Adam Zagajewski ~ Three (more) Poems

In one of his poems (not these) Zagajewski notes: "Without silence there would be no music." That is a theme - the symbiosis of music and quietude - that, it seems to me, runs through the poems in this volume.* So, for instance ...

Music In The Car

Music heard with you
at home or in the car
or even while strolling
didn't always sound as pristine
as piano tuners might wish -
it was sometimes mixed with voices
full of fear and pain,
and then that music
was more than music,
it was our living and our dying.

~~~~~~~~~~

Music Heard With You

Music I heard with you was more
than music . . . - Conrad Aiken

Music heard with you
will stay with us always

Grave Brahms, and elegiac Schubert,
a few songs, Chopin's fourth ballad,

A few quartets with heart -
breaking chords (Beethoven, adagia),

the sadness of Shostakovich, who
didn't want to die.

The great choruses of Bach's Passions,
as if someone had summoned us,

demanding joy,
pure and impartial

joy in which faith
is self-evident.

Some scraps of Lutoslawski
as fleeting as our thoughts.

A black woman singing blues
ran through us like shining steel,

though it reached us on the street
of an ugly, dirty town.

Mahler's endless marches
the trumpet's voice that opens that Fifth Symphony

and the first part of the Nineth
(you sometimes call him "malheur!").

Mozart's despair in the Requiem,
his buoyant piano concertos -

you hummed them better than I did,
but we both know that.

Music heard with you
will grow still with us.

~~~~~~~~~~

Music Heard

Music heard with you
was more than music
and the blood that flowed through our arteries
was more than blood
and the joy we felt
was genuine
and if there is anyone to thank,
I thank him now,
before it grows too late
and too quiet.

__________
* From: Adam Zagajewski. 2008. Eternal Enemies. New York: FSG,
pages 8, 44-5, 93.

Hard Ground

According to this story in The Guardian last week, Tom Waits has collaborated with photographer Michael O'Brien on a portrait of homelessness. The book, Hard Ground, will be published in the spring.* Regular readers will know from my serial postings that I hold Waits in high esteem. I really don't know O'Brien's work at all (except for some of the images he's made for Waits album covers.) But this seems like an auspicious partnership, even if it might be setting expectations just a smidgen high to compare (as the publisher does) the collaboration to Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In any case, I've linked to the publisher's page below where you can find a sample of the images from the book.
__________
* Hard Ground. Photographs and Interviews by Michael O’Brien, Poems by Tom Waits. University of Texas Press. (March 2011).

End of the West

"Carefully stacking up everything I made next to everything I ruined
in broad daylight ..."
~ Michael Dickman (from We Did Not Make Ourselves).

This is a slim first volume of poems by Michael Dickman whose themes strike a chord with me.* Mostly, the poems are populated by kids (sometimes grown) their extended families and their friends (many, apparently, now dead but still around) and, often, their families. I don't think you'd call the poems nostalgic. Nor would you call them self-indulgent. Having seen plenty enough of the latter I know it when it skulks into the room. And while some characters re-appear across poems I wouldn't say haunted either. Maybe unblinking is the right word. Without recrimination, really, too.

From: Little Prayer
Michael Dickman

[. . .]

You think it's going to hurt, and it does, only not in the way that you
imagined

Her hand there and then
not there
His
hand there
and then not
there [. . .]

__________
* Michael Dickman. End of the West. Copper Canyon Press, 2009.

New Books ~ Solnit/Caron & Pollitt

My birthday was a couple of weeks ago. I won't divulge my age; we can simply say 'advancing.' In any case, today I accompanied Susan to a local pub to watch the opening match of the World Cup. I say "opening" in the most parochial possible sense - we went to watch England play the U.S., not South Africa versus Mexico. But the whole event is about parochial interests and identities after all, right?

My son Douglas drove cross town to meet us. After the match (let's just say Susan was rightly disappointed with the outcome) Doug took the opportunity to give me two books he'd bought me as birthday presents. Thanks buddy! The books are new and were written by two politically astute, terrifically smart, and talented women. If you stop by the blog much you won't be surprised that these made it onto my birthday list. Here are s a couple of teasers.

~~~~~~~~~~

“The Bestiaries, or books of beasts, of almost a thousand years ago contained much that we no long believe. There is no stone in the heads of toads that neutralizes poison and there are no unicorns at all, so the ability of their horns to likewise undo poison is not particularly helpful either. Those old books were compendiums of known and imagined animals, of eagles and dragons and elephants, with lore about their powers, lives and meanings, often moral and religious meanings, They were also compendiums of sheer wonder, but the sense of wonder that emerges from scientific knowledge is at least as great, whether its about Belding’s ground squirrel of the Sierra Nevada that hibernates about eight months a year or the elephant seal that not only can hold its breath underwater for an hour but often does so for twenty minutes or more at a time while sleeping on the shore. Or the blue whale, whose heart is bigger than an American bison and beats about six times a minute, a tenth the speed of ours, or the hummingbird in flight, whose tiny heart beats a thousand times a minute.”*

~~~~~~~~~~

From a Notebook
Katha Pollitt**

The final vanity, to think
you're not your life, that even today
as\t the last possible moment
you can walk away; as out of cheap hotel,
leaving ten dollars under the key on the bureau.
Why bother to lock the door? The fuzzy TV,
the footsole-colored bedspread,
the quart of milk souring on the windowsill,
you always new they had nothing to do with you
although you were used to them
and even grateful,
alone as you were, in a strange city.

