What's In A Name?

Catching up on magazine reading this weekend I came across an excellent little piece on Jackson Pollack and a potential new discovery in Smithsonian Magazine. It argues that in one very special piece of art commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim herself, Jackson Pollack decided to sign his name in large letters throughout the canvas. The author of the article, Henry Adams, admits that it was his wife who first saw it over breakfast one day. Adams describes their “aha” moment below:

“I was researching a book about Pollock's lifelong relationship with his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton, the famed regionalist and muralist, when I sat puzzling over a reproduction of Mural after breakfast one morning with Marianne, herself an art historian. She suddenly said she could make out the letters S-O-N in blackish paint in the upper right area of the mural. Then she realized JACKSON ran across the entire top. And finally she saw POLLOCK below that.”

He goes on to write an explanation of why this could be the case and I’ve pasted in their justification for this hidden signature below the original mural. (See the full article http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Decoding-Jackson-Pollock.html). This has created quite a stir in the Smithsonian readership community, both online and now in the December issue of the magazine with most readers asking why Pollack would do such a thing. I’m not sure I have an opinion, but I love this little piece of artistic mystery.

Guggenheim, by then a huge Pollack supporter, commissioned this piece for her own home, not a museum or an art show, thus the artist in question was never “in question” necessitating such a cheeky move. However, maybe that’s what this was, embedding something hidden so all of the guests at her many parties would study it and perhaps “see” it one day. I have no idea, but there are some times I think I see it—it’s in black in his painting after all—and there are other times I need the de-coder to see it properly.  Given his technique, part of me wants to believe that maybe he had to sign a bunch of checks that day or the bottom of many pieces of art and his wrist bone just sort of continued that general motion and he started making shapes of his name without knowing it...What do you see?

Here is a small poem for today inspired by this new development.

Random Concrete
Dripping syllables, spattering punctuations of love
from one intense canvas to another
in states both calm and manic,
You gave life to new shapes, forms
Like a god, you dabbled your drizzle from above.
With fame, wide spread notoriety
Did you pull one last act
A hidden gesture of ego’s the variety?

Somewhere on earth or in ether, methinks
The spirit of Pollack smiles, silently winks.

Going Old School: Wordsworth Revisited

 I had planned on sharing a bit of Wordsworth today, thinking of lines I was asked to memorize or at least I memorized them while studying them many moons ago, and then the entire can of ode upon childhood opened itself up. After reading the Wordsworth’s entire poem, it occurred to me that I may have never even have read this in its entirety before. I consulted a variety of volumes of poems on my shelf and anthologies I own, even the enormous tome that is Norton, king of English literature, and no, the full version of this poem is not published.

Surely any number of volumes at Borders or Barns will have Wordsworth’s “Imitations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood.” But if I had read it once, that was the only time and it was worth a second read. The final stanza remains my favorite because it brings together, for me, all of the philosophy about youth, nature and aging and gives thanks for being alive and human and I think, for the poet to be able to age and understand the beauty of the circle of life. That said, this time, I find the entire second half of this poem gripping.

The lines of giving thanks are the ones I thought of most this holiday weekend. Turns out, the poem gave back my giving to me its entire 208 lines. What a lovely gift

"Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood"
By William Wordsworth

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;

Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;--
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy
Shepherd-boy!

Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:--
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
--But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his "humorous stage"
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul's immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,--
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest--
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:--
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

A Day Of Rest, A Day Of Thanks

Here's to a a day of rest, a day for doing nothing but watching football, eating and a little socializing.  Thankfully for me, the day kicked off with the one and only yoga class at my studio today, the 10am "save a turkey" class, at which I was able to give thanks for my instructors and the people I've come to know over the last almost year there.

While turkey isn't my thing, cranberries, yams, mashed potatoes and all of the sides are.  And, an unexpected surprise before going to my dinner-- an entire two hours this morning on NPR in which a special episode of "The Splendid Table" discussed a cool vegetarian menu.  But much more exciting than that, Garrison Keillor made a cameo appearance.  Since work has been overwhelming I had no idea this program was going to be on, let alone have Keillor reading sonnets from his new book with a little Thanksgiving chat with the host of "Table," Lynne Rossetto Kasper.  Fun times after yoga.

Here is one sonnet read today about food, sort of...

