and, always, there, I find what I didn't know I was searching for.
In the dark hours of this cloudy day, just ahead of the morning I will spend with the seventh graders of Project Flow at Philadelphia's Water Works, I turned to Kate Northrop, Stanley Kunitz, Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver, Ted Kooser, and Greg Djanikian and found:
* a title that leads me toward a game
* a scene that leads me toward a prompt
* a pair of divine metaphors
* a myth that will inspire myths
Whomever thinks poetry is superfluous has not spent a morning with children.
| 50 Book Pledge | Book #24: My Brother’s Book by Maurice Sendak |
In honour of National Poetry Month, I present “Touch Me” from Collected Poems by Stanley Kunitz.
Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.
At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where we're working on color, perception, metaphor, and the evocative shimmers of remembered gardens as part of the
VAST Institute workshops, we were, on Monday, speaking of the senses writers tend to ignore. Smell and taste, perhaps because telling metaphors are elusive. Sound, because what we notice first—bird songs, insect buzz—seems somehow overly heard.
Today, while searching for illustrative examples to share by writers who are in possession of all their senses, not to mention all their wonder, I came upon this passage in Stanley Kunitz's
The Wild Braid. Scale is not a sense, of course, nor is the passing of time. But they are elements of framing and reporting that writers must finally master. With the simplest possible language, Kunitz takes back in time. He isn't trying to be a poet here. He's saying, This is how it was; this is how I moved through things and saw.
During my adolescence, out in the open fields, I would sometimes pretend I was one of the insects. I became captivated by dragonflies and imagined I could see the world as they did. Everything had a different scale.
I reveled in the sensation of being so light and being able to go anywhere, unburdened by a body.
Discovering the body was part of the joy, the sense of infinite possibility of being out in the woods. I recognized that it had weight and had certain limitations—there was no denying that. Obviously one's sensitivity was less acute than that of any other living creature in the woods. At the same time, the body was the very instrument of exploration.
I would find a leaf or a stone in the underbrush and have the sensation that nobody else had seen quite the same thing. And if I came across an arrowhead, that was a real triumph.
Sometimes, especially when one gets older, one gets very clumsy in the handling of delicate objects. The hands, the fingers, are less nimble than they were. But then, there's the compensation that one knows a bit more. There's a quid pro quo.
In the woods, one loses the sense of time. It's quite a different experience from walking in the streets. The streets are human creations. In the woods what one finds are cosmic creations.
It was a movie weekend—"Slumdog Millionaire" at ten on Friday night, "Frost/Nixon" at 4:15 Sunday, "Mongol," courtesy of Netflix, in between, late Saturday afternoon. And then the Oscars, a tradition strong as Christmas here—a semi-glamorous meal delivered picnic style while the "barely mint" dresses float by. The Oscars always make me cry. Call me a sentimental fool (you won't be the first), but I like seeing dreams fulfilled. I like the idea that it's possible.
In between, I was walking about my humble abode feeling knocked-down grateful for all the book recommendations that came my way via Looking for Book Love, for all the passion that is out there, still, for stories that cling to the page. While I considered the titles that came in, I read essays on writing and craft—re-read them, I should say, in preparation for Tuesday, when I'll spend a chunk of the day in a coffee shop with aspiring young writers. Sven Birkerts, Natalia Ginzburg, Mary Oliver, Jack Gilbert, Gerald Stern, Stanley Kunitz, Forrest Gander, and of course Pablo Neruda will keep me and the girls company throughout a day that will also be spent collecting and sorting the details we hunt down with our cameras.
We'll yield to six exercises, which I've named the following way. I plan to write right alongside the girls, for I am not the sort of writer who believes she definitively knows. I'm the sort who keeps trying to find out. Who learns as she teaches, and as she goes.
The class in brief (should you wish to write along...):
Leveraging Involuntary Memory
The Perceiving I
The Hunt for Character
The Fair Release of Story
The Act of Autobiography
Vulnerable Fictions
I was deeply saddened yesterday to learn, through my agent and friend Amy Rennert, that Carol Houck Smith, the long-time editor at W.W. Norton, had passed away. I met her only once, in 1998, when she escorted Gerald Stern to the National Book Awards, and sat with me and chatted, as if we were lifelong friends. As if I deserved to be there. I emailed with her just occasionally.
But you didn't have to be in her physical presence to feel her emanating goodness, to know that the world was a better place because she lived within it. She edited Andrea Barrett, Rita Dove, Stanley Kunitz, Ron Carlson, Rick Bass, Joan Silber. She was, wrote Andrea Barrett in a statement printed by the Washington Post, the sort of editor who did "the simplest (and hardest) task: she asked questions. Questions that presumed the characters created on the page were actual persons, the actions real and consequential, the meanings a matter of life and death." She was the sort who made you feel welcome at her table, who wrote, once, to say that she had "just finished The House of Mirth, if you can believe that. I needed a respite from this century."
Of the books that she edited, I hold as most special The Wild Braid, that magnificent end-of-life collage by Stanley Kunitz. It was so perfectly odd, so uncontained, a spill of garden, words, living, conversation, photographs, and a nearly final page that seems just rightly quotable, this day, in which so many of us are fondly remembering Carol Houck Smith:
When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.
I’m in with “The Layers” by Stanley Kunitz, who was Georgia Heard’s beloved Poetry Professor at Columbia. (For additional doses of Poetry Friday Poems, point your browser to Semicolon.)
The Layers
by Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from [...]
Love Stanley K. And this. Thanks. My friend Anne - whom you shall meet, spent 6 hours in the woods the other day. She, too, revels in nature.