My copy of Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston (Broadway Books, New York, 1999) has been read and reread and continues to inspire me for two decades now. Each time I read it, I understand a little better and can go a little deeper. Along with its elder sister, Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui (Broadway Books, New York, 1997) these books have inspired me to effective action on an ongoing basis, with mixed by also cumulative results. Kingston’s work is translated into 26 languages and sold millions of copies, paving the way for others (like Marie Kondo) to help us with the sticky perennial problems of what to keep and what to send on, as well as what else to do to be able to feel supported, rather than burdened, by our homes.
Background on My Poem, “Winnowing the House in Spring”:
As those readers who have elected to receive this year’s April poems via email can guess, today’s poem is a sister poem to “Sifting Through the Basement” from April 4. Both are influenced heavily by my spiral of spring cleaning and clearing (in turn supported by Kingston’s books.)
Today, for some reason, I am thinking about sports, specifically about sports as metaphor. Maybe it is because it is spring, when the very long hockey season begins to wane and the shorter baseball season starts up? The impetus was my own poem, and then I started to think about a poem I read long ago that still impresses me no end.: David Bottoms’ early poem, “For My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt.” I am especially taken by the end of the poem, actually. It begins,
On the rough diamond,
the hand-cut field below the dog-lot and barn,
we rehearsed the strict technique
of bunting.
Photo of David Bottoms by Rachel Bottoms
Bottoms is an American original with his own voice and point of view. I first encountered his work in the mid-1980s when he visited the M.F.A. program I was in. His second book, In a U-Haul North of Damascus (Quill, New York, 1983) was newly published. He was a mesmerizing reader, and I am still reading the poems in that slender volume with undiminished pleasure–cherishing the inscription, too.
A native Georgian, Bottoms now lives in Atlanta where he holds the John B. and Elena Diaz-Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University and coedits Five Points: A Journal of Art and Literature. The whole text of this amazing poem, as well as others by Bottoms, and a full bio, are available at the Poetry Foundation website and can be accessed through the links above.
P.S. In case you might wonder, there is a small city in Georgia called “Damascus.” Current population? 254 at last count!
Background for My Poem for April 8: “Hockey and Me”:
This morning, I awoke with the idea for this poem about the sport of hockey in my head. It practically wrote itself.
Yes, go to Jane Hirshfield for pleasure and enlightenment in her poems, but make room, too, for her luminous prose.
Consider just some of the chapter headings: “Kingfishers Catching Fire: Looking with Poetry’s Eyes” or “Uncarryable Remainders: Poetry and Uncertainty” or “Poetry and the Constellation of Surprise” for example. Hirshfield illuminates as she unpacks the poems of Gerard Manly Hopkins, Basho, Edgar Allen Poe, W.H. Auden, Phllip Larkin, Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Frost, and more. She is especially thoughtful about the connections between meditation and the making and encountering of poetry, the connections of our inner and outer worlds. The volume as photographic images, too, tucked here and there, like postcards that comment on the text. Of course, I love this! If I had one wish, it would be for Hirshfield to have included more work by poets who walk or used to walk in women’s bodies. Still, I am very grateful to Hirshfield for her original thought and work, and perhaps I will be able to apply some of her observations to other work that speaks to me in order that it speak to me more completely.
Background for My Poem for April 7, “Bands of Brass”:
I had a great deal of that stuck feeling this morning. Then I glanced down at the cover of at this very book that I am slowly reading with a great deal of pleasure, Jane Hirshfield‘s Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2017) and a slice of imagery sparked this (not great but not completely nothing) poem.
I had an enjoyable time double-checking my understanding of armillary spheres, and was taken with a video from the History of Science Museum at Oxford University.
Happy reading! Happy Writing! LESLIE
P.S. If you are not receiving the poem for each day in April via email but would like to, let me know, and I will add you to the list.
