Two Books

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A photo posted by Terra Leigh Bell (@leighandharriet) on Aug 8, 2014 at 6:28pm PDT

            Two books, very different.  Though both were crafted replies to other writers.
            The first — first in chronology as well as psychic weight — is Beltenebros, or the Beautiful Obscure.  This is my first book of poetry, and it was released by Seattle's Babel/Salvage at the end of August.  Beltenebros is a (short) book-length poem.  It was written in direct response to Cervantes' Don Quixote de la Mancha; I think of it as sort of "talking back" (albeit with a great deal of affection) to the novel(s).*

The book finally got finished! #papercraft #paperart #handmadebooks

A photo posted by Terra Leigh Bell (@leighandharriet) on Nov 11, 2014 at 9:10pm PST

            The second, though it got finished around the same time, is quite different.  It is a very small, handmade object.  Each page contains "memorabilia" from either Lemuel Gulliver's journeys in Jonathan Swift's 18th-century novel, or from my own journeys, or some of each.  It took much longer than I'd expected, but I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised by how it turned out.  There are a couple of pictures in this post, but if you click through to my Instagram account, you can find images of all the pages.

                    _______________________________________________________


            I wish I could remember more clearly.  Like most children, I did various art projects when I was little.  And I'm sure that, also like other children, some of my experiments prompted my mother and other grown-ups to say, with a mix of pride and puzzlement, "What is it?"
            I wish I could remember exactly how I felt about that question.  I suspect it doesn't bother kids as much as most adults worry it does.  I vaguely remember feeling pleasure.  Not because of their interest, but because, in realizing the adult didn't recognize what my picture was an image of, I could tell them whatever I wanted.  A dog could suddenly be claimed as a giraffe.  A tree could become a boat.
            I like the adult version much less.  Now people say, "What is it about?"
            In the last few months, each time I have told a person that my first book was published, or that I made a handmade book/art-ish object, I have heard the question, "What is it about?"
            I can think of two appropriate responses.  I could launch into a long analysis of all of the themes and shapes and recurring images and all the layered meanings in Beltenebros.  I could talk about memory and materialism and my highly clichéd but nonetheless thriving romance with the sea in the Gulliver's Travels book.  That's one way of responding that seems as least reasonable.
            Or I could shrug my shoulders and say, "I have no idea."  This seems most honest.
            But I am just as socially assimilated as the next schmuck, so I politely say something like, "It's an homage to Don Quixote/Gulliver's Travels."  Blatant relief sweeps across their face as they realize A) it's not sexual, and B) the fact that it is "about" books they haven't read lets them off the hook from having to feign interest.  They (equally politely) reply, "Oh, I haven't read it."

#papercraft #paperart #handmadebooks

A photo posted by Terra Leigh Bell (@leighandharriet) on Nov 11, 2014 at 9:15pm PST

            The reason I think all of this matters is simple:  I caught myself.  I caught myself being more proud of having had Beltenebros published than I was of finishing the handmade book.  And if I dig under that pride a bit, I realize that my pride in having a book published stems from a sense of validation.  Having someone — anyone — choose your poem or novel or essay collection to send off to a printer's and slap an ISBN on it feels like "someone" — that conveniently vague notion of the rational capitalist at the back of everything — has put their stamp of approval on my work.  Receiving that stamp of approval permits others to grant theirs as well.
            But...really???  Have you seen some of the  books to get published recently?  I know I'm showing some of my elitist colors here, but "getting published" (and the passivity of that phrase should probably bug you) says nothing of the artistic value of a, um...book.  What it tells you is something about its capitalist value; that Babel/Salvage and many, many publishing houses like it are so clearly labors of love, doesn't change that fact.
            For the time being, I'm not going after this so much as an attack on capitalism "out there," so to speak, as I am concerned about the ways capitalism and consumerism have clearly shaped my own mind.  I care deeply about human creativity, and any ideology that fucks with the underlying structures of our individual minds and the consciousness of our larger societies to such an extent that we value the approval of the market more highly than our own inner compass should disturb me.  It should disturb me often enough to actually do something about it.  Maybe I could start with being proud of having written the damned thing.

