Some days I’d like to believe that the most important thing in all the world (well, in my world anyway) is the poem I’m working on—my current one, the one that’s fresh and full of potential, still moldable and tweakable. I’ve got a couple right now that I wrote over the last few days. I may be talking on the phone with the online bank manager or taking a shower, walking in the meadow or watching Crossing Jordan on TV, but I can feel them circling around back there in my head, arranging and rearranging themselves. I go to the computer several times a day to pull them up, read through them, read them aloud, pull a word out here or there, switch another one out, shift the line breaks. When I’ve got a new version I like I print them out on a fresh sheet of paper and set them on the desk.

 There’s been a large red-tailed hawk circling around the house and immediate area the last few days. Sometimes I only catch the enormous shadow of his wings out of the corner of my eye. Just now I watched as he (or she) took a few turns right outside the window, seemed to have something in his sights, but then let the wind carry him away with no reward for his efforts. It feels that way with poems sometimes. I’ll have an inspiration that, in the moment, lyrically sings its way into my head. I write it down and it appears beautifully on the page, so fresh and authentic. In the moments, hours and days following I never take my eyes off of it, hover over it, nursing and encouraging it along, even though at times it may lose all of its luster, seem dull and unwilling to accurately portray the illumination of my original thoughts. More often than not, I must move on to another poem, let this one go, admit that it’s either not ever going to make the grade or that it needs time to mature, come of age, before I can embrace it fully and take it all the way home.

As for the two new poems presently on the table next to my left elbow—I am encouraged. They are coming along nicely, without any major hang-ups to wrestle with at this time. They’ve still got to go through the gauntlet of the workshop and being honed to the point of submission (that’s submission for publishing, of course). Time will tell. Tomorrow the forecast is for thunderstorms. Perhaps there’ll be a new poem there; in the lightening, the rain, the movement of the clouds in the sky. It’s not mine to ordain. The poem, just like the red-tailed hawk, glides into sight on its own clock, shows itself fleetingly. If you don’t look up in that moment, if you don’t grasp it in your heart with passionate adoration, it simply moves on over the trees, out of sight.
 

Rock and Hawk

Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the falcon’s
Realists eyes and act
Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.

 
Robinson Jeffers
Selected Poems
Vintage Books, Publishers 

I wrote the piece below a few days ago when I was in New Mexico to renew body, mind and spirit at the Summer Solstice celebration in the Jemez Mountains. First my husband and I took a couple of days to ourselves, nestling down in a B&B in the Pecos Mtns. owned and run by a family who had carved a beautiful home and accommodations out of the side of a mountain. The father, aptly named "The Mountain Man" has a small tree farm and lives in his own cabin, while his daughter, Judy and her husband Steve live in the upstairs of the sturdy log and stone home they built just a few years ago. We stayed in the large suite downstairs with king bed and jacuzzi tub and breakfast served in the adjoining kitchen/dining/living room area. Our two days there were perfect for resting, doing nothing and going nowhere.

The following few days were spent on another mountain with fewer trees and many, many more people. We’ve been coming to Summer Solstice since 1972 and it has never failed to be transformative, starting every morning with the three a.m. wake-up, the call to stretch the body and mind, to awaken the soul to the field of infinite possibilities. During the day there are yoga classes, cruising the bazaar, children’s camp, karma yoga (chopping veggies, camp maintenance, serving food, the list is really endless), connecting with friends and making new ones and in the evening music at the Yogi Tea Cafe under one of the massive white canvas tents. It is always a timeless experience, a pause in the madness of every day life–an alternate paradigm where the spirit is the priority and each moment is a precious opportunity to open to what could be, how individually and collectively we have the power to live as compassionate, courageous and conscious beings.

Today, another mountain range, the Cascades, is where I reside–back in Oregon for a week–with a couple of days of family ahead, then days to dive into more revision and preparation of poems for going out there in the world. But more on that later. Here’s the piece from the PE-letter from Monday with a few photos of the journey. Peace.

