The English Geek

Arrowhead

Tonight I have been reading poems and thinking about my dad who didn't, as far as I know, read very much poetry. Still, sometimes a poem reminds me of him by the act of capturing some facet of him, even though the poet (obviously) never knew him. It is one of the magics of poems, how someone can write about death, and then when I read the poem I don't think so much of dying but of how my dad liked going arrowhead hunting in southern Utah. He'd go with one of my sister's husbands, or with his brother, and once he had gathered enough, after many, many trips, he'd assemble all the arrowheads together on a rustic board, with buckskin braid and maybe feathers. When he went on these trips, I always thought it was a little strange, and maybe even questionable. Where'd he find the arrowheads? Was taking them from where ever he found them a sort of grave robbery? Or just something that some people do?

Now that it's too late, though, I wish I would have talked to him about his trips. I wish I knew where he'd go, and how he'd find them. I wish I knew which were his favorites, what were his motivations, how he thought about his finds. Did he think what I do, when I hold one of those chipped, triangular stones, of the person who shaped it, wondering how he lived or what he killed, imagining a sort of connection between my modern-day self and that long-ago person? Or something else? Was the arrowhead hunting about connection, or about discovery, or about the rugged beauty of a perfectly-shaped spear point? Or simply the wild peacefulness of being in the desert, the stone a way of carrying home sky, heat, dry bushes, sere stone?

He is not dead, but he (the dad I knew) is gone. I still love the silent, confused man who needs help sliding his feet into his shoes, who seemed baffled by the bright sun at our last visit. We sat together on a park bench, and I told him how my kids are, how my last run went, what book I was reading. He didn't answer, of course, and I wonder: what does it feel like to be him? Where did the dad I knew go to? Is he lost somewhere in the dark, a chipped stone I could find if I knew the path through his personal landscape? Or perhaps he is a million little stones, scattered in earth, and I will never, no matter how much I search, put all his pieces back together. The arrowhead trips are just one stone, just one facet of what is lost and I am again left with the same heartache, the same regret of not asking, of not telling, of thinking I had as much time as I needed, of not knowing how much I didn't know. Not guessing that, one day soon, he would be curled in the dark of his mind, needless artifacts scattered around him; that I would need to become an archaeologist, sifting through time's refuse, to know anything much at all about him.

"Every Dying Man"

is a child:
in trenches, in bed, on a throne, at a loom,
we are tiny and helpless
when black velvet bows our eyes
and the letters slide from the pages.
Earth lets nobody loose: it all
has to be given back — breath, eyes, memory.
We are children when the earth
turns with us through the night toward morning
where there are no voices, no ears, no light, no door,
only darkness and movement
in the soil and its thousands
of mouths, chins, jaws, and limbs
dividing everything so that
no names and no thoughts remain
in the one who is silent lying in the dark
on his right side, head upon knees.
Beside him, his spear, his knife
and his bracelet, and a broken pot.

~Jaan Kaplinski

Book Note: Ballistics by Billy Collins

Since in April I only read poetry, or books about poetry, I've got a feeling there'll be tons of book notes about poetry popping up on my blog. And as I am certain that my blog readers wait with bated breath for my book notes, AND you all love poetry too, there is a general cheer going around the blogosphere right about now, correct? ;) Here's my first one.

Ballistics  by Billy Collins

The poet Billy Collins is officially on my List of Writers I'd Like to Meet. (Not that I have, in reality, written down this list. But if I did, not everyone I like reading would show up there, for varying reasons.) (Who's on your list?) Of course, the few times I have meet authors on my imaginary WILtM list have been sort of disasters. Like the memorable day when I met Margaret Atwood, and I told her it was her fault I became an English teacher, and we talked about English teachers in general and one specific one that left an impression on her, but the whole time I was thinking she's got to be wondering exactly how my reading an excerpt of Cat's Eye in eleventh grade turned me into a teacher, and really it's my eleventh-grade English teacher's fault because I never would have found Cat's Eye had it not been for Mrs. Simmons, and surely someone as astute as Margaret Atwood can see my faulty logic and knows that my proclamation---like the first sentence of an essay, constructed with the goal of hooking the reader---was simply a good way to get her attention and actually spend a few minutes talking to her while the rest of the line behind us rustled impatiently. OK, maybe not a disaster, but not the immediate friendship I hoped would develop. (Because, yeah, I know, writers totally make friends with the people who come to their readings. Happens all the time.) Or the time I listened to the poet X. J. Kennedy talk in an intimate group of only ten people, and how when he spoke about all families having their poet laureate, or how they used to, and the way poetry is declining in the eyes of the general public, I wanted to hug him but knew it would be highly undignified to his very dignified grandfatherly self, and then when he opened it up for questions I couldn't think of anything to ask. "Do you know how much I love your anthologies?" isn't really a question he could really answer. So if I did meet Billy Collins, I'm sure I'd either be struck dumb or say something dumb.

But it would still be cool to meet him.

What I would want him to know but be unable to say is how much I appreciate his poems for their ability to be simultaneously accessible (meaning you don't have to know the entire history of everything in order to understand them, nor even aspire to impossible erudition of the English language) and yet, still, intelligent/thoughtful/full-of-that-double-meaning-thing that good poems have. I would discuss the limits of language, and how the word I want to describe his work with---delightful---is so pallid and wrong and yet, at the same time, exactly right. I would tell him that every once in a random while, some image or other from "Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes"  pops into my mind. That's the sort of impact his poems have on you. You start with one---just open to any one of them---and start reading, and you fall right into the poem; when you come out again, some little essence of the poem or of the poet himself still clinging to you. It'll never stop clinging, and you'll think about the poem at unexpected moments. He manages to get the everyday details of life, the little objects and times, into his poems, but in a way that makes you laugh, or stop to realize: although I have never thought of it that way, the poem gets it exactly right.

