I am so sorry for the Texans I am acquainted with. To say nothing of those good people I only know by secondhand accounts from their worried friends and relations in less-frigid climes.
Almost to a one, the Texans in my orbit are furious with their elected state and local leaders. They likely have been for years. Now, these Texans have had their long-held suspicions of deregulated, Reaganomic-fueled governance proved right. Their state has been an ice-box. The deregulated energy companies looked on with surprise and horror as their system ground to an ice-choked halt.
If only all the hot air expended by the jet-setting Ted Cruz and the bloviating governor could have been put to good use. I would have applied it to defrosting the endless miles of pipelines frozen this February. We’d even have hot air left to move the frosted wind turbines that supply about 7 percent of Texas’ energy. Which ain’t enough to solve the problems of millions without heat and light, now is it? But shhh… I hear whispers in the state legislature that perhaps, just perhaps, some regulation might have prevented the grid collapse. Or at least the $10,000 bills inflicted on some residents.
I hope someone keeps the lights on long enough to jot down a few regulatory notes. All that talk about independent Texas energy, a policy put in place to dodge federal energy regulations, reminds me of a rosier time in the Texas independence movement…
John Steinbeck, in Travels With Charley, fondly talks smack at Texas, about a little organization he’s thinking of running.
We’ve heard [Texans] threaten to secede so often that I formed an enthusiastic organization, the American Friends for Texas Secession. This stops the subject cold. They want to be able to secede, but they don’t want anyone to want them to.
Browsing old bookshelves in the cold
The weather here in the Pacific Northwest has been snowy, then rainy… Not a patch on the frost of Texas. Good weather for staying close to the fire (or just under a blanket that says ‘Don’t bother me, I’m editing’). Preferably with a mug of hot brandied tea and a book.
When I went to look up Texas Secession, I realized the same shelf that holds my battered copy of Travels With Charley also bears some of my earliest poetry purchases. After looking up that Steinbeck quote, my fingers moseyed along the book spines, revisiting old friends. Paramount among them: The Voice That Is Great Within Us, a collection of 20th century verse assembled by Hayden Carruth.
It opens with Robert Frost, and traverses the great, the good, the middling and now-unknown. In its inch-thick paperback binding, I first found Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams; Theodore Roethke and e. e. cummings; Denise Levertov and Gregory Corso.
Time travel, remembering the heat of poetry
When I was in my teens, I was known as “the poetical one” in my high school circle of dancers, techies and layabout theatrical kids. After school (or sometimes during lunch), we would hang out in “the office.” This over-fed cubbyhole was where we kept ladders, a file-box of the musical program’s ad-sales receipts, a decrepit over-stuffed chair or two (recently retired from a performance of Brendan Behan’s The Hostage). From my perch on one of the functioning ladders, I would read aloud whatever poem had caught my eye.
I remember reading aloud Corso‘s “A Difference of Zoos” and whispering the coda “… [I summoned] every monster imaginable / and sang and sang Ave Maria — / The room got to be unbearable! / I went to the zoo / and oh thank God for the simple elephant.”
I also declaimed “I followed a-down the street / the pad of his rhythmical feet / o wotthehell o wotthehell” from “Mehitabel’s Love Song,” brandishing my hardback copy — now long out of print — of Don Marquis’s archy and mehitabel.
But perhaps most vividly, I recall the two poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti that Carruth included in his collection. What my bemused theater pals made of “Christ Climbed Down” and “One Thousand Fearful Words for Fidel Castro”, I can’t imagine. I know I loved whirling through the cascading images, speaking the rhythms and leaning on the off-beats.
I treasure my copy of 1958’s A Coney Island of the Mind, purchased at Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore on a California road trip with Tim years ago. Could Ferlinghetti himself have been in the store that day? I’m going to pretend he was, so I can burnish that little paperback in my memory. Thanks to the late, much-loved Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poetry will live for me, always.
Banner photo by Simon Berger from Pexels