Although she doesn’t publish, my wife Caroline Tigner Moore is an elegant, accomplished poet, one who embraces Archibald MacLeish’s dicta in “Ars Poetica.” MacLeish argues that poems should embody abstractions in images rather than merely stating themes.
A poem should be equal to: Not true.
For all the history of grief An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean But be.
Archibald MacLeish from “Ars Poetica”
Caroline is a craftsperson, one who eliminates every extraneous word so that her final product is imbued with meaning.
She prefers fixed forms, villanelles, sonnets, even limericks.
So perhaps foolishly, I have attempted to channel her methodology in a sonnet celebrating her birthday.
For Caroline, on Her Birthday
Modern poets eschew silken sonnets, consider them passe, clichéd, old hat – like antiquated Easter bonnets – but Caroline Moore doesn’t buy into that.
When she puts her pen to paper, she seeks to frame her words within a fitting form, to render vaporous thoughts concrete, even as they billow, swirl, and swarm
inside her head ¬– sonnets, villanelles – fixed forms that demand strict cohesion, apt rhymes and rhythmic syllables befitting terrain and season.
Oh, how she has rejuvenated my life, My discerning poet, my word-wielding wife!
photo courtesy of Savannah Morning News via Latitude Margaritaville
When it comes to dead-end hedonism, I’m not one to wag my trembling finger at those Boomers who have opted to spend the twilight of their lives playing pickle ball, riding from bar to bar on golfcarts, or listening to classic rock on what they wished might be a never-ending loop.[1] In other words, I’d be a hypocrite to diss the 55-plus crowd who have decided to purchase expanded dorm suites in the Jimmy Buffet-themed retirement community of Margaritaville.
After all, nearly every afternoon, I shuffle down to Chico Feo to bask in its Caribbean vibe and consume two or three session IPAs (on Monday open mic night maybe six or even seven). I will say, however, that Chico provides much more diversity than Margaritaville (which you can read about in this New Yorker article).
For one thing, Chico offers a range of ages, from minors unsuccessfully trying to pass off fake IDs, to surfer dudes with their bronze tans, bleached hair, and intricate tattoos; to middle-aged Folly denizens; to tourists, who come in all ages, shapes, and sizes; and finally, to codgers like I-and-I with, if not one foot in the grave, a big toe testing the temperature of the down below.[2]
Chico Feo in the Morning, collage by Wesley Moore (for sale to a hip family)
Obviously, Margaritaville also lacks economic diversity, which Chico possesses in spades. Economic diversity, I might add, enriches those of us who hang with the day-to-day strugglers, which for many years I counted myself as one. Dishwashers and house painters don’t share their First World irritations but tend to embrace the swirling eddies of day-to-day existence where the future exists merely as tomorrow’s sunrise.
Blind Willie McTell’s dishwasher never went on the fritz, which brings to mind that American musical culture comes to us from the bottom up, from Mississippi Delta shacks and hillbilly hovels, not from the gated communities where Bennington Rhodes is unsuccessfully attempting to tune his brand-new Stratocaster.
Of course, Margaritaville has its share of house cleaners and maintenance workers, but they’re unlikely to be swapping tales with the parrot-shirted McSweenys, who have forsaken the high taxes of the Delaware for sunny, low-tax Daytona Beach.
Chico also possesses a modicum of racial diversity, and once again, I can’t imagine that many African Americans admire Jimmy Buffett’s meld of country and calypso.[3]
A bright lightbulb just flashed on above my fedora: Some enterprising entrepreneurs should come up with a retirement community based on Willie Dixon’s music. I might seriously consider moving to Wang-Dang-Doodleville:
Tell fats and washboard sam That everybody’s gonna jam Just shake it boxcar joe We got sawdust on the floor Tell chicken head till I die We’re gonna have a time When the fish head fills the air Be snuff juice everywhere We’re gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long
[1] I suspect that Eric Burdon and War’s cover of “Mother Earth”: isn’t on the playlist:
Mother Earth is waitin’ for you, yes she is. She is big and she’s round, And it’s cold way down in the ground.