Supper
by Garrison Keillor

You made crusty bread rolls filled with chunks of brie

And minced garlic drizzled with olive oil
And baked them until the brie was bubbly
And we ate them lovingly, our legs coiled
Together under the table. And salmon with dill
And lemon and whole-wheat cous cous
Baked with garlic and fresh ginger, and a hill
Of green beans and carrots roasted with honey and tofu.
It was beautiful, the candles, the linen and silver,
The sun shining down on our northern street,
Me with my hand on your leg. You, my lover,

In your jeans and green T-shirt and beautiful bare feet.
How simple life is. We buy a fish. We are fed.
We sit close to each other, we talk and then we go to bed.

Kindness And Good Form In Word and Shape

(From Calligrammes by G. Apollinaire, subtitled Poems of war and peace 1913-1916)

Today was a different sort of day but has led to a thread of goodness. It started off optimistically after the long slog of four constant weeks of work and then sort of turned into a productive afternoon of optimism and led to a few resentments, especially after missing the first and then tonight's second yoga class, in favor of a computer.  Sometimes not putting things into words is the best way of making them known in another way shape or form.

And sometimes poets take words and make shapes out of them. Calligrams, making the words of poetry into the shape of the theme of the work, is something I would never attempt but admire. While I cannot draw, it’s a good night if I dream in shapes, in words, or in both, and not because of my crossword puzzle habit. But imagery comes in many forms.  I remember a long time ago having to learn this term, calligram, for AP English and I think I probably mocked it-- an eye-roll here, a pronounced nasal exhale there…

However, it turns out the person who popularized this art form is also someone who is known for coining the phrase “surrealism” in art. Yeah—bet you can’t name him either. His name is Guillaume Apollinaire and he fought in WWI, was wounded and then survived to do some great work as a critic and innovator of language until his death—two years later, in 1918, of nothing less than the Spanish Flu. And lest we forget to mention that in his few years of life, this is a man not only befriended Picasso and nearly every other artist during their day, but, and I love this-- Apollinaire was accused of stealing the original Mona Lisa. Not a dull life in 38 years.

In an effort to get out of today’s mentality, I have taken a quote from another author and re-arranged the words to create something new. It’s not a calligram per-se but it’s how I feel and, well, as the Treegap Governess, nothing’s wrong with feeling and writing and sharing. These words, re-arranged are how I would see my heartbeat if I were hooked up to a monitor and where I think the rhymes should fall when reading this out loud.

Believe,
when you are most
unhappy,
that there is something
for you
to do
in the world.
So long as you
Can sweeten another's pain,
life is not in vain.

Even During "Good Wars" Parents Write Back

The two poems published here today are from that ever illuminating yellow folder handed down to me and stashed away. They come from my grandmother’s (Nana’s) grandfather, I believe. They are by G.R. Walker, a man who lived and farmed and saw his sons drafted into WWI. This detail is known because whoever typed these out on their thin pages has, in parenthesis (Written after his son was drafted in WWI). I chose these two poems out of about 5 because of how true they still resonate today. Wars have not stopped and feelings, however patriotic or proud, never prevented parents from wanting their brave kids from entering into any danger zone. The world is still at war and I think G.R. Walker would not be happy to know this.

These two poems were written in the early 1900’s, the first in 1915 and the second in 1917 (again, according to the leafy thin type paper along with notes written by those who typed them), and while they are not famous war poems, I think they are lovely and I’m proud to say that someone in my family was writing poetry during war time and feeling and thinking through it all. I may not always want to acknowledge that the fruit falls near the tree, in this case, I’m proud to have the nectar near.

Our Treasures

If the world would stop its fighting
And live more peacefully;
There would be hope in this present life,
Of Joy through eternity.

But when we lay our treasures up
On the earth, it will appeal
To other men of sinful lust,
Our treasures for to steal.

Then if we would be happy
The advice to us is given;
Lay not our treasures up on earth
But lay them up on heaven.
(August 5, 1915)

The Race

One day while sitting on the back
Of my mule in old Missouri State,
I saw a race I’ll ne’er forget
Between a frog and a snake.

The mule was drinking from a pond
With tall vaks standing near
When all at once his head went up
In a state of nervous fear,
For a rustling cracking noise hand started in the rear.

