Stream of Consciousness

My Word for 2011

 

I've spent some time -- inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love I suppose -- trying to come up with my word for 2011. I meant to do this last year, and the year before, and never got around to it. Then today, this appeared in my e-mail as my Daily Peace Quote—words from a favorite poet no less.

                                                                                
Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure.
                                                               - Rainier Maria Rilke

 

So I knew the time had come and I (of course) instantly knew my word: fearless.

And even though its definition is simply lacking fear and a number of its synonyms veer into the language of battle and war -- bold, brave, courageous, intrepid, valiant, valorous, gallant, plucky, lionhearted, heroic, daring, audacious, indomitable, doughty; unafraid, undaunted, unflinching; informal gutsy, spunky, ballsy, feisty -- I've decided I still want to keep it, for now, to try it on for size as I venture in the creative and West Coast Fitness waters of this my 56th year on earth.

Maybe it will inspire me (or at the very least remind me) to reclaim some of the derringdo and pluckiness I once exhibited (in spades) when I was younger, more optimistic, and, of course, thinner. Maybe it will simply help me have more confidence and know that there is nothing to fear even as my right knee shows signs of arthritis and my hands turn psoriasis-prone. Maybe it will give me the perspective I so often lack -- and truly need and want -- to be able to use my writing to tell my truths.

 

 

 

 

Truth in Force

A recent assignment for my narrative poem class asked us to write a multi-part poem about a forgotten social injustice. I decided to boil down my words to tell the story of Gandhi's march to Dandi, a railhead by the sea as part of a non-violent protest against the viceroy's egregious tax on salt. This became the famous Salt Satyagraha of April to May 1930, a cornerstone of the Indian independence movement. Below a snip. 

Dandi Salt March

What hope shall we gather, what dreams shall we sow?

Where the wind calls our wandering footsteps we go.

No love bids us tarry, no joy bids us wait:

The voice of the wind is the voice of our fate.

                                    —Sarojini Naidu

 

1.

Satyagraha, truth in force:

a peace brigade of khadi-clad disciples

on those winding roads to the coast.

 

Even the famous poet joined—

Naidu, a woman—scandal in 1930,

those purdah days of veiled isolation.

 

The evening before saw

60,000 on a bank of the Sabarmati, prayers

then witness to Gandhi’s call

 

To non-violent arms. No holy war,

this offering up, oblations

for the poorest of the poor.

 

Less than twelve miles a day without luggage?

Child’s play, the Mahatma said.

They simply walked, a month to march.

 

Form, Not Formlessness

 
One of my resolutions for 2010 has been to jump-start what I’ve taken to calling my solo MFA regimen. I know I have many gaps to fill, knowledge-wise. But, instead of spending $30K for another (I already have a degree in fiction)—I hate to say it but likely useless, job-wise—master’s degree in poetry—I’m slowly wending my way through the many books on poetic theory and form that, over the years, have found their way to my shelves.

So far, some pretty freaking nerdy stuff. Lewis Turco’s The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics veers into the esoterica PDQ. Not for these gray, low-light winter days! I made it to page 28 in the chapter about sonic levels only to lose my footing in his back-and-forth discussion (sometimes with examples, sometimes not) of headless iambs and tailless trochees.

Don’t ask.

But great stuff has been swimming to the surface as well. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland is a wonderfully clear and easy-to-apprehend primer. Each form’s traits are listed, then the history of the form is recounted, and wonderfully accessible examples of contemporary poems written in each of these forms are then offered up. “Poetic form is not abstract, but human” is the axiom of this very helpful book.

In Western Wind, what I’d call a classic Poetry 101 textbook, I learned—math dunce that I have long been—about the series of “golden numbers” called the Fibonacci sequence, where each number is the sum of the two preceding ones: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on. Apparently such sequences turn up time and again in nature—in the generation of bees, in the number and pattern of leaves or petals on certain plants, the patterns made by the spiral unfolding of a sunflower. And they find their way into artistic creation as well—how musicians work with duration in their rhythms, and painters decide where to place what on a canvas.  And, of course, in the creation of a poem—from the number of syllables in a line to the number of lines in a stanza to the number of lines in a poem. And I had long wondered why I often ended up with  poems of 13 and 21 even 34 lines and they somehow seemed, well…right.

