Cultivating Peace

Last night I walked around my city with a good friend beneath a stormy sky that broke into light rain somewhere around seven o'clock.  Whenever I spend time with her, I am reminded that peace is something we cultivate.  For whatever reason, she has been able to grow peace within herself, a garden of reflection and observation that is always in the full blown bloom of spring.  She is silly, ridiculous, and admits to having moments of humor that rival those of a particularly ornery twelve year old boy, but within all of that levity is the heart of a truly peaceful person, and I am infinitely better for having her in my corner.

I mention her because I have been seeking peace for about as long as I can remember.  Performative from a young age, I got used to being on a stage, to having people watch me, but that set me apart in ways that didn't really resonate until I got older.  I believed people would want to hear what I had to say because that had been the case for so long.  I had to learn the fine art of tact and self-editing later than almost anyone else I know, and I am still trying to get that grace thing down.

But, back to peace.  I've recently started going to church again.  I grew up singing and praying, Sundays of song and worship, fellowship and good food, but over the years I struggled as most young people do with the notion that God is somehow going to save me but condemn those around me who may not know of Him, understand Him, or call Him friend.  I spent years trying to reconcile my faith with my need to believe all people are worth saving regardless of their religious beliefs.  And then, one day, something bad happened to someone I love and the only thing that consoled me was prayer.  Asking for guidance and help from the great beyond settled my spirit.  To quote Michael Stipe: "I'm breaking through / I'm bending spoons / I'm keeping flowers in full bloom / I'm looking for answers from the great beyond."  It was this search, this need of answers that eventually led me back to church, led me back to the girl I was and to the woman I am becoming.

Last night, at my second church (the bookstore) I picked up Mary Karr's Sinners Welcome.  The Afterword, "Facing Altars: Poetry & Prayer," spoke to me in ways I probably can't accurately write about.  An excerpt I particularly like about the commonality between communion and poetry:

Poetry had consoled me in the same way, with Eucharistic qualities that [Robert] Hass had first pointed out.  In memorizing poems I loved, I "ate" them in a way.  I breathed as the poet to recite the words: Someone else's suffering and passion entered my body to change me, partly by joining me to others in a saving circle. (87)

I read it while lying on my bed with my dog, an animal for whom peace is as constant as her whimpering breath in sleep.  Watching her, paws paddling in some dream river, eyes twitching beneath soft lids, is enough to quiet my heart on most days.

It is time for my exhaustive search stop, I think.  As long as I remember to breathe, to pray, to write, to cultivate it within myself,  that peace I have sought so long may find me.  Here's hoping.

Poetry is What / Happens When Nothing Else / Can

Michelle Kerns may very well be a lovely woman.  I have never met her, never knew her name before tonight in fact, but I can tell you after a little internet sleuthing that she is a fan of Douglas Adams as was evidenced by the note in her bio that she 'knows where her towel is.'  [I have just realized that the fact that I get that reference may say something about me, but I am not a fan, I assure you, I just happen to know a number of people obsessed with him and well, anyway, this is about Michelle and not me.]  She also does not know that Yeats' name has an 's' at the end of it, referring to him as 'Mr. Yeat,' and she wrote an article that I am quite certain smacks of exactly what is wrong with the world.  Again, she may be lovely, but on this one she's just wrong.


Her article, How to Overcome Poetry Phobia: A 3 Step Rehabilitation Plan for Those Adverse to Verse, starts with the assumption that the only people who like poetry are college aged beret-wearing posers studying it now or 30-40ish beret-wearing posers who used to study it.  I should have stopped reading right there, but I liked the coquettish upward glance from beneath the glasses slipping down her nose in her profile picture, so I kept going.  She goes on to suggest that a love of poetry is murdered in school by those damned professors who want--egads--to make students think about what they read.  This was her own experience and, as a friend told me recently, many people have trouble looking past their own experiences when they try to explain something, so Michelle, it appears, is at home in that sea of many.


