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Our Deep Sense of Winter
– Annie Lighthart (Iron String) Once again we have spent most of our preciously hoarded cache of winter endurance, and it's only the end of January. Once again we have arrived at the place where slogging through no longer works. No end in sight, so toss that metaphor. Time to go deep, but stay awake. Let us now visit a few of the unspangled silences of this season.
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1/2/2022 5 Comments Poetry from Image
I see something out my front window – a white cat stuck in an opening halfway up the old board fence along my driveway. This space, where a board used to be, is about the right width for the cat to wedge there: uncomfortably, precariously, but not painfully. The cat is facing away from me, looking into the yard next door where she lives. I look around for my cell phone; this is a rare opportunity to shoot an image in addition to the real thing. I find my binoculars instead. The white cat sees a red squirrel begin to climb a cherry tree next to her, and remains motionless in her slot while she languidly turns her head to observe the fellow animal reach her own level. Likely she is rehearsing the possibility of leaping out and catching it (a universal cat fantasy, I believe) or even perhaps imitating it as it scurries along the branches of the half dead tree a few feet from her face. Is she truly stuck? I doubt it. The squirrel has a walnut in its mouth, as do 89.4% of the squirrels at this time of year. They harvest them from a tree next door, but cross into my yard to bury them, or just as often to eat them, dropping shells all over the grass. A great transfer of nuts thus takes place every year between yards. So far as I can tell, nothing much comes of this. Slowly the squirrel circles its way up the cherry tree, reappearing on a branch that hangs directly over the cat. The cat leans her head back and slowly swivels it round to follow the squirrel's path, until her face seems to come loose and lie flat on top of her neck, like a jar lid. Not many cats are curious enough to turn their heads that far. This does not fit my comfortable stereotype of this cat as stupid. Muttering, I sort through various explanations of what is happening. Swivel – yes, that's the word I want! Across my imagination unfolds an image of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, thus connecting the whole scenario with something mythical. We have crossed temporarily into the realm of magic. Will it hold? What I have stumbled int is not an image but a kind of cobbled-together situation – a story being conjured right in front of me, – one that flings out possibilities: face, swivel, sly, moon, with a pinch of aberration, into a static landscape of intersecting shapes. This is not an anecdote about a cat and a squirrel, it is about the living geography of landscape as it regularly contorts itself into an occasion for art. Spontaneously, with no need for embellishment because this is what the universe does all the time, you just have to be awake while it happens. For in the nature of gifts, these spontaneous incidents don't last: all the loose ends have to be tied up simultaneously, on the spot – you can't go back later and assemble the parts you missed. Nope.
12/9/2021 6 Comments Poet's Petard # 10 – December 2021A Wish ListRecently a friend and I challenged each other with the question: “What's on your secret list of wishes right now, the one likely to make you the most happy?” Pretty simple and straightforward, right? Our only rule was nothing hugely impossible or vague. Doesn't have to be a material possession.Take advantage of this opportunity to be totally selfish. But be careful what you wish for. Right now I'd spend my wish on a room with a floor-to-ceiling window (at least 12 feet high) for this time of year, when the daylight hours are moving into the single digits. I would bask and bask. . . . Think about how foolish this question would have sounded to the wise and kindly centaur Cheiron who was born immortal like his fellow centaurs, but was shot by accident with a poison-tipped arrow from the bow of the hero Heracles. Cheiron couldn't wish his way out of this paradox – eternal life with a festering wound so painful that he finally chose the lesser of evils and petitioned the gods for the ability to die. His request was granted. Song-writer Soham Patel makes a choice (in her poem “Ultra Orator Spell”):
Lawrence Raab, similarly, goes out to the edge to find the center, in his poem Even Clearer:
Reginald Gibbons reminds us that whatever we wish for is always likely to be much larger than we could have imagined (from “After Mandelshtam”):
