day 12: I Still Have Everything You Gave Me, by Naomi Shihab Nye

This poem by Naomi Shihab Nye is from an Anthology called The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women.

I actually gave this anthology away when I graduated from EMU, but I decided I would read this poem instead of one from a book of poems by Chris Martin that I bought at Gift & Thrift, because his poems don't really work at all for being read aloud. They are like the extreme version of what Stanley Kunitz was saying about poets writing for the page and not the ear. 

"I Still Have Everything You Gave Me" is pretty much the anthem for all unrequited loves. I remember reading it with friends at EMU and at various points we would all just sort of groan dramatically. 

"I do not ache," the poet says. "I would not trade."

"Yeah right," we all responded, flopping our angst-ridden bodies over our beds, or couches, or whatever horizontal surface was available at the time.

**

In other news, I had a dear friend visit me today from Lancaster. We met at Camp Hebron, although we weren't super close during the two summers we worked together. We laugh sometimes about how we didn't realize we were kindred spirits until after we had moved out of geographical proximity to each other; it's okay, though, we've conversed quite well via letter.

I made cinnamon rolls this morning. (The Housemate would be so impressed with me if she were here). I didn't have powdered sugar to make a glaze, so I just made a clear glaze with granulated sugar & water, which worked okay although it was less pretty than a white glaze would have been.

Then we traveled downtown to see the cherry blossoms. So beautiful. Also, so crowded. :)

My letter-writing kindred spirit & I have many things in common - for example, a love of poetry & beauty, an ability to enter conversations on Christian spirituality through these loves, and a recent and profound fascination with the poet Christian Wiman.

I'd like to note here that I was totally vindicated on my labeling of Charles Bukowski as The Hipster Poet. She mentioned Bukowski today and sort of nonchalantly said something about how she wanted to read him more, but he was the current hipster poet on Tumblr so she was putting it off for a while. "What?" I said, disbelieving my ears (she told me earlier that she hadn't read my blog all last week because of all the craziness that comes with end-of-semester happenings in your last semester of college). "You said that without reading what I wrote, right?"

"Yeah," she said, looking at me quizzically.

I laughed, and held out a hand for a high-five.

We had so many interesting conversations during the day, often circling around how we are currently interacting with Jesus and writing and life, and touching at some point this evening on the poet Osip Mandelstam, whose work Wiman has translated from Russian. This Mandelstam poem seems appropriate to share on this day of cherry blossoms:

 And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,

    Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree.

    It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering power,

    And it was all aimed at me.

    What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?

    What is being? What is truth?

    Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,

    All hover and hammer,

    Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.

    It is now. It is not.  

We also visited the Smithsonian Museum of African Art. I was enthralled with this little carved crucifix.

All in all, a pretty lovely Saturday.

day 11: Ash-Wednesday, by T.S. Eliot

Would you believe that I had this (the first section of "Ash-Wednesday") memorized at one point? I did. Ironically, despite the fact that I have read this poem aloud more times than probably any other poem I will record this month, I had a terrible time recording it tonight. I kept stumbling over the words. This was take 5, I think.

T.S. Eliot. My first poetry love. He is why Thia and I first started joking about having dead poetry boyfriends our freshman year at EMU. I remember the first time I read "The Waste Land" - I must have been 14 or 15, and I don't think I understood more than a few lines (there are 432 lines, FYI), but it was this sort of otherworldly, beautiful thing...

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. 

..."You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
"They called me the hyacinth girl."
-Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.  

..."You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout?..." 

...After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience  

...Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you?  

...My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries... 

-excerpts from "The Waste Land," by T.S. Eliot

I'm intrigued by the wikipedia entry for "Ash-Wednesday":

Ash-Wednesday is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, it deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith acquires it. Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem", it is richly but ambiguously allusive, and deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. Eliot's style of writing in Ash-Wednesday showed a marked shift from the poetry he had written prior to his 1927 conversion, and his post-conversion style would continue in a similar vein. His style was to become less ironic, and the poems would no longer be populated by multiple characters in dialogue. His subject matter would also become more focused on Eliot's spiritual concerns and his Christian faith. 

Many critics were particularly enthusiastic about Ash-Wednesday. Edwin Muir maintained that it is one of the most moving poems Eliot wrote, and perhaps the "most perfect", though it was not well received by everyone. The poem's groundwork of orthodox Christianity discomfited many of the more secular literati.

The lines from "Ash-Wednesday" that get thrown about in my group of friends is "teach us to care and not to care/teach us to sit still." I will leave you with that as a little thing to ponder on this rainy Friday night.

day 10: Three Poems for the New Year, by Charles Wright

Sometimes I wonder where my evening went. Then I think - oh, right, I was researching random things for my blog.

Sigh.

***

Charles Wright does not get the honor of being tagged with "poets I love." No, he gets the dubious distinction of being labeled "the other hipster poet." (The first hipster poet being Charles Bukowski, who I would totally tag as "that hipster poet" if I actually ever talked about him on my blog.