I don't want to play by play her article, if you want to read it, do.  But I will briefly outline her three step plan so as to get to the point that I really do have:


Step 1) Read a basic overview of great poetry.  The problem here is that people 'adverse to verse' probably wouldn't know a good basic overview from a bad one.  She suggests Camille Paglia's Break, Blow, Burn which, apparently, includes 43 poems and ends with the lyrics to Joni Mitchell's "Woostock." I don't dislike Ms. Paglia or Ms. Mitchell, but when I think of a basic overview of great poetry, neither one of their names would come up on my list.  And, since I'm not 'adverse to verse,' let's just assume I know what I'm talking about.  


Step 2)  Listen to a quality recording of poetry readings, preferably with the poets themselves as the readers.  On this point, I agree with Ms. Kerns.  There really is no better way to appreciate the way a poet meant for something to sound than to hear it in her voice.  Where she takes a breath, which lines she runs together, the way she wants the words to crush or separate can all be heard and felt more strongly when you hear her do the reading.  I won't knock her for this one, it's sound advice.


Step 3) If you're still with me, this is where that point I had becomes clear.  Learn not to avoid poems that you think you won't like (or because you hated them passionately the first time you read them).  The premise of this is great: don't be closed minded.  Read everything and then decide what you like, let the poem speak for itself.  But--and in the world of 'buts' this is a pretty big one--I think it is perfectly alright for people to stay away from poems they think they won't like because I think it is perfectly alright for people to stay away from poetry.  


There are those who will want to disembowel me for that one, but hear me out.  Just like college and drug use and the music of Neil Diamond, poetry just isn't for everyone.  Sure, you can puff on poetry when it's passed to you, but don't bogart that stanza unless you plan to inhale.  Maybe I am an elitist when it comes to poetry, but I think it should belong to the people who want to know it, have to read it, burn for it.  Ms. Kerns' article suggests that it is as easy to learn and love as gardening and changing your oil yourself (two things, incidentally, I neither wish to learn nor plan on ever loving).  My argument is that it isn't easy because it isn't supposed to be.


Charles Bukowski, a man I love more and more with each new fact I learn or poem I read, published extensively and while he may be more accessible than say, Keats or Ammons, even he isn't for everybody.  The following poem (which appears in his book The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain) speaks to what poetry is.  His summation requires an understanding that may only be available to those for whom verse is more about conversion (of the self, of the soul) and less about the aversion and I guess I'm just suggesting that  Ms. Kerns seems keen on curing something that may, in fact, not be a disease at all.  


Those of us who count ourselves converted may be the sickest ones, but we won't stop until we're gorged and sluggish, bellies full of the words that so many don't understand.


Writing, Charles Bukowski 

you begin to smile
all up and down
inside
as the words jump
from your fingers
and onto the keys
and it's like a
circus  dream
you're the clown, the lion tamer,
you’re the tiger,
you’re yourself
as
the words leap
through hoops of fire,
do triple somersaults
from trapeze to
trapeze, then
embrace the
Elephant Man
as
the poems keep coming,
one by one
they slip to
the floor,
it's going hot and good;
the hours rush past
and then
you’re finished,
move toward the bedroom,
throw yourself upon the bed
and sleep your righteous sleep
here on earth,
life is perfect at last.

poetry is what happens
when nothing else
can. 

Now You Take It Smack in the Teeth, Baby

The beautifully brilliant woman who used to teach in my classroom left behind The Portable Dorothy Parker (Penguin: 1973).  I am certain she no longer needed the snarky well crafted prose, but I do still and may always.  (Believe me when I tell you that this book is worth purchasing, if only for her scathing takedown of Kerouac's The Subterraneans.)

The last piece in the book, an uncollected article titled "The Middle or Blue Period," contains the title of this entry.  In it she is waking on her 40th birthday and gives herself a pep talk that has very little to do with pep and is so fraught with tangential asides that one wonders who, in fact, she's talking to.  It certainly can't be herself because, if it were, the reader would have to think her quite insane and pray she did not live to see 41.

The article resonates with me today because I have been thinking a lot about age and how the things we do that are bizarre at one age become immature by another (thank you, Janet Livermore).  I haven't done many of the things I'd planned on doing by this age, and I find myself doing something I'd never imagined and planning not to do one that society expects of women.  And, whether I care to admit it or not, I am tragically, terribly, terrifically tangential in my own circuitous way of speaking both to students and friends and, sadly, to myself.

