Puptent Poets, 1945

Recently, I picked up a literary treasure in a used bookstore: Puptent Poets, published by Stars and Stripes Mediterranean in Italy in 1945. This refers to the US Army's Stars and Stripes newspaper, Mediterranean edition, during and right after WWII. Puptent Poets, a 1945 anthology compiled by Corporal Charles A. Hogan and Corporal John Welsh III, contains poems by American soldiers on various military themes in WWII. Very interesting stuff. If you know of my work on poetry by Vietnam vets, you'll know why I say that. But these poems are of general interest as well, I believe. These poets are our parents and grandparents, after all. Yes, there are poems by women soldiers included. Here is a poem from the anthology that speaks of the difference between peacetime and wartime, especially the huge moral questions involved. I Hunt Today In bygone days, I used to hunt The swiftly flying duck And stalk through woods of birch and pine To bag an eight-point buck. I used to seek to flush the quail That plump and wary fowl And oft at night my roaring gun Would end the coyote's howl. I've faced the charge of wounded moose, I've felt the jaguar's claws, I've faced the tiger's snarling growl, The lion's hungry roars, I've looked into the jaws of death, And never had to pray, But God, please give me courage, I'm hunting "man" today.                     — Sgt. A. Schneider The poem begins with details we might expect of an American hunter: duck, deer, quail, even the (probably) less familiar coyote or moose. But then the speaker refers to hunting jaguar, tiger, lion. Perhaps as you read you began to wonder about truth, and so on. I think Sergeant Schneider is moving the poem's purview here to a more global perspective, and this makes even more powerful the speaker's apprehension that now he is hunting humans. People. I'm gonna stop talking here so I don't over-analyze this and ruin Schneider's effect and message. This is an honest poem that speaks to each soldier's humanity and, by extension, our own. What happens to a person, to you — emotionally, spiritually, existentially, essentially — when you hunt another person, hunt and kill? Over the next days, I'll bring you more poems from Puptent Poets. And also some of the illustrations by Sergeant Stanley Meltzoff. The book was edited by Lieutenant Ed Hill. The book's colophon mentions other names: Major Robert Neville (commander of Stars and Stripes, Mediterranean edition); Major Robert J. Christenson (executive officer); the aforementioned Lieutenant Ed Hill (editor of the newspaper also, evidently); Lieutenant William F. Tout (fiscal officer); and Sergeants Irving Levinson and Fred Unwin (composition and makeup). I include all of these names — poets, compilers, and newspaper staff — not only to honor their work in/on the book but also to get their names into cyberspace so they can be found by friends, family, and others. Many many thanks for your service in WWII, puptent poets and crew. Incidentally, I've made no corrections. And will make none as I show you more poems. As an editor (in my professional judgment, I mean), I would have placed a period after the "lion's hungry roars" instead of a comma. But how I've presented the poem above is how it appears in the book. Perhaps that comma was Schneider's and the Stars and Stripes staff left it a comma out of respect for the poet. Good for them. As an editor, I would have put in a period at that point because of symmetry. "I Hunt Today" is made up of four-line chunks with the second and fourth lines rhyming, what's called alternating rhyme. There's a period at the end of each alternating quatrain except the third one (which ends with "lion's hungry roars"). Presumably, Sergeant Schneider would have wanted parallel punctuation at the end of all the quatrains. However, there is also evidence to the contrary: the elliptical phrase "That plump and wary fowl" is not set off by commas as it usually would, so perhaps Schneider was not as careful with his commas as he probably was with his Garand M1 rifle. Sorry, Sergeant. However, his use of the ballad stanza is quite good. (Tetrameter line, trimeter with rhyme, tetrameter, then trimeter again with rhyme.) Whoa. Over-analyzing again. Stopping. Let me add one more "lit crit" comment, though. I'm sure some readers will label this poem doggerel verse because of its exact rhymes. To me that smacks of literary elitism. This poem appeared originally in the Stars and Stripes newspaper to be read and enjoyed by fellow soldiers. I don't know if Sergeant Schneider had literary aspirations or not, but for me it doesn't matter. What is important is that this poem spoke convincingly and deeply to readers, whoever they are. Otherwise, it wouldn't be in Puptent Poets. To me, the poem's passionate connection to readers, even if there were only one person moved by it, is enough. Won't you comment, please, friends? To make a comment, look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. If you don't see that, look in the red line that starts Posted by Vince, then find the word comments and click it once. Ingat, everyone.   ヅ Added on 3 February 2015: The next post about the Puptent Poets anthology can be read here.

