Poem 4: An Enigma Wrapped in a Mystery ... or Whatever

Today's Napowrimo prompt is kind of involved. Here it is: "One of the most popular British works of classical music is Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations. The “enigma” of the title is widely believed to be a hidden melody that is not actually played, but which is tucked somehow into the composition through counterpoint. Today I’d like you to take some inspiration from Elgar and write a poem with a secret – in other words, a poem with a word or idea or line that it isn’t expressing directly. The poem should function as a sort of riddle, but not necessarily a riddle of the “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” variety. You could choose a word, for example, “yellow,” and make everything in the poem something yellow, but never actually allude to their color. Or perhaps you could closely describe a famous physical location or person without ever mentioning what or who it actually is."

*

Feathers

Sassy, direct, she speaks
from the core of her indignation
(not indignity, never indignity)

at the way the world
revolves around injustice,
cruelty, indifference.

I met her in Arizona:
she traveled 2500 miles
to meet me,

bringing her hopes and dreams,
her love of art and poetry, her husband,
a bag of backstories

I hoped one day to share.
"Are you gay?" she asked her son,
once.

Sometimes our dreams choke us.
Sometimes our dreams rise up
like desert mirages, oases

for those dying of thirst.
Hope is feathered.
It migrates south into clouds

until spring.
Inspiration sounds like
respiration.

This year, she snapped
a few ribs.
Stories of the future

made it hard for her to breathe
through the pain.
I love her like a mother -- she is

my other mother.
Trees communicate through their roots,
create for each other

oxygen and food.
April rain beads their
cold branches:

I love you. 
I love you.
I love you.

Poem 3: elegy

Today's napowrimo prompt: "write an elegy – a poem that mourns or honors someone dead or something gone by. And I’d like to ask you to center the elegy on an unusual fact about the person or thing being mourned."

I've got lots of people who could be mourned -- grandparents, parents, friends, abstract segments of humanity inhumanly dispatched. But I'm feeling contrary. So:

*

Elegy for Circe

You arrived suspicious and reserved,
fur tangled with bitter burs
culled from a hard Arizona yard.

To enter and exit, you rang a bell,
giving the old man next door (poodle father)
a reluctant thrill. "Smart," he said,

leaning over the wire fence.
Strangers, like fellow cats, irritated
and bored you;

you hid from or ignored them,
content to lie under
the stunted orange tree

bursting its barrel,
as bird shadows flit
across your big paws.

Kitty knew to give you
a wide berth.
Dogs made you shake.

When we moved you to Michigan,
you shat in front of Lizzie's crib,
a perfect pile of disdain.

Only you made it here,
after Kitty stopped ticking,
and you lived for 3 years alone,

queen of Reed Street,
a massive gray wraith
balled on the couch.

After the kitten,
your kidneys failed.
I'll never forget you

wrapped warm as an infant
in the crook of my arm,
your faint rumble

as the vet slipped the needle in,
or how your limp leg
slipped out, after,

heavy and empty.

Poem 2: the recipe

Today's prompt is to "write a poem inspired by, or in the form of, a recipe! It can be a recipe for something real, like your grandmother’s lemon chiffon cake, or for something imaginary, like a love potion or a spell."

*

How to Knit Love from Air

Travel by bicycle to where
crones spin thread from air, leaving
behind your need to walk on

solid ground.
You will find them clustered
in the last tower of a castle

built from cloud bricks,
overlooking a bottomless chasm
of fog and mist.

Select five bundles of
the weightless thread: sunset orange,
dusk purple, dawn red,

nightshade, mid-day cream.
Find a spot to sit under a weeping
willow tree, preferably

next to a brook.
Use wood needles carved from
an ancient laurel.

Stockinette stitch will work best.
Cast on a thousand stitches
in cream; knit a row, purl a row

and change to orange
after a thousand rows.
Remember to breath deep,

bringing the air into your belly.
Imagine your beloved
as a warm glow in your chest.

Continue to work each color
a thousand rows,
changing from red to

purple to
night, until the garment
reaches the stars,

spreading out crisp
and light and cold
as the fire in your heart,

then bind off,
weaving the ends in
like figure eights.

April 1 = first day of National/Global Poetry Month, and a poem a day!

This year, I'm going to follow the optional prompts supplied by http://www.napowrimo.net/, unless I find myself so stymied that I have to punt.

Today's prompt reads: "write a Kay-Ryan-esque poem: short, tight lines, rhymes interwoven throughout, maybe an animal or two, and, if you can manage to stuff it in, a sharp little philosophical conclusion."

Yeah, and now monkeys will fly out of my butt.

