To Live: Love, Judge and Forgive, Not Always By the Book

One of the first words out of my little sister’s mouth was “booksh.” Forming this word required her to contort her lips into an indescribably awkward shape we came to call “funny face.” This is the extreme to which a tiny kid must venture when jealous of a sibling five years her elder, especially with parents who encouraged that particular skill-- reading. I could read and she could barely talk, and that pissed her off. As it turns out we both have a love of books and in the year 2009 I read a few good ones, but not enough.

My top two best reads of 2009 were Child 44 by Rob Tom Smith followed by Beautiful Boy by David Sheff. However, the most pleasurable reading came when I was able to read two books in two weeks while on vacation. It’s hard to say you “enjoyed” reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel when on chapter two something so hideous and hurtful happens to a child that I didn’t know if I could continue reading. But I did, continue reading, that is, and did enjoy the book for its candid nature and informative point of view.

But the final book I read in 2009 was given to me from the shelf of that very sister who could say book before she could read a word. Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture turned out to be more heart than schmaltz, definitely the Moose Milk version of all things cheese.

In case you have not seen the posters, the plot is simple: Professor Pausch is going to die. He has cancer. He’s young. It’s terminal. We know how this ends.

But I liked a few things about this book and that is it serves as a reminder about how you should live your own life. This is not to say that Pausch tells you how to live, rather serves a reminder in how to live—with honesty, following your own dreams and with an unending joy to find yourself.  I found a helpful reminder in thinking how I want to live and I was constantly forming opinions about my own life while reading the book.

One section within the first chapter of the book entitled “The Parent Lottery,” made me realize this guy really appreciated his life and knew his parents were to thank. They didn’t do anything extraordinary, they just let him be him.  And I've come to the same conclusion that Pausch had, I want to earn their respect.

His description was the opposite of Oscar Wilde’s in The Picture of Dorian Gay:
“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”

But is it not the same for parents, who love their children, come to judge them and sometimes, they forgive them? And maybe as they all grow older it’s a rotation of all three: Love, Judge and Forgive all at the same time.

Today’s poem is an ode to mother by Billy Collins, but exalts parents who are somehow gracious in loving, judging and forgiving.

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

The State Of Poetry

When I got home tonight and turned on the TV, it occurred to me that I never really used to watch much TV growing up or even in college. None at all for a few years even, save for common areas on tiny sets in various undergrad dorms or in my grad school flat. I’ve always loved radio, NPR, the BBC, and those shows that were cool to watch or be involved in I watched with the group. But, in the last few years, firmly residing and working in one location, I do watch more than I used to. Sports are always important and I love a good dvd, but sadly I have also started watching a little more TV.

Yesterday I purchased a new television, an investment of sorts, which tonight brought to mind the buyer’s remorse existential question: Who am I, a reader/writer or a watcher? Will I give up books and pens for the boob tube altogether?

Pondering this over steamed quinoa and a packet of Trader Joe’s “Punjab Eggplant,” (which took exactly 15 minutes to prepare), ABC’s The Bachelor popped up on the screen. I watched the inaugural season of this show with my mom in one fall years ago after I moved back from grad school and really loved watching it with her. So, I’ve always had a soft spot for the show. While I’ve not watched every season, the downward progression has been embarrassing for me to see, even privately, to the point where episodes became so cringing I had to look away. It hit me last week that this show is no longer even trying to obtain the objective—for the Bachelor to find a wife. Instead it’s about running a high end brothel whereby women throw themselves at one man (more a boy) on episode one and just care about being the first to bag him…or a member of the show’s crew, as it turns out.

What does this have to do with poetry? Not much unless you think to when men used to court women with ink from their quills.  Actually, that's not what I was thinking either.  The larger question is, in what ways has the quality of poetry lost its importance, its quality, its existence in the last 10 years? What is the State of Poetry in 2010? 

These are questions I want to get to, but first, for all of you women on the bachelor, please don’t ask amongst yourselves “what rhymes with wtf? (Sorry, my error, “girls” now that we have to call women even in their ‘20’s, ‘30’s and ‘40’s “girls” on TV shows like Bachelor, the suitcase swingers on Deal or No Deal, etc.) However, based on their behavior, reading skills and writing acumen, I can’t really make the case they demand to be considered women. In that regard, they are girls being willingly or honestly unknowlingly exploited by us.