Wound, Burn, Glacier ... Revisited

One of the things I love most about blogging is meeting excellent writers I didn't know before. Earlier this year, I met Catherine Pritchard Childress, who took on a teaching exercise I described in a blog post in May 2011. Wait, let me back up a little. It might help if you read about this in-class exercise in that post — especially the ad hoc, impromptu, improvisational way it came about — but basically the exercise asked my students to write a 12-line poem based on the following paragraph from the story "VIVA!" by Erin McReynolds. My boyfriend sleeps beside me, and his face is peaceful in the blue light of my laptop. His lashes are long and I bend down to kiss them. Because I'm used to telling him every- thing, I whisper aloud the things I find on the Internet. Things like, "A wound to the carotid artery results in a loss of consciousness in under a minute," and, "They burn the organs they remove during autopsy, unless the family wants them put back in, for religious reasons." When he startles, his glacier eyes wild with panic, I stroke his head. "Sssh," I whisper, "it’s me," as if that should comfort him. He blinks at me and then grabs me around the ribs and crushes his face to my chest. I keep stroking his hair, whispering, "The human body contains about five liters of blood."                                             — North American Review (Winter 2011)                         The tricky part was that you had to pick one word from each line of the paragraph and use it in the matching line in your poem. A word from McReynolds' first line would go in your first line, then a word from line 2 would appear in your line 2, and so on. Small changes in the words (remove to removing, say) allowed. I left line 13 from the paragraph out of the game because it had too few words in it, and I didn't want the word blood to unduly influence what the students might write. And me too, because I did the exercise along with them. Well, I was impressed — flabbergasted, even — by the exercise poems my students dashed off in about ten minutes ... and the two poems I wrote weren't bad either. That experience was the inspiration for that blog post in which I shared the exercise, its backstory, and a couple of the students' exercise poems, as well as my own. So, back to Catherine ... after reading about the exercise, she was inspired to try it and then shared what she'd written in a comment to the post. Here it is, with the "borrowed" words from the McReynolds paragraph in gray at the right. Ragdoll Peace eludes her hard-earned sleep, she lashes out incoherent words, flailing limbs tell long-buried secrets of a past he tries to whisper away with hush nows, there theres, croon clear the blighted artery of memory that burns clean to the surface — a childhood. Family forgotten by light, encircles her with startling clarity in the void of night wild as the twisted vines heavy with grapes, where she blinked tears drawn by mama's hand, clinging to crushed remnants of whiskey-free days, stroking the pale straw hair of a faceless doll. —Exercise by Catherine Pritchard Childress     [do not copy or quote ... thanks] peaceful / sleeps lashes telling whisper artery burn family startles wild blinked crushes stroking This is quite an amazing poem, actually. Catherine wrote this in ten or fifteen minutes. And notice how she uses two words in her first line. (Catherine, I hope you won't mind too much that I edited this a little, adding a hyphen in lines 1 and 3 to match your hyphen in "whiskey-free.") Even more amazing, Catherine then shared, a month later, another exercise poem that, as she put it, "resulted from working with this exercise and a little more time." Oeuvre A real boyfriend would've cared I was only twelve, that it would be a long time before I wasn't jailbait, never had a slow, wet kiss full of wrestling tongues, been able to find my G-spot or even know I had one, that what he had planned for the backseat would wound more than the pink crescent between baby-fat legs. Minutes of his pleasure would remove the thin layer of dignity I cleaved to with the zeal of backwoods religion, sacrificed for a few quick, dry strokes of his manhood. Would have offered a rag for the blood and comfort in his arms, instead of flopping his chest on top of me again and again pounding out his body of work. —Exercise by Catherine Pritchard Childress     [do not copy or quote ... thanks] boyfriend long kiss find / I wound minute remove religious stroke comfort chest body My response to Catherine, in our conversation through blog comments, was this: "I really appreciate the seriousness of the poems, how they deal with such personal topics with dignity and elegance." Absolutely ... dignity and elegance. Since she had written such fine exercise poems, I challenged Catherine to take even more time and try it again. Here's what she sent me two months later. Hush I parked beside a winding mountain road to gather my thoughts before rounding the next bend, a sharp left onto my father’s farm where I'd hide in the hayloft with Jason Martin so we could take turns reading aloud, poems we were ridiculed for reading in view of the real men. Those lost afternoons buried a secret deeper in me than the paperbacks hidden under tawny bales, the one I'd come to tell Dad now. He wants me to marry a nice girl from a religious family, raise a couple kids, work at the mill, Sssh crying babies while the woman gets supper on the table. Wishing for his sake I wanted that too will provide little comfort when I see his face in my rearview mirror, broken after I've laid my future that began whispering in his barn. —Exercise by Catherine Pritchard Childress     [do not copy or quote ... thanks] beside bend I'm aloud loss under wants religious sssh comfort face whispering Just a tremendous poem. The phrase "dignity and elegance" is again apropos, and perhaps even pales. In this persona poem, Catherine affords her character such dignity, such pathos, as he faces up to coming out as gay to his father who will, he knows, be broken by it. Hmm. There's plenty more I could say about any of these lovely poems but I've been holding back. I'd really like to hear what you have to say. Please write me a comment below. And Catherine will be "listening" as well and I'm sure she would be happy to reply. As will I. Incidentally, Catherine recently wrote me on facebook that "My poem 'Oeuvre,' which was inspired by your online writing exercise, was accepted in its revised form, along with another of my poems, for publication in a journal based in Hawaii, Kaimana. Thanks for the inspiration." Congratulations, Catherine! I'm glad and proud that my little exercise had such a grand result. Again, friends, do leave a comment below, please. Thanks. Happy New Year, everyone! Manigong bagong taon! Added later on 2 Jan 2012: After I posted this, it occurred to me another lit mag editor might see the poem "Hush" and snap it up. All because of my hosting it online. Well, I had been thinking about publishing "Hush," so I contacted Catherine and asked if the NAR could have it. And this was on the three-day weekend, no less. (I very rarely do this kind of thing; the great majority of my selections are from work already submitted to the NAR.) Anyway, happy ending. I've made a couple of suggestions and Catherine is considering some revisions. Watch for "Hush" or whatever its eventual title will be in the NAR! Stay warm, everyone!

