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.
W. H. Auden is a favorite poet of mine. Some years ago, I learned that our former neighbor, Ian Barbour, had, as a boy, had Auden as a teacher. I most recently encountered Auden as a character in the novel about Thomas Mann, The Magician, through Auden’s marriage to Mann’s daughter, Erika. It wasn’t until I wrote today’s poem–about water and memory and ancient limestone walls in my own basement–that I discovered this poem of his. When I read it, I thought of the karst geology of my own home region and loved what he did with his local version of this subject. When I look at these two portraits of him, I see the ideas of memory and erosion splendidly illustrated and alive. I hope you this Whitmanesque poem of his, too.
If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones, Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath, A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle, Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region Of short distances and definite places: What could be more like Mother or a fitter background For her son, the flirtatious male who lounges Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting That for all his faults he is loved; whose works are but Extensions of his power to charm? From weathered outcrop To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to Conspicuous fountains, from a wild to a formal vineyard, Are ingenious but short steps that a child’s wish To receive more attention than his brothers, whether By pleasing or teasing, can easily take.
Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down Their steep stone gennels in twos and threes, at times Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step; or engaged On the shady side of a square at midday in Voluble discourse, knowing each other too well to think There are any important secrets, unable To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral And not to be pacified by a clever line Or a good lay: for accustomed to a stone that responds, They have never had to veil their faces in awe Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed; Adjusted to the local needs of valleys Where everything can be touched or reached by walking, Their eyes have never looked into infinite space Through the lattice-work of a nomad’s comb; born lucky, Their legs have never encountered the fungi And insects of the jungle, the monstrous forms and lives With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common. So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works Remains incomprehensible: to become a pimp Or deal in fake jewellery or ruin a fine tenor voice For effects that bring down the house, could happen to all But the best and the worst of us… That is why, I suppose, The best and worst never stayed here long but sought Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external, The light less public and the meaning of life Something more than a mad camp. ‘Come!’ cried the granite wastes, “How evasive is your humour, how accidental Your kindest kiss, how permanent is death.” (Saints-to-be Slipped away sighing.) “Come!” purred the clays and gravels, “On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both Need to be altered.” (Intendant Caesars rose and Left, slamming the door.) But the really reckless were fetched By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper: “I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing; That is how I shall set you free. There is no love; There are only the various envies, all of them sad.”
They were right, my dear, all those voices were right And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks, Nor its peace the historical calm of a site Where something was settled once and for all: A back ward And dilapidated province, connected To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite: It has a worldy duty which in spite of itself It does not neglect, but calls into question All the Great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights. The poet, Admired for his earnest habit of calling The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy By these marble statues which so obviously doubt His antimythological myth; and these gamins, Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade With such lively offers, rebuke his concern for Nature’s Remotest aspects: I, too, am reproached, for what And how much you know. Not to lose time, not to get caught, Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these Are our common prayer, whose greatest comfort is music Which can be made anywhere, is invisible, And does not smell. In so far as we have to look forward To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead, These modifications of matter into Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains, Made solely for pleasure, make a further point: The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from, Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.
May 1948
Background for My Poem for April 4, 2022: “Sifting Through the Basement”:
A flip-book tour of the work-in-progress that is the basement (including the eerie sub-basement that did not make it into the poem.)
Photo: Thomas Sondermann/Pixabay (Used by permission)
Perhaps best known as a novelist of dystopian fiction, Margaret Atwood is a Canadian-born giant in the world of literature. Her work is translated into thirty languages, and she seems to have an unlimited imagination and prodigious work ethic along with her fierce intelligence.
I first read her novel, Surfacing, in a women’s studies class during my sophomore year of college. I was mesmerized, and it has held up over many re-readings. Perhaps my favorite of her novels is the work of historical fiction, Alias Grace. (Yes, not only the exquisite sentences, the historically nuanced questions of identity, and the mystery, but the structure that uses names of quilt patterns–shall I just say, she had me at “Jagged Edge”? In all, Atwood has published work in virtually every genre, so perhaps it comes as no surprise that she is an exceptional poet.
Here is a link to my favorite poem by Atwood, about herself and her father, simply titled “Bored.” It was published in The Atlantic in 1994. I first encountered it two decades ago and I have never forgotten it. I reread it often, and I find that every time I get to the last line I am surprised by the lump in my throat. (When you read the poem, you will understand why I selected the haunting image above.)
For more poems by Atwood, take at look at the Poetry Foundation website.
