Chantlady learns to sing

It's a great pleasure to read, for the first time, a poem that will become a favorite, especially if I realize, if I suddenly know, while I'm reading, that it's going to be a favorite. Ah, that feeling of discovery, that sense that I have found this. But it's an even greater pleasure to have that same experience at a poetry reading, hearing the poet himself (or herself) read a poem that I've not heard or read before. I'm sitting there, listening, paying attention, but at the same time, part of my mind is aware of the moment and thrilled to be hearing this new poem. It's not the same as a discovery, it's different, like I'm just plain lucky to be in this room, at this moment.

At the top of the list of poems I've found this way, is Refrigerator, 1957, by Thomas Lux. I've been reading the poem a few times this weekend, because for the the last week, my refrigerator has been nearly empty, just like the one in the poem. Every night I had eggs for dinner, and whatever I could grab at the food court, for lunch. I can't remember the last time I ate a vegetable or anything fresh. I seem to have forgotten how to feed myself.

All week I've been angry at myself, for what I'm eating. And hungry, for what I'm not eating.

It was at the Dodge Poetry Festival in 2000. that I heard Thomas Lux read Refrigerator, 1957. And so, this is my first plug for the festival; I'll say more as it gets closer, and as they get more content on their website. Pretty much all that's there now, is that they'll be at a new location. Duke Farms, in Hillsborough, New Jersey, which is about an hour south of where they used to be.

The festival happens every two years, and has always been held in mid-September. When I checked the website just now, I discovered that this year it's the first weekend in October (9/30 to 10/3). Which means I'll be there for my birthday. Yay! Can't think of a better place to be. Although .... last October I spent my birthday week at a retreat, chanting with Krishna Das, and that was a fine place to be.

Poetry, chanting, no, I wouldn't want to choose between them. Not that there's any reason to choose, and they feel so similar to me, anyway. Here's a Buddhist prayer that Krishna Das set to music, on his CD Door of Faith. It's called Gate of Sweet Nectar.

Calling out to hungry hearts
Everywhere through endless time
You who wander you who thirst
I offer you this heart of mine.
Calling all you hungry spirits
Everywhere through endless time.
Calling all you hungry hearts
All the lost and left behind
Gather round and share this meal
Your joy and your sorrow
I make it mine

A poem should stand on its own, but I have to admit that sometimes I'm as interested in the story behind the poem as I am in the poem itself. Every year, when I get the Best American Poetry anthology, as I read the poems, I go to the back of the book and read about each poet and see if he or she has anything to say about how the poem came to be written. Some do. Some don't.

Mike Snider reminds his readers that "Poetry is made-up stuff." I don't need to know if a poem is true or not true, but on those occasions when there is a story to be told, I sure do love to hear it. I'll never turn away a good story.

There's a book Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 85 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems, edited by David Lehman. Most of the comments have to do with the form of the poem (because form is what the book is focused on), but there are a few stories.

Here's one, by a poet I'm not familiar with, Dave Morice. I'm not sure what this means but it sure is cool: "he has written fifty poetry marathons in the United States and England, including one thousand poems in twelve hours, a mile-long poem, and a poem across the Delaware River."

(I cross the Delaware River twice a day, five days a week ... haven't once written a poem across it.)

This morning I took the book off the shelf, opened it at random, and read Morice's poem for the first time. I love the story as much as the poem. It's hard for me to separate the two. The poem, the title (a perfect title, without it, it woud be a very different poem), and the story, together, hold the ache of the world.

Alaskan Drinking Song

You know
I know
Juneau
Wino.

And here's the story he tells about the poem:

"Alaskan Drinking Song" came about when I went to Alaska with a friend of mine, Dennett Hutchcroft, in the spring of 1977. Walking through Juneau one afternoon, we turned down a side street marked by a painted wooden sign that said Wino Alley. A few hundred feet in, a couple of older man in tattered, dingy clothes were leaning against a chain-link fence and sipping from a brown paper bag. In the yard behind the fence, thousands of empty booze bottles and beer cans glinted in the sun.

"That must be why they call this place "Wino Alley," Dennett said pointing at the bottle-and-can mountains.

