Day Oops-I've-Fallen-Behind: First Light Edging Cirrus

Well, so, this is what happens when one sets goals like 'daily,' isn't it? Life has just been too busy - we've taken delivery of a new bed and have established tomorrow as the night for attempting to get it up the stairs (woe). And I've been going to hear music, because it's getting cold out, and when it's full on winter I know it'll be much harder to get myself to go out when there's a warm house waiting.

But enough of excuses. Maybe I won't manage daily, but I'll keep on nonetheless.

Today: First Light Edging Cirrus (Jane Hirshfield)

This is from a book that was a birthday gift this year, and having only looked at a poem or two I can already tell I'm going to like this author and find her challenging at the same time. I've always liked writing that spoke to the joy that I find in science and in understanding the universe in a measured way. Because to me science and math are beautiful, they reveal a deep truth about the world that's huge, bigger than anything else. To believe that the world is logical is to believe in something ultimate. But at the same time, there's a distinct gap between our current understanding of science and math, and what I think the ultimate truth is likely to be. We think on a concrete level, and the universe functions on something like a quantum level (by which I don't mean to limit to our current thinking about what 'quantum' means). I think that ultimately we don't know what it is to know, we don't understand what it is to understand. But I think those things are knowable.

 First Light Edging Cirrus seems to get at the gap between those things.

10²⁵ molecules
are enough 
to call woodthrush or apple.


I think it's the "enough" that's the key word here, as if to say that there are some things which get defined by reason, by measurable functions. And then implicitly we are set up for the things for which reason is not enough, which "cannot be counted."

And of course love is one of those things, love is the thing. The thing which is not counted, which is inside each thing looking out to each thing. If you didn't know about sound waves, you'd think it was magic that strings move when someone near is speaking. So it is with us and the understanding of love. We think it is magic because we do not know what is in between us all that allows for waves of influence to pass between. But someday we might understand it. And I don't think that takes anything away from love. I don't think that makes it more romantic just for being mysterious.

I'm not sure that Hirshfield would agree. She might say there's always something unknowable, something for which reason is not enough. I wonder which of us is right.

Day eight: The Last Days of Summer Before the First Frost

The Last Days of Summer Before the First Frost (Tim Bowling)

Skipped posting yesterday because I went to hear music instead. Afterwards, walking back to the subway from the concert hall, I didn't want to put my earphones in because what I'd just heard was still sort of with me. It was brisk then, and dark (city dark, the kind where there's plenty of light but things take on a nighttime character anyway), and this poem reminds me of that, even though there's nothing of the city in it, really.

There are parts of this that I think are a bit sentimental for my taste, and a bit simplistic ("a child's love" and "I followed my heart" - yeesh). But I love the wilderness language, wolf and deer and salmon, the way these make me think fly fishing in the Rockies, standing in a stream with waders on and seeing a grizzly go by. I've been working on a fiction piece that starts off in Yellowstone and this is the same sort of mood I'd like to evoke. I also like "the bee trails turning to ice as they’re flown."

And I love "where the spider lets its microphone down" - what a great, precise-but-new way of describing that. You can picture exactly what it means, but it's a really unusual metaphor. So cool.

Actually, I pretty much like the first half of this a hell of a lot more than the second half, except for the last line. The nature imagery is way more convincing than the schmaltz. I think it's really hard to do straightforward emotional stuff in writing these days - you have to approach it sideways rather than head on. Partly because of the whole earnestness thing. But also because emotions have become cliche. Just expressing an emotion in straightforward terms isn't convincing because it's been said before. Which makes things difficult, because of course, the reason it's been said before is that it is a near-universal experience that we all want to talk about. But by approaching emotion via metaphor, if you do it right, you can convey the sort of personality of the specific relationship between this mother and this child, and still evoke the universal relationship between mothers and children.

Day seven: LXIV (granted the all)

LXIV
E. E. Cummings

granted the all
                     saving our young kiss only
must unexist,solemnly and per rules
apparelling its soullessness by lonely
antics of ridiculous molecules)

nakedest(aiming for hugely the
ignorant most precise essential flame
never which waked)& perfectingly We

dive

      out of tinying time
                                (into supreme

Now:
        feeling memory shrink from such brief
selves as fiercely seek findingly new
textures of actual cool stupendous is


nor may truth opening encompass true)
while your contriving fate,my sharpening life

are(behind each no)touching every yes


Picked this one at random from Complete Poems 1904-1962. Opened the book in the middle and took the one on the left hand page. I've been feeling melancholy today and was hoping Cummings could cure it. So much of his work is joyful and celebratory. But I'm not sure this is the right poem for that - it suits my mood more than something I would have chosen.

"Lonely antics of ridiculous molecules" feels like a pretty accurate summation of what humanity is, today. Not for any particular reason, just that we humans seem a bit fragile and small in the scheme of things. Things feel hopeless, like society is this thing that is happening to us instead of a thing that we make happen. I don't know which of those is true.