In a sense, though, his newest book, Ballistics, was just the tiniest bit of dissapointing to me. Not because he doesn't do all the magic he did in his previous poems---he does. But because I wanted the magic to be bigger. I wanted it to be the new Billy Collins book: the Collins-esqueness, but newer. Which isn't to say I didn't love the poems. As I read, I tried to decide which one was my favorite---which had left the strongest impression. I wanted it to be "What Love Does," because it is a non-mushy love poem, a little bit edgy, even: "It turns everything into a symbol" and "it may add sparkle to a morning," lines that are almost mushy, but not quite, that build to the unexpected point: "but mostly it comes and goes. . .it will arrive like an archangel/through an iron gate no one ever seemed to notice before." Or maybe "The Effort," which runs along the lines of "Introduction to Poetry,"  how misguided some attempts at reading poetry are. "The Effort" pokes at the perrennial "What is the poet trying to say?" question that pops up in English classes. (I love poems set in English classes!) "As if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson/had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts---/inarticulate wretches that they were." I especially like the last line: "and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed." When I finished it, though, I couldn't really pick a favorite. So I'm ending with this poem, which is neither grandoise nor particularly poetic in the traditional ideal:

Oh, My God!

Not on in church
and nightly by their bedsides
do young girls pray these days.

Wherever they go,
prayer is woven into their talk
like a bright thread of awe.

Even at the pedestrian mall
outbursts of praise
spring unbidden from their glossy lips.

But still satisfying, still with that particular Collins-esque zing. I think I love this one so much because it bothers me how often people say "Oh, My God!" Maybe that sounds churlish but instead it goes to the power of language itself. Remember playing with words, saying one over and over and over, until its very sound became something foreign, its meaning a pile of dust? That happens in a broader sense to phrases that everyone uses, all the time, and there are some phrases whose meaning I'd like to keep. But here, like he always does, he turns the idea upside down, making the "Oh, My God!" squeal into something that isn't meaningless, but a prayer. Of course, he's also being sarcastic. Still, when I hear the phrase squealed in a girlish voice in the mall, I will stop to think a bit about how miracles are everywhere, and how maybe those girls are able to see it better than I am. In the end, that's exactly what I go back to poetry for: it helps me see things better than I did before.

You Can't Go Home Again

There's a poem I used to use when I was teaching sophomores about literacy, "Voice You Hear When You Read Silently" by Thomas Lux (who said he wanted to write poems that work so well, even your cat loves them). The poem presents the concept of the individuality of reading, the way when two people read the same book, their reading experiences are completely different, in a way that (even) sophomores can understand. What image comes into your mind when you hear the word "barn"? The poet discusses his: "horse-gnawed stalls,/hayloft, black heat tape wrapping / a water pipe, a slippery/spilled chirr of oats from a split sack,/ the bony, filthy haunches of cows." Your barn is not the poet's barn; you imagine something completely different than I do for each word you read, and that is why no one ever reads the exact same book.

I was thinking about this poem some weeks ago, when, after I'd dropped Kaleb off at preschool, I found myself driving to Springville, the town where I grew up and the place where my mom still lives. I was thinking about reading, and about the personal images and emotions we each associate with words; I was thinking about libraries, not barns; I wasn't really thinking about what I was doing, and why. Every word is loaded; you hear it and "a sensory constellation/is lit." When I hear the word "library," the first, raw, emotional image that comes to my mind isn't the place where I've taken my children to check out books and where I now spend twenty hours a week. Instead, it's the libraryin Springville I grew up going to. On that random March Tuesday, when I drove without thinking about my purpose, I did have a goal: I wanted to take some pictures of the city library, because a couple of months ago I'd read  that a new one was being built. Before the old one was torn down, I wanted a photographic image to match the constellation of imagery that lights in my mind when I hear the word "library." It's the place where, on lonely days, I could find a friendly book. The building I can only remember my dad bringing me to, even though my mom must have taken me far more often. The home of the orange biographies, the place where my first-grade teacher worked during the summer, the residence of story and escape and the comforting scent of paper.

As I drove, the library constellation continued its myriad connections: the time I had fourteen books that were two months overdue, and my dad talked the librarian into letting us pay the fine by donating our own books. The library park, with its wide, metal slide and tire swing all situated in the shade cast by enormous old trees. How sometimes, on days when I was cutting class, I'd hide out at the library in one of the chairs on the east side, by the windows, and how that felt like school enough. The summer reading program they used to have, where you'd get points for however many pages you read; I don't remember what you could use the points for, but I haven't forgotten sitting in the air-conditioned foyer after riding my yellow bike to the library, talking to a librarian about the books I'd read. I still remember exactly where in the stacks I could find my copy of Little Women, how the circulation desk was organized, the way the librarians would stack the books to stamp the due dates in the cards. All those emotional memories are superimposed on the physical shape of the library itself, and I wanted to create a photograph, somehow, of the library's exterior that would match up with that emotional library constellation. Just so I would have it down, once the physical library was gone.

