So yes, we are still amid a global pandemic that has killed a few million people, but it’s spring, we have a sane president, I’ve had both my vaccinations and I’m feeling uncharacteristically optimistic. So I am working on a project, putting together some resources on poetry for university students and community.
So I have two questions.
1. What resources about poetry would you be interested in?
2. What common misconceptions do people have about poetry?
Let me know in the comments!
This week, and really so much of January so far, has felt a lot like Passover, the Angel of Death passing over us and letting us live. Especially after the January 6 Insurrection, fittingly falling on the Christian feast of Epiphany (manifestation: the three kings recognized Jesus as God) just in time to manifest and show us the worst of our nation’s history, it has been a fraught few weeks. And so on Wednesday when I heard sane, rational people speaking in whole grammatical sentences, I keep feeling that, really, that would have been enough. After the last traumatic four years and four months, when we’ve been repeatedly battered by Tweetstorms, shitstorms, and the nuclear dumpster fire that was 2020, I really wasn’t expecting much or hoping for much.
This brings me to the Jewish Passover song Dayenu, It Would Have Been Enough. There are fifteen stanzas describing all the things God did for the Jews, freeing them from slavery, doing miracles and staying close to them, and at the end of each one, everyone sings, Dayenu.
From Wikipedia:
Five Stanzas of Leaving Slavery
1) If He had brought us out of Egypt.
2) If He had executed justice upon the Egyptians.
3) If He had executed justice upon their gods.
4) If He had slain their first-born.
5) If He had given to us their health and wealth.
Five Stanzas of Miracles
6) If He had split the sea for us.
7) If He had led us through on dry land.
8) If He had drowned our oppressors.
9) If He had provided for our needs in the wilderness for 40 years.
10) If He had fed us manna.
Five Stanzas of Being With God
11) If He had given us Shabbat.
12) If He had led us to Mount Sinai.
13) If He had given us the Torah.
14) If He had brought us into the Land of Israel.
15) If He built the Temple for us.
Dayenu
Dayenu
Dayenu
Dayenu
Dayenu
Dayenu
Dayenu
Dayenu
Dayenu.
I needed this poem by our friend at the Flannel Files.
I dreamt I saw RBG in the grocery store pushing a cart down the canned food aisle in a black Adidas tracksuit Her crocheted collar a white flower blooming in her chest I told her I was sorry we had asked her to hold on for so long She smiled and nodded then went back to work filling her cart applesauce sardines blackberry jam #RIPRBG
The writing stays. I wrap it around me like
A blanket, like a superhero’s cape.
Friends drift. Size doesn’t matter and
Sometimes is downright
Counterproductive. Age happens—and
That’s the soft option—bringing its own
Aches and pains. But through it all,
Beyond it all, the writing stays.
So I decided to make a list of things I’m grateful for in the current moment.
Keep Calm, Stay Well, Keep Writing.
So, after a few decades as an English teacher, and a few more as a serious reader, I am pretty blind. My glasses, which started out as readers, and then added distance, are now trifocals, with the middle range for the computer. And normally that’s just fine, although whenever I get a slightly stronger prescription, I have to be really careful (or just take them off) while going down stairs for a few weeks–because that can get wonky.
But yesterday, on my second day of exercisanity walking while wearing a bandana, I found myself 1) fogging my glasses and 2) having my glasses rise over the bandana, putting the mid/low bit of the lenses in front of me as I tried to walk on uneven Boston sidewalks. At first the problem was simply tripping slightly. But then I started to get eyestrain. Then nauseated. Then– Yeah, I cut my walk short so I wouldn’t throw up on the side of the street. Yes, Covid-19 is a respiratory disease, but vomit on a sidewalk in your neighborhood is just never a good look.
But the metaphor holds. My attempts at personal safety and at protecting others made it kinda hard to see clearly. It made me self-isolate even though I really felt the need for exercise.
I’m not sure what else I can get from that, but it seemed worth thinking through.
Keep Calm, Stay Well, Keep Writing.
I got an email from Kickstarter a few days ago that spoke to the current moment:
“In times of crisis, some might feel selfish pursuing creative work. It might be hard to imagine why your art matters in the midst of a pandemic. But think of the book that shaped your childhood; the movie you watch whenever you feel sad. Creative work transports us. It recharges and renews us. And in order to experience it, someone needs to make it—to get that strange, unprecedented idea out into the world.” (No author cited)
But a few hours earlier, for the first time in a long damn time I started writing a poem, which I will find tomorrow and finish and post here. But in the meantime I wrote this for a prompt on one of my Facebook groups. It is dedicated to Musashi, who is now the Teaching Assistant for my now-online classes.
Love in the time of plague is this black cat
walking over my keyboard because he knows
attention is love, attention to what your loved one
attends to is love, and also when she doesn’t yell at you
for making all the M’s run across the screen
that reticence, the soft voice calling you
a goober, that most of all is also love.
And yes. That is my rollbook he’s sitting on.
