So this past week I was working at Remedy and talking to my sweet new Remedy friend, Jackie Newman. Jackie had Mary Oliver's Thirst and I picked it up to flip through it and discovered something wonderful. Jackie had read every poem, underlining things and drawing little pictures on the pages of flowers and sunrises and whatever nature scene Oliver was describing. I looked at this book and loved that she had done this, I loved the thoroughness of it, reading with a pen in your hand, drawing little doodles, and reading every poem, front to back. And I love Mary Oliver. So I went home that day and pulled out Red Bird by Oliver and did exactly what Jackie had done: I read it all and underlined and wrote things and doodled. And I bought 2 more of her books this week and did the same thing. And I read Garrison Keillor's 77 Love Sonnets that I had laying around. I feel drenched in it all after this week. I used to read poetry sporatically, turning to a random page in a book as if poetry was not to be eaten whole, but in small bites or slices swallowed and forgotten. This has been a great week of big bites and hearty sustenance and I am full, almost stuffed. So while I'm swallowing a week of nature poetry and 77 praire home companion love sonnets, here is something totally different. Haikus! Poetry in syllables in rhythm of 5-7-5. Orginally Japanese-style poetry, they are now mostly mainstream humor. I found most of these in random places, mostly inspired by a great book at work called "hipster haikus". Without further Ado, 5-7-5.
First 6 are "hipster haikus"
It remains so cold
In the space between my Vans
And footless leggings
My sardonic wit
Doesn’t translate in email
That’s why I’m alone
Look at these sellouts
Feeding the corporate beast
Starbucks anyone?
After my fifth year,
"Philosophy Ph.D."
Didn't sound punk rock
Write on my tombstone:
"Never bought a Greatest Hits
compilation disc"
Ex-boyfriend's worst dig:
"You've never heard of that band?"
Indier-than-thou
haikus are easy
but sometimes they don't make sense
refrigerator
Computer "error" haiku:
Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that
I am curious
what would it feel like to be
not so curious.
-Beth Lapides' "Did I Wake You"
BEAUTY
Naked in repose
Silvery silhouette girls
Adorn my mudflaps
So for the 4 of you who probably read this, lets hear it for haikus.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Francis Thompson, The Kingdom of God
Francis Thompson, The Kingdom of God
O WORLD invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air--
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumor of thee there?
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!--
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
The angels keep their ancient places--
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
'Tis ye, 'tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendored thing.
But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry--and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.
Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter, Cry--
clinging to Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Genesareth, but Thames!
Francis Thompson lived in late 19th century England. He was educated at Oxford but eventually dropped out because of the opium addiction he struggled with his whole life. He was poet, an addict, and mostly desitute in London. He was in and out of homelessness, living for a while with a couple who supported his poetry, living in monastaries while he detoxed. He is most well known for his religious poetry, particularly Hound of Heaven which describes a poet fleeing from God while God persists in pursuit of him. At the end of his life Thompson was sick, in poverty and homeless. He would write poetry on newspaper and send them to back to the local paper. They published these anonymous poems and wrote, "There is one among us greater than Milton. Please show yourself". but he never did. He lived destitute and in poverty and died that way on the bank of the River Thames. This poem was found with his things written on newspaper when he died. In this, the last line: " And lo, Christ walking on the water, Not of Genesareth, but Thames!".
O WORLD invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air--
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumor of thee there?
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!--
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
The angels keep their ancient places--
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
'Tis ye, 'tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendored thing.
But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry--and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.
Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter, Cry--
clinging to Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Genesareth, but Thames!
Francis Thompson lived in late 19th century England. He was educated at Oxford but eventually dropped out because of the opium addiction he struggled with his whole life. He was poet, an addict, and mostly desitute in London. He was in and out of homelessness, living for a while with a couple who supported his poetry, living in monastaries while he detoxed. He is most well known for his religious poetry, particularly Hound of Heaven which describes a poet fleeing from God while God persists in pursuit of him. At the end of his life Thompson was sick, in poverty and homeless. He would write poetry on newspaper and send them to back to the local paper. They published these anonymous poems and wrote, "There is one among us greater than Milton. Please show yourself". but he never did. He lived destitute and in poverty and died that way on the bank of the River Thames. This poem was found with his things written on newspaper when he died. In this, the last line: " And lo, Christ walking on the water, Not of Genesareth, but Thames!".