*

Spring has sprung

and neighbors explode
outdoors, forced
into crisp air
from insulated
bungalows
soggy with snow/rain,

the dogs snuffling
melted leaves and bones
grown lucid with
waiting.

Green shoots
sting up from mud
like tentative fingers
from sagging graves.

We sway in
simultaneous
motion,
waves lapping
the crushed sands
of suburban shores.

I am reminded
of the earth's
relentless turning,
how it
moves away
and then toward
an inhuman sun,

and life
stuns me
with that sun's
infinite liquid.

The Moth and Storytelling

In the interests of providing my students (don't you love how I can own them with a single pronoun?) with a nudge into the wide world of the inter-webs where stories dwell upon dwell upon dwell, I've put some alternative "readings" on the syllabus. These begin with The Moth website.

(I'm also assigning The Onion, a TED talk, and a bevy of websites devoted to click-baiting college students. After all, we're studying creative writing, and I want to emphasize the creative part of the writing. Who knows, that is, what and where and how we'll be writing in 10, 20, 30 years? I never imagined, when I was a college senior, that I'd be tapping out a form of personal narrative into a book-sized computer and then, with a few clicks of buttons, pushing it out into cyberspace for you and other potential strangers and friends to read and even respond. Back then, we typed our workshop materials onto ditto forms, put them on a ditto machine, and cranked out 15 purple wet copies for the group.)

As I'm a fan of doing my own homework, I made sure to listen to the latest episode of Moth stories -- these are live events where storytellers (famous and not so) stand up in front of audiences without notes or scripts and tell a story. The Moth organizers, of course, first get you to pitch a potential story to them and then, if they decide to go with it, coach you into this live delivery.

And that's my way of telling you that, yes, you can't just get up there and wing it. The piece has been drafted, crafted, cut, rearranged, critiqued, and so on before it ever reaches the stage.  The episode I found is titled "Facing the Dark," includes three stories. John Turtturo talks about his brother's mental illness, Daniela Schiller speaks about her father's memories of the Holocaust and her own work with psychological research on memory, and Kate Braestrup describes the importance of facing death -- in person -- in her piece, "The House of Mourning." I have to confess that this last piece is the one that most touched me, perhaps because of my own baggage with dead fathers.

Often when I'm listening to The Moth Radio Hour (it's a podcast) or StoryCorps (another podcast) or Snap Judgement (ditto), I'm struck by the immediacy of a story told in its human voice, as well as by the intimacy of the form.  Instead of reading the words on the page in my own voice, at top speed, invisibly in my head, I'm using my ears to hear them, in a narrator's voice, with sound effects and pauses and (sometimes) mutual tears.

These experiences remind me that story is vital to us. It organizes the chaos of experience into sense. It makes the intangible tangible. It creates a light in the darkness. It populates the emptiness with friends.

And these oral stories also remind me where the heart of story resides: in the impulse to share our experience with others. All you need, The Moth producers remind us, is a person, a place and a problem.  Then -- boom.  Story happens, transforming teller and audience alike.

It's a powerful communion. And (in this case) it's free.

Mary Oliver is my Priestess of the Familiar

I suggested to others that they write about something they've read "outside of class" recently that has inspired or put them off. In other words, I've thrown down the gauntlet -- write about something that has elicited a strong reaction in you.

When I sat down today, my mind came up blank. I read and listen to a lot of things outside of class (podcasts, novels, short stories, textbooks, research articles, Facebook posts, tweets ... I'm getting dizzy just writing all of this down) but a lot of that just fades out of my brainpan nearly as fast as I cram it in.

Have I mentioned how hard it is to pay attention lately?  So much for all of this mindfulness training.

Okay. I'm back.

And I've got something now. I really like Mary Oliver's poetry, and a few years ago I actually bought (on Kindle) her New and Selected Poems.  Her poetry speaks to me because she's a master of the tight, concrete line, and her tone is often both wondering and severe. Her vision of nature as a repository of the divine comes the closest to my rough and incomplete vision of "god." Whenever I think about spiritual matters, I feel as if I'm trying to sketch in a very delicate mental picture with broken fat crayons. Oliver's work zings me with a kind of recognition, that low-level gut feeling of "oomph" that signals an incoming and felt truth.  She's able to evoke in me a reverence for the natural world, the world outside of "people" and their "busyness," that I can only feel through poetry. It's a merging, I think, of the intellectual with the emotional, a full body sensation of discovery/recognition that I associate with moments (very brief, like nanoseconds) of mystery and revelation,  of spiritual epiphany, blowing small holes in my atheist imagination.

She achieves this with simple and yet lush imagery, with a stark tone and direct vision. She embodies revelation in earthly things -- grass, beetles, birds. Like Whitman on a diet, she captures reverence in a snapshot of landscape.

