Creative Connections: I and II

I’ve been thinking a lot (I’m always…thinking a lot…it feels like effort, and it’s such a good excuse…) about what I do and don’t enjoy about having a blog. Some of that isn’t resolved, and that’s OK, but I did run into my old nemesis in there– Letting Perfect Be the Enemy of Good Enough. So, take a hike, All or Nothing Thinking. I want to enjoy my life a little more.

Before I get to the fun Connection, though, I want to write about a Serious Connection. One place different types of creative people can connect is on the picket line. I stand in support of the WGA and of SAGAFTRA. Anyone who will speak up about unhinged corporate greed with the clout to be heard, will speak for us all. Creative labor is labor, and creative product has multiple types of value. !!!!!!

The Fun Connection goes along with my Mourning post because it’s another of those moments when things raised their hands from different parts of the room. This was the initial inspiration:

Roxi H, you are fabulous. When I shared this in social media, a friend told me her young adult daughter referred to the c-veg as “sad broccoli.”

So my mind went immediately to poet John Keats. As it does, you know. A sad, pale vegetable is going to lead me to two different stanzas of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”:

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

       Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

       And no birds sing.

…

I saw pale kings and princes too,

       Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

 Thee hath in thrall!’

It’s a trippy little poem about being seduced by a faery and left abandoned and possessed on the sad shore there where he is. Keats was SO good at the uncanny/gothic/nature/sex thing. Less into stir-fry veggies, but I hope he would forgive the connection. It was fun for me! I honestly think he would have given a Like to Roxi Horror, anyway.

Layers of Inspiration

Work by Parrish Relics

I love to write about art. I’ve done it as an undergraduate, in my PhD program, for my work at the historic site, for PBS Annual Auctions’ art/antique nights, while covering the local arts scene here in Boston, and for my own pleasure as a poet.

This is the first time, although I hope not the last, that I wrote about work an artist is featuring online. I can follow SEO best practices, but here mainly Creativity was called for. I’ve always found this artist’s work evocative and inspiring, and the fox and rabbit prompted me as much as the medieval French tapestries inspired her.

I’m so pleased to be part of the launch of these pieces at Parrishrelics.com!

Her contribution is in the image, and mine is below: Please visit both at her site.

1.

A fascinating aspect of beautiful medieval tapestries is the sense of many things happening, but not quite in real time or space. That strange perception can wake us up, as our eyes move along the flat woven surface. A flower here, an animal there. We notice a cat, a fox, a rabbit, a variety of plants.

When we take a moment to notice each one, we appreciate the whole tapestry more. Life benefits from the same kind of Looking. When we take a moment to notice, or to wear, one beautiful element of the natural world, we remember each plant or creature is part of Nature, and we can see that Whole in each one of them.

2.

Tapestry Life

The fox was not hungry

for anything

but beauty, for a little

grace, its own place

in the colors, among

the strange stitched plants,

to sit, and some breath

of wind behind

the tapestry, to bring it

life. Being Art,

both sly and soft, and

wise and tricky, fox

eyed the weave to hunt

meanings. Also soft,

signing luck and plenty,

the rabbit climbed

across the tapestry, across

time and space, from one Art

to another Art, to offer

a small shine of

new Beauty,

inspired by old Beauty, one

living thing to another.

– by Lin Nulman

Lin Nulman has wide experience writing for herself, for the historic site where she works, for creative journals and anthologies, for theaters, for public television art auctions, and for websites about real estate and design. She invites creative people who need writing and/or editing services to get in touch. She’s fortunate to have a job she loves; newly self-employed freelancing is her side hustle, so she is mellow and all-around reasonable to work with. Find her at https://thecreativeparttimer.wordpress.com or lin.nulman@yahoo.com

Teacher

Fountain Reflected in Ice, Boston Public Garden, taken by Me, Feb 8, 2022

I am savoring Jane Hirshfield’s most recent poetry book Ledger. 

She is my idol. No one has better guided me through how poems work and what they can do. Her own poetry, for me, combines creative precision of language and air-in-winter-clarity-fed-by-Buddhist-sensibility.  What do I mean by “creative precision”? Hirshfield knows where the expected and the unexpected need to go, and what is just enough. 

I’ve also met her. I have. One of the two hands typing this has been held inside her two hands that she writes with. It really has.

She has translated women’s poetry from the ancient court of Japan. These poets often used the form of waka or tanka, a five-line poem that has 5-7-5-7-7 for syllables, as if a haiku got two extra lines. Centuries ago, the language of educated men in Japan was Chinese, as Greek and Latin were for educated English-speaking men in the past. Often it was women, writing poems that were part of the practice of their courtly love lives, that kept Japanese poetry evolving.

I love these forms as a reader and writer. I used to dig my heels into the challenge of sticking to the syllable count and still getting something expressed. More recently, I practice these forms as many other writers of English do, pursuing the spirit of the form instead of the exactness of the numbers. For me, that is a practice of writing from somewhere that is not my intellect, definitely a change from the past.