Genesareth is the river thought to be referenced in Luke 5 where Jesus walks on water. Thompson says as he lay dying, God was not flat on a page in story or in some tradition. But in Thompson's eleventh hour on the bank of Thames the Lord walking toward him.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Poetry Monday
Poetry Monday.
I guess this is, in fact, prose. but it feels like nothing but poetry to me. Makes me think of waht beauty has been made out of things and that May is Perfect Knoxville, and you all want to Blue your Jazz. mostly because this is so beautiful I wish I had written it.
The author's note to Donald Miller's book "Through Painted Deserts":
IT IS FALL HERE NOW, MY FAVORITE OF THE FOUR seasons. We get all four here, and they come at us under the doors, in through the windows. One morning you wake and need blankets; you take the fan out of the window to see clouds that mist out by midmorning, only to reveal a naked blue coolness like God yawning.
September is perfect Oregon. The blocks line up like postcards and the rosebuds bloom into themselves like children at bedtime. And in Portland we are proud of our roses; year after year, we are proud of them. When they are done, we sit in the parks and read stories into the air, whispering the gardens to sleep.
I come here, to Palio Coffee, for the big windows. If I sit outside, the sun gets on my computer screen, so I come inside, to this same table, and sit alongside the giant panes of glass. And it is like a movie out there, like a big screen of green, and today there is a man in shepherd's clothes, a hippie, all dirty, with a downed bike in the circle lawn across the street. He is eating bread from the bakery and drinking from a metal camp cup. He is tapping the cup against his leg, sitting like a monk, all striped in fabric. I wonder if he is happy, his blanket strapped to the rack on his bike, his no home, his no job. I wonder if he has left it all because he hated it or because it hated him. It is true some do not do well with conventional life. They think outside things and can't make sense of following a line. They see no walls, only doors from open space to open space, and from open space, supposedly, to the mind of God, or at least this is what we hope for them, and what they hope for themselves.
I remember the sweet sensation of leaving, years ago, some ten now, leaving Texas for who knows where. I could not have known about this beautiful place, the Oregon I have come to love, this city of great people, this smell of coffee and these evergreens reaching up into a mist of sky, these sunsets spilling over the west hills to slide a red glow down the streets of my town.
And I could not have known then that if I had been born here, I would have left here, gone someplace south to deal with horses, to get on some open land where you can see tomorrow's storm brewing over a high desert. I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God's way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.
I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.
Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.
Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was. This is from where story stems, the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can't find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did You really do all of this to dazzle us? Do You really keep it shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom? God forbid Your glory would be our distraction. And God forbid we would ignore Your glory.
HERE IS SOMETHING I FOUND TO BE TRUE: YOU DON'T start processing death until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are cast out some fifty years, and just now, just last year I realized my visions were cast too far, they were out beyond my life span. It frightened me to think of it, that I passed up an early marriage or children to write these silly books, that I bought the lie that the academic life had to be separate from relational experience, as though God only wanted us to learn cognitive ideas, as if the heart of a man were only created to resonate with movies. No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:
I'll tell you how the sun rose
A ribbon at a time...
It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.
So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.
And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?
It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.
I want to repeat one word for you:
Leave.
Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn't it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.
Donald Miller.
I guess this is, in fact, prose. but it feels like nothing but poetry to me. Makes me think of waht beauty has been made out of things and that May is Perfect Knoxville, and you all want to Blue your Jazz. mostly because this is so beautiful I wish I had written it.
The author's note to Donald Miller's book "Through Painted Deserts":
IT IS FALL HERE NOW, MY FAVORITE OF THE FOUR seasons. We get all four here, and they come at us under the doors, in through the windows. One morning you wake and need blankets; you take the fan out of the window to see clouds that mist out by midmorning, only to reveal a naked blue coolness like God yawning.
September is perfect Oregon. The blocks line up like postcards and the rosebuds bloom into themselves like children at bedtime. And in Portland we are proud of our roses; year after year, we are proud of them. When they are done, we sit in the parks and read stories into the air, whispering the gardens to sleep.
