"The Bare Arms of Trees" by John Tagliabue

Sometimes when I see the bare arms of trees in the evening
I think of men who have died without love,
of desolation and space between branch and branch,
I think of immovable whiteness and lean coldness and fear
and the terrible longing between people stretched apart as these branches
and the cold space between.
I think of the vastness and courage between this step and that step
of the yearning and fear of the meeting, of the terrible desire held apart.
I think of the ocean of longing that moves between land and land
and between people, the space and ocean.
The bare arms of the trees are immovable, without the play of leaves, without the sound of wind;
I think of the unseen love and the unknown thoughts that exist between tree and tree
as I pass these things in the evenings, as I walk.

Feeling like a leaf

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.


-Naomi Shihab Nye

Evening, at Ottawa Beach

Evening (by Rainer Maria Rilke)

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.

(tr. Stephen Mitchell)

Tuning in: Same HAT Time, Same HAT Channel

Those of you who have been to my apartments over the past few years prior to cable would remember the wonderful little tinfoil rabbit ears that I used for my little t.v. antennae. They served me well, in most cases, because I didn't even have basic cable, and with those little gadgets, I've had a lot of luck tuning in to many great shows. Whenever there was a threat of rain or wind which could weaken the signal, I would stand next to the aluminum rabbit ears and the screen would clear up. If things were pretty bad, I could touch it with my finger, or reshape/recast the tinfoil around the cheap-o t.v. antenna and everything would be fine.

It happened quite often (in Arlington, in Wilmington, and for a short while in Berkeley) that I would have to stand next to the t.v. to watch something clearly on the screen, but it was worth it just to get the strong signals (it's my compulsive need to see the end of all shows, which is why I had shows that end in "To Be Continued"...Hmmph).

Several days ago, I would have gladly used my body as an extension of some sort of antenna just to finish hearing the game between Nederland and Uruguay (in the semifinals of the 2010 World Cup). While driving back to STL, I listened to the game on ESPN radio. As we ventured further and further from the city limits, the signal became weaker and weaker which, naturally, compelled me to continue turning the dial back and forth to find the right signal strength. No matter what I did, though, the station was gone. (Perhaps that was a good thing -- otherwise I would have heard the news and would have been an unhappy traveler the rest of the way.) It was silly thinking that I could turn the dial this way and that in order to get a clearer sound of the game. If I could have, I would have stuck my head out the window holding tinfoil rabbit ears as we traveled along I-80/94. But, the channel was lost.

In Chard de Niord's interview with the poet Ruth Stone (in the July/August 2010 issue of The American Poetry Review), Stone said the following about her writing process and her muse:

Even as a child, I would hear a poem coming toward me from way off in the universe. I wouldn't hear it. I would feel it, and it would come right toward me. If I didn't catch it, if I didn't run in thehouse and write it down, it would go right through me and back into the universe. So I'd never see it again. I'd never hear it again. I've lost about ninety-nine percent of my poems this way. Sometimes I would catch the last line and write it through the bottom up. I have to say. I never thought they were mine. They weren't mine. They belonged somewhere else.

That never happens to me. Or, rather, if this sense of universe-streaming (like webstreaming?) had happened sometime in my past, it was such a long-ago time that I no longer remember ever being a conduit of such burning poetry, the kind that sinks into your soul and your consciousness and you can recite lines from heart-memory as if they were ingrained in my veins. No, I don't think this has ever happened.

Stone admits, though, that there are times when she really has to revise and revise before she gets something just right, and it's not just about tuning in to the right channel of the universe so that the poems just pour right out of her (p. 50). In the interview, the 95-year-old poet says she "couldn't get the last line for years" for the poem "Things I Say to Myself While Hanging Laundry."

It took her several years to get the last line, however, it was only one elusive line that held the entire poem in limbo, waiting. I, on the other hand, have been waiting my entire life for just one line. One poem. One book.

Mind you, I've been working hard to fashion me some fancy rabbit ears just so I could tune in: All the degrees, all the workshops, all the peer-editing, all the writing groups. Then the writings and editing on the side, perusing and analyzing collections, reading and contemplating. Old poets, contemporary poets, classics and experimental. Fiction and nonfiction. Journals, magazines, reviews. The jazz shows and the art galleries, the readings and the lectures -- all for inspiration, like stretching myself into different shapes, twisting my mental torso into different forms, with my finger slightly outstretched to touch that magic "tinfoil" that will help me channel the right word, the right line, the perfect image.