Which I guess I am doing now?

What even is my life.)

***

...UrbanDictionary describes a hipster like this:

"Hipsters are a subculture of men and women typically in their 20's and 30's that value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter. The greatest concentrations of hipsters can be found living in the Williamsburg, Wicker Park, and Mission District neighborhoods of major cosmopolitan centers such as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco respectively. Although "hipsterism" is really a state of mind,it is also often intertwined with distinct fashion sensibilities. Hipsters reject the culturally-ignorant attitudes of mainstream consumers, and are often be seen wearing vintage and thrift store inspired fashions, tight-fitting jeans, old-school sneakers, and sometimes thick rimmed glasses. Both hipster men and women sport similar androgynous hair styles that include combinations of messy shag cuts and asymmetric side-swept bangs. Such styles are often associated with the work of creative stylists at urban salons, and are usually too "edgy" for the culturally-sheltered mainstream consumer. The "effortless cool" urban bohemian look of a hipster is exemplified in Urban Outfitters and American Apparel ads which cater towards the hipster demographic. Despite misconceptions based on their aesthetic tastes, hipsters tend to be well educated and often have liberal arts degrees, or degrees in maths and sciences, which also require certain creative analytical thinking abilities. Consequently many hipsters tend to have jobs in the music, art, and fashion industries. It is a myth that most hipsters are unemployed and live off of their parent's trust funds. Hipsters shun mainstream societal conventions that apply to dating preferences and traditional "rules" of physical attraction. It is part of the hipster central dogma not to be influenced by mainsream advertising and media, which tends to only promote ethnocentric ideals of beauty. The concepts of androgyny and feminism have influenced hipster culture, where hipster men are often as thin as the women they date. The muscular and athletic all-American male ideal is not seen as attractive by confident and culturally-empowered hipster women who instead view them as symbols of male oppression, sexism, and misogyny. Likewise, culturally-vapid sorority-type girls with fake blond hair, overly tanned skin, and "Britney Spears tube-tops" are not seen as attractive by cultured hipster males who instead see them as symbols of female insecurity, low self-esteem, and lack of cultural intelligence and independent thinking. Hipsters are also very racially open-minded, and the greatest number of interracial couples in any urban environment are typically found within the hipster subculture. 

Although hipsters are technically conformists within their own subculture, in comparison to the much larger mainstream mass, they are pioneers and leaders of the latest cultural trends and ideals. For example, the surge of jeans made to look old and worn (i.e. "distressed"), that have become prevalent at stores such as The Gap, American Eagle, Abercrombie and Fitch, and Hollister, were originally paraded by hipsters who shopped in thrift stores years before such clothing items were mass produced and sold to the mainstream consumer. The true irony here is that many of the detractors of hipster culture are in fact unknowingly following a path that hipsters have carved out years before them. This phenomena also applies to music as well, as many bands have become successful and known to mainstream audiences only because hipsters first found and listened to them as early-adopters of new culture. Once certain concepts of fashion and music have reached mainstream audiences, hipsters move on to something new and improved."

My own personal definition is basically as follows:

Hipsters are like that boy - the one who used to walk across EMU's campus in December without a coat, because coats Definitely Were Not Cool - that boy who knew all of The White Stripes' obscure lyrics, and read James Wright and Charles Bukowski, and gave me his beat-up (extra) copy of The Other Side of the River. 

Thia texted me recently about the Bukowski poem "Bluebird." It reminds me of ____, she said, naming one of our mutual friends. She was right, like usual, but I texted back: It reminds me of The Boy With No Coat. She agreed. We laughed about it, this past weekend when she came up to DC.

...Hipsters. Seriously.

***

This whole aside is just to say that I don't really get Charles Wright's poetry - although I've only read snatches of The Other Side of the River; maybe I should give him & his poetry another chance - and I only ever stumbled across him because an acquaintance of mine at EMU had two copies of this book and gave me his extra one.

Wright's poetry is cerebral and dense and word-heavy, and makes me think a little bit of melodramatic theater majors talking about the meaning of life two weeks before graduation and the start of a search for a paying job.

Like...okay, one of his poems is titled "Cryopexy." Good grief. I mean, I looked it up, it makes sense, it's all fine - I mean, it's actually a really interesting idea to write about, whatever. But there isn't even a wikipedia page for that word. Literal definition of hipster, right there.

But I think I am probably swayed by my impression of The Boy With No Coat as someone cerebral and word-heavy... In any case, The Other Side of the River is one of the books of poetry I own, so I'm reading from it.

I did not read "Cryopexy," however.

I picked "Three poems for the New Year," mostly for the line about the "knuckle of solitude to gnaw on," fully realizing that I was really toeing the limit of believability when I read the line "I wake into middle age..." in my twenty-three-year-old voice. (For some reason it didn't seem strange to read the lines about being 45 in Adrienne Rich's poem. I don't know why.)