I come here, to Palio Coffee, for the big windows. If I sit outside, the sun gets on my computer screen, so I come inside, to this same table, and sit alongside the giant panes of glass. And it is like a movie out there, like a big screen of green, and today there is a man in shepherd's clothes, a hippie, all dirty, with a downed bike in the circle lawn across the street. He is eating bread from the bakery and drinking from a metal camp cup. He is tapping the cup against his leg, sitting like a monk, all striped in fabric. I wonder if he is happy, his blanket strapped to the rack on his bike, his no home, his no job. I wonder if he has left it all because he hated it or because it hated him. It is true some do not do well with conventional life. They think outside things and can't make sense of following a line. They see no walls, only doors from open space to open space, and from open space, supposedly, to the mind of God, or at least this is what we hope for them, and what they hope for themselves.
I remember the sweet sensation of leaving, years ago, some ten now, leaving Texas for who knows where. I could not have known about this beautiful place, the Oregon I have come to love, this city of great people, this smell of coffee and these evergreens reaching up into a mist of sky, these sunsets spilling over the west hills to slide a red glow down the streets of my town.
And I could not have known then that if I had been born here, I would have left here, gone someplace south to deal with horses, to get on some open land where you can see tomorrow's storm brewing over a high desert. I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God's way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.
I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.
Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.
Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was. This is from where story stems, the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can't find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did You really do all of this to dazzle us? Do You really keep it shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom? God forbid Your glory would be our distraction. And God forbid we would ignore Your glory.
HERE IS SOMETHING I FOUND TO BE TRUE: YOU DON'T start processing death until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are cast out some fifty years, and just now, just last year I realized my visions were cast too far, they were out beyond my life span. It frightened me to think of it, that I passed up an early marriage or children to write these silly books, that I bought the lie that the academic life had to be separate from relational experience, as though God only wanted us to learn cognitive ideas, as if the heart of a man were only created to resonate with movies. No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:
I'll tell you how the sun rose
A ribbon at a time...
It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.
So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.
And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?
It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.
I want to repeat one word for you:
Leave.
Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn't it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.
Donald Miller.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Marilyn Kallet and TS Eliot and My So Called Life
"Good poetry can communicate before it's understood" T.S. Eliot
Poetry Monday
not memory, not memory
"the
fragment
has more to
do with
nature
than not"
bicoastal rush
oak to eucalyptus
aye-ayeing green coins
cliches don't
tremble
and I hold on to that?
fragrant cells
wavering
save me from hating
honestly, there is
identity in
me, like an oak
tree-- no, really,
really,
a little click-child
"its the terror and the way
you are falling out"
Marilyn Kallet, UT professor
I was given this poem in Mrs. Hartman's creative writing class my sophomore year in high school. As TS Eliot is right: Good poetry can communicate before its understood. And here I am, 8 years later, still no idea what this poem means. But as our friend Angela on My So Called Life reminds us, Sometimes someone says something really small and it fits right into that little place in your heart. That's how I feel about this one. I've only met Marilyn once and almost geeked out because I knew had her poem in my shoebox and in my brain for years. That's where you keep things you dont' want to lose, you know, that and those little places in your heart.
Poetry Monday
not memory, not memory
"the
fragment
has more to
do with
nature
than not"
bicoastal rush
oak to eucalyptus
aye-ayeing green coins
cliches don't
tremble
and I hold on to that?
fragrant cells
wavering
save me from hating
honestly, there is
identity in
me, like an oak
tree-- no, really,
really,
a little click-child
"its the terror and the way
you are falling out"
Marilyn Kallet, UT professor
I was given this poem in Mrs. Hartman's creative writing class my sophomore year in high school. As TS Eliot is right: Good poetry can communicate before its understood. And here I am, 8 years later, still no idea what this poem means. But as our friend Angela on My So Called Life reminds us, Sometimes someone says something really small and it fits right into that little place in your heart. That's how I feel about this one. I've only met Marilyn once and almost geeked out because I knew had her poem in my shoebox and in my brain for years. That's where you keep things you dont' want to lose, you know, that and those little places in your heart.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Poetry Monday
the first paragraph is the poem as I orginally read it several years ago, the second part is more of it that I found online today.
Subjective Pronoun Me, Stephen Bohler
Petrified was on top of Fears station
clinging to the edges and looking in all directions.
Cruel was burying Despair in the sand,
and when Anxious began to push me up to help Despair
Vengeful held me back
Dreary came over and laydown next to me.
Nervous kept yelling at Curious to stop going so far into the ocean.
Baffled watched Inspired build a beautiful sandcastle.
Selfish was busy stuffing sand into his pockets.
Crafty seemed to be making some kind of submarine out of seashells . . .
