letters are preferred by most readers because they are the most comprehended, and can be understood 92% if the time. A close second is sans serif at 90%. The least comprehended --anything close to cursive or script. Such letters are only understood between 37% and 26% if the time.

I just love statistics.

Myth: The Cost of Climate Legislation Is Too High

This is really nice entry from Grist. Esp. relevant for folks in Ohio and other coal states. I have heard from several friends who say that their representatives are whining that it will hurt our economy if we institute climate change legislation. I find it so upsetting that politicians think only of the short-term. But this article is a really good response.

And please oh please (if you haven't already, I mean) write your congressmen today and tell them to support the Waxman Markey bill! It's only takes a few minutes to write a note.

"Legislators from dirty-energy producing states, energy-intensive business lobbies, and conservative think tanks struggle to outdo one another with apocalyptic predictions about the effects of mandatory greenhouse gas emission reductions. See, for example, the Chamber of Commerce’s video showing children shivering in the cold (really). As climate legislation evolves this year, the rhetoric is ramping up again, led by the Wall Street Journal editorial page and doomsayers-for-hire at the Heritage Institute and the Chamber of Commerce.

The mainstream media passes along this kind of Chicken Littleism in gutless he-said she-said fashion, so the public rarely hears the truth: mainstream economists pretty well agree that the impact of a carbon pricing system on the economy will be modest.

Last year EDF did an analysis (PDF) of six separate forecasts of the economic impact of a cap-and-trade, from leading nonpartisan academic and government agency sources. The median prediction was a hit to GDP growth of between 0.5 and 1 percent by 2030. Instead of doubling by January 2030, U.S. GDP would, in the most pessimistic scenarios, double by ... July 2030. (Doooomed!)

Some analysts are even more optimistic, projecting climate targets will be met at net-zero cost or even with a boost to GDP. Perhaps they recall that economists wildly overestimated the cost of the last U.S. cap-and-trade program; the sulfur dioxide trading regime, designed to fight acid rain, came in about 90 percent cheaper than official projections.

Here’s a short list of things that will damage the economy far worse than tackling climate change: the current mortgage/banking/credit crisis, rising fossil fuel prices, competitive disadvantage in burgeoning global clean energy markets, and, oh yeah, climate change itself. Compared to the alternatives, reducing climate emissions looks like a spectacular bargain. (For more on this economic consensus, see Eric Pooley.)"

One Thing I Hate about Summer

The one thing I hate about summer is lawn care. I know. I should have better things to think about. But I am always offending my neighbors by going natural. My yard is like the girl who refuses to wear a bra or shave her pits and legs, I sometimes think, remembering the 60s and 70s. But now, not many ladies go natural. And Chem Lawn owns most of the yards in these parts. Some of my friends keep telling me that the chemical fertilizers are actually natural. I won't go into that . . . But I will post an excerpt below from a New Yorker article that I find helpful.

(I know, I should be talking about poems, not lawns. But for many it seems their lawns and gardens are their poems . . . )

"The greener, purer lawns that the chemical treatments made possible were, as monocultures, more vulnerable to pests, and when grubs attacked the resulting brown spot showed up like lipstick on a collar. The answer to this chemically induced problem was to apply more chemicals. As Paul Robbins reports in “Lawn People” (2007), the first pesticide popularly spread on lawns was lead arsenate, which tended to leave behind both lead and arsenic contamination. Next in line were DDT and chlordane. Once they were shown to be toxic, pesticides like diazinon and chlorpyrifos—both of which affect the nervous system—took their place. Diazinon and chlorpyrifos, too, were eventually revealed to be hazardous. (Diazinon came under scrutiny after birds started dropping dead around a recently sprayed golf course.) The insecticide carbaryl, which is marketed under the trade name Sevin, is still broadly applied to lawns. A likely human carcinogen, it has been shown to cause developmental damage in lab animals, and is toxic to—among many other organisms—tadpoles, salamanders, and honeybees. In “American Green” (2006), Ted Steinberg, a professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, compares the lawn to “a nationwide chemical experiment with homeowners as the guinea pigs.”

