Easing into the New Year

Winter is the Best Time by David Budbill from While We've Still Got Feet (Copper Canyon Press)
Winter is the best time
to find out who you are.

Quiet, contemplation time,
away from the rushing world,

cold time, dark time, holed-up
pulled-in time and space

to see that inner landscape,
that place hidden and within.


I love soup and sweaters, long books and even longer nights, the way the stars sparkle like ice in a winter sky and the blinding sun reflecting off a crusty layer of newly fallen snow.  Winter is the best time.  And in this threshold time between the first day of Christmas and the last, I often find myself  quiet contemplation time that David Budbill mentions in his poem. 

Often the occasion for my contemplation is the turning of the year.  My days of making resolutions and indulging in too much champagne are behind me.  Now I prefer to spend the days leading up to New Year's Eve reflecting on the year that has past and looking forward to the year that is on the horizon. 

This year, I'm leading my first ever "virtual" New Year's Eve retreat.  It's a way for people who are looking to move mindfully into the new year to do just that . . . reflect upon 2012, take some time to be open to the present moment, and vision for the future.  There are reflection exercises, questions to ponder and of course, plenty of poetry to guide you on the journey.  I'll also be sending periodic e-mails to participants Sunday morning through Tuesday afternoon with additional poems/prayers/questions and we'll have a virtual check-in/sharing time on Facebook at 2 pm on Sunday and Monday for any who want to share their experiences in community. 

If you're looking for a different way to begin this year, I invite you to join us!  Click here for more information or to register. 

Carpe Libris - The Winter Edition

IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER by Gillian Clarke from Ice (Carcanet)
trees stand in their bones
asleep in the creak of wind
with snow on its mind.

Come spring they'll need reminding
how to weep, bleed, bud, grow rings
for cruck, or crib, or cross,

to break again in leaf.
The heartwood's stone, grief
of sap-tears frozen in at the root.

While trees are dreaming green,
ice unfurls its foliage
on gutter, gate and hedge,

ghost-beauty cold as snow,
like the first forest, long ago.


Snow isn't just on the mind of Mother Nature here, she's making it manifest.  The freezing rain that hit the leaves in the backyard with its staccato rhythms when I first awoke has now been transformed into an ongoing dusting of snow that's sugaring the ivy and settled in the crook of the cherry tree next door.  It's a perfect day to cuddle up with a good book and a pot of tea and while I'm eager to brew a pot of one of the new brews I got for Christmas and settle in with a cozy mystery, I have work to do so that will have to wait till later this afternoon. 

In the meantime, the weather got me to thinking about my winter reading list.  I didn't fare so well with my summer reading list but that hasn't stopped me from developing a winter one.  Hopefully giving up my Netflix subscription will mean I'll actually get some, if not all, of these books read before the spring equinox rolls around. 

So here's what I'll be reading in the upcoming weeks . . . .

 Ice by Gillian Clarke
This is a slim volume of poetry that I picked up when I was in Wales a few weeks ago in my poetry haul from a bookstore in Bangor.  Gillian Clarke is a Welsh poet who may not be that well known to US audiences.  I love the idea of a collection of poems that was inspired by the landscape during a particular season, especially when that season is winter.  I'll confess I've already read all the poems in this book, many of them more than once, but I'm sure I'll be returning to it as winter deepens. 

Likewise, Winter Hours:  Prose, Prose Poems and Poems by Mary Oliver on the list. 

For straight up non-fiction, I'll be reading Adam Gopnik's  Winter:  Five Windows on the Season and Bill Streever's Cold:  Adventures in the World's Frozen Places.  Gopnik's book is actually a series of five,  hour long lectures he gave across Canada as part of the Massey Lectures.  While Gopnik's work focuses on the season, Streever's book looks at the biology, history and geography of what many most associate with winter-- cold. 