Wound, Burn, Glacier: A Poetry Exercise

This past semester — Spring 2011 — I taught a Beginning Poetry Writing course at the University of Northern Iowa. A few minutes before class was to start one day, I realized I had neglected to prepare an in-class poetry exercise, something to get students in the zone, as they say. Looking around my office for last-minute inspiration, my eyes lit upon the most recent issue of the North American Review, which brought to mind the fine short story "VIVA!" by Erin McReynolds. I leafed quickly through Erin's story, looking for a paragraph that had fascinating words in it. I found one that contained the words blue light, wound, burn, glacier, Sssh, crushes. Bingo! Here's that paragraph as it appears on the page, with the exact lineation: My boyfriend sleeps beside me, and his face is peaceful in the blue light of my laptop. His lashes are long and I bend down to kiss them. Because I'm used to telling him every- thing, I whisper aloud the things I find on the Internet. Things like, "A wound to the carotid artery results in a loss of consciousness in under a minute," and, "They burn the organs they remove during autopsy, unless the family wants them put back in, for religious reasons." When he startles, his glacier eyes wild with panic, I stroke his head. "Sssh," I whisper, "it’s me," as if that should comfort him. He blinks at me and then grabs me around the ribs and crushes his face to my chest. I keep stroking his hair, whispering, "The human body contains about five liters of blood." I quickly xeroxed the half of the page bearing the paragraph (making sure Erin's entire name was visible) and then wrote instructions on the remaining white space: Write a 12-line poem using one word from each line in the paragraph shown. The chosen word from each line needs to appear in the same line in the poem. E.g., if you use the word "Internet" it should appear in line 4 of your poem. If you use "chest" it must appear in line 11. Okay? Ready, set, go. I left the 13th line of the paragraph out because it was short and thus had relatively few words. In class, I also told the students they could slightly alter the words, for example, changing "sleeps" to "sleeping." Here's an image of that actual sheet (click on it to see a larger version); the handwriting shows how truly impromptu the exercise was. Impromptu or not, the exercise was incredibly successful. The 12-line exercise poems the students wrote in the course of about ten minutes were quite good, probably due in great part to the haunting strangeness of Erin's paragraph. After the semester, I looked back at the course and saw this exercise as one of the high points in the class. Via e-mail I asked the students if they would be willing to share in this blog entry what they wrote in response to this exercise. Two volunteered: David Hosack and Mandy Paris. My thanks to both of you. Here is Dave's exercise; the words borrowed from Erin's paragraph are in gray at the right. my face is not like yours it does not light up when the phone rings it has never been kissed it sees things as they really are it leaks the results to loved ones before organ transplants go through my face removes smiles from children and disrobes religious men and says "sssh" after the first chords of "happy birthday" my face only blinks when it matters my face is not like yours my face is not like anybody's —Exercise by David Hosack     [please do not copy or quote ... thanks] face light kiss things results organ remove religious sssh blinks face · · · · David has written a fascinating poem here. I like how he drew from Erin's paragraph an obsessive focus on the face, that idiosyncratic image we advance into the world each day. Notice how Dave finds unusual and striking attributes for the face; my favorite is how the face can say "'sssh' after the first chords of 'happy birthday'" — how we can short-circuit each other's happiness with just a look. Also, Dave makes a savvy rhetorical choice here to abandon the "rules" in the last line: by not using one of Erin's words in his twelfth line, he ends the poem with a convincing and meaningful closing. Bravo, Dave. Mandy, she told me, is usually meticulous in holding on to completed course materials but couldn't locate what she wrote that day. I remember that her exercise was as strong as Dave's. Instead Mandy offered to write something new in response to the exercise. Here is that poem, written at home with more practice, with more than ten minutes grace: I push my face into that crook and I feel you bending against me, limbs locking automatically. You're telling me awful things, about your mother, about your sister. You whisper because this is an open wound. Our hearts beat together. . . . The tip of your tongue burns as it reaches the scalding thoughts at your temple. They remove themselves, but linger, wanting a way back in. Our eyes catch. I have nothing for you — yet you search me. I can't comfort you, I can only blink — and my ribs tighten like ropes around the beating organ that contains every humane wish I had for you. —Exercise by Mandy Paris     [please do not copy or quote ... thanks] face bend telling whisper wound burn remove back in eyes comfort ribs human

