Easter, "which is natural which is infinite which is yes"

For a lot of different reasons, the last few weeks have been rough. Like day-old stubble rough. Like poorly poured concrete rough. Like bouncing down a mountain made of pumice stone rough.

Well, maybe not that rough, but they haven't been exactly bunny soft, either. Luckily, today was Easter, my favorite of all my family's holidays.

We frosted cookies . . .

and hunted for the golden egg, and played our candy guessing games, and--for some reason--thought that this was a good thing to do to our beloved grandfather on a solemn religious holiday:

Every year about the time spring rolls around, I feel like I need Easter, a second chance, a new year full of baby-soft green grass and egg-blue sky, and every year--wonderfully enough--I get it. And "(now the ears of my ears awake and / now the eyes of my eyes are opened)," and there's nothing to do but to enjoy it.

I haven't read a lot of e. e. cummings, but I always think of this poem on fantastically beautiful, happy days like this one. Happy Easter, all.

[i thank You God for most this amazing]

By e. e. cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginably You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Sleeping Preacher

Have you ever put off reading a book for one reason or another, only to finally read it and desperately regret your years of hesitation? That's what happened to me last week with Julia Kasdorf's Sleeping Preacher. Kasdorf was one of my instructors at Penn State. I've always loved her poems (I wrote about one here), but Sleeping Preacher was her first book, a book that I knew she had a love-hate relationship with. I just wasn't sure that it would be as moving as her later work, so I put it off.

But this book was far better than I ever expected. Kasdorf has described it as her "where I'm from" book, the collection that she wrote about her Mennonite family, growing up in small town Pennsylvania, and leaving that world for New York. It's a stunning collection: clear, purposeful, understated, and sparklingly lyrical. Kasdorf writes the type of poetry that gives you a sense of not just a time or place or experience, but of the woman behind the poems, the personality and passions that paint her experiences with meaning. It's no wonder that, out of 900 other first book manuscripts, Sleeping Preacher won the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

Kasdorf starts the collection out with a whammy of a poem "Green Market, New York", which places her in conversation with a Pennsylvanian farmers' market vendor in the heart of New York City. It's not just a good poem--it also serves as the book's thesis, flinging the whole text into tension and motion:

"'Do you live in the city?' she asks. 'Do you like it?'
I say no. And that was no lie, Emma Peachey.
I don't like New York, but sometimes these streets
hold me as hard as we're held by rich earth.
I have not forgotten that Bible verse:
Whoever puts his hand to the plow and looks back
is not fit for the kingdom of God."

From there, the procession of quiet, kind poems moves from Kasdorf's parents' childhood into her own childhood and adulthood. And while the book is known for its Mennonite subjects, some of my favorite poems were the later ones, the adult poems that are connected to other places and personalities far from Kasdorf's childhood. I loved "For Weatherly, Still in New York":

"This place could make you well.
Night, a black healer, comes so dark it kills
as it cures. Stars slice your fingers
if you try to catch them, falling.
This is no dinner invitation [. . .]
you can't stay on the Lower East Side,
or at least stay there and stay sane.
Come, lose your lease for this place."

"The View" was another favorite. The poem is dedicated to a friend who has moved to the shores of Lake Michigan. I especially love the subtle, lilting rhymes nestled within the lines of this poem. It's a technique that, I will admit, I plan to do my darnedest to steal from Kasdorf!

"[. . .] Last week, a wind charged
off the lake so cold pigeons froze to the walks,
four iridescent necks just on your block.
But all the cold carcasses in Chicago
mean nothing next to your view. Although
I never held still for your caresses,
I admit your talk makes me jealous:
the way you speak of the lake like a love
and refuse to hang drapes, the way you scrub
the panes until they seem to vanish into
the view. And lake and sky embrace you."

Julia has a new book of poems out called Poetry in America. Go get yourself some--I know I'm going to.

Howl, Howl, and Howl

What sound does a working woman in her mid-twenties make the morning after her first softball practice in two and a half years?

Why, how did you guess?

Softball practice was fantastically fun yesterday, but I'm paying for it today. I'm having trouble opening doors, people--I mean, lifting my arm, turning a knob, and stepping forward hurts. Who knew that throwing a ball and crouching for grounders and darting across a muddy field for an hour and forty-five minutes could do that to a body?

In less painful news, I finally saw Howl this weekend. Howl is a "biopic" about the obscenity trial that followed City Light's release of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems  in 1956, but the movie was nothing like what I expected.

I thought the movie would be a typical biopic in the style of Walk the Line or Lean on Me or Braveheart: conventional and predictable and utterly sentimental. Instead, the obscenity trial that the film is supposedly about serves as little more than a backbone for the 84 minutes of poetic action, a mere cage of plot line over which the filmmakers draped the central components of the film: the interview scenes with Ginsberg (played by James Franco) and the poem itself (which is read by Franco and beautifully animated). Really, the poem is what gives the movie all its heart and soul and interest; I wouldn't have minded a 45-minute movie with nothing but black-and-white scenes of Franco reading Howl in a Village bar spliced with bits of that lovely, vivid, frightening animation.



