Word For the Day - Chthonic in Everyday Ramblings

chthonic. (some folks say the ch is silent)

concerning, belonging to, or inhabiting the underworld. "a chthonic deity"

“Snappers were the old gods—chthonic, ugly, and crude—who’d been dethroned by the Olympian gods and locked up in Tartarus.” Gregory Orr The Blessing A Memoir.

Because it is due back at the library this next Tuesday I’ve been dipping into this book every spare moment I have. The line above is about his relationship with the local turtles in the ditch behind his house when he was seven.

Orr is a poet and a professor of poetry and how I got on this book was I was looking for the name of the poet named Orr that wrote that book about poetry that I bought and read in hardcover was it last year? Two years ago, 2011. The Orr that writes about poetry for the New York Times Book Review. But I got confused about first names and had Gregory Orr stuck in my head.

That is probably because some while ago I heard an interview with him about this memoir, and poetry in general. Or at least I think I did. And so I saw they had the memoir at the library when I was up on the third floor looking for the New Collected Poems of George Oppen.

How I got onto George Oppen this time was by reading a bit in The Virtues of Poetry by James Longenbach that I have on my Kindle. (They are finally able to format books with poetry in them properly for electronic format.)

And how I got onto the Logenbach book was that I finally realized it was David Orr and his book Beautiful & pointless A guide to Modern Poetry I had been thinking about all along. I gave my copy to Kes. David Orr had written an interesting review of The Virtues a few months back.

I promised myself that if I spent the ten dollars on the Logenbach book that I would take it seriously and dive right in. That is why I have been reading Yeats out loud to Sam while he snuggles into my sweat pants and big polar tech shirts in the evenings after my long stressful workdays. And I also promised myself to utilize the library again.

I own the Yeats but I didn’t have the Oppen. I discovered last night while reading the preface about his unusual life for a poet that there was a CD in a pocket in the back of Oppen (he stopped writing for 25 years) reading his own work. As his formatting is unusual it is a great tool for teachers.

Longenbach talks about the prosody of poems and uses all the terms…Stress and Tetrameter and Sprung Rhythms and Trochee… and so on and I was surprised that it was all familiar even though my eyes and behind them my brain glazes over at the thought of counting stresses and identifying tropes. I have absorbed more of this by exposure than I imagined. :)

Slowly but surely, one tiny step forward at a time I return to this landscape alone without Mr. Finch.

It makes me laugh though to think about how literate a cat Sammy must be. He’s spent almost 13 years sitting in laps or snuggled close to us reading an amazing range of poems (including our own) and biographies of poets aloud to each other; the bird guy and I.

Here in this time of year where one feels the old gods moving, restless, just below the surface there is also vulnerable new life being nourished and shed of its old useless hard shells silently growing towards the light that will eventually return.

Bringing sun baked painted turtles out on a rotting log half submerged in a local pond to look forward to once again.