Michael J. DeLuca

is tonight at 6:00 PM at the Manchester, NH Barnes & Noble. I am readying the sixth episode of the epic saga of William-O the Pirate King even as we speak.

Obviously I’m due for a bunch of updates on Readercon, the Homeless Moon chapbook, TNEO and suchlike, but that stuff will have to wait until next week.

There’s going to be a Clockwork Phoenix reading at Readercon on Friday afternoon at 3 PM, in which I shall participate, along with such zen masters of awesomeness and the literary bizarre as Cat Rambo, Vandana Singh, Ekaterina Sedia, Leah Bobet and Laird Barron. Woo.

As per my usual pre-reading ritual, I shall now commence shaking in my boots. And reciting the opening lines to “The Tarrying Messenger” like a mantra in my head.

Perhaps you knew we lunatics of the Moon were making a chapbook. Well, it happened. I picked them up from the printer on Friday and will chariot them to Readercon on Thursday. They look like this:

See the announcement on The Homeless Moon. Go on over and download a copy. Go ahead, it’s not like we’re charging for them. They are some good stories. You’ll like them.

(Post title to be recited to the refrain of Tenacious D’s Explosivo)

These people:

http://biotruck.co.uk/

claim to have undertaken the world’s first carbon-negative desert journey in a vehicle powered by chocolate. I know, it sounded absurd and dubious to me too. But they do have quite a bit of documentation, including five pages of calculations by some third-party oversight group. Their definition of “carbon-negative” could certainly be more stringent. And it’s not like chocolate is the world’s most readily abundant natural resource. But still.

Found this in a shady spot on the banks of the Westfield River East Branch.

These were the rites of morning by a low concrete
parapet under the copper spears of the palms,
since men sought fame as centaurs, or with their own feet,

or wrestlers circling with pincer-extended arms,
or oblong silhouettes racing round a white vase
of scalloped sand, when a boy on a pounding horse

divided the wrestlers with their lowering claws
like crabs. As in your day, so with ours, Omeros,
as it is with islands and men, so with our games.

A horse is skittering spray with rope for its rein.
Only silhouettes last. No one remembers the names
of foam-sprinters. Time halts the arc of a javelin.

—Derek Walcott, Omeros

Another brief, sublime sojourn in my chaotic odyssey through modern epic poetry in English. Derek Walcott is a Caribbean author born in St. Lucia, who now apparently teaches writing at Boston University. Omeros is a novel-length epic about two fishermen, Hector and Achille, whose friendship is broken over a woman, Helen. It has inspired me to no end. Not only does its verse follow a fairly strict meter, it adheres to this three-line structure throughout, and even actually rhymes not infrequently, yet without coming across as singsongy or stilted. It’s certainly the most unpretentious and accessible epic poem I’ve ever encountered. And it was published, I was surprised to discover, in 1990—long after the advent of the contemporary poetic taboo on metrical rigidity and rhyme, at least as I understood it. I am constantly amazed at the mileage he gets, in terms of variety and stylistic weight, out of little innovations in rhythm. The shortening of “Achilles” to “Achille”, for example. Or the way he interchanges the words “canoe” and “pirogue” to put the accent where it needs to be in a sentence. Often he will seamlessly digress into French or Caribbean patois for a line or a word, conveying both a rich sense of this cobbled-together post-colonial culture and a lesson in the versatility of verse. There’s still a certain amount of overhead, which I encounter whenever I read poetry, where I have to re-learn how to read both for meaning and sound—but in most cases, I end up having to reread at least once in order to get both senses. Here, I can actually do both at once. Which isn’t to say I haven’t been going back to reread—but I’m doing it out of desire rather than necessity.

The other astonishing thing is the way the influences of these disparate cultures combine to make the epic form feel new—and to make it applicable and relevant to events in the lives of a couple of poor, modern-day fishermen. At one point (which I’m not going to be able to find now) he compares a tropical storm to a fete thrown by the gods, invoking Zeus and Ogun in the same sentence. He equates the waning influence of the British empire with that of Rome, the exoticism of tourists with history’s reification of flawed human beings to the status of heroes. Hector ferries tourists around the island in a beat-up nine-passenger van with leopard-print seat covers, and somehow it feels completely natural for us to be reading about it in free verse.

I got onto this epic poetry kick because I was trying to write some of my own, and looking only at translations of Ovid and Sophocles and Homer wasn’t helping. In the end I think it was Omeros that really convinced me I could do it.