And Brenda Hillman, with the final stanza of her poem “Some Kinds of Forever Visit You,” granted another wish for me – one I didn't even know I had:
10/31/2021 2 Comments Poet's Petard # 9 – November 2021Even our Poems are no longer Huggable When I went to replace my ancient and wheezing fridge last year with a brand new one, my first question to the dealer was “will it take refrigerator magnets?” Inside, a refrigerator is all about food and its preservation. But Outside – Outside, a refrigerator is all about photos, magnets, greeting cards – and poems! My fridge gallery always includes a couple or three poems that quietly pulse into the room like a little camp fire, keeping the wolves at a reasonable distance. On my fridge is written, “Poetry: An Embraceable Holiness.” Recently – meaning within the past six months – I have witnessed a notable shift in the poems I review for inclusion in my fridge gallery: No matter what a poem pretends to be about, it's been totally saturated in advance with an apocalyptic view of things: Climate Change, Pandemic, and the worldwide erosion of Democracy. We're drowning in it; we have all sprung leaks, so that freshness, joy, appreciation of raw beauty – formerly the driving engines of Poetry as an Art Form – are being temporarily overwhelmed by a kind of desperate stoicism. The bees have finally become immune to our smoke, and we have lost our protective veils. Here are two examples – my current fridge poems – . A few lines should give you the idea of the seriousness of the infiltration. “Listen, no one signed up for this lullaby. into the same day you dreamed of leaving – get up and at it, pestilence be damned.” ~Rita Dove ("Incantation of the First Order," Poem-a-day Oct. 18, 2021) “Easy light storms in through the window, soft nest rigged high in the maple. I've got a bone I've said You know what's funny? and then, Ada Limón, ("Lover," Poem-a-day Oct. 4, 2021) And returning to the immunity-of-bees as a metaphor, here is a different slant on what happens when the world can no longer postpone presenting its final bill – complete with immensely generous (already used up) discount for all comers. This poem is beyond revenge, beyond justice even – simply a new pathway to the heart's core. Death of the Bee Keeper Humming that swarmed his ears seemed also pain, Because of honey, he forgave them, even Their duty was death The slow savor of which from “Strountes” by Gunnar Ekelöf. Michigan Quarterly Review, 8/29/2021 4 Comments Poet's Petard #8, September 2021Poetry as Haptic Art“The skin is the oldest and the most sensitive of our organs. . .Touch is the parent of our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. It is the sense which became differentiated into the others. . . .” “The body image is informed fundamentally from haptic and orienting experiences early in life. Our visual images are developed later on, and depend for their meaning on primal experiences that were acquired haptically.” Of the so-called five senses – seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting – only the first two have been considered highly evolved enough to support one of the “fine arts.” And yet, for at least a couple of thousand years, physicians in China and other parts of the East have quietly continued to compile a tradition based upon the sense of touch – taking the pulse of their patients for diagnosis – and over time refining this practice into a haptic art. Recently I was conducting a somewhat “haptic” experiment of my own with two tuning forks, and discovered to my surprise that there is more to this than listening, or even just hearing. Both vision and touch have vigorously inserted themselves into the experience. As it turns out, Chinese physician Wang Xi in the 3rd century found the process of taking the pulse to be an extremely deep well, both semantically and experientially. He wrote a kind of user's manual to help guide his fellow practitioners through the various ways that the “mo” (term that means “the abode” or the “pathway” of the blood) declares itself to the extremely sensitized hands of the physician. From a poet's point of view, Wang Xi's detailed instructions are like a whole body immersion into the precision of abstract terms and an affirmation of primal role of metaphor in human speech (see epigraphs above). So, bear with me if you can, as I unspool the original “aha!” moment that allowed me to compare listening to a set of tuning forks with the act of “feeling” the human pulse. I would like to offer a comparison between a single tone from a tuning fork, to the single “tone” that the blood makes inside its abode (mo ) when passing back and forth between heart and lungs, plying its daily task of keeping a single human being alive. Wang Xi made a list of 24 major variations in the nature of the pulse that Chinese physicians were feeling in their diagnoses. I will describe the first four and compare them with four impressions of an A-220 tuning fork when it is struck, then matched by a tuner or musician. 