Mac Tip: Search for Hidden Files

Usually Macs are good at hiding the things you don’t need to mess with and showing you what to do when you need to do it. There are a few times when you want to get in and muck around with those hidden things, and it can be frustrating not to have clear instructions about how to get at them. As Mac OS X has been updated, it seems like the number of things in the hidden category has increased, which isn’t always a happy thing. What I used to be able to find relatively easily has become more of a challenge in the labyrinth of OS X Mt. Lion. (But I’m not really complaining — Windows is even worse in this regard, as is iOS).

This morning, I wanted to uninstall some software that didn’t have an uninstaller. I had installed a trial version that ran out before I made much use of it, so I wanted to take it off my computer. Doing that was easy enough by dragging the application to the trash, I know from past experience that there are files lurking on my drive that I’d like to delete. I searched online, but couldn’t find any instructions. I searched my drive for the software’s name, but nothing came up. Yet I could find a folder in my Library when I looked in Application Support, and I suspected there were more files than that. Searching online some more, I found a few more possibilities of places to look (PDF  Services, for one), and I knew there were probably a couple of Preferences files, but finding those with the arcane names they have in the super-long list of preferences was next to impossible. So I still wanted to search for them, but couldn’t find out how.

Let me take a step back for those who aren’t OS X afficionados. You may be saying, “Wait a minute, how did you open your Library folder? I can’t find mine!” It’s true this is one area that has become hidden in Lion and above. I remembered the trick to see it. Hold the Option key and then click on the Go menu in Finder. You will now see the Library folder as an option (this takes you to your User account library, not the main library, which you can see without this trick). Knowing this trick is what helped me figure out how to do my search (and I’m writing this post so I’ll remember it next time, as well as to help others, since I didn’t find any good advice online about searching for these kinds of files).

It eventually occurred to me that I might be able to find the files in my Library by first going there using the trick I just described. Once I was looking at my Library folder, I could search on the app’s name, and if I clicked on “Library” in the search options, then it focused my search on this folder and because I was in it, the files were now visible. I found two preference files that I hadn’t been able to find when I was outside the library folder. I just confirmed this with the search below. When I click on “This Mac,” I don’t see the files for an application, but when I click on “Library,” I do.

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How I fixed my DSL modem connection, no thanks to ATT support

Warning: for those who are looking for my thoughts on poetry or cooking, this is one of my techie posts. Now and then, I become a complete nerd. My apologies! Look around my blog for other more interesting stuff, if you’re not looking for arcane information on internet connections or Apple products.

Disclaimer: ATT’s help desk might have been able to help me if I had given all the information. I didn’t realize they might need some of the information that follows, so I didn’t volunteer it, and ATT help dude did not ask the appropriate questions to resolve my issue without suggesting I send back the modem.

Note to ATT: Your hold notices that constantly tell me how I could easily troubleshoot my problem online really don’t put me in the best mood when my problem is that I can’t get online.

Okay, now that I’ve gotten those  mini-rants out of the way, here’s the deal…

Tonight our internet connection went down. I did the usual steps of restarting the modem, waiting awhile, restarting my computer and the modem, and then trying to connect directly to the modem from my computer with an ethernet cable. I even tried a second ethernet cable. But nothing worked. That’s when I thought there must be a serious problem, so I called ATT’s help desk, actually hoping they might be able to tell me if there was an internet problem in my area, but fearing there was a problem with the modem.

ATT’s helpdesk walked me through the usual troubleshooting steps, including resetting the modem, which should have resolved the problem, but didn’t. He had me hold the reset button for 5 seconds. The instructions just say “Press the reset button.” When my computer was getting the wrong IP address from the DNS server, I was told that the modem must be bad and would need to be replaced. Or he thought it might be my computer. He didn’t think to ask me the one question that would have resolved the issue, and if I had remembered to tell him, that could have made a better support experience, too. But it’s been awhile since I set up the modem, so I wasn’t thinking about this…

I run a Motorola 3360 DSL modem with an Apple Airport Express base station. To do this, I have the modem set up in Bridged Mode, so that the Airport Express can make the PPPoE connection (login to my DSL account). Why? Because my modem doesn’t assign DNS addresses to computers on my network: it only works with one computer or router, so I have to have the Airport give our computers, iPad, etc. their DNS addresses. To have it do this, I also have to set the Airport to login to ATT DSL (and tell the modem not to do that, which is called operating in Bridged Mode).

