Water Poem: Morning

She smells like flowers and magic
on a morning that the rain has decided to come down
and celebrate how water falls.
The drainage spout from the building next door
 
pours out onto the grass below in heavy clumps.
How different water falls when it is tangent to a mountain,
how necessary waterfall seems, how dedicated the water is
to being in one place, cradled by the ground
 
as puddles and mountain lakes, streaming towards an ocean
held by the rock of this earth. These bedfellows, water and soil
are like her and I, sleeping late, and it is like magic
on this morning that she has decided to stay.

Higgledy Piggledies

There is a fun form I've been composing with semi-frequently lately: the double dactyl. I wrote several while I was on vacation recently and truly only began to relax once I had begun writing them Light verse lovers might recognize it as the "Higgledy Piggledy" lyric. An example:

Higgledy Piggledy

Joseph DiMaggio,

Jolted the ball but was

Jilted in bed.

Marilyn walked, but he

Necro-romantically

Laid her in rose bouquets

When she was dead.

 

-Gene Weingarten

The first line must be "Higgledy Piggledy" and the second line must be a name of who the poem is about. The last line of each stanza breaks the double dactyl rhythm (STRESS-unstress-unstress, STRESS-unstress-unstress) with a trochee (STRESS-unstress) and an iamb (unstress-STRESS). The second line of the second stanza has to be a made up 6 syllable word that also fits the rhythm of the double dactyl. All other lines are written in double dactyls.

The thing about forms is that they help provide a framework for a poem when you're not sure what to write. Writer's block shouldn't be a problem for a writer as long as they have a few minutes to play with a form. Writer's block is not about a lack of ideas, it's about too much pressure on having a good idea.

The form frees you from that pressure by saying, "Fuck a good idea, just find an idea that fits this."

My experience with formal poetry has taken me down some pretty interesting twists and turns in the path to a poem and it is rarely ever a wate of time.

It's fun and when you have fun, you let your guard down, you release those pressures and you can breathe free.

 As a writer, that breathing free is so important. In that free breath of air, you can hear the rhythms of all past language, the iambs and trochees and dactyls that so many other writers before you breathed. And in breathing with them, you put yourself in sync with them, like two lovers, one holding the other's ear to their breast to let the heartbeat in one calm the other until you're breathing in sync, two hearts beating in sync. And in sync and in harmony is a really peaceful place to be for a poet.

Being a writer of light verse won't ever win a Pulitzer Prize, but it may be a way to stay in a vacation state of mind. Which during extremely difficult times is a better place to keep your mind.

Language Acquisition

So I wrote a lot about my coma in the beginning and I'm going to return to it again because that's what I do. That's what any writer does, they return to threads that keep showing up in the great tapestry of their life or their work.

I'm going to start with what I do now. I am compelled to study and talk about and discover how people acquire languages and this is languages in its broadest sense to its most specific sense. Over my life I have asked questions such as: How does one acquire the language to fit in to a certain social group or profession? How does a child learn to read and write? How does someone discover the context it takes to translate a poem into English well? How do I describe in language that everyone can understand my own unique and half-terrifying, half-comforting experience of being trapped inside yourself, your body a prison you later have to relearn to trust, your body a planetarium for your mind to project all its fantasies onto the wall of?

I address the first question in the English composition course I teach for the University of Alaska. In it, I have the students collect empirical data about the writing conventions being used in their field so that they can see through empirical research how to write within their field. Otherwise, they're left to guess half-consciously, and learn through trial and error. I use the work of John Swales and several genre analysis studies to not only describe this process and model it, but also to help dtudents engage in this part of their learning.

I addressed the second question when I worked at the Boys & Girls Club. I had the honor of working with a particular child who, not only had some behavior challenges, was also struggling with his literacy at school, so much in fact, that he may have been held back. I took it upon myself to learn the components of early language acquisition (alphabetics, fluency, and comprehension) and then to use a multi-tiered approach to his learning these principles about the language. By the time he was through my classroom, he was reading and writing at the approriate level.

I address the third question when I translate a poem, particularly one in a language whose culture I'm not familiar with. I work heavily upon notes from my Romanian friend when I am helping her with assistance in translating from or to Romanian. This process involves a lot of clarifying emails back and forth across the ocean, a lot of suggested substitutions and deviations from the literal translation. I learn bushels full of valuable enculturation with every translation.

The last question though, that's a tough one. Ultimately, my mind has a distrust of its body, it fears it and its unreliability, but also sleeps well within it, like a coccon, encased by it, protecting the imagination from escape, from sabotage, from disruption.

Talking was difficult after I came out of the coma and it is often difficult today, when other's are present. When I am alone, when I am with just my thoughts, my imagination, I am able to speak, under my breath, seamlessly with no stutters, with no hems and haws, and "what do you call its." A person's presence, even those I trust more than myself, have a silencing effect on me.

And I wonder sometimes if I wouldn't function better on my own, a hermit, with no connections to other humans, just so I can feel freer with my thoughts and able to make what I imagine happen.

But I crave that human connection, even if I fail or connect poorly. I am like the computer seeking the internet but shutting itself off from it because my firewall is on.

Which is about as close as I can come to a metaphor for saying the following conclusion about what my life has been leading up to. I say it without sorrow, without a need to be pitied, without pride. I say it as a matter of fact only.



I have experienced oblivion first-hand. I do not fit in this world, nor do I belong outside of it.



Maybe there's a bit of sorrow in that.

The Poet's Moment

Poets, in many ways, are trained to believe in impermanence, that all beauty fades, that all living things die, that love, in all its splendor, decays.

And so we write poems and odes to the impermanent, in an attempt to memorialize them, in order to make the impermanent seem less permanent. For if Shelley hadn't written about those two vast trunkless legs of stone, who would remember Ozymandias and his crumbled ruins?

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
--Percy Bysshe Shelley

The monuments we build out of stone or glass or metal seem permanent, but they are hard to copy. They are one of a kind. If they are destroyed, they never return to their former glory. But I can make copy after copy of a poem and distribute them to people I know, I can post it on the web, I can recite it during those silences in a conversation.

And you might recieve that poem, might take a few minutes to read or listen to it. Maybe a few more to try to let it move you or help you connect it with something that matters in your life.

And it might be a lovely moment in your life. Or maybe you'll discredit it. That happens a lot too and although we poets complain about it, we do it too. We're human. Only so much can touch a human being and sometimes poems don't do for one person, what they do for others. You build a relationship with a  poem, like you do with a person. You have some you go back to time and time again in times of need. You have some you hate and those you love dearly. You have a favorite poem and you may even have one you don't read often enough but when you do it takes you back to another time and place.

And the moment when you realize you're thinking about people you know now instead of the poems I'm describing is the moment when you see the impermanance we poets see.

I've been struggling with my marriage lately and with my father's passing and the two events, though unrelated are affecting each other and I've just recently learned just how so.

People keep throwing the word "happy" at me, as in "Only you can make yourself happy." Or "I wanna make you happy." Or "You have to decide what's going to make you happy." Why is happy, a temporary emotion treated as if it were a permanent thing in our lives, as if it were a state of being or a goal. It is simply one of many emotions that are as impermanent as every other emotion.

Except fear.

Fear is, if not permanent, persistent. It takes hold within us. It abides within us and so I think what we mean by "being happy" in the permanent state, is really living without fear.

*

I'm not very good at planning for the future because Robert Frost taught me that way leads onto way and I shouldn't expect to go back and that the road not taken versus the road less traveled by makes all the difference. So a future is about as impermanent as anything can get. Nothing is set in stone, or better, verse.