When the media says this is what the viewers want, I really doubt it. And then I realized I was replaying dialogue from "The American President in my head"—the exchange between Lewis and the POTUS:

Lewis Rothschild: People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand.

President Andrew Shepherd: Lewis, we've had presidents who were beloved, who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight. People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference.

On the eve of the delivery of my new television, this will be my final episode of The Bachelor, especially after I realized the women (sorry, girls) on the show were, on average in their early to mid teens when the show began and have probably coached themselves to be their own agents as an audition for The Heff. And if they’re looking for a reality show promoter, I’m sure the balloon boy’s dad will be single again after his stint in jail.

Is this the best television programming we can do? Won’t giving people water rather than sand result in quality programming, better viewers and viewing minds? Obviously there’s a reason I am not a television executive. Because if I were, I’d be asking the opposite: what’s the least expensive, most ratings-grabbing piece of crap I can air in every market at every time slot? This coming from someone who can love a meal made in a microwave in 15 minutes.

I’m not belittling the merits of business models, and so, in honor of poetry, I propose an audit of the current writers, the old writers, the best sellers and the entire market in print and online. What do people like, what do people want to contribute to and participate in? And I don’t mean local “open mic night’s,” rather things people who like poetry enjoy doing—reading and writing and sometimes sharing. I love research with a passion so let’s brainstorm together…have ideas?

While the date is yet to be announced, the Presidential State of the Union will occur near the end of January—my money is on the 26th. Until then, this website will host a conversation on what poetry means today and hopes to publish that very day our own state of the union.

In honor of this new conversation, today's offering comes from perhaps one of the best well known inaugural poems ever, from the then 87 year old legend, Robert Frost. I did not know this until recently, but those who were in attendance confirm that the glare of the January sun that cold day in 1961 caused Frost to stumble in reading his new poem, “Dedication,” for the new President, JFK, so he recited another from memory. Here is his original poem in full length, a real gift.

Dedication - The Complete Text

by Robert Frost

Summoning artists to participate
In the august occasions of the state
Seems something artists ought to celebrate.
Today is for my cause a day of days.
And his be poetry's old-fashioned praise
Who was the first to think of such a thing.
This verse that in acknowledgement I bring
Goes back to the beginning of the end
Of what had been for centuries the trend;
A turning point in modern history.
Colonial had been the thing to be
As long as the great issue was to see
What country'd be the one to dominate
By character, by tongue, by native trait,
The new world Christopher Columbus found.
The French, the Spanish, and the Dutch were downed
And counted out. Heroic deeds were done.
Elizabeth the First and England won.
Now came on a new order of the ages
That in the Latin of our founding sages
(Is it not written on the dollar bill
We carry in our purse and pocket still?)
God nodded his approval of as good.
So much those heroes knew and understood,
I mean the great four, Washington,
John Adams, Jefferson, and Madison
So much they saw as consecrated seers
They must have seen ahead what not appears,
They would bring empires down about our ears
And by the example of our Declaration
Make everybody want to be a nation.
And this is no aristocratic joke
At the expense of negligible folk.
We see how seriously the races swarm
In their attempts at sovereignty and form.
They are our wards we think to some extent
For the time being and with their consent,
To teach them how Democracy is meant.
"New order of the ages" did they say?
If it looks none too orderly today,
'Tis a confusion it was ours to start
So in it have to take courageous part.
No one of honest feeling would approve
A ruler who pretended not to love
A turbulence he had the better of.
Everyone knows the glory of the twain
Who gave America the aeroplane
To ride the whirlwind and the hurricane.
Some poor fool has been saying in his heart
Glory is out of date in life and art.
Our venture in revolution and outlawry
Has justified itself in freedom's story
Right down to now in glory upon glory.
Come fresh from an election like the last,
The greatest vote a people ever cast,
So close yet sure to be abided by,
It is no miracle our mood is high.
Courage is in the air in bracing whiffs
Better than all the stalemate an's and ifs.
There was the book of profile tales declaring
For the emboldened politicians daring
To break with followers when in the wrong,
A healthy independence of the throng,
A democratic form of right devine
To rule first answerable to high design.
There is a call to life a little sterner,
And braver for the earner, learner, yearner.
Less criticism of the field and court
And more preoccupation with the sport.
It makes the prophet in us all presage
The glory of a next Augustan age
Of a power leading from its strength and pride,
Of young amibition eager to be tried,
Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play.
A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday's the beginning hour.

