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.