Some Poetry at Breakfast

Originally uploaded by w e n d y

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels…
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
Billy Collins, Marginalia

Oh, that last line got me and I had to read it over one more time:
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

Don’t we all do that? Or try? Or hope?
And what might that vessel be?
Not that I thought all these words. No, they stirred around inside me quite unspoken as I stirred my oat meat in its bowl and read the words yet a third time enjoying once again all the questions still unheard.

I’ve been reading Billy Collins for the past week in small, delicious bites: at breakfast, at the hospital, reading aloud a poem or two to Mom and my sister as we wait for doctors, for drugs to help, for healing to begin, for the next “to do.”

It’s been nice. We’re not a family given to reading poetry to one another.
But this past week it has been just right, and this morning Billy didn’t fail me:

Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

How would you like it?
I can tell you that this past week I have found it rough going
And the very essence of awakening.

Some Days, by Billy Collins

Photo courtesy of Wendy

Bad Poetry

earth air fire water
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

I’ve been writing what I call “Bad Poetry.” It started as an effort to conserve the one-liners that spontaneously arise in my constantly chattering mind – those snippets that suddenly stop me in my tracks and momentarily stun me into Silence.

Like the time my partner called from the distant kitchen, “There’s a cricket in the teapot.”
Or the other morning as I dragged myself outside for a cup of coffee only to be amazed by the sunrise and I heard the comment, “God doesn’t know it’s a Monday.”

To me these moments are brief epiphanies that invite poems I have never finished. And so recently I sought to remedy that. Thing is the Moment has long passed and I am left to write the poem itself from a very ordinary state. I went with the appellation, Bad Poetry, kind of an excuse and apology. Though, I do discover that the slow reworking of the lines day after day does begin to shift my brain until it begins to function differently. I begin to feel the original expansiveness that the first line stirred.

There’s a cricket in the teapot –
decrying kitchen accident
her intent was never poetry
though linguistic ambiguity
encourages the paring down
as one might peel an apple
until she could not help herself
until delight became intolerable
until with thumb and forefinger
she placed the phrase... there
right beside the cup.

Presentation, presentation,
she whispered
satisfied.

OK, bad poetry. But, I enjoyed it.
In fact, I have long forgotten bits of bad poems scattered through computer files and scraps of paper tucked away which I find from time to time. It was in this context that a few day as ago, while sorting though old stock trading notebooks (a whole other life and story) my eyes fell upon a folded paper stuck in a notebook pocket. There in my own hand once deliberately set upon the page and now totally forgotten were these words:

To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bench of shadow…

Whoa! No recollection of doing this at all. What an awkward line! What was I thinking? What patios? I don’t know no “patios.” So I started from the top and read slowly once again. My displeasure with the first few lines settled a bit after a few repetitions. I let them off with a "well, OK" as I began to catch the rhythm and could continue on. I began to like each line more and more:

To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bench of shadow to have watched
those scattered lights
that my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their place in constellations,
to have heard the note of water
in the cistern
known the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle,
the silence of the sleeping bird,
the arch of the entrance, the damp
these things perhaps are the poem.
Jorge Luis Borges

This wasn’t my poem! My brain shook itself like some loose jowl dog shaking drool in all directions. And then I was laughing and understood.
It was a real poem, by a real poet. And it was a keeper.

At the bottom of the page I had written:
It is the poem, it is the Silence
of our Self and wanting to come home.

And now I am wondering if maybe the journey would go easier if I didn’t prejudge and label from the start my efforts as “bad poetry.” Not that a discerning eye isn’t necessary – but how quickly discernment becomes merely critical, or worse cynical, or even worse, worse sophisticated.

What we need is simply an eye that notices.
An eye that is awake.
An ear that really hears.
So I’m sticking with the poetry. I’m betting Life will hurt less.

You are a bit happier…

friends 4ever...♫ well, don'cha?^o^
Originally uploaded by bocavermelha-l.b.

Well as I mentioned yesterday, I don’t think I have been laughing enough.
And well, Today has gotten on my last nerve.
And I can’t be all the time invoking menopause, ‘cause I don’t think that’s true.
(I drink soy milk for pete sake.) So... anyway...

I don’t think I’ve been crying enough either.
I had that thought this morning.
But, I didn’t have the time for any corrective measures.
And now, I’m at work. (that’s where I hurried to)
So screw that.
(And, I’m not a screamer. So screw that.)

Which is how I came to sitting quietly at the computer until I'd surfed into a neighborhood I didn’t recognize
and couldn’t tell you how I got there,
where I came across this book of poetry:

Tao Lin's, you are a little bit happier than i am

OH!
"Tao" – how cool
And the title – how true.
Then, I came across One Reviewer saying,

“Tao Lin’s poetry collection gracefully proves the theorem that nothing can be truly sad if it isn’t also funny.”

OH!
WOW!
I REALLY liked that.

So I have been trying to find a poem.
So far, so failed.