_____________
* From: Rebecca Solnit & Mona Caron. A California Bestiary. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2009, pages 5-6.
** From: Katha Pollitt. The Mind-Body Problem. New York: Random House, 2009, page 50 .

Knowledge, Politics, Poetry ~ Nick Lantz

List of Things We Know
Nick Lantz*

40% of all
births are
accidental.
10% of all
accidents
are births.
Kindness
is correlated
to detached
earlobes,
a damaged
amygdala,
a person’s
credit rating,
but in all cases
the direction
of causality
is unclear.
Chances are,
your husband
is lying to
you. Most
substances
contract when
frozen, but
ice expands;
for this reason,
the oceans do
not freeze,
and we can
go on living.
If you see
a ripped pair
of underwear
in the bushes
by the bus
depot, assume
the worst.
Pollen leaps
from flower
to bee, but
this is only
static electricity,
not the work
of affection.
We’ve proven
experimentally
that the mouse
feels fear (we
haven’t yet
devised a test
to determine
if he feels joy).

Donald Rumsfeld - with his classification of things and events into known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns - as muse! Who knew? In any case, the poem I've lifted here falls into the first category; no surprise given the title. And the book has a terrific cover too.
__________
* Nick Lantz. We Don't Know We Don't Know. Graywolf Press, 2010, pages 15-16.

Promise Unfulfilled

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

~ Emily Dickinson

This is just another in a line of poems that capture something we've been promised but which remains undelivered. What is the phrase? "The check is in the mail ..."

Walking Meditation Through the Woods.

Feet touch the damp Earth as green, wet leaves stick to well worn heels as they reach a small clearing on the edge of a forest. The smell of Earthy life fills lungs and relaxes muscles. A reverent hush rolls through the emerald forest and the silent figure stops to gaze up into the rain soaked branches just as a cool drop falls upon the fore head--the third eye. The person smiles, breathes deeply and methodically and slowly continues down the meandering path until they disappear into another dense stand of forest as quickly as they appeared. Somewhere a crow announces its arrival.

-By James R. Ure

~Peace to all beings~

PHOTO CREDIT: A misty morning on a section of the Appalachian Trail outside Blairsville on Blood Mountain, the trail’s highest point in Georgia. By Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times.

Haiku: Literary Meditation.

I write a lot of haiku and enjoy reading them just as much. Haiku seems to fit Buddhism and Zen in general quite well due to the stripped down structure and word usage. A good Haiku in my view is one, which grabs your attention by way of several impressions upon one or more of the senses. In addition, one, which paints a picture but then, presents a concluding line, which pulls the poem together for a feeling of balance.

This gives the reader a sense of closure to the scene and without the contrasting yet somewhat parallel ending it leaves the reading feeling abandoned. Thus, Haiku in my view is similar to the Buddhist/Taoist concept of oneness where two seemingly dissimilar concepts connect to form a well-rounded view of the present reality experienced at the time the writer experienced it. The first two lines provide a detailed, micro, mindful scene with a more open-ended conclusion to leave you with something to contemplate upon further.

Also, I find that writing a haiku is like a meditation as you contemplate a scene in your mind you must be very mindful of the sounds, smells, sights and sensations upon the skin. Only having a few words to use channels the author’s focus so that each word is mindfully chosen to give the haiku a clean, simple, yet strong and insight provoking essence. Its short form eliminates unnecessary wording, which can take away from the focused insight that haiku is so appreciated for. It makes haiku easily digestible for our scattered minds. In longer poetry the mind tends to wander and miss words, thus missing the essence of the writing. Haiku, like Zen Buddhism strips away the clutter to get right to the heart of things. No unnecessary distractions.

Since traditionally Haiku include nature as a theme it is like having the essence of nature anywhere you might find yourself such as in a big city where nature is very limited in between the concrete and steel. Haiku allows you to be right in the middle of a Japanese garden while riding the subway. In addition, being simple and concise also enables you to be in that Japanese garden but still remain quite aware of your present surroundings. That's the great thing about haiku meditation. Its form lends itself well to maintaining a Buddhist mindset even in our fast paced world where we don’t have as much time to contemplate more in-depth Dharma talks as often as we might want. In closing I wanted to leave you with my latest haiku:

shrine bamboo fountain

water descends drain pipe
monk washes old hands

~Peace to all beings~

Spring Evening Contemplation.

Clean, steady rain falls. Smell of damp soil. Tranquility envelopes all like a warm embrace. One awakened essence shines forth. Svaha!!

~They Call Him James R. Ure