Meanwhile, the risks of the chemical lawn are not confined to the people who own the lawns, or to the creatures that try to live in them. Rain and irrigation carry synthetic fertilizers into streams and lakes, where the excess nutrients contribute to algae blooms that, in turn, produce aquatic “dead zones.” Manhattanites may not keep lawns, but they drink the chemicals that run off them. A 2002 report found traces of thirty-seven pesticides in streams feeding into the Croton River Watershed. A few years ago, Toronto banned the use of virtually all lawn pesticides and herbicides, including 2,4-D and carbaryl, on the ground that they pose a health risk, especially to children."

Simon Says

I love my new book of poems, Broken World, by Joseph Lease. So much of the book is a surprise. He really has a different muse . . . with lines like the following from "Prayer, Broken Off":

Simon says, put your hands on your head, Simon says, put your finger up your nose, Simon says you don't have enough, Simon says you don't care enough, Simon says, you can't stop caring--

I love Al Gore

I was going to write something about writing, about my recent trip to Maine, about the incredible beauty of that state, especially at this time of year when the tourists aren't there yet, but then I saw this video of Al Gore. It's about a half hour long--sort of an updated, short version on An Inconvenient Truth. (It also takes a while to load, so if you want to watch it, be patient. )

www.aaas.org/meetings/2009/program/lectures/media/20090213gore_autoplay.swf

Ohio's Coal Representative, Charlie Wilson

I really hate it when you know your congressman answers first to the coal companies--when your congressmen seem to think it's more important to save our coal companies than our planet.

Here are a few excerpts Jim received from Congressman Charlie Wilson about the Waxman Markey bill, which is (it seems to me) way too soft on coal companies as it stands . . .

"Thank you for contacting me to express your concerns over the recently proposed carbon cap and trade legislation. I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue . . .

On May 15th, Congressman Henry Waxman from California and Congressman Ed Markey from Massachusetts introduced the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (HR 2454). This legislation would create a mandatory program for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and make significant changes to our nation's energy policies. While I believe it is important to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, I was disheartened to see that this bill would impose too steep a cost on the use and advancement of our domestic resources, including our area’s major resource, coal."

Okay, Charlie. So--how exactly are you going to reduce greenhouse emissions- and also depend on coal?? Wilson goes on . . .. grrr. . . with statements like:

"That is why I have taken my concerns to both Congressmen two separate times--once as a member of the Ohio delegation and once as member of “coal state” representatives."

"Today, 86% of Ohio’s power comes from coal and we know that the United States has over 200 years of proven coal reserves. Limiting domestic energy production by implementing an excessive federal renewable electricity standard or mandating unproven technology for new coal plants just doesn’t make sense."

Okay, I'll stop now. It just makes me so sad to know that if we continue to keep burning coal at the present rate, we will see all of the worst possible consequences of climate change.

Of course that's real sense, not political sense. The average politician doesn't seem to look at the big picture but is only concerned with his small political career. But of course, of course, of course.

It's always depressing to be reminded (yet again) who our representative serves. And why. Of course, the Charlie Wilsons of the world always assume that the ordinary Ohioan doesn't pay attention to what they do. And they know the coal companies are watching-and writing the checks to keep them voting their way. Sigh.

I hate politics.

Michael Pollan's Fruity Pebbles

I love this --taken from a California blog:

" Bowl devotee Michael Pollan tells how a fellow shopper interrupted him to register disappointment that Pollan was buying Fruity Pebbles for his daughter. Damn skippy! If, after feeling guilty about my dietary transgressions due to reading the veritable avalanche of Pollan’s books and articles, I caught him slipping a box of Fruity Pebbles into his cart, I might be inspired to fling my own unripe avocado at his head."

Maybe Pollan should move to Youngstown. Here where the Fruity Pebbles are abundant, and cheap too, where the likes of a Michael Pollan would be happily anonymous. But then again, if he were buying some of that free-range arugula or some locally grown avocados--questions might be asked.

