Neat on the Net: Heat Wave

It's stiflingly humid here. But here are three interesting things from the net:

1) Oprah on how to beat the lags and dips in your daily rhythm (called utradian rhythms). In all this heat, we can all use tips on how to maximize our energy by listening to our body.

2) Here is an excerpt from Li-Young Lee's talk at Poets & Writers Live: Agents & Editors in Chicago on June 20, 2015. On abundance and scarcity. On what two (make that three) things a poet must study. A new (as yet untitled) poem.

3) My friend poet Erin Malone sent me this picture from the Poets House newsletter. Do you see what I see? Eeeeee! It's Mendeleev's Mandala, on the upper left shelf! (And featured in the picture is poet Jan Clausen with her new book Veiled Spill: A Sequence--that's what the picture is really about.)

Fall

“We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is... joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.”

― Joseph Campbell, Sukhavati

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Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.   Denise Levertov

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Winter Litany   Robin Davidson
                        Kraków, March, 2004

I stand on Wawel Hill
in early March and morning snow
falls in flocks
tiny paper cranes
descending blowing dissolving
one into another
on the cobblestone walk
an avalanche of light

I believe this must be
what death is

this alternate
shining and melting, shining and flying

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“I like the floor as a place for grieving. You can't fall off." Kate Braestrup, Main Chaplain to Game Wardens on "Speaking of Faith."

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One Heart            Li-Young Lee

Look at the birds. Even flying

is born

out of nothing. The first sky

is inside you, Friend, open

at either end of day.

The work of wings

was always freedom, fastening

one heart to every falling thing.

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Grief Daybook II                    Carol Ann Davis

There are panels of sky
as good as forgotten, 

Evans' gelatin folds of Florida
circa 1934. The line of sky is dark at first

where the gulf lifts it,
then comes to me like a halo 

around the palm tree with its neck bent,

its spray of branches 

leaning out of frame
as if to flee. Its roots pull 

at sand, as if to say,
this is what it takes.

I'd believe, if not for the way

my breath catches, 

if not for the wild faint

sleep's become. The palm's branches

are spears left
where they've fallen 

in the dirty sand, too heavy

for the tide to take them. Where the neck bends, 

cut branches—like stubble on a chin
as seen from below—seem to ask

something of the photographer,
something not washed away

in the chemical bath. The shadow of the trunk
just underlines—means to prove the existence 

of the world. It's three o'clock

and the latticework of 1934 

is pulling around me in this light

as if to say my god, my god,

a hymn sung

by infidels to believers 

as a way to ask for water.

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Apprehension in the Blurry Trees                            Cameron Thomas

Fallen, what can a leaf care about being plucked from its
      branch?

Two crows forage on the roof across the street, stepping
      along a gutter, picking through tan and rusty
      swatches, and casting them to the ground.

One finds what he wants, so he steps to the edge, drops,
      and glides across the blurry trees.

The other remains, keeping a leaf in her beak as though
      it were a body.

She must be the one who speaks from the heart and ruins
      everything.

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Fall down seven times; get up eight.                                          Japanese proverb

Channeling BOA

So I just ran across the BOA Editions Limited YouTube Channel. Who knew you could access readings by BOA poets such as Li-Young Lee, Keetje Kuipers, Craig Morgan Teicher, and Kazim Ali (among others) all in one place? For someone living in a region where poetry readings are few and far between (as I do), this is a find!

I'll bet there are other similar channels on YouTube. I'll let you know when I find them if you'll do the same for me!

The Belled Herds

I have early morning wakefulness, a kind of insomnia which wakes me in the middle of the night, often for an hour or two, and sometimes for the duration. It is during these hours that I lie awake and work on my poetry memorization project. This helps me accomplish my memorization goal, and keeps my mind from wandering into the panicky places that woke it in the first place.

Recently I've been working on memorizing my 10th poem, "The Envoy" by Jane Hirshfield, which I include below (and which you can hear the poet read here):

The Envoy by Jane Hirshfield

One day in that room, a small rat.
Two days later, a snake.

Who, seeing me enter,
whipped the long stripe of his
body under the bed,
then curled like a docile house-pet.

I don’t know how either came or left. 

Later, the flashlight found nothing.

For a year I watched

as something—terror? happiness? grief?— 

entered and then left my body.

Not knowing how it came in,

Not knowing how it went out.

It hung where words could not reach it.
It slept where light could not go.
Its scent was neither snake nor rat,
neither sensualist nor ascetic.

There are openings in our lives
of which we know nothing.

Through them
the belled herds travel at will,
long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

This poem has stayed with me for years because of the stunning combination of recognition and foreigness I felt the first time I read the words "the belled herds." Immediately my mind conjured up images of Tibetans and nomadic Mongolians herding yaks, which I'd seen on TV documentaries. Although bells are used as a tool for managing herds of sheep and cows in my home country as well, I sensed immediately the strange feelings evoked by the situation this was a metaphor for, which were confirmed by the words "foreign dust" in the next line.


Still, there was a recognition, both of the sensation described and of the exotic metaphor used to describe it. The word "belled" so clearly lets the reader understand that these herds must be moved from place to place, either by migration or by nomadic owners or by grazing needs. Whatever the case, we immediately understand that bells have to be used on herds that are not fully enclosed by fencing, or not enclosed by fencing at all. If there were a complete and secure fence, no bell would be needed. We understand all of this without Hirshfield even having to mention fences and all the tangled feelings they create in us. So succinct a way to say so much.

And so I felt a complete understanding and yet a foreigness when I first read the words "belled herds," which of course is an echo of the feelings described in the poem. Brilliant.


Memorizing this poem also gave me the added benefit of noticing that it, like the Li-Young Lee poem "One Heart" that I memorized lasst month, use the word "opening" or "open" where I would have used "gap" or "gape" or "gaping hole." The comfort of seeing two of my favorite wise writers use these more mysteriously hopeful words to describe what I usually put a negative connotation to was a gift to me, one I wouldn't have noticed without my memorization project (or my sleeplessness, my opening into the night.)