1. Floating mo: If one lifts the fingers, there is abundance; if one presses down one finds insufficiency. 1. Singing flat: Sometimes I sing out A-220 just as I'm banging the tuning fork on my knee, and get a perfect match between the two tones. But as I continue to do this simple imitation over and over, some ingredient of the two sounds is no longer there, and I am left singing slightly flat. I do not know how to prevent this. 2. Hollow mo: floating, large and soft; pressing down the center is vacuous and the two sides feel full. 2. Sometimes I am singing a correct A, matching my voice to the fork, yet I can “hear” a kind of segment split off from the tone, like bark peeling from its outermost self, so that the tone feels flat when it is still “true” by some more holistic standard. As if the tone is feeling its way into a future not yet realized. 3. Flooding mo: extremely large under the fingers. 3. The voice is thicker than the tuning fork. It has a tendency to melt into it or over it, or between or around – clinging, dripping, penetrating but never really matching. 4. Slippery mo: it comes and goes in fluid succession; similar to the rapid (#5) 4. What does the voice or instrument expect to happen, by imitating a tuning fork? For the two tones to match one another so closely as to be indistinguishable? Or rather, for them to complement one another like a kind of aural triangulation, a fuller steadiness than a single fork or voice can maintain? But even this – is not achievable. Congratulations if you have read this far! Warning: I may continue in this vein (!) next month.
Poetry as Divine MadnessIt took me years of writing poems before I dared to say “I am a Poet” (with a capitol 'P'). Not out of simple modesty was I holding back – but a deep respect for the art, and also a kind of mild terror (?) at what Poetry does to a poet. For example: signing the I Am A Poet contract means you agree to the following:
Now you're good to go, having taken the vaccine that will allow you to function inside a state of Divine Madness without losing your mind. You will be able to sing out to whatever muse or divinity may be guiding your writing life:
As a rebellious teenager I read this and thought, “Wait a minute! 'fervor' and 'wonder' are already excessive. You mean Poetry teaches me how to be extreme on purpose without being accused of disobedience, lying or lunacy? Yes, and Poetry eventually starts demanding you to live up to the part of the contract that says, “make use of this wild excess you have agreed to nurture inside yourself.” As poet Roya Marsh says, dive deep for
And in a poem I've never finished, another reminder to Poets:
7/5/2021 2 Comments Poet's Petard #6 – July, 2021Light and DarkNow that we are emerging from the darkness and silence imposed by COVID – it's easy to get a feeling of having been snatched up and set down on a stage as an actor in a huge drama of cosmic proportions – actually in it, and of it. More than ever, even as a poet, I find myself noticing light and dark, sound and silence as if they were persons, not just abstract terms, and also I keep feeling a need to re-define and re-connect these enormous ideas to one another by way of smaller things, just in case a more hopeful picture of the future will show itself. All of 2020 and into 2021 has been at the very least a painful reminder of our relationship to sound and light. For awhile, “light” no longer seemed bearable in its old form. Here is Macbeth expressing fear of daylight:
And so, we did – scarf up. And close ourselves off from one another to the point of highest anguish and fury. We did not go gently into this night. We obeyed and disobeyed, like Adam and Eve who long ago were accused of a sin called “disobedience,” when they didn't even know what the word meant. But surely we should have known more. Like Riddley Walker in Russell Hoban's post-apocalyptic novel, we found a sudden desperate need to understand “nite” more fully again, in the way of our less “civilized” ancestors from the stone age:
Listening back to the wisdom of the stones, when humans carefully arranged them into geometric patterns that we intuitively felt as a way to connect ourselves to and mimic the larger cosmos. We were matter-of-factly taking on our assigned role to help keep the whole universe active and alive. Here is James Richardson, from his 63-part poem The Encyclopedia of the Stones: #21
And from #6:
