I'm out to find that village

 In a land known for its poets, Seamus Heaney still stands out. The committee that awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 cited his “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.”

Well, yes.

Born in Ulster, Heaney’s literary career took him many places, but he chose to live in the Republic and he wrote frequently about Ireland and Irish history. His “Requiem for the Croppies” is utter heartbreak.

Today, however, we’ll have something less terrible. Just the joy of spring in Ireland.

“May”

When I looked down from the bridge

Trout were flipping the sky

Into smithereens, the stones

Of the wall warmed me.

Wading green stems, lugs of leaf

That untangle and bruise

(Their tiny gushers of juice)

My toecaps sparkle now

Over the soft fontanel

Of Ireland. I should wear

Hide shoes, the hair next my skin,

For walking this ground:

Wasn’t there a spa-well,

Its coping grassy, pendent?

And then the spring issuing

Right across the tarmac.

I’m out to find that village,

Its low sills fragrant

With ladysmock and celandine,

Marshlights in the summer dark.

All I ever had

Without poetry, we wouldn’t have songs. Songs without lyrics are instrumental music. A songwriter or lyricist may have a melody in mind when s/he writes a song, but usually the words guide the music.

Bob Marley was inspired to write “Redemption Song” after hearing a speech by pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey. Unlike most of his other pieces, this one was meant to be sung as a solo, with only acoustic guitar as accompaniment. Therefore, it’s pretty uncomplicated on the surface, but there’s a whole lot of stuff going on. It’s always been one of my favorites.

This video was released by Marley’s estate in February 2020. There’s a lot going on here, too.

Today's National Poetry Month entry: "Redemption Song."

 

 

This is for

I said yesterday that poetry manifests in just about every possible way a writer can fling words out in a way that’s meaningful to her or him. The patterns are not random, except when they are purposefully so, when carefully-plotted randomness is critical to the idea the poet is communicating.

As with any writing—you have to thoroughly know the rules before you can break them with impact.

American poet Nikki Giovanni is an example of this. Since her early writings in the 1960s, Giovanni has powerfully conveyed the intersectionality of race and gender as both targets of societal oppression and vectors of empowerment. And she uses whatever form best suits her purpose.

Today’s National Poetry Month entry is a case in point. You may be a little confused by how long it takes to get to the eponymous character. Then you realize that Giovanni has tied everything together, because everything is, in fact, tied together.

That’s poetry.

“Rosa Parks”

This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said
they couldn’t. And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago
Defender to the Black Americans in the South so they would
know they were not alone. This is for the Pullman Porters who
helped Thurgood Marshall go south and come back north to fight
the fight that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education because
even though Kansas is west and even though Topeka is the birth-
place of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the powerful “The
Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” it was the
Pullman Porters who whispered to the traveling men both
the Blues Men and the “Race” Men so that they both would
know what was going on. This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled as if they were happy and laughed like they were tickled
when some folks were around and who silently rejoiced in 1954
when the Supreme Court announced its 9—0 decision that “sepa-
rate is inherently unequal.” This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled and welcomed a fourteen-year-old boy onto their train in
1955. They noticed his slight limp that he tried to disguise with a
doo-wop walk; they noticed his stutter and probably understood
why his mother wanted him out of Chicago during the summer
when school was out. Fourteen-year-old Black boys with limps
and stutters are apt to try to prove themselves in dangerous ways
when mothers aren’t around to look after them. So this is for the
Pullman Porters who looked over that fourteen-year-old while
the train rolled the reverse of the Blues Highway from Chicago to
St. Louis to Memphis to Mississippi. This is for the men who kept
him safe; and if Emmett Till had been able to stay on a train all
summer he would have maybe grown a bit of a paunch, certainly
lost his hair, probably have worn bifocals and bounced his grand-
children on his knee telling them about his summer riding the
rails. But he had to get off the train. And ended up in Money,
Mississippi. And was horribly, brutally, inexcusably, and unac-
ceptably murdered. This is for the Pullman Porters who, when the
sheriff was trying to get the body secretly buried, got Emmett’s
body on the northbound train, got his body home to Chicago,
where his mother said: I want the world to see what they did
to my boy. And this is for all the mothers who cried. And this is
for all the people who said Never Again. And this is about Rosa
Parks whose feet were not so tired, it had been, after all, an ordi-
nary day, until the bus driver gave her the opportunity to make
history. This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks from Tuskegee, Alabama,
who was also the field secretary of the NAACP. This is about the
moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods
aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that that young man in
Money, Mississippi, who had been so well protected by the
Pullman Porters, would not have died in vain. When Mrs. Parks
said “NO” a passionate movement was begun. No longer would
there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs.
Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system,
the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and
the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young
men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No. Great
voices would be raised singing the praises of God and exhorting
us “to forgive those who trespass against us.” But it was the
Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it
was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not
being able to stand it. She sat back down.

 

 

 

Forgive me

As you’re aware, poetry is an art form that comprises many, many forms—we’ve got novel-length epics and two-line zingers, haiku, sijo and englynion on the short end; tight rhyming and meter restrictions and wild-ass free verse. The subject matter covers mythic heroes, passionate love, the sorrow and bitterness of war—and the littlest quotidian details.