[2] They say teaching high school keeps you young because you spend many of your days with adolescents. I think this is true to an extent. Also, you don’t know how close I came to mixing metaphors with that sentence.
[3] Nor am I fan, except for his early album A-I-A.
I believe that old folks, senior citizens, golden-agers, stooped shufflers – whatever you want to call them – tend to project their mental and bodily decay on the world at large, which leads them to disparage the present and overpraise “the good ol’ days.” Of course, their parents did the same, derided those good ol’ days we fondly look back on as doom-ladened even as they themselves waxed nostalgic about World War II or the Great Depression.[1]
And I can’t help but wonder if this tendency might have something to do with moon-faced Vladimir Putin’s waging war on Ukraine as he nostalgically looks back on the post-Stalinist era of his youth, on good ol’ Nikita banging on a UN desk with his shoe, a lapse of protocol that makes Marjorie Taylor Greene’s and Lauren Boebert’s screeching during Biden’s the State of the Union address seem downright urbane.
The 60s, the good ol’ days
owning the libs
Putin wants to restore the Soviet Empire, a project not unlike restoring the Blade Runner set. Look, I spent twenty-eight days in the Soviet Union in 1989, and I’d never witnessed a population more depressed, especially in Leningrad where virtually every face I encountered was stamped with despair.
If you’d like, you can click HERE for a side trip that offers more specifics on the despair.
Ah, yes, 1989, fun times in the Evil Empire
To be fair, Putin did a fairly good job of fostering a middle class, even in a Kleptocracy, that is, up to now.
At any rate, Putin is suffering from some malady, perhaps Parkinson’s, as his shuffling gate and clenched fist suggest, or perhaps he’s had a stroke. At any rate, he’s obviously on steroids, and some have even suggested his belligerence is rooted in “roid rage.”
What’s the diagnosis? Immunosuppression, metastatic cancer, frontal lobe tumour, steroid abuse, other autoimmune disease, Botox with fillers, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, tertiary syphilis with delusions of grandeur & Hitler fixation, psychosis or simply NFP (Normal For Putin)? pic.twitter.com/MGuuUE8p4T
Given the six-thousand nukes he has at his disposal, it’s pretty damned scary. I remember in the fourth-grade squatting under desks during the Cuban Missile Crisis in duck and cover drills[2].
Now, with my bad back and aching knees, I’m not sure I’m capable of squatting, so let’s pray –if we pray and hope if we don’t – that Putin shows some restraint. He does, I hear, have to daughters via his first wife and four more with a mistress, an Olympic gold medalist gymnast, who, no doubt, is very adept at squatting.
Richard Tuschman, Pink Bedroom (Still Life at Night)
“Sonnet-ish: What Can I do, Dad?” “Nothing, son.”
He quit watching the news, quit his book club, quit shaving. Let the subscriptions lapse.
Sleep became a hum, dreams dubbed like foreign films, the phlegmy rasp of his breathing a cause of concern not broached by Mama or me. He did trudge off to lecture until the dean dismissed him.
Near the end he called out from his bed Mama was out running errands. “Yes sir?” I said, cracking open the door. “Sleep, I need to sleep.” I was fifteen. “My dreams,” he said, “all take place in this room, ghosts, floating above the bed, gossipy whisperers.”
I’ve been devoting un-precious moments of my wee-hour insomnia thinking about Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
[Swoosh]
He’s lying on his back in a crib or cradle kicking his little legs and waving his little arms.
Grandmother, Mother, and Baby Putin
[Swoosh]
He’s in middle school, pasty and sawed-off[1], targeted by bullies who stink of B.O and Turkish cigarettes.[2]
[Swoosh]
Now, he’s sitting at the end of a table, a fifth of an American football field[3] from his nearest underling.
(Photo by Alexei Nikolsky\TASS via Getty Images)
In a recent NYT op-ed piece. Madeleine Albright, who spent three hours with Putin when she was Clinton’s secretary of state, described him as “reptilian.”
