Lazy Friday with poetry and science

I sit here, still in my nightgown, because there's so much good stuff on NPR that I can't do anything else but listen.  They just interviewed the director of "The Wrestler," who turns out to also have directed another one of my all-time favorite films, "Requiem for a Dream."  He is extraordinarily gutsy and demands an audience willing to take it in.  It's a tribute to how he does it that he finds that audience.

Then of course there's "Science Friday" which is always good, this time about algae (Venice is going to build a power plant run on algae, growing algae and burning it, recycling the CO2 back to the algae culture), Luther Burbank (who described his work innovating new varieties of plants as "evoluting"), and a play looking for wider audiences throwing historical and modern scientists and clerics together to find common ground.  I wish I could see it.  Maybe I could fly to wherever its last show is, I forget, gotta look that up.

My income tax bill was so high this year that I nearly choked to death, then remembered the farm sale and calmed down a bit, making sense of it.  By the day after the email telling me how much, I was in a good mood again, remembering that I am so disinterested in money (aside from the pleasure of doing things with it) that I never plan ahead so I can anticipate these blows.  So, it's nobody's fault but my own.

Yesterday I heard a poetry reading by Chris Hutchinson at ASU, the MFA program's ordeal for graduation, open to the public.  I was awed by his ingenuity with words, stunned at moments by a turn of phrase, causing me to miss the next line.  He must be a very good reader, because I looked him up online and found some of his poems, an when I read them they don't have that same bang.  I wasn't reading aloud; maybe that was part of it.  His inflections and pauses make them come to life.  I wasn't able to do that or didn't try hard enough.

Since I am hoping to get into a master's degree program myself, I was delighted to discover that I would also be allowed to listen to questions from his committee members, questions designed to probe both his creative process and his knowledge of the work of other poets, especially those who most influenced his own poetic development.  Fascinating.  Other students in the program, his colleagues, mostly filled the room.  They were fascinating.  There was so much rapport among them, and the shared happiness of launching him together was palpable.  The collaboration among them was honored by one of the poets on his committee, lauding the sweet nourishment they provide for each other's growth.  How I'd love to be part of such a thing!  Or would I back into a corner, quiet like a rabbit, as I mostly did when I was a grad student in biology?  I don't know.

This semester I've been writing long, long narrative poems about myself.  The poems aren't great but they have helped me mine my life history, comprehend it better, and use it for other poems.  I came up with one already, an extension from my own remembered experiences and suspicions.  Then we got an assignment to write a poem based on a myth or fairy tale!  It's almost as if the prof was determined to kick me out of my rut, though really I cannot imagine that I have that much of her attention.  So, I wrote a poem about Leda and the Swan, from the point of view of the swan, that poor victim, the discarded vehicle of a god's lust.  

That was fun to write.  I enjoyed the research -- the story (mythology is not my strong point), lots of poems already written about it, some artwork, and how big is a swan's penis.  (Yes, they have one; so do ducks and geese... and ostriches, tinamous, and a few other odd birds.)  There is one species of duck that has a penis 45+ centimeters long!  After sex (always on the water), he has to flip onto his back and stuff it back in.  I'd like to see that.  The penis of these waterfowl is hydrostatic (fluids move in to swell it up, but not blood; I think I read it's lymph fluid), and the semen runs along grooves on the outside of it, not through the middle.  It is speculated that since they have sex on the water, sperm would otherwise risk getting washed away if they used the cloacal "kiss" typical of most birds.  Well, that doesn't explain the ostrich!