Problem is, I waited too long. While the library wasn't demolished yet, it was surrounded by new buildings, the torn-out parking lot full of orange backhoes, construction trailers, and a crane. The little playground under the trees is gone---the trees and green space, too---replaced with a new fire station. The new library (which looks to be elegantly architectural instead of the sturdy utilitarianism of the old one) takes up part of the remainder of the library grounds and extends into the space that used to be occupied by a grocery store. I can't remember the store's name, but they used to have ten-cent Tuesdays, when you could buy a donut for (obviously) ten cents. Jennifer and I used to go there every Tuesday morning, and then we'd discuss, over fried, frosted, and sprinkled dough, whether or not we'd be going to school that day.

I'd like a photograph of that old grocery store, too.

I pulled over to the curb and looked at the library. It wasn't ramshackle, exactly; it looked forlorn, or confused maybe, encroached upon by new and bigger  buildings. I thought about how often it had been my refuge, a peaceful spot in a place where I was intensely unhappy. I thought about my intentions that morning, and how I had driven to Springville thinking about poems and memory constellations but not, very purposefully, about my real intentions. I'd waited too long to capture a photograph of the library as I remember it---probably years too long---but in a way, it didn't matter. I'm not sure any photographer is good enough to capture what I wanted to, which wasn't really a picture of a building. I came to my hometown that day not just to photograph the library, but to find a little piece of myself. If the building's gone, is that piece of me gone, too? I don't know. I sat thinking in my car until a bulldozer honked at me, and I pulled away.

Rather than just get back on the freeway and go home, though, I thought about all the other buildings I wish I had those impossible photos of, places where other bits of myself might be stored. I found myself driving a surreal route: the roads themselves familiar, but so many things changed. Chris and I used to drive this route, which took us past key houses. We'd drive the vaguely-oval-shaped route sometimes five or six times at a go, talking and laughing and drinking our sodas. (I was a Pepsi girl even then.) When I didn't want to go to school, but Jennifer wasn't awake yet, I'd drive it on my own, crying and drinking coffee. The high school, the junior high, the middle school; the art museum, the dentist office, the building where Becky and I went to gymnastics, the old, empty schoolhouses; the houses of friends and boys. Of course, boys. Even the house I grew up in, which itself has changed: the trees are bigger, the front door a different color, the once-precise stone walls that formed the flower beds now in a state of slanted disrepair. But not even a half-mile into the route, I took a detour. I couldn't follow the path, couldn't be a 30-something woman caught in 20-year-old memories. For a moment I felt completely lost, neither 30-something or teenaged, not any version of myself I could recall. I couldn't even go to the home I grew up in, because it would just be more mute evidence of how I've disappeared.

Instead I went to the fabric store, which is a new building built to look like an old one. I realized that while I love this fabric store, I never shop there because I never come to Springville unless I have to. For family parties and holidays, or as a gateway to Hobble Creek canyon, yes. But not for something as unnecessary as fabric I could find in other stores. It has been nearly two decades since I found myself on those streets, driving aimlessly without anywhere specific to go, and that is exactly the thing I have avoided. Because she's still there, that version of myself, even if it's only in my memories. Just like the library and the nameless grocery store and the ten-cent donuts. There isn't a picture of her---my mom disliked my goth days so thoroughly that she never took a picture of me that way. She exists only as another constellation of my memory, only visible in darkness.

on Daughters

Yesterday morning I woke up from a dream about being pregnant. The "I'm-pregnant" variety is my most common dream, and my favorite, even though in the dreams there is still a part of me that reacts just as I would if I were pregnant in real life: a mix of I can't be pregnant, I get to be pregnant again!, we can't afford another baby, I can't wait to feel it kick!, there's no space left in our house, will it be a girl!, it's not just financial but emotional, Yes, I get to plan and shop and make and buy and fold little tiny clothes again!, no, I'm too old and worn out. It's just, in the dreams, the negative stuff is quieter and the happy stuff more joyous, and even with the ache of reality behind the dreams, I hate waking up from them because the real ache of waking reality hurts more.

Then, at work, I helped a woman who had a newborn baby, her first child. Our elevators haven't been working, so I've been doing more running around for books for patrons, or carrying empty strollers down the stairs. For her, I just had to run upstairs to grab a book off the shelf, but in my still-remembering-the-dream feeling, what I really wanted to do was hold her baby while she went and got the book. Somewhere within the morning I remembered that since it was April 22, it was sort of an anniversary; fourteen years ago I brought Haley home from the hospital (back when insurance companies practiced the medieval torture rite of sending you home 24 hours after the baby was born) and began the real work of being a mom.

Part of me is glad I never have to be a first-time mom again. Remember how terrifying it was? The nurses hand you this tiny little bundle of flesh and send you on your way as if the knowledge of how to take care of the child will just be there, in your brain or your system or something mythical and magical and motherly. And maybe for some women, it does. For me, it was a bit harder. I remember feeling like they'd forgotten to pack the instruction manual with her, like it should have come wrapped in plastic with the afterbirth. And the first night home with Haley? It was awful. She was starving and my milk hadn't come in yet, and I was utterly sold on the idea presented by the nursing Nazis that if anything even vaguely resembling a bottle came within fifty yards of her mouth, she'd never nurse again. Finally, after I had a complete and utter meltdown at the changing table, weeping about how I should have never become a mother and I was destined to ruin her, Kendell took her, fed her a bottle, and put her at-last-asleep and very content self into her crib, and I got to sleep for a few hours.

After that first night, though, things got better. I figured out the nursing thing (something I was surprisingly good at. Overly abundantly, even, despite my, well, my lack of endowment!), I realized I had to figure it out my way, and I began to calm down a bit. First-time motherhood was still terrifying, but it started to become less about doing it the right way and more about how I felt taking care of my daughter. I can't even describe the head-over-heels-in-love feeling I had for Haley during those first few weeks, nor how it grew and blossomed into the closeness we had for the two years, nine months, and nine days when it was just me and her.