Top Shelf Sunday

Content with another indoor day, I settled in with Edna St. Vincent Millay this morning, a poet I was introduced to by the female members of my family as a teenager. I own only one volume of her poetry but was given her biography, Savage Beauty written by Nancy Milford, by Bird Woman Auntie Honey probably seven years ago. While I enjoyed the biography and found her life fascinating, a tad scandalous for her time and fun to read, I never really connected with very many of her poems. That’s not to say I didn’t appreciate her craft, she just felt a little distant to me.

But, that was when I was a little younger and today I read the entire slim volume I have and appreciated each one, not just the poems with quotes my Nana used to repeat about “burning the candles at both ends.” Here are two of my favorites from today.

Snow Storm

No hawk hangs over in this air:
The urgent snow is everywhere.
The wing adroiter than a sail
Must lean away from such a gale,
Abandoning its straight intent,
Or else expose tough ligament
And tender flesh to what before
Meant dampened feathers, nothing more.

Forceless upon our backs there fall
Infrequent flakes hexagonal,
Devised in many a curious style
To charm our safety for a while,
Where close to earth like mice we go
Under the horizontal snow.

The Philosopher

And what are you that, wanting you,
I should be kept awake
As many nights as there are days
With weeping for your sake?

And what are you that, missing you,
As many days as crawl
I should be listening to the wind
And looking at the wall?

I know a man that's a braver man
And twenty men as kind,
And what are you, that you should be
The one man in my mind?

Yet women's ways are witless ways,
As any sage will tell,—
And what am I, that I should love
So wisely and so well?

Re-reading Joyce: Death, Snow And...Life?

Thursday night, as I tuned into the news on my headphones during my commute, it hit me that the “bitter cold snap” that was currently slapping me in the face and made my nostrils scream was also taking a toll on my mood. I don’t do well in cold like this. Every little errand takes longer (mittens off, mittens back on), certain achy toes or knees don’t function as well (which is more of a resentment directed at Father Time rather than Mother Nature), and the whole experience me in a generally cantankerous mood as I navigate over the unmelted now ice near my place out to the small patch of sidewalk that has been somewhat shoveled. But what I hate most about saying that is the fact that it’s worse, much worse even, in other places.

Still, when the forecasters were proven right and the ground was painted white once more on Friday, I was grumpy. I blame this entirely on having a lovely sister who now lives in Phoenix and the fact this year, I was there on Christmas day, hiking in 60 degree weather and running each morning to the site of a hazy winter sun rising over palm trees.

But what of poetry and how on earth is a two paragraph session linked in some way to anything worth reading? I’m in a funk, feeling down and out mostly because of the paralyzing weather, or so I’m telling myself, but at least there are ways of processing this and using poetry to wiggle back out. I have the first line of William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow.” It’s such a simple poem but the first line “so much depends upon…” became one of my favorite assignments in school. A mentor once assigned a small group to write something that began with that. I think it would be interesting for everyone-- not just poets or writers or philosophers—but everyone to think once in a while what so much depends upon.

For WCW, so much depended upon:

“a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens."

And that was it, at least that was it that day or for that poem. For me so much depends upon the weather sometimes. And this is one of the reasons I spent 4 hours this morning re-reading one of my favorite authors, James Joyce. In Dubliners, snow is not just a plot device or a typical Irish piece of sentimental symbolism, it’s a character. I should know, because I said it was when I argued it out so persuasively once in a paper that was supposed to be a 10 pager on “symbolism in Dubliners” and turned into a 40 page dissection of the short stories. Boy did I used to be a know-it-all. Thank goodness the kind academic who read that paper not only gave me an okay grade, but agreed to be my thesis advisor and then took me down a few notches.