That being said, I have published examples of these forms with correct numbers, work I’m proud of. I can do it. I just don’t want to. The simplicity and moments of presence in these tiny poems are more fulfilling than making a puzzle of their syllables. 

I wrote a series of tanka dedicated to Jane Hirshfield, and now I am revising them without the syllable counts, but with more…well, both honesty and ambiguity. The ways those two forces work together in language, and support each other, currently has my attention. Reality is full of ambiguity to be reported honestly. Honesty is sometimes accomplished through being ambiguous. 

Here is the current draft of what used to be the by-the-number poems, opened up. I kept the form for the third stanza, but elsewhere I let it go.

Teacher
	for Jane Hirshfield

Precise hand
print from ancient Japan:
The deep drifts
of garment in the open
space, her room. Woman

writing to a lover
past sunrise, poems
that tell, that keep. This,
their way of moments,
of tristesse and breath. 

First five syllables,
seven, five, seven, seven.
In addition, may 
I reveal what I desire?
The first time. Are not all times

the snowfall yesterday,
your papers freshly dust?
Almost the picture, Lady
Teacher, write with me. Let’s
call them from the blankness.

Untitled Poem

Working Poetry Month, another work in progress, responses welcome

Untitled

The silence circles its fingertip
on the rim of a glass, and the tone
comes, strung ice-water tight.

The afternoon looks out the window.
An old chair offers the body
ease, and neither speaks.

Senses float, here and there
exclaiming their hunger like gulls
that slice across the view outside.

The willow’s winter straws cross
and twist. How can these knotted strings be
eternal, simple, yellow since

before and after your words? 
How can this tree not
know you, when it flows as you breathe?

Photo by me, Fens Victory Gardens, Boston, MA

“More Space” for Poetry Month

Photo by Kristin Vogt on Pexels.com

More Space

Things palpably everywhere seem identical,
so snow is sunlight. And rain
a thousand maple leaves 
seen from underneath.
The appearance of space around,
through, within the fume of fog
or a shining glass sky outlines
the objects it obscures. Nothing
reveals more space than
space taken, when emptiness 
so visibly embodies
there being nowhere to go. 

ADVISE? I perhaps think one or two more concrete images might be wanted. If this brought any images to your mind, will you please comment and share them?  Thank you! (Yes, thanks for asking, it IS a big deal for a recovering perfectionist to post Work in Progress and admit it. I'm pretty pleased with me right now.)

Poetry Month First Course

Let’s have champagne first: Here are some spring Haiku, small poetic bubbles that they are.

A half-circle of melon dawn
disappeared. March snow.


Between small hills, dawn
stays blue. The bare tree is still
its shadow.


Storm wind trickles in somewhere.
The prism fidgets, glints
green-gold.

Mixed Messages

The haloed little figure on one shoulder and the little horned figure on the other shoulder, each whispering, is an old trope. Today I feel as if I have various small voice boxes all over me, with all sorts of things to say. Some have birds’ wings, some breathe cigarette smoke, and some are stone. Mixed messages.

How can any decent person think about a blog today, this week, as if it’s important. Creativity, seriously?/How can any decent person not stand up to every type of violence, the empty noise, the knowledge their attention is a product for sale? THIS week, how can anyone not do some human, Creative thing in the face of all this scratching at our skin?

I should have rolled out, not just been awake, before dawn, and taken a walk before I got to my writing. I should heed my priorities because no one else will./I should be gentle and patient with this person who had chaotic, rough dreams and bad sleep, enjoy the quiet time, and not treat my “schedule” like the chariot that needs to pull the sun./I shouldn’t use the word “should” on myself at all, especially when it pushes “need to” out of the way. Why are the “shoulds” so much easier to articulate than the “need tos”? See above: violence, noise, attention as product.

I want to blog./I want to read./I want to look at the yellow leaves out the window sifting the sun, and I want to do all of them all day.

I want to understand the difference between a sense of purpose and a sense of responsibility./There’s no difference./There’s EVERY difference./Isn’t there?

Every poem can be analyzed, played with, followed forever. It’s never done: there will be no sign./Put your poem on your blog and get some more coffee and do the laundry.

 Dreams
  
 Another dream: late to teach, 
 streets stretch, destination
 retreating. My half-run feeds on
 panic never questioned.
 Spaghetti-like stations,
 unfair, shape-shifting
 routes of trains,
 unchallenged because
 the stamina demanded
 I deliver without
 a thought. Finally the door,
 students hanging around
 like a shop full of clocks,
 space used up in clatter,
 time disassembled.
 In some versions, also
 farm animals. Or snow. 
  