They’re all poems.

For today’s National Poetry Month example, let’s have something from William Carlos Williams, whose day job was as a medical doctor, and who hung about with the likes of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. 

Williams focused on the small things of daily life and sought to build up a thoroughly American take on poetry, in the face of others he thought were too Euro-centric. He influenced later poets like Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, as well as Denise Levertov. Our poem today distils one of life’s small tragedies mixed in with one of its joys.

“This Is Just to Say”

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

 

 

Prize witlessness

Back at the end of 2020, I naïvely thought that after his election defeat, we’d stop hearing from and about the Kleptocrat. Even after J6, I thought that—having literally been beaten back at the Capitol—he’d slink off into retirement and devote his remaining life to cheating at golf and telling lies about all his non-existent accomplishments as president.

Boy—my bad.

No, as the Bard said, the evil that men do lives after them, and this applies to twice-impeached one-term presidents. In fact—as he campaigns again for the job, Cadet Bonespurs is ratcheting up his public intentions to run the office as an imperial grift for life, and his Republican sycophants (which is to say: the entire party) are willing to put up with it if it means they can rip away democratic freedoms like the vote, women’s bodily autonomy and racial/religious equality.

They are hell-bent on returning us all to the bad old days when [white] men were men, and everyone else shut up and made sandwiches.

So I thought that for today’s entry in National Poetry Month, we might have something that speaks to this. I cast about and found Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

I first met Sor Juana (“Sor” means “sister”, as in a religious sister) in a high school Spanish class. (Along with Maimónides, Carlos V and some others, but those would be another post.) Born near Mexico City in 1651, she was the illegitimate daughter of a Spaniard and a mestizo, a polymath who learned to read and write at age three, and who was teaching Latin to other children by age 13. She asked her mother’s permission to disguise herself as a boy so she could go to university, but was unsuccessful. Nonetheless, by age 17 she impressed a convocation of theologians, philosophers, poets and jurists with her intellectual capabilities.

In 1667 she entered a convent of Discalced Carmelites (a very strict order); two years later she joined the monastery of the Hieronymite nuns largely because it allowed her to pursue her studies. Sor Juana’s writings got her into trouble with the male establishment of the Church and the state. The Bishop of Puebla famously told her to shut up and make sandwiches (more or less), and she replied that “one can perfectly well philosophize while cooking supper.”

Well, she wasn’t going to win that one, and she was eventually forced into silence, selling all her considerable library and collection of scientific instruments and retreating into prayer. She died during a plague in 1694, but we are the better off for her body of work that she did leave us.

Viz.: “You Foolish Men”. In this poem, Sor Juana captures and skewers the male propensity to project their own base thoughts onto women, and to refuse to own up to their own actions. There is no mincing of words here; spades are not dressed up as garden implements. She’s got the acid of Dorothy Parker under her Hieronymite wimple, and she’s not afraid to use it to lay bare their outrageous and unjust sexual hypocrisy—“you whimper if you’re turned away, and sneer if you’ve been gratified.” Seriously: this is the GOP platform in a nutshell.

Is Sor Juana a Nasty Woman? I believe she might have turned this one over in her mind, probed the implications, explored the current environment, and given us a well-reasoned, thorough and stylish reply.

“You Foolish Men”

  You foolish men, so very adept
at wrongly faulting womankind,
not seeing you're alone to blame
for faults you plant in woman's mind.

    After you've won by urgent plea
the right to tarnish her good name,
you still expect her to behave--
you, that coaxed her into shame.

    You batter her resistance down
and then, all righteousness, proclaim
that feminine frivolity,
not your persistence, is to blame.

    When it comes to bravely posturing,
your witlessness must take the prize:
you're the child that makes a bogeyman,
and then recoils in fear and cries.

    Presumptuous beyond belief,
you'd have the woman you pursue
be Thais when you're courting her,
Lucretia once she falls to you.

    For plain default of common sense,
could any action be so queer
as oneself to cloud the mirror,
then complain that it's not clear?

    Whether you're favored or disdained,
nothing can leave you satisfied.
You whimper if you're turned away,
you sneer if you've been gratified.

    With you, no woman can hope to score;
whichever way, she's bound to lose;
spurning you, she's ungrateful--
succumbing, you call her lewd.

    Your folly is always the same:
you apply a single rule
to the one you accuse of looseness
and the one you brand as cruel.

    What happy mean could there be
for the woman who catches your eye,
if, unresponsive, she offends,
yet whose complaisance you decry?

    Still, whether it's torment or anger--
and both ways you've yourselves to blame--
God bless the woman who won't have you,
no matter how loud you complain.

    It's your persistent entreaties
that change her from timid to bold.
Having made her thereby naughty,
you would have her good as gold.

    So where does the greater guilt lie
for a passion that should not be:
with the man who pleads out of baseness
or the woman debased by his plea?