I was especially fond of the animators' portrayal of Moloch, the poem's "villain" (see above).

Once I got past expecting an actual plot to appear, I really enjoyed the movie, and I loved it best for reminding me of how much I used to love Ginsberg. He's one of my favorite 20th-Century poets, and I've read a ton of his poems and interviews. (In fact, the first poem I ever published was very Ginsberg-inspired, with long lines and stacks of lists and happy over-the-top joyful cosmic hysteria). He was severely out of vogue at my grad school, so I hadn't read him in years, but in 2004, I pretty much wanted to be Allen Ginsberg.

"You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a

sunflower!"

Watching Howl made me pull out my copy of Ginsberg's Selected Poems: 1947-1995, which (according the the receipt I found in the book) I bought from The Raven Bookstore in 2005. I reread my favorite sections of Howl (the "I am with you Rockland" section and "Footnote to Howl" with all its holy holy holy holys) and flipped through to see what poems I had marked back in 2005. It made for a lovely evening, actually.

I would definitely recommend Howl (the movie) to anyone who's read the poem and, while I'm at it, to anyone who hasn't read the poem. I believe that Franco reads the entirety of the poem over the course of the movie, and the filmmakers do an excellent job of getting to the heart of what Howl (the poem) is all about. They also did quite a good job of portraying Ginsberg as the complicated figure that I always imagine him to be: a poet, a revolutionary, an unloved lover, a square, a Beat, and an all-around brave and joyful human being.

The Supposed Hazards of Creativitiy

One of my co-workers and writing group pals sent me this video a few weeks ago. It's Elizabeth Gilbert (yes, that Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame) talking about how Western culture conceives of creativity. Basically, her argument is that it is necessary for writers, artists, and musicians to figure out a way to deal with the pressures of creativity in a positive, nurturing way. Gilbert does a great job with her talk, and I thought I'd share it here.

It also reminded me of Black Swan, which I really, really enjoyed. But  . . .

***SPOILER ALERT***

why does Nina have to die at the end? Why does she have to go crazy to be a great dancer? Why can't she just evolve into a fulfilled, well-rounded human being who can dance like hell?



The movie is beautifully made, visually stunning, and genuinely (and I don't use this word lightly) thrilling. But I think that it perpetuates a stereotype about artists and, perhaps more importantly, about artists who happen to be women.

Take 20th century writers, for example. Sure, there are plenty of male authors who have killed themselves, but Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, two of the most famous and brilliant female writers of the 20th century, are notorious for their suicides. More people know them for their deaths more than for their writing. (C'mon, be honest--how many of you saw The Hours but haven't read the wonderful, revolutionary, life-changing novel that is Mrs. Dalloway?)

In fact, I don't know how many times I've heard Plath's breathtakingly beautiful and challenging poetry ridiculed by undergraduates simply because they don't like her personal story. They won't even give her poetry a careful reading because of how she died. She even gets the cliche of the mentally ill author permanently named after her ("the Sylvia Plath effect") while Ernest Hemingway gets to keep on being the lovable big "Papa" of Modernist literature despite his suicide by shotgun. He somehow has maintained his integrity in our culture; she has not.

These women, of course, are not the only writers and artists who have experienced creativity and mental illness at the same time, but their reputations are permanently marked by their suicides in a way that male writers' stories rarely are. And in some ways, I believe that our culture tells female artists quietly yet consistently that to be a great creator requires some sort of profound personal loss or damage: you'll lose your boyfriend, you'll lose your family, you'll lose your femininity (like the bluestockings), you'll lose your life. To create, the story goes, we must risk self-destruction and death. (See Dear Sugar and Elissa Bassist for more on this.)

Pretty much every time I've not gotten a job or gone through a breakup or had a fight with a friend or was in some other way miserable, I've been told by someone that "at least it's good for your writing." And every single time I've found it profoundly offensive. Why should suffering and writing--one of the most redeeming, life-affirming, challenging, and terrifyingly real acts I know--be wed together in such hideous matrimony? I don't want people wishing unhappiness on me as some backhanded means of pushing me toward success. What an awful way to live. What an awful way to be treated.

So even though Gilbert doesn't mention gender in her talk, it has sparked in me a belief that pursuing mental health as a female writer is a feminist act. And I truly appreciate Gilbert's thinking on this topic, even if I'm not entirely satisfied with her solution of the happy and distinct genius.

Kay Ryan, the Peeving of Poets, and the Incredible Hidden Sedgwick Hall

Last night, I drove out to Rockhurst University to see former Poet Laureate Kay Ryan read as part of the Midwest Poets Series. Typically, driving to the heart of the Plaza to see a poetry reading on a Thursday night isn't my idea of a good time,  but Kay Ryan is a self-avowed introvert-curmudgeon. She makes a lot of fuss about not being a part of the poetry community, enough so that I thought that this event might be my only opportunity to see her read. 

