Merry Christmas and a Happy 2010

The big news this year is that Linda and I finally decided what we wanted Lillian’s baby daughter Luciana to call us. Linda has accepted the name Nana, and I have to say that I’m pretty happy with Zee-Zee, although there is still some discussion about how that name will be spelled. My preference is the French spelling “Zi-Zi!” but Linda and Lillian and Luciana all seem happier with the more traditional spelling of the last letter of the alphabet, twice.

 

The other big news is that Lillian did have the baby! Luciana was born on May 19, 2009 at 1154 pm and came weighing in at seven pounds and eleven ounces and measuring twenty-two inches, same as a bobcat. Lillian has asked me not to reveal her current weight and size, but let me just say that if you’ve seen some recent pictures, you know Luciana has grown. If you haven’t seen those pictures, you should. There’s about a 1000 more at Lillian and Luciana’s webpage. Just click here to see them.

This baby is something else. Linda and I know what perfect babies are like because we had Lillian, and we are happy to report that this baby is just as perfect. Luciana’s always ready for a laugh and a hug, and she’s got the curiosity of a kitten. She loves the feel of different colors and textures, and she spends a lot of happy time flicking her fingers back and forth across cloth or cardboard or a piece of plastic or wood. She’s fun to watch.

When we’re not watching the baby flick or listening to her say “Mm-Mm-Mm-Mm-Mm,” we’re doing a lot of travel. I thought we were doing our part last year to re-vitalize the travel industry, but this year we decided to increase our stake in the bailout. We’ve been to Las Vegas three times, and we’ve gone on three cruises. The last one was a 12-day oceanic extravaganza that took us to the Eastern Caribbean. I would like to add that our luck both in Las Vegas and the cruise ship casinos has been excellent. For 2010, we’re already planning to double our vacationing, six Las Vegas trips and six cruises with maybe a couple side trips to the new casino at Greenbrier, WV, thrown in.

 

When we’re not watching Luciana and traveling and gambling, we’re enjoying retirement in other ways. Linda has been doing a lot of volunteer work here in Danville at the Free Clinic, and she’s also been doing jury duty here. (Buy her a glass of red wine when you see her next time, and ask her to tell you about the case of the non-habitual habitual offender. Unbelievable story.)

And I’ve been working on my writing. The American Council for Polish Culture honored me this year by giving me their Cultural Achievement Award for my poems about my parents. I also gave readings at the Polish Museum of America in Chicago, the Association of Writing Programs, and the Sept. 1939 Commemoration at the Polish Mission at Orchard Lake, Michigan. But most of my energy has gone into trying to get my novel “The Soldier and the Widow” published and writing my new novel, a police procedural set in 1950’s Chicago in the Polish-American community around Humboldt Park. I’m about two chapters for the end, and I’m hoping this novel will be an easier sell than the one about Nazis committing terrible atrocities on the Eastern Front in a really bad blizzard.

I hope next year I’ll be able to report that both novels have been sold, our luck at blackjack just continues to get better, Lillian’s gotten a position as an assistant principal, and Luciana’s walking and talking and drawing pictures and practicing her letters and helping her mom cook in the kitchen and finding out about all the great things in the world to touch and see.

 

Luciana!

People keep asking me what's up with baby Luciana, and I keep wanting to post about her but getting bogged down in various other activities, like feeding her or trying to explain gravity to her.

 

But right now, while she's in the other room practicing how to eat peas, I think I will post a link to a site Lillian has set up full of pictures of this beautiful and smart baby.

Here's the Luciana Link. Just click here.

Walt Whitman Sells Pants

Yes, he does. And he does a great job at it.

Levi's -- the jeans company -- is doing a series of ads using Whitman's poems.

Here's an ad using lines from "O Pioneers":



Here's an ad using some of "America":



Slate.com has an article about this amazing development in literary history.

Charles Swanson's "After the Garden: Selected Responses to the Psalms"

When my mother was dying, I spent a lot of time in the hospice with her. She had had a stroke, and she couldn’t talk or move. The doctor didn’t even think she could hear me or understand what was happening to her. It was quiet and lonely and sad there with her in her room. Sitting near her, I sometimes talked to her, and sometimes I read the bible.



There was a copy in the waiting room, and I had carried it back to my mom’s room. I’m not religious, but I found myself reading the bible, especially the psalms.

I had always loved their poetry, ever since I studied them in a Colonial American Lit class in college. I’m not the kind of person who likes to memorize poetry or much of anything else, but I sat down as a student and memorized some of the psalms.