    Or which is more to be blamed--
though both will have cause for chagrin:
the woman who sins for money
or the man who pays money to sin?

    So why are you men all so stunned
at the thought you're all guilty alike?
Either like them for what you've made them
or make of them what you can like.

    If you'd give up pursuing them,
you'd discover, without a doubt,
you've a stronger case to make
against those who seek you out.

    I well know what powerful arms
you wield in pressing for evil:
your arrogance is allied
with the world, the flesh, and the devil!

Here it is in Spanish:

   Hombres necios que acusáis
a la mujer sin razón,
sin ver que sois la ocasión
de lo mismo que culpáis:

    si con ansia sin igual
solicitáis su desdén,
¿por qué quereis que obren bien
si las incitáis al mal?

    Combatís su resistencia
y luego, con gravedad,
decís que fue liviandad
lo que hizo la diligencia.

    Parecer quiere el denuedo
de vuestro parecer loco,
al niño que pone el coco
y luego le tiene miedo.

    Queréis, con presunción necia,
hallar a la que buscáis,
para pretendida, Thais,
y en la posesión, Lucrecia

    ¿Qué humor puede ser más raro
que el que, falto de consejo,
el mismo empaña el espejo
y siente que no esté claro?

    Con el favor y el desdén
tenéis condición igual,
quejándoos, si os tratan mal,
burlándoos, si os quieren bien.

    Opinión, ninguna gana:
pues la que más se recata,
si no os admite, es ingrata,
y si os admite, es liviana

    Siempre tan necios andáis
que, con desigual nivel,
a una culpáis por crüel
y a otra por fácil culpáis.

    ¿Pues cómo ha de estar templada
la que vuestro amor pretende,
si la que es ingrata, ofende,
y la que es fácil, enfada?

    Mas, entre el enfado y pena
que vuestro gusto refiere,
bien haya la que no os quiere
y quejaos en hora buena.

    Dan vuestras amantes penas
a sus libertades alas,
y después de hacerlas malas
las queréis hallar muy buenas.

    ¿Cuál mayor culpa ha tenido
en una pasión errada:
la que cae de rogada
o el que ruega de caído?

    ¿O cuál es más de culpar,
aunque cualquiera mal haga:
la que peca por la paga
o el que paga por pecar?

    Pues ¿para quée os espantáis
de la culpa que tenéis?
Queredlas cual las hacéis
o hacedlas cual las buscáis.

    Dejad de solicitar,
y después, con más razón,
acusaréis la afición
de la que os fuere a rogar.

    Bien con muchas armas fundo
que lidia vuestra arrogancia,
pues en promesa e instancia
juntáis diablo, carne y mundo.

 

 

 

Gratitude Monday: It was the eve

Hokey smokes—is it April already? Well, you know what that means: it’s National Poetry Month. Today is also Gratitude Monday, and it falls on Easter Monday. What to do, what to do?

Well, today I’m grateful for poetry—the various forms it takes, its ability to cut right to the heart of expression and emotions, its visible beauty, its use of language(s); all the ways it helps us communicate our most important messages. Don’t get me wrong—there’s a heap of bad poetry out there (just like bad novels, bad songs and bad movies). But when it’s good, it is perfection.

For the Easter Monday portion of today’s post, let’s go that day in 1917 and Eleanor Farjeon.

If you’ve ever listened to Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam as was) sing “Morning Has Broken” (or been surprised to find the song in your church hymnal), then you’re familiar with Farjeon, an English poet, journalist and writer of children’s books. Farjeon came from a late-Victorian literary family, and counted among her friends D.H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare and Robert Frost (who lived for some time in England until World War I broke out). One of her closest friendships was with the poet Edward Thomas and his wife Helen.

On Easter Monday, 9 April 1917, Thomas was killed in his first action, at Arras, France. Farjeon wrote a poem that captures that instant when we at home learn that the one at war has paid the highest price for policy. The tiniest of things are etched eternally into our memories, some to bring a glimmer of joy, others an unexpected rush of tears. Sometimes for the rest of our lives.

Here's the thing—the constant throughout every war humans have fought throughout time: no matter the scale of battalions, divisions and armies, no matter the catastrophically destructive capability of the weapons...it always comes down to the individuals killed or maimed and the ripple effect that changes those who knew and loved them. Thousands of people in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Syria and elsewhere are experiencing this even as I write.

“Easter Monday (In Memoriam E.T.)”

In the last letter that I had from France
You thanked me for the silver Easter egg
Which I had hidden in the box of apples
You liked to munch beyond all other fruit.
You found the egg the Monday before Easter,
And said, 'I will praise Easter Monday now -
It was such a lovely morning'. Then you spoke
Of the coming battle and said, 'This is the eve.
Good-bye. And may I have a letter soon.'

That Easter Monday was a day for praise,
It was such a lovely morning. In our garden
We sowed our earliest seeds, and in the orchard
The apple-bud was ripe. It was the eve.
There are three letters that you will not get.

Take a moment today to be grateful for the friendships you have. Consider reaching out to one or two friends to mention how much they mean to you. There may be letters that they will not get.