6.27.16

Weekend words for a bit of disappointment.

6-26-16

9 am and the moon hangs,

half-cocked

in the morning blue.

Over the fields of sage and

Geranium viscosissimum,

its light purple a lunar echo

in these canyons that fray from

green to silver.

Their colors are echoed in the

breasts of the cave swallows,

and the rock doves.

The moon is here because

one is still looking,

and appreciates the extra eyes.

6.16.16

A lot has been said about the recent tragic events in Orlando, and sometimes when there is an incident I feel like I can't say anything. Maybe I'll be taking space from someone who needs to speak, or time away from someone who needs to hear. Maybe it's not my cause. Maybe no one cares about my opinion (mostly this). There are a lot of people who do want to say something, and that is good. Our words on paper help us remember the moment, for good and bad. Memory is important, but fallible.

Seattle's alternative newspaper The Stranger has a segment entitled "Poems of hope and Grief for the Orlando dead".  Poems featured within are some chosen to heal, or to make sense of the feelings following a senseless act. I like their selections, so I'll share some of them in full. Here is Someday I'll love by Ocean Vuong

Ocean, don’t be afraid.The end of the road is so far aheadit is already behind us.Don’t worry. Your father is only your fatheruntil one of you forgets. Like how the spinewon’t remember its wingsno matter how many times our kneeskiss the pavement. Ocean,are you listening? The most beautiful partof your body is whereveryour mother’s shadow falls.Here’s the house with childhoodwhittled down to a single red tripwire.Don’t worry. Just call it horizon& you’ll never reach it.Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s nota lifeboat. Here’s the manwhose arms are wide enough to gatheryour leaving. & here the moment,just after the lights go out, when you can still seethe faint torch between his legs.How you use it again & againto find your own hands.You asked for a second chance& are given a mouth to empty into.Don’t be afraid, the gunfireis only the sound of peopletrying to live a little longer. Ocean. Ocean,get up. The most beautiful part of your bodyis where it’s headed. & remember,loneliness is still time spentwith the world. Here’sthe room with everyone in it.Your dead friends passingthrough you like windthrough a wind chime. Here’s a deskwith the gimp leg & a brickto make it last. Yes, here’s a roomso warm & blood-close,I swear, you will wake—& mistake these wallsfor skin.


At the Old Place 
Frank O'Hara 

Joe is restless and so am I, so restless.
Button’s buddy lips frame “L G T TH O P?”
across the bar. “Yes!” I cry, for dancing’s
my soul delight. (Feet! feet!) “Come on!”

Through the streets we skip like swallows.
Howard malingers. (Come on, Howard.) Ashes
malingers. (Come on, J.A.) Dick malingers.
(Come on, Dick.) Alvin darts ahead. (Wait up,
Alvin.) Jack, Earl and Someone don’t come.

Down the dark stairs drifts the steaming cha-
cha-cha. Through the urine and smoke we charge
to the floor. Wrapped in Ashes’ arms I glide.

(It’s heaven!) Button lindys with me. (It’s
heaven!) Joe’s two-steps, too, are incredible,
and then a fast rhumba with Alvin, like skipping
on toothpicks. And the interminable intermissions,


we have them. Jack, Earl and Someone drift
guiltily in. “I knew they were gay
the minute I laid eyes on them!” screams John.
How ashamed they are of us! we hope.

Crush a peal (its powder)

Christopher Soto

the night rory died, he moved the chair, his blonde locks fell
& we will never be the same


i moved to the beach, thrusted my hands into the mud
broke the jaw of every clam, hoping to find him


his pearly smile, like a broken necklace, thudded to the ground
scattered across mahogany floor


he kissed open the stitches of my gums & draped my teeth
on a necklace over the shy of his breasts


new lovers plagiarize, say awkward things, and yearn
they ask to see my pretty smile


but who smiles when the sky swallows its stars

In the Loop

Bob Hicok

I heard from people after the shootings. People 

I knew well or barely or not at all. Largely 

the same message: how horrible it was, how little 

there was to say about how horrible it was. 

People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed 

because they know I teach at Virginia Tech,

to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually 

I answered these messages: there’s nothing 

to say back except of course there’s nothing 

to say, thank you for your willingness 

to say it. Because this was about nothing. 

