She's Not Calling Back

Or, What Happens After Jackie Gives Out the Wrong Number on Saturday Night

1.
Hey, Jackie, it's me.
I'll call you back later on.

Alright?

Or call me.
I'm at home
right now.

2.
Hey, Jackie, let me
call you back later.

I'll be at work—
won't get home until
later on tonight.

If you get my message,
call me—
before eleven.

Alright?

Annotation

I've been thinking a lot about annotations lately. Partly, I guess, it's because I have my students annotating books for their summer reading assignments, but mainly it's because I feel like I learn a bit about people when I see their marginalia.

For instance, I have a photocopy of some pages of "Spring" from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek from a friend. She's marked paragraphs in their entirety, nearly the entire chapter in fact, with square brackets, broad vertical lines in the margins. But what gives it away is the question in script that begins the chapter: "Why such extravagance?" Ah, I want to say, of course it's the extravagance that has you. The extravagance is what compelled you to mark nearly the entire chapter. And the extravagance is what took you to the photocopier, book in hand, to make this copy for me.

I even like my own annotations, as if they offer some vision of myself in the past, a sort of time-travel mirror in which I get to see my younger self. Many of my notes seem utilitarian, place-holders I suppose, but they also serve as some indication of what I believed to be important at the time. A note in "Bartleby" reads "unmanned" next to a repetition of the word in the text. Another states simply, "Bartleby stops writing," at the appropriate point in the text.

I tend to by cheaper copies of books, especially of the books that I teach—mostly, that's my way of encouraging students to buy them and write in them. I figure that if a novel costs ten or fifteen dollars, most of my students aren't going to buy it and write in it, but if it costs two bucks, more of them will. But unfortunately, the margins are always small in those cheaper editions, and I find it's difficult to write more than a word or two at a time there.

In my buck-and-a-half copy of The Awakening, I find my note "like the parrot" next to some French: Robert recalls Madame Ratignolle's spurning his prior year's advances: "Passez! Adieu! Allez vous-en!" (The parrot, of course you've not forgotten, opens the novel with the repeated exclamation "Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That's all right!") And I wrote "Edna's coup d'etat—Her last supper" at the beginning of chapter 30.

Sometimes, I wish that they would make my favorite books with huge margins, maybe just print the text of the book on the left-hand page and leave the facing right-hand page for notes. I wonder, in a world where the Kindle threatens to supplant the printed page, if there's a market for this sort of thing. I can imagine it, though, the entire book a sort of dialectical journal.

To be fair, the annotations sometimes give us insights into people's minds that we probably would have preferred not to have. Thumbing through a used copy of Portrait, I found where Joyce wrote this:

Evening had fallen when he woke and the sand and arid grasses of his bed glowed no longer. He rose slowly and, recalling the rapture of his sleep, sighed at its joy.

He climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him. Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky line, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand: and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.

Sadly, someone has written in the margin, "These sentances barely make sence."

(Sigh.)

But sometimes, I find things so wonderful I can't let go of them.

In a heavily-annotated 1927 edition of Howard Judson Hall's Types of Poetry that I bought for three and a half dollars from an antique store in Savannah—or perhaps it was somewhere else; the place where I found this one escapes my certainty—there are notes in pencil about odes, about the rhyme schemes of sonnets, Italian and Shakespearean. There is a pressed flower in an advanced state of decay between pages 282 and 283, in the middle of James Russell Lowell's "Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration." There is a bid card from Kappa Kappa Iota dated March 1934. By Amy Lowell's "Patterns," the note reads, "No poem expresses more vividly beauty of words." There is a record of grades earned, all of them high marks, in literature, contemporary poetry, interior decorating, and architecture. By John Donne's sonnet "Death," the note: "Defiance. Pity. Triumph."

But before that, and really, what I keep coming back to, is the address of one Mrs. L. H. Pechacek of Oklahoma City, and a circled note: "DO NOT SELL. Keep for Larry always."

Current Rotation

Here's what I've been listening to lately...

• Blind Pilot, Three Rounds and a Sound (2008)
• Death Cab for Cutie, We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes (2000) and Transatlanticism (2003)
• The Mountain Goats, All Hail West Texas (2002), Ghana (2002), and Heretic Pride (2008)
• Alexander, Concrete and Steeples (2009)
• Hello Saferide, More Modern Stories from Hello Saferide (2008)
• Manchester Orchestra, Mean Everything to Nothing (2009)

I should note that I've written before about Alexander's EP Concrete and Steeples, but then, I called it Backward Math. What can I say? Sometimes titles change. And I'll take this opportunity to plug the new songs that Ryan--Alexander's lead singer--is working on. They're good. I can't wait for people to hear them. Lots of people.

I should also note that Manchester Orchestra hit the Modern Rock Top 10 yesterday. Well deserved, I say. That's an incredible album.

In unrelated news, I've been running a bit more. I put in a bit over 25 miles in the last week, and that makes me sleepy.

And tomorrow, as soon as summer school classes are finished for the week, I head back to the Panhandle for the weekend.

Where It’s Likely To Go Better

When I see the moss blown to left and right
from where it hangs on branches of old trees,
I like to think it's been growing there forever.
But forever doesn't apply to moss, any more
than it does to trees, whose counted rings
are a measure of their mortality and not of
deathlessness.

The moss grows, and is pulled down by boys
who jump and grab hold, thinking they are
Tarzan, lords of the jungle trying mostly
to impress young Jane who might be looking
from between the blinds of the windows next door.
Or it is weighed down by rain, taken by birds
and squirrels to form the softer parts of nests,
or falls of its own accord, only to be trampled
underfoot or to wrap itself around the blade
of the lawn mower in the unlikely event
that I should ever cut the lawn.

But I was going to say when truth broke in
with guilt for unfinished household chores and the imaginings
of boys who long to be the savage heroes of unseen maidens,
I was going to say I should prefer to think
it's been growing there forever, blown
swinging this way and that, a pendulum of sorts,
descending from the heights of some old oak,
free on this its earthly end but rooted firmly
in the branches of some tree that reaches
its old arms heavenward.

New Poem at YB

I've got a new poem that Rose Hunter has kindly included in the first edition of YB. Rose asked each of the contributors to write something of an artist's statement about or commentary on our work.

I really like that idea, so long as it doesn't take away the poem's soul. For instance, "The Philosophy of Composition" absolutely kills "The Raven" for me (even though both works are brilliant, and yes, I get that that's sort of the point). From what I've seen so far, the artists' statements in YB seem to add to the poems--they're similar to what you'd find in Diagram, and they seem to give the poems life rather than steal it.

You can read the poem here, and my commentary on it here.