When I hung up the phone with ATT support, I was very frustrated that my modem wouldn’t work. I really needed it tonight, and fortunately, I had told the support tech that I would take the modem back to the store in the morning, rather than have him replace it (because I didn’t want to wait for them to ship a new modem). I thought I would try resetting it one more time, and this time I held the button for 30 seconds (remembering that trick from past modems). All the lights went green, and I had an ‘internet connection,’ though actually, as I learned, I really didn’t.

It took me a little while to figure out that I was logged into the default account. I remembered that I had to go back in and change my username and password, so that I could actually get online. Fortunately, after the hard reset, I was now able to access the setup menus on the modem (see below for an explanation). I entered my information, and restarted the modem. Low and behold, I was back online, though I was tethered to the modem with an ethernet cable.

I did the most important communications that I’d been in a hurry to do, then got to thinking about restoring my wireless setup. A little searching online reminded me that I had to change the PPP Location setting to On Computer, instead of the default On Modem. I knew this, but didn’t remember what it was called or where to change the setting. And I hadn’t remembered one key thing…

When I made these changes, the modem gave me a warning as it restarted. Essentially, it told me that I wouldn’t be able to access the modem’s settings interface unless I made the right changes on my computer (I saved these instructions and hope I’ll remember where I put them) or reset the modem. This explains why I wasn’t able to make a direct connection to the modem’s interface until I had succeeded in resetting the modem.

If I had remembered that, I might never have called ATT, or if the tech support guy had thought to ask about bridge mode, then I would have told him. Since I had disconnected my Airport and was trying to connect directly from my computer, I didn’t think it was relevant to tell him that I had the Airport connected at one point. If I’d said that, he probably would have figured it out.

So, if you’re troubleshooting a DSL modem connection problem, it’s probably worth asking whether the modem has ever been set to Bridged Mode. Or if you’re resetting the modem, it’s probably worth holding that button for at least 30 seconds to force a complete reset to factory settings. My 5-second reset gave me the appropriate flashing lights, but obviously didn’t reset everything.

What I don’t know is why the modem stopped working in the first place. My guess is that it was something on ATT’s end that cleared up eventually on its own. Usually restarting the modem fixes the issue when that happens occasionally.

What I do know is how to reset the modem and set everything back up again if this happens again (and I wrote myself instructions for when it happens again). And I know that there’s not a problem with the modem just because my computer can’t connect to the setup screen. Maybe that will help me avoid calling ATT for ‘support’ in the future.

Recommendations from a Poetry Contest

One of the most fun things for me in judging the Davenport Poetry prize at Knox College was talking with young poets about other poets they could read. I did try to write those names in my comments, but I’ve also thought of a few more that I might add, so I wanted to post some suggestions here. Several poets were interested in exploring surrealism, and a couple had seen the artwork of Joan Miró and Paul Klee and written poems inspired by them. That’s great, and I hope they continue to explore surrealism in the visual arts or other art movements that might inspire their poetry.

Surrealist poets ought to go back to the source and find out where surrealism started. I suggested to one poet that Robert Desnos would be good to read, and of course, André Breton. A couple of other important surrealist poets are Paul Eluard, Philippe Soupault, and Pierre Reverdy. Besides the surrealists, though, I would suggest going back a little further to the cubist poets that preceded them: Guillaume Apollinaire has always been one of my favorites, and of course Blaise Cendrars.

These are all French writers. Since I also am interested in Belgian (Flemish- and French-language) writers, I would recommend Emile Verhaeren and Paul Van Ostaijen.

Other writers at Knox were influenced by the work of Gertrude Stein. I was pleased to see that she resonates with this generation. For those who are interested in pursuing this avenue in poetry, I would suggest exploring the Language poets, particularly Susan Howe and Lyn Hejinian. I would also recommend the experimental narrative poems of C. D. Wright. I would also recommend going back to the roots of this kind of poetry by exploring the sound poems of Hugo Ball and by reading the work of other Dada poets, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara (also a Surrealist, later), Kurt Schwitters.

