I am so anti-Halloween, the way we celebrate here in this country, anyway. Around my neighborhood there are so many houses with fake cobwebs strung all over the bushes, gravestones with R.I.P. stuck in the lawns, bones and skulls and witches on brooms all over the house. Then there are those crazy inflatable ghosts and goblins.

It brings out the monster in me to see all this ridiculous “celebration” of a holiday that was originally seen by the pagans “to be crucial joints between the seasons that opened cracks in the fabric of space-time, allowing contact between the ghostworld and the mortal one.” (This per The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker.) What is it about this culture that can’t deal with death? Why are we so surprised when it occurs? Why don’t we talk about it, study it, accept it as the natural transition of the soul from physical to ephemeral? What happened to us that we are so blind to the inevitable?

Okay, enough of the ranting. Maybe it’s the jet lag brain that’s got me so irritable. Let me try and put a positive spin on this Halloween gig. It’s time for a dog walk. I’ll go and get some fresh air and take some pictures of the neighborhood decorations. Maybe I’ll get a sign from the other side.
Got some great shots of the local scary lawn decor AND an undeniable sign (to be revealed after the pictures).

********

A Monarch butterfly, the only one I saw, on this cool Autumn day, flew out of a tree right when I walked by and kept circling me and the dogs while I stood there watching it. Orange and black. It’s orange and black–Halloween’s colors. Lighten up and have fun. Don’t get too full of yourself. Life is short. Soar. Spread your wings. Come out of your shell. Play. This is what I got from it. This was my message from the “ghostworld” and I’m keeping it. Bring on the trick-or-treaters! Bring on the horror shows! Dracula and Frankenstein! And bring on the scary poems…

Two from Emily Dickinson and one from our favorite scary poet–Edgar Allan Poe.

Because I Could Not Stop for Death

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then ’tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.

********

I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died

I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witness in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable,–and then
There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.

Emily Dickinson

********

Spirits Of The Dead

Thy soul shall find itself alone
‘Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone;
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.

Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness- for then
The spirits of the dead, who stood
In life before thee, are again
In death around thee, and their will
Shall overshadow thee; be still.

The night, though clear, shall frown,
And the stars shall not look down
From their high thrones in the Heaven
With light like hope to mortals given,
But their red orbs, without beam,
To thy weariness shall seem
As a burning and a fever
Which would cling to thee for ever.

Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish,
Now are visions ne’er to vanish;
From thy spirit shall they pass
No more, like dew-drop from the grass.

The breeze, the breath of God, is still,
And the mist upon the hill
Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token.
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!

Edgar Allan Poe

********

For more info on the origins of Halloween, All Saints Day & All Souls Day you can go to these web sites:

Celtic Religious Festivals

Library of Congress Folklife Center

It’s 4:30 in the morning. I’ve been in and out of sleep for an hour or so. The heater in the studio clanks and booms every time it comes on but I’m snuggled deep under the comforter trying to get some much needed rest. Just as I am slipping deeply into sleep again I am startled awake by loud (I mean LOUD) shrieks coming from Liza’s room and I’m bolt upright in bed shouting, “What is it? What is it?” She’s on my bed in two seconds flat. “A mouse! A mouse on my chest, looking right at me! I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it” There are critters around here and possums and raccoons roam the property at night alongwith their furry friends, but we were fairly certain that we wouldn’t be having any visitors in our studio but this little guy had another idea. Well, after talking Liza down and waiting for the sun to rise we both decided that this was a clear message that it was time to head out of Hambidge and back home to Boston and L.A. We were planning on leaving on Friday anyway and it turns out a big storm is whooshing up the east coast in the next couple of days so it was a good idea to get going before it hit. We (well, I’m not sure Liza’s in complete agreement) call the mouse “our little angel” as he prompted us to leave and miss the storm.

All in all we come away from Hambidge with a lot of good writing down and some life lessons that we’re still in the process of sorting through–and I’m sure we will continue to do so for a long time. We’re in Chester, Virginia tonight and heading to bed early to get up at 5 and on the road at 6 driving to Philly where I’ll be getting on a plane to L.A. Liza will be getting home that evening. We’re both ready to be home and in our own beds, under our own covers, hopefully with no mice to contend with. We’ll see where the writing goes from here. Posted below are a few more photos I’ve taken over the last week.