Morice rolled the words wino and Juneau around in his mind and "there it was, a full-blown rhymed poem."

I've been reading the book Writing for Your Life by Deena Metzger. The subtitle sums it up well: A guide and companion to the inner worlds. It's not as well-known as some other writing guides, maybe it's a marketing thing, or because the book is not a quick read. But for me it's one of the best books on writing I've come across. Right now I'm in the chapter, "On story." The section titles alone are a marvel. Here's about half of them:

Stalking the authentic tale
All the possible stories
The story has its own mind
All the voices within us become story
Stories of the selves we never met
Stories from the unknown
Finding other mysteries in ourselves
The questions at the heart of every story
Approaching a larger story
The story that must be told

Here's how the section, The questions at the heart of every story, begins:

At the root of our lives is a question, a series of questions, a quest, some fundamental concerns or obsessions;the mystery, the story, and the meaning of our lives reside there. A story also has a question at the core of it, and the question leads to the mystery within the story. The deeper one goes into the story, the more one learns, the more things are revealed, the deeper the mystery. Perhaps the story has no other function than to ask this question or to deepen the mystery. When we're not aware of the questions we are asking, of the koans that define our life and work, our writing may not go deep enough.

I feel such nourishment from her writing. She knows how to dive beneath the surface of things. Story, questions, koans. So much to carry with me today.

And also because I don't seem to have the energy tonight to put together a coherent sentence, I thought, let me look for the Kenneth Koch poem, One Train May Hide Another.

I thought, I'd like to post a link to that poem.

It's a very long poem, so I didn't expect to find it. Not that there's any logic to that, but somehow I always think I'm more likely to find the shorter poems.

Now that I say it, there's definitely no logic to that thought.

I did find it.

Is there anything that's not on the internet? Or more precisely, is there anything that can't be found, quickly, on the internet?

Not only did I find it, right away, but the very first search result also includes a biography of Koch.

And, a real audio link to the poet reading the poem.

I'd never heard him read. So here I sit, tired, and wanting to share this magical poem with whoever happens to drop by my blog, and a few moments later, with no effort on my part, I get to sit and hear Kenneth Koch, who is no longer alive, read.

Life is amazing in the year 2004.

The poem can be read many ways. I find it utterly delightful and it makes me laugh.

It is also wise and has helped me during some tough times.

Here's how it begins.

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line--
Then it is safe to go on reading.

Did I say it's a long poem? Maybe, but compared to what?

My train ride each morning is 22 minutes. and mostly poem-less. Not that it has to be.

You can read and listen to the poem here.

It really doesn't take much to make me happy. I see it again and again, no matter what kind of dark cloud I'm walking around in, one small thing, and I'm positively beaming. Today was one of those dark cloud days. Then I got home and checked my email, and there was an invitation to a free screening next week of the new movie Touching the Void.Two hours later, and I'm still thrilled. Do I have any idea why? No, not really. The movie will be opening in a few weeks anyway. I was already planning to see it. And I get a fair number of these emails about free screenings. But there's something about this movie, that suddenly I can't wait to see it. It's like getting a small gift I wasn't expecting. The movie is based on one of my favorite mountaineering/adventure books, and I've read shelves of them. I don't know what approach the director took to filming the story -- I've vaguely heard that it has a semi-documentary feel to it -- and I'm not going to read anything about it in advance. Maybe that's why I'm feeling so happy, because I'm going to see, in a few days, how one of the greatest, most inspiring stories I've ever read, a story I've thought about frequently over the years, has been put to film. Fascinating, seeing how a mood can change, no matter how solid it feels at the time.

And even more, we like other people to ask us questions. So, thank you, Lois for doing the guest writer series on "why we blog." That's where my post is today, over at Lois' site, Heart at Work. The series is wrapping up later this week, and a great series it has been. It's hard to explain blogs to people who've never seen one, and sometimes even when they take a peek at a few, some people just aren't interested. Sometimes I'll get a polite, "Oh, that's nice." So, this has been a great week. Aside from hearing new perspectives on the blogging experience, and meeting some new people whose blogs I'll be happily visiting, it's been fun to share the enthusiasm of blogging.