Finally, in one conference I mentioned the linguist who has been most influential in my thinking on poetry: Roman Jakobson, whose essay on the Linguistic of Poetry (with sections on grammar, meter, and rhyme) is foundational. Wide-ranging and multi-lingual, Jakobson surveys how poetry has developed in many traditions and looks to the core issues of what makes language poetic.

Reflections on a Poetry Contest

I am in the Moline airport, heading back to Mississippi after two wonderful days at Knox College, judging the Davenport poetry prize. In reflecting back on the experience, I am first struck by how much fun it was. The best part for me, besides getting to spend time at my alma matter and hanging out with Robin Metz and Liz, was spending time with students in half-hour conferences. These conferences really gave me the chance to get to know the students better and to better appreciate their poetry. Of course, my judgments had to be made prior to the conferences, based solely on the poems that I read with no knowledge of the poet. I enjoyed everyone’s poems and found strong moments in all of them. I also tried to point out areas in everyone’s poems that might use work, acknowledging that  sometimes these are very personal choices, but ones that shouldn’t be made too easily, and issues that the poets may want to work on in new poems.

So, how did the process I described in my last post work out in the end? The contest judging turned out about as I expected. Two of the top prizes went to poets whose work struck me on first read, but one was a poet whose work on first reading hadn’t stood out. With further reflection and after reading it a second time, her work grew on me, and I was happy to award her a prize. The ones I focused on initially managed to keep my interest throughout the process. So my method of sorting and reshuffling the poems worked for me to give a new, fresh look and/or confirm my first impressions.

I read all the poems I was given at least three times, and often several more times. I read them at least twice before making my initial decision of who to conference with, and then at least once or twice more as I prepared my comments for conferences. It was only at this point that I made the final decisions about who would receive a prize and who would receive honorable mention.

And I must say that the competition was very stiff. Most of the poems that I read were polished, and many would be worthy of a prize, yet only three could get the top prizes, and I decided three was a reasonable number for honorable mentions, though I did feel it was appropriate to honor everyone who had taken the effort and the risk to enter. They are all poets, as I told them, and all ought to be proud of their accomplishments.

Nonetheless, I am pleased with my selections. I did my best to judge based on a cold reading of three poems. My goal was not to judge the entrants as poets, only to judge their entries as poems. If I had it to do over again, I would come to the same decisions. And yet the first lesson any of these young poets needs to learn about contests is that they are subjective. That is to say, it is the decision of one poet on one submission at one point in time, and if you changed any of these factors, the decision might be different.

The language in one poet’s poems that to me felt just a little too sensational, might to another judge have just the right level of edginess. The formal experimentation in another poet’s poems that to me might have gotten in the way of my reading, may have taken the fancy of a judge whose own work leaned towards a similar use of typography. You can’t take the poet out of the judge, in other words, and there is and never will be a perfect decision.

That said, I feel any of the poems I selected would have fared well in most other judges’ rankings, though another judge may have gone a slightly different way. The shade of difference in the top ten or so entries was not so great that the choice was obvious or easy. And that was the greatest thrill for me in the judging part of the process, since it asked me to carefully weigh what is most important to me in a poem.

I must confess that I am drawn to subtle poems and have a harder time with poems that are brash or flashy. Some poets may have chosen those poems from their portfolios, hoping that they would do better in a contest because they would get the judge’s attention. Another time, that strategy may have paid off.

As is true for most poets, I am moved by vivid imagery and a poem that seems grounded in sincere emotion. But most of the poems I read had this to a greater or lesser extent. Beyond these qualities, that I hate to call basics but will instead name essentials, poems that worked well with the sounds and rhythms of their language affected me. But ultimately, the main concern that differentiated poems for me was the attention paid to the subtleties of sentence structure and syntax. The logic of the poem, both on the macro level of the meanings of words and on the micro level of the syntactical glue that holds them together (and in what order or pattern), made the difference to me in a poem that was nearing a professional level — and many of the poems I read could easily be published; the top poems read like ones I would expect to find in an anthology.

