Quotes of the Day: Uncertainty

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how.
The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.
--Agnes De Mille

When we are not sure, we are alive.
--Graham Greene

Poetry Corner

Now for something a little different. Here is a comment I posted in response to a question on another blog which I didn't expect to get so fired up about, but I did. A reader was asking for suggestions, in honor of National Poetry month, of poems that were somewhat intelligible and accessible. Here's what I ended up writing:

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@Poems - As someone who ostensibly had an undergrad concentration in poetry, I share your impatience with inaccessible poems. Over the past few years I've started collecting poems/poets who I tend to be able to make heads or tails of and enjoy. Always eager to find a real-world application for this rather specialized knowledge, here are some of my findings:

Poems:

-Where You Go When She Sleeps - T. R. Hummer
-Summer Without Summering - Teresa Cader (this was recently on Poetry Daily [poems.com] which can be fun to check although their choices trend toward the highfalutin. Occasionally easily intelligible ones do pop up.)
-Faint Music by Robert Hass. I've found most of his poetry kinda hard to read but I adore this poem in particular.
-Night by Louise Bogan
-Asking for Directions by Linda Gregg
-In a U-Haul North of Damascus by David Bottoms (the best divorce poem ever?)

Poets:

-"Confessional" poets Sharon Olds, Kim Addonizzio, and and Dorianne Laux were quite popular when I was in undergrad, I think because a) their poems are often somewhat autobiographical and therefore somewhat intelligible, and b) because some of the poems had sex scenes!

-Denise Levertov and Jane Kenyon always struck me as classy ladies whose poems were both accessible and beautiful and deep. (Donald Hall was married to Jane Kenyon and his book of poems, Without, about her death from cancer, is a particularly heartbreaking one. And speaking of heartbreaking death poems, Kenyon's "Let Evening Come", written as she was dying, is right up there.)

-Charles Bukowski's poems are good if you're in the mood for some curmodgeonly, depressive musings about like, hard drinking and hard living. His poem Bluebird I think is relatively well-known and I like its kind of grudging optimism...shows his softer side.

-I remember having my mind blown by Gregory Corso's poem Marriage in my AP English class - upon revisiting him, he's still good for an anti-establishment Beat poet-y mood. The other Beat poet I don't think I saw mentioned yet was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who is usually a good time.

-All my professors were nutty over Elizabeth Bishop. And if they had studied with her, it was more like an obsessive cult. I haven't read that much of her but I do remember having my mind blown (again) when studying formal poetry by her villanelle "One Art".

-Edna St. Vincent Millay I find a little harder to get into what with the forms and the rhyming and lots of dust and brows and grass and weeping and the like, but definitely check out "Sonnet XLII, What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why"and "Dirge Without Music" (neither are real pick-me-ups, if you can believe it, but still great)

-Ted Kooser is another good, down-to-earth poet laureate. His Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison is a lovely book of short, post-card length poems.

-Come to think of it, googling a list of the poet laureates of the united states is probably a good way to come across good poets to check out who are at the very least well-respected and somewhat popular (well, as popular as a contemporary poet can be said to be.)

-Linda Pastan. Many lovely poems about family and relationships.

-Wendell Berry. Lovely, nature-oriented poems, many about farming and like, the soil, but often with a kicky, damn-the-Man environmentalist bent. Definitely check out "The Peace of Wild Things", "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front", and "Do Not Be Ashamed".

-Mary Oliver. Many gorgeous poems about nature and spirituality. In particular check out the poem "Wild Geese".

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Whew! I really got into writing that. Most of these poems/poets can be found by googling. Hope you enjoy!

In which the relation of the story of an unexpected gift transforms into rumination on the nature of inspiration

An everyday miracle occurred yesterday, in the sense that it happened not as a result of divine intervention but was a product of real live human effort and love.

I came home to get a few things before Gumbo Night at Spangles's house, and there on the steps was a tantalizing book-shaped cardboard package from MajorOnlineBookSeller.com. I always check the name on these packages left in the stairwell, even if I'm not expecting anything, because I'm a nosy neighbor. Inexplicably, it was for me! For me? My first thought was, great, I bet this is some sort of scam.

But when I brought it upstairs and opened it i found, much to my ferklempt-ting, that it was a brand new hardback copy of The Happiness Project, mentioned as an unaffordable luxury in an earlier post! Since this blog only has one reader at the moment, and I know who she is, I knew this surprise (but not surprising) expression of love came from The Twin. I will leave you to make your own connections as to the sterling character and generosity of heart of said individual, because in my opinion the internet isn't big enough to contain such a subject.

I have already begun to read it, and I'm two months in to her year-long project. (The author, Gretchen Rubin is speaking in Philadelphia in two weeks, too! Guess who will be there with her copy of the book!)

I will hold off on a full blown book review at this point, but preliminary findings suggest that, much to my relief, she has not written the be-all end-all book about happiness after which another one need never be written. There are things I disagree with, methods I question, ways that I would do it differently. My Happiness book remains to be written, my own tune still to be hammered out - as with all of ours as individuals. As she points out, each one of our lives, at least here in the Free World, can be their own Happiness Project.

One of the great things about wanting to create things and taking on enormous amorphous topics like Happiness, is that you never get it completely right. There is always more to be said, a different way to paint the picture that would be more accurate, more beautiful, truer. This is mostly unacknowledged brilliance of the Great Hunger - it keeps you awake and on your toes, keeps you striving, keeps you moving toward the horizon, certain that the answer is just over that next ridge. It's great, because if you're moving you're not stuck, even if that movement comes with this unsettled feeling of incompleteness, of wanting more. I've felt stuck too before in life, and the hunger is by far the more lively option.

I remember when I took a ceramics class as a teenager, as I learned all the different techniques and types of clay and firing and glaze, feeling overwhelmed as I realized the infinite possibilities. You could stay in a clay studio for an entire lifetime and never try out all the different possibilities, never finish all the ideas. And that's great! That feeling that there are too many ideas rushing through your head - that's the feeling of inspiration. It can be anxiety producing if you try to cling to each one and hoard it like a gold bouillon piece. The other option is just to stand there in the middle of the shower and enjoy getting soaked, be thankful for the rain, catch a few drops in your mouth and let the rest roll off of you, trusting that the source and patterns and reasons for rain are far beyond your capacity for comprehension. I think the reason get passionate about anything is precisely this sense of infinite possibilities, the sense that no matter how deep you dig you'll never finish the hole, but there's great stuff down there all the same.