Everywhere, in any direction you walk on this earth, there are stories, wanting to be found, and understood, and shaped into something beautiful for others to see. At the writing workshop I attended two weeks ago, the writer Barbara Hurd told us the story of going to India to teach writing to Tibetan refugee high school students. She told us how the teaching methods that worked so well back home didn't work at all with these students. There were surprising cultural differences that she wasn't prepared for. She would encourage the students to express themselves, to tell their individual stories, because that's what a good teacher does, but they didn't respond. They didn't understand the concept. She figured out, from them, that their culture places more value on group experience and collaboration than on individual expression. She adapted her approach, and the students began to write.

She wrote a beautiful essay about her experience, and how she learned to work with the Tibetan children. It's here at Perihelion, along with a number of poems by the children. There are additional poems at Friends of Tibetan Women's Association. The essay is fairly short, and well worth taking the time to read. Here is one of the poems, by Jigme, aged 15.

When I was Departed from Her

When I was ten my parents went to the market for my new clothes
and led me in the dark
to the monastery to pray
and then I departed from my beloved mother.

When the Chinese were asleep
I and some others walked like cats.

I left my beloved parents,
my home and school.

When the sun rose,
we rested until dark
and then we went marching,
marching like ants.

When I heard the cockoo-cockoo
we were in a thick forest.

I left my beloved school, my friends,
my town of Lhasa.

In the daytime we rested. Others slept,
but I never did.
At night, we walked like thieves on dry leaves
and finally arrived in India,
my second motherland.

I left everything.

When I look at my mother's picture,
I remember everything.

-- Jigme, aged 15

I am in tears reading this essay and these children's poems. It's an exquisite story, and it makes me ache. All I want is to be in one place, and do one important thing. I need to imagine something new, to slow down the momentum of my life, What I know is that I'm sick of this ridiculous life I'm living in the American suburbs. A fast life going nowhere, driving past shopping centers and Wal-marts, multiplex theaters, all the buildings I never set foot in, except for one, the tall building where I work, sitting in a cubicle that contains a desk, a phone, and a computer, day after day. Everything seeks to be made into a story. What is the story that my life is seeking? What is the story that your life is seeking?

Last winter I went to a poetry reading by Billy Collins, who was then Poet Laureate of the U.S. He's one of my favorite poets, and the favorite of many other people too, because even with a big snowstorm on its way to Philadelphia, the auditorium was packed. He has a tricky kind of humor in almost every poem he writes. I say tricky in the sense that he tricks me -- I often laugh out loud reading his poems, but then I see other layers and angles, and a seriousness and sometimes even a warmth mixed with the humor.

The best poem of this particular evening was a new one titled "Flock." Such a short and simple poem. At the end, I gasped and laughed, and wanted to stand up and cheer, but that's not the sort of thing I do at poetry readings, so I stayed in my seat. Who knows what got me thinking of this poem a few days ago, but I needed to find it, and read it, and so I did, in about 30 seconds on Google, which amazes me anew every day. I would have found it more quickly, except I couldn't remember the title, only that it had something to do with sheep. But there's too many references to sheep and sheep's head hill in Billy Collins' poems, so I had to refine my search and have no idea how I ended up finding the poem.

Sheep. Hills. He enjoys telling the story of how he's been called an "indoor nature poet." He doesn't like the label but he doesn't try to deny it, and as proof he reads the poem "Fishing on the Susquehanna in July" which begins with these lines:

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any other river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.

At the site where I found "Flock," there are two other Collins poems: another of my favorites, "I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of Three Blind Mice," (just reading the title makes me happy) and the only poem of his that I don't like (because I just don't get it), "The Lanyard." And, at the Prairie Home Companion, you can hear him read the poem, and several others.

FLOCK

It has been calculated that each copy of the Gutenberg Bible required the skins of 300 sheep.

I can see them
squeezed into the holding pen
behind the stone building
where the printing press is housed.

All of them squirming around
to find a little room
and looking so much alike
it would be nearly impossible to count them.