All this I watched (Attentive made me) quietly under a palm tree . . .
My emotions returned to me one by one as I slept in the warm sun.
Confused wanted to be last, but he was finally coaxed in before Calm returned."
I first read this poem in Rolling Stone magazine several years ago. The article was about the death of Stephen Bohler, an NYU freshman. I read an article online that described him as a popular kid-a juggler, a diver, a poet, always dashing uptown to play soccer in Central Park. He was a liberal, a vegetarian, a conscientious objector. He wanted to write a book called My Life As a Non-Fighter, and talked about it in a school essay: "I have not begun the book, but I have not really lived my life," he wrote.
The day that he died, he had taken psilocybin mushrooms a hallucinogen which robs anyone of any judgment to speak of. Stephen fell or jumped off the balcony of the NYU library right in front of some of his friends. The coroner ruled this death an accident rather than a suicide but opinion differs on whether or not Stephen killed himself intentionally or had taken so many drugs he was out of his mind. Students at NYU created a tribute to him and other student who had died: A vast collage of yearbook-style tributes hangs on a cinder-block wall"-you're my hero, because you brought your own Tabasco to college." Maybe he thought he was just playing around, but the thing is that powerful drugs don't play. They also don't discriminate: Men, Women, Sisters, Brothers, Fathers, Friends, Poets, jugglers, people are going to write books, people who's lives haven't begun get high enough to walk off buildings, literally and figuratively. Some don't, though, some get help, which is out there, thanks be to God.
I didn't mean this one to be so depressing, because it really is about the poem which I think is creative and clear and lovely. Ani Difranco has a song lyric that says, I'm 31 flavors and then some. This poem clearly describes the flavors of our personality and how they interact with each other. I was in high school when I read this for the first time and tore it out of the magazine of the people I was babysitting for and have kept it ever since. This is beautiful, self-reflexive, with strong images and personification. Subjective Pronoun Me, Thank you Stephen Bohler.
Subjective Pronoun Me, Stephen Bohler
Petrified was on top of Fears station
clinging to the edges and looking in all directions.
Cruel was burying Despair in the sand,
and when Anxious began to push me up to help Despair
Vengeful held me back
Dreary came over and laydown next to me.
Nervous kept yelling at Curious to stop going so far into the ocean.
Baffled watched Inspired build a beautiful sandcastle.
Selfish was busy stuffing sand into his pockets.
Crafty seemed to be making some kind of submarine out of seashells . . .
All this I watched (Attentive made me) quietly under a palm tree . . .
My emotions returned to me one by one as I slept in the warm sun.
Confused wanted to be last, but he was finally coaxed in before Calm returned."
I first read this poem in Rolling Stone magazine several years ago. The article was about the death of Stephen Bohler, an NYU freshman. I read an article online that described him as a popular kid-a juggler, a diver, a poet, always dashing uptown to play soccer in Central Park. He was a liberal, a vegetarian, a conscientious objector. He wanted to write a book called My Life As a Non-Fighter, and talked about it in a school essay: "I have not begun the book, but I have not really lived my life," he wrote.
The day that he died, he had taken psilocybin mushrooms a hallucinogen which robs anyone of any judgment to speak of. Stephen fell or jumped off the balcony of the NYU library right in front of some of his friends. The coroner ruled this death an accident rather than a suicide but opinion differs on whether or not Stephen killed himself intentionally or had taken so many drugs he was out of his mind. Students at NYU created a tribute to him and other student who had died: A vast collage of yearbook-style tributes hangs on a cinder-block wall"-you're my hero, because you brought your own Tabasco to college." Maybe he thought he was just playing around, but the thing is that powerful drugs don't play. They also don't discriminate: Men, Women, Sisters, Brothers, Fathers, Friends, Poets, jugglers, people are going to write books, people who's lives haven't begun get high enough to walk off buildings, literally and figuratively. Some don't, though, some get help, which is out there, thanks be to God.
I didn't mean this one to be so depressing, because it really is about the poem which I think is creative and clear and lovely. Ani Difranco has a song lyric that says, I'm 31 flavors and then some. This poem clearly describes the flavors of our personality and how they interact with each other. I was in high school when I read this for the first time and tore it out of the magazine of the people I was babysitting for and have kept it ever since. This is beautiful, self-reflexive, with strong images and personification. Subjective Pronoun Me, Thank you Stephen Bohler.
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