Then, one by one, he lifted the beautiful conchs,
weighed each in his palm, considering the deep pain
of their silence, their palates arched like the sunrise,

delicate as vulvas when their petals open,
and as the fisherman drowned them he closed his eyes,
because they sank to the sand without any cries

from their parted, bubbling mouths. They were not his
property any more than Helen’s, but the sea’s.
The thought was noble. It did not bring him any peace.

Let me try to explain what’s going on here.

Owl has summoned the Maize God here to the altar of the Inverted Bottle at the behest of Jasper. (That’s Jasper on the right, in yellow. This is his garden.) Owl is very angry. She represents the dead and their kingdom, the underworld, where all is not well.

“Many souls are gathered at the Bottle’s neck,” she is saying (referring, of course, to the altar itself—a gateway to the realm of death). “The way is blocked, packed full with the newly-dead and nearly-risen. I was the last to squeeze through. Maize God, you must act!”

“But I rule over both life and death,” says the Maize God. “They exist only in balance. Blood feeds the soil, raising new life from seed. It’s as things must be. Besides—why should I interfere in what is essentially an Orb problem?”

“Yes, it’s true,” Jasper explains apologetically. “It’s the souls of my people causing this. If we could just be content to stay dead for a little while instead of rushing so impatiently towards reincarnation! But it’s Solstice, you see, and nobody can stand to sit it out down in the dark—no offense meant to you, O Owl, or to your kingdom.”

“None taken,” says Owl, blowing smoke from her eye-sockets. “Even I can’t resist a visit to the living world on Solstice night! But you’re sidestepping the issue, Jasper. Your people wouldn’t need to reincarnate in such volume if they weren’t dying at the same pace.”

“Well?” the Maize God prompts, when Jasper hesitates. “Why don’t your people stay in their bodies and tend to their gardens like they’re expected to?”

“That’s the trouble,” says Jasper.

“What is?”

“Centaurs,” says Jasper.

(Just pretend like that’s a shotgun he’s holding.)

“Well, shit,” says the Maize God. “Where’s Hummingbird when you need him?”

And yes, if you’re wondering, I did indeed get some seriously weird looks from my fellow gardeners as I was setting this up. No doubt the whiskey and pipe did not help.

Happy midsummer.

Tylopilus felleus
Moist, swampy ground, mixed hemlock and deciduous forest, Graves Farm Wildlife Sanctuary, Haydenville, MA

This is my entry in the “blog a random book, page 123, 5th sentence” challenge, from zhai. I’m not going to point its barbs at anybody else specifically; If you’re intrigued by it, try it.

These worlds could feel God’s breath visiting their tops;
Some glimmer of the Transcendent’s hem was there.

—Sri Aurobindo, Savitri

The arbitrary nature of this meme makes me think of the folk-religion fortune telling aspect of the I Ching, minus the individually-tailored astrological variables (some people do the same sort of thing with the christian bible). So I thought I’d go with something else that reminds me of the I Ching without actually being much like it.

You might call Aurobindo one of the fathers of New Age thought, in that his influences and background stem from both Western and Eastern sources. He was born in India, educated at Cambridge, a very smart guy; the principle that drives his writings is the belief in an impending spiritual revolution by which mankind will catapault itself into a higher plane of existence, becoming collective entities of pure energy and infinite joy, existing outside the influence of time or space, not unlike all those interstellar beings one runs into all the time on Star Trek. Savitri is his masterpiece, a thousand-page epic poem, heavily influenced both by John Milton and the Vedic poems, retelling the classic hindu love story of Satyavan and Savitri in the form of an incredibly convoluted, near-impenetrable spiritual allegory. Lovely reading in short spurts, but rather forbidding as a whole. Which attributes suggest to me it would make fine fodder for an I Ching style astrological die roll randomization game.

Were I to interpret the above excerpt in that spirit, I’d say the message is that we are always at the hem of the transcendent, always climbing, never getting to the seam. Which I don’t read as discouraging—merely humbling. We’re human. We’ll transcend when we transcend; it won’t be me that tips the scales.

A very silly two-page comic titled “The Freddie Mercury Challenge”, for which I wrote the story (but did not draw the pictures), appears in the now-available Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 22. Which, if you pay a bit extra, comes with some phenomenal chocolate (not to mention the moral high ground).