Yep, there are a few farmers around here who claim to already have some locally grown eggplants, avocados, pineapples, mangoes . . . maybe fruity pebbles too.

Isn't Frito-Lay now claiming to have some locally grown chips? I think so. I wonder if Pollan is adding chips to his cart now.

Screening Books for a Contest

I just finished screening 100 books for the Kent contest. Five go on to the final round. It's heartbreakingly simple to do . . . Heartbreaking because so there are just so many poets, so many pages, so many hearts spilled out on the page. Simple in the way that cream rises to the top. A good book announces itself. It has something to say and to say beautifully.

I love this Jimmy!

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jima/manlauncher_almostfinished.mov

Reading for the contest . . .

About half way thru reading for the contest, and I have one book I am so in love with. I can't imagine I will find a better one. It's so exciting.

And I have a second place choice, too. I am so relieved to find these two books I love.

I am supposed to choose 4.

Contest Reading

Reading for a contest. 5 books down, 95 to go . . .

Reading at the Literary Cafe

literarycafe.net/blog/?p=1306

Well, I won't watch this video of me reading. I can't stand to watch myself. But here it is.

And it was such a fun event. Two of the best things about it: Amber came with her friend and husband from Dayton. (Thanks Amber!!) And Suzanne was home for it as well.

Being a writer in your later years

My father was a talented pianist. But as he aged, he lost his ability to play. Or so he said. His friends didn't believe him, and sometimes at parties they would ask him to perform. I remember the late time he obliged. I was in grade school, and on this particular night, he played one piece after another with such zeal. I liked to watch his hands race over the keys, so I went to stand by his side. It was then that I noticed a sprinkling of blood on the keys. A small sprinkling, to be sure. But I announced it to the room. My father stopped suddenly, wiped the keys with his handkerchief, and sat down.

He was on several kinds of medicine then. I don't know which or what diagnosis he had a that time, but I do know he always said his skin was thin. And he would often mix his meds and take more than was recommended.

After he sat down, the room felt so quiet. A bleak mood hung over the room. That was when Eleanor Ross Taylor, a poet and friend of my parents, turned and said to me in her quiet voice: being a writer is one of the kindest arts. You can do it well even as you age. In fact it can become your friend in your later years.

I've always taken comfort in her words.

Reading

Michael Mahon and Nin Andrews
Thursday May 14, 2009 at 9:30pm
Literary Cafe
literarycafe.net
1031 Literary Rd
Cleveland, OH 44113-4442
(216) 861-3922

Just say no to pork . . .

Friends keep telling me that pork is safe, that you can't get swine flu from eating pork. I don't know. I think you can get a lot of things from eating pork, and evidently, so does the WHO. And even if you don't get sick, you might just want to do a little reading on how pigs are raised and marketed these days.

And then there's this quote from Grist . . .

"Don’t associate U.S. pork with the swine flu outbreak—you can’t catch it through pork. Plus, no pigs on U.S. CAFOs are infected with it.

That’s message the industry and the USDA are straining to get across, anyway. Except ... you can catch swine flu from pork, according to the World Health Organization. "

Yep, you can catch it from pigs, and no one knows if US pigs are infected. They aren't exactly rushing to find out either.

Birthday Week

It was my birthday week! It's exciting to be so old. I think so. How can it not be? I guess the philosopher in me is talking. But I do think about the miracle of being alive at all, much less in this way, in this peculiar body and mind and spirit and time and state and country and, and, and

with these great friends and folks . . .

I do feel dangerously lucky. Some part of me is afraid to celebrate for fear I will be punished for feeling this happy.

After so many catch-up phone calls and notes and so forth, I have a small tower of new books to read. Among them this funny book, Overqualified, by Joey Comeau, which is collection of hysterical letters addressed to different corporations, requesting a job.

And I should now be the envy of all the prose poets out there . . . because Jim found a hardback copy of The Prose Poem, an International Anthology, in great condition! Yep. The Michael Benedikt anthology from 1976! Amazing. (It's the best anthology of prose poems out there, but good luck finding a copy that is in readable shape. I searched everywhere for this book.)

