Category: Whole Life of the Poet (Page 15 of 18)

Snowflakes

Out of the bosom of the Air.
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent and soft and slow
Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels

This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

More Christmas and Hanukkah Poems 

My favorite holiday song is actually a Hanukkah song called "Feast of Lights," a song we once sang in grade school in St. Louis and I've never forgotten it. The song is done, as someone described it, in a haunting minor key (reminding me of "Little Alter Boy" in that way). It recalls dark holiday nights and contains such a beautiful melody coupled with its quavering hope for humanity which is prone to hate "because it's human to." I find most generosity of spirit available in this song:

Feast of Lights

I remember Mama lighting the Menorah,
Then covering her head she'd start to pray.
When Papa finished reading from the Torah,
Mama, smiling down on me, would say:

May your days and nights
Be a feast of lights
The eternal flame, may it glow in you,
And the Holy One,
May He know in you only love.

May the light of peace
Shine and never cease
And the glow of wisdom illumine in you
May you never hate, though it's human to
May you know love.

May you go through life
With your head up to the sky
May you never walk in shame
In sight of the light of the One
Who has no name
This I wish for you.

May your days and nights
Be a feast of lights
Have a warmth for all of humanity
For without it, life is but vanity
May you have love.

May you have faith, and
May you have strength, and
May the Lord grant
Your life will have length
May it be sweet but strong 

May your days and nights  
Be a feast of lights
Your whole life long. 

Hear the song

More affirmations culled from The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo:

When feeling urgent,
you must slow down.

His explanation is particularly good. "A sense of urgency is a terrible illusion. [He's saying this and he has cancer.]

…When feeling like I will die if I don't have your approval, I need, more than ever, to die to my need for your approval."

Stop talking, stop thinking,
and there will e nothing you will not understand.
— Seng-Ts'an

Originally, the word power meant able to be. In time, it was contracted to mean to be able. We suffer the difference.

And if there is nothing that expresses the spirit of this blog, it is this quote:

In a world that lives like a fist
mercy is no more than waking
with your hands open.

Happy Halloween!

Be sure to check out my Top 10 Ways Kids Today Can Use Poetry: Halloween Edition from last year.
Poets.org has a page of make-your-own Poet costumes for Halloween: The William Carlos Williams costume idea comes complete with a bowl of plums and a red wheelbarrow full of candy.

See? Even poets can be fun! Who knew.

Here are a few Halloween poems for you:

The Little Ghost

I knew her for a little ghost
That in my garden walked;
The wall is high—higher than most—
And the green gate was locked.

And yet I did not think of that
Till after she was gone—
I knew her by the broad white hat,
All ruffled, she had on.

By the dear ruffles round her feet,
By her small hands that hung
In their lace mitts, austere and sweet,
Her gown's white folds among.

I watched to see if she would stay,
What she would do—and oh!
She looked as if she liked the way
I let my garden grow!

She bent above my favourite mint
With conscious garden grace,
She smiled and smiled—there was no hint
Of sadness in her face.

She held her gown on either side
To let her slippers show,
And up the walk she went with pride,
The way great ladies go.

And where the wall is built in new
And is of ivy bare
She paused—then opened and passed through
A gate that once was there.

–Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

Each night Father fills me with dread
When he sits at the foot of my bed;
I'd not mind that he speaks
In gibbers and squeaks,
But for seventeen years he's been dead.

–Edward Gorey

If you want to read a great long-form ghost poem, I recommend Albert Goldbarth's "The Two Domains" from his book The Beyond.

I love ghost poems…send me yours!

My husband works at the Georgia O'Keeffe museum in Santa Fe, so we get the member magazine which I read from cover to cover.

Living there for three years, I came to find that Georgia O'Keeffe is a somewhat polarizing figure in Santa Fe. American artists are somewhat over her abstractions of landscapes and flowers (although there are about 2,000 O'Keeffe works, a huge amount of which are not landscapes and flowers). Native New Mexican's also resent her status as the painter of Northern New Mexico, especially since she isn't a native of the state.

I agree with this in that her fame has squelched the painterly fame  of many a local; but I am also interested (being myself both a native of New Mexico and someone who was raised elsewhere) in both points of view: the insider's and the outsider's.

O'Keeffe is currently making her way into hearts and minds internationally and this is interesting to see. Therefore, the museum is most popular with tourists, no matter how much they try to fit in as a community museum.

Anywho, the latest issue had a quote that I want to share here because it applies to us poets. Writer Jackie M (yes, that's her full name) wrote a piece about the kind of role model O'Keffee might be. Although I'm a GeO'Keeffe fan and have read copious books on her, I hesitate to see her as a role model of artistic behavior. She was much more complicated that the heroic "feminist" painter Baby Boomers like to make her out to be. That said,  Jackie M says something particularly interesting about what a life devoted to the arts requires. I'm going to list it as a checklist:

• "Recognizing one's interests and competencies,
• building skills and expertise through training and practice,
• the ability to face fears and challenges, to take risks and learn from failure–all of these contribute to the development of creativity.
• Resilience, allied with a balance of persistence and flexibility, imaginative thinking,
• intrinsic motivation, and being above to focus without being distracted can be found in how O'Keeffe approached her art and life. These are the ingredients for creative accomplishments in any field."

