7.28.15

Much has been said of the transformative powers of literature. I'm sure we all have memories of pieces that opened our eyes, changed how we thought, or led us to a new way of seeing something beautiful.

I am happy to share this Washington Post article about a young lady who had such an experience, crediting a poem with saving her life. That's a pretty tall order. Aidan Park had been depressed since she was ten years old, and at 13 discovered the poem When Death Comes by Mary Oliver as part of an assignment. Her reaction, in part, as she wrote in the Library of Congress "Letters about Literature" essay contest:

“When you spoke of not wanting to have simply visited this world, my own world turned upside down. I began to think about how horrible it would be to have only been a visitor, in the way that you said; to not have made my mark on the world, to have only passed through with no real substance. I thought of a life lived entirely in absence of beauty and amazement, a life barren of love or excitement or laughter. “I began to realize that that was what suicide would do to me. I saw that life was fast becoming my own. I saw killing myself would take me away before I even had the chance to make something of my life. Suicide would eliminate my pain, yes, but it also closed any doors of possibility that I might have still open to me; doors that may lead to happiness in my future.”

Here is the poem:


When Death Comes

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn;

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;

when death comes

like the measle-pox

when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,

tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world

7.27.15

Finally, an offering for weekend words. I haven't made anything worthy in a while, so it feels a while in coming.

7-23-15

I have dreams of a brown house

its gardens fallen into seed,

what used to be such an edifice,

now slumps gently.

The neighborhood has likewise bolted,

and bitter, not yet circling to

what again could be.

I remember how those blocks feel.

The light slants in untempered

past coal chute and casement,

amazingly functional obsolescence;

some of us are still breathing.

“Why are you here?” I can only say

“I saw you in a dream, small house,

old house of memory, and

the dream carried me here.”

7.23.15

These two poems go perfectly together. Not just being about the things that we touch that get left behind when we die, but the fact that houses and clothes are places our bodies inhabit. Somewhat like extra skins, in a way.

Living Room

David Yezzi

God sees me. I see you. You’re just like me.
       This is the cul-de-sac I’ve longed to live on.
Pure-white and dormered houses sit handsomely

along the slate-roofed, yew-lined neighborhood.
       Past there is where my daughters walk to school,
across the common rounded by a wood.

And in my great room, a modest TV
     informs me how the earth is grown so small,
ringed in spice routes of connectivity.

My father lived and died in his same chair
       and kept it to one beer. There’s good in that.
Who could look down upon, or even dare

to question, what he managed out of life?
       Age makes us foolish. Still, he had a house,
a patch of grass and room to breathe, a wife.

It’s my house now, and I do as I please.
       I bless his name. I edge the yard, plant greens.
Our girls swing on the porch in a coming breeze.

The Sadness of Clothes

Emily Fragos

When someone dies, the clothes are so sad. They have outlived
their usefulness and cannot get warm and full.
You talk to the clothes and explain that he is not coming back

as when he showed up immaculately dressed in slacks and plaid jacket
and had that beautiful smile on and you’d talk.
You’d go to get something and come back and he’d be gone.

You explain death to the clothes like that dream.
You tell them how much you miss the spouse
and how much you miss the pet with its little winter sweater.

You tell the worn raincoat that if you talk about it,
you will finally let grief out. The ancients etched the words
for battle and victory onto their shields and then they went out

and fought to the last breath. Words have that kind of power
you remind the clothes that remain in the drawer, arms stubbornly
folded across the chest, or slung across the backs of chairs,

or hanging inside the dark closet. Do with us what you will,
they faintly sigh, as you close the door on them.
He is gone and no one can tell us where

7.16.15

The sonnet is maybe one of the most well-known poetic forms. It has a lot of baggage, erm, connotations too.

Wikipedia says it originated in Italy, etymologically it originated in song, or the Latin sonus. Connected heavily with images of chivalric and courtly love, its well-known form was somewhat cemented in the medieval era. This is pretty sexy:

The structure of a typical Italian sonnet of the time included two parts that together formed a compact form of "argument". First, the octave (two quatrains), forms the "proposition", which describes a "problem", or "question", followed by a sestet (two tercets), which proposes a "resolution". Typically, the ninth line initiates what is called the "turn", or "volta", which signals the move from proposition to resolution. Even in sonnets that don't strictly follow the problem/resolution structure, the ninth line still often marks a "turn" by signaling a change in the tone, mood, or stance of the poem

I like sonnets, they're fun to learn and I think they take skill to do well. They're also fun to tilt and play with, as many have done. (Form is always fun to splash around in, it gives your ideas a little hand up).  Here are some for you. This first one is a double-whammy. I love Spanish, and don't get to use this kind very often. Does this count as using my degree?