Is syntax the most important aspect of a poem, then? Hardly. But image and music are probably the areas of poetry that get the most focus in a workshop setting. I found, as I find with my own students, that Knox poets are quite sophisticated in image and are beginning to listen to the music of their poems. Grammar is an area that may be harder to notice. Beyond being grammatically correct, is a poem structured in the most effective syntactical way?  How to address this in a workshop setting? Yet the phrasing of the sentence across the line and the phrasing of sentences in relation to one another creates the most vital rhythms of a poem, especially of a free verse poem that does not rely on meter. Or that is where one of my interests in poetry lies, and that interest is reflected in my choices and in the comments I made on my selection.

So, if you are a Knox poet who won a prize or didn’t, bear that in mind as you weigh the results of this contest. It is an issue I tried to raise in nearly every conference, and it is an issue with which we as poets must constantly struggle and constantly improve. And remember, if you whether or not you were one of the lucky three, the results will be different next time. The first lesson of the writer is to keep writing. If you win a prize or if your work is published: be happy! Then get back to work. And if your work is not so chosen, move past it and keep writing. Everyone I talked with at Knox seems dedicated to their craft, so I have no doubt they will keep at it. And there will be more rewards in the future. Yet the greatest reward is one they already have, a community of writers who inspire (and yes also sometime compete with) each other. I like to think that the Davenport prizes foster that healthy competition and collaboration. It is one of the things I most value about my Knox education, and one reason I was so glad to once more briefly be a part of the Knox campus community.

How to Judge a Poetry Contest

Okay, I’ll admit it, everyone is different in this regard, so I ought to just title this “How I’m Judging the Davenport Poetry Prize for Knox College.” There, now that I’ve included the name, some enterprising Knox students googling my name or their school, might stumble upon this page. That’s all right. I promise not to reveal the winners nor those who won’t win. With 21 entries, there’s only one thing for certain: 18 people won’t go home with a cash award.

This is a small contest (in terms of numbers). I’ve judged bigger ones with more entries, but my method is about the same. One of my first goals is to read everyone’s poem a couple of times. Another goal is to fool myself into making a decision, because it isn’t easy to disappoint 18 out of 21 people. They are all people, after all. And all of those people are poets. So how to decide?

My method is to start sorting. Initially, I”m not looking for who’s in the top three coveted spots. That would be too daunting. Instead, I’m looking for whose poems strike me as worth another look. But rather than sorting into two piles (again, too daunting), I sort into 3-4 piles: Very good chance, good chance, maybe not, quite likely not. So far, I only have 3 piles, though I haven’t decided what to call them yet.

When I have made it through the stack once, I will go back through each pile again and sort until I end up with 2/3 in one part and 1/3 in the other. I like to read most poems at least twice, since I find my initial reaction to a poem may depend on when I read it or how I reacted to the poem before it. Sorting helps me to look at poems in different orders and different contexts. Reading a poem a second or third time, I usually see it better than the first time, though initial impressions are often true (but not always). Some poems get three or four readings at this stage as I weigh which pile they ought to be in.

One aspect of the Davenport prize is that the next round involves conferencing with students. Everyone’s work has merit, and I wouldn’t mind talking with any of these poets. But my time is limited, and 14 half-hour conferences will likely take me more than 7 hours, figuring some time in between, breaks, lunch, etc. This will be spread out over two days, and I’ll also be giving a reading, for which I’ll need to prepare.

So what am I looking for in a prize-winning or even conference-eligble poem? I’d like to find some lines that I wish I would have written in a poem that I would never think to write. Vivid imagery is one way to achieve that; another is interesting use of rhythm and sound. Ideally, there’s some of both. I appreciate unity and concise language (even in a long poem). Ultimately the poems I’ll gravitate to are the ones that reward multiple readings as I go back through them to prepare for the conferences. For that to happen, the poet also has to have something to say. I don’t mean I want a didactic poem (though I’m not averse to it), but I want to feel what the poet feels, and I want a poem that still gives me something to think about after I’ve read it several times. I’ve seen several poems that have this potential. It will take more time with them all before I know for sure which will rise to the top.

In Memoriam, David Hernandez, Chi-Town Poet

Yesterday, I learned that David Hernandez had passed away of a heart attack at the age of 66. He died in his beloved city, Chicago, on Feb. 25, 2013. (By the way, there is another David Hernandez, a poet from California, who is very much alive.)