Mandy's poem is a heart-rending portrayal of a vulnerable and touching moment shared by two people. Her closing image of the heart both as literal, physical organ and as the metaphorical, metaphysical "font of love," is breathtaking. Brava, Mandy.

The day of the exercise, I wrote along with the students, as I usually do. I was amazed that in three or four minutes, this surfaced:

P O E M   R E M O V E D while being submitted for publication. Please come back later. The poem may return at some time in the future. Thank you!

I'm an aficionado of crime fiction, especially when it centers on forensics. For example, just today I finished a Patricia Cornwell novel featuring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. In any case, I guess I'm well-primed to write about this topic. But what really surprised me was how much of a "real" poem this exercise was. I plan to work on this poem more: I need to work out who the speaker is and why he's where he is. Line 10 is an allusion to (perhaps a re-working of) a line in Yusef Komunyakaa's poem "Facing It"; I need to figure out if that echo helps or hurts the poem. Etc.

Since I had a few more minutes — the students were still writing — I tempted and challenged the muses by trying again. Perhaps lightning might ... well, you know. Here's what came of that second attempt:

Mary Wonders Why Her boyfriend was just too sweet, leaving on the screen of her laptop pictures of dancing hearts and kissing birds. All drawn lovingly from the Internet. He never thought of any losses between them, not in a minute. He removed all possibility of anger and defeat from them. Had his reasons. His childhood was wild and panicked: alcoholic father, angry mother, comfort a rarity. He couldn't face it again now. His jagged and scarred past always whispering. —Exercise by Vince Gotera     [please do not copy or quote ... thanks]

boyfriend laptop kiss Internet loss minute remove reasons wild panic comfort face whispering

Not as good, quite a bit clunkier. Too much abstraction. (Probably my students who are reading this now are laughing, knowing how I rail so much against abstraction.) I don't seem to know what the poem's really about until close to the end. But for a five-minute writing, not bad. The fascinating thing here, I think, is that I've got the seed of a short story here: a man who, perhaps obsessively, tries to control his relationship with his girlfriend because of a traumatic childhood. Obviously nothing earthshaking there . . . I need still to find out what's really at stake for the character.

Well, that's all for today. I just wanted to tell you about an exciting learning moment in my class. Please don't copy or quote anything from the exercise poems above. They are only drafts. Thank you for your cooperation with that.

