I went to Franklin Canyon today—a local park off of Coldwater Canyon Drive, a few miles from my home. You forget you’re in L.A. when you’re walking there among the sycamore and redwood trees, the sky a brilliant blue and the winding trails that lead steeply upward or circle the small pond with mallards and wood ducks vying for position in case you have bread to give them. My friend and I walked and talked—about our work, our families, travels we’ve had, or were going to take, what was to come and what had been. It was a simple walk, not profound in any way, not life-changing, but calm and sweet, gentle in a way that was like drinking a glass of cold water on a warm day or taking a nap in the afternoon, a kind of reverie that nourishes body, mind and soul.

Toward the end of our walk we met a couple who said they had been coming to the park every day for twenty years. They were probably in their seventies. He was tall and bearded and held the leash of their Airedale dog. She walked with a cane and wore a fur trimmed, knit cap that she popped off just long enough to reveal the brilliant white color of her hair, just growing back after undergoing chemo. She laughed about how it had a slight curl to it now, which was not there before. The husband knew much about the trees in the park, showing us the tiny pine cones at the tips of the towering redwoods, the drooping branches of the deodar cedar and told us how the water that flowed into the small reservoir there was not pumped, but siphoned from the source. The wife was Finnish and spoke with a soft voice about when she was a child in school and had learned all the trees and plants in her home region, had made a notebook of samples of each one and had labeled each with their common and Latin names. We strolled with them for awhile until it was time for my friend and I to turn off and return to our car and drive back into the city.

When I was visiting my mother a couple of weeks ago she and I were sitting in her living room one evening and she started talking about the neighborhood where she grew up in Portland, near the railroad tracks on 20th Street—how there was every nationality represented: Italian, Asian, African, Russian, Irish and Mexican. She talked about living as a young child during the Depression, her first job as a secretary and working six days a week for $5 and splitting that with her mother 50/50 to help cover expenses. She talked about the scandals in the neighborhood: divorces, beatings and even murder. There were the decent people and the rotten ones, and it didn’t matter the color of their skin or how long ago they’d stepped off the boat—it was how they treated their neighbors, how they watched out for each other that mattered. I vowed, after hearing her talk, to get these stories down on paper—for our family, for the generations.

Perhaps I’m getting sentimental, seeing the earth spinning so fast that it wrenches my stomach these days and I want to hold onto something that is solid, like the center post in the merry-go-round, where life is not a blur. but more like a leaf-strewn path, meandering through time and space, where precious, precious souls leave their footprints, their stories. Maybe, it’s because I’m a writer of poems, one who fingers the scales of what was, what is and what could be. It seems that poetry is about honoring and preserving what is absolutely unique in each of us—of all that has ever existed and will exist—burrowing into what is so different and finding, there, in the center that still place where we are gloriously at one. The thousand-year old redwood, the wood duck and its mate, the Finnish couple walking in the park, my mother and her long-ago neighbors and the stories they have to tell—all we have to do is listen, just listen.

May your 2008 spin a little less and meander a little more.

A couple of weeks ago I had the fun experience of reading a few of my poems in a studio. My friends Hilda (fellow poet) and Wayne (the director, cameraman, et al) invited me to give it a go. They’ve been filming poets around Los Angeles for the last year and have a website where they post them. They credit me with being the catalyst for the venture. At a feature reading of our Night Birds poetry group at Coffee Cartel a while back I asked Wayne to take some pictures with my digital camera and it planted the seed in him to get a video camera and the whole thing blossomed from there. 

Michael, another of the Night Bird poets (this is what the six of us who workshop with Sarah Maclay call ourselves), volunteered his loft/studio space at The Brewery in east L.A. and filled in as the "sound man" on the taping. It took a couple of hours and the whole thing was really fun and interesting: getting the lights, the background, timing, camera angle, sound, all just right. So far there are three studio tapings: Michael’s, mine and a poet named Annette Sugden (not a Night Bird). You can take a look at them (and more) at Poetry.LA. Just click on the picture and it will take you to YouTube.