Kay Ryan

So I went, giddy and tired and easily disoriented as I was from my long work week. I had a very hard time finding Sedgwick Hall (mostly because I didn't realize that Rockhurst is just a tiny, unmarked, nearly invisible wart on the buttocks of  the UMKC campus). I drove around for twenty minutes, walked around for another twenty, and asked four different people before I finally stumbled across the building completely by chance!

I was very late, but I decided that half a Kay Ryan reading was better than no Kay Ryan reading at all. And I was right. Despite her hermetic self-image, Ryan was actually very well-spoken and funny, and she charmed the audience with ease. She had the funny habit of reading her poems aloud twice, which was great, actually. 

Ryan's poems are all small--clever, compact little things that work very hard to say something very smart in as little space as possible. Her poems are elegant and deep and often funny, and they really beg for two or three re-readings--despite their size and apparent accessibility, they require thought and patience.

Here are two of my favorites from the reading. I especially liked what Ryan said about "Leaving Spaces"--she believes that people are uncomfortable with emptiness and quiet in life--and I've always loved the humor, fantasticality, and burning truthfulness of "He Lit a Fire with Icicles".

----------

Leaving Spaces

By Kay Ryan

From Flamingo Watching

Found on The Poetry Foundation's website

It takes a courageous
person to leave spaces
empty. Certainly any
artist in the Middle Ages
felt this timor, and quickly
covered space over
with griffins, sea serpents,
herbs and brilliant carpets
of flowers – things pleasant
or unpleasant, no matter.
Of course they were cowards
and patronized by cowards
who liked their swards as
filled with birds as leaves.
All of them believed in
sudden edges and completely
barren patches in the mind,
and they didn’t want to
think about them all the time. 

----------

He Lit a Fire with Icicles

by Kay Ryan 

From The Niagara River

Found on The Poetry Foundation's website 

For W.G. Sebald, 1944-2001

This was the work

of St. Sebolt, one

of his miracles:

he lit a fire with

icicles. He struck

them like a steel

to flint, did St.

Sebolt. It

makes sense

only at a certain

body heat. How

cold he had

to get to learn

that ice would

burn. How cold

he had to stay.

When he could

feel his feet

he had to

back away

----------

Despite how much I like Ryan, I did manage to rub her the wrong way when she signed my book after the reading. I asked her if she read a lot of Marianne Moore. In response, Ryan scowled at me. "Well," she said, "I read her long after she could have affected me. I read her when I was young. She bugged the hell out of me." She paused, squinted her eyes up at me, black fountain pen poised over my copy of The Niagara River. "You know, the problem with being a female poet is that you get compared to other female poets all the time." Another squint, a little scowl. "You know?"

"Uh, yeah," I said. "I suppose. Thanks again--it was a lovely reading!" I said, backing away from the table, trying not to giggle. I had peeved a poet! A poet laureate, in fact! (It seemed like some dubious sort of accomplishment.)

I was thinking, It's not like I compared you to Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton or Rita Dove, lady! It's a question that makes good sense to me. I was thinking about "To a Snail," one of my favorite poems by Marianne Moore. If ever a poet made a virtue of contractility, it is Kay Ryan, whether she likes to think so about herself or not.

----------

To A Snail

By Marianne Moore

 

If “compression is the first grace of style”,
you have it.  Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue.
It is not the acquisition of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle that is hid:
in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusions”;
“a knowledge of principles”,
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.

Marianne Moore

Happy December

Happy first of December, everybody!

I'm always a little bit excited about December. It's not the holidays I love--I'm not a huge Christmas person--and it's not exactly the weather; I don't usually like the cold, and I hate having to wear gloves to drive my car or type at the office. But I've always liked winter. At the beginning of the season, the cold feels crisp and new and intoxicating. The first snow flakes look cleansing and bright, and roads and cars aren't yet covered in that awful salty, sandy, dirty sludge that seems to epitomize the February doldrums to me. It feels like a new world is beginning each December, and I like that.

Besides, I've been ready for November to be done for awhile now. It was not my best month ever.  :P

In other news, last night, I walked out in the cold and the dark to see a reading downtown. The two authors were local-ish (native Kansans from a town an hour away). One wrote essays and the other poetry, and they were both underwhelming. They did not write excellent or surprising or even terribly engaging literature, but I tried to listen to it with a better attitude than I used to. In the past, I've been a terrible literary hater; I've gotten angry over the success of poems and essays and even people that I don't like or respect. But that's a cheap and miserly way to live, and it certainly wasn't making me any more successful when I ripped on others' work.

These days, I'm trying to remember that all literature, even literature that I *ahem* disagree with, was written by someone who was doing his/her best to write, to survive, and to be happy. All literature is written by someone who is trying to learn his/her own song and sing it, and their bravery, persistence, and stubborn individuality is something to respect, even if the writing itself irks me.

Enamored

I'm having one of those days where all I want to do is lay on my couch and read about a zillion books and do a little writing. Maybe I'm just growing weary of daleks daleks daleks all day long, but it's come upon me suddenly, the hunger for words. It happens. I've added five or six books to my Goodreads To Read shelf in the past few days. I want to read lots and lots of sci-fi and steampunk and cyberpunk and go back to my gloriously nerdy roots. I'm hungry not for high literature or for sentimental feeling or for postmodern ambiguity but for thinking. I want ideas, big, chewy, crunchy ideas with lots of vitamins and fiber and nutrition and maybe some sprinkles on top.