Someone asked me once, after Kaleb was born, if, could I chose to do it all over again, I'd like to end with my girl instead of start with her. (I am still trying to forgive that person for asking that because it was such a loaded question at a time I was already struggling with giving up on my desire for one more daughter.) But even if I could, I wouldn't switch it. I'm so grateful I got to have the relationship I did with her before the boys came along. Not because I don't love my boys---I do, in individual ways but not with any diminished amount--- but because it was this thing I got to have that I didn't know I would need. I thought, during the days when I only had Haley, that my life would turn out much differently than it has. I rested on assumptions about the future that turned out to be far from reality. That time of being a mother to a little girl was something I thought I'd do at least one more time. Despite the frequent pregnancy-dreams and despite how hard I hoped and prayed and yearned for another little girl, though, it wasn't ever going to happen. I feel blessed now, looking back, at the wisdom that gave me that time alone with just my little girl. It was exactly how it needed to be.

Fourteen years later, there are still things I desperately miss about little-girl Haley, but I also love, so much, the young woman she is becoming. Again it is hard to say with words how it feels. She is so different from me, so much stronger and more confident and able to deal with life. I often watch her and think how could such a creature have come from me? Motherhood is amazing. It is so good it hurts, but the hurt itself is even good. And while much of me still yearns for another little girl, a large part is just grateful that I got to have her at all.

After the patron with the newborn left, I did some shelf-reading in the poetry section. I came across a book of poems by Anne Stevenson, a poet I researched and wrote about extensively during my senior courses at BYU, but whom i've not read for awhile. It was a serendipitous find, because I flipped to this poem, which says part of what I can't say about having a daughter, and helps me feel reconnected to that hopeful and believing and non-jaded person I was fourteen years ago, showing up at home with my newborn daughter. It is good to remember she used to exist.

Poem for a Daughter
~Anne Stevenson

'I think I'm going to have it,'
I said, joking between pains.
The midwife rolled competent
sleeves over corpulent milky arms.
'Dear, you nave have it,
we deliver it.'
A judgment years proved true.
Certainly I've never had you

as you still have me, Caroline.
Why does a mother need a daughter?
Heart's needle, hostage to fortune,
freedom's end. Yet nothing's more perfect
than that bleating, razor-shaped cry
that delivers a mother to her baby.
The bloodcord snaps that held
their sphere together. The child,
tiny and alone, creates the mother.

A woman's life is her own
until it is taken away
by a particular cry.
Then she is not alone
but part of the premises
of everything there is:
a time, a tribe, a war.
When we belong to the world
we become what we are.

Wastelands, Balms, Naked Women, and Other Stuff About Poetry

The opening  image of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” is a poetic line almost everyone knows: “April is the cruelest month.” It pops up in goofy places—tax websites, the dreadful exams week at college, the clever meteorologist’s “it’s snowing” commentary. But Eliot wasn’t being goofy; he was setting the tone of his poem by bashing expectation right from the start. That April isn’t all hyacinths and baa-ing lambs, like we might expect a poem to tell us, clues you in to one of “The Wasteland’s” major themes: life is made out of death.

I’ve been thinking more about T. S. Eliot these days than I have since my time at college. Well, and about poetry in general, and about some specific poems and poets. It’s really Becky’s fault; a few weeks ago, way back on a dark March Friday, we were talking, and I was listing off all the books I’d read lately, making a point about why I was feeling dark and twisty. What hit me, when we got off the phone, is that I hadn’t told her about a single book of poetry, because I hadn’t read a single book of poetry in I-can’t-remember-how-long. I decided right then that in April—the cruelest month, but also National Poetry Month—I would only read poetry (in addition, of course, to my continually-trying approaches to daily scriptures). And, aside from one novel which I sort of had to read because I lucked into a copy without which I would have had to wait for months, I’ve done just that. Plus, I’ve tried to include some little (or bigger) bit of poetry in all my blog posts this month.

Eliot’s line continues to worm around my brain. Not just that first, well-known line, but the complete first image: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain./ Winter kept us warm, covering/ Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers.”  Dull, dead, forgetful, dried; the way that winter kept us paradoxically warm and forgetful: this image is, to me, a powerful bit of writing, conveying depression without ever saying the word. And while my scripture-reading achieves something important, it’s only through the reading of poetry that I’ve realized how metaphorically winter-esque my spirit has been. April—or the thing that strives to wake you—is the cruelest because, as it mixes memory and desire, it creates hope (those blooming lilacs), and hope is painful.

None of this is to suggest that I’m needing a prescription for Prozac, but just to say that I needed waking up, needed to shed my winter, and it was re-reading Eliot’s poem that made me see my recent bout of dark-and-twisty. The only other writing that’s as curative as scripture, poems seem to achieve a focusing in me that is also scripture-esque. The idea goes that all the answers to life’s questions can be found in holy words and that, by studying and pondering, you find what you need to know. We hear the stories at church so often of someone opening their scriptures to a random spot, beginning to read, and discovering their answer. Over and over, I find that poetry
focuses my problems in the same way. Not, exactly, with answers, but with, at least, balms. Seamus Heaney says that one of the questions poetry tries to answer is “how with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?” How, in other words, is there room in the world for poems when so much is consumed by “rage”—war, poverty, starvation, cruelty? He says the answer is that poetry must offer “befitting emblems of adversity.” Poems, in other words, that don’t just describe the lilacs but give space for suffering; poems that use beauty to create an elegy for adversity. In my life, those emblems of adversity, like the random spot in the scriptures, arrive at the time I need them.