What does it mean to be "touching every yes" in modern life? I think it's about being fully engaged with what you're doing, about mindfulness. That's something I've been working on for a while, actually. I stopped taking pictures because I felt like it was creating this distance between myself and the experiences I was having. I was spending more time thinking about taking a picture than I was enjoying the experience I wanted to commemorate. But it's hard to be in the moment all the time. I could turn off the picture-taking impulse, but I haven't yet figured out how to turn off the narrative impulse, the way my brain sort of describes what I'm doing, finds ways to phrase things humorously, writes little blog entries about everything. Sometimes I can sideline that by thinking very deliberately about a physical sensation, but that doesn't work for long.

I want to "fiercely seek" more often. I want to feel without thinking, hear without thinking. I want to learn how to just be. I just don't know if I have it in me.

Day six: I Am Waiting

I Am Waiting (Lawrence Ferlinghetti)

This poem makes me think about Occupy Wall Street. Because we have been a generation of waiting, of thinking that things would happen someday, soon, now. Only we’re still waiting, aren’t we? Waiting for the system to change, for the war to end, for all those things we’ve been promised (jobs, homes, happiness). But they haven’t come.

This feels like a protest poem. The repeated “I am waiting” is like a chant, a drumbeat, a demand. All the mythologies of America as the promised land are still out there, are still being sold to us, but there’s no there there. Just pretty pictures with nothing underneath.

But it’s not just about the problems of our generation, or of Ferlighetti’s generation, or of any generation. It’s also about being an adult, I think. About realizing that reality never measures up to our imaginings, that all mythologies and symbols are just pretty pictures, that none of humanity’s dreams will come true. That’s the nature of dreams. Even if we reach some specific goal it won’t be like the dream. We went to the moon, but it wasn’t heaven. You can write that “great indelible poem” but it won’t be good enough. It won’t ever be good enough.

So we’re waiting. We’re always going to be waiting – for the war that will end all wars, for God to show himself, for humanity to come together as one and death to be overcome. We’re always going to be waiting for the point when we can return to the innocence of childhood, when we can return to hope. For “the new rebirth of wonder.”

Day five: Enthusiast

ENTHUSIAST

Jonathan Williams

literature – the way we ripen ourselves

by conversation, said

Edward Dalhberg…

we flower in talk, we slake

our thirsts in a brandy of heated speech, song

sweats through the pores,

trickles a swarm

into the sounding keyboard,

pollen falls

across the blackened paper…

always idle – before and

after

the act:

making meat

of vowels

in cells

with sticky feet

I happened across a book of poems by this author in the library while hunting for another poet, picked it up more or less at random (went to return 2 books, came out with 4, you know how it goes). The back of the book describes the poetry within as “eccentric, strange, and boundlessly authentic,” and I certainly found it so. Though the authenticity is of the sort that I think would seem false, to someone not familiar with the context.

Because this is Black Mountain poetry, Appalachian poetry. It’s poetry of the American south, but the part of the south that gets forgotten even by the rest of those states. It’s scatological, sexual, dirty. A lot of it’s found poetry, but without the romantic NYC associations of the Beat poets. And it’s spare – each word chosen with no space for frills or lyricism.

Which sort of ties in with my comments on Saturday’s poem about how things should be read aloud. The Black Mountain group was associated with this manifesto by Charles Olson, which talks about shaping poetry by breath rather than by the formal constraints of meter, that form should come from content rather than content from form. A lot of that essay is pretty incoherent, I think, but there’s something to the idea of poetry as an essentially sounded thing, where a word is a sound above anything else, even above its meaning. (“speech is the ‘solid’ of verse, is the secret of a poem’s energy”)

And I think there’s a natural connection between that idea and found poetry, because the act of creating a found poem is an act of listening, of taking what’s there rather than making something be there. Yes, the poet shapes the end product, but that shaping is subsidiary to the source material. There are things you can’t do in a found poem – you can take things out, you can put things in a new order, but you can’t add things, not if you want to keep the authenticity of the found.

So, Enthusiast. I picked this one out I think because sub-consciously some part of me thinks of this as one of the more poem-like poems, one that seems most crafted. That doesn’t surprise me – I like art that shows skill and crafted-ness and effort, so it’s natural that I would like this more than some of his more clearly experimental or found poems, the ones that are more explicitly snippets:

one edinburgh publican has

a sign over the

bar that says if

assholes could fly this

would be an airport

or

my daughter can spot

a cute boy at

150 yards what she

can’t find is a

tomato in the refrigerator

And Enthusiast is a poem about words, which, you know. Button, pushed. So what do I like about it? I like the way there is this series of images but that they’re given in a very terse way. Each of these words makes me think of a different image: brandy, sweat, swarm, pollen. And more isn’t needed - my brain supplies all sorts of detail to go with those words. To analogize, reading the poem is to reading a book, as reading a book is to watching a film. Watching a film can be great, but when you’ve got this very spare wording, your imagination does the work.

