Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
I’ve been thinking about my writing styles, and really my writing identities, as I gather poems to read at my first headlining poetry reading since March of last year. I recognize the healthy ways that the person who has written my poems of the last couple years is different from those one who wrote the works that filled up my previous published and unpublished books.
Tomorrow, Thursday, March 14th, I will be reading 25 minutes of new poems starting around 8:30, with open mic performers performing before and after my feature. You should come by the Silver Lining Piano Bar at 1414 16th Street in Midtown Sacramento to see the show.
As our parents have faced all sorts of health problems in the last few years, most of them cognitive, my wife Kate and I have adhered ever more closely to the brain health regimen recommended by neurologists. I’ve been a vegetarian for more than 40 years, and I don’t typically eat high-calorie or high-sugar baked goods or desserts, but in recent years I’ve recommitted to healthy eating, for Kate has started making me elaborate feasts packed with tofu and more than a half-dozen vegetables. These meals take Kate almost an hour to make, and they take me almost that long to eat. As only one in ten Americans eats the vegetables that they should, I assume that I eat more vegetables at one sitting than most Americans do in a week.
I started walking during the pandemic lockdown, and haven’t stopped since, averaging more than five miles a day since 2021. According to a recent article in The Telegraph, “Walking 15,000 steps a week for two years could add years to your life, a London School of Economics (LSE) study has found.” As I walk back and forth to campus, I hit that benchmark easily, and my son Jukie and I typically cover more than 15,000 steps every weekend day. This past weekend we walked 25 miles.
So my poems these days are fueled by healthy food, and many of them are composed (sometimes by dictation) while I am enjoying the greenbelts of Davis.
The other big change that affects my poetry? My going to bed before 11 PM every night.
I used to wait for everyone in my family to go to sleep before plumbing the depths of my poetic brain for material and quiet composition time. Franz Kafka journaled about his insomnia in his diaries, and some biographers think the wild imagery found in stories such as “The Metamorphosis” resulted from his lack of sleep. He died at age 40.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac and many other authors struggled with alcohol, and Charles Baudelaire and Hunter. S. Thompson were also drug addicts. All of them, like Woolf, Plath, and Hemingway, suffered from insomnia, and most of them died much too early.
Addressing my own sleep problems (starting with a sleep study) and choosing to go to sleep (early) when my wife Kate does have all improved my life. It has been refreshing to wake up feeling rested, and I nap a lot less than I used to, using that awake time to write poems during the day, rather than overnight.
But are the poems any good? I can tell that they are more controlled, less obstinately random. The comedian Stephen Wright once said, “I have to be asleep by one in thе morning because my dreams are going to start whether I’m sleeping or not, which can make for some pretty strange conversation if I’m still awake.” I have sometimes felt the same way about poems I wrote late at night, such as this one in which I tried to represent the kaleidoscopic descriptions of Kate’s first ocular migraine:
First Ocular Migraine
Transchromatic vision spiraled before her,
Void of calculations or of volition,
Rather, arctic icepick arpeggios,
Hyacinth river syringes, an antipathetic siren song,
Synthetic shuddering childbirth of synapses,
Awakened autoplay of uneven blackative perforations,
Intermission from logic and pretension,
Like Carmen Miranda choking a parrot, furious tintinabulations,
Squawking polychromatic involuntary terrace table geyser-sabre fever-burst!
Waves of judgment, the snap of brain-stem hunger!
Somewhere a basilica is burning pestled crystals;
they are the color of the world!
Hypertrophic painters have machine-blasted zigzag astronomical cracks.
The imps are dancing to transparent friction idiophones,
Two or three of them on the sides of her eyeball.
Blushing buzzer, besmirched blushing bloodstained barefaced bandit!
Hallucination independent of eyeball, of eyelid, of light source,
Formless and inchoate, like the lacuna of an unborn star.
I don’t know if I could write such a wild and haphazard poem at two in the afternoon, but now that I am taking better care of myself, I will see if I can bring other strengths to bear to my writing processes and products. You will see evidence of my new verse at The Silver Linings Piano Bar if you join us tomorrow night at 8.
The Sudwerk Pub Quiz happens tonight and every Wednesday night at 7. If you are in Davis this evening, please join us. Recruit a team and join us at the beautiful outdoor patio where we have room for everyone. At the end, we are left only with our thoughts, so I would love for your thoughts to be populated with your friends. As Saint Augustine allegedly said, “Good times and crazy friends make the best memories.”
In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on art museums, social media, 401K accounts, annoying people, football, elements, Florida losers, the year 1988, Beavertowns, expensive cities, second acts for athletes, secondary names, Oscars, NATO headquarters, Ryan Gosling, funny girls, books about teeth, notable novellas, things that are soft that you wouldn’t expect to be soft, crabs, imagined scenarios with the UC Davis alumni ski team, covers, scientific sub-disciplines, people who have been arrested, public domain characters, common sense, tennis stars, New York University, The Financial Times, job titles, centers of culture, SI units, current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare.
Thanks to my new patron Adam who has been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Thanks also to Brooke, Jeannie, Becky, Franklin, and More Cow Bell. Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, and others who support the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of supporters. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine!
Best,
Dr. Andy
P.S. Here are five questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:
- Mottos and Slogans. What was the most famous slogan of Wheaties?
- Internet Culture. What does the “QR” of a “QR code” stand for?
- Newspaper Headlines. In the city of Davis, did Measure N pass or fail?
- Four for Four. Which two of the following are native to North America: cabbage, cactus pear, carrots, cranberries?
- The Streets of San Francisco. What street is famous for a steep, one-block section with eight hairpin turns?
P.P.S. Kim Stanley Robinson will be reading his poetry at Poetry Night in Davis on March 21st, the first day of spring!