Here is a link to this phenomenal author’s own website. The always surprising Atwood has a new surprise for us–she–the doyenne of dystopian fiction–is convening a master class this year in “Practical Utopias: An Exploration of the Possible.” If you scroll down to the two-minute video and listen to Atwood describe the eight-week online seminar, you’ll find a moment at the end that made me laugh out loud. The first time Atwood has startled me into laughter, I think! The line-up of experts across many fields is impressive and intriguing, and makes me wonder how her own discoveries will affect her future fiction and poetry. There is also much more about her biography, bibliography, and even samples of her hand-drawn cartoons (yes, she does that, too!)
If you have a favorite poem by Atwood, please let me know!
Margaret Atwood (image by Larry D. Moore from Wikimedia Commons)
Background on Today’s Poem, “Celestial Navigation”:
Dawn from Our Front Porch
Not so much to say about this poem, except that I find it helpful to step out each morning for just a few breaths of fresh air, and also that every a friend (thanks, Ann!) enrolled me in the Cloud-a-Day organization I find that I photograph the sky nearly every day, often many times each day.
The poem below is one I first encountered in my early twenties. It is one that I return to again and again, always seeing something new, hearing something new. Rereading is, for me, a kind of passive revising, I suppose. Frequent rereading of certain texts overlays insight upon insight. This, for me, provides a deep kind of pleasure that is a counterpoint to the pleasure of encountering the startling new.
As I reread Yeats’s poem afresh this morning, I am thinking about how we tend to regard time as unspooling in a linear, storytelling way– but that it is more holographic and holistic than that, and how we cannot help sometimes noticing that we are all ages at once. Every blank hour or blank page is a new school room. While there are never any guarantees there is always the possibility of transport through embodied effort–and by releasing of effort, shifting from doing to simply being.
Probably you know this poem and see something entirely different in it? I would love to know where it takes your thoughts.
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher and to sing, To study reading-books and history, To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way—the children’s eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
II
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent Above a sinking fire, a tale that she Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event That changed some childish day to tragedy— Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent Into a sphere from youthful sympathy, Or else, to alter Plato’s parable, Into the yolk and white of the one shell.
III
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage I look upon one child or t’other there And wonder if she stood so at that age— For even daughters of the swan can share Something of every paddler’s heritage— And had that colour upon cheek or hair, And thereupon my heart is driven wild: She stands before me as a living child.
IV
Her present image floats into the mind— Did Quattrocento finger fashion it Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind And took a mess of shadows for its meat? And I though never of Ledaean kind Had pretty plumage once—enough of that, Better to smile on all that smile, and show There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
V
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap Honey of generation had betrayed, And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape As recollection or the drug decide, Would think her son, did she but see that shape With sixty or more winters on its head, A compensation for the pang of his birth, Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
VI
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays Upon a ghostly paradigm of things; Solider Aristotle played the taws Upon the bottom of a king of kings; World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard: Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
VII
Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother’s reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose. And yet they too break hearts—O Presences That passion, piety or affection knows, And that all heavenly glory symbolise— O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;
VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?
My own poem for today, “Awash” was sparked by an early venturing out into the dark garden. How interestingly reliable and magical the world always is a few feet from our lamplit living room!
As I set out on this April poem journey, I am heartened by knowing that thousands of other people all over the world are engaged in similar quests. My friend, Liz Boquet, is also undertaking the daily challenge to write and share a poem each day this month. Her work is always thoughtful and delightful. Here is a link to her website.
Finally, in a salute to the alphabet, here is a link to Robert Pinsky’s masterful and playful short poem “ABC” from 1999 and another to a summary of his storied career as a public poet (including a term as Poet Laureate of the U.S. beginning in 1997.)
Despite the ups and downs of March weather here in southern Minnesota (temperatures in the 60s one day, followed by nearly two inches of cold rain and then a day of snowfall) the light is longer, greening is beginning to show along with budding leaves, the birds in the garden are fashioning nests from wisps of straw and stray twigs, and birdsong begins every morning at dawn.
That means April will fast be upon us, the month when poets, too, have new songs each day.
In April 2022, I will undertake for the seventh year in a row, the National Poetry Writing Challenge to compose and share a new poem each day for thirty days. (I thought I might give myself a sabbatical this year, but have decide to try once again to rise to the challenge.) And again I am going to share the poems themselves via email. In addition, I will share the title and a little bit of backstory for each poem here on Winona Media, along with something else from the wide world of poetry.
If you received poems from me each day in April 2021 via email, and would like to continue to do so in 2022, no action is needed.
If you would like to be added to the email list to receive poems in April 2022, send me an email at winonapoet@gmail.com.
Or, if you did receive poems each day in April last year, but wish to opt out, send me an email at winonapoet@gmail.com, and I will remove you from the list.
I hope you will enjoy the sweetness of April this year, no matter what else looms, and that you will find a sense of renewal and regeneration through daily encounters with nature and art.