                    _______________________________________________________


            As I mentioned in my last post, the move to Portland has been tumultuous, and I can't currently locate my copy of Don Q.  But in the next couple of weeks I should be able to put up a couple of posts that show some of what I did in working with Cervantes' text.  If you're curious, you can search for "quixote" in the upper left-hand corner to see a couple of short excerpts, as well as some of my thoughts on the novel and my process in general.
            As always, feel free to comment, and thanks for the patience in my transition to Portlandia!



* Today if you go to your local bookstore (my favorites being Elliott Bay in Seattle and Portland's Powell's on Hawthorne), you will find the single book Don Quixote de la Mancha.  I only think it worth mentioning that it was actually two separate books written by Cervantes because the two are quite different, and writing the second book probably contributed to Cervantes' decline in health.  He worked his ass off to get the book out partially because so many copycats had published spurious second volumes to his original, and he wanted to set the records straight.

5 Options for Artists that Aren't Really

Lists are popular.
“10 Best Pick-Up Lines Ever!”
“8 Reasons Your Marriage is Already Failing!”
“5 Ways Parents Can Stop Insulting their Childless Friends!”
I am super into being popular, so I thought I’d create a list, too.  Well, actually, it’s just to get some things off my chest.  I am working on a post on vocation and profession, and I kept getting bogged down responding to all of the old men who, over the course of my life, have felt it incumbent upon them to offer me unsolicited life advice.  Honestly, though, these things still get said, both to me and to some of my artist friends.  Typically in a much more well-meaning way than they used to be offered, but without exception they come from folks who are not artists themselves.
So in the interests of clearing my throat before I get to my post on vocation, and because these points bring up REALLY important issues around capitalism, here are my 

5 Things Non-Artists Need to Stop Saying to Artists

1. Oh, you’re a poet!  Have you thought about being a professional writer?  Like, advertising copy, or journalism, or something?

So I’ve used poetry and writing as my examples, but the same goes for all art forms:  an actor doing TV commercials; a musician playing for a recording studio; a painter doing video game illustration.  The thing non-artists do not seem to get is that your passion, and the skill you acquire expressing that passion, are two separate things.  Using the skill you’ve acquired does not satisfy the passion.  Not one tiny bit.  If I do journalism — and I have, as it so happens — it is no closer to writing poetry or my own essays than is cleaning toilets (which I have also done, and found far easier on my creative side than the supposed creativity of paid writing).
Also, there’s money in journalism?  Are you fucking kidding me?

2. There are jobs for artists.  You could be a college professor!  (Or any type of teacher.  Acting, painting, photography, composition, etc.)

Actually, now that I think of it, this one has a similar problem to #1.  Namely, teaching is a completely different job.  It is not satisfying to creative urges to teach artistic skills when what you want to be doing is painting giant abstracted oil paintings inspired by Victorian novels.
Also — and this is important to the quality of our art, folks — as a professor, I would spend over half my time reading poetry written by 18- to 22-year-olds.  I know what I wrote between the ages of 18 and 22.  I promise you:  reading it would not make you a good artist, of any stripe.  So professors are forced into filling their heads with incredibly heartfelt drivel.
For another thing, in order to get a job at the college level, you have to be willing to move pretty much anywhere in the country.  So, you know, just don’t fall in love with anyone or ever, ever want to settle down and have a family.  (Seriously on this one.  I’ve known people who speak multiple languages, who’ve been moving around the country or the world for over ten years, trying to get tenure.)  Also, going along with that one, 76.4%.  That’s the percentage of professors, across all institutional types, that are adjunct and not tenured or tenure-track.  That means no guarantee of a job next year, and most likely no benefits, and now (and where are those insane tuitions going??!!) most are reported by a recent study to be living below the poverty line.
And finally…  There are no jobs!  Not even crappy ones in the middle of nowhere!  Our parents’ generation is holding onto their tenured jobs for dear life, and there has been such a massive explosion of 30- and 40-somethings with graduate degrees in the humanities that some of my professor friends have told me they are seeing upwards of 100 to 300 applications for every ONE job that comes available.

3. You're making excuses.  There are people out there living their dream.  You could be one of them!  You just gotta be committed!

