Poet Matthew Dickman has a big idea: he wants us to advocate for poetry by buying a book (or two) of poems and sending them to someone in our lives (in the private or public spheres) who doesn't normally read poetry (or who we assume doesn't normally read poetry).
Read Dickman's plea here, at Tin House. He's decided on a hashtag over on Twitter so participants can share their experiences.
Good idea, yes?
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Resistance Quotes
Resistance is on my mind these days, for oh so many reasons. So today I offer quotes on resistance:
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"It’s not impermanence per se, or even knowing we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering, the Buddha taught. Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation. Our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness. When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. Another word for that is freedom—freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human."
Pema Chodron
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"The poem resists. It resists coming into being. It resists eloquence. It resists transmitting unpleasant or embarrassing knowledge. It resists grammatical constraints. It resists moving away from simple utterance. It resists revision. It resists completion. It resists success. Hopefully, the poet resists as well."
Stanley
"Art begins with resistance – at the
point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created
without great labor."
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"It’s not impermanence per se, or even knowing we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering, the Buddha taught. Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation. Our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness. When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. Another word for that is freedom—freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human."
Pema Chodron
****************
"The poem resists. It resists coming into being. It resists eloquence. It resists transmitting unpleasant or embarrassing knowledge. It resists grammatical constraints. It resists moving away from simple utterance. It resists revision. It resists completion. It resists success. Hopefully, the poet resists as well."
Jennifer Moxley, from "Fragments of a Broken Poetics" (Chicago Review, Spring 2010)
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"The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance starts
when you try to convert it into language. Language itself is a kind of
resistance to the pure flow of self. The solution is to become one’s language."
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"…remember
fear for what it is: a resistance to the unknown."
Terry Tempest Williams, from
an interview on the NPR show “Being,” interviewed by Krista Tippett (who read
this excerpt from a book of Williams’)
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Andre Gide, in Poetique
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"The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully"
Wallace Stevens (CP, 350)
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"Let us love the country of here
below. It is real; it offers resistance to love."
Simone Weil
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“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”
Leonardo da Vinci
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“Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is... The only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds. ”
Dan Millman
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“Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good...The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.”
Donald Miller
Monday, October 15, 2012
Three Isaacs
My sons have been for years now wildly into catching bugs. This is a common pasttime for children in Japan, though my sons have persisted at it many summers longer than most of their peers. We have a catch and release program which works well, except for the time they let 38 cicadas out in the living room when I told the boys to release them but was busy talking overseas on the phone and didn't supervise the emancipation. We had cicadas coming out of the drapes for days.
Beetles, huge ones, are the main madness here. We have even (I'm embarrassed to say) purchased exotic beetles and bred them. My husband likes suzumushi best, 'bell-ringing insects' that translates to, and the sound they make is beautifully ethereal.
My sons like the big fighting beetles the most, though this year and last they have been more into catching reptiles and amphibians, so we haven't really had the menagerie of bugs this year that we have in the past.
I myself have fallen in love with a certain kind of beetle named the kamikiri, or paper-cutter, called longhorn beetles in English. Here's the kind I mean:
(Hee hee--see the bandaid. They aren't called papercutters for nothing!)
This one, called the gomadara, is my favorite kind, ever since I kept one for an entire year, through the winter and into the next spring. Every year my sons catch me one and I try to keep it all winter, but they've never lasted that long again.
Last year and the year before we couldn't find a single one of these, because they are agricultural pests and have been sprayed for in this area. This year we found tons of them in all weird color combinations, blue and yellow, and red and green, things we've never seen before, and we wondered if these were mutations from the spraying. But we didn't find a single black and white one.
My sons found me a yellow and black one though, and it seems so healthy that I haven't released it. I've had it for over a month now, and it's doing very well. In fact, it would probably be dead by now in the wild, without me feeding it daily. So I am going to try and keep it all winter. Since it's going to be part of the family, I've named it. Isaac. Because I recently finished a poem that has Isaac, son of Abraham and Sarah, in it. And I realized afterwards that that's the second poem I have with Isaac in it. So, I decided to name my beetle Isaac. So that's three Isaacs.
Isaac squeaks at me when I give him his daily rainshower. Long live Isaac.
Beetles, huge ones, are the main madness here. We have even (I'm embarrassed to say) purchased exotic beetles and bred them. My husband likes suzumushi best, 'bell-ringing insects' that translates to, and the sound they make is beautifully ethereal.
My sons like the big fighting beetles the most, though this year and last they have been more into catching reptiles and amphibians, so we haven't really had the menagerie of bugs this year that we have in the past.
I myself have fallen in love with a certain kind of beetle named the kamikiri, or paper-cutter, called longhorn beetles in English. Here's the kind I mean:
(Hee hee--see the bandaid. They aren't called papercutters for nothing!)
This one, called the gomadara, is my favorite kind, ever since I kept one for an entire year, through the winter and into the next spring. Every year my sons catch me one and I try to keep it all winter, but they've never lasted that long again.
Last year and the year before we couldn't find a single one of these, because they are agricultural pests and have been sprayed for in this area. This year we found tons of them in all weird color combinations, blue and yellow, and red and green, things we've never seen before, and we wondered if these were mutations from the spraying. But we didn't find a single black and white one.
