Tomato Harvest, Writing Report, and Hearing Chana Read

To Tomato or Not To Tomato, with Freeloaders!

So blogging the shame of those tomatoes did the trick -- we got out there to harvest the tomatoes this past week. Not only was it about time, because we are overdue for first frost (tonight, they say), but we've also had pouring rains for two days straight.

So I started a bunch of different tomato varieties, and what came up and was hearty by the time I was ready to transplant (this is often how it goes -- I tend to garden in fits), I had a Silvery Fir Tree, an Amish Paste, a Jaune Flaume, a Nebraska Wedding, and a Roma. Now, if this is all we had, it would've been fine. But we also had an Isis Candy, which is prolific, and what I thought -- or hoped -- was Riesentraub, but what wasn't unless I had some strange strain that goes orange. The Isis Candy and the faux Riesentraub were the ones whose tomato cages went wonky several times during the growing season and finally, after one Michigan wind too many, went down altogether. Of course, these tomatoes just keep on going, which must be part of why I keep planting them because it's not because we're a family of such avid tomato-eaters.

A couple years ago, I didn't plant any tomatoes because I'd found before that we didn't eat them. Then last year I planted cherry tomatoes in droves because we'd tried out and loved a bruschetta a la Julie and Julia recipe, but the productivity of the tomatoes outstripped my love of the making and eating the recipe day after day. Then last year we discovered that we liked a particular tomato sauce with pasta recipe, so I thought I'd plant bigger tomatoes for sauce, but we discovered that we don't in fact like tomato sauce all that much -- except in stuffed bell peppers, which we discovered we love this year, though, of course, I didn't plant any bell peppers because we had too many that went uneaten the year before.

Now I admit that part of the continued tomato planting may be just because they are so fun to plant and so rewarding. But I have to get it into my thick skull that they do -- in this climate anyway -- pretty much all ripen up at once, which overwhelms me every time, especially if I'm rolling in tomatoes when it's already getting cold, when I only want warm things.

But we would've been okay with our harvest had it not been for. . .freeloader tomatoes!

So what happened was that last year I planted all those cherry tomatoes in this big raised bed I have. This year, I decided I would plant my son's sunflowers and pumpkins in there, trying to rotate the crops because we tend to have big problems with powdery mildew on our pumpkins. I was also worried that we needed to keep tomatoes out of there because last year for the first time we'd had what I think should be called Scary Alien Tomato Bugs (Tomato Hornworms -- yuuuuuccck -- really, just writing about them gives me the willies -- I'm embarrassed how quickly everyone in the house knows if I've spotted one -- or like the other day, touched one).  Pretty early on, I started seeing tomato plants growing outside the bed. It was too difficult for me not to admire their tenacity, so, eventually, after they'd proved themselves and the pumpkins died a powdery mildew death incredibly early this year, I put up the tomato cage and wire to train the plants on.

And so we ended up having even more tomatoes. Here's what we got before the rains started.

Here you can also see some deformed Beit Alpha cucumbers. (These are amazing cucumbers, but I didn't tend them well this year. Last year they were like a dream. Yum!)

For the next few days, we'll likely also be eating our weight in green beans. Fall clean up and putting in the garlic is just around the corner (probably in November because my son's birthday and Halloween tend to just suck up my October energy). After the garlic and shredding the leaves to put on top of them, I hope to dig up my calla lilies and thin them out for the first time. (Gulp.)

Writing Report and My First Encounter with Chana

This week in accountability news I met my weekly goal of writing two pages of poetry (in this case, fairly revised), going through another section of my old notebook and pulling poems and scraps out, and moved forward on my transcription project of The Song of Songs.

I also beat my own personal best for number of new poems submitted in a single year! I am now officially more productive than I have ever been in my entire life. (It's kind of a weird feeling.)

So here's something I've been thinking about. Right after I graduated from college with a degree in English at Cal State Northridge, I moved to Sacramento. I had applied to various MFA programs in the Bay Area and had gotten into Mills College in Oakland, but had decided to delay. I got a job working as a secretary in a construction company. I regretted delaying almost instantly. I missed school, the intelligent conversation about things I cared about. I'd look longingly at Sacramento State College and the area around it (which is very funny to think about now as a professor). By the fall, I decided to audit some classes: a course on poetry in translation and a managerial accounting course. I no longer remember exactly why, probably just good sense, but I didn't continue with the managerial accounting course. I did audit the poetry in translation course. It was fascinating. That was where I first seriously studied  Neruda. We read big sections of John Felstiner's Translating Neruda. I honestly can't remember all that we read but I do remember looking longingly at someone's bright yellow copy of Neruda's Canto General. I believe I did some kind of presentation, even, though I didn't have to. I wish I could remember -- or had computer files from those days.

The Poetry in Translation professor told us that John Felstiner would be reading in Berkeley at Black Oak Books on Shattuck, as part of a celebration of translation that Black Oak Books was having. So I drove the 90 minutes to Berkeley one night after work, and attended this celebration of translation. I believe there was another speaker before John Felstiner, who was probably amazing in his or her own right, but I don't remember who it was. I do remember that Chana Bloch read from her translation of The Song of Songs that night. Here's a taste:

My beloved is mine and I am his.
He feasts 
in a field of lilies.

Before day breathes,
before the shadows of night are gone,
run away, my love!
Be like a gazelle, a wild stag
on the jagged mountains.

and

My beloved is milk and wine. . .

His cheeks a bed of spices,
a treasure 
of precious scents, his lips
red lilies wet with myrrh.

The images were so succulent, they pierced right through me, no matter how tired I was, how out of place I felt. And this was the Torah, translated by a Jewish poet who looked a bit like my not-at-all-poetic grandmother. I was mesmerized. There she was, Chana Bloch, who taught at Mills College, where I'd already been accepted and had, for no earthly good reason, delayed. I enrolled part-time the next semester so I could take her poetry workshop. Of course, it was at Mills that I began writing about my family and Jewishness, the Holocaust and Israel, not only because of Chana, but with Chana as a role model. I remember she said her translation work was one of the ways she honored her Jewishness.

Chana Bloch, of blessed memory, died on May 19 of this year. She was a remarkable poet, translator, and mentor. My understanding is that she was writing poems in a fever up until the end. While I can't know whether that's true, I can say that when I emailed her to ask if she would blurb my chapbook (very long in coming) last year, she didn't hesitate; she printed out my chapbook and took it with her to the hospital, where she was having a week of chemo for her aggressive sarcoma. (Imagine that. I feel so honored she wanted to blurb it that much. I cherish that. Thinking of her belief in my work makes me think I should make her proud.) Last weekend, there was a memorial for her at Mills College, that dear place, where she directed the creative writing program for a long time. Of course, I couldn't go. But I'm thinking a lot about Chana as I work on this collection of poems on Israel/Palestine, as I transcribe her translation of the Song of Songs that so transfixed me more than twenty years ago, as I read her translations of Israeli poets like Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovich, and as I only now exceed how productive and inspired I was when I was under her tutelage at Mills. What hasn't changed is how inspired I am by her still.

I miss you, Chana!