You wanna know my dream?  It’s so, so simple:  permanent American expat, traveling from one gorgeous, fascinating place to another (Paris!  Lagos!  Kuala Lumpur!  Istanbul!), spending my days writing poetry and essays, painting with media I don't even know the names of, and my nights drinking with other fabulous expats and going to operas, ballets, musical performances, and art openings, and sleeping with so many gorgeous men I finally lose count in a blissed-out, orgasmic haze.  That’s all!  And you know what, the non-artists are right about one thing.  If I was more committed — say, committed enough to marry some rich prick who wanted a tall, blonde trophy — I could totally finance my dream.  So why am I so lazy?

4. Well, but look at [insert famous person with buckets of money]!  He/she certainly seems to have figured it out.

Okay, just for clarity’s sake:  Rick Steves is not an artist.  Neither is Heather Graham.  Neither is Mandy Moore, nor Dan Brown, nor Thomas Kinkade.  Neither are a hell of a lot of other people that Wikipedia will happily label “writer,” “actor,” or “artist.”  They are entertainers.  Pure and simple.  They make crap, so we can all stop thinking for a few minutes.  Nothing against not thinking.  I’m a regular meditator.  It’s just, if you’re going to try to turn your brain off, don’t call it art. Now, that being said, there are artists, across all disciplines, who to all appearances support themselves financially by making wicked art.  Tilda Swinton is a goddess.  Rose Wylie.  Philip Glass.  Arvo Pärt (be still my heart).  Lupita Nyong’o.  Michelle Ndegeocello.  Adrienne Rich.  Anna Netrebko (*sigh*).  Lang Lang.  They are out there.  But here’s the thing:  most had money at their back, and if not money, artistic parents.  No American ever wants to admit this to themselves, but the pulling-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps myth is largely that.  And for the one in a billion artists who do manage to do that?  Can you not tell that I am far too much of a pessimist to be that one? Did you read the above article I linked to? Read it.

5. (In response to an artist voicing concern over balancing art with marriage and kids.)  Sure you can have it all!  Lots of artists have homes and families!

I saved this one for last because this is tough for me to address.  Not because I have a stance against it.  Lots of talented artists do purchase homes and have transportation and get married (and stay married!) and have kids who don’t hate them or kill people.  It’s not that it’s technically impossible.  It’s tough because how to balance art-making with family life is a legitimate problem for a lot of people. It's a question of priorities and sacrifice, and I find that generally, non-artists whip this one out way too casually.
When you have a child, you understand responsibility in a whole new way.  Your very identity gets changed.  But the problem is, it probably won’t be 100% changed.  So an artist may suddenly see their old, artistically active self as selfish and focused on petty things, and simultaneously resent their children for keeping them from their old selves.  As a woman, I tend to hear more about this from the perspective of moms rather than dads, but I can tell you:  there are some moms out there who both desperately want to hold their babies, and desperately want to throw them across the room and run off to somewhere, anywhere, where they can be their artist selves again.  Somewhere they can not be a mother anymore.
These are not “bad women.”  They are not necessarily bad mothers.  Any responsible adult can and should figure out how to deal with their own disappointment once they’ve brought a child into this world, and buck the fuck up.  Most (that I have seen, anyway) do just that.  But at what cost?  How many ways can a human be split?  And is it such a great thing?
  The major advantage I see to encouraging everyone to do everything is productivity.  Yes, my life would look much more impressive if I published books, made art, studied philosophy, and bought a house and had babies.  So?  Why the obsession with production?  Oh!  Right!  Capitalism!  I always forget.  Right, totally need to get on board with capitalism, and its fixation on making more and more, so we can consume more and more.  Return to Go.
And this is the meat of the matter.  Americans want to believe the aforementioned pieces of advice can work because we really, REALLY want to believe that capitalism can be done in such a way that it doesn’t hopelessly contort each and every soul it touches.  I am showing my so-far-left-I-don’t-know-where-the-leftists-went colors here, but yes, capitalism distorts and taints everything.  Everything.  And everyone.  This is why Beyoncé — whom I instinctively want to fall down and worship — is still a problem.  This is why we should never, ever indulge in regretful surprise when we hear what the pace and demands of capitalism do to creators (click here for one example out of thousands).  Americans want to believe that it is possible to be the most authentic version of themselves possible, within this system.  I assert that it is not.  It is not possible.I speak mainly as a poet here, but there is no way to slice the cake that doesn’t hurt me and my creativity.  The solution I have arrived at — and I make no claims that this is the best solution, only that it is no worse than any of the others — is to protect the space my creative urges come from as much as possible.  For me, this means never, ever placing responsibility for things like food and shelter on their very fragile shoulders.  (Huh.  My creative urges ended up with shoulders.  Metaphors are weird.)
I could go further and get all Žižekian, but as I mentioned earlier, this is mostly a throat-clearing exercise.  Of course, there are probably at least five more silly pieces of advice I could come up with, but these are the main ones that continue to re-assert themselves.  And there are real potential pitfalls to the option I’ve chosen.  For one thing, I think it’s awfully easy for folks like me who choose to (attempt to) keep their art and money as far from one another as possible to get awfully self-righteous (a particular talent of mine). We can fool ourselves into believing that somehow we manage to accomplish what everyone else fails at; namely, that we somehow stay free from capitalism’s dirty fingers.  We do not.  Also, there’s a scary psychological potential here, which is that if not one dime ever comes to me via my art, given that I have a psyche shaped by the belief that money is the primary marker of value, it’s often (read:  always) difficult to remember that I am in fact an artist. This one hurts, and it's a constant problem for me, but again, that's part of my point: there isn't a solution within capitalism. Which means that the solution is... (Raises eyebrows...) Yes...???

