A Sweet Unrest

My haggard face

I loved this book so much I'm having trouble writing anything about it.  It was one of those lucky secondhand finds, I'd never heard of it and had no idea who Gregory Orr was.  Published in 2002, it looked pristine, unread, but it's thoroughly battered now, creased and scribbled in and mine.  It's all about how poetry helps us live.

I started reading poetry a little over four and a half years ago, late in life and at a time when things were not going all that well.  I mean all the sudden I was reading Keats on a freezing New England bathroom floor at 3am by the light of one of those smelly candles praying the baby (the first one) wouldn't wake up.  This book is very much about that kind of thing and it was lovely to read, and he starts in the introduction talking about music and about how songs also save us over and over again and how real it is so I knew right away I'd found  friend.

He writes about how we collect our favorite poems and lines, treasure them, and fashion them into something that helps us navigate our lives.  And he really is at this point just talking about poetry but to me it's so much more too- songs of course, images we love, and also a certain type of blog post, the ones we write ourselves trying to capture and make sense of our own experiences, and the ones we find by those miraculously kindred souls who become our favorite bloggers because they express for us what we might not be able to say for ourselves, or because they share stories from their lives that somehow echo ours even if they live a world away.  And play the perfect song to go along.

The isn't an anthology really but Orr includes a lot of poems and of those that were new to me I think this is my favorite.  

Feelings Wakened by a Mirror by Po Chu-i

My beautiful one gave it to me when we parted,
but I leave the mirror stored in its box.
Since her flowering face left my sight,
autumn waters have no more lotus blooms.
For years I've never opened the box;
red dust coats the mirror's green bronze.
This morning I took it out and wiped it off,
peered into it at my haggard face,
and, done peering, went on to ponder sadly
the pair of twined dragons carved on its back. 

A pocketful of disposable razors wrapped in a parking ticket

April 26th is Poem In Your Pocket Day here in the US.  I've always liked the idea of it, of people carrying around a few cherished, crumpled lines maybe to share but truthfully just because they're needed.  To borrow a phrase from someone we'll be hearing more from in a minute, I really am this foolish.

I've been saving this one especially for today, from this.

The Great Poet Has Gone by Adam Zagajewski

Thinking of C.M.

 

Of course nothing changes
in the ordinary light of day,
when the great poet has gone.
Gray sparrows and dapper starlings
still squabble heatedly
in the tops of ancient elms.

When the great poet has gone,
the city doesn't miss a beat, the metro
and the trams still seek a modern Grail.
In the library a lovely girl
looks in vain for a poem that could explain it all.

At noon the same noise surges,
while quiet concentration reigns at night,
among the stars- eternal agitation.
Soon the discotheques will open,
indifference will open-
although the great poet has died.

When we part for a long while
or forever from someone we love,
we suddenly sense there are no words,
we must speak for ourselves now,
there's no one to do it for us
- since the great poet is gone.

                            (translated by Clare Cavanagh) 

I've got a great song for you too- it's written by Mark Spence, author of the first poem in the collage above, and performed by him and his band Royal Chant.

Royal Chant - Hesitation Kills

In the motel coffee shop

Recovering from last week's festivities and shaking my head over the inner workings of my three year old who, through the round of bunny sightings, egg dyeing and hunting plus spring-themed baking, parties and days out, kept demanding to see Santa.

The rain has returned now and with it a little quiet, so back to the books.  Over the past few weeks (I got very happily sidetracked by this and the next one is on the way) I read through A Book of Luminous Things, an anthology edited by the poet Czeslaw Milosz.  This was my favorite thing in the book, it's such a strangely sweet and unexpected tale-

Toast by Leonard Nathan

There was a woman in Ithaca
who cried softly all night
in the next room and helpless
I fell in love with her under the blanket
of snow that settled on all the roofs
of the town, filling up
every dark depression.

Next morning
in the motel coffee shop
I studied all the made-up faces
of women.  Was it the middle-aged blonde
who kidded the waitress
or the young brunette lifting
her cup like a toast?

Love, whoever you are,
your courage was my companion
for many cold towns
after the betrayal of Ithaca,
and when I order coffee
in a strange place, still
I say, lifting, this is for you. 

Spinning

 My little one had a birthday last week.  If this doesn't sum it up I don't know what does.

Spinning by Kevin Griffith

I hold my two-year-old son
under his arms and start to twirl.
His feet sway away from me
and the day becomes a blur.
Everything I own is flying into space:
yard toys, sandbox, tools,
garage and house,
and, finally, the years of my life.

When we stop, my son is a grown man,
and I am very old.  We stagger
back into each other's arms
one last time, two lost friends
heavy with drink,
remembering the good old days. 

 

I can't read it without crying - perhaps it's that feeling I sometimes, on a bad day, have of my own life being pretty much over, my remaining years flying into space.  

But how we love them. What are you gonna do, eh?

xx

Their giggling progress

I am addicted to Instagram - it's kind of like Twitter only with pictures so there's no worry about spelling/being witty, making it perfect for parents of young children and other perennially exhausted individuals.  I also recently learned how to make nifty photo collages on my phone.  Here you see the result of my two new pastimes.  You might notice the prominence of glitter nail polish, an emergency measure after the sad thoughts of last week.  Similar to tea, there is no situation glitter nail polish can't improve.  

And the same is true of favorite books.  Edwin Morgan's The Second Life is one my new (poetry-era) favorites and it's got everything, all the big things, but I have been resting my eyes on this sweet, simple snapshot.