Once I read an Oliver poem to start off a faculty meeting of some sort. I picked the poem because it transports me out of my mundane academic blah-blah and into something larger than myself. And because it has a dictatorial (pedantic?) message that I like: Be better than your own stupid self.

Here it is:

When Death Comes
               Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up having simply visited this world.

*

I finished reading this poem and a strange hush lingered in the room. The meeting's leader said something like, "Well, that was something," and muttered about death and darkness. Of course the poem was about death. Of course it was a little lecture on living fully and facing the "cottage of darkness" with amazement, with particularity and realness. Like Mary Oliver, I don't want to die as a tourist. I want to die as a native of the world, having lived -- like a field daisy -- with singularity. And I want to walk through that doorway with curiosity and wonder.

Fairy Tales and the Lonely Child

For a second blog post, I suggested to writers that they consider a significant moment in their histories as writers. Where were you? What happened? Who, if anyone, helped you in this moment? What did you learn/realize/otherwise discover?

As an instructor and even more as a parent, I'm often struck by how difficult it is to follow my own advice, or to complete my own homework. That said, here goes.

When I review my "history" as a writer, the moment that snags in my mind most often occurs in Falk School, in Pittsburgh, PA, in the first semester of my third grade year.

Okay, here I will make a confession: I can't remember, honestly, when in the year it took place. Only that my desk didn't face a window, and so the quality of light in the memory is golden, spring-like ... which could be an effect of the florescent lights, or of the corruption, in general, of any memory that is 44 years old.

So. I'm sitting at my desk, which happens to be in the aisle facing a row of carrels. I'm writing an illustrated story about Nancy Tupperware and her magical red shoes. Nancy puts on these shoes and they allow her to fly wherever she wants to fly in the world. She uses them on Christmas eve to fly to ... memory lapse ... England? ... and there she meets with animals in a manger (THE manger? Interesting/rogue religious moment in the agnostic kid's life) who can now, since it's Christmas eve, talk to her. The conversation -- its import and substance -- has been lost, though the "fact" (sorry, couldn't resist the scare quotes OR this pretentious aside) of that conversation, animals to Nancy, remains. Then, to end the story, Nancy flies up to heaven to converse with angels.

(This probably means that I was writing this in November or early December, in anticipation of Christmas.)

I am writing this story in order to share it with my friends. My best friend, Madeline Schwartz, is back now after spending second grade with her family in France. Maybe I'm writing this story in order to capture Madeline's attention, to win her back. As I color in the magnificent vibrance of Nancy's electric red shoes, I'm thinking of Madeline and her deep brown eyes, her wavy dark hair, her delicate olive skin. I want her to like this story. I want her to think it's a wonderful story, a magical tale. I want her to admire me as much as I admire her and the mysterious, fabulous "fact" of her new ability to speak French.

I can't remember if Madeline liked the story -- or if she ever read it. I do remember that after third grade we moved to Louisiana for a year and that marked the end of my friendship with Madeline. When we came back, I don't remember her in my fifth grade class. She took up ballet and I played the piano. She stayed at Falk and my parents shipped me off to the public middle school. We reconnected briefly when we were both in separate colleges, but she said, once, while going somewhere with me and my mother, "Laurie, you have the same stupid sense of humor you had in the first grade." And that I mark as the end of it all. No flying shoes, no talking animals.

Perhaps this tidbit of memory, which still has the power to shame me, survives to remind me that Nancy's magic was reserved just for me. The notion of flying, of speaking to animals and angels, of crossing barriers and expanding connection through conversation, movement, magic -- all of these are achieved through poetry and story. But especially story.

I think what I've learned, looking back on myself, hunched over my desk writing that story, drawing in Nancy and her shoes (and her billowing dress, like a mushroom umbrella in the lined sky, bobbing over the crooked manger below), lovingly laboring over those red shoes, is that I was a lonely child who found a gorgeous and busy life in books. There was nothing I enjoyed as much as losing myself to a fictional world -- fairy tales, the house at Pooh Corner, the wizard of Oz and the oddball hybrid characters (all of them infused with magic). I could forget about my desk in the walkway, my accomplished French speaking friends whose invisibility still lingers in my memory like a careful erasure, my forbidding (step)father, and the palpable feeling of uncertainty and fear that stalked me in my own house.

The story I was living at the time, my reality, was both boring and repressive. I certainly experienced joy, I won't lie. But most of that joy -- if it happened in my "real-life" narrative -- was both temporary and tenuous. The joy I experienced while reading and writing was enormous, and life-giving, and a balm to the solitary child bent over her notebook at the battered desk. It wrapped that child up in a warm sunshiny light, and allowed her to fly to far off lands, the author of her destiny and her destinations.