Of course, looking at the video, I can see where I could have done so many things better: smiling more, for one, and doing more voice modulation in tone and energy. Oh, well, it’s a learning experience and it could definitely have been worse. I took a couple of pictures of us at Michael’s after the shoot. We were breaking everything down and getting ready to go before I remembered, so the pics are staged after the fact.

Hilda, Wayne & me 

Pretending to be filmed–but it looks good! 

Michael outside of his loft at The Brewery. 

A couple of days ago my husband and I took a trip up to the Getty Museum. It was a blustery, rather chilly day, for L.A. but there were still pretty sizable crowds lining up to get on the tram that climbs to the top of the hill, where the many buildings of the museum reside. We arrived around 12:15 and had a reservation at the very popular restaurant there for a post-Christmas lunch at 1:30, so we didn’t have time to see too much. Our first stop was at the permanent collection of the European masters with always my favorites of the late 19th century paintings of Monet, Van Gogh, Pizarro, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne and others. There is always a crowd in this particular room of the exhibition, but it was manageable and we made our way around the room, stopping in front of our favorites to linger and drink them in. My husband favors Claude Monet’s, Wheatstacks, Snow Effect Morning and I am entranced by the watercolor of Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Blue Pot.

It reminded me that I had written a short essay about the still life watercolors of Cezanne and in particular, Still Life with Blue Pot when I was in my third semester of school at Vermont College. It was my art study semester and I fell in love over and over again with the paintings of the impressionists and expressionists of the late 19th century and early 20th century. To me this art is the most alive, most present and most emotionally compelling of anything I’ve seen. Following a few photos from our day at the Getty is a reprint of my mini-essay and a poem, of course.

Still Life with Blue Pot by Paul Cezanne is deeply explored in this oversized book written in conjunction with an exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Cezanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors. There are numerous partial and full-page photos of Cezanne’s paintings, with particular attention given to details of the painting Still Life with Blue Pot. These close-up photos of the painting are particularly entrancing as they reveal the movement of the brushstroke on the canvas, the layering of the colors of the paint and the penciled lines of the original drawing.

The French poet Charles Baudelaire is quoted as saying that “the modern artist acts as a kaleidoscope; color is relational and plural in its effects, while working on the eye and imagination of the viewer like a prism or faceted jewel.” This is the experience of peering deeply into these Cezanne’s watercolors. They are beautiful to behold as a completed composition or a simple study, as in Decanter and Bowl on page 80, which is charming in its depiction of these two simple objects, yet one can also feel the energy of a man and a woman; partners who are not only utilitarian, but have a wistful and demurely sensual aspect to them. Cezanne accomplishes this effect with his ability to create a carefully crafted still life scene that, at the same time, appears unassuming and spiritually beguiling.

Cezanne sought to “realize his sensations” and was not given to follow any particular school of painting, rather chose to incorporate them in relationship to his own artistic sensibility. He follows no set procedure to constructing his art and often blurs the “distinction between sketch and finished picture, and even privileging the former over the latter.” This shows up in the enlarged details of Still Life with Blue Pot where graphite lines are seen swirling amidst the brilliant colors and white expanses, adding a wonderful sense of imagining the hand of the artist on the canvas, not in perfect determination, but wandering, playing, letting the hand go where it will.

There is something about the irregularity of these watercolors, how they pool, drip, are not controllable within any boundaries, that is so liberating to observe. The way the colors run together and the objects themselves have murky boundaries, often flowing over into one another. It speaks of life and how individuals slip into and out of our lives, daubing their particular hue onto our psyche. Cezanne had the ability, through his mastery of color and brushstroke and his intention to “realize his sensations,” to depict a simple grouping of fruit and pottery that transcended the commonplace, transforming them into a glorious and ephemeral experience for the viewer.

Cezanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors
Carol Armstrong
Getty Publications
 

Van Gogh’s Bed

is orange,
like Cinderella’s coach, like
the sun when he looked it
straight in the eye.

is narrow, he sleeps alone, tossing
between two pillows, while it carried him
bumpily to the ball.
is clumsy,
but friendly. A peasant
built the frame; and old wife beat
the mattress till it rose like meringue.

is empty,
morning light pours in
like wine, melody, fragrance,
the memory of happiness.

Jane Flanders (1985)
from Ekphrastic Poetry website
 

It’s been a busy poetry week, not to mention the revving up for the holidays (which I don’t participate in at full bore). I’ve been to two readings and met with three different workshop groups. I had on my schedule to go to another reading this afternoon, but decided to stay home instead. Starting in October it was my intention to branch out more into the poetry community here in L.A. until I’m off and traveling later in the spring. I’ve made it a point to attend and participate in more workshops, readings and events in the local Southern California area–to get a taste of who’s doing what. I also wanted to do more open mic readings, to get myself out there. What I’m understanding more and more is that although I often enjoy these outings and find them useful in my own process, not to mention supporting fellow-poets, they can be a drain on my creative energy. It’s not just the physical aspect of driving the L.A. streets and freeways to get to these things and staying up a little later than would be my preference. It’s more about realizing that there is only so much of other people’s poetry and opinions my psyche can handle, quite a bit of which I don’t find useful and often times find detrimental in enhancing my own creative process. Suffice it to say, I’ll be cutting back on some of these excursions and pinpointing those activities that really do have the maximum amount of juice for the effort—small get togethers with writers I know and trust to be honest and supportive and quality readings where the poet uplifts and inspires with their work and with their humanity. (Such as the reading last Monday by Robert Hass.)

I’ve also been thinking a lot about what it means to be a “poet.” What I’ve come up with is that I’m not interested in being any one thing and truthfully, what I’ve observed in our cultural is that there is way too much baggage that comes along with any particular label and I don’t want the parts that never will apply to me and the parts I don’t want to ever apply. I know that sounds rather vague, but the distinction really is between being tagged as falling into a general category or being me, Hari Bhajan, with all the subsets underneath: Woman, Mother, Daughter, Wife, Friend, Sikh, Life Coach, Business Administrator, Writer of Poems, Workshop Facilitator, etc. You get the idea. It’s way less pressure not to feel squeezed into a mold that will never quite fit and actually be a distraction from the truth of the whole, of who I am.

Oh, by the way, a regular reader mentioned the other day that she hadn’t seen any of my poems in the e-letter or on the blog in quiet awhile. The reason is that I’ve been submitting many of my poems to journals for publication these last few months and generally they do not accept any work that has been previously published, even if it’s on your own website. The good news is (well, it’s good news for me, anyway) several of my poems will be appearing in issues of journals around the country very soon. I’ll keep you updated on which ones with links to their sites. The latest two are at Poetic Diversity, an online journal that published a poem in their August issue and Lilliput Review, which is a small journal devoted to small poems. In their most recent issue, #159, they published the poem Spirito, which I wrote for my father on his 85th birthday, just a few months before he passed away.

Here’s a little Christmas fun for you…our next door neighbor, Billy, and his family built a gingerbread house to enter into a contest to benefit a charity. It had to be constructed of all edible materials. My husband helped them load it into their SUV to take to the hotel where they were all being displayed. I haven’t heard how it fared in the contest. I don’t think Billy much cared. He was just having a good time putting it together. It’s really quite amazing!!

The day after the Thanksgiving weekend I took off for my own private holiday, driving east on the 10 freeway past Riverside and San Bernardino, past the hills of Palm Springs to the dusty little town of Desert Hot Springs and the Sagewater Inn & Spa, where the doors are painted turquoise, the linens are European, you’re handed a pound of Gramma B’s coffee cake when you check in and aahhh, the mineral water flows into the Jacuzzi at 104 degrees. The last two years I’ve made reservations to come out here, after a recommendation from a friend, and have cancelled each time, either for financial or scheduling reasons. This time I was determined to get out here. I knew I’d need it after my usual bout of “holiday fever” over the Thanksgiving weekend. (We won’t go there for now.)

