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1/2/2022 5 Comments

Poetry from Image

A person at the poetry reading raises her hand:
“Do you write from image, or from idea?” she asks.
“I don't know,” I say. “Are those my only choices?”
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.
5 Comments

12/9/2021 6 Comments

Poet's Petard # 10 – December 2021

A Wish List

Recently 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”):
"My goal isn't to unfold popular music once more,
rather it is to speak now
to how the animals say it better."

Lawrence Raab, similarly, goes out to the edge to find the center, in his poem Even Clearer:
"Many times the world has ended,
and many times things turned out
a lot better than they are right now.
Don't be fooled by what you can see.
Think back: the story of your life,
the one that happened, is enclosed
by the shadows of others,
every moment more deeply surrounded,
the way evening crosses a meadow
and climbs the walls of a house,
though inside a light still burns."

Reginald Gibbons reminds us that whatever we wish for is always likely to be much larger than we could have imagined (from “After Mandelshtam”):
"The rain-barrel's full,
there's ice in its mouth.
Smash the ice – comets
and stars melt away
like salt, the water
darkens and the earth
on which the barrel
stands is transparent
underfoot, and there
too are galaxies,
ghost-pale and roaring
silently in the
seven-hundred-odd
chambers of the mind."

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:
            "Here comes the fond
                mild winter; other
                   realms are noisy
                   & unanimous. You tap
            the screen & dream
                  while waiting: four
                      kinds of forever
                   visit you today:
            something, nothing,
            everything & art,
                greater than you are
                      & of your making –"

6 Comments

10/31/2021 2 Comments

Poet's Petard # 9 – November 2021

Even 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.
No bleeped sheep or rosebuds or twitching stars
will diminish the fear or save you from waking

into the same day you dreamed of leaving –
mockingbird on back order, morning bells
stuck on snooze -- so you might as well


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
                        edges of the world, smudged by mist, a squirrel's

nest rigged high in the maple. I've got a bone
            to pick with whomever is in charge. All year,

I've said You know what's funny? and then,
                        Nothing, nothing is funny.

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,
But the grass was soft, he old,
And it didn't matter, their thousand-stinging fury
As he lay under the sun,
His hands and feet cold.

Because of honey, he forgave them, even
This turning on a friend;
Hadn't he stolen their essential sweetness
Like a bear?

 
Their duty was death
As a means to a golden end.
And what is death – a singing helm of bees,
His full head a hive
For poison changed in one ripe thought to mead,

The slow savor of which
Made good his being alive.
And now the humming dimmed to his awareness
Of slowly simplifying
Toward what soon he'd be – earth, flowers,
Pollen that only wanted
Brief wings for flying.

from “Strountes” by Gunnar Ekelöf. Michigan Quarterly Review,
                        Vol. 7 #4. Tr. by Leonard E. Nathan

2 Comments

8/29/2021 4 Comments

Poet's Petard #8, September 2021

Poetry 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. . . .” 
​~Ashley Montagu
​“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.” ​
​~Juhani Pallasmaa
​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.
4 Comments

8/5/2021 6 Comments

Poet's Petard #7 – August, 2021

Poetry as Divine Madness

It 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:
  1. “A poet is useless due to being permanently usurped by love.” (Thoreau, but I can't find the exact reference)
  2. Plato was probably right that poetry is a distinct kind of divine madness,
  3. and you further cheerfully acknowledge “Poetry is not after all a civilized art”  (Peter Levi, in his introduction to the translation of Nikos Gatsos' poem Amorgos, tr. by Sally Purcell)
​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: 
 “Enlarge thou me in Love, that with the inward palate of my heart
I may taste how sweet it is to love, and in Love to dissolve
and to bathe myself. Let me be holden by Love, rising above myself
in excessive fervor and wonder.”
~Thomas a' Kempis
​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
“our DNA
sheet music
at the bottom
of the ocean”
​And in a poem I've never finished, another reminder to Poets:
​“More sky! I need more sky:
                        The thing is
you have to keep yourself so charged up on Beauty
that you cannot – simply
cannot –  think of anything
else.”
6 Comments

