Whether or not you know you will know

Last weekend, something prompted my daughter to tell me that "the pokes of light coming off of the sun" are actually my father's legs and his toenails. She knows that he is gone. She knows that death signals the end of being in your body. She is 3, but we've talked about that. How she got to the notion of spirit and light is beyond me. And the simplicity of it -- right down to the minimalist line-drawing of the sun that she describes -- is profound.

Today, I saw W.S. Merwin read his poems at Princeton. He is 83. He lives in Maui and the south of France. For me, his poems are like sunlight. And he closed with this:

Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

A dying mother points to the sun waking the flowers from behind the curtain of a white cloud. We don't see the sun on a day like that, but the flowers "wake without a question." They don't need to see something to know it is there.

I read a piece about Merwin earlier in the day in which he spoke about "the dimension of existence ... that embraces the unknown and recognizes that our roots are in the unknown." I am struck tonight by these two ways of seeing death and by the notion of embracing the unknown.

There is Always the Risk

Change appears to happen suddenly. It doesn't. At Thanksgiving, my cousin shared the perspective that the birthing process is a perfect metaphor for change. Even while you are in a safe and comfortable place, there are pressures and forces working on you. A birth can be sudden. The change it brings about is monumental and obvious. Each day of pregnancy the fetus is changing, and it is readying for the ultimate change. Nothing about a birth is expected to be simple or painless.

Most change, I suppose, is the same. An outcome looks like a transformation, but it is typically the final manifestation of a substantive process. The more significant the change, the more likely it is to have included stress, difficulty, and profound new ways of seeing.

One of my favorite accounts of change is Adrienne Rich's "Prospective Immigrants Please Note." With a door as a metaphor for change, Rich starts: "Either you will / go through this door / or you will not go through." And she finishes: "The door itself / makes no promises. / It is only a door."

As Rich points out, you can resist -- not go through -- change and still "live worthily." At the same time, she cautions: "much will blind you, / much will evade you, / at what cost, who knows." What I hear behind her words is the truth that for her, the resistance would have meant continuing to live her life as a lesbian in a heterosexual cloak and relationship.

The power of change is, as she says, "the risk / of remembering your name." To me, "remembering your name" means knowing your true center and being deeply rooted to the person you are and the life you are meant to be living.

Change is courageous. It is generative.

"Either you will" or "you will not."

An aperture, nothing more, but wide open

The past month has been a headlong sprint. Two things have brought spaciousness into my days and drawn me deeply into the present. One has been my family, and a great gift of all this snow has been that we have seen much more of each other than we had expected the month would allow. The other has been my students and the poetry we have been studying together.

Tonight, three poems -- all about sky and boundlessness -- surround me with presence and stillness.

In "Sky," Wislawa Szymborska says that "the highest mountains / are no closer to the sky / than the deepest valleys." She goes on: "Division into sky and earth -- / it's not the proper way / to contemplate this wholeness."

When Emily Dickinson says: "I dwell in Possibility -- / a fairer House than Prose," she names the openness of poetry. "For an everlasting Roof," she has "The Gambrels of the Sky."

In a translation of Muso Soseki, W.S. Merwin writes:

"In the world outside of things
there is nothing
to get in the way"

Near the end of Szymborska's poem, she clarifies that drawing a distinction between sky and earth:

"simply lets me go on living
at a more exact address
where I can be reached promptly
if I'm sought."

I am grateful both for my "exact address" and for my daily encounters -- with family, poetry, and learning -- that point to the "wholeness" Szymborska describes.

And My Son a Handle

As a senior in college, I was flying home from Maine to Baltimore what felt like every other week. My father was dying. I often spent my visits at his bedside, sometimes at home, sometimes at the hospital. I read him the poems I was studying, some of them naming things I would never have been able, otherwise, to name.

In Gary Snyder's "Axe Handles," a father goes from teaching his son to throw a hatchet to crafting a new axe handle so that his son has an axe of his own:

"We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
'When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off.'"

Yesterday, our dear friend lost her father. Her son is four months old. I know some of the contours of grief stretching out ahead of her, and I know that for her they will have textures all their own. I would like to say a long prayer for her that will last as long as her grief will last. I don't know a prayer like that.