I brought three suitcases. The first had my clothes and toiletries. The second was really a plastic filing case, but I used it to tote all the food I’d need for three days, as each room has its own kitchenette. In the third suitcase was all my reading material: The New Yorker from two weeks ago with an article on Robert Hass & Mark Strand’s new books of poems, the Sunday L.A. Times crossword puzzle and Book Review (with an article on Bukowski), literary journals (FIELD, Willow Springs, Pool, The Ledge), my trusty Moleskine journal, a spiral notebook with notes from all my poetry workshops and, of course, a plethora of books: The Universal Myths by Alexander Eliot and Joseph Campbell (for an upcoming workshop with David St. John), Handbook of Poetic Forms, by Ron Padgett, The Situation of Poetry by Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass’  and Mark Strand’s new books, They Came to See a Poet: Selected Poems by Tadeusz Rozewicz, Hapax: Poems by A.E. Stallings and The Paper Rose (a new book of poems by my Vermont College professor, Tom Absher). Oh, a few more, but enough is enough.

It takes awhile to settle into not doing your routine. I’ve had the urge several times today to go into town and find a bookstore or a grocery store or go on some inane errand that will get me out of my room, away from the very thing I came here to do. Funny how that is. I do have to ease into it and I find two things very helpful: water and television. No, not at the same time—that could be dangerous. Taking baths, showers, dipping in the Jacuzzi, drinking lots of water (which is fantastic here), all these things get me relaxed and unwound from the city. TV, well, it’s a distraction and one that has to be carefully monitored or it could end up consuming inordinate amounts of precious reading and writing time. I find them (distractions) valuable as process time, beyond the very useful ones of sleeping, walking and meditating, which all fall under the healthy category, whereas blobbing out in front of the tube is purely indulgent and necessary in allowing myself freedom to simply enjoy without guilt.

I’ve been here a little over 24 hours and have another 40 or so to go before the two hour drive back home to L.A. I’ve gotten through a couple of journals, organized some poems for submissions, read that New Yorker article and gotten half-way through the crossword puzzle. Dinner is over, I’ve watched enough TV for the day, so it must be time for a soak in the hot tub, where, who knows, under those magnificent stars, inhaling the good, clean, dry air, any number of transcendent poems may arrive to fill up the rest of my evening. If not, I’m sure the faces of the books strewn across the white duvet will be vying for my attention to fill up a few minutes of these precious hours in the desert.

Pictures and a Desert poem by Tom Absher below. Also, if you are interested in any of the books or journals I mention, just roll over the title and click for a link to more info. 

Courtyard outside of my room. It’s been windy today, as you can see.

View of the mountains with the whirling windmills below.

Wood carving of a Chief at a nearby Museum

 
 There are 15-20 inns and spas in this area of Desert Hot Springs. They run the range of funky to sublime. This one is the former, but I do love the sign!

THE DESERT

Many people have walked
into one desert or another
to find their gods, like Arabia,
east of the Euphrates, an unholy
violence of heat, sand and those
salamanders which thrive
on fire from the sun, because
there is so little else to eat.

If one seeks to hear the voice
of a deity it might be found there,
where sky overwhelms the land,
where there is no sound
but the pulse of blood in the ear.

It has been said that divinity
does not speak in thunder clouds
or a whirlwind, or from the bottom
of a well, but in the presence
of animals, or the voice of a child,
ordinary, soft-spoken words, sounds,
musings, a question,
a voice so small one must go
into the desert to hear it,
to believe it.

I have heard it is a voice that addresses us every day
in one form or another,
but we never notice,
perhaps like the voice Abraham heard
before he set out for the Promised Land,
that place overrunning with milk and honey
and war, endless war—
words first heard so faintly
so close by, he might have thought
they were from the salamander
beneath his feet:

Return here often and listen for me.