Take this example. Maybe six or seven months ago, Kendell and I had our annual “why do you spend so much time reading?” argument, the one that leaves me feeling stripped to my very core—my seemingly very faulty core. In the aftermath I found myself vaguely remembering a short story I’d once read, about a teenage girl whose mother had the unfortunate and bewildering (to the teenage girl) habit of running, in her very gauzy nightgown, through their neighborhood at midnight. I don’t remember the title or the author or even the point of the story, but I do remember that image: the slightly-off mother in her white gown and bare feet, racing nearly-naked down the street where she lived. It came to me in that moment of uncertainty because, for the first time in my life, I understood the mother’s impulse. I felt like running through the dark, completely naked, not in a spirit of joy or even of exhibition but because it felt like the response to have, felt like night against nakedness might be the thing to heal what was hurting.

A few days later (I managed, by the way, to not run around my neighborhood in any form of nakedness, something I am certain the neighbors are extremely grateful for), when I could read again without feeling guilty (recriminations and apologies and a few nights of sleeping on it having done their trick), I picked up an anthology of poems I’d brought home from the library, flipped through it without much purpose, and let it open where the spine was cracked. And it
happened to be this poem:

Naked
~ Jennifer Michael Hecht

The reason you so often in literature have a naked woman
walk out of her house that way, usually older, in her front garden
or on the sidewalk, oblivious, is because of exactly how I feel right now.

You tend to hear about how it felt to come upon such a mythical beast,
the naked woman on the street, the naked man in a tree, and that makes
sense because it is wonderful to take the naked woman by the hand

And know that you will remember that moment for the rest of your life
because of what it means, the desperation, the cataclysm of what it takes
to leave your house naked or to take off your clothes in the tree.

It feels good to get the naked man to come down from there by a series
of gentle commands and take him by the elbow or her by the hand and
lead him to his home like you would care for a bird or a human heart.

Still if you want instead, for once, to hear about how the person came to be
standing there, naked, outside, you should talk to me right now, quickly,
before I forget the details of this way that I feel. I feel like walking out.

There it was, exactly: the poem I needed to read and just the moment I needed it; the emblem of my small adversity offered up, beauty in the place of rage. Also: magic. I don’t know how the magic happens, how I stumble upon a poem I need when I need it, but it does. The poet
Brendan Kennelly (I seem to be stuck with the Irish poets today, don’t I?) writes that  “Poetry is, above all, a singing art of natural and magical connection because, though it is born out of one person's solitude, it has the ability to reach out and touch in a humane and warmly illuminating way the solitude, even the loneliness, of others.”  There are many poetic-device things I love about Hecht’s poem—like the way most of it focuses on your response to the idea of the naked man or woman, how you might handle such a situation, rather than the elephant in the poem, the thing no one wants to look at but yet can’t stop eyeing, just from the periphery (and just as we might both look and not look, want to and not want to look, at an actual naked human striding around our suburban normalcy): the naked woman. By not ever telling us how the woman feels, but inviting us to ask her, the poem lets the reader connect. But I love even more that it simply exists, and that someone else has felt “this way that I feel.” And I love that the poem came to me at the right time, a balm.

I’m not sure exactly when I forgot I needed to read poems. I think it has to do with work, because when I do get a question that’s about books, it’s never (literally:  never) about books of poems. I want to be able to quickly and confidently recommend a novel to a patron, want to have read more than I have, and reading poems in that context seems pointless. A waste of time. No one will ask me to recommend a poem to them. But I know this: I needed to be reminded. I needed the coincidence of a random anthology I took out from the library’s poetry section because (honestly) I liked the typesetting on the cover, and I liked the title; needed the random fact that “The Wasteland” was included in it. Needed T. S. Eliot’s work to be an emblem of the lack of feeling the lack of poetry engendered.

Literary FYI: William Wordsworth

Today (April 7...it might be yesterday by the time I get this written!) is the poet William Wordsworth's birthday. I know: it's a fact that will stop your life in its tracks, causing you to break out in unfettered joy. For certain.

I've just spent a good half-hour trying to write about why Wordsworth's birthday would matter to anyone. But it's coming out all stuffy and scholarly and boring; details about the Romantic period in writing, and his Lyrical Ballads, and how his poems revolutionized poetic thought are hard to write about in a bloggerly way. So, here I go: I'm going to delete all the drivel, and just say this: 

I was thinking about poetry tonight after work, and about the things I studied for my Bachelor's, and how happy it made me to finally be learning about literary stuff. At work, we were talking about the value of a humanities degree, and while the world definitely doesn't place much value on learning about books, ideas, philosophies, or ways of thinking critically, I still value it. Studying different historical periods and movements in literature felt like putting together a puzzle for me; all my life I'd heard or read about things like romanticism, or the Victorian era, or feminism, but I didn't really understand it. Whether or not the world in general values it or even cares (and, trust me: it doesn't), some of my life's best experiences came in my college English classes.

And maybe the world is right: maybe my knowledge of the romantics doesn't do much for me. It certainly hasn't brought me much money! But I still cherish what Wordsworth brought into my life, the knowledge of people who paid attention, and wrestled with words, and did both things in an attempt to make art---to create something larger than themselves. Wordsworth is a case-in-point of that idea: More than 200 years after his first poems were published, and nearly 16 decades after his death, I'm here, thinking about his poems, his ideas, his life, and in that way he continues to matter, even thought the mattering is pretty small compared to things like recessions and presidents, basketball madness and whether or not Jessica Simpson is still hot or not.