As Gary Snyder's poem continues, he remembers that his teacher, "Shih-hsiang Chen," "translated that and taught" him that "in Lu Ji's Wen Fu, fourth century
A.D. 'Essay on Literature'" it says in the preface that:

"'In making the handle Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand.'"

At the close of the poem, the speaker reflects:

"And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on."

She posted a picture of her father with her son. I think there should be a name for the feeling that comes when you look in wonder at your child and simultaneously feel the absence of a lost parent. It is sweet, full, and empty. Every edge of it is touched on both sides by a kind of love, and on one side by absence, and on the other side by hope.

We Only Write What We Know

My students from first semester are typing away at their exams right now, and I am thinking ahead to the poetry course that I start teaching next week. In a recent interview from The Writer's Chronicle, Colum McCann says that he tells his students, "Don't write about what you know. Write toward what you want to know." He goes on to say, "That's the liberating thing. I try to find out what I want to know. And then I see what comes of it. One has to, in the end, discover that we only write what we know. That's the essence of honesty. But in making that peculiar shotgun leap toward what we supposedly don't know, we transform our vision of what we are."

This feels like a way to marry Frost's idea of "No suprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader," to the old adage, "write what you know." McCann's point feels like useful advice for a new writer, and it hits me like a total revelation. Elizabeth Bishop used to tell her students that they didn't need to worry about having "something to say." If they worked at the craft of making a poem, what they needed to say would inevitably surface.

These are perfect reminders for me to carry into the work of teaching poetry next week...

Hold It Up to the Light

I'll be teaching poetry in a few weeks. I can't wait. One of the books I'm going to try this year is Poetry 180, an anthology that Billy Collins put together when he was poet laureate. His vision was that poems should be read in schools every morning over the loudspeaker. 180 days of school, 180 poems. I once heard him talk about the project and he referred to choosing poems that could be caught on one bounce. Read it aloud, experience it in real time, and take something with you.

The first poem is -- appropriately -- "Introduction to Poetry," by Collins himself. He says that he wants his students to "take a poem / and hold it up to the light / like a color slide." Instead, "all they want to do / is tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it."

I'm with Collins. There's certainly a purpose for explicating a poem, unfolding it to see precisely how it is made. But there's a pleasure in words and images that is sometimes best accessed if you can just "waterski / across the surface of a poem / waving at the author's name on the shore."

In a Speeding Car

In "A Quick Poem," Adam Zagajewski's speaker is "listening to Gregorian chants / in a speeding car / on a highway in France." He tells us that his life is "tattered / on both sides of the road, brittle as a paper map."

He notes a contrast between his pace and circumstance and that of the chanting monks. For him, "the trees rushed past." For "the sweet monks," it is as if "salvation were just growing in the garden."

For me, when a poem works -- as this one does -- the words lead me deeper into a quiet and stillness within myself. They bring me to a more deliberate state of contemplation. They are like prayer.

Later in the poem, Zagajewski's speaker again contrasts his circumstances with the monks:

In place of walls--sheet metal.
Instead of a vigil--a flight.
Travel instead of remembrance.
A quick poem instead of a hymn.

On the road myself today, I spoke with my great-uncle, always an exercise in clarity, wit, and wisdom. He said prayer, religion, meditation -- anything designed to bring transcendence -- ultimately slows us down so that we notice the amazements directly in front of us. If it all worked, he said, we'd just stand around staring at the world, slack-jawed with wonder.

New year's eve and new year's day are another an opportunity to consider time, pace, what has passed, and what is possible. I will try to spend some of it -- as much as possible -- in sincere contemplation of the mystery and magnificence of it all.

To Keep What I Already Have

This is a time of year when it is hard for me to avoid being reflective. It feels like a threshold moment. Arbitrary as it is, a year is ending and a new one will soon begin. And for some reason it was entirely lost on me -- until yesterday -- that we also enter a new decade next week.

I've spent the last twenty-four hours with my youngest daughter. She'll be a year and a half in January. Now that she has real words emerging, she seems to be surfacing into herself more profoundly than ever before. I feel impatient to meet the child, the teenager, and the young woman she will become. And at the same time, I want to keep her exactly as she is now.