Fran, the resident co-ordinator, in her office.

Back door to the Rock House.

Spot, the cat. Where were you when we needed a mouser??

The garden shed.

The recycling and garbage shed.

In the garden.

Down the road at Hambidge.

On the back porch at Garden.

Abandoned house and barn.

At the Dillard pharmacy and soda shop.

Tuesday morning and a chilly one. Yesterday was productive. I worked on revising my essays. Liza wrote another chapter for her book. I spent all day on the property, only left the studio once to go down to Rock House and make a phone call. It felt good to be in the groove. My goal is to do a preliminary revision of each essay before I leave, also marking down how mang pages and words in the piece. I was saying to Liza yesterday how it feels like now I can talk about the essays as one entity, that they are starting to congeal and form into a chorus of many voices singing together, really that they are not “they” anymore but “It” and have a single destiny. Yippee!!

I was reading another encouraging and inspiring book yesterday by William Stafford. He’s always been dear to my heart as he was the poet laureate of Oregon for many years and that’s my home state. He also writes great poems and was a teacher at Lewis & Clark College for many years. His approach to writing poetry is so real, so uncomplicated. He (just as Brenda Ueland does) believes that the key to great poetry is the greatness of the poet, not whether they have multiple degrees, have read every classic backwards and forwards or have fame and fortune in their lives. This is what he says in his essay The End of a Golden String from his book Writing the Australian Crawl: “Let me say that a poem comes from a life, not a study. The influences pounce upon a writer, and any rules or traditions get buffeted. Entering the sequence–writing or reading–is entering what unfolds.”

Stafford rose every morning of his life at 4 AM to write. He knew that if he showed up for writing, if he sat there with pen in hand and began where he was at that moment that it was possible he would be led somewhere interesting. He believed in writing as a practice, not as a product. He says in his essay A Way of Writing: “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions.” I feel in complete alignment with this view of writing. It is my experience that writing is 80% the heart and soul of the writer and 20% craft. I have read so much writing that did not move me–oh, there were deep contemplative thoughts, beautiful language arranged artistically on the page, but I felt nothing when I read it. There is nothing “wrong” with such writing or with the one who wrote it. There is only a misdirection of energy which has been perpetuated by the culture pointing the writer in the direction of intellect rather than spiritual and emotional depth.

I hadn’t been writing much of anything new since I had been here but after reading Stafford’s essays I sat down and did exactly what he suggests and this came to me by starting simply with describing what I saw…

Garden Studio Monday Morning

Out the window the water tower covered with ivy, a dozen red leaves clinging. On top a rotting two by four ensnared by the vine, moss clinging, three rusted nails protrude. A breeze shakes the yellow leaves. Inside the heater blows warm air. My fingers are chilled, goose bumps on my legs. I can feel the tip of my nose, icy and numb. In the garden below birds feed on decaying plants. The mottled hillside to the south is letting go the sun, slipping into winter. Somewhere people are wearing suits and ties, hose and high heels, taking elevators to the 23rd floor to their desks, opening their computer, a cup of coffee beside them, looking at the clock at nine, wanting it to be five. Somewhere trains are running and street lights change from red to green and mother’s drop their children at school, take the laundry to the cleaners, stop for groceries, fill the car with gas. Somewhere planes are flying to New York and Zurich and Bombay. Someone opens a magazine, another does a crossword, the earth passes below; farms and cities, mountains and rivers essing through the land. Here, outside the window, the tower, the trees and garden, the birds and clear blue sky. Here I am watching, recording. Here we are woven together, remembered; forever and immortal.

********

Here are some photos of the Garden Studio inside and out:

Road from Rock House up to Garden and other cabins farther up in the woods

The Garden Studio

The tower and garden shed.

My sleeping and meditation space.

My Writing Desk

This is a big room where performances can be held. That’s a grand piano in the corner.

