On the death of Ruth Stone

Ruth Stone has died and I didn't know much about her when she was alive. Except that she was very old.

According to the BBC, her best-known work, including The Solution and Simplicity, came after she turned 70. In 2002, she won the National Book Award for Poetry, for In the Next Galaxy. She was 96 when she died.

Stone's second husband, poet Walter Stone, took his own life in 1959 - the year of her debut - leaving her to bring up three daughters.

Eta Carinae


The snow is coming straight down
Like heavy rain,
The crows protesting—
What do they know?
So the weather patterns change.
The crows, blue jays,
The soggy robins, the gold finches—
Dupes of the weather,
All deceived by the light.
The sun, wobbling and coughing
Along the dust belt;
The entire galaxy
Shuddering with Eta Carinae
Swollen to term.
The super-novae, like Christ,
Come to illuminate the ignorant,
Who can only swallow one another.



Strings


We pop into life the way
Particles pop in and out
Of the continuum.
We are a seething mass
Of probability.
And probably I love you.
The evil of larva
And the evil of stars
Is a formula for the future.
Some bodies can
Thrust their arms into
a flame and be instantly
cured of this world,
while others sicken.
Why think, little brother
Like the moon, spit out like
A broken tooth.
"Oh," groans the world.
The outer planets,
The fizzing sun, here we come
With our luggage.
Look at the clever things
We have made out of
A few building blocks—
O, fabulous continuum.

 

Boredom by Margaret Atwood

Tuesdays can be so dull. The week seems to stretch ahead with little hint of respite in our regimented lives. Wednesday is hump day - perhaps the worst - although one day we will be dead and in our last days we will probably give our right arm for a month of Wednesdays.

Still this circle of the week and the seasons can be claustrophobic. It can trap us in these ever decreasing circles like the rings inside a tree. Freedom is a relative concept, decreed by time, circumstance and wealth. Routine, once familiar and comforting, can also be our jailer.

And now we are trapped in our unbending ways, shuttered off in rooms and kept from the sun. Atwood's poem makes me think of the repetition of the saw and the hard and flat Canadian plains where there are no horizons. And God knows we need something to aim for.

Bored by Margaret Atwood

 All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
distances between things, or pounded
stakes into the ground for rows and rows
of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored)
weeded. Or sat in the back
of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel
he drove, steered, paddled. It
wasn't even boredom, it was looking,
looking hard and up close at the small
details. Myopia. The worn gunwales,
the intricate twill of the seat
cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular
pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-fans
of dry moss, the blackish and then the graying
bristles on the back of his neck.
Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes
I would. The boring rhythm of doing
things over and over, carrying
the wood, drying
the dishes. Such minutiae. It's what
the animals spend most of their time at,
ferrying the sand, grain by grain, from their tunnels,
shuffling the leaves in their burrows. He pointed
such things out, and I would look
at the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under
the nail. Why do I remember it as sunnier
all the time then, although it more often
rained, and more birdsong?
I could hardly wait to get
the hell out of there to
anywhere else. Perhaps though
boredom is happier. It is for dogs or
groundhogs. Now I wouldn't be bored.
Now I would know too much.
Now I would know.

Verse of the Day - Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas is one of my favorite poets and Fern Hill is surely one of his best poems. Which makes it special.

Fern Hill is about childhood and youth and its exuberant verse runs like the imlpulses of the young until its bittersweet conclusion; "Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my chains like the sea."

It also echoes the estuaries and rolling green hills of  South Wales that Thomas made his own. You have to go there really to feel it and understand.



Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.


All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.


And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.


And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,


Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Anna Akhmatova and the victory of art over dictatorship

All our images from that time are gray and industrial - of seven year plans and cold intrigue in the Politburo; of weapons of war being paraded past a faceless leader in Red Square.
It's strange and unreal now to think of Russia in the 20th Century, of those totalitarian days when art, literature and religion were trampled under the jackboots of the paranoid Georgian.


But the land of Tolstoy and Chekhov wasn't going to give in easily to the plunder of its ideas and free expression, to the reduction of all that art and color onto one flat easel that bore the brutish features of Comrade Stalin. Even as the trains bore the dissidents north to the labor camps and salt mines of Siberia, as Collectivisation led to mass slaughter of the peasants and famine, so writers continued to write in the most uncompromising of places.

The life of Anna Akhmatova illustrates how art can triumph over oppression. The poet's first husband was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921; her son and second husband were deported to the camps. And yet her popularity with the Russian people meant even the all powerful Russian leader did not risk imprisoning her.