As I get closer to the beginning of the new year and the decade that 2010 ushers in, I am grateful for the perspective of Jack Gilbert's "Bring in the Gods." It is such a substantial poem -- full of issues of mortality and the human condition -- and it comes from his book, Refusing Heaven.

He starts, "Bring in the gods I say," and "when they have eaten, I ask which of them / will question me." As the examination unfolds, the speaker says, "I stand on myself like a hilltop and my life / is spread before me." I can't translate all that he sees. You'll have to read the whole poem.

As he closes, he says, "I am hungry / for what I am becoming." One hope for my girls as they grow is that they want, as Gilbert's speaker says, "to keep what [they] already have." Another is that in all their changes, they stay hungry for what they are becoming.

Prayer for Our Daughters

Mark Jarman is a teacher of mine. I encountered this poem several years back alongside an interview with Mark in an issue of The Writer's Chronicle. My oldest was nearly six months old at the time, and I so appreciated the way it named my wishes for her, reaching from the hope that she "never be lonely at parties," to the broader wish that if she forget herself that "it be in music / or the kind of prayer that makes a garden of thinking."

The first time I heard Mark speak about poetry, I was grateful for his willingness to connect poetry and prayer. And here he offers a series of blessings that I will surely repeat many times on behalf of my daughters. I love the way he closes: "And may they find themselves, as we have found them, / complete at each stage of their lives, each part they add to." I re-see this in my children every day: they instantly become the accumulation of all they have been and all they are becoming. It is wondrous.

Into the Silence and the Light

Thanks to a friend, I've been thinking all day about the Japanese tradition of cleaning for the new year. Clean everything. Top to bottom. Close out the year that has passed and make space into which you can invite the new year. My oldest daughter helped us prune through toys today, carrying blocks, books, and stuffed animals to what we called "the give-away table" by the front door.

In the steady snow, we had nowhere to go. And the volume accumulating across the lawn and road was a metaphorical erasure. Out the window the world looks ready -- like a new year -- to be written on for the first time.

Soon I'll take the dog for a short walk, to enjoy quiet, the haloed streetlamps, our almost inaudible footsteps, and my head full of Mary Oliver's lines from "First Snow":

and only now,
deep into night,
[the snow] has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles, nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from.

Singing a Little in There

Charles Bukowski wrote some pretty cynical poems. I like the way they set the table for this little gem called "Bluebird."

"There's a bluebird in my heart," the speaker says, "that wants to get out." Turns out the bluebird is something like a metaphor for tenderness, and the speaker of the poem is determined to exert dominance over his vulnerability. "I'm too tough for him," the speaker says. But as he tells us later in the poem, they have a "secret pact":

I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die

I love the way the speaker invites us in to this inner dynamic: private compassion obscured by his projected toughness.

What's in your heart that wants to get out?

Rising Beneath My Feet

Jimmy Santiago Baca learned to read and write in jail. In the opening chapter of his memoir, Working in the Dark, he offers an image of his beginnings as a writer: "when at last I wrote my first words on the page, I felt an island rising beneath my feet like the back of a whale. As more and more words emerged, I could finally rest: I had a place to stand for the first time in my life. The island grew, with each page, into a continent inhabited by people I knew and mapped with the life I lived."

To me, this reads like someone finding god. At sea -- the ultimate metaphor for the disorder and chaos of life -- words became Baca's foundation, or what Robert Frost calls "a momentary stay against confusion." At some point, artistic practice is no different than spiritual practice. Reading a poem is like reading a prayer. Writing a poem is like offering a prayer out of nothingness. In Judaism there is a story about an uneducated man who, out of an impulse to pray, recited the Hebrew alphabet and trusted that god, with access to all of the letters, would know what was in the man's heart and therefore be able to shape the prayer into the language it required.

I heard an author speak today to a group of students. He told them that they should always be working on a project that stretches them. He said that the best way to grow is to work at something that you are not sure you can do. The first trick, I guess, is to summon the whale from below. From there, the work is, as Baca says, to keep shaping it and mapping it, and to grow it into a continent.