Reading those poems of love and grief, sadness and light, I sat near my dying mother and thought about how much truth and longing there was in them. I said to myself that maybe someday I would try writing poems about the psalms, try to write something that would carry something of what I found in them.

After my mom died, I did try to write those poems. Over and over and over again I tried, but I couldn’t do it. I don’t know why, but they didn’t come for me.

But they did come for Charles Swanson, a fine poet I met here in Virginia. He lives about thirty miles north of Danville and teaches high school in Gretna. He also pastors the Melville Avenue Baptist Church in Danville.

Charles has written a series of poems that respond to the psalms, and those poems are now included in his first book, After the Garden: Selected Responses to the Psalms.

The poems in this book take us back to the true roots of poetry, to its source in prayer, music, and the lives of ordinary people who struggle to make sure that the ones who come after them are able to live lives of freedom, hope, and faith. In these beautifully-shaped poems about growing up and living in the Virginia Piedmont and Appalachia, Swanson turns ordinary lives into extraordinary prayers.

Here’s the title poems from his book:

After the Garden: What Does It Mean, the Killing Fields?

For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
Psalm 51:3, RSV

Now this is the truth:
If there is sin, sin beyond
the thorns and the sweat of the brow, then
I have eaten.

We ran through the swamp woodlands,
blasting hummocks of litter like puffballs,
the bunny zagging through patches of light,
my mother with the twenty gauge,
I with a mouthful of marbles,
hard questions that choked me.
She shot a log from under his leap—
mossy wood showering green fireworks,
the somersaulting figure
an acrobat landing on his feet.
He slipped the skin of earth,
in the hollow trunk of a tree.
Putting aside the gun,
she reached a long arm up to armpit
into the mystery of darkness
to grasp his warm hind foot,
pads like buttercups, smooth as wax.
He came out lank, sinews stretched,
long last the tender twitching ears.
We sank onto the mossy log
damaged by her errant shot
and she laid the rabbit along her lap.
Her left hand gripped his feet,
and with her right she swaddled his head
in caress or stranglehold.
The rabbit made a squeaking noise
and I choked out
one hard marble. “Mama,
what will you do?”
A practiced hand made the wrenching sound.

These are the killing fields.
Out of the milk of human kindness
I have been fed.

_________________

Charles Swanson's book is available through his publisher, Motes Books, and through Amazon.

The Motes Books site has more information about Charles and includes another poem.

This November, Finishing Line Press will be publishing his second book, a chapbook entitled Farm Life and Legend.

Hercules: The Epic Poem Unbound!

Hercules has appeared in TV shows, movies, Disney cartoons, comic books, and even Disco Battles, but for a long time there hasn't been an epic poem focused on this hero.

Sure there may have been such a poem in ancient times. There are rumors on the internet that Peisandros of Rhodes (c. 600 B.C.) wrote such an epic but the thing is apparently "lost," and there are some scholars who figure that this epic was just something dreamt up by Peisandros's PR man to pump up his reputation.

All of this is changing, however. My friend, Matt Flumerfelt a fellow originally from New York who is wild about rhyme and Ancient Greece and Hercules, is in the process of completing an epic poem based on the life of Hercules and the poem (or at least XIV books of the epic) is available online at Matt's blog, Baloney Emporium.

Here's a sample from book XI with a brief introduction by Matt:

I’ve always been rather proud of this section, when Hercules goes to the ends of the earth and the Garden of the Hesperides to retrieve the golden apples for Eurystheus. In this section he’s crossed the desert and begins to reach the garden.


For days on end Alcides faced
the barren waste without the taste
of food or water, trudging west,
his gaunt cheeks hollow as a ghost.
Sporadic tufts of stoic greenery
intruded on the sabulous sea,
infringing on the sterile scenery
till dunes gave way to luscious lea.
The air grew vibrant with the song
of birds, the murmuring of leaves.
A vernal ichor, young and strong,
made zaftig earth's eclectic entities.
He abutted on a crenellated wall,
a bulwark reared of rough-hewn megaliths
with barbicans to guard against assault,
though here were neither Gauls nor Visigoths.
Such monumental piles of stone
have mostly been reserved for those
whose dainty nates graced a throne,
their egos perilously grandiose.
Tracing the wall's periphery,
he came to a quaint embrasure,
a portal of azure porphyry
with an elaborate entablature.
He gave the door a gentle push,
surprised at finding it ajar.
It swiveled open with a whoosh
as wind swept through the aperture.
The fields unfurled before his eyes
were named for the renowned Hesperides,
praised in the lays of other days
as Dilmun, Eden, Asgard, Paradise.



