World Poetry Day (A Day Late)

In celebration of World Poetry Day (yesterday...oops) I will now rant about poetry. Rejoice.

I love poetry. I wish more people loved poetry. Alas, we live in a world where "reality" shows are the leading form of entertainment and people need everything fed to them in flashing lights competing with all the other flashing lights to be the flashiest lights. Subtlety and sparseness are not exactly the tickets to success these days. And stillness. And effort. It seems that people aren't patient enough to sit with something, think about it, imagine what it could mean, parse out the sound, the images, the feelings it evokes. Instead, we instantly react, critique, bully, and boost ourselves by beating down others. 

On initial glance, poetry doesn't seem to fit our culture anymore. But if I love reading it, wouldn't you imagine others take delight in it? Maybe people could find respite from this crazy world in poems. Maybe poetry could do more to create those pauses and that space for real reflection to happen, like it does for me. Maybe that could somehow reintroduce the idea of real thinking into our society. Maybe people would develop that skill of thought and start to dig one layer into what they see, read, and hear to understand how to determine its truth and value. Wouldn't that make people better and in turn, communities better? Pshaw.

This morning my colleague mentioned a version of an "art CSA" that the local arts council is sponsoring. Similar to organic farm CSAs, where you sign up to receive boxes of locally grown produce throughout the season, the arts version provides you with locally created works of art. In total, you get nine pieces of visual art throughout the year. Brilliant!

I envision a poetry version. Maybe it's new poems by local poets, or maybe it's more of a curation thing like this blog, or maybe the focus is encouraging amateur writers to take up the pen and create something. I know it's a barely formed idea and a pipe dream at best, but at least I have a name.

We'll call it "Poetry to Make America Think Again."

A Poem For A Monday

W.S. Merwin's newest book of poetry, Garden Time, came out in late 2016 and was a birthday present from my brother and sister-in-law. I'm just now diving in, perhaps sadly inspired to read it after learning of the recent death of Merwin's wife, Paula. 

As I mentioned before, this collection is deeply related to loss. Merwin has been losing his eyesight over the years and wrote these poems by dictating them to Paula. Merwin's work is so immersed in imagery - his surroundings, the natural world, what he sees, feels, hears, and touches. To think that he can't see the trees or the sun or his wife or his poetry is devastating to me. And now without Paula, will he write? Are these the last poems from the single most inspirational poet of our time? 

So there is loss, so much loss embedded in this book. I don't know these people. I met Merwin once very briefly at a reading and obviously never met Paula, but I'm so very sad. It's his perfect words, the situation, the multiple layers of loss, the aging, the place I am in right now. All of it I guess but this poem in particular, the last one in the book, had me on the floor.

The Present

W.S. Merwin

As they were leaving the garden

one of the angels bent down to them and whispered

I am to give you this

as you are leaving the garden

I do not know what it is

or what it is for

what you will do with it

you will not be able to keep it

but you will not be able

to keep anything

yet they both reached at once

for the present

and when their hands met

they laughed

A Pun

Our hotel in New York had a chalkboard wall. Hip right? Well, except for the fact that this chalkboard wall was behind the toilet. I like to think I took full advantage of the bizarre situation with the "art" I created. I have presented this genius piece of work to a variety of people with varying degrees of appreciation all the way from a blank stare to Simon declaring it the "funniest thing I have ever done." 

Not everyone likes toilet humor. 

Eating Our Way Through The Big Apple

Oh Brooklyn. How I love you. We reunited with our favorite borough this past weekend, making the drive to the big city Saturday morning and enjoying a whirlwind but absolutely wonderful long weekend reuniting with friends, seeing great dance, eating amazingness, and attending the Rangers game. Glorious, all of it was glorious. The only downside was the blizzard eating into our plans and causing an early departure. We missed the last period of the game (in which they lost) but also a visit with a great pal from my NY heyday. Big bummer since I haven't seen her four-year old since he was four months old and I've never met her brand new daughter!

