A recent night-time muse of mine has received some positive response so I thought I would start out my first attempt at a blog by sharing it more broadly. Here is an excerpt of a letter, slightly edited, which I wrote to family and friends. I should note that the letter was written in preparation for an event at Chapters, Rideau branch, in Ottawa, Canada, which was organized by www.bywords.ca for area poets and a musician to share some of their work. Since my poem "i see" was being featured in the Bywords Quarterly Journal, I was invited to participate. The afternoon went well (Sunday July 16) and since then, I have discovered that I am one of the featured poets in this years annual poetry magazine, "Quills", with a poem I wrote inspired by my son, Jesse.
I should also note, for those of you who may not be aware, that I am a life-long practitioner of the Baha'i Faith, which is to say that my terms of reference for spiritual practice originate from having been raised as a Baha'i (by formerly Christian parents) and in adult life, to varying degrees, continue to believe and try to live according to the fundamental philosophies inherent in the teachings of Baha'u'llah, the founder of the faith. I also mention 'Abdu'l-Baha, in the letter; this was the son of Baha'u'llah, to whom Baha'is look as an example of how best to live a spiritual life. From time to time I may post some reflections on my Baha'i practice, but if you want to know "stuff" about the faith, I recommend reading or an internet search (at www.bahai.org/ or http://www.ca.bahai.org/index.en.cfm).
Back to poetry:
Here is the letter.
I will dedicate (dedicated) the reading to the memory of Juan O'Neill, a Cuban-Canadian poet who died suddenly last winter, and who devoted much of his life to the arts, organizing poetry readings and events for many years. I did not know him well, but I miss him at Sasquatch, which is where I did my first "full" reading as a profiled poet.
Then I will share (shared) some of my recent reading, and it is for this that I thought I might write out the remarks for you all. I have been thinking a lot about why poetry has come to mean so much to me, aside from the fact that it teaches me to be more brief than I would otherwise be. I am finding my voice, but it is through a medium that is not much paid attention to. Yet I am beginning to realize that poetry connects, in my mind, with spirit, in ways, perhaps, that prose finds more difficult. My summer reading at the cottage this year included much of the work of the Pulitzer winner, Buddhist professor and legend Gary Snyder. I also immersed myself in a series of essays entitled "Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy", edited by one of my favourite Canadian poets, Tim Lilburn, and with essays by several 'icons' of Canadian poetry: Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky, in addition to Lilburn. ...Here they are, for your rich contemplation, and perhaps to illustrate why I think of poetry as part of our spiritual repertoire:
"The reason for writing poetry is that poetry knows more than those who write it. My job as a poet is to listen, not to talk. I stand here talking at the moment, but if I want to write some poetry, I have to close my eyes or leave you and go elsewhere, and be quiet enough for the poetry to be heard. Poetry is what I start to hear when I concede the world's ability to manage and to understand itself. It is the language of the world: something humans overhear if they are willing to pay attention, and something that the world will teach us to speak, if we allow the world to do so. It is the wén of dào: a music we learn to see, to feel, to hear, to smell, and then to think, and then to answer. But not to repeat. Mimesis is not repetition."
Robert Bringhurst
Bringhurst also says, in another source, his poem "The Stonecutter's Horses": "The land is our solitude and our silence./A man should hoard what little silence/he is given and what little solitude he can get."
I am beginning to have some appreciation for that view!
I also will share this quote:
"Poetry begins at the edge of the ineffable, the silent site where words dissolve and one's understanding has more to do with intuition than reason, with emotion than logic....How can poetry not contain the spiritual..." Lorna Crozier
Lorna Crozier is a well-known Canadian poet originally from Saskatchewan. She now teaches at the University of Victoria, along with her husband, Patrick Lane, also a prolific and prize-winning Canadian poet. I will be studying with Lane at a poet's retreat on Vancouver Island in November... Last year I heard Crozier read at the Writer's Festival here. She said that poetry "comes from a place of immanence, the place where the poem is received." I liked that a lot; I find that if I take time to listen, I hear things in my soul that I had not heard before. I suspect that Baha'u'llah is giving us clues about this when He encourages us to meditate. I have long been struck by 'Abdu'l-Baha's observation that "it is axiomatic that a man cannot both speak and meditate at the same time." For one given so to speech, I find this pithy remark very helpful, and as I get older, am trying to learn to listen much more, not just to the words I hear, but to the underlying stories inherent in the meditative moments; the bird song, the pulse of the sleeping house in the night, the rain sweeping against the house, the sound of distant laughter from a child.