Alas, alas, although I feel like I've fashioned all the rabbit ears that I could with all the tinfoil that exists out there to channel "a poem coming toward me from way off in the universe", my muse isn't easily found (not like the old Bat-Man t.v. shows which were shown same bat-time, same bat-channel). So I will continue tuning and fine-tuning, and hopefully one day I'll finally get to universe-stream what was meant for me all along.

I wish I could say that we eventually picked up the soccer (ahem, football) game again on the radio that day, but we never did. We drove far beyond the limits, and truth be told, the conversation in the car was much more interesting than listening to the game on the radio. I learned some fascinating history about my dear old dad, and that, I think was much more valuable. A secret (writerly?) part of me was mentally recording our car conversations for future material, I think.

[Also see a fun article about rabbit-ear TV antenna and Photo source]

2010 AWP in Denver

Things To Do In Denver When You’re Braindead: An AWP Retrospective - The Rumpus.net

I've not attended AWP since my days at UNCW. Though I miss the thrill of being so close to authors whose books I love, I know it is not a scene for me, with hundreds of writers experienced and new surging the hallways looking to (re)connect. So, I just look on from afar and pieces like this article (to which I've linked) by Steve Almond.

Eleanor Ross Taylor Awarded 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Eleanor Ross Taylor Awarded 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize : The Poetry Foundation

A listing of the previous winners of the Lilly Prize can be found here.

Thought-Bombs! Rae Armantrout 2010 Poetry Pulitzer

The Pulitzer Prizes | Citation

Imagine your poems being described as thought-bombs... and that's a good thing! How exciting!

From the HAT files:

The Bowl of Roses is so beautiful; it couldn't possibly begin with something so raw like flaring anger between two fighting boys. How does that connect with roses? Perhaps Rilke tacked on the first two stanzas after finishing the rest of the poem. No. Impossible. It exists/begins with the truest, most primal expressions of human nature, of self-containing which extends outward "to change the world outside." But does that make sense? How can we begin with two boys "baring their teeth" and progress towards a bowl of rose "unforgettable and filled"? It is full of the "utmost of being and bending" so is that the connection between the two images? I don't know... perhaps it is not just the sense of being but the branching out into space "where adjacent things diminish."

I am curious what "it" in the last line stands for... It lies "carefree in these open roses." Does this refer to the "self-containment" which actually means reaching out to touch everything outside in the world and having that influence reach back into a "hand full of inwardness"? Is this a Buddhist notion of the karmic circle in which all things exist within all things, and everything touches each other with the potential to become each other, or at least a part of each other? The roses are aware of themselves. They are full of their self-knowledge. In achieving that, they become aware of everything else, because everything else is a part of them -- it is all connected.

These are strange interpretations of and ruminations on Rilke, but somehow, I feel they gesture toward the definition of poetry, and the role of a poet. There is something universal about attaining awareness of individuality. It's contradictory to say we create unity by identifying what it means or how it means to be alone, in pain, insecure. We all share that. Perhaps that's why Orpheus and his pain resonate so strongly with us all. It is universal or far-reaching because it is so acute and so self-containing. We experience it all...? That's why poetry, for some, resonates so intensely...

- Excerpted from Reflections over Rilke's selected poems, pulled from HAT files

From the HAT files:

I love Rilke's rendition of Eurydice. Why? Because of the depths from which Rilke paints this young woman. Because of the dimensions we can grapple onto this single figure following Orpheus. There is more to her than meets the eye. Eurydice is a wandering soul recently lost, rewon, and lost again. She is one who is loved, adored, and desired. Much stronger. Desired. What is significant is that Rilke states that Eurydice "was that man's property," only "echoed often in the poet's songs," and only an "island" or a "scent" to be possessed, worn. In life, she was an echo of Orpheus' great gift of song. Though she was loved and was the cause of great lament, in marriage, she was "this blond wife." Is it too much of a social commentary to suggest that she might be viewed as an objectified woman?

After dying, she is defined differently, separately, from Orpheus. Apart from his power, she walked beside a god; not just alongside Orpheus, or perhaps behind him, even. In death, she "was within herself," uncertain, but "untouchable." In a way, Eurydice is full of greatness, far more than her living self. There is no other way to say that her death "filled her with abundance." She is gentle, and without impatience; she is a woman of definition and free. As much as it is, she is a heavenly gift, given before being fully earned. In the end, Orpheus loses her because he does not earn her at all.