Reading this news two months after the fact brought back vivid memories of another stage of my life, when I was fortunate enough to know David and be influenced by this fabulous poet and teacher. As I read articles about his life that included lines from his poems, his distinctive voice came back to me as well. David read his poetry with a musical lilt, even when he wasn’t performing with his band Street Sounds. When he was with the band, then the full sense of the Latin rhythms came through, but even without the band, you could hear the echoes of the music in his lines. Poetry Poetry has audio clips of several of his poems available online, including one of my all-time favorites “Why I Want to be a Real Poet.” But it’s hard to pick a favorite David Hernandez poem: every poem is a hardened gem.

Hernandez has been described as a street poet, as Chicago’s unnofficial poet-laureate (he wrote innaugural poems for Mayor Harold Washington), and Chicago’s first Latino poet (he began publishing in 1971). But I didn’t know any of those things when I met David in 1986. He was well into his second decade as a published poet, but apart from his fabulous poems, you’d never guess it to look at him or to interact with him.

I was just a kid, fresh out of college, trying to make a living in my first job at Chicago Review Press, and my good friend and college professor, Robin Metz, was running Knox Colleges’ Urban Studies program in Chicago for a semester. He enlisted me to help out with their poetry workshop. David was the real poet, I manned the coffee pot and  sat in on the informal discussions. I was probably full of myself and gave too much ‘advice.’ David was always encouraging, gently prodding or exploring a poem, but mostly encouraging the other poets to explore their creativity. You see, he never treated us like students; he always treated us like artists. He could be demanding about art, but you never felt judged or looked down upon. He led by example, and his example was absolute honesty. There was no room for pretentiousness in the little church basement where we met each Saturday. He never had to lay down the law or tell us to be humble: you just knew. In part because, though he never claimed to be a great poet and even wrote ironic poems about wanting to be a ‘real poet,’ we could sense we were in the presence of a real poet.

I learned more about life and about poetry in those Saturday mornings with David than I would in many other classrooms, so I was sad when the Knox students packed up their bags and went back to campus. But I didn’t need to be. David was still around, and I’d bump into him at the Green Mill Lounge, where I’d started going to the Poetry Slams. And David never forgot who you were and never acted like he didn’t know you because he didn’t have to know you anymore. Each time you saw David, it was like no time had passed. We remained friends throughout the time I lived in Chicago, and he remains one of my absolute favorite poet friends from those days.

How I May Have Saved My Dog’s Life with Buttermilk

Disclaimer: Okay, I’ll never really know if buttermilk saved her life or if it’s just a coincidence, but if you ask me, it helped. And it makes a catchy title. I’ll give the real credit to our vet and only partial credit to buttermilk.

First a little background. Last week our dog, Zinneke, was diagnosed with Autoimmune Hemolytic Anemia. If the name isn’t enough to scare you, then the symptoms would be. Essentially, her body has started fighting her own red blood cells, so she was lethargic and wouldn’t eat. If you know Zinne, then you know there’s something seriously wrong if she won’t eat. So we took her right to the vet, but certainly weren’t expecting anything as serious as this. She’s 7.5 years old, and other than some bladder problems due to a birth defect when we first got her, she’s been as healthy as they come.

Fortunately, there is a treatment. Steroids can block the immune system’s response and manage the disease. It will likely shorten her life, but she could go on for quite awhile. Or she could die quickly, according to the vet. Our research online showed 40%-60% of dogs die from the disease, but it seems crucial to get past the early stages.

That’s where the buttermilk comes in. When we got her home, Zinneke would eat some chicken and some rice. As the days went on, though, she started eating less and less. We tried different dog foods; we tried human food — pancakes were still a hit on Saturday, but by Sunday, she was hardly eating at all.

Monday morning, out of desperation, I thought to give her some buttermilk. I’ve heard that it can help with ulcers and stomach upsets due to cancer, etc., so I figured it was worth a try. She lapped it right up, better than anything I had given her in days. After the buttermilk, she was more interested in wet food and would also eat rice soaked in buttermilk. Eventually she got back to eating chicken and even her own dog food. By tonight, she has been eating out of the bowl (and not my hand), and has regained much of her appetite.

Now did the buttermilk really save her life? If it turned her appetite around, then I believe it helped, at any rate. Of course, it could be that the steroids and antibiotics had finally kicked in and that’s why she was more interested in the buttermilk in the first place. You be the judge.