So I will talk about the influence of spirit to the people I speak to this weekend, and I will share with them a poem which I have not yet read in public but which I have workshopped. I am currently attending a class with Ottawa poet rob mclennan as its animator, along with Amanda Earl, Jennifer Mulligan, and Pearl Pirie, all lesser known but quite outstanding poets. I need to learn so much...
and recently rob invited Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell to address us. He gave a very interesting lecture, in which he said that poetry should be these things: a work of art in words, a dynamic tension between the culture it's produced in (the poet's sensibility and the reader's ability to decode it), should have "some sense of eternity, a vast finiteness that a poem can touch" and that a poem can "concatenate words", that in some ways, "every poem already exists" yet the infinite possibilities of the arrangements of words implies that there are yet thousands of poems to be written. Brockwell challenged us to write poems that had "vocal energy", a reason to speak, combined the concepts of temporality and memory, and worked competently with the line and with the word. He then gave us homework; to choose a form modelled on the past and to attempt a poem which did these things.
I chose to follow T.S.Eliot, in a very loose manner, in that when he created his "Four Quartets," he brought together four of his previous poems and combined them as a grand masterpiece of a statement. I did not attempt anything quite so grandiose, but I did decide to make my poem one of ecopoetics. Part of my thesis explored ecopoetry, or the poetry of advocacy/rage/celebration of the need to be tender to the ecology of the world, so I combined four previous poems into one, and titled the whole "ontology" (as I am fascinated by the science/logos of being). I think I may choose to read this poem on Sunday, rather than the one I published, which is called "i see" and which you can find under the Author's Index at the Bywords site, if you are interested: www.bywords.ca is the address.
So I will close my musings this evening by sending you the text of the poem I will use as my synthesis of spirit and form, a poem with "vocal energy" and "reason to speak," which combines temporality and memory, and works as a poem. Please consider my voice in "ontology".
ontology:
1. sand
“The ones who suffer/the ones who suffer,/
lie mutilated,/washed up on beaches,/
these words I sing/for you,”
Di Brandt, Now You Care
from les îles de la Madeleine
& Miquelon’s land spit to Tofino’s
Galapagos
salt water washes deeds
over sunken coral seed pearl grit
by solitude’s land mines:
nuclear core mushrooms
from inside Mururoa
women keen salt
into sable
gather kelp
green, green boils
over spiny urchins. soft flesh
essence: ambergris
what happens to sand
when lightning strikes
incandescent new forms borne
atoms
into the world:
2. cold
blood winter
she was caught in a March storm last winter
in small-town Saskatchewan. black woman
lived a long time there, never
experienced such a fight. elements.
wandered through whiteout, climbed drifts
towards locked alleys, found at last by
RCMP four-wheel drive security. winds
dogged steps like tumbleweed,
her life infected blood. hiv visions (Jesus, hallucinogens)
blood weeds. another refugee woman dug
old knees in soils better suited for tumbling.
the bounty of homelessness whispers its story.
she struggled across nothing that led
to her perhaps death. wondered what caprice
made her Lord leave her on that prairie
red till next cold, nothing white.
3. after light
it's not small, this moment winter crunch of snow
below imagination crisper than possible
it’s not neighbour's kid crackling cross ice deck, toqued
on plastic snow board, shadow absence of Alberta moon
not hay bales, horses, creaky sleigh, tractor, lost
old power. my father walks borrowed boots above sunswept
February rural mile. pancakes, kitchen patchwork black/white
range near hot coffee pot, mother's oxygen wheezes
nor gas fires distant laughters gnarled knitting fingers. sun slants
across that jade plant taller than some human bones
neither silence nor knowing this too shall pass, dark moments
en route through valleys. it's not awareness of pain
suppressed, this multivitamin ground gone waste
in saddened country. more, it’s catch of breath,
air into skin faded to telluric surge beneath frozen feet.
evening waits for what comes next,
not having any reason.
4. open
against forgetting
(for Carolyn Forché)
someone suggested
removal
fruitless trees
to plant an orchard
replacing stones gathered by
sea with semi-precious gems
(soul leaves body)
regret lost silhouettes, black
nightglow sky over valley
roots, stumps, knolls,
craggy wanderings of bark.
memory burgeons into
springs while sap lingers.
old buildings crumble.
some black white
wish, these unnameable branches,
skyward moss, this taste of pebbles.