Liza’s room

Out Liza’s window

I don’t know if you can ever really tame your dragons. More likely you can come to peace within yourself and learn to accept a certain amount of turmoil when you stir up their nest. What am I talking about? Well, coming thousands of miles across the country and ending up in a cabin in the woods, a rustic cabin, without phone or internet, and me without a car, well, that got my dragons out and roaring. I’ve spent three out of five nights at the Holiday Inn Express and Liza and I were on the brink of making like trees and “leafing” this morning because we were having such a difficult time sleeping and focusing on our work. We decided to check out one last option…the Garden Cabin, which has a very large room and a small “apartment” in the back with a bedroom, kitchen and bath. We decided to give it a go and unloaded our bags once more and rearranged the furniture, setting up a futon bed for me in the big room and settling Liza in the back. With that settled we’re hoping to get back to honing in on our writing.

I’ve been working on compiling and organizing my essays and have enjoyed seeing them all again, like old friends, reminding me of the times and the places when they were conceived. I have a lot of affection for these writings. They feel like a conversation I was having with friends, working out what was difficult or joyous or curious or infuriating. I can see in them where I speak authentically and where I can tend toward more of a stiff, prosaic voice. I just got through reading the book, If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland. I’ve had it on my bookshelf for at least five years (a recommendation from a friend when I first started writing) and pulled it out last week just before I left, thinking it would be inspiring to take it with me this week. Ms. Ueland was a strong and independent woman who taught writing to “regular folks” and reveled in seeing how when someone spoke true to their own way of being, how alive and engaging their writing was for the reader. She loudly and clearly denounces academic writers who make their work complicated and convoluted, not telling their stories from the heart, but from the head. I felt she spoke so directly to my own misgivings and have now put her right up there as one of my muses along the journey of creating this manuscript. I highly recommend this book for writers–beginning, intermediate and especially, advanced.

Rock House, where meals and laundry and phone are. The first night we went to dinner we were swarmed by thousands of lady bugs right at the front steps. It was a warm day and they must have hatched. By the next day they were all dead.

Liza & I in Rock House catching up on email.

On Friday night we had an impromptu get together. I read one of my essays and a couple of poems and Kathy (below) did a presentation of one of her pieces (she’s a storyteller, writer and actress) about the women of the South during the Civil War, spoken with their own words. It was really wonderful.

It’s high color season here in the Southern Appalachians. I took some photos of the local landscape and even though a couple of them are a bit hazy, you can see how absolutely stunning Autumn is here in northern Georgia.

Please Note that you can click on book and author titles and be taken directly to Powell’s Bookstore to purchase or peruse. Or, you can use the Powell’s Search on the sidebar to look for and purchase on their site.

The food here is fantastic (didn’t I say that in the last post?) and last night Cindy outdid herself with herbed soup, pasta with garlic, mixed green salad with homemade dressing and these little breaded eggplant rolls stuffed with cream cheese and ricotta that were so delicious of course I had to have seconds. And everything is vegetarian, which is such a blessing when there are so many of these kind of workshops or retreats where I’m reduced to eating lettuce, tomato and cheese sandwiches.

Before each meal all the fellows (that’s the term for the artists here, male or female) all hang out eating hors d’oeuvres and talking about our projects, our day and anything that happens to come up. Last night the discussion included Rilke’s poems, if the artist can ever make art without imprinting his/her mood or intention into the art, the thousands of swarming lady bugs (most of which were laying dead on the windowsills, floor and tables all over the enclosed porch), and about the bear hunters who might have been out that day treeing a bear.

Janet, Kathy and Liza

Dick and Norma

Fereydoon & James

I slept at the cabin last night, watched a couple of my movies from The Spiritual Cinema Circle, locked all the doors and turned on the night light so I could find my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I didn’t sleep particularly well, but that’s not news these days. I loved the quiet and felt very warm and secure in this little cabin. In the morning the light coming through the mist onto the leaves was exquisite and a good omen for a creative and productive day.

In the morning I read and wrote for a couple of hours then organized my printed essays to prepare for the afternoon when Liza came over and we put them up on the white board into preliminary categories with poems to go with them. Tomorrow I’m going through quotes I have saved over the years to match a quote with each piece. This is all such a great process and we were so stoked by the end just looking at them all hanging there–actual manifestation of a budding manuscript.

