Tito Titus, I Can Still Smile Like Errol Flynn

I CAN STILL SMILE LIKE ERROL FLYNN, Tito Titus. Empty Bowl Press, Chimacum, Washington, 2015, 100 pages, $15 paper, www.emptybowl.org.

I had heard about Tito Titus, had maybe bumped elbows with him at Litfuse in Tieton some years past; sometime, somewhere, someone had given me his book of poems. On Saturday at the launch of I Sing the Salmon Home, he said hello and introduced himself. Today, I rummaged through my bookshelves, found his book, and read it all the way through, even the end notes (which are sort of a poem, themselves).

These words, from Titus’s website, capture the experience:

In I can still smile like Errol Flynn Tito Titus interrogates life, aging, and death with a delicate blow torch. These poems adore the beauty of youth and memory, fluently articulate the melancholy and nostalgia delivered by loss; and, with irreverence and awe, dicker with Death. It’s wry, wistful, fierce, searing, erotic, humorous, regretful, brave, and lonely.

“A delicate blowtorch.” Exactly. The poems are also, at least part of time, quite charming.

Someone’s darling daughter

approached me today
with a bag of weed
at a good price,
even for Hilo,
and I said yes
because the plumeria
tattoo peeking above
her low slung sarong
told me pleasure
lasts only a while.

—Tito Titus

In these poems the body gets all the attention it craves. Nose hairs, penises, “the old bastard’s feet,” bellies. And so much music that you begin to picture the writer with a guitar in his hands.

As Joannie Stangeland remarks in her cover blurb, the book also “reaches further back to childhood, facing the past’s violence and the silence after, its bruises and scars.” In the last section, we’re introduced to a cast of characters just as they’re leaving life’s stage. You’d think it would be too heartbreaking to read, but Titus uses a conversational tone that drew me in.

Here’s a poem, so you can make up your own mind. I love the long title.

The evening of the day after things changed like they’d never changed before

He wanted to sit on the front porch
watching no one pass on the empty street,
but it was cold, wet, and windy,
so he sat in the darkened room
watching the telephone. It rang once
earlier in the day. A wrong number.
He thought to engage the caller
in conversation but let it pass. Perhaps
someone else would call. Or maybe not.
Or probably not. Or not at all.
The radio played songs he didn’t know
by performers he didn’t know.
The newspaper still lay by the front door.
He cleaned the refrigerator. It contained so little.
He forgot to turn on the furnace,
put his hands in his pockets and shivered.
At last he reached for the bookshelf.
Sometimes he felt a little bit Leonard Cohen,
but he felt like Bukowski tonight.

—Tito Titus

The spareness, bawdiness, and understated (often macabre) humor that runs through this book reminded me a lot of the school of Charles Bukowski. If you, too, would like to know more about Tito Titus, visit his website, particularly the scrapbook page: https://www.poetfire.com/scrapbook.

Give Thanks

The Books I’m Thankful for Today

one

In October I enrolled in another Hugo House poetry class, again with the amazing poet, translator, and teacher Deborah Woodard. The class focused on the work of Fernando Pessoa, born in Lisbon in 1888. Our main text, Fernando Pessoa & Co., edited and translated by Richard Zenith, gathers together work by Pessoa and three of his heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. Pessoa created entire biographies for these alter-egos and considered them mentors and colleagues. He is, Zenith tells us, “an editor’s nightmare,” but also a treasure trove:

Pessoa published relatively little and left only a small percentage of the rest of his huge output—over 25,000 manuscripts have survived—in anything close to a finished state. The handwritten texts, which constitute the vast majority, tend to teeter on the brink of illegibility, requiring not just transcription but decipherment. (Richard Zenith)

Pessoa prided himself on being impersonal, even invisible, a crossroads where observations took place. He deplores philosophy and metaphysics. I had difficulty caring about him for almost the entire stretch of the course. But…as usual…as I read and considered (and attempted to write my own poems), I began to feel curious about this poet, writing in another language, in another time, and living in a place I have never been. I have a feeling Pessoa would have approved of my journey, both the reticence and the curiosity.

Here is one piece, from the section titled “Uncollected Poems”:

It is night. It’s very dark. In a house far away
A light is shining in the window.
I see it and feel human from head to toe.
Funny how the entire life of the man who lives there, whoever he is,
Attracts me with only that light seen from afar.
No doubt his life is real and he has a face, gestures, a family and profession,
But right now all that matters to me is the light in his window.
Although the light is only there because he turned it on,
For me it is immediate reality.
I never go beyond immediate reality.
If I, from where I am, see only that light,
Then in relation to where I am there is only that light.
The man and his family are real on the other side of the window,
But I am on this side, far away.
The light went out.
What’s it to me that the man continues to exist?
He’s just the man who continues to exist.

8 November 1915

Alberto Caeiro

two

I’ve been reading—or reading around in—another strange book, this one titled The Ashley Book of Knots. It was written and illustrated (3384 numbered illustrations) by Clifford W. Ashley, and first published in 1944. My copy belonged to my paternal grandfather (a Navy Seabee during WWII, which must explain why the book looks so well-read; I could go on a bit about my grandfather—as he was in his 40s and had 5 children when he enlisted; he kept his paychecks [from what I’m told], but wrote letters home signed, “Your poet, Gene”). His name and the date, Eugene H. King, 10/14/46, are written on the inside front cover. I can guess that the book came to belong to my father in 1959, when his father died. Since 2012, it has been mine, and this year I finally took it down from the shelf.