But New York, as it does, will surely suck us in again and I'm confident we'll make it back there soon. It is such a special place to us. Who knows, perhaps one day we'll return for good!

Women Up

Happy International Women's Day. The organizers of the successful January Women's March intended today to be a "Day Without A Woman," helping to demonstrate the enormous impact women have on our economy and our society. Participation was encouraged by women taking the day off of paid and unpaid work, avoiding making purchases unless from women or minority-led businesses, and wearing red in solidarity with the day and movement. 

I'm at work today but I am rocking the red. What's remarkable to me is that every single female member of our staff is doing the same. The men? Not so much. It says a lot about the power of women and the idea that for many people, these inequities are not inequities.

My interest in women's issues and gender equity is relatively new, likely simmering for awhile but spurred on as a result of the implicit (and explicit) bias that played such a large role in the Presidential election. And the policies cropping up as a result of who was elected. And the misogynistic, disrespectful attitude of the elected (and millions of his followers) towards women. And the continuing unfairness of this country's attitude toward family leave and its disproportionate impact on women. And the idea that we're still, after all this time, supposed to be skinny, nurturing, independent, dependent, pretty, career-driven, happy, honest, tactful, quiet, assertive, faithful, and motherly creatures who shoulder it all and shut up. And the idea that so many people, including women, reacted with disgust when millions marched together in January, fully believing that there was no cause for such a display since there is nothing unequal, nothing anyone doesn't have simply because they are female.

So I'm wearing red, both for myself and for those people. It's nothing really, but when I looked around the table at our staff meeting today and saw all my fellow women also in red, it felt like everything.

Ocean Breeze In Ogunquit

It was so warm and beautiful here last week - the thermometer reached into the seventies for a few days! Apparently, that was an evil trick because this weekend was bitterly cold with a fierce wind that brought real feel temps below zero. Pete and Sille were visiting from Vermont so we decided to carpe diem anyway and took a drive over to Ogunquit, Maine for a stroll along the beach. Despite the frozen nose and ear tips, it was bright, sunny, gorgeous and just what we needed before a hearty lunch at When Pigs Fly.

Just A Little Moment

Merwin is the cutest, especially on Saturday mornings when he's lazy and we're lazy and the fire is cozy and we just ate lemon custard doughnuts and it's too cold to go outside so we embrace just being.

A Poem For A Wednesday

Pulled Over in Short Hills, NJ, 8:00 AM
Ross Gay

It's the shivering. When rage grows
hot as an army of red ants and forces
the mind to quiet the body, the quakes
emerge, sometimes just the knees,
but, at worst, through the hips, chest, neck
until, like a virus, slipping inside the lungs
and pulse, every ounce of strength tapped
to squeeze words from my taut lips,
his eyes scanning my car's insides, my eyes,
my license, and as I answer questions
3, 4, 5 times, my jaw tight as a vice,
his hand massaging the gun butt, I
imagine things I don't want to
and inside beg this to end
before the shiver catches my
hands, and he sees,
and something happens.

This appeared in my email through one of many poetry list serves I receive daily. It's not a poem that would typically grab my attention - there are no sweeping nature images or contemplations about living in the moment. But this one dug under my skin and stayed there. 

The word choices and structure are perfect - the violent language in the narrator's description of his body's reaction, how this entire thing is one choppy sentence. You can feel the rush of anger, rage, and underlying fear. The poet took one second of one occurrence and enabled us to feel it the way he has. Amazing how great poetry can do that seemingly so easily.

There is a context for this poem that I might be oblivious to if a picture of the poet had not accompanied the poem. The poet is a black man. And I've been there so I know that Short Hills, NJ is an incredibly affluent NYC suburb. So yeah sometimes poetry is more, much more, than nature images and living in the moment contemplations. Sometimes it's a reminder that while I may be musing about how to be "happy" in my privileged life, another person's life may depend on properly masking his justified anger at an unjust world.