Poor Orpheus. A man of mute impatience. Uncertain and anxious in his mission/journey of retrieval. Such pain and longing, such sweetness in anticipation -- it fills him so that his senses are split in two. How can you portray it in any other way? Orpheus is defined/painted in the image of the dog earnestly running ahead to prepare the way for his beloved's treading steps. At the same time, he is engulfed in the intense "delay" of the moments of waiting and listening for her approach. All of this, however, is left with the image of the lone figure, whose face we can't even imagine -- so blanked, so empty and unrecognizable -- because it is a figure darkened by the light of what was to come. That is his vulnerability. He is alone, and must step into the severe brightness of a world that will bare his story, his soul. What was approaching had been an opening that represented hope because it was the medium through which he will once again embrace Eurydice. Now, as Rilke shows it, the "shining exit" only reveals what Orpheus does not have. It honestly (and is so cruel because of its honesty) lays out what Orpheus becomes: a darkened figure continually looking backwards into the darkness representing Eurydice's silent retreat. What is so painful in Rilke's version is the way (as we can see through Hermes's meditation) Eurydice is so oblivious to Orpheus, but is so full of her death. That she utters "Who?" so silently and confusedly makes Orpheus' image so much more anguished, lonely, vulnerable.

Speaking of Orpheus... What does he become now that he is changed forever by her second death? What more from this poet whose lament created an entire world? What else can he invent, imagine? If from her first death, he creates this lament-heaven, what is left to impart another, double-meaning to this double-death? How can Orpheus function as a poet? What roles does he play? What is the role, in general, of the poet? To create this fictitious world with "disfigured stars"? It can't even be perfect! Why can't this imagined world be perfect? In a reality that is imagined, poets try to create another world -- but we create one that's not more perfect, it just has to be similar to it. Why, then, would poets do that? What is the function of the poet? What does Orpheus do if he can't imagine another world in which Eurydice exists, breathes, and enraptures? Why recreate pain? Perhaps beauty exists within it. Meaning exists within it. Depth and growth exists alongside it. Appreciation does not exist without pain. Value and importance has no meaning without pain. Orpheus wouldn't remember the value and importance of Eurydice, the vulnerability of love, or the meaning of loss if he couldn't remember the pain. In a way, without recreating this lament-world, he wouldn't remember at all.

- Excerpted from Reflections in HAT's poetry seminary

The desert has many teachings

In the desert,
turn toward emptiness,
fleeing the self.

Stand alone,
ask no one's help,
and your being will quiet,
free from the bondage of things.

Those who cling to the world,
endeavor to free them;
Those who are free, praise.

Care for the sick,
but live alone,
happy to drink from the waters of sorrow,
to kindle Love's fire
with the twigs of a simple life.

Thus you will live in the desert.

- Mechtild of Magdeburg

a Hymn, at the Dawn Hour

How long we wait, with minds as quiet as time,
like sentries on a tower.
How long we watch, by night, like the astronomers.

Heaven, when will we hear you sing,
arising from our grassing hills,

And say, "The dark is done, and Day
laughs like a Bridegroom in His tent, the lovely sun,
His tent the sun, His tent the smiling sky!"

How long we wait with minds as dim as ponds
while stars swim slowly homeward in the water of our west!
Heaven, when will we hear you sing?

How long we listened to the silence of our vineyards
and heard no bird stir in the rising barley.
The stars go home behind the shaggy trees.
Our minds are grey as rivers.
O earth, hen will you wake in the green wheat,
and all our cedars sing:
"Bright land, lift up your leafy gates!
Your abbey steeple, sing with bells!
For look, our Sun rejoices like a dancer
on the rim of our hills."

In the blue west the moon is uttered like the word:
"Farewell"


- from Thomas Merton

New HAT Status: Godmother

My dear, dear friends M and T recently announced that they are expecting their very first baby. The excitement, the joys, the mystery, the expectation... I get to experience one degree of all those emotions because M and T have also asked me to be Baby's godmother!! Lord, believe that? Can you imagine me as anyone's Godmother! I will be maaaagnificent... I can't even describe my delight, joy, excitement, thrill, etc, etc, etc...