Anyway. You get the idea. It's lunch time, obviously. Here are some other things I'm enamored with:

• My new iPod Nano, which my lovely parents bought me for my birthday because they are awesome and because they love me
• Putting together lots of new playlists for my new iPod Nano after the gym tonight
• Laurell K. Hamilton's Meredith Gentry series. I mean, the woman can make faeries (faeries?! are you kidding me?) into fantastically creative and compelling mystery novels for adults. She is obviously some kind of genius.
• 70 degree days in November, warm breezes, cool skies, the chilled and rainy days to come.
• My birthday tomorrow. I plan on getting a massage, buying a bottle of red wine, ordering Indian take-out, and settling in for the night with a good book, which sounds like pretty much the best idea I've ever had.
• This brief essay by Lera Auerbach on The Best American Poetry blog. 
• This fantastically textured, moody, profoundly beautiful poem by Claudia Burbank on the same blog.

Enjoy, folks, and have a happy Monday.
---------------

Geranium

Thank you for the dead geranium, red
memory of a short-stemmed city.
For nickel shows, tea rooms, the rotten-egg
mill-smell that crept between the fretted sheets.
For elms that divided our limbs with dusk,
and twisted things in ash trays, girls lit with gin,
long trains moaning, the night in a plum.
Thanks, too, for captured Kaiser helmets stowed in attics,
the Alligator Man and Monkey Woman at the circus,
and rented clarinets, and dented trombones,
ladies in a savage dance, hair bound high.
Thanks, perhaps, for noon, the dark bird’s love call,
being born on ice, out of wolf, wolf.
For the stately progress of capped men
towards a gray chowder, something shaken by the gills.
And all that we devoured, and all that didn’t drown.
--Claudia Burbank

Curiosity

As you know, I'm working on putting together a chapbook out of some old poems from my thesis. Most recently, I've been grappling with a poem about Greek water clocks. It's a topic that I find complex and strange and absolutely fascinating, but I know that most people have no idea what a clepsydra is and, to be honest, they don't give a damn.

And that's perfectly fine. The problem is that this poem is dependent upon a knowledgeable audience or, even better, an audience willing to hit up Wikipedia when confusion strikes. It's also a poem that draws my attention to my own knowledge, to my own academic backgrounds. It makes me hyper-aware that I've spent more of my life learning about Greek history and literature than most people care to, and yet I still know so little about it. It's a topic that sounds very learned and obscure, but really I'm only scraping the surface of a whole fascinating field of study that some scholars of Greek archaeology have dedicated their lives to. I'm an amateur at best.

This makes me think about my other areas of "expertise": poetry, American literature, personal essays, baking, etc. But what I know about, say, poetry is just a smattering in a huge field that's bursting with poets and poems I've never heard of. I can name at least twenty people I know personally who know a heck of a lot more about poetry than I do. I know that, even in this, my primary field of expertise, it's absolutely impossible to know everything, and it's nearly impossible to gain mastery over even a fragment of such a wide field. For example, it would take a lifetime of study and reading and thinking to master a tiny category like Post-Modernist Midwestern American Poetry By Women written after 1960.

Sometimes, I find my persistent and unavoidable ignorance to be depressing, but more often I find it thrilling and even comforting. A friend once told me that libraries make her sad because she walks into the stacks and knows that she will never be able to read all the books that she sees. But this is the exact reason that libraries make me so happy: no matter how hard I work to learn, there will always be too much to know in my lifetime, and there will always be some work left for someone else to do.

There is a limit to what one man or woman can know. In a library full of hundreds of packed shelves and millions of volumes, each of us can only read a few shelves worth in a lifetime. No matter how boundless our curiosity is, the world is always much vaster and much greater than our aspirations, and this, I know, is a gift.

Sleeplessness

After a weekend full of plentiful and restful sleep, I had a bad bout of insomnia last night.There aren't many pleasures to insomnia, except for the quiet reading time. Once I accept that I cannot sleep and drag myself out of bed, I usually enjoy the quiet, late-night time, the sense that I have no place to be and nothing to do.

Last night, I read a fascinating New Yorker article about Colorado uranium mining towns that have been gutted and razed due to radiation. Despite the health concerns that plague the towns, the "uranium widows" would happily welcome back the uranium mining industry. You can read an abstract here, but it's definitely worth tracking down the whole article.

I also read more of The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, which I've been working on for awhile. It's not the cheeriest late night reading, but it's a great anthology, in part because editor Kevin Young does such an excellent job of mixing old and new poems. The poems in the collection are varied in age and style and message, but Young is nearly unfailing in his ability to choose compelling poems from excellent poets.

Here are two of my favorites from the collection. The first is a poem by Mary Oliver that I heard her read last fall. I liked it then, too, but these days it seems so important to remember these lines: "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."

