Photo by Vince Musi from National Geographic

As little as we know about the builders of Newgrange in Ireland, we know even less about the builders of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. What we do know about these monuments is that the first were built about 11,000 years ago, during the earliest years of the Eurasian Neolithic. In other words, Göbekli Tepe predates our current understanding of when agriculture began. (And yes, it also predates Stonehenge — by six or seven thousand years.) It’s hard to imagine what motivated tribes of hunter-gatherers to create such monumental architecture, full of animal sculptures and mysterious standing stones. It’s also hard to conceive of why each succeeding structure grew smaller and less sophisticated over time.

So this is where archaeology, science fiction, and poetry all converge. As a poet, archaeology enables me to explore that alien otherness while remaining grounded in the scientific reality of human experience.

More about Göbekli Tepe:

• Archaeology: The World’s First Temple
• Smithsonian: Göbekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? (with photo gallery)
• National Geographic: The Birth of Religion (with photo gallery)

I wrote this poem almost exactly four years ago, when I frequently stopped for coffee or breakfast in a Microsoft building between my bus stop and my own building. My product group has moved to another satellite campus since then, but I was back in Building 112 this morning for a meeting and overheard a team of corporate movers swapping stories about their accident-prone supervisor. I finished my coffee, looked up, and they were gone. I immediately thought of this poem.

I owe the poem’s current form and other improvements to feedback from David Wagoner while he was the Poet in Residence at Richard Hugo House.

National Library, Dublin

“The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.”

Happy May Day!

I first fell in love with William Stafford’s “Traveling through the Dark” when I read it in college. One of the most frequently taught and anthologized of his poems, I’m sure this poem was the first encounter with Stafford that thousands of other aspiring critics and poets had since its publication in 1962.

I may analyze poetry I read to pick up techniques and hone my craft, but the poems I love are frequently those with which I feel a more personal connection. (There are also hundreds of analyses of the poem online, so I won’t do so here.) Even though I liked “Traveling through the Dark” quite a lot, it didn’t become a favorite until I made that personal connection.

Reading You Must Revise Your Life just a few years ago, I learned that an experience on the same road between Portland and Tillamook that I’d traveled so many times had inspired Stafford to write the poem.

Rationally, I object to either the poet’s intent or biography influencing the value I place on a poem. It also seems downright silly that my “Oh, oh! I’ve been there!” reaction would influence my affection for a poem.

Nevertheless, the simple fact of shared experience with the poet makes William Stafford’s “Traveling through the Dark” one of my most beloved poems.

Update: I changed my mind. You can now follow @AndrewBecraft on Twitter.

Historical Tweets combines witty writing with an appropriate sense of the absurd. For example, what result would Twitter’s arbitrary length limitation place on a lovably prolix writer like Joyce?

Indeed.

I took the Tube from Russell Square to Leicester Square, transferred to the Northern Line for one stop going south, and entered Trafalgar Square from Charing Cross.

Two nights earlier, I’d walked down in the dark, emerging between St. Martin-in-the-Fields and the National Gallery at dusk, tossed unfamiliar coins in the great glass box and raced through the echoing halls until the docents herded me out with the tourists plodding at the end of their day and the young artists squeezing in one last brushstroke.

Friday morning, the sun glared off the marble. I walked down Whitehall past the Houses of Parliament, where I lingered in the shade behind the Jewel Tower.

I’d allotted just an hour or two for Westminster Abbey. I stepped through the door and picked up my audio guide, briefly considering the Japanese version, but allowed myself to be swayed toward English by the promise of “Oscar-winning actor Jeremy Irons” narrating the tour.

From number to number, I stepped clockwise through the hulking medieval architecture, past the gaudy tombs of the forgotten rich. I marveled at the twisted lid of King Henry V’s sarcophagus, lying as though discarded in the gloom behind the Coronation Chair.

Eventually, I turned into Poets’ Corner.

I hadn’t been inside a church in years, and the rest of Westminster Abbey certainly didn’t feel very ecclesiastical, despite the pause for prayer at noon. From a line of chairs facing away from the tombs, a little girl banged on the seat beside her and shouted at her brother, 「日本人はここに座るんだよ！」 I considered ascertaining what other unique cultural contrasts she’d been learning on her Grand Tour, but thought better of it.

Jeremy Irons trailed off in my headset, so I fumbled in my bag for my iPod. I looked up and Handel’s memorial caught my eye. “Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs” from Messiah followed me as I jotted in my Moleskine the names of my favorite writers buried there — Thomas Hardy, Ben Jonson (buried upright), Charles Dickens, Geoffrey Chaucer (“Galfridus Chaucer”).

Turning around at Chaucer’s tomb, I looked down to see a black slab inscribed with the name THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT and the epitaph “The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.” I stood there and listened to Eliot’s own reading of “The Waste Land.” I must have looked odd, staring for 25 minutes at that slab, but on their rush through this less-than-spectacular section of the sprawling abbey, nobody else lingered long enough to notice.

Amid the swirl of tour groups and the silent tombs of my dead gods, the 30 minutes I spent in Poets’ Corner were the most numinous of my life.

Double-checking my facts as I write this now, fifteen months later, I’m instead embarrassed to find that the slab was merely a memorial. Eliot’s ashes are actually buried in East Coker, Somerset — more than a hundred miles west.

Sometimes, even false assumptions can lead to important moments that linger and inspire.

Dad pointed me to his old house on Victor Ave, which is still a dentist’s office today (Grandpa & Grandma sold it to a dentist back in the 70s). I stood in the parking lot on Sunday morning as he pointed out the bedroom he shared with his older brother, where he stuffed towels under the door so he could read late into the night.

