Scoreboard

So this past week my sister and I have been housesitting together for my mom in Farragut. So all week I have been switching from my little abode in Market Square to a perfectly manicured lawn in Farragut. This week has meant going to strength classes with my sister and watching her walk bowlegged for days. We have put cheese wiz on pills and fed them to the dog and nearly killed a tomato plant. Honestly. How do you people keep those things alive? Honestly. So one week and this is the last day. This day, Sunday, a long day's looooooong day and I drove from downtown out west for the 9th time in 5 days for the finale of Abby and Jen's house sitting adventure 2010. I was exhausted, done, over, spent, pooped and because coffee does not equal fewd, I was also so hungry that I seriously considered getting dinner at a gas station. "Dinner". because that, my 3 loyal readers, is what it has come to on days like these. But instead I went home and found Abby there, who had very nearly gone to Menchies to drown her own Sunday sorrows in froyo.Let us be real, who among us has not been there? So without our own respective pathetic dinners of menchies and gas station station delicacies we fended for ourselves: Abby was making a veggie burger and put in a tortilla and said outloud, Hello White Trash. I was out of saltines and was seriously jonesing for my new fav snack, I put oyster crackers and jelly on a spoon and ate them leaning against the counter while Abby read me blogs (by blogs I mean Texts From Last Night, blogs just sounds a little smarter). I made myself some eggs. At 24, making eggs is my newest skill. Abby found this hilarious earlier this week when I called her at work to ask her how to do it. If I ever find myself on internet/personal ad dating, if I ever give up gas station dinners on Sunday and give that a whirl instead, I will now be able to list making eggs as one of my marketable and desireable relationship skills. Single White Female. Can make eggs. I ate these man-magnet eggs at the kitchen table while the dog stared at me with a very concerned look at his face which I can only assume is trying to tell me, "Sour Cream and Onion chips from Pilot would probably have been a better decision." Could not have agreed more, dear doggy. Single White Female. Have chips, will travel. So Abby's Sunday was that kinda DAY too and we sat over the empty plate of eggs and compared our wounds and decided the next natural step to cheer ourselves up would be to go rent movies and buy diet mountian dews and packs of gum. Duh. So we drove to Weigels and listened to a combination of Sting Fields of Gold ( When he says something about the fields of Barley, Abby made some connection to Barleys and out loud wondered if Sting was singing about picking someone up at bar) and then a bad cover of Tupac's Changes, which is so appri-pro right now, as Tupac always is. And I had to smile, hearing Elton John's The Bitch is Back on the radio thanks to the fine folks over at B97.5. We had an unsuccessful attempt at Redbox and instead went home and went home to rewatch a fifties version of Leonardo Decaprio wear a Newsies hat in his reunion with Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road. This is a good movie for the time period of the fifties and the clothes and places and things, but a terrible movie about relationships. So, naturally this was a perfect movie for the almost-resorted-to-froyo-kind of night. So Abby and I bedded down on the couch with the dog and diet cokes and toasted our lives on this Sunday, the land of singledom, all the problems we don't have. As Abby said, "Here's to not dodging right hooks on the side of route 12." Amen to that.

So sports fans, Here's the scoreboard:

Cheese Wiz 0. Goldberg 1.
Whoever covered Tupac 0. Tupac throwbacks anytime 1.
Sour Cream and Onion Chips 1. My eggs 0.
Abby's White Trash Gyro 1. Menchies 0.
Sweltering East Tennessee Heat 1. Tomato Plant R.I.P.
Toilet Humor and cocktails with my sister 1. Crying into your diet mountain dew alone 0.

This blog has been brought to you by Kate Winslet's costume's designer, Free range eggs, and "that's just the way it is", the air conditioning newly fixed in my car, and new mercies for a better tomorrow morning.

Just standing in my kitchen

So today in lieu of poetry Monday, confession-food-sjp blog.

so one time when i was out of food, I put jelly on some saltines. Either because it was really good or that saltines come in huge packages or because I'm perpetually poor, I do this now all the time. Poorfolk food, brain food, after work food, awesome food, power food. Just standing in my kitchen by myself putting jelly on saltines. Seriously, favorite snack. Mmm boy. And then tonight, low and behold, my sister and her depth and breadth of Sex and the City knowledge said, Oh that's not weird, Carrie Bradshaw does that. In an episode called "Secret Single Behavior" SJP via Carrie B. said this: Carrie Bradshaw stacks saltines -- she puts grape jelly on them. And she eats them, standing up in the kitchen while reading the latest issue of Vogue." So I salute you SJP, all the rest of you with bare cabinets with only crackers and jars of jelly, mixing salty and sweet, and the fine folks who make saltines.

Here, Just listen.

