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The Sunday Poem : Anzhelina Polonskaya, Translated by Andrew Wachtel

November 17, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with 0 Comments

 

Anzhelina Polonskaya

 

I first met Russian poet Anzhelina Polonskaya several years ago at the MacDowell Colony, where many of the poems in her new collection, Paul Klee’s Boat, were written.

While in New Hampshire, Anzhelina graciously offered to share her work at a local poetry event. She read each poem in the original Russian, while another MacDowell artist read the English translation. In casual conversation, Anzhelina seems quite soft spoken, but her poems carry all of the force of a head-on collision, particularly when read aloud. She kept us all mesmerized until the final period on the page.

“Polonskaya consciously guards her outsider status,” translator Andrew Wachtel writes in the introduction to Paul Klee’s Boat. She chooses “to live not in Moscow itself, but in the little town of Malakhovka, where she was born in 1969, some thirty miles from the center of the city, a peaceful enclave far from the daily squabbles of Moscow literary life.”

When Polonskaya sent her poetry to Wachtel for translation in 1999, he says he “discovered a poetic voice quite different from the meta-metaphorists and conceptualists of the 1970s and 80s.” Wachtel elaborates in his introduction:

Perhaps this is because Polonskaya, unlike most Russian poets, had not received a classical literary eduction. Rather, her poetry comes almost exclusively from her own experience and, even more important, from her own thoughts. This is not to say that Polonskaya is uneducated. She has read widely in Russian (Brodsky, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, and Mayakovsky being particularly important) in Anglo-American and in Spanish poetry. Nevertheless, her lack of formal literary education has allowed her to be far freer in her relationship with previous poets than is the case with many of her contemporaries…While one can find echoes of the diction of other poets in her work, her poetry lacks the typical self-consciousness of those poets who are more immediately aware of the weight of their literary tradition.

Loss, loneliness, and miscommunication are major themes in Polonskaya’s work. While most of the poems in the new collection explore these ideas from a personal perspective, the last ten poems commemorate the horrific sinking of the Soviet submarine Kursk in 2000—a tragic loss on an entirely different scale. The ten poems in Polonskaya’s Kursk cycle were the basis of the libretto for composer David Chisholm’s “Oratorio-Requiem” Kursk, which debuted at the Melbourne Arts Festival last year. Here is the fourth chorus from the cycle:

00.15 Water in the hold. The deck rocks.
We sail. A taut wire of legs,
we bespatter the walls

00.45 We’re sinking. The anchor glows
like a farewell star. Wind rasps, the cries,
the sea sucks the Great Bear.

00.53 The storm laid the blueness of its hands
on the heeling boat. Called for help,
no answer. Nothing lasts forever.

“The high point of this collection, in my view, is the ten poems of the cycle Kursk,” says Wachtel.

They’re haunting poems, and the lack of narrative or specifics only adds to their weight and mystery.

For today’s Sunday Poem, I’ve chosen three selections from Paul Klee’s Boat. Enjoy the poems and your Sunday, and have a wonderful Thanksgiving week.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grey and Blue

 

Today you came again and asked me to buy
you some clothes.  We chose something blue and grey,
but you kept standing there, head hanging, saying: “it won’t do,
won’t do.”  And, seeing that my hands too have become all wrinkled,
I suddenly felt, how could these hands lead you to accept a
simple bolt of cloth?  They just can’t.
There’s much shame in this world, but perhaps the least known
is to age before your mother’s eyes.

 
 
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The Sunday Poem : Bruce Snider

November 10, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with 1 Comment

 

Poet Bruce Snider

 

Bruce Snider’s latest poetry collection, Paradise, Indiana, is a book steeped in place, from Midwestern farms, to taxidermy conventions, to interstates dotted with roadkill, to the Pick ‘N Save, where the narrator’s grandmother shoplifts.

Reading the collection sequentially, a moving narrative unfolds about adolescent love and loss set in the cornfields and rest stops of Indiana. Although the suicide of the speaker’s cousin, Nick, is the centerpiece of the book, Snider’s memory-driven poems are never morbid, indulgent, or sentimental. Each poem is like an absorbing snapshot, capturing the sights, smells, sounds, and emotions of the narrator’s past.