It’s complicated to explain further here so I’ll give you the erudite scribes at Wikipedia to further expound. But suffice it to say, pretty darn cosmic and cool. And, according to Plato, “God always geometrizes.”

Iambic pentameter is the familiar heartbeat of the English language. Blank verse—unrhymed iambic pentameter—is poetry’s “tool of all trades.” You can count only the syllables in a line of poetry and that’s a form—haiku does this. Same with counting words. Any and all of these form decisions affect the tone and energy of your work. Free verse has much to do with the interrelationship between the line and sentences. And then there are the newer kids on the block, concepts like fractal poetry where (if I got it somewhat right) a three-dimensional discontinuity of plane, surface, texture, opacity, transparency and understory is what the poet makes her or his textual assemblages about. This is some pretty out there stuff!

I know this level of exploration and book-learning isn’t for everyone. Many folks who write poetry are content to simply get down their “first thought, best thought” as Allen Ginsberg famously said and leave it at that. But the longer I immerse myself in the art form that is writing poetry, the more I fing I both want and need to have at least a skeletal handle on what all the fuss was about in the ages before I showed up and wanted to break my thoughts out into lines and/or stanzas on a blank page. And that takes me back to the basics: rhyme and meter and form.

Poetry began as an oral art form, the telling in memorable ways of stories and myths and tales and epics to be passed down, our song and heartbeat, in forms from rap to Lear’s final soliloquy. There’s something to be said in these too-much-speedy-information days about the fact Robert Frost pulled it off a very difficult eleven-syllable rapid and skipping rhythm so effortlessly in his poem, “For Once, then Something” that most of us never even need to know it’s the hendecasyllabic meter of Catullus. And Catullus was a great admirer of Sappho, whose poetry centers on her passion and love for various personages and both genders. That sounds awfully contemporary to me…

A Tao of Writing

 

“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”

—William Stafford

In his smart and insightful collection, Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation, William Stafford has the briefest of essays that always has something to say to me. Originally published in the second issue of the the-then-fledgling FIELD in Spring 1970, it’s called “A Way of Writing.”

Lately I’ve come to think of it as my own 21^st century Lao Tzu, a simple gathering of a fairly small number of paragraphs that can swiftly reassure. Whenever I find myself doubting my poetry process, doubting the words I choose to speak my voice to the world, I remember to dip back into this collection and, in no time, all is OK in both how I approach the work and the word. I wonder if, from time to time, all of us who write need to be reminded just how important receptivity is to any creative work. Using his own writing life as example, Stafford reminds us to open and accepting of any and every “nibble” that inevitably comes when you sit down for a stretch of hopefully uninterrupted time with the intention of courting words. Because, in his words, “something always occurs…to any of us. We can’t keep from thinking.”

There is another “readiness” that goes along with this receptivity: being willing to fail. And being willing to fail just might mean that we then take risks, we let ourselves follow our thoughts, our amazingly untamed minds, our words as channeled through our scribbling or typing hands into perhaps crazily original, yet-uncharted territories.

Which leads to another Stafford truism—making no judgment when you are first doing the work as to the significance or value of what you are writing. The time for judging is later, after your creative discoveries have been made.  Stafford believes that those discoveries may not have much to do with one’s skills but rather to a deep, mysterious connection with the process whereby “I do not know what I am going to say and then I find out what I am going to say”—straightforward as that. Indeed, in his view,  “a writer is one who has become accustomed to trusting that grace, or luck, or—skill.”

Finally—and again, this is all in barely four pages—Stafford leaves us with two other insights from his “process-rather-than-substance” perspective on writers and writing. First, he offers a reminder that, of course, nearly all of us possess the skills of language. And that, in this regard, writers may not necessarily be special or more talented and gifted than everyone else who speaks and writes and reads.

What is it then that writers actually do that is different, that allows them to make art from our commonly shared reservoir of language, of words? For Stafford, it all swims back to a sustained engagement with language—anything created “comes about through confident reliance on stray impulses that will, with trust, find occasional patterns that are satisfying.”

And the second, even more elegant, simple, and to my way of thinking, decidedly profound insight: that “writing itself [remains] one of the great, free human activities” one that offers ample room for “individuality, and elation, and discovery…Working back and forth  between experience and thought…writers have the whole  unexplored realm of human vision.”

So we wait. We listen. We dream. We wade. We practice laps. We test the waters. We venture into the depths. We skim the surface and we dive. We keep some, toss back others. We are always willing to fail. And we are always willing to trust, and to forgive.

That when we know we’re on the way.

Hold These Truths

We hold these truths to be self-evident...  —The Declaration of Independence

 

A single event can have infinitely many interpretations.

A lot of professionals are crackpots.

Disgust is the appropriate response to most situations.

 

These days, when civility in public discourse has plummeted to yet another low when accusations fly like poisoned arrows from one ideological camp to the next, facts are taken out of context and twisted, and half-truths and blatant lies treated as equivalencies on nightly newscasts, I’ve turned back to Jenny Holzer’s Truisms in search of some way, any way to get a handle on the contrarian nature that seems to have infected our every attempt at conversation of late.

 

Private property created crime.

Any surplus is immoral.

People who don’t work with their hands are parasites.

 

Jobs lost, homes foreclosed, surpluses squandered, wars waged, fortunes gambled, security destroyed, health care ever elusive, far from the civil right it should be in a country half as rich as ours—it’s easy to see how the power of any kind of propaganda might seize a fretting mind in these less-than-best of times.

Worrying can help you prepare.

You are a victim of the rules you live by.

Words tend to be inadequate.

 

Jenny Holzer works with text as her art. She finds, crafts, and then puts provocative, strange, unsettling, at times enigmatic words and sayings and texts and documents—into public spaces and leaves them, waiting for discovery, response, and reaction. Sometimes the words make an obvious narrative, even a story, sometimes not; more often, you the viewer/reader are left to construct a meaning for yourself.

 

Symbols are more meaningful than things themselves.

Description is more important than metaphor.

 

In the early days, thirty-plus years back, Holzer put her words on posters, placing them pretty much at random on New York City street lights and telephone poles; not long after she moved to her primary medium, LED signs and displays often projected in places as diverse as the façade of the New York Public Library, a JFK terminal arrival/departure board, and on the Big Brother-esque electronic marquees that now leer above Times Square.

 

Chasing the new is dangerous to society.

Confusing yourself is a way to stay honest.

Abuse of power comes as no surprise.

 

 Holzer’s Truisms project, begun in 1977, gathered sayings that you may or may not have heard before and then (maybe or maybe not) repeated some verbatim and turned others on their tiny linguistic heads. The thing is: they sound authoritative, like something you ought to pay attention to and believe. They sound like they contain the wisdom of the ages, like they are channeling the truth, like they might offer a tidy little Zennish koan you can use to chant your blues away.

 

Categorizing fear is calming.

Fear is the greatest incapacitator.

 

Except many on the list contradict one another. Cancel one another out. Fight side-by-side to the death. Not unlike the screaming matches I can only imagine breaking out in the chambers of Congress if decorum were really to be breached and the furious tempers of misunderstanding and conflict let loose. Which for someone like me, words and writing-obsessed and -possessed, just might be the unnerving point: maybe it is impossible to ever hold any—let alone these—truths.

 

Or is it?

Quietness, Indeed

Quietness

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky,
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape;
Walk out like someone suddenly
born into color.

Do it now,
You're covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side.

Die and be quiet.
Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life is a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.
- Rumi

Here We Are in the Years...

...when the showman shifts the gears, lives become careers, children cry in fear, let us out of here.

—Neil Young

A dear, dear friend from my long ago past life was found this week. What a gift that is! I, who pride myself on not losing touch with those I hold so near and dear lost this person, how, I don't even recall. But now he's found, thanks to a mutual pal who braved the vagaries of Facebook to connect with him. And already, after a mere 24 hours of e-mail back-and-forth, man oh man, there are some people you just pick up with where you left off...

When was the last time I saw G.? 1978 or 1979? Before I moved up the road to Ithaca, New York? My son was 1 or 2; he'll be 33 this coming June. A life, a generation unfolding, days passing, so much time gone. G. said in an e-mail, and rightly so:

"Time eats us alive. Mozart died at 35 and Louis Kahn built his first building after 50. It's a minute by minute thing with no real boundaries. It's a dream."

Damn if he isn't absolutely, ineluctably right.

Photo: One John took of the damn coolest outdoor art exhibit: one-dimensional but stand-up photograph/cut-outs of African immigrants living throughout Italy. It was staged in Campo San Margherita, April 2008, when we were living in our Venetian apartment a short stroll across the Rio San Barnaba canal. Shortly after, it moved on to Roma.

A Member of the City of Ideas

I had a good run there, writing daily, productively, and actually producing farther-along-than-first-drafts for something like over a month. Then the (inevitable?) crash and burn which, for me, comes in the guise of self-doubt, a feeling of wasted time, being utterly convinced I will never learn how to "do" this, get it "right" (even though there is no right, of course), on and on, blah blah blah.

Then to stumble on this poem on the Mudlark electronic poetry journal site last eve—yet again the reminder that wisdom does often arrive, to rescue and embolden, just when needed:

The First Step

The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritus:
"I've been writing for two years now
and I've composed only one idyll.
It's my single completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder
of Poetry is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I'm standing on now
I'll never climb any higher."
Theocritus retorted: "Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it's a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing."

C.P. Cavafy

---

Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard, Translators
The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy
Chatto & Windus: London, 1975

Photo: The side of a train car, National Train Day, Portland, Oregon.  May 2009.

Thanksgiving Day Rumi

 
Why even try to write when this guy has already said it all?                                                  

                                                   

Those who don't feel this Love
pulling them like a river,
those who don't drink dawn
like a cup of spring water
or take in sunset like supper,
those who don't want to change,
let them sleep.
This Love is beyond the study of theology,
that old trickery and hypocrisy.
If you want to improve your mind that way,
sleep on.
I've given up on my brain.
I've torn the cloth to shreds
and thrown it away.
If you're not completely naked,
wrap your beautiful robe of words
around you,
and sleep.

- Rumi

Photo is of a store sign undergoing repair, I guess. Santa Monica, California. September 2008.

Keeping the Heart Open

I went to a writing weekend at Esalen in Big Sur, California back in October 2003. At the final session, all the attendees gathered together and we were all asked to reflect on these questions:

What do I do to keep my heart open? How do I stay in touch with the source of compassion inside myself in these difficult times?

Thirty years ago today, American hostages were taken in Iran and I moved with my toddler to Ithaca, New York. Looking back on old journals this morning a part of research for a writing project, I found what I wrote at that Big Sur weekend, back in that year when we started on the debacle in Iraq:

I sleep eight hours, eat slow meals, walk every day. I take a short nap, cook soups from scratch, sit out on my deck in the sun and pet my fifteen-year old Siamese cat. I pick zinnias from my garden, hang laundry out to dry on the line. I read every day but I also take time to sit and do nothing, to simply be. I let the world in but only so much. I listen to music. I breathe. I haul wood for my woodstove, put oiled sunflower seeds in the feeder for the nuthatches and the finches. I write in the morning. I listen to Garrison Keillor read me a poem at 10 a.m. I practice lovingkindness toward people like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. I watch Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! I practice gratitude each and every day for my bountiful good fortune. I take deep breaths.

Photo: Calla lily by the Oxbow back deck steps, Corvallis, Oregon.