Tom Absher
The Paper Rose
Plain View Press, Publishers
 

Last Thursday I went to a reading at the downtown L.A. Public Central Library through ALOUD, which is a wonderful series of readings, discussions and performances held in the Mark Taper Auditorium (beautiful venue, great sound) and presented by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. If you live in the L.A. area and want to get on the email list for upcoming events you can go to the Aloud website and sign up. There were three readings I would have liked to have gone to on that same night, but chose to see Kinnell, as he doesn’t get out to the West Coast often and I hadn’t seen him read before. I was supposed to go with a friend but she had to cancel at the last minute. I decided to go ahead and brave the rush hour traffic on the 10 freeway and left early enough not to be stressed about being late. I took a few minutes to walk around the library and snap a few pictures. The library was built in 1926 and was extensively remodeled from 1993-1996, after an arson fire in 1986. You can read more about the library on the Wikipedia website and the L.A. Public Library Site. There’s a few of my pics at the end of this post, too.

It took awhile for the room to fill up, as it does at most events in this town, but the night was sold out and I saw many of my poet friends settle into the comfy chairs, most reading, or holding in their hands, a copy of one of Kinnell’s books of poems. The evening was relatively short, with a very nice introduction and then Kinnell reading a few poems, taking a few questions, reading a few more poems and then he signed books afterwards. I truly enjoyed just closing my eyes and listening to his sonorous voice roll out into the room. He is an icon of American poetry and it was just delightful to sit and hear his poems, his thoughts, watch him fuss with papers and pages, trying to find the poem he wanted to read, telling us a little bit about the poem, or not. He was casual, unassuming about his work, seemed mildly uncomfortable, but a seasoned veteran of this sort of thing, playing some old favorites and bringing out a couple of new poems for the crowd.

One of the poems Kinnell read, Neverland, is a lovely portrayal of his experience at the bed of his sister Wendy, as she lay dying. Before he read it he rustled around a bit searching for a pen and then made a note to revise one of the lines. I’ve heard he is well-known for this propensity to alter his poems, even after they’ve been published. If you’d like to hear an audio recording of Kinnell reading Neverland you can click on this link to Poetry.org. Guaranteed you’ll enjoy it. Strong Is Your Hold is his latest collection of poems. I just pulled it out and realized there’s a CD that comes along with it. I’ll have to pop it in the player and see what’s on it. Below is one of the poems from that collection.

Promissory Note

If I die before you
which is all but certain
then in the moment
before you will see me
become someone dead
in a transformation
as quick as a shooting star’s
I will cross over into you
and ask you to carry
not only your own memories
but mine too until you
too lie down and erase us
both together into oblivion.

Galway Kinnell
Strong Is Your Hold
Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers

 
A night shot taken with my little digital. It’s an impressive building night or day. 

 One of the "chandeliers" hanging in the atrium.

Escalators from above.

 The Statue of Civilization

Mural: The Founding of Los Angeles

It’s been a little while since we’ve heard from Liza, but she’s back with another book review and she promises me she has two or three in the hopper, so we’ll have more to come. She and I both fell in love with the poetry and the prose of Mark Doty when we were at Vermont College. I had the privilege to study with Mark last year at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Liza has a special connection as she has lived in, or around, Provincetown, Massachusettes for much of her life, where Mark has lived and where much of Heaven’s Coast is set. Enjoy!

Heaven’s Coast
by Mark Doty

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what anyone supposed and luckier.     Walt Whitman       

With death, there often comes a wondering about meaning for those who are left behind in its wake. In the opening preface of Mark Doty’s luminous memoir, Heaven’s Coast, he embraces the mysterious immediately. He writes, “The Lakota Sioux say that when nature gives one a burden, one’s also given a gift.” The repetitive experiences of magic that make up this book seem in part to be the journey that encompasses such a gift. 

Against the mystical, coastal backdrop of the natural world in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a town forgotten by time and ordinariness, a town where the less “normal” you are the better you fit in, Mark Doty has used his experiences with the otherwise unexplainable as a passage to and from heaven’s coast, both for himself and his reader, as they pass together in and out of grief.  

