Amen!
"Like a bowl of roses, a poem should not have to be explained."
--Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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March 25, 2006
March 23, 2006
From the Poem, "Ladder"
...by Jane Hirshfield, and in her collection, Given Sugar, Given Salt :
"Rarely are what is spoken and what is meant the same.
Mostly the mouth says one thing, the thighs and knees
say another, the floor hears a third.
Yet within us,
objects and longings are not different.
They twist on the stem of the heart, like ripening grapes."
March 15, 2006
A Public Space
Today's mail brought my inaugural copy of A Public Space, the new lit rag edited by Brigid Hughes, deposed heir-apparent to Plimpton's Paris Review empire. I tried to read a few pieces with my new glasses which seem, $642 dollars later, to be somewhat bifocal-impaired. But French and stylin', did I forget to mention that? So, all is not lost or sacrificed yet.
There was something I wanted to talk about when I started this. Has it escaped my addled brain, already, now? Today, what has been today? Driving to/from Eugene on the glasses run. That included flights of birds, llamas that babysit sheep, and water, water, everywhere in Christmas tree plantations and fields. I read an essay in an Alaska literary magazine by Jane Hirshfield, my new poetry guru. Read a bit of John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice but Jan Morris in the introduction is right, the prose is a tad dense.
I walked the trail, put recycling and urine-drenched kitty litter in the back of the pickup and hauled it to the garbage can at the top of the hill. Had one, two, maybe three mini-crying jags that are all tied up with mostly my failure as a mother of an adult son but as a writer, too. Like so much, with the waning light and the rain on the roof, their urgency has since faded.
It's sometimes hard to locate what's the mettle of a single, lived-long day. There's something in what Jane H. says, that a poet, a writer comes to the page with a sense of disturbance. A burr in the saddle. A discomfort. A sense that all is not right and, from that, words flow and beg to be explored.
I wish I could surrender to such insights day in and out, blindly and blithely. Life would be so much simpler. I wouldn't be considering Prozac.
March 06, 2006
What is Language Anyway?
Gary Snyder's words from the introduction to Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry struck a chord with me today:
"Language is not something you learn in school, it is a world you're born into. It's part of the wildness of Mind. You master your home tongue without conscious effort by the age of five. Language with its sinuous syntax is not unlike the thermal dynamics of weather systems,or energy exchanges in the food chain—completely natural and vital, part of what and who we are. Poetry is the leap off—or into—that."
March 04, 2006
Kurt Vonnegut Gems
From his newest book, A Man Without a Country:
"The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."
And these quotes from Saul Steinberg, whom Vonnegut calls the "wisest person I ever met in my entire life" --
"There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history or his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself...what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations."