april is -

the cruellest month, you were thinking, you t.s. eliot fans, but no.

well, it might be the cruellest month, okay, it's not like I think my first poetry crush would lie, but the point of this post is that April is National Poetry Month, and I'm going all-in this year. the plan is to record a poem every day and stick my voice up on my blog.

I'm a little nervous, mostly because I really dislike the sound of my voice when it's recorded (& I always think - man, if that's what my voice really sounds like, well, that's annoying & terrible). but listening to Christian Wiman recite poems on the OnBeing podcast inspired me - I decided that one thing I really want to be better at is speaking poems aloud. so, in the interests of improving my skill in the art of the spoken word, I'm going to pick one poem from each of the twenty (yes, twenty) poetry books I own, and record myself reciting them. That will take me to April 20, and then there will be ten days to pick ten other poets who I haven't yet added to my shelf.

thia says I should add poetry commentary to the posts. we'll see how ambitious I get. also how much time I have, because poetry thoughts take a lot of time to think and write down.

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I probably shouldn't put this up on my blog because I will never be this good, argh.

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp," Robert Browning said. Poets, always with the good advice. Anyway, it's lovely, so - another Christian Wiman recording, this time of one of his own poems, "From a Window."

[Also, the commentary to go with this post will just be a Stanley Kunitz quote, plus a few brief sentences of my own analysis:

"...few young poets have mastered traditional prosody. The result is that they don't really know how to make language sing or move for them. There's a modicum of music in most of what's being written today. They're not testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed."

I love Christian Wiman's poems for the way they sound, and how this sound is inextricable from what the poems mean. This is hard to explain - my best example is that when I heard him recite "From a Window," I realized that the line "pressed my face to the pane" could also be heard "pressed my face to the pain," and that double meaning changed the whole poem. I started to hear the poem like this: as he leaned into the pain, he saw the life that was not the life of men, and that was where the joy came in...

And I didn't get that until I heard it read aloud.]
 

reading back through my blog is fun

I've been going back through my blog to add tags to my posts and I came across this, which was just sort of sitting there as a draft. I don't know why I never published it.

Mennonite Writer's Conference: draft 3/31/12 

This weekend I was able to attend 'Mennonite/s Writing VI: Solos and Harmonies,' a writing conference hosted at EMU. It was an amazing experience. 

Throughout the weekend there were all sorts of presentations, panel discussions, poetry readings, singings, and book signings. I have a ton of new and exciting thoughts in my head... 

One of the most interesting things for me was attending the banquet this evening. Not very many EMU students were in attendance (the table I was sitting at held most of us); the rest of the people at the banquet were professors from Bluffton, Bethel, Goshen, Conrad Grebel; retired professors; people associated with Mennonite Media; editors of things like The Mennonite; authors of poetry, novels and nonfiction. 

I have to admit that I didn't know all that many of the writers that were present this weekend, the exceptions being Rudy Wiebe, Jeff Gundy, and Julia Spicher Kasdorf. I learned quickly, though: about writers of my grandparents' generation, and my parents' generation, and the atmosphere of things now in the world of Mennonite publishing - the way things will be for my generation. 

At the banquet, 4 writers were honored, two men and two women, interspersed with discussion about Rudy Wiebe's first novel, Peace Will Destroy Many. It was absolutely fascinating for me to hear and think about the community that these authors lived in; the things they have spent their lives pushing back against. 

All of the authors honored were older Mennonites, and every single piece of writing talked about was published after Wiebe's Peace Will Destroy Many - which is a novel that created quite the controversy, if you aren't aware. His novel is about a Canadian Mennonite community and their struggle in how to think about conscientious objection to war as well as moral issues and communication within their church. The book changed a lot of things for Mennonite writers; here is a great resource by Wiebe about the reaction of the Mennonite church to his novel.

Actually, I think the reason I didn't publish it to my blog was that I wanted to write something more, about how the weekend felt rather than what I learned. It felt beautiful and hopeful to me, so many artists gathered from this faith tradition that I belong to, this faith tradition that has such a tenuous and anxious relationship to art. And the women - ah, I wish I had tried to finish writing this last year, because now I don't remember it as clearly as I'd like to. But the best thing, maybe, was this one older women - in her eighties, maybe? - who was recognized at the banquet. I believe she might have been the first Mennonite woman to have a book of fiction published? Maybe not, but anyway, she was given a microphone and rambled on and on about people she remembered, about what church was like for her as a child, about growing up and gaining a voice.

And also all the connections shimmering just under the surface of things; that was maybe the other best thing. Like my great-uncle's brother introducing Omar Eby, and like eavesdropping on Jeff Gundy, who somehow has a connection to a different great-uncle, and like hearing all the things about Rudy Wiebe, who I first heard about from my uncle who is the pastor of a church in Lancaster (where I first met Julia Kasdorf.)

And, you know, that sort of paragraph, right there? Is one of my favorite things about Mennonites.

little shards of narrative glass

He turned the corner.

The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. Her head was half bent to watch her shoes stir the circling leaves. Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them.



"Bet I know something else you don't. There's dew on the grass in the morning."

He suddenly couldn't remember if he had known this or not, and it made him quite irritable.

"And if you look" - she nodded at the sky - "there's a man in the moon."

He hadn't looked for a long time.



She laughed at this. "Good night!" She started up her walk. Then she seemed to remember something and came back to look at him with wonder and curiosity. "Are you happy?" she said.

"Am I what?" he cried.

But she was gone - running in the moonlight. Her front door shut gently.



What a strange meeting on a strange night... He looked at a blank wall. The girl's face was there, really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it had to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun.



"Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"

"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you. And because we know each other."

-Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury


This has been my bus reading for the past few days. I can't believe I never read Fahrenheit 451 before... good stuff. I would like to live in such a way that someone might describe me like this, like Guy Montag thinking about Clarisse McClellan. 

if you aren't into poetry, you can just move along now

because this blog post is dedicated to my new favorite poet.


[It's such a beautiful night I feel like I can't sleep. The rain is falling on the skylights, soft and unpredictable, a funny sort of conversation. The quiet-seeming yellow lights strung across my window, Anais Mitchell's "Child Ballads" playing... ah, life just burns at me sometimes, how wonderful it is.]


okay, so, you know how i just wrote "meet Christian Wiman. This will never happen, but a girl can dream" as part of my '20 things to do' list?

Yeah, yesterday I listened to this On Being podcast, an hour-long interview with this lovely human being. I felt like I had met him. I was listening to it at work and I had to keep pausing because my eyes kept burning like I was going to cry. It was kind of weird, actually, but I'm chalking it down to one of those odd 'kindred spirits' moments and leaving it at that.

So now I'm just going to quote a bunch of stuff he said on the show/in essays archived on the poetry foundation website because I think he's awesome & I want all these thoughts in one place.

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Krista Tippett to Christian Wiman: You know, you've written "Faith is not a state of mind, but an action in the world, a movement towards the world."
Me: Yesss.
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Ms. Tippett: So one thing I really like in your poetry and I think it connects also to your faith is this real tie to reality, which also gets intellectualized, the notion of reality. Do you know what I mean [laugh]? I don't know. When I was reading through you, I also found a lot of reference to reality from Simone Weil, "It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy in order to find reality through suffering" or even in this essay you wrote, "Hive of Nerves." You talked about Christ using metaphors, speaking the language of reality in terms of the physical world. So tell me about how you think poetry works with reality uniquely.

Mr. Wiman: Well, you know, I've been sick lately and I actually had a bone marrow transplant and was in the hospital for quite a long time. And one of the things, poetry died for me for a while. I found that it just wasn't speaking to me. I think I had certain expectations that took me a while to realize were false expectations. I think we often talk about poetry getting us beyond the world and taking us to the very edge of experience and then getting us into the ineffable. I have to say, when I was, you know, faced with the actual ineffable, I didn't want poetry that gave me more of the ineffable. What I wanted was some way of apprehending the world that was right in front of me that was slipping away.

I wanted the world, you know, in front of my eyes, and the poems that I found useful were absolutely concrete, sometimes not at all about religious things and not at all about spiritual things, but simply reality, and reality rendered in such a way that you could see it again. There's a great quote from the mid-20th-century literary critic R.P. Blackmur. He's talking about John Berryman. He said that his work "adds to the stock of available reality." It added to the stock of available reality, and that's a good way to think about what a real poem can do. It suddenly makes the amount of reality that you have in your life greater. You're able to apprehend more of it.


...Mr. Wiman: Right. And that has helped me to at least understand those terms somewhat and to explain to myself why I do need some sort of structures in my life. I do need to go to church. I need specifically religious elements in my life. I find that if I just turn all of my spiritual impulses — if I let them be solitary, as I am comfortable in being, I'm comfortable sitting reading books and trying to pray and meditating. Inevitably, if that energy is not focused outward, it becomes despairing. It turns in on itself and I will look up in a couple of months and I find that I'm in despair. So I think that one of the ways that we know that our spiritual inclinations are valid is that they lead us out of ourselves.

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From The Poetry Foundation...