But Joyce knew how to write a story that connects with people, transcending gender, generation or lifetime. Here is one line from the aforementioned collection:

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Today’s poem is a Treegap original. Started a while ago from a newspaper clipping, it’s given new life. Stay warm, dear readers.

The Wall

I thought it ended
and I was headed up
alongside the windows,
bulb sprouts and ducks,

reclaiming ponds, pushing back fog.
And then today came,
cold and back-peddling
freezing me in with only memory.

I slept knees up,
feet raised to pelvis,
chest falling restless
into rhythms unbeaten by my heart.

Then, in a dream I remembered
biology class in spring, pasting
families of flora together with their phyla
on a board: an organizing, memorizing tool.

Pressing flowers to paper
they faded in color, went fossil-like.
Scrapped wisps of seasons ago,
dry veined pages of life.

Next came the animal kingdom,
traipsing fields with the boys
where they coaxed bugs into jars
and I netted the wingers for our collection.

All were cotton-balled to death
and then came the hard part--
pinning the moths to the chart.
They were easier than the beetles,
the crunch of the thorax depleting
as our pin passed through,
like a pen without ink, scratching
a final note.

I went wide-eyed when the butterflies
relinquished their wing-beats,
and the old ones, when lifted, fell apart.
And those with pollen in their nose
left powder and hairs in the jar.

But I am not dreaming now
and they tell me a man has been found
within his house, a suicide they think
dead for nearly 70 years.

Three generations, two world wars
and famines ago: Your medic said
your young body was dead,
days crawling in a shell of skin.

And in the end, you alone
decided how you would go.
Cancer inside a wall.

Diseased, ashamed, you left life
leaning on a divining rod.
Note written, breaths taken,
plastering commenced.

Away, you said, you were going away,
setting by ship, a slip of a legend,
a love-designed lie:
to America in this dream-making time
and send word, in health someday.

But how could you, how could you,
create your own coffin,
fall into a wall not yet there,
wait for the insulate mix to set
and harden around your lungs,
packed into a white nothingness
waiting on solidifying cement?

How can the sadness,
eating me like sickness,
with the starvation of a city rat,
overcome someone who knows you?

I think I’ll get up now
and wade through the snow.

Lincoln or Log Cabin?

In an unabashedly pompous way, James Cameron’s Avatar steals actual dialogue, plot, story-lines and basically every other important component possible from himself and clichés in making one bad film I wish I had not spent time watching or paying to see. (It’s a push-- if I could get back the time or the money—today I think I would have preferred to reclaim the 3 hours of viewing and half hour to and fro...we’ll see what tomorrow brings.)

The year 2009 took a big toll on me emotionally, physically and every possible way. Unlike the millions out of work, I did not lose my job. I lost a little in the retirement account, but hey, who didn’t? The worst loss for me this year was hopefulness and that scares me more than anything else.  Because despite the fact that Avatar was an example of horrid excess, at least one director is still delusinal enought to believe he did something fantastic. 

Today I was asked to explain my ho-hum attitude about 2010 to a mentor and she asked whether or not I had set the bar a bit too high for what was realistic in the last few years. It’s not the first time someone has asked me if I thought my expectations were a tad high. When she posed this question, it was in the nicest of ways, but I chuckled and thought, yes. I’ve always thought large and set out to accomplish things. However, in the last few years I haven’t really done anything. I think I’ve just been getting by, but for me, that’s not okay. On the happiness scale, I’ve lost more than I’ve gained and embracing 2010 if only because it’s not 2009, that seems perfectly fine.

Oddly enough the first few hours I was back in Oregon, Woodburn to be exact, I was given monetary change after a purchase which included brand new pennies with images I had never seen before. I felt lucky, especially noting that this extraordinary 16th POTUS, the guy responsible for more actionable change in America than any other President, in my humble opinion, has his mug on the lowest level of currency possible. This shiny beautiful one cent with a log cabin on the back brought me a bit of hope.  I'm not sure why but I felt a little better after holding the coins in my hand and making sure that teach of my parents hand one.

