The phantom phone booth in the middle of the field is gone. I guess maybe that means that someone will do something with the huge lot on 55, right next to the old C-Support building, but then, maybe it just means that whatever foreign or alien nation needed to spy on Durham, NC, finally realized that their work was done and they took the phone booth back, or they transplanted it to another empty field.

This was a long weekend, but I don’t feel terribly refreshed. I feel like I’m stuck in a longish daydream. I had incredible dreams this morning on the cusp of waking. One I’ve had before, I don’t know how many times, but as I was dreaming it I had the incredible sense that I was awake the whole time and simply daydreaming, not actually in REM sleep. I don’t know– I may not have been in REM sleep. I also cannot articulate what the dreams were about now. One was a presentation in which I had an hour and fifteen minute session but a co-worker spent an hour introducing the topic. I’m pretty sure I was talking about entrepreneurship. That was not the recurring dream.

Best spam headline of the day: Tiny Spokesperson. I could write a poem about that. It would be the perfect answer to the question “Where do you get your ideas?”

The sky is crackling. Every few seconds, it belches deeply, the rumbling so pronounced that you expect the sky is removing something. Something is being torn out, perhaps, by hands we cannot see at a height we cannot see.

I love rainy nights, the unpredictability of thunder. Do you settle into your bed at night during a rainstorm to read, and think that there’s a remote, remote, almost infinitely remote chance that you could be struck by lightning, that it could stream in through the window and strike you right there in the bed? I do. Once, when I was young, our house was rocked violently for a few seconds during a storm. My parents explained it away by saying the house had been struck by lightning.

It’s time to take a bath, to turn on all the electrical appliances in the house, to open the blinds. Rainy night. Best time to read or write.

Looks like this link is subject to change, but you’d be doing yourself a favor if went and checked out Robert Bohm’s beautiful poem “Blood Parents,” available here.

Last night: Finished some overdue thoughts about an essay in the May Poetry.

Today: June issue arrives in mailbox.

Yipes.

Tonight I’m reading: Arthur Vogelsang, A Planet. Carol Snow, The Seventy Prepositions.

I spent several days ruminating on a quote: “The case for nonsense is not the same as the case against meaning.” This is Louise Glück, prefacing Peter Streckfus’s book The Cuckoo. And while it’s eloquent and quite wonderful, I’d like to tweak it a little, because I like the inexactness of exact opposites.

The case for nonsense is not the same as the case against sense.

Sense, you see, is just a synonym for reason, the process by which we make logical deductions about the causes and effects of what happens around us in the world. We expect things to work a certain way– if we throw a ball in the air, we expect it to come down; if we submerge the sack of puppies in water long enough, we expect them to drown. (Examples must be visceral in order to be fully understood.)

However, things continually happen that defy our expectations of sense. Despite the irreversible nature of death, people die on the operating table, and then come back to life. Chunks of ice fall from the sky without reasonable explanation. Heck, traffic accidents, which are eminently explicable, are so often labelled “senseless,” just because they’ve defied our expectations.

Within the realm of interpersonal relationships, sense is more often defied than not. For example, when I dated the harpy, I fully expected that by the time I broke up with her, she would be equally glad to rid herself of me. This was not the case. I once had a co-worker that would sit in a room full of people telling her that x=4, then march straight to the dean and tell her that the room full of people swore x=3. I used to be baffled by some peoples’ inability to act sensibly, until a good friend explained it to me in the terms I’d been waiting to hear all my life: “You’re trying to apply a rational model to an irrational behavior.”

And isn’t that what sense is all about? Rational models? And yet, at what point can any of us know with certainty that we represent the rational model, or rather, at what point can any of us be sure we don’t represent the irrational behavior? Who decides what’s rational when we, emotional creatures that we are, are running around trying to decide what’s best for our own lives?

There’s a certain lack of sense in what we do– in her essay in Poetry, Kay Ryan rightly notes that poetry “does not ‘find a need and fill it,’ as Henry Ford urged inventors to do.” And, of course, neither do we– at least not in any cosmically confirmable way. We simply order our existences in such a way that we make meaning out of our everyday lives. If the creation of poetry or the reading of poetry enters our daily lives, then there’s arguably a very well-constructed sense to it for those engaged in the endeavour, and very little sense for those not involved.

Yet, very few people who have no use for poetry will accuse poets of “nonsense,” they’ll merely accept that “it doesn’t make sense to me.”

There seems to be a commonly accepted belief that nonsense is not necessarily found in paradox or the inexplicable, not in the willful bending of sense so often found in poetry, fiction, and magic shows, but in the absolute snapping of sense to a subversive end. Glück rightly noted that nonsense is not divorced from meaning– it stands in direct opposition to meaning, and willfully so.

Would it not be fair to say that we can often find the “reason” for nonsense, or the logical explanation behind its creation? But those things which have no logical explanation, no obvious inherent motivation, are merely “senseless”? The aforementioned traffic accident defies our expectation of how lives are supposed to proceed, but does not willfully lack meaning. We simply cannot determine one aspect of the causality– why it has to happen to us.