Tangent 1 (with a point):
I've had several conversations with a good friend about how age looks on a man.  Words like distinguished, sophisticated, polished, dapper and learned get thrown around.  Men of a certain age are charismatic, world traveled, salt and peppery.  Perfection.  Women, though...we are lumpy bags of lukewarm oatmeal under thinning helmets of gray straw.  Let's face it, there just aren't very many women who age gracefully and you can stop right there with your Sophia Loren, Lauren Bacall, and Ann Margaret.  All stunning, yes, but every single one of them still dyes her hair.

Tangent 2 (also with a point):
I've reached an age where, statistically, all of my adventure ought to be behind me.  I should be comfortable settling down and settling in to a nice quiet life, but I am not.  In the last few years, I have met a version of myself that I did not know existed, the one I thought I could see winking at me conspiratorially from the dark blue ring around my irises as I stared into the mirror wondering who the hell I was looking at, the one who knows that books and breathing are really, without exaggeration, the same thing.  I'm in a place where the thought of being alone feels simultaneously like a death sentence and a Get Out of Jail Free card.  I'm no Mrs. Mallard, but I can see what Kate was trying to do there.  I really can.

So where does all this age ramble take us?  In her article, Dorothy rambles far and wide, from the analogy that trying to lie about one's age is like placing sandpits on an archipelago, to a feigned letter to Rosetti asking 'what the hell a watered shoot' is.  She gives herself a staunch reality check early on:
Now you face it, baby.  Now you take it smack in the teeth, baby.  Quote baby unquote.

But she also advises herself to remember how far she's come and to acknowledge the solid ground on which she stands.  It is those words, these words, that I plan to return to from all of my tragic tangents in the coming days.  Lord knows if they're good enough for Dorothy, they're good enough for me:

Your path stretches so smooth, so gracious.  There are no more ways for you to make a fool of yourself; you have assembled the complete set.  There are no more mistakes; you have made them all.  There are, for you, only ease and fulfillment and tenderness.  And you did not work to gain them.  They are given to you as gifts for this, your happiest birthday.

2010: A Bibliophiliac Odyssey

Over the course of the last four days, Friday to Monday for those in the loop, I have been to the Lawrence Public Library exactly twice.  They're holding their spring book sale (the one in fall is better, I think, but this one was no slouch) and, after spending $18.50, I've come away with 30 books.  Thirty.  One may ask if I need these books.  I have no appropriate response.  Do I need them as in 'will I die without them?'  Certainly not.  Do I need them in the sense that they will fill some gaping hole in my life?  Again, no.  But, and here's the odyssey part, do I need them because they will serve as maps and legends (with apologies, R.E.M.) to the woman/poet I am on the road to becoming?  Absolutely.


I've purchased collections of poems by Rich, Boyle, Cummings, Ammons, Smith (P. not M.), essays by Codrescu, Sedaris, Berry, short stories by Welty, novels by Irving, O'Brien, Ford, Murdoch, and literary criticism by Wilde and a host of other writers/editors I don't possibly have time or need to name here.   While I may not get to them immediately, or even in a timely fashion, these texts allow me populate the landscape of my bibliophiliac frontier with exactly the sorts of people I most want to encounter: men and women for whom words are not just things they find growing in their mouths, formless teeth made of air and agenda, but instead--for them--words are the things in the mouth that nourish more than food, refresh more than drink, intoxicate more than liquor.  


One of the texts I purchased is a collection titled America is Not All Traffic Lights: Poems of the Midwest.  Edited by Alice Fleming, this book looks most like the landscape I inhabit, the physical one, not the one of the mind.  The book itself is slim, flat.  A black and white photo that shows a ranch style home with detached garage, their rooftops covered in snow, spans both sides of the book jacket.  The bottom half of the photo is just white, just snow, a few footprints here and there (it is unclear if they are animal or human), the thin line of a barb wire fence stretches above the gold lettered title, the subtitle text a light blue.  Black, white, gold, light blue--all colors of Kansas winter--where everything is stark, where sun and sky are the colors felt most often if not seen, and where snow seems unending on a prairie unmarred by buildings, industry, or time.


