Monthly Archives: April 2021

April 5, 2021: Spotlight on NINE GATES: ENTERING THE MIND OF POETRY by Jane Hirshfield and Context for Poem “Yellow”

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This collection of essays by poet Jane Hirschfield has been in my library for nearly a quarter of a century, and it still pulls me back in every so often to reread and mull over Hirschfield’s quiet but authoritative wisdom. (I also love the cover image, all that bright citrus partially obscured and in different stages of revelation and accessibility.)

Here are the two sentences that open the preface:

Poetry’s work is the clarification and magnification of being. Each time we enter its word-woven and musical invocation, we give ourselves over to a different mode of knowing: to poetry’s knowing, and to the increase of existence it brings, unlike any other.

A longtime practitioner of Zen Buddhism, Hirschfield’s prose and poetry reflects the values of spare elegant surface opening the mind to penetrating depths. Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz has written of Hirshfield’s “profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings,” another hallmark of Buddhism’s emphasis on compassion.

Nine Gates is equally appealing whether approached as a reader of poems or as a maker of poems, exploring as it does the enlarging function of poetry for both the reader and the writer. (Her other collection of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, is one I still have not read, but I am looking forward to dipping into it. As a well-regarded translator of poems from Japan and India, she is well qualified to ponder this. I am also hoping to explore more of Hirschfield’s body of work in poetry. If you have a favorite among her volumes, please let me know!)

Regarding today’s Poem: “Yellow”

Today’s poem, “Yellow,” cohered around a memory of homeschooling days, when Julia was gaining new confidence as a cook and baker in a circle of friends that extended out from her peers through multiple generations and across state lines–gifts that matter in the moment and linger in the heart and mind. In this case, a yellow gingham apron, practical and beautiful, made especially for her with love, the gift of a grandmother who extended her caring beyond her own grandchildren to their friend, our daughter.

I think the combination of the prompt of the letter “Y” and maybe the cover of Hirschfield’s collection were the catalysts for the poem.

Until tomorrow, maybe you experience increased existence! LESLIE

April 4, 2021: Spotlight on PRINCETON ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POETRY AND POETICS and Context for the Poem “Zither”

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This two-inch thick tome has been with me since I first had a real job and could afford to buy books. (When you see that the stick price is $7.95, you can compute just how long I have treasured this rather battered paperback.) It is a classic reference, and continues to be updated. Arranged alphabetically, with entries from “Abecedarius” to “Zeugma,” it is my first reference of choice for all things poetic, and it is usually the most complete. Yes, the prose is a little bit dry, and the font size (arrayed in two columns per page) can be politely described as miniscule, but if it were in a reader-friendly 12. font then I wouldn’t be able to lift it. (As it is, the paperback I own weighs three pounds on my kitchen scale.)

This doughty workhorse has no page-turning narrative arc but were I packing a sea chest for a sojourn on a desert island, I would make room for it, right next to my dictionary, blank note books, pens, energy bars, and sunscreen.

Regarding today’s Poem, “Zither”:

For those of you who asked to receive the daily poems, I hope this short video will help give some background resonance to the poem for today. I can’t play a guitar or even a piano myself, much as I have longed to coax music out of both, yet I can see how the three are related. Folk music, and making music at home–can we think about these trends in the past two hundred years without the instruments that made them possible? I would add to that the flute and penny whistle, the recorder (and, of course, the concertina!)

This comes performance of the Beatles “Let it Be” comes from musician Etienne de Lavaulx. I hope that you will enjoy it as much as I do. (Please know that de Lavaulx, a native of France now based in Western Australia, has many YouTube performances of familiar songs and also offers CDs and sheet music. You might want to look for his rendition of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence” online. If you have a little more leisure–just twelve minutes!–look at this autobiography in which he demonstrates his life as a musician specializing in guitar and zither.)

(Note: there is no entry in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics for “zither” but there is one for “dithyramb.”)