Today the sun arrived and the temperature went up into the 70’s. We arrived yesterday at Hambidge in the rain, pouring at times, fog and wind, like it was going to go on for days or weeks. But it moved on, went south and today the colors of the trees on the hillsides call to be admired, to be stared at, open-mouthed and with reverance. It’s the south and everything here seems of a gentler nature; people passing on the street slow their step just a bit, say hello, nod, look you in the eye. The little town of Clayton, five miles south of Dillard (where The Hambidge Center resides) has a health food store, a coffee shop called the The Grape & the Bean, a local medium who visits once a month to do readings at Mindful Expressions, a “new age” shop owned and run by Christy, a 64-year old, whose charm and wit kept Liza and I buying crystals, candles and charms for ourselves and friends until we’d racked up a good $100 each.

Last night was our first dinner with the other artists here. There are eight of us this week: Norma, a quilter from Asheville; James, a painter from Atlanta; Dick, a composer, from Atlanta; Kathy, a storyteller, from Murietta, GA; Fereydoon, a painter from Atlanta; Janet, a poet from Columbus, OH. The chef, Cindy (whose reputation as a fantastic cook preceded her), laid out a delicious dinner of lentil dahl, curry, basmati rice, collard greens and pumpkin bread for dessert. Better even than the wonderful taste was the loving energy felt in the ingestion of such food. It was a sweet beginning to our week and we were welcomed with loving arms into the Hambidge family of artists.

My little nest in the woods is called Cove Cabin. It has wood floors painted white, a red roof, windows that stretch across one entire side of the house looking out into the trees to the hills beyond. There’s a small bedroom, living room with two desks in it, a couch, chair and fireplace. The kitchen and bathroom do what they were intended–no frills, definitely this is a “cabin” not a condo. I set up a little altar, hung a sparkling angel in the window, burnt incense, lit candles, laid out my books and bought a flowering plant to place on the desk. It is beginning to feel like home. Today I read and slept and wrote a little bit–a warming up exercise, mostly, about the leaves and the sounds of the animals in the woods. Last night I slept in a hotel in town as I wasn’t quite ready to be alone in the cabin, but tonight I’ll sleep there on my little single bed and listen to the night and hopefully, dream a good dream.

The woods outside my cabin at twilight in the rain.

Leaves on the path.

The road up to the cabin.

Cove Cabin with the sun breaking through.

Leaves, leaves.

The Grape & Bean in Clayton.

I’m sitting in a hotel in Asheville, North Carolina. The rain is drizzling outside. It’s dark. Liza and I were in the car from 8 am until 6. We drove through the Blue Ridge and the Applachian Mountains. We ate Mexican food at a little town in southern Virginia. We listened to two CD’s of poetry with Sandburg, Auden, St. Vincent Millay, T.S. Eliot, Langston Huges, H.D., and more. We talked about our writing projects, our kids, friends, her enrollment in the MFA program at Lesley University. Claudine (that’s what we call the satellite navigator in her car) kept us on track telling us in her calm, but insistent voice, when to turn right or left, what exit to take and exactly how many miles and how many minutes to our destination. We talked about the heart chakra and Tony Hoagland and how road trips give you a chance to examine your thoughts and allow fresh input into sometimes stale brain cells. I got a motto for the upcoming week from a Langston Hughes poem “Deeds cannot know what dreams can do.” Oh, my God, if this could only be broadcast throughout the land–downloaded onto every IPod, MP3 player, computer and run across the bottom of the daily news–what a different world it would be. We ate sushi and salad and veggies with rice for dinner, checked our email and our phones and now we’re at rest until tomorrow and the adventure begins as we get settled in our little cabins, hang our clothes in the closet, put our almond milk and blueberries and tofu in the fridge, make the bed, set out a candle or two, stack the books on the desk, set up the computer, pull out a pen, a notebook, stare out the window at something new, something we’ve never seen before. Tomorrow is full of possibilities, just as today was and as every day will be, because that’s what we feed on, as much as air or water or food or love…be they grand or be they humble, we must have possibilities, or we have nothing, we only trudge along…we do not sing, never dream. Wow! That got heavy all of a sudden. Well, here’s to dreams and possibilities and blue, smoky mountains and sushi and a good night’s sleep on a tempurpedic bed with down pillows and cotton sheets!

A Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
…Langston Hughes

The photos below were taken at the rest stop right after we crossed over the Tennessee state line. They had a whole visitors center there with brochures for all the sites in Tennessee, including Dollywood, which Liza was keen on going to. (I’m going to get in big trouble for that one.) They also had the highest rating so far on the trip for bathroom cleanliness and fragrance…and that’s no small thing to accomplish.

Tomorrow, at 5 AM I am driving to the airport and flying to Philadelphia where my friend Liza will pick me up (she’s driving down from Boston) and then we’ll be on the road for a day and a half on the way to Rabun Gap, Georgia to spend two weeks at the Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences. We both were granted fellowships and will be helping each other work on our writing projects, each in our own cabin with no TV, no internet (except for one line that we all share), no husbands, no jobs, no errands, and all the rest that comes with maintaining one’s “regular” life. I’ve never done anything like this before and up until a couple of days ago was trying all sorts of ways to understand how I was going to do it–felt like I had to really accomplish something big…go with a plan and come away with a product. Well, that’s pretty much disappeared and I’m simply looking forward to dreaming, reading, taking my journal and writing while I sit on the porch swatting flies and sipping tea. I desperately need the “nothing” where anything can, and often does, happen in the creative realm. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to blog, or even if I’ll want to, while I’m there but you can be assured I’ll be taking pictures and jotting down my thoughts to share.

Yesterday, here in L.A., there was a substantial cloud burst in our neighborhood. It was a very local event but the sky and the light and the rainbows were spectacular. I thought I’d share a couple of photos I took, one looking north, the other south. The contrast was amazing. If you look closely you can see the rainbow in one of them. I’m taking it as a good omen (it did happen on Friday, the 13th) for my trip and that the muses will be with me.

Bukowski…one of those great and terrible and brilliant and heart-breaking and triumphant figures that chose in his life to write…to write about what he saw, what he felt and what made him who he was and to write like no one had ever written before. When I was studying in school a couple of years ago I spent quite a bit of time reading Bukowski’s poetry, went to the movie “Born Into This” about his life and wrote a couple of papers, one of which I’ve reprinted below and the other, which was about how I saw him and Rumi as some kind of poetry Odd Couple, I’ll save for some other time. I even had a very powerful dream about him when I was at the Idylwild Poetry workshop where I felt his spirit daring me to crack open the “nice” me and let out the lion. Of course I wrote a poem about the experience, which is still waiting to be revised (which of course Bukowski would hate). Anyway, since I’ve been facilitating a workshop on him this week he’s been cruising around in my consciousness with all his intensity and inspiration, so I thought I’d plunk down this essay. If you want more info on him there are dozens of websites and most of them have quite a few of his poems posted. Google away.

Charles Bukowski was born in 1920 in Germany. He spent his childhood and the majority of his adult life in Los Angeles. He is somewhat of a cult figure in the Los Angeles poetic scene. His childhood was a “horror,” as he describes it, of brutal beatings and emotional deprivation. He turned early in life to alcohol for escape from the pain of his past. In the documentary on his life, Bukowski: Born Into This, he is queried on when he started writing poetry. He says that when he was 13 he picked up a pencil and just started writing. He discovered a way to have a voice, to express himself that no one could take away from him.

There is rawness in Bukowski’s poetry that can be crude, even brutal at times. He writes of the street, the bedroom, the bar and the racetrack. The people in his poems are whores, pimps, crazed poets, women who throw themselves at him, and always, himself. He never shies away from telling what he sees and how he sees it. He doesn’t make excuses for how he sees the world or the dysfunctional world that he inhabits. This is where he lives. This is what he knows.

When I first began to read Bukowski’s poems I had a difficult time getting through the harsh language he often uses, but as I read deeper into the collection I was able to let go of my judgments and hear the beauty underlying his work. It was a tremendous help for me to hear Bukowski read his poetry and see the interviews with him in the documentary. To know about his life and the circumstances and times through which he lived are instrumental (at least for me) in connecting with the essence of his poetry. He suffered greatly and for most of his life he struggled mightily with functioning in any kind of social or structured society. He himself said that the one thing the beatings taught him was to “do away with any pretenses.” This is seen clearly in his poetry and in the way he lived his life.