It is this force of memory—the gap between present and past, between the old self and the new—that gives these poems their heft and poignancy. The cumulative effect is formidable, not dissimilar to reading a compelling book of connected short stories or a novella. Snider’s gift is concision; there are so few words on the page, and yet he stuns us with how much depth he can impart. Snider makes every word of Paradise, Indiana count.

“We can neither love nor hate the place from which we come,” writes C. Dale Young. “These places divide us ‘like one of those snowy Indiana towns / with names like Paradise or Liberty.’” Snider’s poems are not only an elegy for his lost cousin, as well as his adolescent self, but also for a lost home: “25% of Hoosier women died, their long dresses and aprons catching fire” Snider writes in the poem “Indiana History.” But this rural community of Holsteins, female factory workers, and barbed wire is changing: “Two miles away / the Wal-Mart is going in, barns giving way / to Pizza Hut.”

To his credit, Snider knows better than to use his home state as mere decorative backdrop (after all, this is not a bad country music song or some nostalgic travel essay). Snider’s Indiana is shot through with both tenderness and authenticity; this place, with its “gutted saw mill” and “turtles tucked in burrows,” is as much a part of him as his own skin.

 

 

“Like many writers I mostly write what I’d like to read,” Snider told Brian Brodeur at How a Poem Happens. ”I do believe in inspiration, but I also think … [writing poetry] generally requires a lot of help, which often means sweat and tears. Or at the very least it means showing up and making yourself available. I’m not generally someone who’s struck with lines, images, or ideas while walking down the street. Not much happens for me unless I’m sitting in front of an empty page or at the computer.”

“Nothing in Snider’s America is ever lost: not love, not beauty, not the first furtive kisses of adolescent boys,” says D.A. Powell. “In this paradise, no one form of pleasure takes dominion over the others.”

“These powerful eloquent poems explore the difference between the place we make and the place that makes us,” poet Eavan Boland says of Snider’s book.

We’re all divided beings, and Bruce Snider’s Paradise, Indiana eloquently captures that division with all of the grit and comedy of a compassionate writer who’s narrowly made his escape. And like Lot’s wife, he just can’t resist looking back.

 

 

 

 

Epitaph

 
 

Because I could be written anywhere,
I loved the hard surface of the blade,
my name carved into barn doors, desktops,
the peeled face of a shag-bark hickory.
I pressed my whole weight into it, letters

grooved deep as the empty
field rows along Tri-Lakes where I’d seen
my cousin Nick buried in ground so hard
they had to heat the dirt with lamps
before they could dig.  I gutted squirrels

my grandmother fried, hanging
skins from the window,
and with the same knife gouged a B
at the base of the frozen creek bank,
the season breaking

like the rose our teacher, Miss Jane,
dipped in nitrogen so it would shatter.
There were more atoms, she claimed,
in the letter O, than people in the entire state.
I could feel God inside that letter,

the vast sky refigured, buds scrawled
on the black limbs of trees.
Trucks carried spring feed down
Highway 9 as I wove through headstones,
tracing names in the late frost,

looking for Nick’s plot
with the wax white roses,
his lucky fishing lure.  I could sense
him down there, satin-lined,
curled like the six-toed cat

we’d found bloated in the creek, alive
with lice and maggots.  Sometimes
I was sure I could hear him, restless,
waiting for me, the Wabash
pushing its icy waters, my tongue

humming with the fizz.  It never ended,
that stretch of road snaking back home
like an artery through my own heart
where an owl gripped a rat in its claw
over I-80.  I’d put my hands in my pockets

and walk, dreaming of the places I’d go,
the things I’d do, the dump rising
to meet me at the edge of town,
chrome bumpers twisted as the owner
himself, withered arm swinging a fist.

I waited for something to escape—
mouse darting from a glove box, oil
from a cracked sump.  I could stand
on a crushed Chevy, feeling it all
thaw inside me: asphalt

and barbed wire, cows and steaming
pails of milk, even the graveyard
rising, new stones nursing old griefs,
slow bones and winter’s cherry trees
making their long walk to leaf.

