Poetry for Mid-Summer

Tonight I'll be leading a "Poetry for Mid-Summer" program as part of Washington National Cathedral's Crossroads program.  From 7:30 - 8:30 I'll be in Bethlehem Chapel, hopefully with other people, reading some summer poetry and reflecting on how the poetry of the season can be companions for us on the journey.
Of course, we'll be reading Mary Oliver's The Summer Day to kick things off.  It may be ubiquitous but is a good intro for talking about the connection between prayer and paying attention (as is When the Roses Speak, I Pay Attention, which I've commented on before).  A few more poems will follow:  Mark Doty's The Green Crab's Shell, a couple by Billy Collins, and a gorgeous, timely poem from the luscious poet Li-Young Lee, just to name a few.  If time permits, we'll try our hand at writing poetry and that's where this blog comes in.

 

But first, I'll let you in on a little secret.  In the poetry programs I lead my intention is always to get people writing poetry as well as reading it.  I daresay if people knew this was part of what they were getting in to, about half of them wouldn't show up.  The idea of writing a poem terrifies many people.
While most, if not all of us, have probably tried our hand at writing poetry at one point in our lives-- do childhood attempts at a riff on the classic "Roses are red . . . " and the angst filled,  really bad poetry of teen age years sound familiar to anyone other than me?-- as adults who have been taught (hopefully) to think before we act or speak, and who have learned to read and therefore write with a critical eye, the idea of creating a poem of our own, facing that blank page, is often intimidating. 

And that's exactly why I give people only five or ten minutes . . . it's enough time to put together a coherent thought without stopping to think about what they're doing   Which brings me to my second secret:  I always provide a structure, which people are more than welcome to ignore if they are poetry pros.

 

I've written before about using other poets as inspiration for writing but more often, when we only have five or ten minutes, I like to give people a tighter container like a cinquain or haiku.  This evening I will invite people to write a pantoum,while we're together or after they've gone home. 
A pantoum is easy enough to write, a repetitive poem of twelve lines that repeats ten central lines in a specific order.  It's derived from a Malay form and poets from Baudelaire to Linda Pastan have tried their hand at the format at one time or another.
For those who won't be there this evening and want to give it a go, here's how.

• Number a piece of paper from 1-10 leaving enough room to write a full sentence on each line.
• Decide what you want to write about.  Mary Oliver writes that each morning the world says to us, "Here you are, alive.  Would you like to make a comment?"  Your poem is your comment.  You can use as a starting point an object, place, memory, experience, anything you'd like to write about.  (Our overall theme for tonight will be summer if you want to write along.)
• Sit with your subject for a few minutes.  think about the sensations it brings to mind, the colors, the textures, the scent, the taste, the sounds, the emotions, the images, the metaphors, any wisdom or insights that come to mind.   
• When you feel ready to write, record ten words, phrases or sentences on your paper. 
• Then rearrange your ten lines into the following format of four stanzas to finish your poem:

     1
     2
     3
     4

 

     2
     5
     4
     6

 

     5
     7
     6
     8

 

     7
     9
     8
    10

As Baudelaire would have said, "Et voila!"  You've written a poem. (Although it's not yet noon as I write this so chances are Baudelaire wouldn't have tumbled out of bed from his laudanum induced slumber yet.)

When I've led workshops and programs such as this, people often say they wish there was a forum for sharing what people have written so later tonight or tomorrow I'll edit this entry to post my pantoum here.  I'll also invite others to either post their pantoums in the comment section or e-mail them to me if they'd like me to post them.  So check back for some summer pantoums in the next day or two or post/send me your pantoums to have them added to the collection . . .

Cherries, Fairies, and Summer Reading

CHERRY TIME by Robert Graves from Fairies and Fusiliers (A. A. Knopf)
Cherries of the night are riper
Than the cherries pluckt at noon
Gather to your fairy piper
When he pipes his magic tune:
Merry, merry,
Take a cherry;
Mine are sounder,
Mine are rounder,
Mine are sweeter
For the eater
Under the moon.
And you’ll be fairies soon.

In the cherry pluckt at night,
With the dew of summer swelling,
There’s a juice of pure delight,
Cool, dark, sweet, divinely smelling.
Merry, merry,
Take a cherry;
Mine are sounder,
Mine are rounder,
Mine are sweeter
For the eater
In the moonlight.
And you’ll be fairies quite.

When I sound the fairy call,
Gather here in silent meeting,
Chin to knee on the orchard wall,
Cooled with dew and cherries eating.
Merry, merry,
Take a cherry;
Mine are sounder,
Mine are rounder,
Mine are sweeter.
For the eater
When the dews fall.
And you’ll be fairies all.


In one sense, this past weekend ushered in the beginning of summer in the U.S.  True, it isn't meteorological summer quite yet nor astronomical summer, which I always mean to celebrate, but don't, with a frolicking mid-summer fete.  Nevertheless, Memorial Day weekend brings long lines of traffic at Kent Narrows as hoardes migrate to the beaches, the sound of Rolling Thunder coming to town, and the ability to wear white linen pants without fearing grandmothers everywhere are turning over in their graves-- all harbingers of summer for many folks in the DC area.

For me however, the first tell tale sign of summer arrived on Monday in the form of an e-mail from the orchard where I go fruit picking every year:  Cherries will be ripe the end of this week.  As the message pointed out, this is three weeks early.  I usually coordinate my cherry picking with my blueberry picking, and while the berries on the bushes in the backyard do have a tinge of blue to them now, they still need another few weeks before I have to fight the birds for their limited bounty. 

Cherry picking has become something of a ritual for me.  I don't remember every picking cherries when I was young-- maybe because it was easy-- no squatting in rows of muddy straw like for strawberries, no digging deep in bushes full of prickers like blackberries or raspberries.   My parents seemed to prefer taking us to pick fruit that had an element of discomfort to it. 

Several years ago, when I first picked sour cherries (my favorite) with a friend at the orchard in question,  I was amazed at not only how fast I could fill my bag, but at the way the fruit itself looked on the tree-- the ruby red globes glistening in the sun against the backdrop of the dark green leaves.  I probably spent as much time admiring the cherries as picking them.  But pick them I did and ever since then, my start of summer has been marked by an afternoon spent sprawled on a blanket in the backyard with a bowl of cherries, a glass of iced tea, and a good book.

To that end, I'm glad that during my cleaning frenzy over the holiday weekend I rearranged my bookshelves in order to devote one shelf to summer reading.  Just as there are seasonal fruits, I believe there is seasonal reading.  Tolstoy is best read in winter curled up with a cup of tea under a warm blanket and Virginia Woolf is best read under a tree in the languid, steamy days of late summer.  I don't know why this is, it just is. 

My earliest memory of assigning a season to an author goes back to when my mother introduced me to the Mary Poppins books.  I still re-read these classics by P.L Travers each summer, often with a dish of raspberry sherbet as the two just seem to fit so nicely together.  In later years when we'd holiday in the Outer Banks during late spring, I'd visit a little shop on Okrakoke Island and buy whatever Andrew Lang book they had in stock that I didn't already own.  The ensuing weeks were spent indulging in a fairy tale or two at bedtime.  As I was in graduate school at this point in my life, reading anything other than theology tomes was an indulgence.

This year there are 19 books on my wooden bookshelf and 7 on my virtual one that I hope to read this summer.  I'll be posting my progress and short reviews in a Carpe Libris post each month but as I figure it, that means I need to read about a book and a half per week.  Now I just need to go pick some cherries so I can begin . . .