The Sound of the Wind

Today -- if I recall correctly -- is the anniversary of the death of a student at my school. He was never in one of my classes, but I knew him well from warm and casual interactions in the halls. Losing him was utterly tragic for our entire community. I remember walking from my car to our Meetinghouse on the Sunday after the accident. It was bright as a day can be and unusually warm for early December. I thought of him several times today, though it was long enough ago that there was no moment of silence among our student body. Instead, I thought of him on my patio this morning. The morning air was warm and the moon was midnight bright at half past six. I thought of him on my way in and out of the buildings at school and during the quiet stretches of class. I wrote a poem for him that month when he died. It felt like a way of praying for him. It is after Roethke's "Elegy for Jane." Roethke's images capture the impossibility of reckoning with a young life taken like this: "The sides of wet stones cannot console me, / Nor the moss, wound with the last light."

Spend it Now

The poems I own are like rare coins. They're currency for which there is no exchange rate. Lines that run through my head give me ways of naming the complexities of human experience and emotion. I can use a line from Stanley Kunitz to make sense of who I am now against the palimpsest of who I once was. A Jack Gilbert can remind me that "anything worth doing is worth doing badly." Larry Levis buys me an understanding of how death is like the "lights [going] off, one by one, / In a hotel at night, until at last / All of the travelers will be asleep, or until / Even the thin glow from the lobby is a kind / Of sleep."

If there was one of these rare coins that I could mint and pass out like pennies, it would probably be Rumi's line: "When someone bumps against you in the street, don't react with irritation. Everyone is careening around in this surprise."

If we all had endless supplies of this one to spend, I suspect that rush-hour traffic would be simpler. Bad days would get lighter. A moment of frustration could alchemize into a moment of human understanding and connectedness.

And Speaking of Teachers...

This was forwarded to me by a fellow alum from my MFA program. It's Dorianne Laux speaking about Philip Levine and using the style and voice of Merwin. And it feels like a direct echo of "Finding a Teacher."

MINE OWN PHIL LEVINE

after W.S. Merwin

What he told me, I will tell you
There was a war on
It seemed we had lived through
Too many to name, to number

There was no arrogance about him
No vanity, only the strong backs
Of his words pressed against
The tonnage of a page

His suggestion to me was that hard work
Was the order of each day
When I asked again, he said it again,
Pointing it out twice

His Muse, if he had one, was a window
Filled with a brick wall, the left hand corner
Of his mind, a hand lined with grease
And sweat: literal things

Before I knew him, I was unknown
I drank deeply from his knowledge
A cup he gave me again and again
Filled with water, clear river water

He was never old, and never grew older
Though the days passed and the poems
Marched forth and they were his words
Only, no other words were needed

He advised me to wait, to hold true
To my vision, to speak in my own voice
To say the thing straight out
There was the whole day about him

The greatest thing, he said, was presence
To be yourself in your own time, to stand up
That poetry was precision, raw precision
Truth and compassion: genius

I had hardly begun. I asked, How did you begin
He said, I began in a tree, in Lucerne
In a machine shop, in an open field
Start anywhere

He said If you don’t write, it won’t
Get written. No tricks. No magic
About it. He gave me his gold pen
He said What’s mine is yours

I Could Tell That His Line Had No Hook

Warning: I'm breaking my own rules here with a slightly longer post...

Finding a Teacher
In the woods I came on an old friend fishing
and I asked him a question
and he said Wait

fish were rising in the deep stream
but his line was not stirring
but I waited
it was a question about the sun

about my two eyes
my ears my mouth
my heart the earth with its four seasons
my feet where I was standing
where I was going

it slipped through my hands
as though it were water
into the river
it flowed under the trees
it sank under hulls far away
and was gone without me
then where I stood night fell

I no longer knew what to ask
I could tell that his line had no hook
I understood that I was to stay and eat with him

~W.S. Merwin

There is something about the simplicity of the exchange in this poem that says volumes to me about teaching at a spiritual level. When I think of my most significant teachers, I think of gestures, manners, cadences, moments of insight, and about a feeling I had in their classrooms and in their presences.

Ultimately, these were the teachers who found some way to create space for me to discover truth -- about myself and about life. It’s hard to be sure that there was a neat relationship between what they hoped I would learn and the lessons that rose to the surface for me. They gave me reason to wait and to let my questions hang in the air. They allowed me to feel safe enough to let my guard down and invite the arrival of unexpected discovery.