Atlas' daughters roamed the meadows,
weaving chaplets to adorn their tresses,
trolling airs and three-part operettas
whose harmonies and graceful cadences
were sweet as honey from Hymettus.
Spring, that Dionysian season,
was perpetual, reason being
the garden's pivotal location,
beyond the range of winter's fang.
Ladon was the garden's sentry,
a reptile of outstanding parts,
a member of the dragon gentry,
past master of the mantic arts.
Crossing the intervening croft,
Alcides reached earth's finisterre,
where Atlas held the world aloft,
though what he stood on isn't clear.
Heracles was frank with Atlas,
explaining in plebeian phrases
what he wanted with the apples
and why he'd made his anabasis.
"Why stick your neck out?" Atlas said.
"That dragon's like a pet to me.
He's sweet as lamb’s milk when he's fed.
I'd fetch the apples if my hands were free."
Rather than face the dragon's wrath
and slay so mannerly a creature,
Alcides chose to prop the earth
while Atlas took a little breather.


Putting his shoulder to the wheel,
he hoisted the telluric sphere.
If Heracles had dropped the ball,
life might have ended then and there.
Atlas lolled about the meadow,
feeling like a pardoned felon,
lounging in a live oak's shadow,
munching chunks of watermelon.
This taste of the dolce vita
fired Atlas with a love of gold.
A life of leisure is sweeter
than playing caryatid to the world.
Instead of dealing with the dragon,
he got the apples from his daughters,
who plucked them to relieve the sagging
branches, hoarding them like staters.
Atlas, returning with the booty,
told Heracles peremptorily
he felt it was his bounden duty
to take the apples to Mycenae.
Alcides said he understood
and only asked the Titan leave
to put a cushion on his head
for reasons easy to conceive.
It seemed a sensible request,
so Atlas graciously complied
and briefly reassumed his post
after laying the fruit aside.



Heracles swept up the plunder
and booked without a backward glance.
Atlas recognized his blunder
and reviled him from a distance.
His journey seemed incredible
to the simple folks back home until
he showed them the inedible
fruit. Even then most doubted still.
Eurystheus admired the apples,
but they had a bad track record.
Anyone who touched the globules
was jinxed by the goddess Discord.
He foisted them on Heracles,
who fobbed them off on Athena.
She passed them to the 'sperides,
who socked them away for Hera.

_____________

Matt is also the author of The Art of Dreaming, a book of poems. Info about purchasing it and a sample poem are available here at Everything's Jake.

61st Birthday Post: Grandbaby Luciana

Dear family and dear friends,

Usually what I do here for my birthday is post a recent photo (that shows you I haven't changed a lick in 30 years) and tell a little about what I've been doing.

Well, the biggest news is that Linda and I are now grandparents, and we're happily spending a lot of time with our daughter Lillian and our granddaughter Luciana.

Here's a photo of Lulu and me:



Here's a photo of me and Lillian that Linda took in 1979:

 

And here's a letter that Lillian sent out about where you can see some more photos of Luciana, Lillian, Linda, and Me.

Subject: one month old!

Luciana is one month old today, and I thought I would finally send out the updated website with tons of pictures. I have been putting it together in the evening after she goes to sleep and before I finally collapse into bed.

http://web.me.com/lcguzlowski

She seems to be getting bigger and changing everyday and it is hard to believe that she is already a month old. Although, at the same time, I can't remember what life was like before she got here. I seem to remember more sleep, but I don't remember being this happy.

I hope everyone is doing well.

love,
Lillian

Baby's Working For the Man Every Night and Day

My granddaughter is now three weeks old.

Last friday when she was 17 days old, she received her first bill in the mail. It was an insurance bill. She owes $237 to her insurance company for in-hospital baby doctor visits.

I don't know how she'll be able to pay off this money. She's currently unemployed and doesn't have much chance of getting a job locally. Unemployment where she lives in Danville, Virginia is about 14%. I think she would have to move someplace else to get a job. Her mother probably wouldn't be happy with that.

I figure the insurance company will bill her and continue to bill her adding 2-3% to the bill each month. I'm not much good with math but I calculate that she will probably owe Anthem Insurance about a million bucks, maybe two, by the time she's out of high school.

The good news is that her Great Aunt and Uncle (Joan and Bruce) sent her a baby gift of $50. I'm sure my granddaughter will be able to put some of that toward her Anthem Insurance bill.

By the way, if you have some spare change, please send to me, and I'll pass it on to her.

I promise.