Wholly Alive in This Short, Exquisite Life: Seven Poems I Love

Written, once again, for the edX Art of Poetry course I'm doing. This week we gathered seven poems that mean something to us and wrote about them. It was a wonderful experience--a lot of work for one sitting but to see how they all folded together was a blessing.

1. Sugarskulli: “Ode to Boyhood” (USA)
2. Eileen Kernaghan: “Mohenjo-daro: a poem” (Canada)
3. Seamus Heaney: “A Sofa in the the Forties” (Ireland)
4. Julian of Norwich: “I it am” (England)
5. Togiram (Emile Célestin-Mégie): “M’ap Ekri Youn Powèm/I’m Writing a Poem” (Haiti)
6. Thich Nhat Hanh : “Please Call Me By My True Names” (Vietnam)
7. Mirabai: “The Plums Tasted” (India)

Sugarskulli is Alex Barr (b. 1998, USA), a sixteen-year-old transgendered girl. She says she’s not a poet, but “Ode to Boyhood” shook me as good poetry can when it strikes a personal chord.

She tells about a girl who’s a boy inside, and the clash with family expectations, fellow students, self.

A pink dress, hanging in the/

closet with/

chains in the pearl necklace./

Weight /

Weight, and the color of shame./

Cement/

blocks in the shape of high heeled shoes,/

a mother who makes too many tomboy jokes./

“That’s my girl,” she says “You’re just like your/

dad.” The role of the daughter never fit./

More than just clothes are in that closet.

Recently, a young man I know (now a young woman I know) dove into self-harm, shutting inward, grief. In my youth, I rejected the stereotypes of girlhood—if this was what we were allowed, I wanted out. Then later, the uneasy awareness that though men are cute—so are women. Say that out loud in 1970? Puhleeze.

I could write yards about this, but I won’t, only that Sugarskulli’s pain hits close to home. Her last stanza is one line:

Dysphoria is the ugliest poet.                     

http://allpoetry.com/Sugarskulli

Eileen Kernaghan’s (b.1939, Canada) “Mohenjo-daro” introduces her beautifully written novel about the Indus Valley, Winter on the Plain of Ghosts. I find Kernaghan’s writing absolutely magical, whether in prose or poem; here I’m swept off to a long-dead yet vibrantly once-living place.

The Art of Poetry: T. S. Eliot's “The Dry Salvages"

Photograph: Express/Getty Images

(See below for the full text of the poem, and click here to hear T. S. Eliot reading “The Dry Salvages”.)

I wrote the following for the edX course I’m currently taking, “The Art of Poetry”. Although I have been terribly busy and having a bit of trouble keeping up with the assignments, the course is providing some of what I had intended when deciding to create Another Fine Day In The Scriptorium: an opportunity to slow down and immerse myself in the calm depths of the written word.

Getting up early this morning, I brought out my copy of The Four Quartets and, while pacing the room, repeatedly read aloud the third quartet (which, oddly, has five sections, not four), “The Dry Salvages”. I am grateful to the authors of the course for inspiring me to return to this wonderful poem and sink into it. I will have to make many returns, like the tide, to imbibe it all.

Essay: The most difficult poem I've read that compelled my interest is “The Dry Salvages” from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Part of the difficulty is the length: ten pages. Part is the language and slipperiness of Eliot’s thinking processes.  When I read it I can grasp the concrete images he offers—the river as a brown god, the shattered lobsterpot, the salt on the briar rose—but like the river something is moving underneath the words, underneath my conscious understanding of them, so that when I reach the end of the first section I am drenched in unexpected sadness and a sense of the immense sweep of existence. I look back asking, why sadness? Is it the ignorance of humans who wrestle the river without trying to understand it? Is it the nature and naturalness and omnipresence of the river itself? Is it the worried women, of whom I am one, “Lying awake, calculating the future, Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel...” I think it is all of this and more.

Suddenly I realize I am describing not only the difficulty but the pleasure. Both grow from the sublety and complexity of his words, so that to flow to the poem’s end I have to toss myself onto its waters and not try to cling to any solid thing, and that is both frightening and liberating.

Part of the pleasure, too, is simply his timing, and the weight and texture of his words—“sullen, untamed, and intractable”—that offer the concepts in such a physical way. At the end of section one, when I have moved with the river for two pages and then stopped with the worried women, the river and the women are gathered together in an expression of time itself, and how it wears on and in us. The beats of the stanza pull that expression into me by unfurling long, breathless line after long, breathless line and ending with two short taps:

“Clangs

The bell.”