*************

The breeze is beginning to stir. It’s ten a.m. in the Pecos Mountains in northern New Mexico. Yesterday we rested, my husband and I, slept on and off all day, didn’t leave the premises. The pine and fir trees, the pond with trout, the wildflowers and blue sky were enough food for the soul. He watched golf on TV. I read Norman Dubie poetry and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. We both took long baths. I found myself inspired to reorganize my poems in my computer into those that were pretty much ready for submission and those that were still in need of some serious revision if they were to make the grade. It felt good to be ruthless about the readiness of the poems. I was determined not to cater to my attachment to any poem. To make it into the “Submission Ready” folder the poem had to meet a high standard of completion: rhythm, diction, form and meaning all had to mesh to make the poem sing. I was pleased to see that my standards have risen since I did a similar culling a few months ago. It has begun to mean more and more to me what the poem is aside from my sentiment or what I think it might convey. The poem must be an entity that is complete unto itself. It must have the ability to stand on its own two poetical feet.

We’re leaving here in a couple of hours. Everything back in the bags, back in the car and taking the drive through Santa Fe to Espanola and up into the hills to the 3HO Summer Solstice site where we’ll be there for a few days of yoga, meditation and connecting with our spiritual family of almost two thousand seekers. It will be hot and dry, the dust will blow, the skin will burn, thunderstorms will roll in and chanting will be heard echoing off the peaks and mesas. Just as the poems must be cut and amended, so it is time for a soul revision— a time of reflection and appraisal of the year past and the year to come and a look into the timelessness of the journey. I wish you all a blessed summer solstice and may all your revisions be clean and strong and may you always follow your bliss. It is the path to the center of your heart.

The Mountain Man 

The Pecos River 

Wild Irises 

A bucket of firewood.

The main trail through the Summer Solstice Camp. The yellow building is the kitchen, which is always jumping day and night! 

One of the yoga tents–looking out to the Jemez Mountains and Espanola Valley below. 

A little bluegrass music to end the day at the Yogi Tea Cafe.

The following is a short essay I wrote while I was in school at Vermont College a couple of years ago. It’s on the book, Poetry as Survival by Gregory Orr, which is still one of my all-time favorites on the power of poetry to transform the individual, be it the writer or the reader. I’ve also included a few quotes from the book at the end and if you click on his name it will take you to the poets.org page on Mr. Orr.  Because of the length of the piece you have to click "Read On" to get it all.

At the age of twelve Gregory Orr was responsible for a hunting accident in which his brother died. He was devastated for many years. He eventually found his way back to a fulfilling and productive life through writing lyric poetry where he could express the guilt, shame and horror of that day. Orr has written and taught the art of poetry for the past twenty-five years and says of lyric poetry: “Everything I’ve learned in that time reinforces my own experience that the personal lyric helps individual selves, both writers and readers, survive the vicissitudes of experience and the complexities and anguish of subjectivity and trauma.”           

This book, especially in the first couple of chapters, read like a love story. I found myself richly absorbed in this homage to language, to language in the form of the personal lyric, where the hurts and longings of the soul can spread out onto the page as a salve upon a festering wound. Orr speaks authentically, with a wisdom and clarity that allowed me to take in what he had to say as if he was speaking as a friend, not as a scholar expounding with unquestionable authority. It is in Orr’s willingness to simply state what he has found true for himself, through experience and investigation, that I found myself relaxed and confident that we were in this together and he had my best interests at heart.

Orr gives the poet permission to be “self-centered” in writing the personal lyric. In fact, he insists it is essential for the speaker in the poem to “absolutely believe that he or she is the central point around which all meaning constellates.” He goes on to say that, of course, this is not healthy as a principle for daily life, but without the assertion of the poet’s confidence in the writing of the personal lyric the poet, as Antonio Machado says, “wanders disoriented again among objects.” It is heartening and empowering to hear this call to the poet to stand firmly in his or her experience, to claim dominion over the expression of their poem as truth, if only for them, if only for that moment. It is at once liberating, and a responsibility, to be taken seriously in the crafting of a poem; keeping attuned at all times to the honest nature of what is emanating from the self into the language of the poem. To do otherwise is to create something lifeless, words that will suck energy from the reader, rather than imbue him/her with a kind of life-juice, an electrical current flowing from poet to poem to reader.

Orr illustrates the transformative powers of the lyric poem through the examples of a multitude of works where the poets have written of struggles, tragedies and transcendence. He speaks of the need, no matter what our level of trauma, to create order from disorder; to have a methodology in which our psyche can comprehend the incomprehensible. Often, as can be seen in the mentally and criminally ill, a distorted order has been achieved, one which has not been allowed to be expressed healthily, to be heard in a way that brings a peaceful resolution. When one does not use an outlet, such as art, to “make sense” of the paradox which is human existence, the mind is stuck, as a scratched record, repeating the trauma over and over, until there is an implosion or explosion.

(Read on …)