 

 

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The Sunday Poem : Martha Collins

November 4, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with 0 Comments

 

Poet Martha Collins (Photo by Doug Macomber)

 

As a five-year-old boy, Martha Collins’ father sold fruit in front of the Blue Front Restaurant in Cairo, Illinois. One November day in 1909, he was lifted onto a relative’s shoulders to watch a bloodthirsty mob of 10,000 people kill a black man, and then hang an accused white murderer. In her critically acclaimed book, Blue Front (Graywolf 2006), Collins carefully examines the horrific event and its aftermath, especially the effect on her father, who later seeks a home in an all-white community. She then extends her thoughtful scrutiny to incorporate newspaper accounts, photographs, personal accounts, and history to expose the way racism permeates all layers of society.

Martha Collins’ latest collection, White Papers (Pitt Poetry 2012), is the perfect follow-up to Blue Front. In a series of experimental, narrative, untitled poems, she explores race from a number of personal, historical, and cultural perspectives. What does it mean to be “white” in a multi-racial society with a deeply racist past?

Collins’ writing style is restrained, and she makes brilliant use of white space in the book, even going so far as to leave some pages intentionally blank. “These fierce, beautiful poems not only confront the illimitable issue of “whiteness” itself,” says Gail Mazur, “they are a breakthrough in the conversation we, with our fractured thinking about race, have yet to have. They defy the silences and insist nothing is unspeakable.”

“White Papers is that difficult beginning, the one beneath traditional poetic confessions of written Whiteness,” writes Thomas Sayers Ellis. “Martha Collins transforms the history of America’s troubled racial roots and, most importantly, her own into a slide show of non-capitalized flesh. This book is the one we knew was out there but had rarely read. It is an honest and powerful half-portrait, leaning into its own brave profile.”

With Tuesday’s election fast approaching, Martha Collins’ poem “[white paper #46]“ seemed like the perfect choice for today’s Sunday Poem. Enjoy your weekend and don’t forget to vote!

 

 

 

[white paper #46]

 
 

Obama Waffles Mix
sold at Values Voter
Summit September

2008 in a yellow
box with an Aunt
Jemima version

of the candidate
on the front wide
eyes thick lips and on

the top flap the candidate
in Muslim dress and on
the back the candidate

in Mexican sombrero
with a recipe for Open
Border waffles to serve

illegal aliens all
the same African
American terrorist

immigrant not
white like the stuff
in the box

which cannot be
eaten and enjoyed
until mixed and browned

 

 
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The Sunday Poem : James Arthur

October 27, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with 4 Comments

 

Poet James Arthur (Photo by Sean Hill)

 

“That feeling of becoming a new person in a different place, even if it’s an illusion, is intoxicating to me, and always has been,” says poet James Arthur. “I love writing about places, but only places where I don’t belong.”

James’s debut collection, Charms Against Lightning from Copper Canyon Press, captures places that are both strange and familiar. He is fascinated with the smallest details of daily life: the minutia that too often goes unnoticed, as well as larger forces like history and politics that influence our personal relationships.

One of my favorite poems, “In Defense of the Semicolon,” (included below) is the perfect example of how Arthur skillfully merges humor, sharp observation, with intimate revelations.

James often composes his work in his head while walking, and a number of the poems in Charms Against Lightning reveal a talented flâneur absorbing his surroundings, whether wandering down an icy, urban street or hiking deep in a New England forest.

In “Daylight Savings” Arthur writes: “Give me some light / in the maplefire, in the sudden fierce embranglement / and rapid setting on / of this wind, its sweep that bends the saplings / and deforms the standing leaves.”

To see the world through James Arthur’s eyes is to rediscover the mystery and beauty that was right in front of us all along: “I pulled pears / from the pear tree, and saw a few things / grow (the wise, dumb pumpkins / engorged below the gate…). / I split a stump, wrote letters, gathered / oysters, ate the rain.”