Touring the Coal Power Plant

I’d like to say I learned something on the tour of the coal power plant, but we had to wear goggles, hard hats, and insert these orange earplugs, so I could barely hear at all. (We also had to wear natural fibers. I guess they didn't want us wearing anything too flammable.)

Our tour leader was so enthusiastic. He kept pointing to things and opening and closing his mouth. We all nodded and stared at him vaguely. This must be what it's like to be deaf, I thought. The building was humming and giving off a smell like hard-boiled eggs.

When I leaned in close, I could hear an occasional sentence from the tour guide . . .

This is where the pulverized coal is blown into the furnace.
This is the fireball. It's 2000 degrees. (It hurt my eyes to look at it. The sun's surface is 6000 degrees.)
This is where the steam is returned to water.
This is where the plant is monitored. (It was this room with both modern computer equipment and the old technology: levers and dials and I'm not at all sure what else.)
This is the roof, and from here, you can see the coal heap. You can see the water we used for cooling. It’s clean enough to swim in.
Would you swim in it? I asked.
No, he laughed.
Do you worry about the ash? I asked. (On the rooftop, there was a dusting of ash blowing around.) But I don’t think he heard my question.

Inside the coal power plant

Inside the Crawford plant in Chicago, after we made it through security (which took ages), they gave us lunch ( pizza and soda), a lecture, and a tour. The plant-folks seemed a little anxious. UCS isn’t exactly Greenpeace, but it is an environmental organization. And the Crawford Plant, owned by Midwest Generation, has been in the news in the past few years for spewing deadly toxins into the Chicago air and increasing the risk and incidence rate of asthma. Because the Crawford plant is old (built in 1924), it has been exempt from the more rigorous clean air regulations. The EPA has cited the plant for violations in the recent past—for pumping out emissions with more soot and particulates than the law allows.

The Crawford speakers gave us a tidy power point presentation. (I think it was tidy, but I almost fell asleep when they got into the history and some of the more extensive scientific explanations of its operations.) They explained that they were working hard to clean up their operation. They talked about their control technologies for reducing toxic emissions such as mercury, nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide, claiming that their emissions of the latter are below state and federal limits. They also made of point of saying they import their coal Wyoming because it’s lower sulfur coal. Only the cleanest coal, I guess. No Midwest coal there.

It sounded good, but I have trouble thinking of clean and coal in the same sentence. And I’m terrible at statistics. Statistics do something to my brain. I never know what they mean. And my brain just goes around and around the numbers. For example, one man there mentioned they had a 30% reduction of nitrogen oxide emissions. Compared to what? What is the starting point? What would a new coal plant emit? And how much nitrogen oxide do we really want to inhale? Or mercury? Or sulfur dioxide?

All the same, I was really impressed with how nice the men there were. I mean, they seemed to love their job at the plant. And they loved chatting it up.

Just a spoonful of sugar makes the toxins sound fine.

At the end of the presentation they had a display of their community projects and prizes. One was a green award. When someone asked why they got an environmental award, they said they thought it was for planting trees in a park.

98% of What Folks Think of You

Last weekend we visited Chicago.


Actually, we visited the Crawford coal-fired power plant with other members of the Union of Concerned Scientists. It was weird. I mean, it was like like taking a school field trip to the dark side.

We rode in on a black, unmarked bus, passing the nice urban sights and traveling into a less affluent neighborhood to the site of the power plant.


Stop 1: Security.
They photo-copied our driver’s licenses and waved their magic wands over each of us as we stood in front of a large poster of a security guard in uniform with these words written across the top:

98% of what people think of you is based on your appearance.

98%?

What accounts for the other 2%?

Your smell?
Your voice . . . or accent?
Your handshake?


(I was reminded of my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Dorrier, who used to tell us she could tell everything about a child from her handshake. All these years, I’ve been misinformed. I’ve been worried about something that accounts for less that 2% of the impression I might make on a person.)