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C
So obviously something went terribly wrong with him somehow, somewhere.
He claims to have revered his parents, so they must have loved him – or maybe not.
A bad seed?
I bet it’s complicated.
Then end product is overcompensation. Why all the overcompensation?
Overcompensation, micro and macro.
Micro: Judo black belts, bare-chested horsemanship.
Macro: Resurrecting the former Soviet Union.
In the irrational pre-dawn of my depressive sleeplessness, it seems we’re regressing, devolving, that even in the US democracy is disappearing.[4]
Meanwhile, In Ukraine, babies lie on their backs, kick their little legs, wave their little arms.
[2] I spent twenty-eighty days in June of ’89 in the Soviet Union. Anonymous high rises galore, the stench of Turkish cigarettes, shuffling pedestrians everywhere looking down at the sidewalk.
Putin’s citizens are more prosperous, less woebegone. He’s popular, especially among the countryfolk, c.f. Trump
[3] Approx. twenty yards, two first downs, i.e., 18.288 meters, give or take a centimeter or two.
[4] Folk wisdom insists “that just before daylight is the darkest hour.”
My interest in street art commenced in 1975-7 when I lived next door to the artist Blue Sky. I can’t claim that Blue Sky and I were even acquaintances—don’t recall any conversations I had with him, meaningful or otherwise. We merely nodded and smiled as we passed, coming and going.
To me he was just another old hippie stubbornly clinging the ‘60s zeitgeist at the dawn of the disco age. Even though we were neighbors, I wasn’t aware that he was in the process of creating the iconic[1] mural Tunnelvision on the Federal Land Bank until shortly before its unveiling, which I attended with a few of my friends.[2]
What a contrast in worlds! I wanted to pass through that tunnel out of the otherwise soulless streets of Columbia into the wide-open spaces of that setting sun.
A quarter of a century later, visiting my son Harrison who was studying at Humboldt University, I once again encountered graffiti that blew my mind. The building, originally a department store, stood in the Old Jewish quarter in East Berlin on Oranienburger Straße. After reunification, a group of artists moved into the building as squatters. Harrison frequented a bar in the building that once held French prisoners during WW2. For whatever reason, the mural, with its marching African army or conga line and smiling spermatozoa, thrilled me.
photo by me
Of course, the remaining sections of the wall that had not been torn down also became media for graffiti artists.
a 4 second video I took during the Berlin trip
So, I became interested in street art, in commissioned murals as well in the renegade productions of spray-can-wielding night painters like SEEN, the so-called Godfather of Graffiti. Whenever we visit an urban area, my wife Caroline, who wrote her master’s dissertation on outsider art, seeks out graffiti and murals, and I am more than happy to tag along.
Thus,[3] over a long weekend in Atlanta celebrating stepdaughter Brooks’ thirteenth birthday, we wandered over to the High Museum to check out the KAWS exhibition, which Caroline enthusiastically embraced, pointing out to her less visually astute husband the ways in which KAWS’ work, a crown jewel of the genre, illuminates the work of all graffiti artists.
photo by me
After seeing the exhibit, immediately I started paying closer attention to my physical surroundings, noting especially the shadows of trees on the sidewalks of Decatur, where we were staying. Even at night, these shadows created beautiful, life-enhancing patterns.
photo by me at night
The next day, Caroline suggested we Uber to Cabbagetown, a funky Atlanta enclave with some of the finest street art in the city. Cabbagetown was originally a mill town east of Atlanta, and the ruins of the high wall of the mill span a half mile along Wylie and Tennelle Streets in an electrifying, eclectic array of divergent styles.[4]
Here are a couple of examples:
photo by me
As we Ubered back to the house, we traversed the incredible Krog Street Tunnel, a place so spooky few people attended a Halloween festival staged there.
me again
Obviously, visiting both the museum and Cabbagetown inspired me. I couldn’t wait to come home and create one of my collages.
Ta da!