 

 

 

 

In Praise of Noise

 

             The sound begins with a furnace
clicking awake in a two-room house, answered
by a few, then more, voices: gauges,

and old-fashioned watches ticking out of synch, in growing number,
so their tip-tip-tip fattens to a moan, joined

by a horn’s upbeat honkity-honk, then ringtones and speakers
rehearsing drawn horsehair, air in a woodwind, or mimicking

a hand slapping a polyester drumhead, but unlike
             these coarser frictions, playing the same, every time.
A car door bangs, a jackhammer hammers, and a bassline

             purrs through a wall. The sound congeals,
sucking in more, a mechanical syrup in an IV drip, the automatic

             ruckus of a robotic ocean, a symphony
                              no one wrote, confounding every pattern:

teach me the song that no one can sing, someday
             to be the song of everything.

 

 

 
 

In Defense of the Semicolon

 

“No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships

that only idiots need defined by punctuation.”

— Richard Hugo

 

But it’s a reassuring logic that rivers freeze
because your hemisphere has rolled away from the sun,
that cities rest because there must be time for resting.
I could never deny it, or disown my desire
for the certainty of home, for mills and reservoirs
I always come back to. I’m thinking of a girl
pinning butterflies through her bangs, the first woman
I ever asked to marry me. She was slight and strange;
her brother lived in England, and was dying there.
Years after our split, she and I met in an open-air restaurant
crowded with chatter and cigarettes. I was still very young,
still afraid of being abandoned at the terminal.
She no longer ate; she had lost teeth and some hair,
she said. There were pale islands of skin
where the butterflies had perched. The waiter came around
to refill our coffee, a phone was ringing, and fifty feet away
streetcars jostled like dusk nudging against darkness;
even between those two there are gangways:
moveable bridges ship to shore, small therefores.

 

 

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The Sunday Poem : Bruce A. Jacobs

October 20, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with 2 Comments

 

Bruce A. Jacobs

 

The Sunday Poem is back!

Apologies to readers who missed the poem in their inbox last weekend. I appreciate your emails and messages. It’s good to know that the series has become such an integral part of your weekend and that you genuinely look forward to it.

I’ve just returned from a nine-day arts trip that included visits to Norwalk, New York, Newark, and Boston. Because the Sunday Poem doesn’t simply involve preparing the post (it also involves hours of work sharing the poem on social media, through email, etc.), I’m not always able to publish new articles when I’m on the road. I want to be certain that all Gwarlingo Sunday Poets receive the time and attention they deserve. Thanks for your understanding.

One of the highlights of this recent work-trip was attending the Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey, for the first time. This is the largest poetry event in the country and exceeded my expectations in every way. It was fun to see so many Sunday Poets at the event and to meet new writers for the series. Stay tuned for an in-depth article and photo essay on the festival. I’ll also be sharing some other highlights from my travels on Gwarlingo in the coming weeks.

 

 

Today’s Sunday Poem is the perfect example of technology actually fulfilling its potential to build genuine connections. Bruce A. Jacobs emailed me after discovering Gwarlingo through a friend’s Facebook post on Natalie Diaz’s poetry. Although we’ve never met in person, we immediately struck up a correspondence about writing, music, his work on race relations, and his Tuesday Muse column at the agonist.org.

In addition to writing and speaking about race relations, Bruce is working on a new book of poetry (which is long overdue). As you can see from the three poems I’ve featured here, Jacobs has a sharp, empathetic eye. What I appreciate most about his work in all genres is his belief that impassioned viewpoints and compassionate respect for others’ experiences are compatible.

But Bruce never falls into the trap of didacticism in his poetry. He allows the scenes, ideas, and individuals he portrays to speak for themselves.

I hope you enjoy this introduction to Bruce Jacobs’s writing. Have a fabulous Sunday!

 

 

 

Gallery

 

Lines are lies
we tell ourselves
through our eyes.

Look: If a sphere of air
helps push up tall trees, then
where does the sky start?

Painters know this question.
They work to undo our vision
while we watch.

 

 

 

Knock-Knock

 

It’s probably nothing,
An invisible something
you’ve had all your life.
And I’m thinking:
This is what they all say,
the men who hold clipboards
and sell you things you can’t
refuse: oil filters, echocardiograms.
In the hard white room
my life clears its throat.
Heart murmur. Perfect:
An echo throbbing
backward in time.
A sound God’s receptionist makes
to keep us waiting quietly.