Bukowski was a prolific writer. He wrote over 45 books of poetry and prose. When reading this volume of poetry it was as if I was reading a history of Los Angeles spanning half a century. His poems are written in a style that is very prose-like, with few flourishes or nuances. You can read down the page as if a story is being told, with scenes, dialogue, drama and humor all packed into a page or two—like you’re reading a short story. One example of this is the poem, “my literary fly,” written on a very hot day when he is trying to write. This is the first stanza:

115 degrees
not even a turkey could be happy in this heat
but it beats burning at the stake,
and like my uncle once said
(when I asked him how things were going)
he said, well, I had breakfast, I had lunch and
I think I’m going to have
dinner;
well, that’s us Chinaskis,
we don’t ask for much and
we don’t get much,
except I have an awful good-looking girlfriend
who seems to accept my madness,
but still, it’s
115 degrees.

Bukowski shines a light on the everyday. He glorifies the weather, the words of his uncle, his girlfriend and, most significantly, how we human beings simply cope with the life that has been handed to us. This, I believe, is what drew so many of the rebellious young to his poetry in the ‘60’s & ‘70’s. He did not sugarcoat. He did not offer a philosophy. He did not say he had the “answer” to anything. He put his screwed up life out there on the page and laughed at it, screamed at it and cried over it. He said, as the title proclaims, that “what matters is how well you walk through the fire.”

There is a tremendous amount of heart in Bukowski’s poetry. Underneath his crusty, belligerent exterior is a man of great tenderness. He is ferocious in his desire to be real in a world where there is so much pretension and conformity. He understands the men and women who are down and out, on the streets, who do what they have to do to survive. He knows he is one step away from being one of them.

winter: 44th year

I am sad
like
a
dead angel

I am sad
like
porksalt

I am mad
like
a
dead angel

a woman has
told me
when things get bad
she’ll come and
bring me
lovely living
angels.

I phoned her
an hour ago
holding a
sharp knife
in my
left hand.

the phone service
said
they’d

leave the
message.

Through all the drinking, gambling and rage Bukowski goes on. His message is always one of hope. There may be much despair in the lives of the people he writes about, and in his own circumstances, but every day he rises from his bed and he writes. He gives of himself and he has the courage to put what he knows down on paper and send it out into the world to be heard, to be felt and to be a hand reaching out to those who are lost and confused in an overwhelming world, where their voices are rarely heard.

Poetry clearly saved Bukowski’s life and if not for writing he might have ended up a violent criminal or a derelict on the street. He fought the good fight and through his poetry he found his way. In the final poem of this collection, an older, wiser and softer Bukowski speaks directly to the reader in “roll the dice.”

if you’re going to try,
go all the way.
there is no other feeling like
that.
you will be alone with the
gods
and the nights will flame with
fire.

do it, do it, do it.
do it.

all the way
all the way.

you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter, it’s
the only good fight
there is.
(last 4 stanzas)

Bukowski brought a dynamic new voice to poetry at the time when it was sorely needed. He freed many poets to follow him to speak in their natural voices, to speak of what they knew (even if it wasn’t “pretty”) and to throw a good majority of the “rules” out the window. His disdain for pretenses gives his poetry a freshness and an honesty that grips the reader from the first word to the last.

In all the multitude of poems that Charles Bukowski wrote there is one constant; if a man such as he, who has been through such unspeakable pain, can do his laundry, sort mail at the post office for 15 years, and sit down at the typewriter to write poetry every day of the year, then there is hope, and a place in this world, for all of us.

Monday morning I was feeling down in the dumps. I was sitting on the floor by the side of my bed doing a bit of yoga and trying to breathe myself out of my head and into a more expansive space. On my nightstand was the latest edition of the Best American Poetry (2006), so I picked it up and opened it to see what might fall out and found this poem by Mary Oliver. I was reminded how her poems were the portal through which I reconnected with poetry and understood the power of poems to reach into the soul and lay it open. I think what I love most about her writing is that she is so grounded in the earth and all of the plants and animals and minerals that inhabit it and she has the vision to see how we, the humans, are eternally trying to reconcile the earthly ways with the transcience of our own existence. We are made of the same fragile flesh but we have this capacity to comprehend that there is something beyond, that there is some organizing force pulsing through it all. Her poetry continues to touch me deeply.

The Poet with His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need any more of that sound.

So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

from New and Selected Poems, Volume Two
Beacon Press, 2005