Ryan’s argument for poetry as nonsense seems to me misguided in the same way that Alanis Morrisette (I know, I promised this days ago) incorrectly argues for irony when discussing events that are merely unfortunate. And where Morrissette’s examples lack a certain sophistication, a certain black humor, Ryan ascribes the black humor where perhaps there is none. Poems that play linguistic games of hide-and-go-seek, like those of Robert Frost, or which express comic impossibility, like those of Emily Dickinson, aren’t explicitly opposed to meaning, they’re merely open to a multiplicty of meanings. That’s hardly nonsense, to me.

But really, it’s senseless to argue about it.

Continuing my obsession with the word “runcible,” I began daydreaming about becoming a “runcibility consultant” for large corporations. I feel strongly that I could, through interviews with managers and their employees, determine the degree of runcibility in any corporation and provide some specific suggestions aimed at making the company more runcible.

Of course, if you’ve been reading a little more than I have (and I guarantee: this week, you have), you’ve probably seen Kay Ryan’s essay in this month’s Poetry. “A Consideration of Poetry,” an essay whose title belies its liveliness, takes a good hard look at what Ryan calls nonsense– the “giggly aquifer under poetry.” Edward Lear, not surprisingly, plays a nice role in the second section of the essay, in which Ryan uses “To make Gosky Patties.”

I will, perhaps, say snarky things about the essay (which, despite my disagreements, I did enjoy quite a bit) soon, hopefully tomorrow. Perhaps I will draw a fantastic parallel between Alanis Morissette and Kay Ryan. But for now, the beautiful wife is home with a sprained ankle, and I must tend to her and make her milkshake. I will leave you with this thought– writers are mystified and mesmerized by bruises and swelling. Ponder it.

A few days ago, someone used the word “runcible” as an adjective in a sentence during a meeting. I remember thinking at the time how oddly pleasant and revolting the word sounded– both sensations at the same time– and how I was unable to determine if the word was positive or derogatory. But, as it was a hella-long meeting, the kind of meeting that sucks your will to live, I let thoughts of runcibility go in favor of cartoon doodlings.

Then, as I wandered into the blogosphere recently, I found the word again– this time as part of a proper name for a restaurant. My immediate impulse to Google the word was, however, suppressed in favor of further exploration of the blogosphere. Of course, nothing I found had any lasting impression on me, but I suppose that when given the choice between actual knowledge acquisition and the blogosphere, I will make the wrong decision about 40% of the time.

The word has come back to haunt me at the oddest times over the last few days– while driving, while making teriyaki beef, while meeting with an entrepreneurship group. Last night, I dreamt in runcible terms.

Only today did I finally think of the word while I had access to a dictionary, and it wasn’t in there. So I turned to dictionary.com, and found this: “Early system for mathematics on IBM 650. See also FORTRUNCIBLE, IT.” Fortruncible? I was calling shenanigans. That just didn’t seem right, and certainly wan’t adjectival. So, finally, my good friend Google saved the day– it turns out “runcible” is a term that lies somewhere between nonsense and neologism. Created by Edward Lear in “The Owl and the Pussycat,” the term started showing up in other Lear poems and soon enough, people began defining it. Some dictionaries now include it– apparently my crappy desk dictionary is not one of them– defining it thusly: “However, since the 1920’s (several decades after Lear’s death), modern dictionaries have generally defined a runcible spoon to be a fork with three prongs, such as a pickle fork, which is curved like a spoon, and also has a cutting edge.”

Hoorah, Edward Lear. You have made my day, many years after your death. Perhaps Coventry Kessler’s magnificent term “eavesreading” will last as long as “runcible” has.

I’ve just mailed off my final packet of work for my second semester of grad school. This one was relatively short– only about 27 pages total. I am at once both relieved and irretrievably sad.

From now until next January, everything I write in Little Fury will serve no purpose but to amuse me or– gasp– allow me to participate in a conversation much greater than the confines of central North Carolina. And usually both.

Perhaps tomorrow: the thoughts on found poetry that I’ve been storing up for a few days.

I propose that the Poetry Society of America was just fine for fighting against the formalism, but the new world faces new threats– language poetry, new formalism, the dastardly School of Quietude! We need a new group for poetry’s Silver Age.

Oh. My. God. I am such a geek.

The question was posed in another blog: how do we know the difference between good poetry and important poetry. This is, for most Americans, a very significant question, for we have no appartus for immediately evaluating importance, which so often requires a measure of historical perspective.

In most foreign countries, this evaluation poses no great task: poetry’s greatness is assessed by the Shatner Scale.

Bad poetry is poetry that is made pleasant only when read by William Shatner.

Good poetry is poetry that does not require a Shatner reading to be pleasant to the listener, but is improved by the Shatner reading.

Important poetry is poetry that, when read by Shatner, is no more pleasant than it was without Shatner. Only a very few poems meet this criteria.

Very little in the literary world is not made better with Shatner. There have been no important poems written since Shatner began filming Boston Legal, as he has not had time to read poems since.