6/6/2021 7 Comments Poet's Petard #5 – June, 2021Swinburne Got Me Started: A Rhythmic Riddle The oldest, most decrepit book on my poetry shelf is a collection of Swinburne I found in a used book shop when I was a teenager and my idea of poetry was language that galloped you to beautiful scenic places where love and adventure were abundantly available. The book, for which I paid $1.00, was falling apart then, and still has not finished. As the Introduction says, “For sheer sensuous delight of singing, the pleasure of beautiful, fragrant words singing together, in a matchless harmony of music, Mr. Swinburne's poetry is unique in the English language.” The poems were full of blood, sleep, death, but not much action, and a lot of moping about for no good reason. But one immediately caught and held my attention, even though I didn't know what the title meant. Here's the opening of that poem, “Hendecasyllabics,”
What a difference one syllable can make! Here you have fully ELEVEN of them per line instead of the usual ten that result from iambic pentameter. Not only does this poem kick the iamb and rhyme itself out the door, the “Deca” goes along with it, and you end up with a rhythm that turns the poet's word-hoard into a corral of restless stallions, eager to return to the wild. This one poem hooked me for the rest of my life, in a way that none had done before it. Besides, what a way to nail a sunset! Here again is Swinburne – still sensuous and musical – offering a standard iambic pentameter poem:
The riddle: Can you feel the shift between ten and eleven syllables? Does it matter to you? Here is an observation by Olivier Messiaen, composer of “Quartet for the end of time,” who could have been writing about poetry:
Swinburne, although scarcely read much today, may have been ahead of his time. I am grateful to
his particular poetic imagination. 5/2/2021 4 Comments Poet's Petard #4 – May 2021“Nature is everywhere – so why even mention it?”
Poets have written a lot about this thing called “Nature.” Recently we have nudged “nature poetry” up a notch by calling it “eco-poetry,” and as such, given it a place the human arsenal of possible ways to fend off the Sixth Extinction. I offer here a wee spectrum of attitudes about what possible practical use “nature poetry” can offer our world. The first is my own wry response to Goldsworthy:
Even Wallace Stevens, who seems to live mainly inside his head, was passionate about the earth. “It's an illusion that we were ever alive,” he says, and his solution is to embrace the illusion head on and declare it to be a good thing – So, he suggests a way to resolve the paradox. If “rock” stands for “ultimate nothingness” then yes, nature covers the rock with flowers and leaves, which are impermanent. But contained within the nothingness of illusion is a cure, which he called “the cure of the ground” – (from “The Rock”):
So, he offers a compromise: the poem is the permanence, with its own “leaves,” and with
Again, I offer a lighter bulwark against nothingness, a flock of tiny birds:
And here is James Stephens in his wonderful fantasy novel The Crock of Gold – The speaker is The Thin Woman of Inis Magrath:
(Try it, next time you've conveniently worked yourself into a rage on a clear night when the moon is out.) And finally, from native American poet Jennifer Elise Foerster:
*And speaking of abandonment, I am grateful to Erik Muller's recent book A New Text of the World: Ways of Looking at the Poetry of Wallace Stevens for drawing my attention again to Stevens, whom I long ago abandoned.
3/28/2021 9 Comments Poet's Petard #3 – April, 2021
(Freddy the Pig) This month I want to reinforce the cliché of Spring. It showed up again this year. We can watch from the sidelines, or jump right in. In my front-yard garden a couple of Ravens are obviously going through their first year of nest-building. No need to switch on the television, just watch this lordly fowl pulling at a dry twig from a Curly Willow tree – the twig about 4 times his length and built like a bedspring. Nope, it won't disentangle itself from the twisted clot of other twigs, even when Raven turns on the full power of his stocky frame. (Yank! Yank! Wiggle! Wiggle!) Through the binoculars, I swear he looks bewildered. Eventually I watch (her/him) fly off with a much smaller bit sticking out both sides of his beak. Could there be a more efficient way to do this? Tradition be damned. Here's lordly Greek poet Odysseus Elytis offering his support:
And in the latest issue of Emergence Magazine Jay Griffiths combines literature with science in a detailed rhapsody on the soil beneath and way-beneath our feet. The kind of essay that makes you feel totally nourished:
Don't forget to leave a little offering to Runcina, the Roman goddess of weeding.
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