The final poem in the collection is here.  I do not think it is particularly good.  I dislike the Seussian end rhyme, but it says something I have tried to say about Kansas fields but haven't been able to nail it down.  


Kansas Boy, Ruth Lechlitner

This Kansas boy who never saw the sea
Walks through the young corn rippling at his knee
As sailors walk; and when the grain grows higher
Watches the dark waves leap with greener fire
Than ever oceans hold. He follows ships,
Tasting the bitter spray upon his lips,
For in his blood up stirs the salty ghost
Of one who sailed a storm-bound English coast.
Across wide fields he hears the sea winds crying,
Shouts at the crows - and dreams of white gulls flying.


And while my odyssey is, as of yet, devoid of Cyclops, sirens, or Circe, it did manage to take me to the public library on a gorgeous spring day where I found, here in landlocked Kansas, a way to see the sea.

Simply Seeing

Last night, I tuned out and turned off.  With the exception of the computer--which, admittedly, is a weakness of mine--there wasn't a minute of television or music in this house.  I opened windows and watched my dog run in the backyard, I read, I listened to the night, I watched the sky change.  I felt peaceful.

We forget sometimes that the world exists around us as much as for us.  We set out to find peace but end up with retail therapy, buying self-help books, new lipsticks, just released in paperback novels or other irrelevant piece of detritus that serves only to clutter spaces we want so desperately to clear.  We seek to find so long and so exhaustively that we miss the peace in front of us, the grace of sunset, the perfect truth of starlight.

In section one of A Writer's Journal, Thoreau writes about the virtue of "simply seeing."  It is April 9, 1841, and he is awed.  "How much virtue there is in simply seeing!  We may almost say that the hero has striven in vain for his pre-eminency, if the student oversees him.  The woman who sits in the house and sees is a match for a stirring captain.  Those still, piercing eyes, as faithfully exercised on their talent, will keep her even with Alexander or Shakespeare.  They may go to Asia with parade, or to fairyland, but not beyond her ray.  We are as much as we see.  Faith is sight and knowledge.  The hands only serve the eyes.  The farthest blue streak in the horizon I can see, I may reach before many sunsets.  What I saw alters not; in my night, when I wander, it is still steadfast as the star which the sailor steers by."

It strikes me that his comparison is of the woman at her window to the captain on the sea.  I have a love of the water and of windows and so his connection is certainly not lost on me.  I am trying daily to live this art of seeing simply, to make my hands serve my vision, and to make my heart--which Thoreau forgets to mention--serve itself as truly and, yes, as simply as it can.

  

An Almost Monstrous Notion

I have a bizarre fascination with old book covers.  The pulpy kind, buxom girls in rolled jeans or a straight skirt, their blouses taut across the only weapons they've learned to use, buttons near bursting, seams strained.  Boys leering, cigarette in hand or tucked behind the ear obscured by a nest of greased hair, tight white t-shirts tucked into starched denim.  Books with titles like D for Delinquent bearing the tag line "She Was Strictly for the Boys," and Boy-Crazy, "A Powerful Story of Teen-Age Girls Who Fight Recklessly for Life and Love."  And of course, my favorite, Satan Was a Man, "A Surging Novel of Passion and Ruin."

These book covers adorn the wall next to my desk at school.  There are twenty or so of them, each one telling the same central story: hell is a woman, but Satan, it seems, is a man.  Woman is hell: heat, pain, both scorching and terrifying, but there is something irresistably attractive in the sinning that might get one there.  Man, though, is the devil.  He, master of temptation, is the one that brings these erstwhile good girls down.  Were it not for his nefarious ways, wouldn't all these little darlings be home, sewing in their laps, Bible on the nightstand, nothing more in the glass on the nightstand than water and ice?  Of course they would, because they have no agency.  These book covers tell the story of women controlled by their lust, their desire to have and be had, to feel more than they've been told they should.

It is ironic, my love of these covers, because I don't believe in victims.  I believe that people can be victimized and that bad things can happen to good people, but I do not believe in saying "Look what happened to me.  It made me this way.  Otherwise, I would have been good."  I believe in saying "This is what I want.  This is what I need, and nobody made me choose: I chose."  I, I guess, am the decider.

Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Bitch and Prozac Nation, writes in the former:

"What if you want to be large in a world that would have you be small, diminished? You don't want to diet, you don't want to say no, thank you, and pretend somehow that what is there is enough when always, always, you want more. That has been your defining characteristic: You have appetites, and only if you are truly shameless will you even begin to be sated because nothing is ever really enough. Not because you are greedy or insatiable but because you can't help it, you can't go along with the fiction that the world would have you believe and adhere to: that you ought to settle and be careful and accept the crumbs that are supposed to pass for a life, this minimized self you are supposed to put up with, that feminism and other political theories of woman cannot really begin to address because this is about something else entirely.


This is about what has become the almost monstrous notion of female desire."

So, while I find true joy in naming what I want, saying it out loud, asking for it, acknowledging my desire as valid, natural, human, I still feel drawn to those book covers.  Maybe because, in those images, a woman gets to belong to one group (the monstrously seductive bad girl) whereas my life seems to fall on a spectrum somewhere between good and bad, girl and woman, devil and damnation.  Being one thing may be easier, but for now I think I'll stick with my spectrum.  I find more and more that I, too, contain multitudes.

How to Tell the Truth

I've always prided myself on being a truthful person.  I have said more times than I can count that I would rather be a woman who tells the painful truth than be the one who tells sweet little lies (thanks, Stevie).  I'm not saying I haven't committed the little white lie here and there, "No, that dress doesn't make you look fat at all," to the friend in the middle of a body-issue meltdown or "Of course I want to come to your insert-completely-pointless-and-totally-uninteresting-function."  I've played the game when I've had to, it's part of life, that easing through, that glossing over, but when it comes to big things, I'm a truth teller.  I don't have a choice.

You see, the people who know me know when I'm lying, know when I'm pretending things are okay when really I am about a half a second away from splitting apart like a lightning struck tree, my charred insides still smoking from impact as I list first right, then left, then down.  They know when I'm hiding and evading and the people who really really know me, the ones that I simply could not function without, don't let me do either.  They call me on everything, make me confront, make me talk, make me tell the truth.  They help me be who I want to be, even when I'm terribly afraid of her.

So, in case you aren't sure how to do this little truth thing yourself (It's not easy...I make it look easy...) here are some ifs for you:

1) If you mean it, say it.  If you really mean that shirt she's wearing is the most hideous thing you've ever laid eyes on, tell her.  If that's not true, just smile when she says how much she loves it.  That smile acknowledges her joy and frees you from comment.

2) If there's even the slightest chance that you'll regret not telling, tell.  You don't want to be the guy looking through old photographs who realizes she was there, right in front of him, but he was too scared to tell her.

3) If your life will change for the better, speak.  Sure, change is frightening and nauseating and difficult and bleary eyed at times, but consider the alternative: a lifetime of 'this is as good as it gets' isn't good for anyone.

4) If someone else can learn from your example, sing out, Louise.  I stand in front of my students and know that if I don't tell them the truth, I'm just one more adult that doesn't respect them enough or trust them enough to handle what's really going on.  If I lie, I become one more false prophet spouting poetry and literature from a mouth not worthy of either.  They, and everyone around me, deserve to hear what I really think, who I really am, because maybe it will help them show themselves, too.  Wouldn't it be great if we all could do that?  Tell the truth?  Be authentic?

I think so.  I really do.

Beginning (Again)

It is spring. Brids sing outside my window, trees green, grass grows so quikly that mowers cannot run fast enough to clip back its bright beginnings. The world is being reborn and I, too, along with it.

I've had a blog before this one. I've written in it often, written seldom, written sad, written ecstatic, written when there was nothing else to do but write. Written when writing seemed the last thing that would help and then suddenly, surprisingly, it did.

The title of this blog come from a Charles Wright poem, Clear Night. It has been in my head for months and is the start I want most to whatever it is I end up doing here.

Clear Night, Charles Wright

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky,
Moon-fingers lay down their same routine,
On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys,
Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.

I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.
I want to be stretched, like music wring from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean.

And the wind says "What?" to me.
And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say "What?" to me.
And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.
And the gears notch and the engines wheel.