7/5/2021 2 Comments

Poet's Petard #6 – July, 2021

​Light and Dark

​Now 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:
Come, seeling night
 Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day;
 And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale!
​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:
“Every thing has a shape and so does the nite only you can't see the shape of nite
nor you can' think it. If you put your self right you can know it. Not with knowing in your head
but with the 1st knowing. . . . Some times the nite is the shape of a ear only it aint a
ear we know the shape of. Lissening back for all the souns whatre gone from us.”
​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
"Stone (stōn), noun. Originally a verb meaning
 to illumine blackness, later
to hold without touching, or
to be capable of all things."
​And from #6:
“The old remember being flowers,
but the young ridicule them and remember fire.”
2 Comments

6/6/2021 7 Comments

Poet's Petard #5 – June, 2021

Swinburne 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,”
“In the month of the long decline of roses,
 I, beholding the summer dead before me,
Set my face to the sea, and journeyed silent,
 Gazing eagerly where above the sea mark
Flame as fierce as the fervid eyes of lions
Half divided the eyelids of the sunset.”
​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:
“A sea that heaves with horror of the night
As maddened by the moon that hangs aghast
With strain and torment of the ravening blast,
Haggard as hell, a bleak, blind, bloody light,
No shore but one red reef of rock in sight
Whereon the waifs of many a wreck were cast. “
​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:
“Rhythmic music is music that scorns repetition, squareness, and equal durations. . . .it
is inspired by the movements of nature, movements of free and unequal durations.”
​Swinburne, although scarcely read much today, may have been ahead of his time. I am grateful to
his particular poetic imagination.
7 Comments

5/2/2021 4 Comments

Poet's Petard #4 – May 2021

​“Nature is everywhere – so why even mention it?”
~ Andy Goldsworthy
​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:
“Poetry keeps the concrete from drying around you before you get into a comfortable position.”
​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”):
“It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
 We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground”
​So, he offers a compromise: the poem is the permanence, with its own “leaves,” and with
“Its copy of the sun, these cover the rock
These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man.
These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves.”
​Again, I offer a lighter bulwark against nothingness, a flock of tiny birds:
“I love it when the bushtits come through.
They are like little raindrops falling
among the rosencrantzs and guildensterns.”
​And here is James Stephens in his wonderful fantasy novel The Crock of Gold – The speaker is The Thin Woman of Inis Magrath: 
​“It is strange that we may not be angry while looking on the moon.”
(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:
“Spider will weave a ladder to your heart,
it is said, even though you are sleeping,
intoxicated by abandonment
a bitter wind reminiscent of a wave.”
​*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. 
4 Comments

3/28/2021 9 Comments

Poet's Petard #3 – April, 2021

   O Spring! O Spring! O Spring!
   It makes me sing
​(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:
“I will tonsure my head, monk of things verdant,
And reverently serve the order of birds.
​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:
“Who else dwells here below? Rotifers, their tails turning like wheels. Protozoa. Amoebae. Nematodes or round-worms, some feeding on fungi and some being food for fungi and bacteria. (It's all a feast down here.) There are forty thousand named species of mite. Here, too, there is the hardy tardigrade, better known by its endearing moniker, the water bear, champion of sheer survival; and also the glorious Collembola, or springtail, that can jump a hundred times its own length. These miniature shapeshifting jesters can alter their size and shape rapidly if they need to. And they have eye patches.
​Don't forget to leave a little offering to Runcina, the Roman goddess of weeding.
9 Comments

3/7/2021 3 Comments

The Poet's Petard -- March 2021

Today the subject is "The Soul."

I've always had trouble distinguishing between "soul" and "spirit," and quotes like this can offer some help if this is also an issue for you.
Or, not.
"You can survive only in a new self,
 but your former self is your soul,
  and you do not have another."
~Andrei Bitov
                        (from his incredibly quirky and wonderful travel essay book
                        A Captive of the Caucasus: Journeys in Armenia and Georgia)
AND
I toss in as an afterthought, a chapter heading from Václav Cílek's To Breathe With Birds :
The Man with the Soul of a Moose and
the Moose with the Soul of a Moose
3 Comments
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