Reading on, the sense grows of a great compassion and even pity in the narrator as he hands to us, line upon line, the vision of ourselves as fishers on a vast ocean, not pilots of our own fate so much as creatures of our vast, destinationless surroundings and mortal lives, creatures that might cling to this belief or that, but must in the end let them go.

It is difficult because it tackles the greatest difficulties of life, expanding from the intimate to the cosmic and back to the intimate again—the individual placed in the wholeness but not made small.

Read aloud, the lines of the poem rock back and forth like waves, and with all the talk of death and renunciation, there is something soothing in their very rhythm. This is not a hopeless poem, or a hopeful poem, but a poem of that which is, and it is deeply moving, and deeply beautiful. This is a poem I can continue to feed from for the rest of my life.

THE DRY SALVAGES
(No. 3 of Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot)

(The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages. Groaner: a whistling buoy.)

I

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;

Art of Poetry: with Seamus Heaney's “Last Look"

I've signed up for edX's course the Art of Poetry, taught by Robert Pinsky. (There is still time to sign up--it just started yesterday.)

I'm excited about it--immersing myself in poetry is what I planned to do with the next three or four months, and I have been diligently working on my own poems for a few weeks now. What perfection to have Pinsky's guidance and the inspiration of all the participants and poets whose work is featured in the course.

Part of the coursework is to present our own "anthology": favourite poems by other authors and what they mean to us. I present my first response here.

Last Look

by Seamus Heaney

In Memoriam E.G.

We came upon him, stilled

and oblivious,

gazing into a field

of blossoming potatoes,

his trouser bottoms wet

and flecked with grass seed.

Crowned blunt-headed weeds

that flourished in the verge

flailed against our car

but he seemed not to hear

in his long watchfulness

by the clifftop fuschias.

He paid no heed that day,

No more than if he were

sheep’s wool on barbed wire

or an old lock of hay

combed from a passing load

by a bush in the roadside.

He was back in his twenties,

travelling Donegal

in the grocery cart

of Gallagher and Son,

Merchant, Publican,

Retail and Import.

Flourbags, nosebags, buckets

of water for the horse

in every whitewashed yard.

Drama between hedges

if he met a Model Ford.

If Niamh had ridden up

to make the wide strand sweet

with inviting Irish,

weaving among hoofbeats

and hoofmarks on the wet

dazzle and blaze,

I think not even she

could have drawn him out

from the covert of his gaze.

From Station Island by Seamus Heaney (1985)

This link takes you to the typed poem which is also read aloud beautifully by an uncredited Irishman. http://www.rewardinglearning.org.uk/microsites/poetry/heaney_hardy/the_look/

 I am blown away by this poem on so many levels. Each word is essential, and if stayed with a while, brings me straight into the seedy physicality of this moment, and a wonderful, halfwild physicality it is.

On first reading I am swept away with compassion and sympathy for this old man who is looking out over his world at his long ago life. Because I came from the Canadian prairies, with strong connections to farms and farmers and old people whose clear insistent ways were being—unbeknownst to me, who couldn’t understand their aggravation—sheared away from their centrality in the world by the unhesitating crush of change, I feel in my own body the empty-handedness of his loss.

Here of course I am reading more into the poem than is actually stated. He may not feel loss, but I do. I fought hard against the rigid thinking of my elders, even as I loved them immensely and suffered unbearably under their disapproval of my “crazy” beliefs and life. But at the same time I rose from these people just as this man rose from the hills and roads and work that shaped him. Now that they are gone, and I’m living in a world where few of my acquaintances knew or felt bonded to the people and ways—much of which had great value to me even then—that I ran from and now have lost, I find myself bereft, and longing for a visit home.

How often I am not quite in 2014, standing instead gazing into 1963. When I read this poem I am the gazer and the onlookers, both.

I love that the onlookers are looking on. Though he is by now a lock of hay on a bush, a small integral element of his environment, he is real and current to them. They may not exist for him, but for them he exists intensely; they witness him as I witness my elders and their vanished way of life. Heaney and his unnamed companion have great empathy for the gazer, but they are on the roadside, they are comfortable in now; they love the man of the past and the present both at once.

It is with great delight that I arrive at the final stanza, where Heaney reminds me of the magical precedents of Ireland, of the queen of the Land of Youth who came from the sea and enticed Oisín away to the Otherworld for three hundred years. She is from a time far more ancient than the gazer’s cart and Model Ford, and she is as much of him, more even, than she is of Heaney and of me.

“Last Look” is a trip into a beloved past that is firmly rooted in today, tying both together with the dancing power of a goddess on her horse clattering about the beach.

And even she can’t flush him from the covert of his gaze. What a wonderful word! He is the hay, he is the hills and cart, he is the bird of memory hidden in the brush.