Blind Woman in Cabbagetown
So hail, museums, hail street art!
[1] I hate the overused word “iconic: however, in this context, I can’t think of a more accurate adjective.
[2] Although the Federal Land Bank refused to fund the project, they did grant Blue Sky permission to use the side of the building, that is, if he swore he wasn’t a communist (Wikipedia).
[3] A creaky looking old word that when uttered out loud sounds so cool, a sibilant hiss of a transition.
When I first started writing as an adult, around 1978, publishing short fiction was very difficult.[1] Hotshot quarterlies like The Georgia Review received a thousand manuscripts a month, and of those three thousand submissions, they’d publish maybe two an issue. Stephen Corey, one of its editors in those days, told me if the story didn’t grab a reader’s attention in the first paragraph, it was tossed in the “thanks-for-submitting-your-manuscript-but-it-doesn’t-meet-our-needs” pile.
Fortunately, my home state of South Carolina has an Arts Commission that provides writers chances for publication. I was fortunate to be selected to participate in a workshop led by Blanche McCrary Boyd. We met once a week for six weeks or so, and I learned a helluva lot about technique, but on the less positive side of the ledger, I discovered that my writing was no great shakes. Jo Humphreys, Lee Robinson, Starkey Flythe Jr., and William Baldwin were among the participants. It was humbling –disillusioning in the positive sense that – poof – an illusion had disappeared.
It was through the Arts Commission that I published my first story “Airwaves,” which was later anthologized by the Hub City Press. Encouraged, I started sending manuscripts out to literary journals I’d cull from the Fiction Writer’s Market published by Reader’s Digest Books, a pre-internet storehouse of possibilities.
One journal that caught my eye was a quarterly out of Richmond, Virginia, the New Southern Literary Messenger. They, according to the entry, received 140-150 submissions per month and published five. The pay was meager, $10, 6 copies, and a free subscription. So, I sent them a story entitled “Almost Blue,” my latest.
It took them so long to get back to me that I had forgotten I had submitted it. In fact, I’d gotten full-time teaching job in the meantime and had more or less given up writing.
I’ll never forget reaching in my mailbox in Rantowles, pulling out the acceptance letter, and doing a little jig of joy. They wanted me to provide a photograph and write a first-person bio. Of course, I was ll too happy to comply.
I crowed, I boasted, informed my parents and in-laws and my new bosses at Porter-Gaud. After all, Edgar Allen Poe had once been an editor of the [Old] Southern Literary Messenger!
I should have been more careful reading the entry in the Writer’s Market, for example, that the journal was 5×8 with card stock cover.
Here’s a Xerox reproduction of the last page. To say I was disappointed at the layout would be an understatement.
My poor parents, my poor in-laws, my poor wife. The Georgia Review this was not.
So now that I’m finally publishing my first novel, I have some trepidation about the quality of the product, but so far so good. I received the preliminary proofs this week, and the editors had gone through the manuscript with [awkward attempt at avoiding a cliché alert] a cootie comb, and with David Boatwright doing the cover, I’m confident that the book itself will be high quality.
The quality of the writing, however, I’m still not so sure about.
A Cootie Comb
[1] It’s still very difficult, but a bit less so with so many on-line journals out there nowadays.
Here’s a brief video of me reading “Wintry Mix” at the George Fox’s Singer/Songwriter Soap Box at Chico Feo on 31 January 2022. The poem is printed below.
Wintry Mix
I’m not a fan of the wan light of winter, the weakening light of day, the marrow-penetrating
wind off the river, the fallen leaves’ decay.
I’m not a fan of hypocrisy, the politician’s flipflop, the post hoc ergo propter hoc array of fallacious thinking I hear every day.
I’m not a fan of fantasy, ogres, princesses, dragons, flying carpets defying gravity, flagons containing elixirs, mages with conical caps, sages holed up in caves.
I am a fan of poetry, though, even the darkest of wintery verse, Dylan Thomas’s father’s curse, John Keats’s death lament – that shiny black hearse in reverse.