In some cases, I have found these people in the classroom. In other cases, these encounters have been more coincidental. Regardless, I think that finding a teacher requires a sense of openness captured by this poem.

The speaker of the poem sees that his friend’s line is not stirring, but he waits. It is not entirely logical, but perhaps he knows -- consciously or unconsciously -- that this time spent together will be of value even if no words are exchanged.

I love the way this poem deals with the dailiness and simplicity of teaching and learning. Real teaching and real learning are unfolding processes which require abundant patience. The idea that this encounter between friends can be boiled down to standing together quietly watching a loose line linger in the water is magnificent.

It feels to me like a gathering akin to a Meeting for Worship in which no words are spoken but the silence is so rich that when it is over friends shake hands and are in some deep way replenished. You can feel the quality of centeredness when everyone stands and stretches and begins to walk out of the Meetinghouse with intention. Good teaching, like good art and good worship, has the capacity to leave us changed -- both teacher and student -- in quiet and unnamable ways.

Instruments and All

I remember asking Mr. Blauvelt, my favorite high school English teacher, about whether or not I could call my favorite hip-hop songs poetry. He wasn't so interested in that possibility. He loved music. I know that he was a record guy. He once played us Simon & Garfunkel's "Richard Cory" when we read the poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson.

I'm sure I asked him because I was starting to frame my own theories and wanted to test his sensibilities. No doubt mine were more inclusive then than they are now, but I still see the overlap. More than anything, it's the language play, the bending of words and their taste in the mouth that keep lines of hip-hop angling for space in my brain alongside the poetry. It's also the possibilities of any song. Catch me at the right moment and I can get moved by Ray LaMontagne, Beth Orton, or Mos Def just like I can get struck dumb by Wislawa Szymborska, Larry Levis, and Jack Gilbert. But they're different. A poem has to generate all of its power through the words. They sit on the page alone. No accompaniment. None of the aggregation of force that Billy Collins talks about in his "Man Listening to Disc."

He Takes Off, Last of All, The World

In Randall Jarrell's "Field & Forest" -- definitely one of my all time favorites -- he offers a luminous image at the end of undressing, both physically and mentally. I didn't hear this poem until I was several semesters deep into my graduate program, but I think it offers a unique and haunting account of quieting down, turning off, and slipping into deep, self-forgetting solitude. The entire poem is wonderful, but this is the image that gets me every time...

At night, from the airplane, all you see is lights,
A few lights, the lights of houses, headlights
And darkness. Somewhere below, beside a light,
The farmer, naked, takes out his false teeth:
He doesn’t eat now. Takes off his spectacles:
He doesn’t see now. Shuts his eyes.
If he were able to he’d shut his ears,
And as it is, he doesn’t hear with them.
Plainly, he’s taken out his tongue: he doesn’t talk.
His arms and legs: at least, he doesn’t move them.
They are knotted together, curled up, like a child’s.
And after he had taken off the thoughts
It has taken him his life to learn,
He takes off, last of all, the world.

The Gift

I lifted up her chin so she could look me in the eye while I told her about the scarecrows and what her grandmother said. She winced. She looked down to see her mother's fingers pushing at the splinter. I lifted her chin again and kept on about the scarecrows.

When she looked down again the splinter was out, and I was left with Li-Young Lee's words in my mouth: "to pull the metal splinter from my palm / my father recited a story in a low voice... I can't remember the tale, / but hear his voice still, a well / of dark water, a prayer."

Who knows whether she'll remember this splinter or not. But the kindnesses we give her are our way of "planting something... in [her] palm." All we can do is give and hope. The rest is up to her.

This Being Human

The last few days have left me short on sanity and patience, and clinging to some of my favorite lines by Rumi from his poem, "The Guest House." "This being human," he says, "is a guest house. / Every morning a new arrival." Later, he says, "Welcome and entertain them all." Even "a crowd of sorrows .... may be clearing you out / for some new delight."

Today, the delight has been my family. This morning when I asked my three year old how she learned to dress herself, she told me, "Mommy taught me how." I told her, "your mommy is one smart lady. That's why I married her!" Tonight, that same smart lady oriented me to her system of organization and time management. Already I feel more prepared to meet the next arrivals "at the door laughing and invite them in."