Maybe it would be seasonally appropriate to share his daffodil poem, considering how the lines "they flash upon that inward eye/which is the bliss of solitude" are some of my favorites, and especially how my daffodils were particularly gorgeous today, when it finally warmed up. But I'm going to share my favorite Wordsworth sonnet instead, just because I love it so much and because I want someone else to think about the poem today (or tomorrow), too. It says much that I feel but cannot say in another way.

THE world is too much with us: late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. -- Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Solitary Run

I was feeling a little bit sorry for myself at the start of the half marathon I ran on Saturday. For one, the cool-but-sunny morning I had hoped for hadn’t happened. Instead it was freezing: low thirties with intermittent snow. And not just snow, but spitting snow, splayed through the air by bitter wind. Plus, I wasn’t sure I was ready. No; I was certain I wasn’t ready. My longest run since my last half was only seven miles. I was afraid my ITB would start to hurt, or that I wouldn’t have enough stamina to finish. But what really had me gloomy was a little bit of down-right pathetic loneliness. My friend who I’d planned to ride to the race with had decided not to run it. And even if she had come, she’s much faster than I am, so it’s not as if we’d have run the race together. As I walked from the parking lot to the starting line (bundled up in a wind breaker, a long-sleeve, insulated turtleneck running shirt, gloves, and ear warmers, yet already shivering), it seemed like everyone around me had someone to run with: husbands and wives, big groups of friends. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, to have a friend to run with? Someone with a similar pace and a similar crazy desire to run long distances, even in the cold?

I wasn’t sure what to do with my race number. Usually I pin it somewhere low on my shirt, but I didn’t want it underneath my jacket; plus, there was the off chance that it would magically warm up, and I could unzip my jacket—which would be problematic if my number was pinned across the front of it. Plus I couldn’t stand the thought of listening to it crinkle and rustle in the wind. I’ve a weird thing about sounds when I’m running. I don’t carry a water bottle, for example, because the sound of the water sloshing around with each step makes me want to hurl. A number rustling in the wind would make me equally nauseous. So I walked up to a complete stranger—an older, grandmotherly-type woman even more bundled than I—and asked her to pin my number on my back. I asked another complete stranger where to put my timer, as I’ve never run a race with one. (It goes around your ankle. Good to know.) And that, dear reader, was the extent of my race conversations.

So I wasn’t very cheery or optimistic when the gun went off. Except—it is hard to maintain gloom when you’re running in a big group of cheering runners, even if you feel like you’re the only one there without a friend. The cold began dissipating as I began to run, and even with the course’s only real uphill, I managed an exactly-nine-minute pace for the first mile. I didn’t even turn on my music, just ran and thought, trying to find my stride, listening to the voices around me, blurred from individual words to sound by my ear warmers. The swish of my jacket, the staccato of feet hitting the pavement, that tiny sound a snowflake makes, falling on your shoulder. Suddenly the cold seemed perfect; my cheeks were stinging with the snow, and occasionally my eyelashes filled up with it, but the rest of me was pleasantly warm.

The miles slid past. The first three felt fast and easy; by mile four I had slowed down a bit, the road’s berm beginning to take its inevitable toll on my ITB, starting the painful numbness along the bottom outside of my knee that's something akin to that feeling you get when you bump your elbow on something—but nothing too painful. I turned my music on, took a bite of Cliff Blok and a gulp of water at the four-mile water station, and settled into my run. Despite the cold, the nervy knee pain, the want of a running friend, I found that place in my head, the one that makes me love running, a quiet zone that must, by its very definition, be void of the negativity that’s usually sprinting around in my head. It’s not even a place that’s filled with encouragement. It’s just...quiet.

At about seven and a half miles, though, my body was like "OK, that’s as far as we need to go. That’s as far as we usually go. That’s as far as we’ve gone for a long, long time. That’s as far as we’re going. Really? We’re going to keep going?" and my quads were starting to sing an unpleasant tune. My quiet place slipped away. This part of the race was on a country road weaving through cold fields. Horses galloped their own races, up to and away from the road, a course only instinct could show them. Then it met up with the lower part of the Provo River Trail, which I’ve never been on, a tunnel through still-naked trees and swampy bits of marshes, then houses. Out of my quiet spot, I had to coax myself not to stop, and my pace became a mantra: keep going, keep going. Every once in awhile, a huddled group of people would appear on the side of the trail, cheering the runners on. As I ran, and ran, and ran, I started thinking about my loneliness at the beginning of the race. I watched the three girls I’d been following for the past two miles, listened to their voices, saw the way their strides all matched. But I wasn’t lonely anymore.

Instead, I remembered: this is what I do. Most things, for me, aren’t about doing with someone else. Mostly I am alone. And it wouldn’t matter, anyway, even if I’d come to that race with 18 other friends who also ran some miles in nine minutes and others in eleven, because in the end, everyone has to run the race on her own. The friend next to you can’t run it for you. No one else could be that voice in my head, the one saying keep going, keep going. No one else but me could hush the "you’re not strong enough to do this" voice. No one else but me could make me just keep going. And probably I wasn’t getting enough oxygen, but it started to feel like that’s how life is, too, not just running. People at your side make it easier. The cheering of spectators along the way gives you bits and bursts of energy. The thought of someone waiting for you at the finish line helps pull you along. But no one else runs the race. Just you, alone, pushing along.

