Kay Ryan has become one of my very favorite poets in the past few years. I go back and back again to her work. Today, I thought of her poem, “Cloud,” as a perfect example of ephemera.
Background to My Poem, “Renouncing Kleos”:
I first encountered the Greek word, “kleos,” when Julia and I studied Homer’s epics during our homeschooling days. Today, with the sky granite grey, it came back to me, and I thought about how humans want to create something that outlasts themselves but that ultimately seems foolish–and maybe particpating imaginatively in the ephemeral nature of things is a better way toward wisdom. And I wonder why it can be so difficult for humans to stay anchored in the present moment.
Still later, I thought how sidewalk pavers are a nice half-way place between making one’s mark in a permanent way and living in the present moment totally. And they are mostly kleos-free, since no name is attached.
I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know
How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
(Photo Collage by Karla Schultz; Used by Permission)
After I wrote today’s poem, “The Quest,” about names, I realized that there was only one poem to spotlight today–this classic by Dickinson. It is one that I have memorized, that I repeat aloud irritatingly often, and in which I was see and hear something new each time.
Background for My Poem “The Quest”:
This week, I talked with a friend who needed to adjust her middle name legally on some documents, so that got me thinking about names and name changes. Then, this morning, I was reading Chapter Ten: “Our Real Names” from one of my go-to books on the craft of poetry (Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge) and a memory from childhood resurfaced.
I rather think I might eventually write a series of poems about dream names, pen names, nick names, secret names, unspoken names, the names of characters, children, and pets, and place names.
Naming is such a rich topic. Perhaps the naming instinct is what gave rise to language itself? Is a name something we are given or something we make?
Today, I have been thinking about physical activity and how glad I am just to be ambulatory. Here is a photo Karla took of me at Stone Mountain in Georgia, and below a poem I wrote and published here on April 6, 2016, my first year of indulging in the vigorous activity of the April poems.
A Holey Prayer Rug
It’s when I wonder where I’m at
That I unfurl my yoga mat.
Although it’s tattered like a tarp, it
Has become my magic carpet.
On it I fly that sense of doom
That seeks me daily in my room;
No matter muscles—ached and pained—
My inner poise can be regained.
No matter where my thoughts have flown
I chant, become one perfect tone.
Leslie Schultz
My yoga mat used to be unfurled regularly in public but it is now a very private retreat.
Background on My Poem “Athleisure”:
This morning, I was musing about the word constructed not too long ago by marketing guru- trend analzyerTypes: “athleisure.” It is very true that as a society we are both living longer and are “aging” more actively as a whole. I have many friends who have a couple decades on me and who are far more physically fit than I ever have been or probably ever will be. And yet, the recent combination for me of continued pandemic restrictions and a (now-healing, but still compromising my walking) pinched nerve have, over the past year have made me see the value of prioritizing comfort while still asking for some measure of style. The word “athleisure” makes me giggle but the concept is, I think, a sound one and here to stay.
Days of Yesteryear, Back When I Wore Yoga Togs in Public
William Shakespeare, Bard of Avon and fountainhead of Early Modern English poetry, died on this day in 1616 and was likely born on this day in 1564. It was unlikely that he ever celebrated with the kind of sugary confection we call a “birthday cake.” (One wonders how he would view such modern beloved spectacles as “The Great British Baking Show“!) He would, however, have known about refined sugar from both the East Indies and the West Indies even if it rarely crossed his own lips, and been aware of the problematic politics and the human cost of the sugar trade.
This article from by food historian Tasha Marks, posted by the British Museum, purports to tell the story of sugar in five objects from the collections. She notes that the British Museum was founded by Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), a successful physician, who counted King George I, King George II, and Queen Anne among his aristocratic patients and whose forward thinking helped to promote early practice for small pox innoculation and the use of quinine to combat malaria. And yet, it was this healer whose vast wealth came directly from slave holding and sugar production in Jamaica, whose collections in so many areas–manuscripts, artifacts, and art objects–served as the nucleus of the current British Museum. Today, the British Museum’s holdings include nearly 5,000 objects connected to William Shakespeare and his work; in 2012, the Museum mounted an exhibit titled “Shakespeare: Staging the World,” one that examined the tide of Shakespeare’s popularity and influence from the 19th century to our day. “Sugar,” she notes, “was not just a food, it was an artistic medium of tremendous flexibility.” Marks also includes this intriguing quote from another scholar:
Initially, the displays were important simply because they were both pretty and edible. But over time, the creative impulses of the confectioners were pressed into essentially political symbolic service, and the subtleties took on greater significance. ‘Not only compliments,’ writes one commentator, ‘but even sly rebukes to heretics and politicians were conveyed in these sugared emblems.’
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Sidney W Mintz (1986)
(For more on sugar as art, search on Tasha Marks Sugar!)
Certainly sugar is an even more prevalent part of our modern world than the works of the Bard. (The biggest consumer of sugar in the world today? You guessed it: the U.S.A.) Just as certainly, Shakespeare had awareness of its double nature, as medicianal and celebratory at times, and as poison to human bodies and corrupting of human values just as often. His poems and especially his plays are full of references to sweetness that lifts but also cloys or acts as a surface decoy for devious designs.
(Photo: Congerdesign@web.de Used with permission)
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, the frivolity and fun and high comedy are a confection created on the top of dark materials from a world where the marriage plot recognizes that fathers can compel daughters to marry on pain of death. And consider this passage from Act III, scene 2 of the history play, Henry VI, Part 2, a play rife with hidden and public treasons, spying, self-interest writ large, civil rebellions, and murderous double-dealing–and pointed metaphors, including:
“Hide not thy poison with such sugar’d words;”
Spoken by the King as a rebuke to his courtier, the murderous and duplicitous Lord Suffolk, the doomed King makes clear that he sees through surface sweet phrasings.
Background on My Poem, “Elizabethan Sugar Work”:
This is the seventh year in a row that I have written something to acknowledge Shakespeare’s influence on me. (If you want to see the first five of these efforts, you can check posts for April 23 from 2016-2020.)
It was a visit that Julia and I made to the Minneapolis Institute of Art in December of 2012 that came to mind today, and that memory led to the poem for today, as well as the post above. Here are some photographs I made in 2012 one of the period rooms that then held a mini-exhibition on Elizabethan sugar works.