I like the sounds of the poem as well. I tried mouthing the words and found myself really aware of the shapes my lips made, the movement of my tongue. It’s the sort of thing you don’t really think about most of the time because it’s become second nature, and then when you stop and try to think about it, it seems really weird. I wrote a poem about reading as eating once, and this reminded me of that, of sort of taking each word into your mouth.

I think I’m going to try finding more poetry at random, maybe hit up the library again tomorrow.

(This should be day 6 but I missed a day due to busy life, etc)

Day four: Why I Am Not a Painter

Why I Am Not a Painter (Frank O'Hara)

This one is me, oh yes. I start writing something and I know what it is about, and by the time it's done I've taken out those first scribbled lines and there's no mention of them at all, but the piece is still about what it is about.

I love the conversational tone of this one, the way it sounds like a story someone would tell you, and yet it keeps a certain rhythm that's poetic. I'm not sure I could put my finger on what makes that happen - is it just the format? I don't think so. There's just a bit of a swing to it. "The painting / is going on, and I go, and the days / go by." This is one I'd love to have heard the poet read aloud, just to know how it was intended to sound.

It's one of the things, I have to say, that I still don't really get about poetry, how you're supposed to read it. You don't pause where the line breaks (oho, what a newbie mistake that is when you're first learning), just where the sentences go, except why break there if it doesn't mean anything? I've studied poetry in classes and things and I never really felt like this was explained to my satisfaction. And obviously there isn't "an answer" but I think most poets must think about this sort of thing, don't they? I know I did, when I was writing poetry, and to me it felt like those line divisions should have some weight, should mean something. Yet that doesn't seem to be the pattern I've noticed at readings. I wonder if there's some sort of book on this. I will research and blog more later!

Back to O'Hara. I like the parallel of the painter and the poet, the repetition of "days go by. " The way they're doing the same thing basically, except that what they work with is different. The painter is a painter because he paints, that's the essence of the difference. It's not a difference in the way of working but in the material used. Art is still art. That's reassuring, actually. Because I'd really like to be a painter. But this kind of makes me feel like I'm not too far off.

Day three: The Wilderness

The Wilderness
W. S. Merwyn

Remoteness is its own secret. Not holiness,
Though, nor the huge spirit miraculously avoiding
The way's dissemblings, and undue distraction or drowning
At the watercourse, has found us this place.

But merely surviving all that is not here,
Till the moment that looks up, almost by chance, and sees
Perhaps hand, feet, but not ourselves; a few stunted juniper trees
And the horizon's virginity. We are where we always were.

The secret becomes no less itself for our presence
In the midst of it; as the lizard's gold-eyed
Mystery is no more lucid for being near.

And famine is all about us, but not here;
For from the very hunger to look, we feed
Unawares, as at the beaks of ravens.


Today's poem is a departure from the last two, a more "poetic" poem. In some ways it's a lot harder to find something to say about this - the previous two poems are both fairly popular even with people who don't 'do' poetry, they're more conversational, whereas Merwyn isn't like that at all. This is a poem of words and images.

What do I like about it? I like that the sentences don't necessarily lead you, grammatically, where the feeling of them takes you. "the moment that looks up, almost by chance" - how does a moment look? (Old joke: my dog's got no nose.) And yet if you let the words roll over you, you can feel what's happening there. There are bits of images, fragments that thread together in a way that's sort of deceptive. Or, not deceptive, but organic as opposed to formally correct. This poem feels like wilderness to me, like the words make wild shapes on the page, and they make sense to themselves but maybe not to us unless we take them apart down to the atomic level and see how they work. Or we can just go visit the wilderness of the poem and take it as it is, enjoy the view.

I like the phrase "the hunger to look." I started thinking about whether I felt that, and the answer is I'm not sure. On the one hand, I love to find beauty in things (not just nature, but I do find it a lot in nature). I find myself searching for beautiful sights. But then when I find them, it's hard for me to just look. I think my brain just can't be that still for too long; I have to start thinking about something. Sometimes I tell myself a story about what I'm seeing, I imagine myself as a character in that landscape and then think about why I'd be there. Sometimes I write blog entries in my head, trying to find a good way to describe what I'm seeing. But I can't turn off the narrative part of my brain. So I guess in some ways it is like hunger in the wanting.

And maybe that's what Merwyn is getting at there. From the very hunger to look, we feed - the act of searching gives us what we're searching for, though we may not realize it. We look for the mystery of the wilderness and don't find it, and the mystery is in the fact that we don't find it. The more precisely and hungrily we look, the less we expose the mystery. Hmm. Maybe.