And there is no telling which one of them
will carry the news
that the Lord is a Shepherd,
one of the few things
they already know.

When he was Poet Laureate, Billy Collins' project was something he called Poetry 180. He wanted to bring accessible poetry into high schools, and to that end he selected one poem for each day of the school year. The website calls it a resource for high school teachers, but that's probably how he had to market the project. The poems are for anyone looking for contemporary poems that are relevant to daily living. At the website, you can look at the list of 180 poems and choose one whose title appeals to you. Or, from the main page, you can type in a number, which takes you to the poem assigned that number. Like this, surprise yourself with Poem 132, a poem I think everyone can use.

One last thing, if you have the Poetry 180 book, most of the poems in the book are also on the website, but they're in a completely different order. Just browsing through the titles, I'd say about 95% of them are in both places. There are some notable differences. When I first got the book, I couldn't believe it didn't include a poem by Mary Oliver, since she's the first poet many people think of when they go looking for a poem to relate to something in their life. Maybe the omission had something to do with obtaining rights, because she is included on the website, with several poems.

A few months ago a friend told me that when he was in the army, oh so many years ago, one of his jobs was to go out on the rifle range at the end of each day and collect the spent shells. Today I saw this photograph, one of the most amazing images I've ever seen. The caption says:

"Hill of shells: An Indian army soldier displays bullets recovered from the forests in Kupwara, some 100 kms north west of Srinagar."

How many such forests are there, strewn with shells and bullets, from wars we barely know about? How many years will the shells remain on the forest floor? Tell me how many forests, I want to walk them all. I have good eyes, I can clean the forest of all the shells, without missing one. I'll fill basket after basket, for as long as it takes.

This makes me think of one of my favorite poems by Gary Snyder, "Dillingham, Alaska, the Willow Tree Bar." Maybe I'll post the whole poem sometime, but it's the last three lines I'm thinking of now:

the pain
of the work
of wrecking the world

Lois at Heart @ work has launched a series of guest writers, starting today, on the topic "Why we blog." The topic is open-ended, so there's sure to be a range of imaginative and surprising responses; I can't wait to see what different people have to say on a subject I'm so passionate about. Plus, the series will give me a chance to read the work of some bloggers I'm not yet familiar with. When I first became interested in blogs, back in August (I'm not even sure how I first knew about blogs, the idea just seemed to suddenly be "in the air"), I wondered how I would ever find any I wanted to read. I knew there were hundreds of thousands (millions?) of blogs "out there" (somewhere), but how would I find them? Little did I know! It didn't take long to find a kindred spirit, and each one I found led to another. In one of her first emails to me, Lois said, "Isn't this web of bloggers divine?" Yes, it is. So, please do check out the posts each day at Lois' site, and if you'd like to contribute, drop Lois a line and talk to her about it.

I have a folder of poems and quotes that I read almost as prayers. I just found a new poem for the folder, in the book Writing for Your Life by Deena Metzger. It originally appeared in her book The Axis Mundi Poems.

RETURN

When you go
to the dark place
you must come back
singing
the note inscribed
on your palm
the song written
on your hand
the way trees
grow about the
shape of wind

In the new issue of Yoga International, there's an excellent article by Rolf Sovik, "Radiant Energy: A Mantra for Healing and Comfort." He goes into great detail on the mantra, its history and when and how it can be used. One short excerpt:

Just as a plant patiently gathers nutrients from the soil, so healing and nourishing forces enter the human body through foods, medicines, supportive emotions, and encouraging thoughts. The Maha Mrityunjaya mantra attracts these forces and creates an inner environment to enhance their effectiveness. Thus the mantra can be used whenever any restorative process is undertaken.

The Sanskrit text of the mantra reads:
OM. Tryambakam yajamahe
Sugandhim pushti-vardhanam
Urvarukamiva bandhanan
Mrityor mukshiya mamritat

The article includes a detailed (full page) translation. You can also hear the mantra recited aloud. I downloaded the sound file and just finished listening to it. It's very helpfu, because he first recites it slowly, two times, so you can clearly hear how to pronounce it, and then three more times at a smoother, more natural pace.

Beautiful.