My sons found me a yellow and black one though, and it seems so healthy that I haven't released it. I've had it for over a month now, and it's doing very well. In fact, it would probably be dead by now in the wild, without me feeding it daily. So I am going to try and keep it all winter. Since it's going to be part of the family, I've named it. Isaac. Because I recently finished a poem that has Isaac, son of Abraham and Sarah, in it. And I realized afterwards that that's the second poem I have with Isaac in it. So, I decided to name my beetle Isaac. So that's three Isaacs.
Isaac squeaks at me when I give him his daily rainshower. Long live Isaac.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
My Process
Yesterday I started working on a new poem. Wrote a pretty strong first stanza. Wrote a second stanza with a good image but too wordy, too loose, but nonetheless a strong image. Started a third stanza. Got stuck pretty quickly. Quit. The whole thing took me less than 30 minutes.
I had more time yesterday that I could have been writing, but I didn't. I was done. I used to feel guilty that I can sometimes only write for short bursts of time. I felt wasteful since there are very few days when I have longer than a short burst, and on those days I may still not write more than a short burst. But I've stopped feeling guilty about it and realized that in the early stages of my process, when I am still working with something formless, all I can do at a time is 20 to 30 minutes. That's it.
Later when I am reworking, rewording, revising, I can work for hours at a time. Once there is form, I can think about a word or a phrase or a line and rewrite it and rethink it for hours. But when I am trying to find form in formlessness, it's a short burst and then I'm done. At that time, my subconscious works pretty hard on the problem, and then my conscious mind sits down to try to hear what the subconscious has done, and transcribe it, and that's it. Then I've got to wait some more for my subconscious to do the heavy lifting.
So I woke up at 4:50 this morning thinking about yesterday's poem. I have a block of time this afternoon when I have to wait for a child to finish an activity, and it was at that time that I was planning to do my writing today, but here it was 4:50 on a Sunday morning no less, and the poem was calling.
So I got up and looked at it. The first stanza was still good. The second stanza, which differed completely in imagery (I had been going to do alternating stanzas of contrasting images that would come together in the end somehow) now was clearly a different poem entirely. So I moved it out--it's still a good idea but it doesn't belong with yesterday's poem. Thus the third stanza became the second, and I worked on it, got further along. It's still flabby and missing something, but I made progress with it. That took all of 20 minutes, being that I'm still in the fairly formless stage, and I went back to bed.
I'll work again later today when I have that block of time waiting for my son. I'll probably get 20 or 25 minutes on yesterday's poem, and 20 or 25 minutes on the poem that will come from the old second stanza, and then I'll have more time to wait, so I guess I'd better take some reading with me. Or papers to correct. Or something.
Too bad I don't have a poem in the hopper that's further along in the revision process since I happen to have that kind of time today, but I don't. That's how it goes.
That's my process, and now that I've written in down, it'll probably change radically. Let's hope not. It may not be the most efficient process, but it's one I understand.
I had more time yesterday that I could have been writing, but I didn't. I was done. I used to feel guilty that I can sometimes only write for short bursts of time. I felt wasteful since there are very few days when I have longer than a short burst, and on those days I may still not write more than a short burst. But I've stopped feeling guilty about it and realized that in the early stages of my process, when I am still working with something formless, all I can do at a time is 20 to 30 minutes. That's it.
Later when I am reworking, rewording, revising, I can work for hours at a time. Once there is form, I can think about a word or a phrase or a line and rewrite it and rethink it for hours. But when I am trying to find form in formlessness, it's a short burst and then I'm done. At that time, my subconscious works pretty hard on the problem, and then my conscious mind sits down to try to hear what the subconscious has done, and transcribe it, and that's it. Then I've got to wait some more for my subconscious to do the heavy lifting.
So I woke up at 4:50 this morning thinking about yesterday's poem. I have a block of time this afternoon when I have to wait for a child to finish an activity, and it was at that time that I was planning to do my writing today, but here it was 4:50 on a Sunday morning no less, and the poem was calling.
So I got up and looked at it. The first stanza was still good. The second stanza, which differed completely in imagery (I had been going to do alternating stanzas of contrasting images that would come together in the end somehow) now was clearly a different poem entirely. So I moved it out--it's still a good idea but it doesn't belong with yesterday's poem. Thus the third stanza became the second, and I worked on it, got further along. It's still flabby and missing something, but I made progress with it. That took all of 20 minutes, being that I'm still in the fairly formless stage, and I went back to bed.
I'll work again later today when I have that block of time waiting for my son. I'll probably get 20 or 25 minutes on yesterday's poem, and 20 or 25 minutes on the poem that will come from the old second stanza, and then I'll have more time to wait, so I guess I'd better take some reading with me. Or papers to correct. Or something.
Too bad I don't have a poem in the hopper that's further along in the revision process since I happen to have that kind of time today, but I don't. That's how it goes.
That's my process, and now that I've written in down, it'll probably change radically. Let's hope not. It may not be the most efficient process, but it's one I understand.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
e-Emily
Smithsonian.com has collected a few Emily Dickinson poems reworked in song/video/reading. Just in time for the poet's birthday.
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