With the keen eye of a poet and a deep curiosity about, “the texture and weight of a word,” with sparse language and clear, unsentimental prose, “Writers try to make the world into themselves, and then when they return to the outer life they expect to have changed it,” Doty chronicles the illness and death of his long time partner, Wally Roberts and his assent into heaven from their home on the Massachusetts coast.

Roberts’s death from AIDS in 1994 left an open door for Doty to peer into. Almost as if Doty, in his mind, went to heaven with Wally, only to return after a time to tell us what it’s like. He writes, “In the months after Wally died I felt a kind of spirit with me that sustained me, even though I was miserable; it was strange how I could be in so much pain and feel, at once, somehow close to the heart of life, in a place of no little radiance.”  

Doty handles the meaning and magic of his dreams with brevity, “I dreamed one night that I was wondering how I would survive this, how I’d come through these days, and I saw in front of me a stack of books and papers and pens. The message: You have everything you need,” and then moves quickly back to the story. In a sense this brevity allows the dreams to inform the reader in the same way the writer was initially informed by them. They are there to be considered and to resonate as the ends come in against the middle.    

This portrait of Roberts’s slow and painful death breathes and lives as it dissects the connections we often feel, but can’t otherwise put into words. It taps into something we often avoid because we can’t define it. Into the abyss we go with Doty as he confesses, “To write was to court overwhelming feeling. Not to write was to avoid, but to avoid was to survive. Though writing was a way of surviving, too: experience was unbearable, looked at head on, but not to look was also unbearable. And so I’d write, when I could, recording what approached like someone in a slow moving but unstoppable accident, who must look and look away at once.”

So clear is Doty’s rage, “And partly my rage is at the world, at God, at the blind bone-breaking ugly design of things,” set against the ethereal images of their home and the landscape of the coast that we hold our breath as he writes about a winter afternoon as the two men wait together for death to arrive. “The afternoon’s so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes.”  There’s the clear ear of the poet again. “A cold, struck bell.” You can almost taste the tarnished metal against your tongue. Doty’s prose is like a poem. To read him is to watch the soul see before your eyes.

(Read on …)

Saturday night, following a week when fires raged, Mercury was doing it’s retrograde thing and the moon shone full on it all, four Vermont College graduates of the Class of Fall, 2005, found a way to spend nearly an hour together trying to catch up on each other’s very creatively active lives. The catalyst was our New York City friend, Tamara, who came to town for the installation of her partner’s paintings in a local gallery. We had hoped to have a few more folks join us and to find more time to connect, but that wasn’t to be, so we did the best with what we were able to eke out.  Here’s who they are and what they’re up to…

Tamara:  Graphic artist (designed our graduation program), painter, collagist and altar maker (click HERE for website), blogger (HERE for blog) and lover of her pup, Bear. Of course this is only the short list. The exciting news is that Tamara will be leaving for Bern, Switzerland in January for a six month artist residency, where she will have the opportunity to visit fabulous museums and galleries, but most importantly focus solely on manifesting the brewing ideas and visions in her head. (The painting in the picture is by Chris, her partner. It’s Wonder Bread, in all it’s glory.)

Christine: Photographer (I have three of her photos from Romania hanging in my home in Oregon), painter and interior stylist. Christine’s also a mother of two and grandmother of three, who’s become quite the accomplished yogi and has plans to spend a few weeks in India at an ashram in the coming year. She just bought a new home in Mar Vista, remodeled it and set up a darling little art “shack” to work on all her projects.

Brit: One of a kind guy, Brit got his B.A. in “Popping,” a dance style akin to break dancing. He’s from Maine, but has been in L.A. for a few years (took some months to travel to Israel and Egypt after graduation). His mission is to get the whole world up and dancing—feeling the spirit of movement. His group is Elastic Illusion and they perform and make instructional videos.

 
Group Pic and the closest thing Vermont College will ever have to a cheerleading squad!! 

In honor of our new Poet Laureate I went back to my Vermont College essays and pulled out this one on Charles Simic’s book of poems, The Voice at 3 A.M. I’ve also included one of my favorite poems of his at the conclusion.