Oh, about the exercise itself. This word-from-line-from-found-text approach is not my invention. I first learned it in a Teaching Creative Writing class taught by Sena Jeter Naslund over two decades ago at Indiana University. Thanks, Sena! In any case, you can find many (probably better) versions of this exercise in books and online. Do try it yourself, though. You might be pleasantly surprised at what you end up writing. There may even be a "real" poem waiting for you to do this exercise. If you do use this exact exercise, I'd like to hear how it turns out.

Please write a comment below. I'd love to hear what you think. Hope you're having a great weekend!



Added 31 December 2011: There's a "reboot" of this in-class poetry-exercise topic in the post titled "Wound, Burn, Glacier ... Revisited" . . . new poetic responses/exercises by the poet Catherine Pritchard Childress. Check it out!

Shh, Shh, Shh

Went to a reading last night: a book-launch event for J. D. Schraffenberger's new (and first) book Saint Joe's Passion (Etruscan Press, 2008). The reading was part of the University of Northern Iowa's "Writers Talk" Reading Series . . . and a welcome to Jeremy, who is a new faculty member at UNI.

Jeremy made a sweet gesture at the reading: along with his own poems, he read a poem by James Hearst as well as one by me. That poem was "Newly Released, Papa Tells Me What It's Like Inside," from my third poetry collection, Fighting Kite (2007). (By reading poems besides his own, Jeremy was also furthering the cause of making poetry relevant to our everyday lives, a là Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?" — a now-iconic essay from 1991.)

Jeremy's reading was simply marvelous, a hint at the scintillating career that lies ahead of my new young colleague. Congratulations on the new book, Jeremy. And thanks again for performing my poem. For those in the audience who might like to see that poem after hearing it last night:

Newly Released, Papa Tells Me What It's Like Inside Vin, that psych ward is Dante's Inferno — circles within circles, you climb and climb. The sons of bitches in white, they're monsters and devils. You see, son, you're paying for your sins while you're there. Each circle a privilege you purchase with blood and bile. It starts with seclusion, the innermost circle. Almost a jail, but your bed's made up with wet sheets and you become Satan on ice — the teeth chattering inside your head, stones rattling round and round in a can. Then once a week, they take you down for shock, the mouse killed again with an elephant gun. First time was '46: the bed just like an electric chair — electrodes, colored wires — That's all I can remember. Except for that shock, vibration, a lightning flash dead in the eyes. And on your tongue a taste like bitter almonds or wet pennies. A buzz in your ears like flies. Closest to outside is the circle called grounds privileges, they let you walk all the way out to the high, black, wrought-iron fence surrounding the whole hospital. Air, trees, grass, flowers, the sky. Only the fence, your blue pajamas, saying you're different from real people. But how do you get there? Between is a tortured drama: wide, sloping stairs of kowtow and kiss-ass — mixing with real lunatics, the gamut running from rapists to certified pigstickers, manic depressives to schizos. And always the devils in white, those sadists and macho bitches. But, Vin, it's always the walk I'll remember. The Thorazine shuffle. We're all diviners doomed to Dante's Eighth Circle: our heads on backwards for time eternal. We shuffle like mules rounding a millstone, wish it would end . . . we shuffle in line for lunch, we shuffle in line for meds, in line to piss, we shuffle in line . . . our slippers whispering shh, shh, shh. — Vince Gotera, first appeared in The Kenyon Review (1991). Also published in the collection Fighting Kite (2007).

My father was a schizophrenic. This doesn't mean he had multiple personalities — the layperson's usual (mis)understanding of schizophrenia. It meant, among other things, that my father sometimes heard voices, saw visions. In the Philippines, this meant Martin Avila Gotera was considered a visionary man. In the US, it just meant he was crazy.

During my childhood, my father was often in and out of psych wards. In "Newly Released . . ." I imagine Papa telling me what life is like inside the psych ward at the VA hospital. Some of the material in the poem comes from things my father did tell me, for example, about his being given shock therapy at Letterman Army Hospital, though the details about that in the poem are wholly imagined. The wet-sheet treatment is also something Papa endured.

I suppose some readers of the poem may think of the Dante connection as arising out of my literary background. Well, first, my father was himself a fiction writer who studied literature avidly and so quite likely could connect with Dante. In fact, he was quite an aficionado of The Divine Comedy. Second, my grandfather, Papa's father, Tatay, had in his sala (the formal living room), a copy of The Divine Comedy, an edition with the Doré engravings; as a small child, I used to sneak into the sala (I think now that maybe that room was off limits to the grandkids, because I remember sneaking) and pore over that huge volume. Not for the text so much — I didn't really read Dante until I was in college — but for those illustrations. I remember vividly the one that showed people walking with their heads facing backward, a punishment for the sin of foretelling the future. There was also another showing sinners rending their chests open . . . for what infraction I have no clue.