A system, which is to say, an embrace

          The plant is its cellulose, its own plasmalemmas, its epidermis, its plasmodesmata.  The plant's cells both make and are the plant.  It takes sunlight, and makes it into food.  It takes its own flowers, and they become fruit.  The vine is all of these things, the various bits muting and swelling into one another.  But also it is the oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen; one moment they are within the epidermis, the next transformed and exchanged.

            In responding to my last post, John mentioned an old roommate who believed "there was no choice of any kind, ever, for any of us.  We were just organisms reacting to stimuli."  I think the image of an organism reacting to stimuli depicts a common perception; it also just so happens to illustrate the kind of "anti-free-will" stance I am not taking.  It seems, in common parlance anyway, that we are always talking about individual organisms, and they are either:

      A)  free, in the sense of being a locus of origination, whether of desire or action or both; or

      B)  determined, in the sense of being poked and prodded from "without," and compelled to do/feel/think various things.
            Both seem to be based on a concept of individuality which, at the very least, I would like to see defended well before using it as a basis upon which to build other ideas.

___________________________________________ 

"Now, changeless within the limits of great bonds,
 [What-is] is without beginning and without end, since birth and perishing
Have been driven far off, and true trust has cast them away.
It stays in the same state and in the same place, lying by itself,
And so it stays firmly as it is, for mighty Necessity
Holds it in the bonds of a limit which restrains it all about,
Because it is not lawful for what-is to be incomplete.
For there is no lack in it; if there were, it would lack everything"
                 (Parmenides, fr. 8).

             This quote is where all of my puzzling over free will began.  All with that little, tiny segment which declares that "mighty Necessity/Holds [what-is] in the bonds of a limit which restrains it all about."
            Ananke — or Necessity — might sloppily be translated as fate, but I would resist such a translation precisely because of the issues I raised above:  when people talk about "fate vs. free will," they talk about it like they are an individual atom of the universe, being pushed and prodded by an external force which they call fate.  But I think Roberto Calasso's ramblings about Ananke — which are extremely beautiful, but also long enough that I won't include all of them here — actually point in a more helpful direction:

"In the late pagan era we can still find this in Macrobius:  'amor osculo significatur, necessitas nodo':  'love is represented with a kiss, necessity with a knot.'  Two circular images, the mouth and the noose, embrace everything that is.  Eros, 'born when Ananke was lord and everything bowed before her gloomy will,' once boasted that he had gained possession of the 'Ogygian scepter,' primordial as the waters of the Styx itself.  He could now force 'his own decrees upon the gods.'  But Eros said nothing of Ananke, who had come before him.  There is a hostility between Eros and Ananke, a hostility that springs from an obscure likeness, as between the kiss and the knot" (Calasso, 99).