A boy who felt that he was nothing, 

who erased and entered that erasure, and guns 

that are good for nothing, and talk of guns 

that is good for nothing, and spring 

that is good for flowers, and Jesus for some, 

and scotch for others, and “and” for me 

in this poem, “and” that is good 

for sewing the minutes together, which otherwise 

go about going away, bereft of us and us 

of them. Like a scarf left on a train and nothing 

like a scarf left on a train. As if the train, 

empty of everything but a scarf, still opens 

its doors at every stop, because this 

is what a train does, this is what a man does 

with his hand on a lever, because otherwise, 

why the lever, why the hand, and then it was over, 

and then it had just begun.

Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame is known for freestyle rapping to audiences, and delivered this timely sonnet on reception of his Tony award:

My wife’s the reason anything gets done
She nudges me towards promise by degrees
She is a perfect symphony of one
Our son is her most beautiful reprise.
We chase the melodies that seem to find us
Until they’re finished songs and start to play
When senseless acts of tragedy remind us
That nothing here is promised, not one day.
This show is proof that history remembers
We lived through times when hate and fear seemed stronger;
We rise and fall and light from dying embers, remembrances that hope and love last longer
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.
I sing Vanessa’s symphony, Eliza tells her story
Now fill the world with music, love and pride.

This is a lot of material, and somewhat disjointed, so forgive me for takings someone elses' work to put this together and merely sharing it. I'd love to hear what other people have written (eta: found this really great, but long, entry by Mick Powell called cadencia, do go read it). One facebook friend shared a little quatrain, I wanted to link him to my last post, but that felt really stupid. I don't want to be one of the self-promoters who are constantly badgering people to watch their stream or whatever, not that they shouldn't, I just can't do that. So it felt wrong to be like YEAH SO TRAGIC READ MY BLOG. Or whatever. Hicok's words seem the truest right now:

" there’s nothing 

to say back except of course there’s nothing 

to say, thank you for your willingness 

to say it. "

6.13.16

Real and actual weekend words that need no explaining, given the recent great tragedy.

6-12-16

When you wake up

You never expect the scales

Would be so heavily tipped,

Filled with the felled

Matchsticks

Of what could have been your friends.

Will they see it?

Will they fill their pockets with bullets?

And trace with their fingers

The spidered glass,

Coming away only a little cut?

6.8.16

I  have a friend who is a librarian who always posts the most lovely articles. This one from the Guardian made me smile, admit especially awful things going on in the social media world. The author shares what pieces of poetry walk her through the daily things she does, and provide beauty in plain things.

I have been quoting Leontes in the bath ever since I studied The Winter’s Tale for A-level. I have been quoting Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale ever since I studied it for O-level. I think of it when I’m fed up. I think of it when I’m tired. I think of it when I’m broken-hearted. And I think of it when I order a nice glass of Rioja, or what Keats would have called “a beaker full of the warm South”. 

“There are some people I know,” said Salman Rushdie at the Hay literary festivallast week, “who are just able to carry around absurd amounts of poetry in their heads.” Memorising poetry, he added, had become a “lost art". 

If it really is lost, it’s a shame. It’s a shame not just because random scraps of poetry from childhood can make you giggle in the bath, and because there’s nothing like a Keats ode to turn a minor irritation into a full-blown drama. It’s a shame because poetry really does do powerful things to the brain.

I know some people hate to memorize, but it's a style of learning that works for me, and I can definitely relate to this article. The article suggests that memorization exercises are great for mental stimulus and long-term memory health, which is great. I enjoy the more present benefits of being able to spit out something lovely that someone else wrote as commentary (and maybe the benefit of feeling a bit smug for being able to do so). My favorite is from a memorized passage from Romeo and Juliet done in high school "Ancient damnation, oh most wicked fiend, is it more sin to wish me thus forsworn?" etc. Ancient damnation sounds nice if you are mad at something but don't necessary want to go to the vulgar. My librarian friend suggested posting poems up in places where you have to do unloved but necessary work, like dishes or folding laundry. 

The article cites a poem, Electric Light by Seamus Heaney, which I will share with you, because that's what we do. 

Candle grease congealed, dark-streaked with wick-soot.
Rucked alps from above. The smashed thumbnail
of that ancient mangled thumb was puckered pearl,

moonlit quartz, a bleached and littered Cumae.
In the first house where I saw electric light
she sat with her fur-lined felt slippers unzipped,

year in, year out, in the same chair, and whispered
in a voice that at its loudest did nothing else
but whisper. We were both desperate

the night I was left to stay with her and wept
under the clothes, under the waste of light
left turned on in the bedroom. "What ails you, child,

what ails you, for God's sake?" Urgent, sorrowing
ails, far-off and old. Scaresome cavern waters
lapping a boatslip. Her helplessness no help.