This was not the plan: a hurting hip,
mystery gut pang and now
the whisper in my chest.
Six months ago I left Esther
to keep myself from getting sick.
The way
she lorded it over my body
with suggestions and preventions,
like a plumber camped out
in the cellar, an expert gearing up to
love a broken me. Time to get out, I said
to myself and I thought I
got away but now it’s
hounds in the woods, the sound
everywhere. Murmur. In the dark,
my blood roars through its circle of tunnels.
Head under the pillow, I try to hear
down into the torrent, listen
for the submerged sound
of someone at
the door.

 

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The Sunday Poem : John Yau

October 6, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with 5 Comments

 
 

 

Poet, art critic, and curator John Yau was born in Lynn, Massachusetts to Chinese emigrants. Like a painter obsessed with the physicality of paint, Yau takes pleasure in words as words. His poetry is playful, surprising, and pushes the limits of language. “I do not speculate about ceaseless wonders,” Yau writes. “I go out and see if I might/ Find another remote and insubstantial form.”

Yau is also a noted art critic and curator, who has published many works of art criticism. His passion for visual art permeates his latest poetry collection Further Adventures in Monochrome. Yau not only creates a poetic dialogue with artists like John Cage, Yves Klein, and Andy Warhol, but he also employs a collage technique in his poetry, much like the Surrealists and Pop Artists.

Though Yau is using words to convey his vision, his poetry is both visual and aural. It’s this interplay between language, sound, and image that allows Yau’s poetry to be both deep and mischievous. Further Adventures in Monochrome is multidimensional in every sense of the term. Reading a poem by John Yau is not unlike the process of looking at a sculpture in a gallery—the work is best appreciated when approached from different directions: above, below, in the round.

The Poetry Foundation writes, Yau “has won acclaim for his poetry’s attentiveness to visual culture and linguistic surface. In poems that frequently pun, trope, and play with the English language, Yau offers complicated, sometimes competing versions of the legacy of his dual heritages—as Chinese, American, poet, and artist.”

One of my favorite poems in Yau’s new collection is the title poem, “Further Adventures in Monochrome.” The fifteen-part poem investigates the life, art, and ideas of French artist Yves Klein, sometimes in the voice of the artist himself. What follows is an excerpt from “Further Adventures in Monochrome”—three sections of the poem that beautifully capture John Yau’s startling imagination.

 

Yves Klein, Monochrome blue sans titre (IKB 67), 1959, 92 x 73 cm. (Photo courtesy yveskleinarchives.org)

 

 

The pages of Yves Klein’s 1954 book Yves Peintures (Photo courtesy www.cuba.nl)

 

 

 

 

from Further Adventures in Monochrome

 

5)

Everything exists to end up in a book, Stephane Mallarme

Nothing exists except in a book, which is the imagination, Yves Klein

 

In 1954, with the help of my aunt, I published two books, Yves
Peintures and Haguenault Peintures. They documented the paintings
I wanted to preserve in the impossible, the only domain we should
long for. The preface for each book was made of thick black lines,
rather than words, which links the books to Mallarme: An insinuation
simple        in the silence. The purported author of the prefaces was Claude
Pascal (or Pascal Claude). His name links him to the philosopher
who wrote: “Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of
contradiction a sign of truth.” It is said that you can’t have it both
ways, but they are wrong. The infinite sky shows us this with every sun
shower.

Each book has ten tipped-in color plates. In Yves Peintures, each plate is
signed “Yves” and the name of a city in the lower right hand corner.
It might be where I made these paintings made of colored paper.
Isn’t that what happens to a painting when it is put in a book?
It becomes a piece of colored paper. So why not show that?

Each tipped-in plate is a piece of colored paper pointing to a
monochromatic painting that never existed, except in the mind’s eye.
(Isn’t this the only eye with which one sees?)

To make love is to be neither abstract nor literal.

To argue over whether the paintings existed or not is to miss the point.
It is like arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a
pin when everyone knows that infinity is not a number, but a feeling,
at once overwhelming and elusive, impossible to grasp and equally
impossible to avoid.  Just try sitting alone in a bath for an hour with no
one in the next room.