***

To be fair, I feel like I should acknowledge that I do remember standing in the cold bite of a December night talking about DFW with The Boy With No Coat. It doesn't seem very sporting for one literature nerd to take digs at another. Even if the other was illogical enough to shun coats for the sake of fashion.

day 9: An Embarrassment, by Wendell Berry

I love Wendell Berry so much. That's all I have to say today.

day 8: Vespers, by Louise Glück

I guess this book of poems (The Wild Iris) isn't technically mine...Meg, you can claim it back whenever you want. ;)

The Wild Iris, to me, feels like a book that should be taken as a whole, rather than pulling one poem out at a time to look at. But there was no way I was going to read an entire book of poetry aloud at one sitting, so I picked one that I thought would read well. Her work in general, and also, specifically, in The Wild Iris, is sort of dark and spare and full of the feeling of loneliness. It's pretty, though, and works okay to read aloud.

Louise Glück is - um, pretty well decorated, you could say. "In 2003 Glück was named the twelfth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by the Library of Congress. That same year, she was named the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her book of essays Proofs and Theories (1994) was awarded the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. In addition to the Pulitzer and Bollingen Prizes, she has received many awards and honors for her work, including the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize, the MIT Anniversary Medal and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2008, she was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award."

She was the judge the year that Richard Siken won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, and wrote the foreword for his collection Crush (which I will be reading from at some point in the next ten days). I think I'm going to quote a bit from that introduction today, even though it is about Siken's work, because she wrote it and I am sure I will have lots of other things to say on the day I read from Crush. I love these paragraphs, especially Emily Dickinson's description of what poetry is:

We live in a period of great polarities: in art, in public policy, in morality. In poetry, art seems, at one extreme, rhymed good manners, and at the other, chaos. The great task has been to infuse clarity with the passionate ferment of the inchoate, the chaotic.

Siken takes to heart this exhortation. Crush is the best example I can presently give of profound wildness that is also completely intelligible. By Higginson's report, Emily Dickinson famously remarked, "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"

She should, in that remark, have shamed forever the facile, the decorative, the easily consoling, the tame. She names, after all, responses that suggest violent transformation, the overturning of complacency by peril.

In practice, this has meant that poets quote Dickinson and proceed to write poems from which caution and hunger to accommodate present taste have drained all authenticity and unnerving originality. Richard Siken, with the best poets of his impressive generation, has chosen to take Dickinson at her word. I had her reaction.

a break from our regularly scheduled programming

I have had a whirlwind last three days: Saturday in Harrisonburg, Sunday in DC, dinner last night with visiting family members. 

I didn't decide to head South until Thursday evening, when I realized that my parents were definitely going down to help my brother with some car issues and also watch him play in the alumni-student soccer match. I stayed at my aunt's place in Massanutten, which is where this daffodil picture is from:

A brief stop on discipleship hill to visit my writing-tree...

Then back to DC to meet up with Thia's family, who were visiting from Colorado. We went to the fish market near the junction of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers...

Rode the metro (all 9 of us...what an adventure)...

Walked by the White House, where I just happened to run into my great-aunt and -uncle, who are visiting the area from Iowa. They knew Thia's grandfather - file this one under #MennoniteGame...

And finished the day out by retreating to Thia's uncle's apartment in downtown DC, where we cooked up the fish we bought at the market.

Then, yesterday night, I had dinner with my great-aunt and -uncle, which was lovely. We talked for a long time about family, work, food, all sorts of Mennonite news...I was so happy to have family around. It's funny how being around family, even if they are people you haven't seen for a while, somehow makes a place feel more like home.

day 7: II, III (from 21 Love Poems), by Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich is a poet I found through theology; most of the memories I have of her words circle around a professor I had at EMU who taught in the Bible and Religion department.

Her biography on the Poetry Foundation website says, "Rich's prose collections are widely-acclaimed for their erudite, lucid, and poetic treatment of politics, feminism, history, racism and many other topics." Honestly, I think I actually prefer her prose to her poetry - one of my favorite essays I ever read at EMU was an excerpt from "On Lies, Secrets and Silence":

"An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. 

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. 

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. 

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

...It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you.

It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

The possibilities of life between us."

 -Adrienne Rich, "On Lies, Secrets, and Silence"

"I began as an American optimist," she commented in Credo of a Passionate Skeptic, "albeit a critical one, formed by our racial legacy and by the Vietnam War...I became an American Skeptic, not as to the long search for justice and dignity, which is part of all human history, but in the light of my nation's leading role in demoralizing and destabilizing that search, here at home and around the world. Perhaps just such a passionate skepticism, neither cynical nor nihilistic, is the ground for continuing."

A friend of mine said once in a letter to Thia that Rich's poetry seems too bitter to really enjoy; I suppose that is a matter of opinion, and a matter, also, of where you are standing when you look at her words. She is interesting, anyway, even if her work isn't always "enjoyable," whatever that word means. I guess you could say that she is interesting, even if she isn't pleasant.