In the days since Stalin's death there have been seen many imitators. The Romanian leader Nikolai Chauchesku  in 1989, although it appears he can still be friended on Facebook; Saddam Hussein was executed in 2006 and it appears the mob didn't wait for a formal execution in the case of Muammar Gaddafi.

So is this the end of the line for the dictators who paraded in dark glasses and outlandish uniforms while their people suffered. Probably not but it gives hope that art and freedom of expression will overcome in the darkest of places.

Everything is Plundered by Anna Akhmatova

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses --
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.

1921

Can poetry revive Modesto's Image

I'm always interested in the redemptive power of poetry and how it can breathe life into the most uninspiring of places. T.S. Eliot's bleak canvass was The Wasteland and Slyvia Plath wrote about the dark places in the mind.

In their own way a group of poets in California have attempted something almost as impressive; putting a positive spin on Modesto.

I have never been to Modesto, although I believe I skirted past a few strip malls on its western side. The Rough Guide said there was no reason to go there unless you wanted your car stolen.

The book More than Soil, More than Sky, is the work of 51 poets, according to the Modesto Bee.

It goes beyond crime and foreclosures to talk about the cycles of nature, although the cycle of offending is there too.


"Some write about rural life. Think almond trees and red-tailed hawks. Others talk about the city's urban nature. One poem looks at prostitution on Ninth Street, another remembers an 11-year-old boy shot and killed by police officers," the article states.


Sam Pierstorff, who teaches at Modesto Junior College, is one of the inspirations behind the book. It's interesting but I'm still not sure it will persuade me to get off the bypass.


The Drowning of Poetry by Sam Pierstorff



It looks as if murders of crows have nested
in the ceiling of Barnes and Noble and are now
peeing on the poetry section below.

Or maybe God himself is spitting
upon the paperback coffins of living poets
lost in dead languages.

But the clerk says it’s the broken air conditioner:
“It’s been dripping all day.”
The poetry section is soaked. A plastic trash bag

catches each drop with the sound of cracking quartz rocks
or a quick succession of letters depressed on a keyboard:
the sound of this poem or this line perhaps
if you could hear it being t–y-p-e-d.

And why not the Self-Help section or Audio Books?
Shouldn’t those aisles drown first?
Or Religion? Imagine the fanatics lined up for miles
to see a book cover with Jesus weeping real tears
or the miracle of shelves parted like the Red Sea.

The temperature tonight seems fine
in the crowded bookstore, but the air conditioner
has broken above Poetry where no one seems to visit.
Perhaps the section is lonely.
Perhaps the ceiling cries.

Verse of the Day - Mark R. Slaughter

It must be fall again. The leaves are about to fall and the evenings have a chill tinge to them. I have neglected this blog for some time but give it fleeting glances every now and again. Like the feeble and fleeting sun on the lake in fall.


Pirouetting Autumn by Mark R. Slaughter



The tree blushed - a rude blast of air
Betrayed a shapely bough.
My saddened heart aware
That Nature's clock was chiming,
I froze upon the twelfth
Clanging tone, caught alone,
Staring at a creaking door -

Left ajar for dancing, coloured Autumn,
Pirouetting in her leaves,
While agitated summer creatures
Backed away resignedly,
Sighing in protracted breves.
I turned; gave company;
We stood together, watching
Summer slowly blow away.

Verse of the Day - Adam Zajajewski

Yes folks, there are poets whose name begins with the letter z, a letter that's pronounced zee over here, although I prefer "zed"


Adam Zagajewski is not only the only poet I am familiar with with a 'z' surname, but he's the only Polish poet I am aware of. And this poem strikes a chrord with me because I need balance - work/life balance right now.


Balance by Adam Zagajewski

I watched the arctic landscape from above and thought of nothing, lovely nothing. I observed white canopies of clouds, vast expanses where no wolf tracks could be found. I thought about you and about the emptiness that can promise one thing only: plenitude— and that a certain sort of snowy wasteland bursts from a surfeit of happiness. As we drew closer to our landing, the vulnerable earth emerged among the clouds, comic gardens forgotten by their owners, pale grass plagued by winter and the wind. I put my book down and for an instant felt a perfect balance between waking and dreams. But when the plane touched concrete, then assiduously circled the airport's labryinth, I once again knew nothing. The darkness of daily wanderings resumed, the day's sweet darkness, the darkness of the voice that counts and measures, remembers and forgets.