Charles Simic is a complex man with complex thoughts. He possesses a large cache of memories from his childhood in Yugoslavia where he lived through the German and Allied bombings, as well as those as a young immigrant to the U.S. in the fifties and sixties. The chaotic and frightening circumstances of his childhood in combination with the educated and articulate adult he grew to be create poetry that combines tenderness and vulnerability with an often acerbic or pragmatic view of the world. Simic is not willing to allow one emotional force to rule his experiences, rather he gives himself permission to put on the page the very duplicity that haunts, as well as informs him.

 Simic’s poetry dwells frequently on the subject of death; how he observes its affect on people, contemplating his own, and the temporal nature of our soul inhabiting such a fragile vessel. He has seen much death from an early age and has respect, as well as an almost casual familiarity with the way it goes about its appointed task. In the poem “Death, The Philosopher” death is personified, is said to have an “unfortunate passion,” to love “the way the summer dusk fell” and to give “excellent advice by example.” In the last four lines Simic brings himself into the poem:

Miraculously lucid, you, too, came to ask
About the strangeness of it all.
Charles, you said,
How strange you should be here at all!

The sense I had when reading this poem is that there are so many mysteries in life and you can dwell on how dreadful it is, how confusing, and how there seems to be no way to “figure it out,” but in that truth is the strangest of all truths; the unfathomable miracle of your very existence.

Simic has a talent for stringing disparate images together in a poem to create a strong mood, whether it is playful, sensual or somber. One of my favorite lines in the selection is seen in these two stanzas from the poem, “Promises of Leniency and Forgiveness”:

…Someone rising to eloquence

After a funeral, or in the naked arms of a woman
Who has her head averted because she’s crying,
And doesn’t know why. A hairline fracture of the soul
Because of the way light falls on these bare trees and bushes.

Sea-blackened rocks inscrutable as chess players…
One spoke to them of words failing…
Of great works and little faith of blues in each bite of bread.
Above the clouds the firm No went on pacing.

These lines speak of the beauty of sorrow, of how we reach out in our awkward way to comfort each other in times of loss, even though we are inadequate to the task. The line that is most striking is “A hairline fracture of the soul…” It describes a moment of being caught off guard by a slant of light through the trees, or the scent of jasmine on a summer’s evening, or the cry of a child and how, in that instant the soul cracks open, reveals itself, and we are nothing but pure energy.

Although a good many of the poems in this collection (which are selections from 1986 to 2003) dwell on the dark and disturbing aspects of life in the 20th century and the struggle of an individual who has seen more than his share of pain and suffering, there are poems that touch the lighter side and those that exhibit a sweetness and serenity. “De Occulta Philosophia” is one of the latter, and perhaps my favorite poem in the book. Here the narrator speaks to the evening sunlight and “Seeks initiation / Into your occult ways.” There is humility in the voice of the speaker, who is in awe of the incredible majesty in such a display:

Tell me something of your study
Of lengthening shadows,
The blazing windowpanes
Where the soul is turned into light—
Or don’t just now.

The narrator exhibits a longing, a desire to touch the elusive quality of light, of shadow, of the quiet power in the setting sun. In the end the narrator realizes that he is but a mortal, “Seated in a shadowy back room / At the edge of a village,” and although he is given a certain knowledge in his experience of the sunset, he will forever be unable to understand such a profound phenomena in the way he craves.

One of the primary strengths in Simic’s poems is his ability to bring forth images that are both vivid and unusual. They reminded me of French or Italian art films, with the shadows and sharp edges of black and white photography and the sparse, poignant lines of the actors. He is a master at creating mood in his poems as seen in the first stanza of “Against Whatever it is That’s Encroaching:

Best of all is to be idle,
And especially on a Thursday,
And to sip wine while studying the light:
The way it ages, yellows, turns ashen
And then hesitates forever
On the threshold of the night
That could be bringing the first frost.     