Of course, there are other tricks that have helped, like giving her her pills in peanut butter. That’s something I learned from our humane society vet, and it really works if you need a dog to take medicine. Once they start licking the peanut butter, they don’t taste the medicine, and they can’t stop licking, so they swallow whatever’s with it. I cut the pills up small enough so they aren’t much bigger than a peanut chunk. Other suggestions I’ve used are to wrap the pill in deli chicken (which worked at first), or cover it in cheese (but Zinneke turned her nose up at cheese, as hard as that is to believe). Peanut butter proved irresistible, especially once I got a little on her tongue and she started licking.

So if my dog stopped eating again, would I give her buttermilk? No. I would take her to the vet and find out what the problem was. But if she’d been to the vet and was being treated and stil wouldn’t eat? Then I’d be sure to try buttermilk again. With any luck, now that she has her appetite back, she will regain her strength and the vet can reduce the steroid dosage until it’s manageable. She’ll be back to her old self or close soon.

Federated Music Clubs Festivals

Tomorrow, our son is participating in the local Federated Music Clubs Festival for the 8th year in a row. It’s about time I add a post, so I thought I would take a moment to thank the clubs for the opportunities they provide for so many students. The kids in our Suzuki Strings program (and the piano students from around the city) have all been practicing like mad to earn their Superior ratings (we hope). They learn music theory and get to perform some pretty complicated pieces. We would still have a good strings program in our town without the Music Club Festival, but this gives many of the kids the incentive they need to really polish a piece. That and recital are the high points of the year, at least for individual performance. Though only some will go on to be professional musicians, the appreciation for music that they develop, along with the discipline that it takes to excel, will remain with them their whole lives. And many will continue to play in one context or another for the rest of their lives. Without the many hours of volunteer work that goes into organizing the Festival, many of these kids would not receive the encouragement they need to excel with their chosen instrument.

Translating Goethe

This past weekend, I took up the challenge to translate a few poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I did it because my World Lit textbook didn’t include any of his lyric poetry, and it’s no fun to teach Romanticism without starting with Goethe. Yes, I know he’s technically part of the Sturm und Drang movement that precedes Romanticism in Germany and includes Classicist elements, but especially in the lyric poems (not to mention his incredibly romantic novel The Sorrows of Young Werther), he clearly establishes the tone for Romantic writers to come, and I like to see him as a transitional figure that creates a bridge between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Literary periods never start and stop as conveniently as their labels would suggest.

But the problem with teaching Goethe’s lyric poetry is that there aren’t good translations available. One issue is copyright. I don’t feel comfortable using much of another recent poet’s translation without permission (there is fair use, though that’s a tricky issue). So if it’s not in my textbook, I prefer public domain. There are some competent 19th Century translations, but their language is dated and can be a challenge for students — too many thees and thous, and too convoluted syntax. The twentieth-century translations that I own (Michael Hamburger’s, Christopher Middleton’s, and John Frederick Nims’, and Vernon Watkins’ in the Princeton Selected Poems) are faithful renderings, but at least in the four poems I wanted to work with, the translations lacked the simplicity I value in the original.

I had translated a couple of the very short poems a few years ago, so this year I decided to tackle “To the Moon.” The challenge with Goethe is that he rhymes, and he does it very facilely in German. To ignore the rhyme would destroy the poem, but to get exact rhyme would often require too much change to the meaning. I tend to be fairly literal when I translate. I don’t like to interpret or read too much into the poem, though I am willing to rearrange and play with shades of meaning as needed to get the form. As I’ve done when translating Dutch sonnets for my Masters thesis ages ago, I resorted to off-rhymes or vowel rhymes at times. As long as the vowel was close and the consonants of the rhyme words weren’t too far off, I was willing to live with it. The point was to suggest rhyme, rather than slavishly repeat what couldn’t be repeated in English. The rhyme sounds are all different, anyway, and often different words have to be used as rhyme words. I tried to have at least one pretty close rhyme pair in each stanza and allowed one pair (usually the first and third lines) to be a little less exact. Since Goethe uses a ballad stanza, and since that can be an unrhymed, A, unrhymed, A pattern, I felt that a partial rhyme was justified, especially if it allowed me to keep from straying too far with the meaning. I was a little more strict about the meter. I didn’t always follow the exact foot that Goethe used, but I tried to keep the number of beats consistent with the ballad stanza. I wanted the feel of the poem to be what it was in the original as much as possible.