Senator Mike Fair, the carefree hypochondriac, has successfully struck a clause from cutting edge South Carolina’s not-so-new new science standards as the Modular Home State continues to lead the nation in embracing the concept of a 1st Century AD classroom.
This educational apostasyphilosophy, according to Senator Fair, will prepare students for the most profound challenge they will face in the upcoming century, i.e., avoiding an eternity of everlasting perdition, “torture without end [. . .] a fiery deluge, fed with ever-burning sulphur (sic) unconsumed,” as the 17th Century astro-physicist John Milton put it.[1]
Here is the controversial clause in question:
Conceptual Understanding: Biological evolution occurs primarily when natural selection acts on the genetic variation in a population and changes the distribution of traits in that in that population over multiple generations.
Not so fast, says broad-minded Baptist Fair: “To teach natural selection is the answer to origins is wrong. I don’t have a problem with teaching theories. I don’t think it should be taught as fact.”[2]
In agreement with Fair is state Superintendent of Education Mick Zais, a Darwinian doubter who for some odd reason introduced forensic chemistry into Newberry College’s college curriculum when he served as president. “This has been going on in South Carolina for quite some time,” Zais noted. “We ought to teach them both sides and let students draw their own conclusions.[3]
Actually, Dr. Zais’s idea of teaching the theory of evolution vis a vis with creation mythsscience has already been implemented in a few avant garde Upcountry independent schools in the state. Your commentator has obtained an exclusive copy of a comparison/contrast essay by a senior at Pitchfork Ben Tillman Christian Academy.
***
Skinner Hodges Mrs. Tammy Jean Weektee English IllI Febuary 2014 A.D.
For the six thousand years man has walked the planet
earth, they have been arguing about how this God-Created
miracle of a planet came to be. And we are not only talking
about people, that are saved, but about pagean people, too.
That being the case, it is not, we reckon, not all that
surprising that people are still arguing about this topic.
This six-weeks we have been studying two different
versions of creation. The scientific and biblical versions.
The scientific version is based on human observation, that
is often faulty, and the Biblical version is based on the
unerrant Word of God. This paper using the block method
will compare and contrast the two theories.
First, the scientific theory, which is full of holes. According
to this, out of nowhere this bigbang spit stars that cooled
and somehow or other little cells popped up on earth,
started dividing and over a ridiculous long period of time
ended up being monkeys that ended up being man. Not to
mention they haven’t found a missing link to prove any of
this.
The Biblical theory is that the Lord created the world and
all of its creatures. This makes more sense. First, the world
did not come from nothing, which even a special education
kid could tell you makes no sense, but from the Hand of the
Almighty. Adam and Eve started out as people, not as
germs and viruses, who could walk upright in the garden
from Day 1. Add to this that this version does not come
from the faulty observations of Fallen Man but from the
Mouth of the Almighty by way of Its servant Moses.
In conclusion. We live in a free country. You’re free to
believe in evolution if you like or in the Biblical version.
The facts, though, speak for themselves.
A+
Great job Skinner. Almost perfect, except that “Six Weeks” should be in capitols because it refers to a specific school-related period of time
***
In other good news, Governor Hayley is expected to sign the bill allowing patrons to bring their firearms into bars without their having to go through training or criminal background checks.
[2] When self-proclaimed right-thinking leftist Pointee Head questioned if Fair, a product of SC schools, could actually read, given that the above clause says nothing about “origins,” he was easily squashed by Fair’s Churchillian sally, “Hey, if I can’t read, how did I get a football scholarship to USC?”
[3] The “naked” this in above sentence doesn’t refer to sex education but to “not believing in science.” Dr. Zais believes students should receive abstinence only sex education and that students should not be aware that condoms even exist because sometimes letting students “see both sides” and “draw their own conclusions” can lead to eternal damnation.
Bill Thompson, prolific reviewer, travel writer, and retired editor of the Post Courier Arts and Leisure section has written a profile of me that features my art and upcoming novel Today, Oh Boy.
You Do Hoodoo 