I found a long-buried poem, C.P Cavafy 's "The Road to Ithaca," surfacing in my mind. "Hope your road is long," I kept thinking, instead of keep going. I had started with Laistrygonians in my soul, had brought along my demons, but I had dropped them along the way. Exhausted, my legs wanting to stop, I didn’t want the race to end, didn’t want to get to the finish line. I wanted instead to keep running, to keep wanting to get to the end, to keep anticipating it while I grew "rich with all I gained on the way." To have the running be the point of everything, and not the end of running. But it came anyway, the end. I ran the last block, looking for Kendell and the kids, and when I saw them at the finish line I nearly cried I was so glad to see them—to know I managed the race alone, as I had to, but also not alone, because they were waiting for me, filled with a new knowledge that life is always like that, that everyone is both alone and not alone, and that there are people cheering us on, and that someone is always waiting for us at the end.

"The Road to Ithaca"
~ C. P. Cavafy

When you set out for Ithaka 
ask that your way be long,
full of adventure, full of instruction.
The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - do not fear them:
such as these you'll never find
as long as your thoughts is lofty, as long as a rare
emotion touch your spirit and your body.
The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - you will not meet them
unless you carry them in your soul,
unless your soul raise them up before you.

Ask that your way be long.
At many a summer dawn to enter
- with what gratitude, what joy - ports seen for the first time;
to stop at Phoenician trading centres,
and to buy good merchandise,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensuous perfumes of every kind,
sensuous perfumes as lavishly as you can;
to visit many Egyptian cities,
to gather stores of knowledge from the learned.

Have Ithaka always in your mind.
Your arrival there is what you are destined for.
But do not in the least hurry the journey.
Better that it lasts for years,
so that when you reach the island you are old,
rich with all the you gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to give you wealth.

Ithaka gave you the splendid journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She hasn't anything else to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka has not deceived you. 
So wise have you become, of such experience
that already you will have understood what these Ithakas mean.

Book Note: The Septembers of Shiraz

I’ve tinkered around with quite a few poetic forms (the villanelle is my favorite) but I’ve never managed to finish either a sestina or a ghazal. The ghazal is an Arabic form that’s still used often in Iran, Pakistan, and India. The poem is made up of couplets that should be strong enough to stand on their own as an individual image or poetic thought. The first couplet establishes a "radif," which is either a word or a phrase that repeats in the second line of each couplet (if you click on that link, you can read a couple of examples). One of the effects a well-written ghazal achieves is that the radif creates an emphasis. The same idea, but it’s surrounded by a different context in each couplet, so you start to see it in a prismatic light.

In that sense, Dalia Sofer’s book The Septembers of Shiraz is a ghazal in novel form. The radif—the repeating idea—isn’t really the father’s experiences in an Iranian prison, or the ways the family must adapt while he is gone, although that is what the novel is about. Instead, it is something bigger, and harder to put into words. What is an acceptable level of comfort and luxury to have in one’s life? Why is it that some people seem to have everything (the beautiful home, the money for great vacations, the opportunity to mingle with artists and musicians and government big wigs) while others in the world get to be maids, or beggars, or just barely-getting-by? The inequality of the distribution of wealth: that is the radif in Sofer’s book, and it is also, in a sense, the cause of the troubles in Iran.

That was one thing I appreciated about this book: I learned a lot about the country and its troubles. I have a few vague memories of the Iran hostage crisis. I think I was nine or ten when that happened, and I remember watching it on the news one day when I was home sick with the stomach flu. I tried figuring out what the news was talking about, but I couldn’t understand most of it, and then I was also nauseous, so I have hereafter associated Iran with confusion and nausea. Sofer’s novel helped to dissuade me of that association; I began to see the place as a real country, with real people who struggled with real sorrows. The wealthy are powerful and arrogant until they are overthrown by the poor who want better lives; they are the new power, and become wealthy and arrogant. Thus the battle continues.

How does that—the distribution of wealth, power, luxury—affect individual lives? This is what the novel studies. For Isaac Amin, who is dragged off to prison on suspicion of being a Zionist, wealth is a thing you work for and achieve. He studied poetry in college, but realizing that "words do not put food on the table," he became a gemologist instead. This brought him and his family wealth and opportunity, but it is also what brought him to prison, really. People have a hard time forgiving the wealthy for their wealth. His wife, Farnaz, has obviously benefitted from that wealth, as has their son Parviz. But when the wealth stops (when Isaac is in jail), they begin to understand what really matters. The vacations? The house on the beach? The jewelry? In some ways, they do matter. The things that our money can get us become the things we define ourselves with. But they really begin to see that it is our relationships that matter the most.

As I witnessed this radif play out within the characters’ lives, I thought about it in my own life as well. I can remember thinking some of the same thoughts the book discusses when I was about Haley’s age. Just exactly why was it that there were girls who seemed to have everything: they were gorgeous, popular, and funny; boys liked them; they had tons and tons of clothes. Had I done something wrong I didn’t know about, I often wondered, that made it so I had my life: perpetually money-challenged, shy and awkward, and nowhere close to beautiful? Why, exactly, were things so unevenly balanced? And while maybe it sounds childish, and while my perspective on the idea has changed radically, I do still wonder how it is that some people seem to have so much. Of course, I can see this through more adult eyes now. I know that having lots of money and opportunity doesn’t mean your relationships (which, I believe, are the core part of any person’s happiness) are going to be successful. But the opposite is also true: the lack of money doesn’t ensure the success of relationships. They can still fail. Plus, you still don’t have any money.