Walt Whitman embraced multitudes and sang the body electric. But to
embrace infinity knowing that it will embrace you (and that it begins
to do so long before you arrived in this quadrant) is the song I want
to sing—its single note followed by a silence of equal length, a silence
that, as John Cage whispered, can never be silent.

That the paintings did not exist should have sent you
on the road to the impossible.
Where would you turn if you could not see them?
I wanted you to see what could not be seen,
to glimpse that fact, to be touched by something small and vast,
and know that you are somewhere between them,
moving in both directions at the same time.

 

 

 

7)

Yves Klein Blue (Interlude)

 

Bevel slue inky

Been veil sulky

Bye venue skill

Bilk evenly use

Bulk eye snivel

Buys eleven ilk

Blues like envy

 

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The Sunday Poem : Jean Valentine

September 29, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with 7 Comments

 

Poet Jean Valentine (Photo © Star Black courtesy Star Black)

 

No one has captured the essence of Jean Valentine’s poetry as eloquently as the late writer Adrienne Rich:

“Looking into a Jean Valentine poem is like looking into a lake: you can see your own outline, and the shapes of the upper world, reflected among rocks, underwater life, glint of lost bottles, drifted leaves. The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet. This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn’t approach in any other way.”

Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 – 2003  is one of the few poetry collections I keep close at hand by the bedside. You can open Valentine’s book to practically any page and find brave, urgent, personal poems that somehow manage to be both emotional and unsentimental (not an easy task).

When Jean called to tell me that her brand new chapbook [The ship] was about to be published by Red Glass Books, I jumped at the chance to share her latest work with Gwarlingo readers. In addition to being a well-respected teacher and mentor, Valentine is the winner of the National Book Award for poetry, the Guggenheim, several NEA fellowships, and was a recent finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. I can think of no better way to kick-off a Sunday morning…

 

 

 

 

Shirt in Heaven

 

Come upon a snapshot
of secret you, smiling like FDR, leaning on your crutches—

come upon letters I thought I’d burned—

“I suppose you’ve got a place with lots of stairs.“

“I’m at the end of something, you’re at the beginning.”

 

I’d be rich, I’d get you an elevator:
a rare old smoky wood one.

I was at the beginning, so I was the oldest:
a looking-away cage that opens at your touch.

 

       —dearest, they told me a surgeon sat down
in the hospital morgue, next to your body, & cried.
He yelled at the aide to get out.

His two sons had been your students.
—me too, little-knowing—

 
 
 
 
 

Bury your money

 

Now, there:       there’s the money.

Great captivities tap
in our sleep.

But we made a promise         God and us
to meet in another life
when we both could want it.
If only one of us wanted, that
wouldn’t be enough.
We made a promise to be naked
—though great famines bury the ear and the mouth,
though captivities cut parts away, or swell, or sap them,
we made a promise to be naked, John Cage said
Music is permanent, only listening is intermittent.

 
 
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The Complete Creative Part 2 : Christian McEwen on Creativity and Slowing Down

September 26, 2012 in Events, Process, The Complete Creative, Words with 12 Comments

 

 

Every day we’re faced with the decision of how and where to focus our attention. Sustained attention may be the most endangered resource in our modern age. We often forget that we have a choice about how we spend our time, as well as how we use technology. No one is requiring us to live harried lives in a reactive state, constantly struggling to stay on top of emails, texts, deadlines, and our overfilled schedules.

Writer and poet Christian McEwen understands the relationship between time and imagination better than anyone. Her new book World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down makes a potent plea for us to live deeper, more deliberate  lives. McEwen shows us that making art isn’t about squeezing yet another activity into an already overflowing schedule. It’s about making time for play and scheduling fewer activities and slowing down—creating what McEwen so eloquently describes as “a rich sufficiency of time.”

Though McEwen currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, she grew up in the Borders of Scotland “in a big old-fashioned house” with “beautiful shabby rooms and scented gardens” and “a perpetual drone of adult anxiety about school fees and taxes and the latest heating bill.” “Marchmont was a kind of paradise,” McEwen writes in her book.