With a little help from my mom (“Head east on 44 and turn left…”) and the Internet (pictures…from space!), I managed to find the old ranch in Millville, east of Palo Cedro. I recognized it right away from the white fence behind the house.

What’s even odder, I realized on the drive back into town, is that Grandpa & Grandma moved from Millville into Palo Cedro by the time we visited in 1984, so my very clear memory of where the ranch was and what it looked like dates all the way back to 1979.

Beth took a picture of me next to Cow Creek, where Grandpa pulled me out of the water after I’d stepped off the shallow shoal into the deceptively deep (for a five-year-old) main channel. I wrote a poem about that a few years ago, and I now have a few more details to add from the unchanged scene I saw today, 30 years later.

I called my brother Nathan from the shopping complex where Grandpa & Grandma B got their groceries, which still has an odd windmill structure I described to Beth even before we saw it come up next to the highway. It’s a Verizon store now.

We went up to the dam at Whiskeytown this afternoon (we did Shasta Dam yesterday), and stopped for a few minutes among the ruins of Shasta — exactly as I remember them, despite several recent fires that swept through the area.

Ultimately, the only place I’ve been unable to find here in Redding is that little Mexican restaurant Grandpa used to take us to, La Casita, I think. The only La Casita in the area is way out in Weaverville, 40 miles east. Redding has changed a lot in the last twenty to thirty years, but nearly all the places I remember — and even some new ones, like my father’s childhood home — remain essentially unchanged.

Photo from Pierre J‘s collection of French nuclear test photos taken in 1970

Back in the mid-90s, I toured the Hanford Site in eastern Washington State with a small college class. (In the contemporary national security climate, I’m surprised to learn that tours of the Hanford Site are still available from the Department of Energy.) Eight or nine of us piled into a van and drove around the site unrestricted, stopping a few hundred yards from the plutonium production reactors that the Manhattan Project used to create the core of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. The reactors themselves (in the photo below) had long since been retired and their cores “entombed.”

Photo of Hanford Site taken in 1960

Our professor drove us past the trenches in which sections of nuclear submarines were stored, awaiting disposal of their reactors. We stopped again in the abandoned town of Hanford, where the only structure left standing was the high school.

Finally, we arrived at the commercial power generation plant, Washington Nuclear Power Unit Number 2, where we were met by a PR man from the Department of Energy. He guided us through security checks and into the reactor building, where we were issued little badges to wear that measured our radiation exposure.

Eight stories up in an elevator, we emerged into a room overlooking the pool, control rods hanging over the water and the reactor itself immersed below.

We didn’t spend much time chatting or asking questions. We quickly turned around and stepped back into the elevator. Halfway down, the elevator stopped with a jerk.

For 20 minutes, we laughed at each other’s increasingly outlandish hypotheses about an impending catastrophe, as the PR man grew increasingly drenched in sweat. The elevator finally jolted back to life and we descended to the clinically white lobby, handed in our dosimeters, and headed back out into that unique light that seems to hang over Eastern Washington in the fall.

More than a decade later, I would write a poem that incorporated the entombed reactors, the abandoned town, and the submarines. The DOE PR man and his flop sweat didn’t make the cut.

UPDATE: Read “Cathedrals” here on Andrew-Becraft.com.

McCarthy’s writing is full of incomplete sentences and anastrophe, completely lacks quotation marks, and frequently embeds dialogue in the middle of paragraphs. What truly annoys me, though, is McCarthy’s inconsistent use of apostrophes for contractions. Each of these conventions is a barrier to straightforward reading (though I finished The Road in only a few hours). If they made me stop and think about the language, characters, or plot, I wouldn’t object, but they’re merely distracting.

Naturally, this apocalyptic abomination is being made into a “major motion picture.”

I think what bothers me most is how much attention McCarthy and The road have gotten. With more praise and “book of the year” awards than God’s own Bible, you’d think McCarthy had done something deeply original. Well, he hasn’t. Writers like Joyce experimented with alternatives to standard dialogue punctuation, but I would argue that time has proven their experiments a failure.

And there are far superior works that address how we as humans might react to the end of our civilization and the impending extinction of our species. Two of my favorite examples appear at the end of Elizabeth Hand‘s Saffron and Brimstone. “Echo” and “The Saffron Gatherers” explore similar themes of survival amidst the loss of hope without resorting to needless typographical devices.

Thankfully, I’m not the only one who’s annoyed and even a little angry about The Road‘s undeserved success.

The Bibliophile Baker:

What really irritates me is his apparent aversion to punctuation. For a while I was trying to decide why some words deserve apostrophes, and others don’t, but I think I finally figured it out: he puts apostrophe’s for contractions of words + had, but not words + not. i.e. He’d use some markings, but he didnt use others. This to me is both annoying and pretentious.

Bibliobibuli has an excellent analysis of the specific patterns, along with a roundup of the punctuational criticism from around the ‘net.

Literary Kicks may respect Oprah, but nevertheless has some more well-constructed analysis of McCarthy’s assault on the English language.

And with that, I’m hereby inaugurating my list of…

Writers I Would Like to Punch in the Face

• Cormac McCarthy, for being a pretentious twat.
• Philip Pullman, who doesn’t seem capable of creating a sympathetic character, even in books ostensibly written for pre-adults.
• Michael Crichton, whose varied and single-minded obsessions in each book (chaos theory! quantum mechanics! the Japanese!) seemed about as relevant as an elevator operating manual to a Kalahari bushman.

Having actually met enough reasonably well-known writers to think that there’s a greater-than-zero chance that I might also meet those on this list, I should of course note that I’m a pacifist and wouldn’t think of really punching these guys in the nose. Well, maybe Michael Crichton, since if I met him now he’d have to be a zombie…