All sorts of useful things may be written in perfectly adequate prose: editorials, history, philosophy, theology, even lasting novels. But there is no such thing as a perfectly adequate poem, because a poem into which some strange and surprising excellence has not entered, a poem that is not in some inexplicable way beyond the will of the poet, is not a poem.

***

Seamus Heaney has noted that if a person has a single poem in his head, one that he returns to and through which, even in small ways, he understands his life better, this constitutes a devotion to the art. It is enough. And in fact I find that this is almost always how non-specialists read poetry—rarely, sparingly, but intensely, with a handful of high moments that they cling to. The emphasis is on the memorable individual poem, and poetry in bulk is rarely memorable.

***

You don’t need to know a thing about quantum entanglement, wherein one atom can affect another even though they are separated by tremendous distance, to have some sense that our lives are always larger than the physical limitations within which they occur. We exist apart from our existences, you might say, are connected to the world and to other people in ways we will never be able to fully articulate or understand—and we assert our iron wills and ravenous hungers at our own peril. There is such a thing as a collective unconscious. There is such a thing as a spirit of place, and it reaches beyond geography. And poetry, which is a kind of quantum entanglement in language, is not simply a way of helping us to recognize the relations we have with people and places, but a means of preserving and protecting those relations.

***

Most poets I know read almost unconsciously at first, feeling the poem’s formal and linguistic dynamics as much as its “meaning” (in the end, there is no way to separate meaning from a poem’s form and sound). Meaning matters, of course, and most poems do have some bedrock denotative sense upon which the mind can rest. But still, some mystery usually remains. Poetry, like life, has its patches of pure black, its furthest interiors where meaning gleams darkly, and must remain in that darkness if it is to mean at all. You know a good poem by whether or not those irreducible dark spots are integral to your experience of the whole. “Our only obscurities...should be those we are driven into,” Ruth Pitter once wrote, “then a sort of blessing may descend, making such obscurity magical.”

***

One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise.

***

For all the canons and anthologies, for every rock-solid reputation and critical consensus, poetry is personal or it is nothing. That is, until a poem has been tested on your own pulse, to paraphrase John Keats, until you have made up your own mind and heart about where you stand in relation to it, and it to you—until this happens, all poetry is merely literature, all reading rote. It’s true that some people are better readers of poetry than others; that some people’s judgment matters (for the culture as a whole) more than others; that, just as with music or art, there are elements of craft and historical perspective essential to being able to formulate a meaningful response. But still: poetry is made up of poems, and poems repulse and entice in unpredictable ways, and anyone who reads independently and spiritedly is going to carry an eccentric canon around in his head. This is half the fun of it all.

Special bonus feature: this recitation of Robert Bringhurst's "These Poems, She Said."

So, believe me yet? He's the best. The best.

3rd year of college

My life just got a whole lot more difficult.

As I've done every fall, I will give a brief overview of each of my classes...

Organic Chemistry: is going to be difficult but interesting. Also, out of my science classes, probably the easiest. (that is a terrifying statement!) My lecture is being taught by an adjuct prof this semester, because Dr. Tara Kishbaugh is on sabbatical this year. The new professor is British, which definitely makes listening to lectures more pleasant. :) My lab is taught by Matt Siderhurst, who I had for Gen Chem II and the lab section of Analytical Chemistry.

Mammalian Anatomy: This class is SO SCARY. We began our dissection on Tuesday, before we had even begun any lectures. My lab section is 8 people, with two cadavers. There is a ridiculous amount of stuff to know. The first day, to know where we were supposed to cut, we learned these places/parts on/of the human body (among other things) - external occipital protuberance, mastoid process of the temporal bone, vertebra prominens (C7), crest of the ilium, spine of the scapula, inferior angle of the scapula, acromion, crest of the illium, T6...

Biochemistry Seminar and Research: I have to develop a research project and do it. Help!

Love & Politics in Dante and Milton: Maybe I should have been an english major. :) I really like this class - we are reading Dante's Inferno right now, and already after only 2 hours of class I feel like I've started to see some things in new ways. Tuesday night we talked about Dante's love for Beatrice changing his whole life, making everything else more beautiful. Kevin Seidel, my professor, asked "What is the civic duty of love?" How can we rethink love as more than something between two people, but as a powerful force with the ability to reshape entire communities?

History of Recent America: really cool class talking about 1941-the present, using lots of media (magazines, advertisements, propaganda films from the 40's, 50's, etc. I haven't taken a history class at EMU yet, but I think that this one will be relatively easy to enter - that is, I don't think it will be a problem that I haven't studied much history.

Ceramics: I won't have this class until Monday. But I'm predicting it will be a lot of fun.