You never know when you’ll need a few hundred water meter covers.
That was my thought upon hauling a sagging trailer load of 13” diameter, cast iron water meter covers back to Wise Acres about ten years ago. Some were painted, most were rust colored, all were heavy. I got ‘em for a quarter apiece. A picker’s goldmine. Or not.
A few weeks ago, Freddie suggested a gravel walkway from the house to the studio, and since we had used some of the covers for walking tiles, they had become silted over and buried. A gravel walkway would solve that problem. A dump truck delivered fifteen tons of gravel, and I dusted off the pick, shovel and wheelbarrow and embarked upon a week of hard labor. This old boy can still dig ditches. I installed edging and hauled gravel until I was panting. Was it worth it? Heck yeah. We can now traverse the path to the studio without tracking mud and the walkway is decorative besides. The huge pile of gravel that remains will find its way to the driveway where it needs solidifying and I’ll get even more exercise. Can’t wait.
Studio building. Haven’t trimmed the pampas back yet, or turned the flower urns right side up, but Wise Acres wasn’t built in a day…
“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” —Carl Sandburg
April is Poetry Month,and if you’re one of the accursed breed, you’re always trying to improve your craft. Here’s one way; The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets, by Ted Kooser, Pulitzer Prize winner, former U.S. Poet Laureate, and writer of impeccable clarity, gentle humor and generous accessibility. It’s so worth reading, as is his The Wheeling Year, a compendium of thoughts from his workbooks. Enjoyable reading for anyone.
Another way I tried to improve my voice in the craft was by taking a Masterclass from Billy Collins, another U.S. Poet Laureate. We had to write a sonnet in this class, after Shakespeare. Here’s mine:
Iambic Tetrameter?
Sonnet?
it would make a cat laugh
my trying to write a sonnet
bring me a full coffee carafe
Ain’t no rhyme but bonnet
two more quatrains shit oh dear
will I come through unscathed?
it’s really ill advised I fear
to be thusly so enslaved
but it’s a Billy Collins course
and it’s only lesson eight
I fell behind, to my remorse,
and, rabbitlike, I’m late
It may be iambic, I’m not sure
but more of this I can’t endure
I think Mr. Collins would have graded me severely, had it been a for-credit course. I hadn’t the temerity to run it by him. But the course is quite good and, who knows, may have improved my outlook if not my craft. Happy Poetry Month. Did you know there’s a Masterclass in hostage negotiation? They have quite a menu. Check it out here. And take a poet to lunch.
Next up: Beats walking. No it doesn’t.
It actually works! Sort of. Thanks to Moss & Fog for this one…
This thing really speaks to me as a sculpture. But as a working thingamajig it says someone had far too much time, money, genius and lust for likes on Instagram or some major social medium because this is more than a sparetime project. It’s a “let’s go viral.” (See video.) In standup comedian terms of the 50’s, it’s cockamamie. But I can see it, alone, commanding space in a large white room at MOMA with erudite folks strolling around it stroking their chins and making notes. It beats the hell out of a lot of stuff in the white rooms. It’s art, and I love it as such. But it actually works. Wow. And that’s all I’ve got to say about it.
About walking. And the BoDiddley trophy for same.
It’s a handsome trophy, and it’s inscribed, GW, GW where you been, around the world and I’m goin’ again. It’s self-awarded and exists only in my mind. Recently I passed the twenty million steps goal on my Fitbit, and that is supposed to be once around the world. I started this adventure on my 80th birthday, four years and eight months ago— walking no less than 10,000 steps a day, sometimes as many as 16,000 a day. And for those of you who put up with this indecorous and outright brag here’s a very energetic video of BoDiddley performing with some of his colleagues on stage in 1968. Talk about putting in the miles and delivering the goods, no one outperformed BoDiddley. No one. Go BoDiddley! Around the world and he’s goin’ again!
Henry Thomas—Talent will out.
Canned Heat paid homage to Thomas in the 60’s…
Thomas was born in 1874 to a family of freed slaves in Texas. He took off early, maybe to escape the grind between emancipation’s gritty beginnings and the harsh life under a virulent Jim Crow system to became a hobo with music in his soul. The talented black musicians of the time had no agents, no ASCAP, no major labels vying for their work. They played where they could, ate and slept where they were allowed. Their work spoke for them. I had never looked further than Canned Heat on this song, but ran across Henry Thomas on Youtube’s treasure trove. Going Up The Country was one of his; here’s a 1920’s version. Note that Canned Heat’s 1969 homage cover changed very little in the arrangement and the instrumentation, even down to the quill panpipe, canebrake flute, once played by slaves—if it ain’t broke, don’t mess with it.