And this:

"Of the two, [the gods] prefer to submit to Eros rather than Ananke, even though they know that Eros is just a dazzling cover for Ananke.  And cover in the literal sense:  Ananke's inflexible bond, which tightens in a great circle around the world, is covered by a speckled belt, which we see in the sky as the Milky Way.  But we can also see it, in perfect miniature, on the body of Aphrodite when the goddess wears her 'many-hued, embroidered girdle in which all charms and spells reside:  tenderness and desire are there, and softly whispered words, the seduction that has stolen the intellect even from those of sound mind.'  Unraveled across the darkness of the sky, that belt denotes not deceit but the splendor of the world"  (Calasso, 100).

__________________________________________

            The term "system" feels off somehow when I try to explain why I don't align with either free-will or deterministic camps.  But a system does denote the myriad tugs and pokes along the way, the interconnectedness of human experience.
            The question remains as to whether there is something unique within certain beings which is an origin point of any kind.  The experience of artistic creation seems to both support and belie that possibility.  When I create a poem, I experience it both as something which, to all appearances, emerged almost ex nihilo.  But then again, I also experience it as coming from outside of me, and therefore to not be entirely under even my control.  Also, we start to get into very interesting territory, because if we were going to claim the existence of a spark of origination, I would adamantly defend the right of all mammals (at the very least) to get to be in this category.  The more we learn about animal consciousness, the more we discover that the supposedly uniquely human attributes aren't so uniquely human.
            But yes, the term system still feels off.  Embrace.  Bond.  A girdle, tightly binding two atoms in the universe to one another.  Another pair, more loosely.

____________________________________________

a vine that grows up trees

                                       (Sappho, 349) 

And this:

                                            when all night long

                                                                       it pulls them down

                                                                                         (Sappho, 301)

_____________________________________________

            Well, this is it.  All my thoughts on free will from the last three months.  I'm sort of shocked by how much the Parmenides fragment sent my head spinning, and how little I now have to say.  The gist of it seems to have been that I have become aware of a gigantic gap between what makes sense if we spend any time talking about it sensibly, and how we think about ourselves unconsciously on a daily basis.  I suspect that American culture is particularly "free-will-ish," which gives me more cause to doubt the usefulness of our bloated adolescent of a nation.  Come to think of it, Dudley Dursley seems like a nice embodiment of American-ness.
            If any readers are curious, there are some good basic articles on free will on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  I'm particularly interested in Strawson's "Reactive Attitudes" theory, which is towards the very bottom of the page.  There's another good basic page on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as well.

                                             

         



Sappho.  If Not, Winter:  Fragments of Sappho.  Trans. Anne Carson.  New York:  Vintage Books, 2002.  Print.

Parmenides.  Trans. Robin Waterfield, First Philosophers:  The Presocratics and the Sophists.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000.  Print.

Calasso, Roberto.  The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.  Trans. Tim Parks.  New York:  Vintage International, 1993.  Print.

Two (Very Different) Poems

            As a poet, I consider it my god-given duty to bemoan how little Americans understand poetry.  So here:  "Bemoan!"  Next week, thoughts on Plato's Apology.  This week, I thought I'd post a couple of poems.
            Neither of the poems below is what I would call the finest of the respective poets — namely, Mary Oliver and Maya Angelou.  Nor are Oliver and Angelou my favorite poets.  They are, instead, poems that were very important for my development as a writer.
            The writer who first made me want to be a poet was William Shakespeare.  I say this not so much as a "Hey, aren't I classy?" but more to demonstrate just how out of step I was with contemporary writing and thought and...well, existence.  I read almost the complete works of Shakespeare sometime between the ages of 11 and 14, and understood little to none of it.  I just knew that every once in awhile I would stumble across a turn of phrase that sent my head spinning with its convoluted-yet-crystal-clear beauty.  Also, I knew that the main characters were largely sociopathic, fascinating, disturbed men, and I was already pretty clear on the fact that this was totally my type.
            Then, one day, for reasons I don't recall, I was at a bookstore and thought to myself, "Well, if I'm a poet, I should read some poetry."  I went over to the poetry section and chose one book — Maya Angelou's Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie — almost entirely because I recognized her name, though how I don't know.  The other was West Wind, by Mary Oliver, and I have absolutely no idea why I picked that one up.  I'd never heard of Oliver, and the phrase "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize" printed on the front meant nothing to a kid as sheltered as I was.
            The two poems below are the first poems in each book.  They are the first poems that I read by these poets, and they may very well qualify as the first 20th century poetry I ever read.  (Sidenote:  I was eighteen or nineteen at the time.)  I'm putting them here because...well, because for many different reasons, poetry has a reputation for being difficult.  And it can be.  And while I may enjoy slogging through difficult poetry, I certainly don't enjoy difficult literary theory or scientific research papers, so I sympathize with people who think poetry is somehow "beyond them."  But it's not.  It's just not.  Poets like Oliver seem pretty intent on proving that.