I kept thinking about that poster after we left. How the presentation was very nice. Everything "looked" okay. Well, maybe not exactly okay, if you take into account the ash floating around. The scent of sulfur. The pile of coal outside. But still, the folks there seemed so genuine and nice, even if coal is anything but nice, no matter how clean you try to make it sound/look/smell, etc..

Hot Sauce

Last weekend we visited Chicago. For every city I visit, I tell myself I have to discover a new love.

This trip it was hot sauce. Yep. Hot sauce on eggs.

Do you want some hot sauce with those eggs?

Now that you mention it, I think I do.

Senator Sherrod Brown

April 20, 2009
By Sen. Sherrod Brown
Special to Roll Call


Everyone knows that Ohio and the industrial Midwest have been hit especially hard by this recession. What many people don't understand is that climate change legislation can make our region and our country stronger.

Across my state, manufacturing towns such as Toledo, Cleveland, Dayton, Youngstown and Columbus are leading the way in advanced manufacturing for new clean energy technologies. Our state and our nation need this boost in manufacturing, because in important ways, manufacturing jobs anchor our nation's middle class.

Manufacturing jobs can provide wages and benefits that enable homeownership and economic security for working families. Manufacturing jobs tend to have a strong multiplier effect on economic activity that bolsters our nation's gross domestic product, and they are critical to supporting vital public services and schools in communities across the nation.

But clean energy policy is far more than a means of bolstering U.S. manufacturing. If we care about the world in which we live and the generations that will follow us, then we must no longer dismiss the lethal risks global warming poses to our planet. We must craft an aggressive strategy to combat global warming, and we must do it now.

And there's yet another reason for focusing on clean energy policy. The United States cannot safely remain dependent on foreign sources of energy. We cannot break free of this dependence without getting serious about producing our own energy sources and increasing the efficiency with which we use the energy available to us.

Whether it's reducing carbon emissions to combat global warming, increasing energy efficiency or securing U.S.-based energy sources, all of these goals underscore the importance of clean energy manufacturing. It's important to note that such manufacturing is not a narrow sector defined by finished products such as wind turbines and hybrid engines. Current industries - such as steel, glass, aluminum and cement - are necessary for the construction of our nation's renewable energy future. A modern wind turbine, for example, requires the same amount of steel as 250 midsize sedans.

We must not simply trade our dependence on foreign oil for a dependence on foreign manufactured renewable energy sources. The right, clean-energy-oriented climate change policy will not only spur demand for new energy sources, but it will also put in place the foundation for these technologies to be developed and built here in America.

And what is true for manufacturing is true for all industries. Climate change legislation must ensure that the steps we take to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels does not simply shift the smoke from our stacks to those in the developing world.

Some people would say that our current economic crisis compels us to delay action on comprehensive climate change legislation. I disagree. Inaction is not an option. Capping carbon emissions can create new jobs in a clean energy economy. Without action, we face dangerous consequences. We risk the health of our citizens, the viability of our coastal areas, the productivity of our nation's farms, forests and fisheries, and the long-term economic and national security of our country.

We can enact climate change legislation that does not needlessly pick winners and losers among regions, workers or industries. Done right, climate change legislation will improve our nation's competitiveness by creating new jobs and developing new technologies. We must confront the twin challenges of our economy and environment with a robust and thoughtful response. And we must recognize that climate change legislation is an opportunity to rebuild our nation's manufacturing base.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) serves on the Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committees and chairs the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Subcommittee on Economic Policy. Brown is the author of the Green Energy Production Act and the Regional Economic Recovery Coordination Act.

The Winning Font

The other day a friend was telling me how much he hates judging poetry contests. He said the last time he chose a winner, he wasn't sure about the book. But he really liked the font.

I keep thinking about that font. It sounded a little like he was saying--the girl was really dumb, but he really liked the way she walked, giggled, talked . . .

At the same time, I know that when you read a lot of books, the appearance matters. I'm not sure I've ever thought much about the fonts. I don't even know which fonts I like or don't like.

I wonder if there is winning font.