I read the Galway Kinnell poem for the first time in this anthology. It's so beautiful, so simple and spare, that I couldn't resist posting it here. It has that ring of trueness to it that all poems should have, no matter what their message or style.

----------

When Death Comes

Mary Oliver

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. 

---------- 

Wait

Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now. 

Distrust everything, if you have to. 

But trust the hours. Haven't they 

carried you everywhere, up to now? 

Personal events will become interesting again. 

Hair will become interesting. 

Pain will become interesting. 

Buds that open out of season will become lovely again. 

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, 

their memories are what give them 

the need for other hands. And the desolation 

of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness 

carved out of such tiny beings as we are 

asks to be filled; the need 

for the new love is faithfulness to the old. 

Wait. 

Don't go too early. 

You're tired. But everyone's tired. 

But no one is tired enough. 

Only wait a while and listen. 

Music of hair, 

Music of pain, 

music of looms weaving all our loves again. 

Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, 

most of all to hear, 

the flute of your whole existence, 

rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion. 

Bringing It All Back Home

So I'm back.

I took a long Blogger break for a couple of reasons. The most important one is that I broke up with my boyfriend of four years. Naturally, it's been a very hard few weeks. The adjustment has been extraordinarily difficult. I didn't just break up with Charlie, I broke up with his friends, his family, our shared hobbies, our plans, and some of my hopes for the future. It's left me shaken in a way that I haven't felt in a very, very long time.

The breakup has made me question a lot in my life, including this blog. I considered quitting it permanently. I started writing here to help with my job search--the idea was that I could use this space to showcase my writing ability, my journalistic style, and my ability to write lots of prose really fast--but it's outlived that use. It's transformed into a place to talk about things that I love, about what I read and write and bake and listen to and watch and experience. It's become a place to connect with family and friends and other bloggers. It's become a casual place, a place of impressions and expression.

Largely, I like it that way. I like that my audience has changed from an anonymous potential employer to people I truly care about. I like that this is casual, that I can post as frequently or as rarely as I would like, and I like that I write this largely for me, not for anyone else.

So I've decided to return to writing here for as long as it makes me happy. I'm also working on a chapbook of poems, which is, honestly, a much larger priority than this; if you ever wonder why I haven't posted here in awhile, just assume I'm neck deep in poetry! I'm also taking a class in letterpress printing, spending a lot of time with friends, going to concerts, and listening to music voraciously. I'm spending a lot of time on me and on doing my thing, on figuring out who I am and what I have to do in my life to be happy.

As hard as the last month has been, all this, I know, is a good thing.

And now, an extremely beautiful and extremely convoluted Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that's been on my mind lately.It's a tough read, but it's lovely to hear out loud. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Yours with much blogger love,
Lesley

------------

Carrion Comfort

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me	5
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,	10
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

Morning Walks & Mary Oliver

If you're in Kansas right now, you know what sort of day today is: it feels more like early March than mid-May. It's all bluster and chill and gray, spitting rain. I could have picked better weather for my first day of work, but this bleariness had to do! (My first day went swimmingly, by the way!)

But despite how damn cold my arms were as I walked to work this morning, I was gloriously happy to be outside walking in Lawrence. I love this town with its old, bright houses, its soft grasses crowding up between brick-paved sidewalks, its many trees thick and green and writhing in the wind.

I've missed walking, too. I've always been a bit of a peripatetic, maybe not in the philosophical sense but in the sense that I love walking and thinking and, when I can convince someone to come with me, walking while I talk. It made me brilliantly happy this morning to hoof my way up "Mount" Oread. I saw pale lilacs and wet stones and robins dark-feathered with rain. Walking makes me mindful of the world, and I miss that when I spend too much time in a car.

This morning got me thinking about Mary Oliver, who I got to see read last week on KU's campus. I've always liked her poetry (especially American Primitive, which is one of my favorite books), but the clarity and peacefulness and passion of her poems is even more apparent when she's reading them aloud. Her poems feel like blessings, somehow, in the same way that What Whitman's "Song of Myself" and Marilyn Robinson's Gilead do: they're not religious works, per se, but they are works of careful attention and love and praise.

I've posted Oliver's "Peonies" below. It's one of her most famous poems, and it's one that she almost always performs at readings. It's a beautiful poem, full of death as well as life, as so many of her poems are. And I absolutely love that, in the midst of all her rich, sensuous specificity, she's ballsy enough to ask "Do you love this world? / Do you cherish your humble and silky life? / Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?" She's not afraid to ask the big questions or to say just what she means, and that's what makes her so damn good.

---------------

Peonies

By Mary Oliver

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises, 
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open ---
pools of lace, 
white and pink ---
and all day the black ants climb over them, 

boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls, 
craving the sweet sap, 
taking it away

to their dark, underground cities ---
and all day
under the shifty wind, 
as in a dance to the great wedding, 

the flowers bend their bright bodies, 
and tip their fragrance to the air, 
and rise, 
their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness 
gladly and lightly, 
and there it is again --- 
beauty the brave, the exemplary, 

blazing open. 
Do you love this world? 
Do you cherish your humble and silky life? 
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? 