Things get ugly in prison. Isaac is tortured and the few friends he has managed to make are killed. He is forced to look at his life in unexpected perspectives. Was he "evil" simply by the accident of achieving wealth? Is there something wrong with wanting to have pleasure in your life, especially if you can afford it? Is standing by and doing nothing—not participating in atrocities, but overlooking them—a way of living that is deserving of torture and execution? As he goes through the horrific prison experience, he is always thinking: what can he tell his torturer, Mohsen, to bring his freedom? He realizes he can only confess to living out his life, but he figures out a way to achieve his goals; his wealth, which condemns him, ultimately saves him.

I’m only touching on a very few aspects of this novel. It’s a layered thing. You see the story through many perspectives, which makes it hard to sum up. I totally left out Shirin, Isaac’s daughter, and the experiences Parvis has in New York, and how I felt a sort of kinship for the torturer Mohsen—not for the torturing part, of course, but in how his life has at last brought him a sense of having: power, if not wealth, at least. Everyone, in fact, is layered, both bad and good, as it is in life, as it is in a ghazal. Poetry brings a sort of peace to Isaac; he chants it with his prison compatriots and it comes to his mind during his torturing, a way of putting into words what can’t otherwise be said. In the end, his life, as well as our understand of the radif, comes out just like he teaches Shirin a ghazal comes out: "There is no end, Shirin-jan. That’s the first thing you should learn about ghazals. There is no resolution. Imagine the speaker simply throwing his hands in the air." What else can one do, but try and try and try to understand the things that repeat, all the time knowing that there is no resolution? Throwing your hands in the air is not defeat; it is acceptance.

in which I Get Political

During the elections, I very purposefully refrained from blogging about the elections. My political views are too shaky for me to throw them out in public very often. By "shaky" I mean that I don't know that my opinion really even matters much, so why share it? But this morning I am feeling the smallest bit more hopeful, and it is, after all, the Inauguration. When else might I get political?

Yesterday, I was reading the newspaper as I do three out of four Sunday mornings, over a plate of carbs (homemade waffles, but usually it's pancakes), and I got stuck on an article about the new president, and how he wants to craft "a new Declaration of Independence." I sure hope he was speaking metaphorically, as in declaring us independent from, I don't know, things like meddling in other countries' business, or war, or financial ruin. Because I honestly still quite like our old Declaration of Independence, you know?

I am deeply uneasy about our future.

I listen to political speeches and I can't help but think: isn't this all rhetoric? How can anyone believe anything a politician says, when we've had so much contemporary history prove that they rarely do what they say? I've stopped believing that politics is about governing a nation; now I see it as something similar to Hollywood, something that's about money, fame, and power. And I have to add that I would feel that way no matter which guy was elected president. I feel like America has become very Roman in our outlook, in the sense of conquering and claiming the world with our philosophies and ideas. Forcing democracy doesn't feel very democratic to me. And look what happened to the Roman empire! It feels, to me, like some sort of crumbling is in order. Of course, I'm just the pessimistic girl in the back row, so no one should listen to me.

Still, today's Writer's Almanac made me feel a little bit better. It introduces the poet who'll be reading an inaugural poem at the festivities today. I don't know anything about Elizabeth Alexander and don't think I've read any of her poems. Still, not many presidents choose to even involve the poets. President Kennedy did, and I've always thought that if I could go back in time, one of the events I'd like to see is Robert Frost reciting "The Gift Outright" instead of the poem he'd written for the occasion because he couldn't read his inaugural poem from the bright-white paper. Obama's inclusion of a poet makes me like him more. It makes me think he and I might have that little bit in common: poetry. Even if the cynical part of me is whispering "but he probably only has a poet there as a way of making you think you have that connection." Even with that whisper, I still like him a little bit better.

And, and: I think I like his poet, too. Or, at least, I like the poem from the Writer's Almanac because, well, I agree with it: real poems aren't about "love, love, love"---they are not about false emotion---but are about something real that we can all relate to. So, I think I'll share it here and then go back to watching the inauguration. I might even try to believe a little bit of what I hear.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

by Elizabeth Alexander

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry
is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said
"Every 'I' is a dramatic 'I'")
digging in the clam flats
for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.
Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love
and I'm sorry the dog died.
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other?

Just Some Random Stuff About Poetry

At work I've been trying to write an essay about poetry for our little local newspaper. I say "trying" because it seems that perhaps my January Funk has broken my writing psyche; I've typed and backspaced, typed and deleted, for days now, alternately berating and cajoling my bruised writing self. After way too many hours for a 600-word essay, I'm finally finished. I realized halfway through that my difficulties were coming because of my goal for the piece: to have my writing be the thing that brought the whole city rushing to the library to check out poetry. The writing got easier once I realized how absurdly lofty my goal was. The best poet in the world couldn't make that happen, let alone me.

At any rate, I've been surrounding myself with poetry books (even more than usually do). I mean it quite literally: stacks of books teetering around me while I fruitlessly crafted and then hated sentence after sentence. Yesterday, one of my coworkers noticed my stacks and asked me, "Amy, are you a poet?" How many times in your life do you have that question asked to you? How hard do I wish I could answer "Yes"? But I’m afraid that by "poet" he didn’t mean "a person who knows enough about good poetry to realize how bad hers is, and therefore never lets anyone see her poems," and so I had to say no.

Still, whether I’m a poet or not, I still get to be a reader of poetry, and that holds its own rewards. I’d call one of them "serendipoetry" if that made-up word wasn’t so ridiculously hard to pronounce; whatever it’s called I experienced it today, when I discovered this Billy Collins poem, on a Wednesday, and then walked out to my car in a blinding-blue, white-shiny day just like the one in his poem. Just the sort I savor piling up:

Days

Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.

Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.

Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow

on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.

No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday

you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday’s saucer
without the slightest clink.

~ Billy Collins