So last Tuesday, one of my lesbian friends, who teaches 5th grade science at a nearby school, texted me for a poem that she could read at the school assembly. They have been doing a poem a week, and she had asked if she could do something for Pride, which has just kicked off in Boston. I said sure.
I spent two days writing, working on a sestina, my favorite form, since it would give me a way to look at the idea of pride over the years, which would be educational and supportive for the kids, and also reflect some things I’ve been learning from my friends and other queer role models from over the years.
So this is what I wrote.
What We Mean, Now, By Pride
a sestina
Years ago, people always said that pride
Was bad, that it and humility were night and day,
That proud people thought only of themselves.
Being proud meant being vain, and that was a no-no.
It meant that you loved only the person in the mirror.
For centuries, folks used “pride” in that sense.
And if you think about it, that probably made sense.
Ancient Greek playwrights warned of the perils of pride,
How heroes saw themselves as gods in their mirrors
And overestimated themselves on the day
Of battle. That’s a good way to get killed, no
Doubt about it. Heroes need to know themselves
Accurately, what they can do and be. Knowing yourself
Can be difficult. We change as we grow, gaining a sense
Of who we are and who we might become. To know
Who you are is wisdom. To accept who you are is pride,
The good kind of pride, the one that says, “Today
I will be myself in earnest! When I look in the mirror
I will see the good I can do, and those who see me will mirror
That goodness back.” Sometimes we change one self
For another, learning to be better and love better every day.
And it’s true: there will be dark, rainy days. There’s no sense
Denying that. There will always be days it’s hard to feel pride
Or joy or accomplishment: this is a fact we know.
So we must stand up, let the rain run off us, take no
Notice of those who cannot see us as we see ourselves mirrored
Back. We stand tall, proud of our good selves and our good pride,
Proud to be who we are, love who we love, and accept the self
That God or the universe gave us, with a clear sense
That we will give our gifts to the world, now and someday
In the future, when we’ve dreamed and worked our way to a day
When everyone is accepted for who they are, with no
Exceptions. This is not a utopian dream in any sense.
Change happens; the world expands, and then mirrors
Become kinder to those who look at themselves
And smile because they finally know this pride.
Let us begin this work today, start by looking in the mirror
Accepting what we know, accepting our truest self
And our sense, finally, of deep and lasting pride.
I sent it to my friend and she expressed shock that I had written the poem. She had expected me to send her some good gay poem I knew about or found online. But because I knew that she had read my poetry in the past, it never occurred to me that she had meant anything other than that I should write one.
Today was the assembly. Afterwards she sent me a text saying, “I want to thank you for putting the time in and writing that beautiful poem about Pride. It was a huge success….! I even heard there were some tears.”
Success.
Happy Pride Month!
I often tell my writing students that we all write alone but we shouldn’t always write alone. What I usually mean by this that nobody can adequately read their own writing much of the time, so we need someone else—or better yet, a few someone elses—to give us feedback.
But recently I got the opportunity to work with a new friend on a new creative endeavor. Although we are both teachers, we are also artists: she, a photographer, and me, a poet. I have frequently caught my breath when seeing her photographs of the city. Sometimes they are simply (“simply”) from an unusual angle—from the ground looking down the trolley tracks, or from the top of a spiraling stairway. Sometimes it’s the filter she uses: a street corner with all the colors but blue drained away, for example. It reminds me of M.C. Escher or Georgia O’Keeffe. And of course, that’s what artists do: find some lens that stops us in our tracks and forces us to look, to actually see what is in front of us.
We were discussing this over sushi and beer on St. Patrick’s Day (because, duh, sushi on St. Patrick’s Day) and decided to set up on Instagram account to present pairs of our work. She would send me a photo and I would write a poem.
So we set it up. (Okay, TBH she set it up and I nodded and gave opinions when she asked me about choices. I did mention that I’m the poet here.) Over the second beer, we came up with the description of the project @vertexekphrases:
“Our project: creating common endpoints of two rays, where lines meet and act as a rhetorical device where one medium of art works to relate to another.”
We liked the image of the vertex, since the two rays are always at the same angle to each other, no matter how far out the rays go, so even when our two art forms are very different, we can still be in conversation with each other, or the art we make can be.
I’ve engage in ekphrasis for years, usually writing poetry about Japanese woodblock art, as I have written about here before, but also writing about the works of artists such as Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper. But now, I get to write into the works of a contemporary artist. Yay me!
So our Blog Buddy, Mike Allegra, is having a contest to give away a copy of Scampers Thinks Like a Scientist. The ballot question is what fictional character would you most want to have as a next-door neighbor. I picked Hermione Granger. We could go to used bookstores together and then come back home and argue about how we are each going to arrange our home library. This isn’t thinking like a scientist, I know. It’s thinking like a humanist.
Image: “Hermione in the Library” by Pelegrin-tn
Cover art: Elizabeth Zechel
buildingapoem 