Stammering translated sonnet in which the poet sends the rains of Havana to her love in New York


By Suzanne Gardinier

Got your message, here
in the letter you didn’t write:
burned, with a forbidden seal,
marking the burial site
of what has neither voice nor definition,
what has no face, no peace, no place to sleep,
a whisper in which I can’t [inaudible]
—what the sea doesn’t say, whispering, every night,
and when the rain comes to erase the streets
tomorrow, & all the dusks that follow that,
and runs around making up street dances
from what you once said, I’ll have this map,
without details, made of what I’ve missed,
telling me that that which isn’t is.

Spanish:

Soneto Balbuciendo En Que La Poeta Manda A Su Amor En Nueva York La Lluvia de La Habana

He leído el mensaje que mandaste,
aquí, en la carta no me has escrito:
quemada, y con sello prohibido,
diciéndome dónde enterraste
lo que no tiene voz ni luz ni cara,
ni paz, ni un lugar para dormir,
susurro donde yo puedo oír
cada noche lo que no dice el mar,
y cuando la lluvia borrará las calles
mañana, y los crepúsculos después,
y correrá haciendo bailes
de lo que me dijiste una vez,
yo tendré este mapa, sin detalles,
que me dice que lo que no es, es.

mmmmm. This second one is also about sensations, natural ones, but of a slightly different type (in some ways):

Stridulation Sonnet

Jessica Jacobs

Tiger beetles, crickets, velvet ants, all
know the useful friction of part on part,
how rub of wing to leg, plectrum to file,
marks territories, summons mates. How

a lip rasped over finely tined ridges can
play sweet as a needle on vinyl. But
sometimes a lone body is insufficient.
So the sapsucker drums chimney flashing

for our amped-up morning reveille. Or,
later, home again, the wind’s papery
come hither through the locust leaves. The roof
arcing its tin back to meet the rain.

The bed’s soft creak as I roll to my side.

What sounds will your body make against mine? 

7.15.15

Best-laid plans said I would post this over the weekend, but I didn't. The haze is all gone now, but here are your words about it:

The haze draped heavily

strung on a wire,

hanging between high-rises,

settling on stoops.

The city is on pause.

The faces in windows

are stopped between breaths,

the playgrounds deserted.

The palpable weight is

slowing down out heartbeats.




I'm glad for the dictum "a poem isn't unfinished, only abandoned", because this one gives me a strong signal that it needs a "so what" at the end. Part of what helped me learn the basic 5-paragraph essay so well in high school (aw yeah AP) was assigning my own names to the parts of it. The concluding sentence and thesis always needed a "SO WHAT" statement. Because really, why should we care about some haze? Or about anything, unless the speaker/author tells us why?

I may be thinking about "so what" a lot in the context of writing and creating and life-pursuits in general. Belated spring cleaning?

7.7.15

Did I date the last post wrong? Sometimes dyslexic tendencies get the better of me, especially with numbers. 

Today's selection is from Laure-Anne Bosselaar, a Belgian-American poet, anthologist, and translator. (She has poems in French and Flemish if you are linguistically equipped). Here is an interview for some more background and color on the author.





Rooms Remembered



I needed, for months after he died, to remember our rooms—
some lit by the trivial, others ample

with an obscurity that comforted us: it hid our own darkness.
So for months, duteous, I remembered:

rooms where friends lingered, rooms with our beds,
with our books, rooms with curtains I sewed

from bright cottons. I remembered tables of laughter,
a chipped bowl in early light, black

branches by a window, bowing toward night, & those rooms,
too, in which we came together

to be away from all. And sometimes from ourselves:
I remembered that, also.

But tonight—as I stand in the doorway to his room
& stare at dusk settled there—

what I remember best is how, to throw my arms around his neck,
I needed to stand on the tip of my toes.




Stillbirth

On a platform, I heard someone call out your name:
No, Laetitia, no.
It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing,
but I rushed in, searching for your face.

But no Laetitia. No.
No one in that car could have been you,
but I rushed in, searching for your face:
no longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two.

No one in that car could have been you.
Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen.
No longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two:
I sometimes go months without remembering you.

Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen:
I was told not to look. Not to get attached—
I sometimes go months without remembering you.
Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.

I was told not to look. Not to get attached.
It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing.
Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.
On a platform, I heard someone calling your name.

7.5.15

Belatedly:


I, Too


 by Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.