Baby is not due until the spring, but I'm already getting a headstart in my new status as godmother-to-be, which, as I understand it, is uber-difficult to describe and fulfill. In December, we will find out if it is Baby Girl or Baby Boy. Baby's mom has already informed me that whether it be XX or XY, that little baby is going to be all blue or all pink. So, I'm having to wrap my mind around very color-coded and gender-specific toys, books, clothes, etc.

In the back of my head, I think, as godmother, don't I get to be the voice of dissent? Will I be the one who says, hey, pink isn't just for girls! And football isn't just for boys! and, hey, what's wrong with bringing G.I. Joe figurines in for tea time?

It appears I'm going to face a tough battle ahead of me, but in the meantime, I'm going to pick out the pinkest yarn there is and am going to knit me a pink baby blankie.

open / like a hinge

I wanted
the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while


- excerpted from "Dogfish" in Dream Work by Mary Oliver

Rise on Great Silent Wings

When these senses
fall into darkness,
will your heart
be a trustworthy flame?

When dust
fills your eyes,
will your grave
still be bright?

When hands
and feet fail,
will you rise then
on great
silent wings?

- Rumi

Just Is.

We've started a new kasen over on the Renga Writing blog. For this new kasen, we chose the theme "All About Us is Noise" which came from a line in Elizabeth Alexander's poem which she read at President Obama's inauguration. Below are two stanzas:

"All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues."

AND

"We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider."

I originally suggested this theme/meme because I wanted to think about the kinds of noises that we hear or don't hear each day of our lives. I especially love the first line of the first stanza that I posted above:

All about us is noise. All about us is

Look at how she teases us, reminds us, chastises us with the line break. All about us is... empty white space. After the To Be verb, the rest of that line is followed by emptiness. Or, to see it another way, the rest of that line after the word "is" fills up with the quiet space that you need to absorb before moving onto the next line.

But feel how we so quickly, easily, naturally, fall into the next line. We, or mainly just I, too hastily push past the silence of that space, completely ignore the pause, in order to move onto the next line which is filled with "noise and bramble, thorn and din," and we don't even know it.

All about us is. Just is. Imagine that: Just is. To be.

Minutes: An Accounting of the Day's

Meeting: of minds, in real time, in Second Life, to discuss (usually)
a predetermined topic, or community event planning,
to come together, or assemble, for a common purpose, to worship
as an organizational unit, ad-hoc, a society,
typically between a manager and subordinates, a chair
and a board, colleagues gathered round
conference tables in meeting rooms
the size of pinheads taking stock of investments (of time &
energy), capital gains, accruals, endowments restrictions, reductions,
bringing down to a set of elements vital to sustaining
any body:

Every milli-second, minute traces of the soul seep
from gray building to gray building, tapping from window to window
looking for that ribbon on which the day's hours have been
transcribed. This is not a prayer meeting, but here
the soul mourns for what escaped between the readings,
between commentaries stricken from the record,
leaving actionable items -- Moved,
Seconded, Resolved.


- 2/16/09 HT

Helpless

There are certain things that one cannot write on blogs, and I'm having a hard time figuring what to write about when what I would like to write about isn't bloggable. But the mind is teeming with ideas and thoughts...

Acts of Helplessness by Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

Here are the miracle-signs you want: that
you cry through the night and get up at dawn, asking
that in the absence of what you ask for your day gets dark,
your neck thin as a spindle, that what you give away
is all you own, that you sacrifice belongings,
sleep, health, your head, that you often
sit down in a fire like aloes wood, and often go out
to meet a blade like a battered helmet.

When acts of helplessness become habitual,
those are the signs.

But you run back and forth listening for unusual events,
peering into the faces of travelers.
"Why are you looking at me like a madman?"
I have lost a friend. Please forgive me.

Searching like that does not fail.
There will come a rider who holds you close.
You faint and gibber. The uninitiated say, "He's faking."
How could they know?
Water washes over a beach fish, the water
of those signs I just mentioned.

Excuse my wandering.
How can one be orderly with this?
It's like counting leaves in a garden,
along with the song-notes of partridges,
and crows.

Sometimes organization
and computation become absurb.