Ever since I could remember, which is basically round the same time I learned to speak or read, I have always been someone who hated to read out loud. Public speaking, public reading ... articulate? I was a reader, still am. Through and through. I remember my junior year in high school my English teacher made us read poems out loud, going around the room. As as much as I hate reading out loud (and boy, did I hate it) that idea stuck with me: That the rhythm of the words and the beat of a poem needs to be heard, not just read. The day I fell in love with Mary Oliver's poetry I was at Remedy and Jackie Newman leaned across the counter and said, let me read it to you. And she leaned over and quietly read aloud from Thirst. If I were sitting beside you right now, I would do the same thing. Even though I have not learned to hate reading out loud any less (man, i still hate it), I would lean over and take the book out of your hand and say, "here, just listen. Just let me read this to you." And then I would quietly read it and you would think it was charming, just like I did when Jackie did it. It's just the speaking and the hearing of the thing; The poem would have voice and the rhythm would have a beat and it would better than just reading it quietly. But because I still hate me having to do the reading, and because I'm not, in fact, with you, and mostly because far better than me reading you anything is the poet reading their own poetry. If you close your eyes, the beat and the rhythm sound almost like live music. Most of these are videos with the audio recording included because that was the easiest way to find the readings. The audio is infinitely more important than the images in the video itself. So really, don't watch, just listen: Langston Hughes, TS Eliot, and Maya Angelou and Jude Simpson. Pretend that you bathed in the Euphrates when the dawns were young; That you were one of the women going to and fro, talking of Michaelangelo. That you hummed like a hive of honey bees and, God, how I loved your hair.
If you only listen to one, let it be Maya Angelou. Sweet voice. great, great poem.

Langston Hughes, Negro Speaks of Rivers

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15722


T.S. Eliot, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock



Maya Angelou, In and Out of Time


Jude Simpson, Not Cut Out for Religion

Mindfulness

This week at work I overheard a customer telling a story of Joshua Bell, child prodigy turned internationally renown violinist. Bell, winner of the Avery award at 39, sold out Boton's Symphony Hall, where "merely pretty good seats" went for $100. It is estimated that while playing at Symphony or Orchestra shows solo, Bell makes as much as $1,000 a minute. Bell plays a Stradivari violin handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari himself. Stolen 2 times from the previous owner, Bell bought it for a cool $3.5 million, which served his career well as, " no violin plays like a Strad from the 1710s." Meanwhile, Gene Weingarten, a writer for the Washington Post was leaving the subway station on morning and passed a raggedy man playing a keyboard who Weingarten said was quite talented, but his music was lost on the masses in the rush of the morning Subway. The reporter walked away and wondered if even YoYo Ma himself standing in this subway could cut through the crowds. Weingarten even he went into his office that day and tried to contact YoYo Ma's agent but nothing came of it. The music critic for the Washington Post later suggested Joshua Bell for the idea who agreed to participate in the experiment. So on a Friday morning in January, Bell, the world class violinist, put on jeans and t-shirt and took his place beside the metro trashcan with his Stradivari and played classically composed pieces to Washington's morning metro station. Weingarten writes that Bell started with Chaconne" from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. "Bell calls it "not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history." In the time that Joshua was playing, 7 people stopped, 27 gave money and he made $32. More important than the change people flipped into his open case, was the lack of attention to the music and the amount of people who not only did not part with their pennies, but did not even notice the music. Bell later said, "I'm surprised at the number of people who don't pay attention at all, as if I'm invisible. Because, you know what? I'm makin' a lot of noise!" This is a great experiment and great article written about it; The question that Weingarten's article clearly asks is, are we conditioned to stop and notice something beautiful if we aren't told to be looking for it? This what music, whether in the subway or in the symphony, and poetry and art of all kinds have to offer: Something beautiful, just because it's beautiful. This, in a nutshell, is what I have found to be beautiful in Mary Oliver;s poetry. All of her poems are just little nature journals that records perfectly ordinary old beautiful things on a regular day. She has deep reverence and a real ability to communicate what she finds in nature, which is a great capacity for God.
And also, for the record, a few weeks ago someone said something about this blog that made me feel silly for doing it. I felt like I was very small and this blog was very small and altogether silly. And maybe it is silly and smallish but the thing is, is that this silly small thing has made me read more poetry and I have loved it. Some of Mary Oliver's poems are making more sense to me right now than almost anything else I read or hear or know about; This small little poems have made me stop and want to listen to men busk in Market Square and notice other small, silly things. So whether this is small or silly or not, Jonathan Bell or any other subway musician, three cheers for mindfulness and Mary Oliver and art art art.


Mindful
By Mary Oliver

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for--
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world--
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant--
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these--
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

from Why I Wake Early

Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver
Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety –
best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light –
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.


All information about Jonathan Bell stuff found at :
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

5-7-5

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.

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!".

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.

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.