Lisp and relapse. Eddy of sibylline English.
Splashes between a ship and dock, to which,
animula, I would come alive in time

as ferries churned and turned down Belfast Lough
towards the brow-to-glass transport of a morning train,
the very "there-you-are-and-where-are-you?"

of poetry itself. Backs of houses
like the back of hers, meat safes and mangles
in the railway-facing yards of fleeting England,

an allotment scarecrow among patted rigs,
then a town-edge soccer pitch, the groin of distance,
fields of grain like the Field of the Cloth of Gold,

tunnel gauntlet and horizon keep. To Southwark,
too, I came, from tube mouth into sunlight,
Moyola-breath by Thames's "straunge strond."

If I stood on the bow-backed chair, I could reach
the light switch. They let me and they watched me,
A touch of the little pip would work the magic.

A turn of their wireless knob and light came on
in the dial. They let me and they watched me
as I roamed at will the stations of the world.

Then they were gone and Big Ben and the news
were over. The set had been switched off,
all quiet behind the blackout except for

knitting needles ticking, wind in the flue.
She sat with her fur-lined felt slippers unzipped,
electric light shone over us, I feared

the dirt-tracked flint and fissure of her nail,
so plectrum-hard, glit-glittery, it must still keep
among beads and vertebrae in the Derry ground.

6.6.16

Yep, Frost. Sue me, it's summer here. 

The Pasture



I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;

I'll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.



I'm going out to fetch the little calf

That's standing by the mother. It's so young,

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.

The Oven Bird



There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations


You'll wait a long, long time for anything much 

To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud 

And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves. 

The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch, 

Nor strike out fire from each other nor crash out loud. 

The planets seem to interfere in their curves — 

But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.

 
We may as well go patiently on with our life, 

And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun 

For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane. 

It is true the longest drout will end in rain, 

The longest peace in China will end in strife. 

Still it wouldn't reward the watcher to stay awake 

In hopes of seeing the calm of heaven break 

On his particular time and personal sight. 

That calm seems certainly safe to last to-night.

6.1.16

Hello, still here. I know the tactic is to not post on a regular schedule, the idea of posting gets to be too large, the gap widens, and then when you return it's with great apologies. I've heard of this called "a-blog-ogising". Maybe because most of the blogs I read are written by women who do other things for a living I encounter this so much, but it feels like it shows up regularly.

 I assume that people who post a lot feel guilt for not posting regularly because they feel like their readers enjoy their posts, possibly because they enjoy the posts of others. I know I enjoy reading other's work. I have been thinking about the writing in the context of another type of craft.

In the sewing community, "Me-Made May" is a pretty big deal, where sewists are encouraged to wear the stuff they make out on a regular basis and maybe document it, maybe just meditate on what about the clothing works and what doesn't. Many creators make great things, and then tuck them away, and the event is an attempt to circumvent that. (Boy, does that sound familiar). I thought it would be great to have a similar thing for other types of people who create, but there's a stumbling block there. (I almost typed blog, hello Freud!) Wearing handmade clothes for a month gets folks' attention, because clothing--as a part of fashion in general--is considered intrinsically socially valuable. Writing is not. I am not saying writing is not important, because we know that's wrong, but culturally it is way down he ladder of value.

Do you read the news online? How often do you wish the organization, often a real news outfit, would just please employ the services of a copy editor? This happens to me constantly. When they can't catch their spelling and grammar errors, should we trust print media as a reliable source? (Okay, that is a giant argument, but the point is that if writing were important, the news outfit would care enough to proofread and edit their stories). I read an article the other day that said ever since Facebook launched their streaming video service, other types of content went way down in visibility. (Read: photos and text) Whether this is due to users viewing the content less or the site promoting the video disproportionately, it shows written content is at the very bottom rung.

So, we can go out and create poetry terrorism, hold open mics, graffiti verse on public spaces, but I doubt it would do much. Does having the art be underground do something for it, or is there another benefit to being an extreme subculture? I apologize for being somewhat fatalistic about all of this. Thinking about it has been revelatory, but still hasn't gotten me writing.