Today's offering is something from my own mind, questions I wish I had answers to:

Head's, Please

Are my expectations lowering,
or am I learning how to live in the real world?

In a place that changes faster than I can keep pace,
where few unexplored lives breathe
and forms of expression are brought to brief life
by individuals craving to lose face.

All for the price of one shiny penny
or less, but perhaps that's all it takes.
As Lincoln said, “The best thing about the future
 is that it only comes one day at a time.”

Holiday Adventure: The Heard Museum

(Photos I took at the Heard Museum: Phoenix, December 29, 2009)

The very last day my family and I spent together this holiday season was in Phoenix and entailed a strange mix of emotions ranging from nice, beautiful, artistic, to frustrated and freaking out by nightfall back in a snowy Portland. But hey, it wouldn’t be a proper Christmas without some family drama.

The beauty of that December 29 was that it started with seeing my sister, after working her night shift. She’d been up some 18 hours after a nap’s worth of sleep making sure that people in pain felt better, emergencies were taken care of and patients at her hospital were cared for. We said goodbye to her and went to the Heard Museum for a few hours and it was a really lovely experience. It was there I encountered the art of Harry Fonesca, a native Californian with a lot of heart in his Maidu and Hawaiian heritages and came to explore immigration and creation myths as well later in life.

Finding Fonesca has been fun and while my favorite paintings of his are the 1977 creation myths involving turtles, they are rare and, sadly the internet has not gotten hold of them so I will not show them here.  But I do love his Coyote creations: first a male, just Coyote, then Rose, Coyote’s counterpart. I had no idea a few days ago when I saw this for the first time, but Fonesca wrote poems for Coyote as well as drawing him.  How beautiful to find an artist who then became his own poet, especially when with my family who have talents beyond what they thought they could do in this life.

Coyote, Coyote, Please Tell Me

Coyote, Coyote, Please tell me
What is a shaman?

A shaman I don’t know
anything about.
I’m a doctor, myself.
When I use medicine,
it’s between me,
my patient,
and the Creation.

Coyote, Coyote, Please tell me
What is power?

It is said that power
is the ability to start
your chainsaw
with one pull.

Coyote, Coyote, Please tell me
What is magic?

Magic is the first taste
of ripe strawberries and
magic is a child dancing
in a summer’s rain.

Coyote, Coyote, Please tell me
Why is Creation?

Creation is because I
went to sleep last night
with a full stomach,
and when I woke up
this morning,
everything was here.

Coyote, Coyote, Please tell me
Who you belong to?

According to the latest
survey, there are certain
persons who, in poetic
or scholarly guise,
have claimed me like
a conqueror’s prize.

Let me just say
once and for all,
just to be done:
Coyote,
he belongs to none.

A New Day, Year, Decade

(A long-exposure photo using sparklers in Manila.  ROMEO GACAD/AFP/Getty Images)

On this first day of a new year, a new decade, it feels right to start big. Alfred, Lord Tennyson spent 17 years writing his masterful “In Memorium A.A.H.,” a one hundred and thirty three (yes, 133) canto poem that started off as an elegy written in sadness after the sudden death of young Arthur Henry Hallam, his sister’s fiancée, but is truly more a grand missive on life and death and, to me, reveals more about Tennyson’s own philosophy and sensibilities than anything else. In fact, Tennyson himself probably knew he was taking on so much more when he wrote the words of the original title: “The Way of the Soul.”

Since this work is divided into parts, each of them can stand on their own, individual poems in their own right. My favorite part, “Ring Out, Wild Bells,” is also most appropriate for today, the welcoming of a new year. The act of embracing the new means shedding the past, leaving things behind to make room for the unknown. Here Tennyson doesn’t just celebrate time to come, but has a wider vision for embracing the better parts of ourselves as people, as societies and a world. Let’s join him in ringing in “the nobler modes of life.”

Wishing a happy 2010 to all and ringing in of that which is good and a tolling out of all that is not.

Ring Out, Wild Bells

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out thy mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

(Clean-up in Times Square early this morning.  Gives true meaning to "out with the old.")