We climbed to the top of the huge Victorian wardrobe, and leapt down, squealing, on the squashy beds. We seized the cushions from the sofa in the music room, and ran and skidded on the polished floor. We threw ourselves at the house with everything we had, meeting it, head-on, with our entire bodies…

There was breakfast and lunch and tea and supper, all at regular intervals. There was church and tidy clothes and remembering to do your homework. But there was silence too, and solitude, and calm, where clocks and watches mattered not at all: lying in the long grass behind the raspberry canes, listening to the roo-coo of the pigeons, self dissolved in wonder, lost in light.

 

Christian McEwen (Photo by Jo Eldredge Morrissey)

 

McEwen is a reader’s reader and is skilled at weaving in the work of other writers like Virginia Woolf, William Stafford, Adrienne Rich, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, and Adam Gopnik. Her bibliography alone is worth the price of the book. Drawing on the stories of artists as diverse as Meredith Monk, Frida Kahlo, Walt Whitman, and Auguste Rodin, World Enough & Time is an intelligent, poetic antidote for anyone suffering from what McEwen calls “hurry sickness.” (And who among us, doesn’t suffer?)

I’ve been savoring Christian’s book all summer long and was delighted when she agreed to share an excerpt from World Enough & Time with Gwarlingo readers as part of my new series, The Complete Creative, an in-depth series that will examine practical topics like money, social media, artist retreats, presenting yourself online, and grant writing, as well as a range of deeper, more complex subjects like fear, procrastination, technology, community, time, and limitation. (If you want to read the entire series, be sure to sign up for a free email subscription to Gwarlingo).

Christian works as a freelance writer and workshop leader. She has taught poetry to teachers through the Creative Arts in Learning Program at Lesley University and also worked as a writer-in-the-schools through the Teachers & Writers Collaborative and ALPS (Alternative Literary Programs).

Her most recent anthologies are Jo’s Girls: Tomboy Tales of High Adventure, True Grit & Real Life (Beacon Press, 1997), and, with Mark Statman, The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing (Teachers & Writers, 2000). A collection of her poems, In the Wake of Home, was published by Meadowlark Press in 2004.

If you enjoy the below excerpt, I encourage you to pick up a copy of World Enough & Time. It’s the perfect book to keep by your bedside, and it would also be a worthwhile selection for book clubs and other group discussions. The book is available now in trade paperback from Bauhan Publishing, as well as on Kindle and Nook. You can also purchase a copy through your favorite bookstore on Indie-Bound. (More trade paperbacks will be available at Amazon soon).
 

Christian McEwen was born in London and grew up in the Borders of Scotland. (Photo by Gerry Cambridge courtesy the Scottish Poetry Library)


 

From Chapter 8 of World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down by Christian McEwen

 

The Space Between
When you are lost, go deeper into the woods.   -Maia

Empty and Alive

In the fall of 2006, the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) published a map explaining where to find tranquility. Among its defining categories were the ability to hear bird song and to experience peace and quiet, to see natural landscape (including natural-looking woodland), and to be able to identify the stars at night.

Tranquility belongs to a long list of shadowy essentials to which our culture pays lip-service, but to which we are mostly oblivious, among them, rest, sleep, silence, stillness and solitude. What I am describing is a certain vibrant emptiness, what the Japanese call ma. Ma is found in the silences between words, in the white space on a page, in the tacit understanding between two close friends. The Japanese school of Sumi painting says: “If you depict a bird, give it space to fly.” That ease, that spaciousness, is ma.

The western world is filled with things, crammed to bursting point with noise and movement and color and excitement, which to us mean wealth and vigor. From childhood on, we learn to distrust all the varieties of ma, and to replace them, as far as possible, with their opposites. We value action over stillness, light over shadow, sounds over silence. But in Asian cultures, such quiet resonance has value in and of itself. It is seen as generative, sustaining, something one can trust. As Lao-tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching:

 

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

…

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.

 

Twenty-five hundred years later, Lin Yutang declared that a room, like a painting, should be k’ungling, or “empty and alive,” explaining that it is the unused space that makes a room habitable, just as it is our free time that gives our lives their shapeliness and ease. It comes as no surprise that the Chinese character for “leisure” should be made up of “space” and “sunshine” – the pause, the attitude of relaxation, is what creates the gap that lets the sun shine through.