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, 
and softly, 
and exclaiming of their dearness, 
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, 

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, 
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?

AWP

I'm off to the AWP conference in Denver for the weekend! I'll update here when I get back. Expect pictures, poetry reading reviews, and Denver sightseeing stories!

I'm most excited to see this lady: Anne Waldman, famous Beat-era poet and one of my personal favorites from college. I'm certain that she'll be wearing a scarf at her reading, and I'm certain that I'll want one of my own afterward!

Best wishes, folks--I'll be back soon.

Springtime

Okay, okay, I'm back!

Last week was one of those unofficial vacation weeks when I wanted to be miles away from my computer. I didn't want to write anything or check my email or tweet or do anything except exist.

Besides working at the cafe, the only business I handled involved 1) planning my upcoming trip to AWP in Denver, 2) the mall (new khaki shorts!), 3) reading yet another Anita Blake novel, 4) frosting sugar cookies and eating Easter candy, and 5) sitting on the back porch generating vast stores of vitamin D and watching the birdies. I couldn't even muster up enough energy to take pictures of the budding hyacinths and sprouting daffodils and fluttering birdies for this blog--I was too busy actually enjoying them!

April and May are my favorite months of the year. I don't know if it's the lengthening days, the shifting color of the sunlight, the warm breezes, or the hard-earned eruption of green grass and tulip shoots, but I get positively giddy in spring. I'm always full of energy, but, fortunately, I'm never bothered with any industrious inclination to do anything practical with that energy. I turn lazy and frivolous, and it is wonderful.

Come to think of it, I believe that frivolity is highly underrated: isn't it basically a useless, desultory, meaningless joy and an appreciation for life's happy minutiae? Isn't a touch of frivolity here and there--especially when the springtime air smells like earth and rain and tangy green things--a necessary, life-affirming thing?

Anyway, go outside. But if you're stuck inside for some reason, here are a few of my favorite spring poems that might help you through your captivity. The first, William Carlos Williams's "Spring and All," captures the difficulty of spring, how each year it is truly a challenge for the earth to recreate itself whole from nothing but scraps of gray grass and soggy roots. I love how Williams depicts the miraculousness of spring's rebirth in this poem, even while paying close attention to its gritty, grimy specifics.

The second poem, Billy Collins's "Today," is a typical Billy Collins poem: it's simple, playful, and true. While Williams's poem is better crafted, Collins's seems just as true to me and perhaps more relatable: why yes, Mr. Collins, I do want to "rip the little door from its jamb" in springtime joy, I do!

---------------

Spring and All

By William Carlos Williams

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

---------------

Today

By Billy Collins

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,

so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw

open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,

indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths

and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight

that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight

on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants

from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,

holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,

well, today is just that kind of day.

Ten Tumbled Tidbits

I don't feel like writing anything sensible today, so here's a list of what's on my mind:

1. Spring begins in less than two weeks. I love that the color of sunlight is changing and that I can smell the earth again. Yes, PLEASE.
2. Easter is one of my favorite holidays. Everyone's joyful, the weather's usually beautiful, and, let's face it, Easter candy is the best holiday candy ever. What can possibly compete with jelly beans, Sweet Tarts shaped like bunnies, malt balls, and Cadbury cream eggs? (Yes, Halloween, I am calling you out, chump!)
3. (Nerd Alert!) I've been thinking about the benefits of AP Style lately. It's unflinchingly in favor of brevity, simplicity and clarity. I think it might be a good thing.
4. I've been in an essaying sort of mood. Writing poetry every day has made me grumpy: I've grown sick of forcing line breaks and of hearing that irritatingly "poet-y" voice I sometimes fall in to. So I've given in and started writing brief lyric essays everyday instead. I like how this is going.
5. Someone recently told me that I have terrible taste in music because I like Lil' Wayne. Are you kidding me?! You can disagree with his persona, his hairdo, his violation of gun laws, and his misogyny, but, good grief, you cannot deny that the man is a brilliant poet/rapper/lyricist. And his music is funny, which I think is a rare and wonderful thing.
6. Project Runway should never have a break between seasons. Ever.
7. I'm finally reading George Eliot's Middlemarch. I love Eliot's insights into human nature, but goodness, it's wearying to read such dry, relentless, scathing satire. Just like someone already, George!
8. I'm a redhead again thanks to the efforts of my cousin Sarah, who is an amazing hairdresser! It's been a few years since I've dyed my hair, and I'm enjoying the change.
9. OmigoodnesssoexcitedwhenwillithappenahhhhIlovebasketball! (Translation: I am suitably enthused for the NCAA men's basketball tournament.)
10. I'm reading a collection of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poems very, very slowly. His work is beautiful; each line is stuffed with the complex music of sprung rhythm and constant alliteration. But his syntax is downright tortured by his sound schemes, and it's hard to pick out the meaning of some of his lines. I have to read each poem through a couple of times before my initial response ("Ooooo, pretty!") matches up with my desired response ("Aha! I see what old Manley is getting at!"). Anyway, he's good, so here's one of my favorites. Enjoy!