I learned only recently about the extraordinary poetry of Melissa Range through the upcoming opportunity to hear her read and discuss sonnets that will be happening at the Blue Heron Coffeehouse at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 12, 2022 in Winona, Minnesota. This event is the kick-off celebration for the annual international Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. Go, if you possibly can! It should be an extraordinary experience. Here is a short description form the MWF website: Turn and Turnabout: Contemporary Sonnetswill be presented by Melissa Range. From Melissa, “The sonnet is one of the most flexible of poetic forms, lending itself to all kinds of formal innovations. We will look at a handful of contemporary sonnets and talk about how contemporary poets both follow and break the rules of the sonnet, as well as how the flexibility of the sonnet affects us as readers and inspires us as writers. Time permitting, we may also do a short sonnet exercise!”
Range’s work inScriptorium: Poems[a winning manuscript in the 2015 National Poetry Series] is, as former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith notes in the introduction, “All the many formal commands to which Range’s poems gladly bend are in the service of something urgent, something having to do with a view of language as a means of survival.”
Indeed.
Poet Melissa Range
Background for My Poem, “Wyvern”:
When I run across an unfamiliar word in my reading, especially one I like the sound of, I look it up. Sometimes I jot it down in my Alphabet Soup notebook as the title for a someday poem. Earlier this spring, I happened on the word “wyvern” and it intrigued me. Its etymology winds back through Middle English and Old North French to the Latin word “vipera” which suggests not only “viper” but, by association, “snake,” “serpent,” and “dragon.” I have learned that the wyvern could be regarded as a littler dragon-wannabe. In mythology and heraldry, wyverns (which have but two legs and beaks, as opposed to four-legged dragons who have open mouths glittering with teeth) are smaller. They don’t breathe fire or lay waste to whole landscapes or amass and guard golden hoards or debate sagaciously with the gold of their word hoards. They are smaller and less impressive, usually stingingly vicious and generally unpleasant but not so deadly. Yet they appear in heraldry not infrequently, even for modern sports teams in the U.S. and Britain, as an emblem of persistence. Perhaps think mosquito rather than grizzly bear?
I am sure today’s poem was influenced by my recent enjoyment of Range’s work.
My loose sonnet construction imagines an upstart wyvern being slapped down by a proper dragon, and, as an aside, a comment of literary ambition.
For some reason, I keep thinking of this photograph I took at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden:
The Poets light but Lamps — Themselves — go out — The Wicks they stimulate If vital Light
Inhere as do the Suns — Each Age a Lens Disseminating their Circumference —
Emily Dickinson
I took these photographs yesterday. A friend who knows both Emily Dickinson’s work and the city of Amherst, Massachusetts well gave me the postcard of Dickinson’s desk some years ago. If you look through her window, the landscape appears to be that of early April. I decided yesterday to send it to a friend who takes daily comfort in mail. Then I thought to take a photograph of the mailbox through the just-now-blooming pussy willow branches. Finally, I came inside and caught sight of the paper weight–also a gift from my Dickinson-loving friend (Thank you, Sally!)
About My Poem for April 5: “Azaleas at Winterthur”
I love spring more each year. And I have always had a particular appreciation for azaleas, probably stemming from childhood years in Portland, Oregon where they vie with rhododendrons for pride of place. In Lake Charles, Louisiana, where I spent two years in an M.F.A. program, I was stupefied by the explosions of azaleas in February. Here in Northfield, I occasionally see one of the hardy Northern Lights azaleas bred by the University of Minnesota, and I still hope one day to have one planted in our garden.
Within all these memories and dreams, however, nothing tops the time my friend, Beth, drove from her apartment on the campus of Westtown School to the incredible horticultural gardens of Winterthur Estate. Designed by Henry Francis du Pont, these gardens are a kind of living library of plants, curated for impact of form and color.
I couldn’t locate any photos from my trip to Winterthur. That was back before I had my first digital camera. Instead, here are a few local buds, leaves and blooms from earlier springs.
P.S. A special thank you to Mark Danowsky of ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry. His April newsletter offered a list of prompts, one involving colors, that was the catalyst for today’s poem.
/GettyImages-112186483-56b008f05f9b58b7d01fa126.jpg)