Seven White Butterflies

by Mary Oliver

                                    Seven white butterflies

                                    delicate in a hurry look

                                    how they bang the pages

                                          of their wings as they fly

                                    to the fields of mustard yellow

                                    and orange and plain

                                    gold all eternity

                                          is in the moment this is what

                                    Blake said Whitman said such

                                    wisdom in the agitated

                                    motions of the mind seven

                                          dancers floating

                                    even as worms toward

                                    paradise see how they banter

                                    and riot and rise

                                          to the trees flutter

                                    lob their white bodies into

                                    the invisible wind weightless

                                    lacy willing

                                          to deliver themselves unto

                                    the universe now each settles

                                    down on a yellow thumb on a 

                                    brassy stem now

                                          all seven are rapidly sipping

                                    from the golden towers who

                                    would have thought it could be so easy?

            The poem was something of an epiphany to me.  The sensuality took my breath away, and while I understood the references to Blake and Whitman, the poem changed them for me.  Before, poets like Blake and Whitman were part of a different world, a world that seemed both better than this world, and ferociously unavailable to full comprehension.  Oliver, in twenty-six lines, wrote a gorgeous poem that had as its stars seven insects — no lovers, no sailors, no fairies or mermaids or goddesses or other-male-fantasies — while she effortlessly tugged Blake and Whitman into supporting roles.  I had had absolutely no idea that poetry could be beautiful, and comprehensible.

            Angelou is, of course, an entirely different writer.  I'm not sure if she is more famous as a poet, or as an autobiographer, but either way she is one of our Black Classic writers.  Angelou has very much played a role as a spokesperson for African Americans, and in particular black women.  And while I knew Angelou was black — while her race and the radical difference between our life experiences was, it felt, written in blood in her books — I appreciated the violent shock I got from reading her poetry.

They Went Home

by Maya Angelou

                                         They went home and told their wives,

                                               that never once in all their lives,

                                               had they known a girl like me,

                                         But . . . They went home.

                                         They said my house was licking clean,

                                               no word I spoke was ever mean,

                                               I had an air of mystery,

                                         But . . . They went home.

                                         My praises were on all men's lips,

                                               they like my smile, my wit, my hips,

                                               they'd spend one night, or two or three.

                                         But . . .

            In retrospect it feels almost charmingly naïve, the way I took Angelou's poetry in.  I had read nothing like it before, and I was repeatedly flabbergasted at how frankly she wrote about sex and racism and violence and drugs and the beauty of black people's bodies.  But it registered as something like, "Wow!  I had no idea you could do that.  Huh.  I guess you can do that."

            As a final note, I, like every other vaguely-guilt-ridden upper class white person in the world, feel uncomfortable talking about, oh, what shall we call it?  Blackness?  Race?  Not-me-ness?  I'm not sure.  I feel uncomfortable drawing attention to a writer's race, because it is "rude" to do so.  It has only recently dawned on me, however, that this is due to the fact that I am white and, therefore, the somehow "neutral" race.  It's like, I'm normal, and it's rude of me to call attention to a black person's lack of normalcy.  I haven't found what feels like an organic, graceful way to address my own privilege and racism, but until I do I'm just going to start hammering at it, probably, ungracefully.

an experiment

The following was an experiment/mash-up using the very, very strange and wonderful poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, including some of the original German.  All of the words are Hölderlin's, or from the English translation by Michael Hamburger.


Fragments of the Fragments of the Later Version of Patmos, by Friedrich Hölderlin

Voll Güt' ist; keiner aber fasset
Allein Gott.

Most kind is; but no one by himself
Can grasp God.

In gloomy places dwell
The eagles, over
The chasm walk the sons
On bridges lightly built.
Give us innocent water,
O pinions give us, with minds
To cross over and to return.