This poem is also the result of a one-sided competition with my former teacher David Wojahn at Indiana University, where I earned my MFA in poetry. "One-sided" because I don't think David knows about "our" competition. I remember one day in an MFA workshop, 20+ years ago, David had us read and discuss Craig Raine's poem "In the Kalahari Desert" which ends with this striking line: "Shhh, shhh, the shovel said. Shhh . . ." At a poetry reading some months later, David read a poem that also featured the word "Shhh" in the last line, and he may have even mentioned his own competition-of-sorts with Raine. Not to be outdone, I eventually produced my own poem with "Shhh" as an ending, however petty and unpoetic that might sound.

In terms of craft, the poem is written in terza rima, Dante's rhyme scheme: aba bcb cdc, etc. Of course, as I suggested was my frequent mode in the previous post, I use slant rhyme, very slant rhyme. For example, "sons" / "sins" / "seclusion" or "kiss-ass" / "——stickers" / "Vin, it's." Quite distant rhyme in some places, then . . . in the case of those last three words given in that example, the two similar vowels, the trochee stress pattern, and the ending /s/. With regard to meter, perhaps predictably, a "roughed-up" pentameter (again, see the last post).

When I was in the Army, my MOS ("military occupational specialty" or job) was Military Pay Clerk. For a time, I worked at Letterman Army Medical Center, where I helped mentally ill patients (all military service members) with their pay problems. This was where I learned about the system of privileges (that we see also in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). In the poem, I have my father use as a metaphor for that system the concentric circles of Dante's Inferno. (Ironically, my father was also a mental patient at Letterman Army Hospital three decades before I worked there.) It was also at this job that I witnessed what everyone called "the Thorazine shuffle," the way the drug Thorazine made patients essentially catatonic.

As far as larger thematics are concerned . . . that's your call. I didn't have any axe to grind, I don't think, when I wrote the poem. At some level, I guess, I hope you are getting some idea about how the mentally ill have been treated, historically, by American medicine. Though I'm not on a crusade or whatever. I do wish my father had had available, during his lifetime, medicines like Prozac and other contemporary anti-depressants. They would have made his life easier. Nevertheless, he held down a job; he toughed it out, as men in his generation were supposed to do; and he held on to his dignity. What more could one ask for?

Starting Up This Poetry (etc.) Blog!

Friends:

Welcome to The Man with the Blue Guitar . . . my new blog with a name shamelessly pilfered from Wallace Stevens.

I'm not exactly sure what's going to transpire in this blog, but I do know it will focus on poetry, among many other themes.

I do want to post, piece by piece, Dragonfly, my first poetry collection from 1994, currently out of print. Along with each poem: a bit of background about the making of that piece, the slice of life it shadows and illuminates.

I plan to experiment also in this blog with poetry films and animations, slide shows, podcasts, and the like. And of course post poems. And poems. And poems.

Discuss contemporary poets, poetry, poetics. The other genres. Perhaps from time to time post a short short. Or even a full-length short story. Or a piece of creative nonfiction. Now and then a piece of what critics call "autotheoretical" writing. Post the occasional book review. Talk about publishing trends and tips. Editing and magazines. Post art . . . photographs, collages, pen-and-inks, paintings. Et cetera.

Won't you join me in this endeavor, this journey? Let's find out where the blue guitar will take us. This aquamarine ark, spaceship, brave vessel of verse and bliss. This glorious palimpsest . . . Pablo Picasso's 1903 painting The Old Guitarist (shown above), which inspired Stevens's poem "The Man with the Blue Guitar," is said to have a ghostly image painted underneath. Thus also with poetry . . . layers upon layers upon layers. Sediment of beauty and bone, sense and song.

It will be fabulous to have you with me in these travels. And now, be well . . . ingat (as we say in Filipino).

— Vince

NOTE: To pronounce "ingat," first say "Klingon," then drop off the /k/ and the /l/. Replace the ending /n/ sound with a /t/. Now change the short /i/ vowel to a long /e/ . . . EENG-aht. This Filipino word means "take care" and you can use it as a parting greeting. Be careful today . . . ingat, okay?