It was fun to pull out my old dictionaries and spend time looking words up in my Roget’s Thesaurus. Translating is always a puzzle, but when form is involved the puzzle is more complex and challenging. It was so much fun, that I decided to take on The Alderking next. I stuck with that title, even though some translators use Erlking, which doesn’t make much sense in English. Maybe Earlking would be better, but the combination of Earl and King seems redundant; whereas, Goethe’s mistranslation of Erlkönig out of the Danish to make an Alder-king makes the Elf-king a king of the forest trees. To me, that adds to the poem. Again, the rhyme was a challenge, as was the meter. There are places where I’m not 100% satisfied, but then you never are. When I teach them again, I might revisit the translation and make other choices, but I’m happy enough with it for now. And I provided my students links to some alternate translations so they can compare. That emphasizes for them that translators vary in their rendering of a poem and reminds them that what they read in World Literature is always translated.

Genesis of a Poem

This is not my usual method of writing a poem, but I’m pleased with the way it turned out: A good friend wrote me the other day and asked if I would write a poem for his daughter’s 18th birthday. Since we know her very well, I was happy to do it, though I didn’t have a lot of time to get it done. (And to be honest, if I’d have had more time, I probably would have procrastinated!)

I’ve been thinking for awhile about writing an ‘occasional poem,’ especially in the wake of the recent inaugural poem. So I thought about what this might entail, and was glad the the occasion wasn’t quite so momentous or public. It was comforting to think of inaugural poems I have heard, which usually don’t reference the occasion directly. They have often been written to fit the president, but also incorporate themes and even experiences that come from the poet’s experience as well. They are often loosely organized, almost Whitmanesque, and though I didn’t want to vie with an inaugural poem in length, it was nice to realize that the poem’s unity can come from the occasion as much as from the poet.

With this in mind, I still was stumped about where to begin. So I looked at some recent photographs of a trip where we’d seen the family. Nothing immediately came to mind, but it did bring back good memories. Then I thought that a birthday poem might start by referencing the name of the person. I looked up “Tesse” in a few online baby guides, and wasn’t thrilled, though the meaning of ‘harvester’ did seem appropriate for someone turning 18 and reaching a kind of harvest. This image made it into the poem. ‘Hunter’ and ‘Woman from Therasia” weren’t very helpful, though vestiges of hunting may have survived in one image, and woman appears in the poem. I found a few places that listed the meaning of “fourth child,” though that didn’t help, since she’s the second. I decided that four might suggest square, and used that at one point. Some sites seemed to be influenced by the harvest meaning, and added ‘summer,’ which I thought was useful. Since her birthday is in February, this suggested contrasts, and helped me get to a first stanza.

Of course, a birthday poem might easily reference birth, so I began there, with a seed planted in winter. Other contrasts followed, some going back to the memories and associations I had from photographs and visits. Rather than get too literal, though, I wanted to keep the images a little on the surreal side. And as I was searching for an image and for a title, I thought of the word “tessellations,” intricate mosaic-like geometric patterns. This is something our son has been interested in from his art classes, and we had gone to the M. C. Escher museum this summer and seen his drawings of geese, frogs, and fish other interwoven shapes. This fit the theme of contrasts, and of course the play on words with her name worked for me. Combining that with the idea of the harvest as a rite of passage into adulthood and the paradox of leaving home and staying tied to it, I had my poem.

Of course, it took a few revisions before I was completely happy with it, or at least happy enough to send it off with birthday greetings! I was also glad that, unlike an inaugural poet, I only had one poem to write. I’ve heard for an inauguration the poet often writes three, and then the President picks the one he wants to have read. That would up the pressure just a bit! Though of course, you’d have two more poems that you could then take and revise on your own terms. We’ll see what happens to this poem after the big birthday (tomorrow). As I told my friend, it was an interesting assignment. It was a bit of a challenge, but turned out to be a rewarding experience. And if Tesse likes it, that will be the main thing.