Finally, for fiction I have Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and Pullman's His Dark Material's trilogy on my night stand.  I've long been a fan of the movie Doctor Zhivago but have never gotten around to reading the book.  Actually I have a lot of Russian novels on my nightstand with the hope we'll get a good snowfall that will leave me housebound long enough to work my way through War and Peace and maybe Anna Karenina in between rounds of shoveling.  But given global warming I may have to move further north for that to be a part of my future so Pasternak will likely win out over Tolstoy this winter.  I got Pullman's trilogy when I was doing my doctoral studies and would pull it out each December and read the same few chapters then realize I had books for school I needed to read my early January so I'd put it aside and the next year repeat the process.  This year I'm finally going to get past the point where Lyra meets Iorek Brynison . . . or else.

 

So how about you?  Do you have any wintry books on your reading list for 2013?

 

Poetry as a Closure to What Cannot Be Closed

Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski (translated by Clare Cavanagh)
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

Like so many, I've been struggling with my feelings about what happened on Friday in Connecticut.  Unlike many, I've refrained from posting anything on Facebook or Twitter and wasn't even sure I was going to say anything about it here this morning.  I understand the need some people have to talk about tragedy in a public forum:  the media for whom recapitulation and conjecture is part of their job, political and spiritual leaders who are called to offer words of compassion and wisdom, all those individuals who feel anger, fear, despair, isolation and turn to others for reassurance. 

My usual response to crisis or tragedy, however, is silence.  Not a silence born of denial or disconnect, rather a silence that emerges from a need to search for Light to illumine the darkness.  If I reach for words too soon, it extinguishes any spark I might find. 

Rumi and John of the Cross have both said that silence is the (first) language of the Holy One and it is to that language, one that as an adult in exile I've had to relearn, that I return.

Eventually, when I feel that words will fan the ember and help the flame grow, I turn to poetry.  The pauses for silence in the lines, the economy of language that gives each word import, the imagery that evokes emotions that are often too knotted to name-- poems are my bridge between conversation with God (silence) and conversation with others. 

Zagajewski's poem that I chose for today can be found in The Art of Losing:  Poems of Grief & Healing, edited by poet Kevin Young.  This collection of 150 poems is an invaluable resource for anyone for whom poetry resonates in times of grief and sorrow. As Young says in his introduction,  "  . . . I think it is in grief that we need some reminder of our humanity-- and sometimes, someone to say it for us.  Poetry steps into those moments when ordinary words fail;  poetry as ceremony, as a closure to what cannot be closed."

Yes Galway Kinnell, how many nights must it take?

Another Night in the Ruins by Galway Kinnell from Three Books (Houghton Mifflin Company)

1
In the evening
haze darkening on the hills,
purple of the eternal,
a last bird crosses over,
‘flop flop,’ adoring
only the instant.

2
Nine years ago,
in a plane that rumbled all night
above the Atlantic,
I could see, lit up
by lightning bolts jumping out of it,
a thunderhead formed like the face
of my brother, looking down
on blue,
lightning-flashed moments of the Atlantic.

3
He used to tell me,
“What good is the day?
On some hill of despair
the bonfire
you kindle can light the great sky—
though it’s true, of course, to make it burn
you have to throw yourself in ...”

4
Wind tears itself hollow
in the eaves of these ruins, ghost-flute
of snowdrifts
that build out there in the dark:
upside-down ravines
into which night sweeps
our cast wings, our ink-spattered feathers.

5
I listen.
I hear nothing. Only
the cow, the cow of such
hollowness, mooing
down the bones.

6
Is that a
rooster? He
thrashes in the snow
for a grain. Finds
it. Rips
it into
flames. Flaps. Crows.
Flames
bursting out of his brow.

7
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?

I was hoping to post a poem by a Welsh poet today but I stumbled across this poem by Galway Kinnell and it stuck. It's not that I haven't read some new-to-me wonderful poems by Welsh writers this afternoon and evening. Owen Sheers, who was recommended to me by not one, but two separate people during the course of casual conversation today, has moved me to tears several times in one slim book of verse. I finally had to stop reading because I was too overwhelmed and he deserves more attention than I can give him at 10:30 pm-- sorry Owen. Perhaps tomorrow when I stick close to Gladstone's and focus on reading and writing.