It is easier, perhaps, to write such definitions in one’s private notebook, and agree wholeheartedly that they feel right, than to include such luscious emptiness in one’s daily life. And yet it is unquestionably true that people are able to work better and more creatively when they are calm, unharried, free of stress, and that this is, at least in part, a matter of choice. “No man will ever unfold the capacities of his intellect who does not at least chequer his life with solitude,” wrote Wordsworth’s friend De Quincey, and Kafka too has much to say on this: “You don’t need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, simply wait. Don’t even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

 

Maruyama Ōkyo, Pine Trees in Snow, between 1781 and 1789. (Image courtesy the Mitsui Memorial Museum. Click to Enlarge)

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The Sunday Poem : Jim Daniels

September 22, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with 3 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

Last Day in Coldwater


Our phone died due to lack
of payment. I left her a note
and trudged down
the gray splintered stairs.

She was sleeping the weekly
sleep of the dead,
the morning crash after the stairs
burned down beneath her.

After days of artificially sustained
floating above the scorched earth.

Paying bills required
a certain sustained attention.
We had cold water
and nothing more.

The unwritten debts were due.
They had the steepest
interest.

Listening to the blue music
of our veins, we had broken
the unwritten rules
and red-tagged our whereabouts.

I walked through dawn
and into hunger. I walked past
the smell of coffee and the shrinking
menu of our young lives.

We were close to Ohio,
closer to Indiana. Michigan
did not want us. We had no friends.
They had exploded

in one of our many miracles gone
wrong. She slept with hands limp
over the fold-out couch—our bed.

She’d want a fix when she awoke
to wind her clock.  How many pencils
can you have with hardened erasers
before you throw them all out?

Disconnected. Perhaps the recorded
message might briefly fool those out
to find us. Precision lost

its wings, then the wheels fell off.
We repossessed each other, in lieu
of fiscal responsibility. The wind swung wide
across the flat land. My face stung

with radioactive love. For her,
for it, and what came first? The drugs.
The drugs came first, so I mention them
last. Someone was going to climb the stairs

and it wouldn’t be me, and what
would they demand? I should’ve
woken her, but I did not. I should’ve
shaken the map in her face.

Look where we are,
I should have said.

 

 

 

About Jim Daniels

Jim Daniels’ recent books include Trigger Man: More Tales of the Motor City, fiction, Michigan State University Press, (Winner, Midwest Book Award), Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry, Carnegie Mellon University Press, (Poetry Gold Medal, Independent Publisher Book Awards), and All of the Above, Adastra Press, all published in 2011.

In 2010, he wrote and produced the independent film Mr. Pleasant, his third produced screenplay, which appeared in more than a dozen film festivals across the country, and From Milltown to Malltown (a collaborative book with photographs of Homestead, Pennsylvanie, by Charlee Brodsky), was published by Marick Press. His next book of poems, Birth Marks, will be published in 2013 by BOA Editions.

 

 

His poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, in Billy Collins’ Poetry 180 anthologies, and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” series. His poem “Factory Love” is displayed on the roof of a race car.

He has received the Brittingham Prize for Poetry, the Tillie Olsen Prize, the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies.

At Carnegie Mellon, where he is the Thomas Stockham Professor of English, he has received the Ryan Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Elliott Dunlap Smith Award for Teaching and Educational Service, and a Faculty Service Award from the Alumni Association. A native of Detroit, Daniels is a graduate of Alma College and Bowling Green State University. He lives in Pittsburgh with his family near the boyhood homes of Andy Warhol and Dan Marino.

 

 

Note: “Last Day in Coldwater” appears in The Plume Anthology, a new publication from editor Daniel Lawless and Plume, the popular online journal of contemporary international poetry. Almost seventy poets are represented in this inaugural volume, often with several poems, representing  a broad range of the best work by the best U.S. and international poets working today —  the latter with both originals and English translations. You can purchase a copy of The Plume Anthology on the Plume website or from Amazon. You can sign up for the Plume newsletter here or follow Plume on Facebook. Thanks to Jim Daniels and Daniel Lawless for permission to reprint this poem. 

 

 

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