 ---------------

The Windhover

By Gerard Manley Hopkins 

From PoetryFoundation.org

To Christ our LordTo Christ our Lord This epigraph dedicated the poem to Jesus while echoing the Latin phrase, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, the Jesuit motto meaning “To the Greater Glory of God.”

I caught this morning morning's minionminion favorite, darling; also, an underling or servant, king-

    dom of daylight's dauphindauphin prince; a French historical term, along with “chevalier”, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimplingwimpling rippling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

    Buckle!Buckle! to bend, attach; prepare for flight or battle. The verb could be descriptive of the bird’s action, or it could be the speaker’s imperative. AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!chevalier French word for “knight” or “champion”; pronounced Chev-ah-leer, to rhyme with “here” and “dear”

     

   No wonder of it: shéer plódshéer plód slowly, laboriously, and without break; these accent marks, inserted by Hopkins, tell the reader to place more accent or emphasis on those syllables when reading aloud makes plough down sillionsillion Fresh soil upturned by a plow (“plough”)

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dearah my dear Compare with the same phrase in the poem “Love (III)” by George Herbert, a poet Hopkins admired.,

    Fall, gallgall to become sore, crack, or chafe themselves, and gash gold-vermilionvermilion a vibrant scarlet color.

Poem a Day: Days 3 & 4

The first three days were easy.

Today, not so much.

That's how it always goes. Even though I've never tried to write a poem daily before, I wrote four or five days a week in grad school. So I'm very familiar with sitting down and staring out the window for ten minutes without having a single idea I can stand putting on the page. I know this feeling all too well: the ennui, the dull laziness, and the sense that I have nothing to say and have never had anything to say before.

But I persevered. And that's the whole point, right?  : P

Yesterday's poem is about a pest-infested shed. Today's poem is about the Lazy River water "ride" at Worlds-of-Fun. Enjoy!

---------------

Day 3

"you find it everywhere, 

behind hollow walls, wriggling

between rotted boards, dangling

from exposed beams--life! 

dark-eyed, glinting things: 

a sea of insects glittering

in soft-sheen shells . . ."

---------------
Day 4

"parched maple leaves clinging to the damp tube,
a rosy pall of sunburn blushing down your stomach
as you bump and swirl your way into the future
on sheer, blue, burbling, bleachy waters . . ."


Copyright Lesley Owens, 2010

Poem a Day: Day 2

Today, I was thinking of the basement in the house I grew up in. We had our washer and dryer down there, and a TV, and a huge wooden desk my mom used for crafting. For a few years, she made wooden Christmas tree ornaments using a jigsaw and acrylic paint. The poem I wrote today was about that basement, how it frightened me when I was little, and how it smelled when my mom was at her work table.

"the crinkle of newspaper
being spread across a table, the smell
of dust and mildew, cigarette smoke, the sawdust
thick upon the air, softening the floor with its powder . . ."

Copyright Lesley Owens 2010

A Poem a Day

I'm finally done teaching my literature course (at least until the next session begins), and I've finally settled into a schedule at the cafe. So what does this mean for this blog, you may ask?

Fortunately, I'll be writing here more often, baking more often, job hunting more vigorously, and writing a poem a day!

Writing a poem a day is not a new idea. I first heard of it while researching David Lehman's The Daily Mirror (1996) for a class in college. He wrote the entire collection by writing a poem a day for 140 days. Some poems, he has said, were awful and were scrapped, but some were good enough to be published in the final manuscript.

Lehman's idea has spread rapidly since then, and writing 31 poems in a month is popular enough to have caught the attention of Writer's Digest and to have inspired at least one independent web site supporting the project.

So I've decided to finally try my hand at the Poem a Day project as a way to make good use of my new free time. And, folks, I'm depending on you all to keep me honest! So I'll post a few lines from each day here. (I can't post whole poems in case I want to publish them elsewhere later!) The lines will be rough, I promise you, and they may not make much sense on their own, but the whole point of the project is to create frantically, joyfully, and consistently, all without paying too much attention to my internal editor!

So here are the inaugural lines of the PoemsAboutOranges Poem A Day project. I hope you enjoy reading along with me in this process!

"This time of year, geese fly overhead,
soft white bellies, brown-black wings,
trailing out flawed V's, branching figures,
aerial charts like family trees . . ."

Copyright Lesley Owens, 2010

Impromptu Poetry

Today, a patron came into my cafe and asked me to recite a poem.

It's not as strange as it sounds. Everyone who works in the cafe wears a name tag that says his or her name and "My passion is _______." My passion, naturally, is poetry. So it's pretty common for people to ask me who my favorite poet is, or to ask me if I write poetry.

But this is the first person who's asked me to drop some rhymes on him. I instantly went to Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." I've memorized it slowly and by accident from teaching it a few times and from just loving it so much. It's one of those rare perfect poems, so elegant and breathtaking that it never seems to lose its power.

