Clark Street Bridge

No more posting until after Labor Day. Maybe I'll see a thing or two between now and then. It's been known to happen.

This is the Clark Street Bridge in downtown Chicago, as it appeared very recently.
 

This is the Clark Street Bridge, rising into the air. Sure, it's pivoting on its fulcrum, but still. An engineering marvel.

Today I also learned that Carl Sandburg wrote a poem called "Clark Street Bridge." He must have been inspired by the older one on the site, since the bascule bridge pictured here was built in 1929, while the poem dates from the 1910s.

DUST of the feet
And dust of the wheels,
Wagons and people going,
All day feet and wheels.

Now. . .
. . Only stars and mist
A lonely policeman,
Two cabaret dancers,
Stars and mist again,
No more feet or wheels,
No more dust and wagons.
     Voices of dollars
     And drops of blood
     . . . . .
     Voices of broken hearts,
     . . Voices singing, singing,
     . . Silver voices, singing,
     Softer than the stars,
     Softer than the mist.

Missing Haiku

"Judges Hiroaki Sato and John Stevenson have completed their work," a letter we received today said. "We now know the names of the finalists in the 2012 Student Haiku Contest. Entries were up nearly 50% from last year... From among these English-language entries, the judge selected 45 finalists in the four divisions."

The divisions were by grade. Annoyingly, the letter doesn't say the number of English-language entries, but it does say that 102 finalists were selected from those who wrote 800 Japanese-language entries. But anyway, "the poems will go on exhibition at the United Nations International School later in the school year.

"The following are the finalists selected from your school... Ann Stribling, Grade 3, Tyler Jovanovich, Grade 1."

The kicker is that, in an unusual lapse, we didn't keep a copy of Ann's English-language entry, and she can't remember how it goes, or I'd put it here. Ah, well. As far as I can tell, the prizes for winning, and for being a finalist for that matter, include only honor and glory, or, as the letter puts it: "special recognition during [an] Awards Assembly to be held at UNIS starting at 10 a.m., June 9, 2012."

201 W. Madison, the Poetry Garage

Snow tonight, the kind we usually get often from December through February, not just on scattered days during the winter. The entire day was cloudy, with some drizzle. In the early afternoon, I looked out the window and saw light rain and large snowflakes falling together -- almost straight down, since there was little wind. There was no reason to go out today, so I didn't.

Yesterday I needed to be downtown for a few hours. On the way back to my train, I noticed that the parking garage at 201 W. Madison now calls itself the Poetry Garage. I used to pass by that structure often, but never noticed that it had a floor-remembering scheme. I've seen other such memory schemes, of course, including one featuring a different Chicago sports team for each floor at the long-term parking garage at O'Hare. But this is the first one I've ever noticed, and may be the only one anywhere, that uses poets or any literary figure toward that end.

"Each level will be represented by a culturally significant poet from various historical periods and poetic genres," says the facility's web site. "Sights and sounds of poetry will entertain parkers and enable each guest to remember where to find their car. With a facade designed by Lucien LaGrange, this architecturally significant parking garage was designed to exceed the stringent and evolving city aesthetic code requirements for parking garages."

I'd be surprised if the city's "aesthetic code requirements for parking garages" is actually that strict, but never mind. Good idea, Lucien, if that was your idea (he's an architect I've met a few times). The poets and their floors are as follows:

2nd Level: Billy Collins, "Forgetfulness."
3rd Level: Ernest L. Thayer, "Casey at the Bat."
4th Level: Emily Dickinson, "Success is Counted Sweetest."
5th Level: W.H. Auden, "The More Loving One."
6th Level: Alberto Rios, "The Cities Inside Us."
7th Level: Kay Ryan," A Hundred Bolts of Satin."
8th Level: Carl Sandburg, "Languages."
9th Level: Langston Hughes, "Harlem."
10th Level: Robert Frost, "Mending Wall."

Among the Bills and Circulars

This postcard arrived from the poet Geof Huth last week.

28 January 2012

"Dees ----------------

The reverse of this card... I used to practice three poems that were physical in nature, three poems that I could not start over because I was creating each onto surfaces that I had only one copy of, so this is colorful, messy, exact, crayoned, inked & impressed onto & tomorrow I may begin another one of these. Geof.

Manchurian Buckwheat Pi

Every time Pi Day rolls around, I forget to mention it until March 14 has already come and gone. Not this year. Time to post a few links about the world's favorite irrational number (though there must be e partisans; but it's too hard to conceptualize for mass appeal).

YouTube doesn't disappoint when you run "pi" through it, once you get past trailers for the movie of that name. That may be a fine movie for all I know, but it isn't "Pi Pi Mathematical Pi Song."

All I can say about this is, surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman.

By way of the blindingly erudite Mr. Kurp, a Polish poem about pi, reconfigured into English.

I was looking through one of my envelopes of personal debris recently for things to scan, and came across a ticket stub that fits mid-March.