So I strive to live in the moment. The poet's moment, the moment of awakening into the future, the moment where the thing being remembered ceases and the memorial begins. That moment of becoming something else, that moment where love becomes sensual touch becomes love again. That moment of stretching far and away.

Translating Eugenio Montale

The original in Italian:

La poesia

Dagli albori del secolo si discute
se la poesia sia dentro o fuori.
Dapprima vinse il dentro, poi contrattaccò
duramente
il fuori e dopo anni si addivene a un forfait
che non potrà durare perché il fuori
è armato fino ai denti. 

The word for word Italian to English transliteration:

The Poetry

Since the dawn of the century discussion
If the poetry is in or out.
He won the first, then counterattacked hard inside
the outside and after he became a forfeit
that will not last because the outside
is armed to the teeth

English Interpretive Translation:

Poetry

Our modern poets have argued
whether poetry comes from inside the poet or outside.
Poetry revealed himself from inside the battlements
and In was thought to have won,
but then, he relinquished
because outside, Poetry was armed to the teeth.

***

I've never taken a course in Italian. The transliteration was conducted by some Microsoft program designed to translate web pages. But that is not where the poem's meaning comes from. It is as if I have chipped away at the stone to reveal some of the geode underneath. The act of translation must first transliterate, but it also must interpret.

Montale seems to say here that it is both inside the soul and outside the body. It exists wherever there is a human being and I agree with him. Poetry as an internal act is very personal, very protective. The poet constructing poetry for himself creates a world and its structures for him to live and work in, to protect him from the outside.

But the poet must also construct poetry for the world, the poet must use his words as weapons to tear down ideas that people hide behind, to force them into the open, to reveal the vulnerability of us all. To lay bare our faults and injustices, and to set us free from our illusions.

Poetry must be both inside and outside, must reflect this constant conflict of this inner landscape and our outer environment. And good poetry, the poetry that really is able to turn us from being protected to being proactive, from being on the defense, to taking up arms against our oppressors, that poetry that serves to connect us to our other, better self, is also the barrier between the two worlds. It is also the door.

And in Adrienne Rich's words, "It promises nothing. It is only a door."

And it occurs to me that non-believers can go ahead and not believe in poetry or the soul or the spirit or the life force or whatever other invisible things we have created words for out of a need to hope for something better. Just because you don't believe in it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It only means you haven't opened the door.

And you haven't opened the door because you want it to promise you something which it cannot.

I feel courageous opening that door and I gladly walk through, not knowing if I am going outside or inside. That is the job of the poet: to walk through poetry, to live through poetry, to speak through poetry, to infuse everything we contact with poetry.

Ash Wednesday by TS Eliot

I
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is
nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.


II
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been
contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each
other,
Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.



III
At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jaggèd, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond
repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind
over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.


Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy

               but speak the word only.

IV
Who walked between the violet and the violet
Whe walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked,
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs

Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour,
Sovegna vos

Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke
no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile


V
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny
the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season,
time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks
In the last desert before the last blue rocks
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.


O my people.


VI
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit
of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

You're Missing It

Is sharp.
Is filed and shaved down.
Is a dot on the map.

Is infintely small, yet still exists.
Is the reason for speech, for action, for thought.
Is what I'm getting to.

Is often questioned about it all.
Is blaming you for everything.
Is showing me the right direction.

Is a place on my body where it hurts.
Is a place in my mind where it hurts or decides.
Is of no return.

Is of fact.
Is here where I am.
Is the place where the pin hosts an angels dance.

Is the place where movement becomes language.
Is the thing that matters most.
Isn't going to change.

Isn't going to stretch out along a line.
Has no depth, no width, no length, just direction of travel.
Is what I'm coming to.

Is a mark of significance or insignificance.
Denotes the start or the end.
Denotes the midway.

Is the first thing I write and the last thing I write.
Is the thing I do when I don't write.
Is what I've made.

Is sharp, is movement.
Is the purpose and direction.
Is infinitely small, yet still exists.