So as I handed back the customer's credit card, I rattled off "Whose woods these are I think I know, / His house is in the village though; / He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow. . ." The patron seemed surprised! I think that he just wanted to tease me--he's a regular, and an ornery one at that! He expected a blush and a laugh, and he got some melancholy Modernism instead!

Still, poetry isn't that unusual in our bakery. I get poems "stuck" in my head all the time. They'll run through my head, and I'll say them under my breath as I make a sandwich or blend a smoothie. And since my manager likes to sing showtunes and one of the line cooks falsettos his punk rock tunes while pouring bowls of soup, I guess I'm in good artistic company!

But I love those moments when poetry, those beautiful little bits of language, pop for a moment into everyday life. Frost is good for that: a brush of haunting lyricism at the edge of the ordinary.

---------------

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

By Robert Frost 

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Encouragement

Hi, folks! No, this blog isn't abandoned, just going through a dry spell. I've been working a lot (I put in eleven hours at the bakery today). Once I get my class finished up next week and slog through my first 40-hour work week at the cafe, I'll surely be on track!

I've had some good news this week: The Raven Chronicles, a literary magazine based in Seattle, Washington, nominated one of my poems for a Pushcart Prize! I'm very, very excited about it, and so proud that they thought my poem worthy of being one of the few they nominated in 2010.

It's given me a big boost of confidence when I've been feeling low about my writing. I've managed to write about one poem a month since I've been out of grad school, and I haven't even revised those. I've been seriously doubting my commitment to poetry, but this nomination has made me feel rejuvenated and ready to gear up for another round of poem submissions. So watch out Post Office--I'm headed your way with a big stack of manilla envelopes!

I recently stumbled across Kate Monahan's blog MFA Confidential. In her most recent post, she writes about the vital importance of encouragement in a writer's life. I completely agree with her: I remember every single time that a professor, workshop member, or friend told me that, yes, I could do this, that I could write something worthwhile. And every time it's happened, it's come at just the right time, just when I felt like giving up.

Monahan quotes Anatole France at the end of her post: “Nine tenths of education is encouragement." I believe that this is absolutely true, especially when teaching writing. I've made the decision to never tell a writer "No" in workshop, and I would never tell a beginning composition writer "No" as they worked on a paper, nor would I tell a beginning reader of literature "No" when they first start trying to interpret a short story. I've seen enough students come into my classroom morose and unwilling, convinced that they "are just no good at writing." They cannot learn if they do not believe themselves to be capable of learning, or capable of writing cogently. As a teacher, I try to tell my students "Yes" as much as I can, to focus on the positive, to show them how they can build on their natural talents and what they already know.

Anyway, that's my pedagogical rant for the day. Now, I'm off to bed: gotta get up and sell them bagels tomorrow!  ;)

"Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)"

I've been reading a lot recently. Or maybe I should say that I've been reading a lot of different things recently, all at the same time.

As a little kid, I was addicted to books. I couldn't wait to start a new one, even if I hadn't finished the one that came right before it! This meant that I ended up reading four, five, or even six books at a time. I once took a backpack full of eleven books to stay overnight at my cousin's house--I was a fiend!

I liked to jump back and forth between each book, tasting a few chapters of Black Beauty before shuffling over to The Black Stallion (I had a thing for horses, what can I say!) before switching over to one of the Goosebumps books or to a Dr. Seuss book that my mom read to me when I was small, like The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.

I'm sure that this ecclectic style of reading was caused mostly by a short attention span and too much enthusiasm for the next new thing. Yet, somehow, I managed to finish almost all of those books, even if I read them in ten page increments!

The last few weeks, I've been going back to my old habits and reading several books at once. I'm still working on Rebecca, but I'm also working my way through another Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter novel (I'm on number seven now: Burnt Offerings). I've been listening to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead on my drives to and from Lawrence. I've also been sampling a few books of poetry, including William Carlos Williams's Sour Grapes and Louise Gluck's Ararat.

On top of those, I've also been furiously reading The New Yorker. Charlie bought me a subscription for my birthday, and I've loved every issue so far! The only problem is that there are too many interesting articles in each issue; I usually only have enough time to read two or three before the next issue arrives!

I love my new/old arrangement of reading so many things at once, sampling here and there, feeling edified by my New Yorker articles, excited by the wonderfully extravagant plots of Laruell K. Hamilton, and calmed by the wise old narrator of Gilead. Each thing I read seems to satisfy one part of me that the others cannot. And, week by week, my head is filled with such wildly different stories and thoughts and experiences that I feel enlivened by the variety of it all.

Last night, my class and I read a poem that reminded me of this experience. "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the first poems I read during high school, and it has always amazed me. I love the beauty of its language, the vibrant roughness of its sounds (read it aloud, I beg you!), its joyful message, and the sense of peace that always descends on me when I come to the last lines.

Every time I read this poem, I agree with Hopkins once again: it is the strangeness of this world, its overwhelming variety and frantic richness, that makes living such a wonderful thing.

---------------
Pied Beauty
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
           

    Glory be to God for dappled things—
        For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
            For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
    Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
        Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
            And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
    All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
        Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
            With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
    He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
                                                Práise hím.