I’m working on a little chapbook of poems (at least I think it’s a chapbook) to turn in for my Hugo House class project. I’ve titled it “Keeper of Knots,” after Caeiro’s The Keeper of Sheep. (Which begins: “I’ve never kept sheep / But it’s as if I did.”)

three

I’m immensely grateful to have been able to join Priscilla Long for the Elliott Bay Zoom / Eventbrite launch of her new book, Dancing with the Muse in Old Age. After losing my father at age 82 to a stroke; after accompanying my mother through ten years of Alzheimer’s, stroke, and skilled-nursing care, then her death at age 86; I had pretty much decided that I’d better get things done right now, because I would be decrepit very very soon.

Although I had read drafts of Dancing previously (I wrote one of the cover blurbs), it was wonderful and timely to read it again. Priscilla Long provides us with dozens of models of old creators, not all of them able-bodied, but all—in their 80s, 90s, and 100s—joyously still in the game.

There is so much great stuff here:

Our ageist stereotypes equate old with ill, old with decrepit, old with physical and mental decline. Yet the majority of people over age 85 do not require assistance in daily living and some of these provide assistance. (p. 15)

Long is also a science writer, and her book is meticulously researched. The information about cognitive development (not decline, not maintenance) in old age is something I wish everyone I know would read.

And, speaking of my mother, late in the book, in a section on elegy, Long writes:

Art can provide a shelter, a kind of home, a means of sustenance, for a person in the midst of the shock and sorrow of grief. At the age of 90, the pianist/composer Randolph Hokanson said, “I continue to play because I love music so. It has been the sustaining force in my life. I’d go down the drain without it. It was such a savior after my wife died.”

Is it too obvious to say that one advantage of growing old is to remain alive to the beauty and suffering of the world? To make an elegy is to express that beauty and that suffering. (p. 151)

Thus it has been for me. I love thinking that I will continue to be here (for another 40 years!), reading, witnessing, scribbling—and sharing my work with you.

If you would like to watch the video of my conversation with Priscilla, go to her website: https://www.priscillalong.net
(you can clip past the first six minutes).

May you have an amazing holiday and holiday season. Thank you for spending a few minutes of it with me.

Dancing with the Muse in Old Age

I cannot say enough about this amazing book by my good friend and long-time co-conspirator in all things creative, Priscilla Long. Watching Priscilla produce this book, reading drafts, devouring a number of her sources, has been a game-changer for how I think about aging, and how I want to behave in my next chapter.

To read the Northwest Prime Time review, follow this link: https://northwestprimetime.com/news/2022/nov/08/dancing-muse-old-age/

And, most important, sign up to attend the virtual book launch here:

There will be a virtual book launch at Elliott Bay Books November 15 at 6:00 PM: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/priscilla-long-dancing-with-the-muse-in-old-age-with-bethany-reid-tickets-429907824877

You can order the book through our sponsor, Elliott Bay Books, your local independent bookstore, or anywhere books are sold.

Fallen

I think it was my friend Carla who told me that the opposite of Lent, or Lenten, that 40 days preceding Easter, is

Photo by Kaboompics .com from Pexels

Fallen. (I think this was fall of 2011, when I blogged for 40 days in a row.) My mother, after sleeping pretty much steadily for two days this week, was evaluated by paramedics on Thursday morning and transported to St. Anthony’s hospital in Gig Harbor.

Mom’s severe UTI (urinary tract infection), even after she was rehydrated and awake, and more or less alert, left her more confused than usual. Yesterday (Friday) I felt like Alice after the fall down the rabbit hole. It wasn’t that nothing made sense, it was just an…alternate sense. She wasn’t in the hospital, I was. When the nurse asked her name, she said “Bethany.” I was her sister, then I was my sister. I told her, I’m not the redhead, that’s Sharyl. And she said, Since when? She told a nurse that I’ve been combing my own hair for quite a while. I finally figured out that she thought I was my niece, Misti, who used to cut and perm Mom’s hair. When I tried to straighten her out, she said, Misti is a little girl! She can’t cut my hair!

Well, this went on…all day. I read aloud from our current Agatha Christie novel. I went to the cafeteria for my lunch and then I went to my car and napped for an hour. Later I coaxed her into watching some TV with me. (At the end of an episode of How I Met Your Mother, she turned to me and said, in perfect wonderment, “So he turned into a cat?” It must be pretty amazing to live in my mother’s head.)

Toward the end of the day she decided that she would move back into the farmhouse. She wanted me to call my nephew and tell him he would have to move out. At least we were in the present day (until she asked where my father was living!). I helped her with dinner, and then I left. I got turned around on highway 16 and ended up taking the ferry, even though Gig Harbor is pretty close to I-5. I began to think of how it isn’t just my mother — we ALL get turned around. I see a shadow from the corner of my eye and I disregard it, or I look more closely to see that of course it is just a shadow; my mother thinks there’s a man standing in the corner. I think about Mom’s sisters, visiting her on her birthday; Mom thinks of her sister Evelyn and then she tells me what Evelyn is telling her. I notice that the woman who brings mom’s dinner has gray hair and looks like a grandmother, and Mom asks me, Was that Mother? Did she cook this food? (And maybe that was why Mom ate better last night than I’ve seen her eat in a long time.)

I wish my Dad were still alive. I wish they were still living on the farm and I could visit and have them take care of me. But I know that isn’t reality, so I don’t say it out loud. Mom says it.

But maybe that’s a little bit what I do, after all. Because what is a writer but someone who gets to entertain every fantasy, every fancy that comes into her head? Or at least select fantasies and fancies. I get to share them with you, here, and I get to take out my manuscript and, well, not so much make stuff up, as be with the stuff that makes me up.