So I offer this excerpt from BigHeartedBoy who was good enough to post
Tao Lin's Book Notes essay on his poetry.

You are a little bit happier than i am is I think a non-fiction poetry book. The narrator is myself, "Tao Lin." I wrote most of the book to console myself against unrequited feelings, loneliness, meaninglessness, death, limited-time, and the arbitrary nature of existence, maybe. The reason the book today exists is because my brain used my body and the world of phenomenon as tools to create something to make itself feel better. My brain said to my fingers what to type, my fingers said, "Okay," words appeared on the computer screen, my eyes delivered the words to my brain, my brain processed the words, and my brain said, "I feel better, thank you. You're welcome."

Wow! This reminds me of the insight migraines provide… didn’t I write on that a bit ago? (PB talking here... now back to Tao Lin.)

When I was writing most of the book I think I lived in a studio apartment with my brother on 28th street in Manhattan. I was also working on two other books. A novel called Eeeee Eee Eeee and a story-collection called Bed. Each day I woke and ate cereal and brewer's yeast and flaxseeds and walked or took the train to the library and sat at the computer two to six hours until night, then walked to a bookstore and stared at books and walked somewhere else and stared and maybe ate dinner alone somewhere and walked back to the library where two to six more hours I stared at the computer screen (or sometimes I went to a reading and stared at authors), then around or after midnight went home and lay facedown or in a fetal position on my brother's bed. If my brother was asleep I hid in the bathroom and read on the floor, to not disturb him with light. I didn't see anyone really or have any friends, or talk, and slept on an air mattress. My life was optimized for writing. If I had a choice of what to do I would just think, "What will make my writing better," and then there would be no choice anymore and I would just do what was required, like a robot. It was good. ...

And that was good.

It made me want all the more to find a poem from you are a little bit happier than I am
But, all I was ever able to come up with were couplets
(are they couplets? Couplets?) ...

Anyway One Reviewer, while meaning to offer something like high praise

(“for every ounce of drear and self-pity, Lin inserts an arresting aside”)

mentioned these lines that finally made me realize that Tao Lin was
REALLY depressed:

this poem has all this between each stanza
…someone on the largest dose of tylenol cold in the history of the world falling off a sixty-story building at night.

Well, gee.
There’s an image.
This is actually Too depressed for me.
And suddenly, it hit me!

Hey!
You know,
I am a little bit happier than this guy! Tah Dah!

I Bow and exit stage right.
(Careful, Don’t trip over the curtain.)
Thunk...
damn this menopause, where's my soy milk?

Thinking too Much

Pear & Butterfly II
Originally uploaded by Jack Hindmarsh

I’ve been thinking a lot lately.
Making lists of reasonable reasons, if not on paper certainly in my head.
There’s this and this and this and this…

Then, yesterday I received an email from a Nick Forrest, which didn’t make any sense to me at first. It read

Subject: agatha defuse animate

bard bolshoi, chromatography conception bloomfield, defrock combine. compactify allure babyhood actinide dakota bureaucratic conveyance. bottommost capillary dobbin cancelled amos casualty astrophysical chairman cane burette chambers armenia. baxter alexander cruelty boeing angelic bloodstone browne

What is this? It makes no sense.
And then I realized.
This is "asemic poetry."

I’ve got this little asemic connection ,via my painting, to a group of artists round the world doing stuff like “concrete poetry” and this Nick Forrest must be saying hello in his own asemic manner.
That was it.

And then I recalled the poem I posted about a week ago. Yeah, I brought this on myself
probably with that bit of poetry that is actually an instruction on the lab’s centrifuge.

Now, it all was making sense and so I read again what Nick had sent.
And I began to get the feel... to understand.
OK!

So, I wrote Nick back:

Well, I really like "bottommost capillary dobbin," but the rest doesn't really help me make sense of a life that seems to be getting stranger by the moment.

“Cancelled amos casually.”

And I don't know if it’s good when it begins to fall into place. But, "Yeah."
“Angelic bloodstone browne.”

I really meant that, “Yeah,”
And was feeling pleased with making yet another little contact out there in radio-land,
When my email system sent a "failed delivery" notice.

Apparently, “Nick Forrest” is some kind of obfuscated computer dead-end in the UK.
And I had been carrying on, happily conversing with, even finding meaning in, the non-sense of some spam generating computer.

UNIVERSE to PATTY:
"You have gone too far!"
Coyote, you’re hanging in the air and the cliff edge is over there.
Get back, Honky Cat!

Sometimes non-sense is just non-sense…
Unless the intellect/intellectual gets a hold of it and starts thinking WAY too much.


So, (Good Buddhist that I am) from now on I am going with what’s right in front of me,
With That which simply Is.

... (In fact, I’m doing that right now) … (look. No hands) ... (Doing it.) ...

Well, Dang!
I find I still really like the phrase, “bottommost capillary dobbin.”
How very curious and
Delightful

How wonderful!

It all works out
even without a brain churning away.