 Downstream of chaos, waking
 cramped. Some books rest near
 the weary lamp. Somewhere I read
 that eras ago, the unexhausted
 slept night’s first hours,
 then rose a little while, 
 to rustle embers, sit,
 turn pages, listen to
 the hidden river of the trees.
 Or to love, bodies safe
 from daylight’s flying shards,
 grind-spin of metal on stone.
 Or just to look at whatever
 indoor shapes cast shadows. 
  
 Who first found out that even sleep
 needs pausing, found out it would
 submit? Is there a foxed treatise,
 spell of the old words
 however desired? Or did they
 simply pull chairs closer around
 a remark at table on the moon
 that eased clearly through oak leaves,
 like a shell flown by tides, after
 invisible rain? Didn’t they
 discover what each had
 witnessed alone? Didn’t they
 nod and smile over the hill of rinds,
 the crags of bread, the sea of salty meat?
 Didn’t that moment of empty
 mouths, that pause, become so quiet that,
 before another wave of conversation,
 the candles stood amazed
 to burn that true air, that silence? 


The photo, by me, is of two pieces in the Kindness Rocks Project, seen on The Mall, Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA, on Easter weekend, 2020.

Burn

There are books I read every few years. Do you have such books? I circle slowly back around to them like the orbit of Neptune because I’ve noticed interesting change between the first and second, and subsequent, readings.

Some books, read again, reflected back a new (older) reader with different responses. That helped me know my mind and sense of language better, as well as opening the vista a good piece of Art is.

Sometimes I return to writing of my own with the changed perspective of time. I understand them differently. Even the way I want specific words to communicate has changed

This poem started with a round burn on my hand got not long after noticing a small, dark rose in falling snow; it bloomed late, into a tight knot of petals, ready to face winter. The poem slid around on those two images, sort of a narrative about my own observations.

Buddhism likes to say…well, Buddha said….the world is burning. Our senses are burning. This simple, complex statement has to do with the nature of the world and our attachments to things. It’s a wake-up call about how easily we make ourselves suffer. It’s also now a new layer of the word “burn” for me, and there it is.

So what happens when I go back to this poem? The actual hand burn once got lifted into something higher through the image of the rose. Now my hand provides the poem with the metaphorical Buddhist burning the real rose can’t escape. Once the burn “bloomed” like the rose, and now the rose is burning. (If I’m not careful, I will justify the false impression that exists in the world that Buddhism is a real downer.)

The poem before was imagining connections, and I feel as if now it’s reporting a real connection I finally paid attention to. I have another “thinky” poem that is struggling to go in exactly the opposite direction and soak its reporting in imagination, to revel in imagined connections. My smile at this knowledge of my own tangled Creativity is both wry and satisfied.

 
 Burn
  
 The stove’s sharp blue heat
 invaded the pot handle
 you grasped without attention.
  
 The burn asserts itself
 like the red fist of a rose
 opened late, defying snowfall.
  
 Take note. The earth insists.
 The undulation of your palm
 has always resembled a drift,
  
 snow crept upon by claws
 of sunset, bloody hue under bare branches.
 There have always been things on fire.
  
 The body burns to say it. So
 your same grasping hand sets
 it down, sears white paper darker.
  
  
   

Hello, October

POND WALK
 

Pond blinks,
red-rimmed
under October
cloud-glare,
as landscape begins
to change. Or that
is just eyes
grown used
to gritty air.
 
But here,
freely, widely 
do the encircling,
while water
shines or clears
of sun-leaves,
ripples, swans’ feet.
 
Pass a wine-stained,
blood-stained,
love-stained vine
winding a tree,
a melancholy,
a potion. Yes
 
and no. Leaves
know only
their going,
not the pacing
of minds. Sit
on a stone
embedded
by water. Pick up
driftwood birch
with its dark
inscriptions, but
look elsewhere.
Hear the greens
crackle behind
you. Pond wind
fans bright,
cold coming fire.
 

Steam Poem (You Heard Me, Punk)

You know how, when you’re on the first break from work you’ve had in years, and you relax some and refuse to call it unemployment, and you use your brain for nothing, and that’s good, and then you get several ideas for blog posts all at once, and you draft them all instead of finishing one, so you come off your break by ignoring them and posting a poem? Yeah, it’s like that.  Photo by me.

 

Steam

for PC and J O’D

 

The wise write the mind

can know the border

of thoughts, one to the next,

to the next, as eyes

can see when one drop

of water turns to steam.

 

My mind behaves precisely

like an empty urban corner.

Leaves scrapped to dust, and

stained empty paper cups

congeal and scatter, the wind

full of scratching.

 

Rain, whose freedom

the wise suggest

we should lean on,

I watch from home.

Under streetlights, seeding

a parking lot with more

tender shapes.

 

In the wall

over there, a pipe

becomes a vent

and then a slithering

line of steam, supple

ghost becoming dark

damp starlight on the street,

no longer even that.

As it happens,

branches reach toward

my window, close by

and clearly. How is it

the space they cross

evaporates unseen,

as if the distance

held anything at all?