I looked behind and what I saw
Was a frong a jumping high
And the snake was coming fast
To catch him, he did try.
Before the frog could reach the pond
That we were standing by.

The frog was jumping for his life
The snake was for his dinner!
The frog saw safety in the pond
From that most wicked sinner
And I am glad here to record
The frog he was the winner.
(March 23, 1917)

Cultural, Generational Exchanges

One of the first poems I ever wrote was about my Nana.  It was a middle school assignment and I don't even remember what the guidelines were at the time, but it turned out that the poem was submitted for publication and made it.  It was really exciting to see something I wrote included in a book, a publication which included student writing and illustrations from kids in Oregon and Japan.  The book was published with one page having the English version and the opposite page in Japanese. 

By the time this actually made it into print, I was in high school and a little embarrassed by the attention and perhaps that the poem itself was so simple.  Maybe I thought I was too grown up or wanted people to know I was capable of something better, but now that I look back on it, some poems are okay just the way they are.  And it makes me happy that my Nana really loved this one.  There are three copies of this in that yellow folder I'm going through. 

When looking for an image to post with this tonight, I found an interview done by me when reading this poem at Powell's bookstore in Portland, OR.  I had never seen this quote before tonight, so I'll put the whole thing in.  Funny what you can find about yourself on Google, especially if what you said or wrote was in the pre-internet boom.

Nicole Speulda, a high school student who had a poem published in Treasures 3: Stories & Art by Students in Japan & Oregon, tells what it was like hearing from others who had read about her and her writing.

"After my poem was published in Treasures 3, it appeared in several newspapers. I received letters from people that I have never even met before. It’s been pretty exciting to learn what people think about the stories and works that are in the book. One lady thanked us for restoring her faith in the youth of today. I feel really glad that I could be a part of Treasures 3 because it highlights the positive things that the youth of today in both the United States and in Japan have to offer."

My poem entitled “Our Song” is about my grandmother and her nickname is Nana because she doesn’t like the word grandmother. She thinks it makes her sound too old. I chose to write about her because I wrote it when I was fourteen and I was trying to deal with myself growing older and she also was starting to age. This is what I had to say:

Our Song

Nana sat upon the piano bench,
Vibrant eyes fixed upon the page.
Her smooth hands glided over the keys,
Blending together a melody,
So sweet and gentle to my ears.
She played it to me almost every day,
And it became our song.
Now she is stricken with age,
And her gnarled hands are slightly palsied.
Her tired grey eyes search for the notes,
But alas it is to no avail,
As she begins to sob quietly.
I slide next to her on the bench,
And play the melody that will always be
Our song.

The Yellow Folder Finds Sunlight

Photo of a leaf that fell into my hair, a perfect yellow star on marathon weekend by Nicole Speulda 10.24.09

On another long Thursday where a constant spittle of rain has personified my attitude, I am happy to say the lightning and thunder of the last hour has kicked me into a clarifying frame of mind. Today's offering comes from that neon gold folder I took out of the archives about a month ago for the first time in years. This is a poem by my own Nana, something I found on two slips of the 6x9 inch pad of paper she used to write on in her ever elegant cursive, an unmistakable font that made grocery lists look like the Bill of Rights and turned birthday cards into important documents with the signature flourish.

I like this very much. I remember reading this once before but it’s beautiful to re-discover. The thing I love about this most? The paper I’m looking at is the original and she has crossed out the second to last line. Originally it read “I’ll smile, put out my hand…” But she changed it and I love the final draft. Why is this important? Because even my Nana, not known for being a poet, was one and she thought about her words enough to want to edit or re-do something. I know the feeling.  To be true to the paper, she signed it "Maggi" and the g's look lovely.

A Plan
by "Nana" Margaret Cook

I wish I were a flower
     Hanging on a vine,
Or a pretty little bluebird
     In the sunshine.

I might be a raindrop
     To give a rose a drink,
Or a golden sunbeam
     I’d like that, I think.

I could be a rainbow
     To cheer a troubled heart
All this would be nice
     But where do I start?

I could stand in the shadow
     Of a red maple tree,
The take a tiny step-
     Then another, then three.

It isn’t very difficult
     To begin my plan of cheer,
I’ll smile and say hello
     And welcome all who hear.