So succinct and true. How many writers do you know who fell by the wayside for lack of any one of these qualities, say lack of sustained focus, for example.

The Art of Soliciting Poetry Members

While I was debating whether to rejoin Poetry Society of America and The Academy of American Poets, I reviewed all the mail solicitations I had received from both over the past year. 

PSA only sent me one letter asking me to rejoin at the end of my membership. The Academy of American Poets sent me five letters in total. My membership with them expired on September 30 but the Academy sent missives as far back as March
(about a Langston Hughes journal),  one on June
4 (about a leather bookmark I could receive if I would only send in an extra $25), one on June 6 (about renewing
online…I was still 4 months away from my expiration), and the last few in August and early September
(both about renewing early) .

I spent a little over a year working in the database and appeals department of The Prostate Cancer Foundation many years ago and I learned all sorts of interesting things about how those appeal letters work, most importantly how the jist of the whole thing gets summarized in
the post script at the bottom because non-profits secretely believe nobody reads these marathon letters. The Academy is surely the most slick non-profit of the two in this regard because they sent out typically crafted non-profit appeal letters at regular intervals.

I also received a postcard from The Academy of American Poets about their October 24-26 seventh annual poets forum in New York City, which promises to be full of discussions and lectures. Check it out here:
poetsforum2013.evenbrite.com.

Poetry London and Glyn Maxwell

I've just stated a subscription with the journal Poetry London. More on that later but my first issue contained a review of the latest book by Glyn Maxwell and I
remembered I his book The Boys of Twilight on my shelf, a book that keeps getting passed over because I can never remember where I got it. Honestly, I remember almost every place, city and age I've picked up every record albums, tape, CD or books I've ever purchased. Why can't I remember this book?

It's all those iPod songs I can't remember downloading!

Anyway, I was insprired to start reading Maxwell and I tentatively like him so far. He's got a sincere working-class edge to him and is sporadically very funny.

A New Book is Brewing

I also finished an early draft of my next book of poems this week. After I came home from the writing sequester in Phoenix and we moved down to Albuquerque from Santa Fe, my husband sat down with me and reviewed the set poem by poem. I'm going through a touch-up draft now and soon hope to send some poems out into the big wide world. The poems are based on the late 1800s Goodnight-Loving Cattle Trail that traveled from Texas through New Mexico to Colorado and Wyoming. I've literally been working on this thing since late 2004. I started researching it a few months before meeting Monsieur Big Bang in that Westwood boba shop back in 2005, never dreaming we'd end up married and living in New Mexico before the thing was done.

I missed my blog! Even if only two people are reading it. It
helps me process my journey.

But I was derailed on the whole adventure in August. Our Santa Fe landlord told us
he needed to move back into his house. We were fully unprepared for a move at that moment and
finding another place (which eventually involved moving to another town) was
arduous and frustrating. But we finally moved and so far we love our new
neighborhood, our new house, and things are getting back to normal.

I have a lot of
blogging and manifestoeing to do. I have a new writer’s interview to post, a
review of some more podcasts and writing guidebooks, as well.

While I’ve been busy moving, I've received a big stack of poetry magazines and newsletters that I’ve been unable to read. The first thing I picked out of the stack was the summer issue of Poetry Reader from the Scottish Poetry Library.

This summer issue talks about poet Robert Wrigley, discusses the demise of the Salt publishers production of single poet editions and how it has affected their members (one SPL member found out from the Internet news before hearing from Salt) but SPL also talks about how pamphlet publishing is “going strong.” The director talks about the sales figures of poetry in the UK and their own lending readership. There’s an interesting short piece on the concertina book form and examples with pictures, including Anne Carson’s book Nox. There’s a piece about Scottish poets partnering with Iraq poets and the process (including the social aspects) of working on translations with them. There’s an interesting profile of poet Jackie Kay and her experiences using both prose and poetry to tackle the same topics:

“…in poetry you can have that moment of lift-off, where the poem almost takes leave of its own senses; it lays down the path and then rises either above or below it. It’s much more difficult to do that in prose without seeming fanciful or too artful.”

I’ve covered this before but I still love SPL materials:

– The fall program schedule that also arrived is very well designed, both pleasant to look at and with a high quality user interface. You can scan the book easily to see all the practicalities: the type of event, the date, time and price. Their language is very inclusive and inviting. I hope to get to one of their events someday if I ever visit Scotland.

– The do interesting and effective outreach…partnering with Botanical Gardens for their Walking with Poets series.

– They’re with it: they incorporate programs that utilize iPads, image uploads, and blogs. They’re not threatened by progress.

– I love that their mission is not so narrowly defined. In America, poetry is too often seen as an elitist endeavor, both by those who hate it and those who love it. SPL “has always been convinced of [poetry’s] therapeutic value” and have taken poetry into nursing homes and residential care centers.

– They articulate their mission in every issue (in a clear bulleted list in the About Us section)