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

April 3, 2021: Spotlight on THE POETRY LIFE by Baron Wormser; and Homage for Standish Henning

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Library Spotlight

I love to read fiction about the writing life. This collection of short stories, The Poetry Life (Cavankerry Press, 2008), offers ten short stories by poet and novelist Baron Wormser. Each one gives the reader the sense that she or he is part of the imaginative and physical world of a poetry you want to know better. I think only a poet who is also a gifted prose writer, as Wormser is, could have rendered so vividly these portraits how the work of William Blake, William Carlos Williams, Elinor Wylie, John Berryman, Weldon Keyes, Anne Sexton, Gregory Corso, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, and Joe Bolton have affected their readers. And I suspect that this will be one of my summer re-reads!

Regarding Today’s Poem

We all have moments of seizing up, especially when a blank mind greets a blank page. Sometimes relaxing into memory helps. During my junior year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I was extremely fortunate to have had two back-to-back semesters under the tutelage of renowned English professor Standish Henning. These two classes covered the entire canon of Shakespeare’s plays, along with a healthy slice of his sonnets. I not only learned about Shakespeare’s work, I learned how to write academic prose.

Last month, I learned of Mr. Henning’s death from a friend (who still lives in Madison and who thoughtfully sent me his obituary.

(I am keeping this tucked into my copy of the edition of Shakespeare’s works that Mr. Henning insisted on, edited by Craig and Bevington.)

Rarely does a short obituary sum up a life so accurately. He was, indeed, “…a man of great depth, humor, and decency, a man much loved.” Clearly, he lives on in the many, many lives he affected, including my own.

That same junior year of college was the time I first encountered singer-songwriter-musician Tom Waits (Memorably at a live concert–for free, because I was an usher at the University Theater. I had no previous awareness of his work, but I promptly went out to by his Blue Valentine record album.) And it was while living in Madison that I first fell into the life-changing poetry of William Butler Yeats. In writing this poem today, I was thinking of his “Lines Written in Dejection” (one I memorized a few years ago in a zeal of memorizing poems I love) and “The Circus Animals Desertion.”

I hope none of these esteemed gentleman–Henning, Yeats, Waits–mind my slender effort titled “No Poem Today.”

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

April 2, 2021 Spotlight on THE WILD BRAID: A POET REFLECTS ON A CENTURY IN THE GARDEN by Stanley Kunitz

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It is warmer here, today, and windy. If the wind abates, we are thinking of having a fire in the garden at dusk to relax after a long but productive week.

Library Spotlight on

A poet whose work I care deeply for, Stanley Kunitz, famously wrote that “a garden is a poem that is never finished.” And I feel that I am never finished reading and rereading his prose autobiography by way of a garden narrative, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden. This account of the making his East Coastal garden in Provincetown, Massachusetts was published by W.W. Norton in 2005, when Kunitz was celebrating his 100th birthday by still tending to and enjoying his garden. It is lushly illustrated with photographs and adorned with excerpts from Kunitz’s work as a poet, but the focus is on the nitty gritty of gardening, the exhilaration and the heartbreak of amending soil and amending airy ideas by making room for the ideas your own patch of earth has to offer.

Born on July 29, 1905, Kunitz lived a life active in mind and body, winning the National Book Award in 1995 and serving as our national Poet Laureate — for the second time — in 2000.

This volume opens up in many directions, making it a wonderful gift for anyone who delights in gardens, poetry, photography, and thoughtful autobiography highlighting persistence, integrity, and a willingness to listen to what is and what might be.

REGARDING TODAY’S POEM:

These two sonnets, “The Exchange,” show the two points of view and are twins, in a way. After hours of writer’s block this morning, all it took was one old uncomfortable memory, an iambic pentameter first line, and the hope of exorcising the memory. The second sonnet was the gift, seeing the whole encounter from the other side, at least in my imagination! Both turn on questions and self-questioning.

Until tomorrow!

Leslie

Garden tags that I use as book marks for The Wild Braid