So I spoke when
a Genius carried me
From my own house. There clothed themselves,
Like men,
The shadowy wood
homeland;
So, fresh,
golden haze
Quickly
fragrant,

Now, Asia burst into flower for me,
drowsy almost with flowers the garden,

O Insel des Lichts!
land of eyes,
More athletic
In ruin.
The hand of the Lord.
Rein aber bestand
Auf ungebundnem Boden Johannes.

von Cana.
A little while I shall stay, he said.
the Baptist's head,
Just picked, like script
on the platter. Like fire
Are voices of God. Yet it is hard
In great events to preserve what is great.

Johannes. Christus.
But that's
Impossible.
And now
I wish to sing.
Werden Träume. Fall on the heart
Like error, and killing, if one does not

Consider what they are and understand.
the Lord
Pronounced death, for never
He could find words enough
To say about kindness. Sein Licht war

Tod.
Alles ist gut. Thereupon he died.
as when
A century bends, thoughtfully.

The evening had come. For to
Be pure is a skill.
But much is to be avoided. Too much
Of love
Is dangerous.
und der Heimath.
beside them
Walked, like a plague, the loved one's shadow.
mightily trembled
The house and God's thunder-storms rolled
Distantly rumbling,

Another Hirshfield Poem

Leather

by Jane Hirshfield

There are times I feel myself cow stripped of her leather.

The hide going on without me,

flensed, vat-dipped, beaten to pliable smoothness.

What remains — awkward, vaguely aware

that something is missing, but what? — continues

its looking outward, evenly breathes.

Sunlight, wind, the black, inquiring noses of others:

sharp now as the knife.

Muscled unjacketed egg.

Impossible butcher's diagram walking.  Beginning to graze.

A Poem About Poems

Like an Ant Carrying Her Bits of Leaf or Sand
        by Jane Hirshfield


Like an ant carrying her bits of leaf or sand,
the poem carries its words.
Moving one, then another, into place.

Something in an ant is sure where these morsels belong,
but the ant could not explain this.
Something in a poem is certain where its words belong,
but the poet could not explain this.

All day the ant obeys an inexplicable order.
All day the poet obeys an incomprehensible demand.

The world changes or does not change by these labors;
the geode peeled open gives off its cold scent or does not.
But that is no concern of the ant's, of the poem's.

The work of existence devours its own unfolding.
What dissolves will dissolve —
you, reader, and I, and all our quick angers and longings.
The potato's sugary hunger for growing larger.
The unblinking heat of the tiger.

No thimble of cloud or stone that will not vanish,
and still the rearrangements continue.

The ant's work belongs to the ant.
The poem carries love and terror, or it carries nothing.

Poems About Summer, and Alone

I hadn't planned on posting poems by other folks on here, but lately these have been holding on too tightly.

All Summer You Kept Trying to Answer

by Jane Hirshfield

All summer you kept trying to answer the knocking.

Down the hill,

the new houses composed themselves,

first story, second story, roof.

Your own story stayed unvisited, unfurnished.

What lived there

was smaller than mouse-sized.  Perhaps a cricket still moved.

The heart, wanting to waken,

drank its tiny cups of morning espresso.

One morning choosing a green cup,

the next morning yellow.  Red.  Blue.  Then once again green.

All summer the heart circled the wheel of its colors.

What does it matter if now a dog wakes you,

night after night, in the dark?

Comes to the bed and stares until you open the door,

then goes out to start up a racket that no neighbor hears.

When Tu Fu turned forty,

he drank rice wine, dipped his cup over and over,

barked like a dog into wind.

Perhaps this dog is Tu Fu, still going on,

howling at time, at friends gone to the Yellow Springs.

Does he hunt some impossible answer —

beauty?  or justice? — there in the outer dark of the world?

Or, more modern questioner,

hunt only the scented knock of a better question?

He is gone a long time.

Who stands in the doorway is you.

Still, waking is waking.  It is good to have a companion.

The late stars shine in the cold, some red, some blue.

And this isn't Tu Fu, but Hirshfield made me think of my Chinese poets.

Bamboo Retreat

Wang Wei

Sitting alone amid dense bamboo

strumming my lute and whistling

deep in the forest no one else knows

until the bright moon looks down

            -translated by Red Pine