I think the Kinnell poem struck me because I like to believe I've learned that I am to be flames but lately I've had a hard time even pretending to be a flickering spark. I was hoping something in my interior landscape would shift being in the Welsh landscape once again and I'd find myself opening up but so far that hasn't happened. Granted, it's only been about 36 hours. Maybe there are subterranean shifts happening, a fracking process I can't sense causing imperceptible fissures and one of these days-- hopefully before next Tuesday, I'll awake and think, "A ha! Today is the day I can just be." I feel like I want to force or rush that process but I realize that it's just that-- a process.

Before I left home, I re-read my notes from a phone conversation I had with poet Ruth Bidgood last time I was in Wales. As I mentioned in a previous post, one thing we talked about was the symbiotic relationship between photography and poetry. Ruth said that sometimes a landscape has a lesson for us that we can't quite grasp at the time and only discover later, from a distance. Her photographs, she said, help her capture whatever that ineffable quality was that she was feeling and aid in the discovery process later on. I find the same thing happens with me. My poetry falls into two categories--- poems that come out of an experience of meditation or prayer (as I've written about before) or poems written about a place that I've often captured in a photograph and returned to in order to help translate a memory.

Today as I was wandering around Chester I realized I was taking photographs as a matter of rote, primarily for information and documentation rather than inspiration and appreciation. I can't say any of the images below will inspire a poem in the future, nevertheless, here are a few images of my journey thus far . . .

Ruins, Basingwerk Abbye

More of abbey ruins

Roman Wall surrounding Chester

The hydrangeas are still blooming in the
remembrance garden at Chester Cathedral!

Christmas Market- Chester
Don't worry Campo Santo Stefano in Venice,
your Christmas market still has my heart.

Plant based diet on a sabbatical-- mulled wine and wild boar burger for lunch . . . 

and coconut lime cupcake and mint tea a bit later at the Mad Hatter Tea Room in Chester.
Can you tell I didn't eat anything but a piece of toast yesterday?
I made up for it today.

Planes, Trains and Poetry

The Journey of a Poem Compared to All the Sad Variety of Travel by Delmore Schwartz

A poem moves forward,
Like the passages and percussions of trains in progress
A pattern of recurrence, a hammer of repetetive occurrence

a slow less and less heard
low thunder under all passengers

Steel sounds tripping and tripled and
Grinding, revolving, gripping, turning, and returning
as the flung carpet of the wide countryside spreads out on
each side in billows

And in isolation, rolled out, white house, red barn, squat silo,
Pasture, hill, meadow and woodland pasture
And the striped poles step fast past the train windows
Second after second takes snapshots, clicking,
Into the dangled boxes of glinting windows
Snapshots and selections, rejections, at angles, of shadows
A small town: a shop's sign - GARAGE, and then white gates
Where waiting cars wait with the unrest of trembling
Breathing hard and idling, until the slow~descent
Of the red cones of sunset: a dead march: a slow tread and heavy

Of the slowed horses of Apollo
- Until the slowed horses of Apollo go over the horizon
And all things are parked, slowly or willingly,
into the customary or at random places.

 

I'm on my way to Wales this evening thus the departure from Mary Oliver Monday to offer up this lovely little poem about the journey of a poem.  I find it interesting that the title and poem can be interpreted in many ways . . . is it the journey of a poem that is being written?  Or the journey that a reader takes when encountering a poem for the first or even fifty first time?  I like to read this literally.  I picture the journey of the poem itself:  written on a piece of paper and tucked in a pocket to be carried on a hike, in a book with others that have been tucked into a carry on bag and tossed into an overhead compartment, resting comfortably in the mind of a traveler and turned to for a bit of conversation as the landscape unfolds out a train window.

Interior of Gladstone's Library

There's something about traveling to Wales that is so tied up with landscape and poetry in my mind that poem/journey/landscape form a kind of tangled trinity. It has me wondering how this trip will impact my own writing.  Although the days are delegated to pilgrimage work, I've set aside the evenings for writing.  I'm also looking forward to discovering some new (to me) poems and poets as I browse the shelves of Gladstone's library, so stay tune this week for more poems and perhaps even some pictures.