Using the words “idle,” “ages,” “yellows,” “ashen,” and “hesitates” there is a strong sense of suspension of time, a slow motion, a remembrance, as if in a dream where all is seen as a movie, and the dreamer knows it is a dream. The melancholia sets up the next two stanzas where a young boy is watching a man (perhaps his father) with two “loose” women whispering and drinking together. We see this all as through a thin veil until the last lines, when the boy reveals his thoughts as he sees in all this revelry the conflicting emotions of one of the women:

The grown-ups raise their glasses to him,
The giddy-headed, red-haired woman
With eyes tightly shut,
As if she were about to cry or sing.

Above all I admire the honesty of Charles Simic’s poetry. There is not an iota of pretension. His poetry requires the reader to slow down and listen carefully to what he is saying to be able to go with him, but when you do (as I finally did), the originality of his perceptions and his sensitivity to human suffering is an enriching and emotionally fulfilling experience.

STONE

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

For the first time in years I look forward to the mail dropping down the chute. There are more than bills, coupons and credit card solicitations coming in the mail these days. In the last three or four months I’ve been submitting my poems to journals—actually getting them out there into the world and seeing if they stick anywhere. I’ve taken the whole submission process on with vigor; setting up computer files containing documents on the submission guidelines of nearly 150 literary journals (gleaned from their web sites), two or three “cover letter” templates, folders with a copy of each poem submitted (hard copy and on computer), and the same for each journal submitted to, organized by date and alphabetically. There’s a bit of OCD in all of this, but it’s a way, I think, of keeping some emotional distance, of relegating this part of the poetic journey to the left side of the brain where it belongs.

When submitting work rejection is the norm, as all poets and writers know, and you’re doing well if you get one poem accepted out of a hundred submissions. This can be hard to take, unless you grow alligator skin or have a plan that keeps you in motion, preventing you from spending a whole lot of time hung up on why that editor didn’t like your poems or even worse, concluding that your work should all be thrown in the toilet and never see the light of day again. To me, it’s always about writing the poem, the experience of expression and awakening to an insight that wasn’t there yesterday. I figure if I spend a lot of vital emotional fluid moaning over what didn’t happened, then I won’t have the juice to create what’s waiting to happen.

Back to the mail—it’s those self-addressed-stamped-envelopes that I look for amongst the Lands End catalogues and electric bills; checking the return address to see which journal it’s from, sussing out from their thickness if there’s an iota of a chance that a poem got accepted, then taking a kitchen knife (most often I can’t wait long enough to get them to my desk to use the letter opener) and slitting the envelope open and most often pulling out the slip of colored paper or Xeroxed memo stating, ever-so-kindly, that the editor has read my submission “with interest” but has found that “it does not meet our present needs,” or the very generous “we wish you the best in finding a home for your manuscript elsewhere.” What provides a little dangling hope is when there’s an actual scrawled message on the rejection to, “send more” or “really enjoyed these” or an arrow pointing to one of the poems with “liked this one the best” written in the margin.

It’s all okay, the submitting, the rejections and the occasional acceptance. The latter, that rare and lovely moment when you open the envelope or receive an email that says Yes to one of your brave little poems—ah, that is a glow to revel in for a day or two, maybe even share with a couple of your closest friends and, if a particularly sought-after journal takes a poem or you get more than one poem accepted, then tell the spouse, being sure to alert him/her that, of course, this doesn’t mean you’ll be getting any money for your efforts, that it’s really all about creative satisfaction anyway.

It’s almost four and there’s no mail yet. The last couple of days a substitute carrier has had our route and it’s been here before noon. Today, it seems, our regular guy is on the job and it could be as late as 5 or 6 before he arrives. The tally so far this week is:  Monday, one submission out, three rejections in; Tuesday, nothing out, nothing in; Wednesday, three submissions out and nothing in. (The mail finally arrived.) The truth of it is that it’s all about perseverance, confidence (maybe not all the time) and a lotta, lotta luck.  And, in the final analysis, it’s really in the hands of those almighty and wise poetry gods. Now, it’s on to tomorrow and to forgetting about the results and focusing on the process.