Item from the past all right, but the trick of memory is that I don't remember seeing Buckwheat Zydeco at all, and the only bit of writing that I can find about doing so is an entry in my 1988 At-A-Glance desk calendar (of course I still have it). The entry uselessly says "Buckwheat Zydeco," but is on the correct date, at least.

So that show's down the memory hole, though I probably saw something like this. Another note in the calendar a few days later tells me that I saw The Manchurian Candidate for the first and only time 22 years ago, when it was revived at the Fine Arts Theatre. That I remember, maybe because Wo Fat was in it.

There Once Was a Lawyer Named Rex

Experts claim that regularly partaking your evening meal with your children will promote their social skills or at least dampen their antisocial skills, or something. Whatever the impact, we're in the habit of doing so (though not quite every night), and things do come up for discussion at the table.

Such as the limerick. Lilly didn't know the term, so I suppose it's about time she did. Probably she knows the rhyme pattern whether she knows its name or not. I was hard pressed to think of an example because (1) I'm not good at remembering that kind of thing (jokes, either); and (2) some of those I can remember I'm not going to tell my 12-year-old daughter. She'll have to hear them from someone else.

There's something Disneyfied about clean limericks, anyway. But I did my best to make up a clean example, so she might remember what a limerick is. It's a poor specimen, but here it is:

There once was a man named Magoo
Who cooked up a really big stew
He used chicken feet
Which was pretty neat
But in the end it tasted like glue

More suggestive than dirty is one the late Ned Nabors, my Latin professor, told me, and which I actually remember after nearly 30 years. It was one he knew that used a Latin line, de minimis non curat lex, which is a legal maxim meaning "the law does not care about trifles [or small things]." I didn't tell it to Lilly because it seemed too complicated to explain right now. Maybe later.

There once was a lawyer named Rex
Who was poorly equipped for sex
When charged with exposure
He said with composure
"De minimis non curat lex"

Poetry in the Zoo

After an early afternoon lunch with my editor last Wednesday, I had a few hours to kick around, combined with the ambition to walkabout in Manhattan. What I didn’t have was energy. I’d gotten up very early to catch my flight, without the luxury of going to bed early the night before.

So from West 56th Street between 5th and 6th avenues, I made it as far as the Midtown-facing side of Central Park. At least the weather was good. In fact, it was flawlessly dry and warm. Somehow, in the dozen times I’ve visited New York, I’ve almost always had good walking weather, even in August or November. Then again, I’ve never been in January or February.

Last week the park was still very green, with just a dash of fall. Just inside the park, next to Central Park South, is an imaginatively named body of water, the Pond, which has a bright green surface these days. Pond scum, I thought. Not pond scum, all passersby are told by signs, but eco-friendly duckweed. Probably the Central Park Conservancy, which manages the park on behalf of the city, got tired of people complaining about the pond scum.

Near the Pond is the Central Park Zoo. It was just the thing: not far away, not too large, and new to me. I like zoos anyway, sometimes even better when there are no children to shepherd around. The Central Park Zoo is exceeding handsome, completely rebuilt according to a Kevin Roche design in the 1980s, with a lot of brickwork and plantings. It’s divided as the Earth is, into temperate, arctic, and tropical zones—the latter two formed (mostly) by indoor exhibits, while the temperate exhibits were outdoors, taking advantage of New York’s temperate location.

Wandering around, I saw penguins, puffins and polar bears in the arctic chambers; otters, red panda, marsh turtles and snow monkeys in the temperate zone; and a selection of colorful birds, including the remarkable white-fronted amazon in the tropics. Believe me, those Google images do it no justice.

Before long, I started to notice the poetry posted near the animal habitats. Besides the usual zoological information provided on signs, the zoo has also erected permanent signs offering verse to visitors. Generally, the lines had something to do with animals, though sometimes only tangentially.

Famous poets were represented: Sappho, Auden, Frank O’Hara, among others. There was a cross-section of poems translated from other languages as well: Spanish, an Inuit tongue, haiku by Issa, and more. Reading about these signs when I got home, I discovered that they were installed only this year. I’ve never seen anything like them at a zoo.

In the temperate zone, I spotted a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye called “Famous”—white letters on green Plexiglas, very aesthetically done. By golly, seeing that did me good. She’s a San Antonio poet who visited my high school English class one day in 1978 to read some poems. I think, but do not remember for certain, that she actually attended my high school before my time there (she would have been a new college grad in ’78). I didn’t write “Famous” down, but I did read it all, with considerable enjoyment.

I fed “river fish famous Nye” into Google this evening, and sure enough there it was:

Famous

By Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and is not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

Coleridge, Weatherman

Illinois this June:

All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.

In all my hundreds of postings, I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned Coleridge. Just an oversight. Among the romantic poets we covered in Donald Ault’s English Poets of the Romantic Period, which I took at Vanderbilt in 1982, Coleridge grew to be my favorite. I’d read some of his work in high school, of course, especially Rime, but high school was too soon to appreciate him.

He captured Illinois in January, as well:

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!