The Mysterious Human Heart by Matthew Dickman

If I could, I would send this to you, whoever you are:

The Mysterious Human Heart

The produce in New York is really just produce, oranges
and cabbage, celery and beets, pomegranates
with their hundred seeds, carrots and honey,
walnuts and thirteen varieties of apples.
On Monday morning I will walk down
to the market with my heart inside me, mysterious,
something I will never get to hold
in my hands, something I will never understand.
Not like the apricots and potatoes, the albino
asparagus wrapped in damp paper towels, their tips
like the spark of a match, the bunches of daisies, almost more
a weed than a flower, the clementine,
the sausage links and chicken hung
in the window, facing the street where my heart is president
of the Association for Random Desire, a series
of complex yeas and nays,
where I pick up the plantain, the ginger root, the sprig
of cilantro that makes me human, makes me
a citizen with the right to vote, to bear arms, the right
to assemble and fall in love.

—Matthew Dickman, from All-American Poem (which you should order direct from the shopsite of American Poetry Review)

Christ who suffers

As part of the Uganda mission trip, I'm reading the book Compassion by Henri Nouwen, Donald McNeill, and Douglas Morrison. We're supposed to be reflecting on the readings, asking ourselves questions that probe why we are committed to this mission work. So far, I've completed Chapter 1 (slow reader!) and have been trying to blog about this for some time, without any success.

Today's passage was about the mystery of God's compassion as embodied through Christ Jesus:

In Jesus, all suffering was sensed with a perfect sensitivity. The great mystery revealed to us in this is that Jesus, who is the sinless son of God, chose in total freedom to suffer fully our pains and thus to let us discover the true nature of our own passions. In him, we see and experience the persons we truly are. Jesus who is divine lives our broken humanity not as a curse (Gn 3:14-19) but as a blessing. (15)

Now that we are in this seemingly silent space before Sunday morn, I can't help but think about what it means for us to dwell on a Christ who suffers for us and with us. Not one who is a knight in shining armor, charging down the streets on a white steed, ready to save us in a grand and triumphant way, but one who suffers with us. This is a Christ who hungers with the hungry children in Uganda, thirsts with the women and children who have to carry water for miles and miles, ails with the children sickened by malaria, dies with the children dying of HIV/AIDS.

Easter Sunday has not been a mystery for us for quite some time -- at least, not like the mystery fraught with uncertainty on that one morning thousands of years ago. We know the story. We can pretend to re-enact the fear, the uncertainty, the anxiety, etc., but we all believe and know what happened. (Come now, how many of us recall that story about the empty plastic Easter egg that symbolizes the empty tomb on Easter Sunday morning?)

But for some kids in Uganda, in Africa, in Vietnam, in China, in the U.S., each morning is an uncertainty -- do they die from cold, thirst, malnutrition, sickness? Do they live to see the sunrise? Will there be another morning of light and freedom from death?

My thoughts are convoluted tonight as I write, but I'm struck by the messages about compassion in this book... Compassionate being, compassionate living.... It's not that easy. As I read the section on "Toward New Life," I wondered how many people think that for the millions who are suffering, does that mean God is not compassionate? Or, what if some folks believed that there were not enough people praying for the sick, the elderly, the weak, the dying? What are we saying about God? What are we thinking about God? Are we defining God with our limited human understanding? How dangerous it would be if we started thinking that God's compassion Being is measured and defined by who is rescued and who is not!!

"The mystery of God's love is not that our pain is taken away, but that God first wants to share that pain with us" (14). Indeed. That makes sense to me. It's not that we are unloved if we are not "saved" or "cured" or "rescued". It's not that God is not compassionate to me, to them, to us. It is about how we as the Body of Christ choose to embody Christ in the best way we can -- to be instruments of Godly compassion and vehicles through which Christ's resurrection is seen, felt, experienced, and understood.

To the Gods, by W.S. Merwin

When did you stop
telling us what we could believe

when did you take that one step
only one
above
all that

as once you stepped
out of each of the stories
about you one after the other
and out of whatever
we imagined we knew
of you

who were the light
to begin with
and all of the darkness
at the same time
and the voice in them
calling crying
and the enormous answer
neither coming nor going
but too fast to hear

you let us believe
the names for you
whenever we heard them
you let us believe the stories
how death came to be
how the light happened

how the beginning began
you let us believe
all that

then you let us believe
that we had invented you
and that we no longer
believed in you
and that you were only stories
that we did not believe

you with no
moment for beginning
no place to end
one step above
all that

listen to us
wait
believe in us

- from Present Company, Copper Canyon Press