Linoleum Chocolate by Edwin Morgan

Two girls running
running laughing,
laughing lugging
two rolls of linoleum
along London Road-
a bar of chocolate
flies from the pocket
of the second, and a man
picks it up for her, she takes it
and is about to pocket it
but then unwraps it
and the girls have a bite
to recruit the strength
of their giggling progress.

The Second Life is out of print but many of the poems are in this.

 

What the living do

I'm not sure where I first heard about this poetry collection but I somehow knew that Marie Howe wrote it in the wake of her brother's death and I read it deliberately, wondering if I would see anything of myself.  Parts of it were very dark and disturbing, which may seem like an obvious thing to say in re a book about loss and death and grief, but unexpectedly it was the first part, about her childhood, which I found the most difficult.

There are three poems I really loved, the title poem being one of them and this being another.  I'm always pleased to come across a poem that has something to do with music, always and ever curious about what it means to someone else given what it means to me (and yet I am so poor at describing it!).

Without Music by Marie Howe

Only the car radio
driving from the drugstore to the restaurant to his apartment:

rock and roll, oldies but goodies,
and sometimes, softly, piano music

rising from the piano teacher's apartment on the first floor.

Most of it happened without music,
the clink of a spoon from the kitchen,

someone talking.  Silence.

Somebody sleeping.  Someone watching somebody sleep.

                                                        *            *            *           

I heard this again accidentally over the weekend and like the book it deals with the darkest things.  I was a brand new mother when the record came out and this song made me so sad and not in a natural way.  Even now I never really seek it out and when it does find me it stays in my head haunting me for days.  This is a beautiful performance of it, her voice every bit as pure, strong and lovely as on the record and I love how with the back up singer she manages to get that same incredible gooseflesh raising soaring ache on the chorus.  Brilliant.  But someone play something dancey quick!

In the library a lovely girl looks in vain for a poem that could explain it all

Over the weekend I visited one of my favorite places in all the world and came home with a new book which I love. It's him and Merwin in the place of honor on my bedside table.

New Hotel by Adam Zagajewski

     Krakow

In February the poplars are even slimmer
than in summer, frozen through.  My family
spread across the earth, beneath the earth,
in different countries, poems, paintings.

Noon, I'm on Na Groblach Square.
I sometimes came to see my aunt
and uncle here (partly out of duty).
They'd stopped complaining about their fate,

the system, but their faces looked like
an empty secondhand bookshop.
Now someone else lives in that apartment,
strange people, the scent of a strange life.

A new hotel was built nearby,
bright rooms, breakfasts doubtless comme il faut,
juices, coffee, toast, glass, concrete,
amnesia--and suddenly, I don't know why,
a moment of penetrating joy. 

               (Translated by Clare Cavanagh)

My heart creaks on its fault lines

A while back I read Kate Clanchy's 2004 collection Newborn.  According to the little bit of poking around I did, it seems writing about something as girlie as motherhood diminished her standing the poetry world.  But I liked it, and I especially liked that all the poems put together told real, complete story.  As I was reading it the first time I wasn't knocked over by any one poem, until the end, but by the time I finished I had an enormous amount of respect for what she'd done.  It progresses the way life with a newborn does, from the insulated, cocooned world of the early months to everyday life slowly penetrating back through sweet fog, and the way she depicts that is brilliant.  The last poem is an absolute stunner and cut me right to the quick, and it would completely stand on its own but it's a spoiler so we'll have something else.

Learning to Walk by Kate Clanchy

He's on the brink - all day
hanging on a table's edge,
nosing his feet - his fists - his grand
round Sévres head, slowly
into nothing.

                        All my life
I've smashed cups and wept,
and this is forever too, I guess;
this liquid heart, this sense
that he's the water, I'm the glass. 

It was the winter solstice

Aneurysm by Kate Clanchy

When my father heard his friend 
was dead, we sat a while and talked
of traffic: how cars clog
each by-way now, every road
you think you know.  We were quiet,
and I lit the lamp.  I thought

I could hear the cars outside,
bashing, lowing, rank on rank.
There'd been a crash, my father said,
and his friend had walked out,
shaken, saved.  It was hours
before the blood-clot got him.

I held my son on my lap.  It was
dark, it was the winter solstice.
We said there is no such thing
as the right route or a clear passage
no matter where you start,
or how you plan it. 

The glassy boys, the bursting girls

One of my favorite things this time of year is Desk Set, which isn't I think so much a Christmas film as a film set at Christmastime.  It's one of the few films to portray librarians not as dowdy ssshhing buzzkillers but as regular, smart working girls and I've always loved it for that as much as for the sparring between Hepburn and Tracy which is so wonderful it's almost a let down when they inevitably kiss and make nice at the end.  

(not really related but speaking of Christmas films, this made me laugh)

This kind of evokes the Desk Set era though I think it may have been written earlier.

Office Party by Phyllis McGinley

This holy night in open forum
     Miss Mcintosh, who handles Files,
Has lost one shoe and her decorum.
     Stately, the frozen chairman smiles

On Media, desperately vocal.
     Credit, though they have lost their hopes
Of edging toward an early Local,
     Finger their bonus envelopes.

The glassy boys, the bursting girls
    Of Copy, start a Conga clatter
To a swung carol.  Limply curls
     The final sandwich on the platter

Till hark!  a herald Messenger
     (Room 414) lifts loudly up
His quavering tenor.  Salesmen stir
     Libation for his Lily cup.

"Noel," he pipes, "Noel, Noel."
     Some wag beats tempo with a ruler.
And the plump blonde from Personnel
     Collapses by the water cooler.