You Cannot Break the Wings of Poetry
— I’m just going to carry on here in this sort of unconnected notes form. The times seem to call for it or at least my attention span does.
— I read a poem lately that went straight to my heart:
Poetry Itself Is a Kind of Sunlight
by Yanyi
Believe me, poetry itself is a kind of sunlight
No substance has been found anywhere in the cosmos
That can break the wings of poetry.
Here’s a chance at last to meet one another,
The river in Shenzhen chuckles merrily
The sky sheds joyous tears.
Though we’ve never met before,
We can love each other with brotherly sincerity,
As if we’d lived in the same family
Ten thousand years ago.
Then, believe me, after a hundred thousand years,
We’ll still be inseparable.
Yes, there is a continual interweaving of poetry’s sunlight
While poetry’s sun and our hearts
Burn together
Warming and illuminating the cold world.
(translated by Fang Dai, Dennis Ding, & Edward Morin, found here)
— Another poem by Yanyi here.
— Recently read: quotes from Sean Cranbury’s Field Notes:
“Complaining about the internet on the internet, something I have worked hard to succeed at over the years, is over and done.” — Sean Cranbury
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
— Francis Weller on the As It Is podcast talking about “the long dark” and the alchemical concept of negredo, the blackening. He says (from the transcripts):
“Yeah. In the alchemical language, the season we’re in is called the negredo, which is the blackening. And the blackening in the alchemical tradition is actually a form of beginning. James Hillman, one of my primary teachers, would say that the blackening is actually an achievement, that something has happened at a deep soul level, at a psychological level, where you have gathered what has been decaying, dying, decomposing, all these wonderful strong “d” words that remind us that this is actually an essential part of our psychic life. Nature is not always increasing. It’s not always growing. It has its own periods of decay and decomposition, of breakdown, of endings, the same as with the psyche personally, but also collectively as well.
So the negredo, they call it the subtle dissolver. And I don’t think things are so subtle right now. Things are dissolving. What I find valuable about this imagery, this idea, is that it gives us, again, a way of appreciating what’s happening. Not that it’s pleasant or easy, but it gives us a way of imagining where we are, that things are breaking down. Certain things must break down. Systemic racism must break down. Gender discrimination must break down. Economic disparities must break down. Capitalism must break down. So if these energies that are gathering help us to dissolve some of these structures, we then have a chance to recede the imagination of what does living culture actually look like?”
— Worth listening to for his thoughts on the imagination as medicine, trusting in the dream process, on the necessity, deep necessity, for staying in love with the world. And I love that he says this: “You know, that’s the broken heart that can contain the whole universe, and it may be that grief is what saves our ass right now. It may be that our tenderness, our felt sense of loss for this beloved, beleaguered earth is what gets us to participate in her dreaming.”
— Do you know the A.R. Ammons poem, “Success Story” ?
Success Story
by A.R. Ammons
I never got on good
relations with the world
first I had nothing
the world wanted
then the world had
nothing I wanted
— I sort of laughed at myself, replacing world with internet in the poem. But you know, world is good.
— Always reading: God’s Silence by Franz Wright. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book of poems that made me feel so much, that felt so human.
— In an interview on Image, Wright says, “I thought of the poem as the holy thing, the aim of everything. If there’s a change, it’s that I came to see there was no necessity anymore to finish a poem. The poem was a step to the next point. The poems were all attempts to find a place to store the joy and certainty of the ultimate goodness and coherence and tenderness of reality.”
— And maybe I’ve quoted from this before? but he also says,
“I remember very early having the sense that there is one poet in the world, and sometimes if you’re very lucky and you work very hard, you get to be the poet for a while. The rest of the time, you’re trying to earn your way back to being the poet for a moment. Meanwhile, you love poetry itself. It still makes me uncomfortable to call myself a poet. I think of myself as someone in the service of poetry. If I happen to be in that blessed state of consciousness where I am able to write, I guess at that moment I’m a poet.”
— I hope you keep storing joy and tenderness in poems. And by poems I mean any container in which you can put your holy things.
— I’ll always stop and listen to Tilda: “Be wary of the doubtless,” says she. “Bless the handmade.” “Find joy in the shadows.” “Feel your courage.” “Read history.” etc.
— And then back to Szymborska, as a sort of balance to Franz Wright. They hold a similar kind of light very differently. The light of attention. Peering at the light from places of darkness. Rembrandt vs Hammershoi?
— Her translator, Clare Cavanagh says that “what if” and “I don’t know” go hand in hand in Szymborska’s poems. These seem like things that could be applied to a lot going on these days. From the same article, the image of the suitcase arrested me:
“In one of her rare public talks, she recalls a film in which Charlie Chaplin can’t shut an overflowing suitcase and simply snips off all the bits and pieces that don’t fit. “That’s how reality fares when we try to squeeze it into the suitcase of ideology,” she remarks. But the bits and pieces matter; they are the stuff that make up our lives, that make up life as such. It all depends on your point of view.”
— What I continue to be interested in is the details of individual lives. Us! How all the politics and antics and brutalities come home to us. Every single life has worth, every life is poetry.
— Updates/notes on this space. You might notice a few small changes. I’ve turned the comments off, not because I don’t like your comments but I’m trying to reduce your internet burdens and mine. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been reducing my presence on the web (my separate author site is next to go and I’ve already moved whatever I wanted from there to here in the “About” and “books” tabs on the menu etc.). I’ve been stepping back from the socials, deleting profiles on sites I never go to. It’s time, I think. The one place I still feel attached to is this blog. It’s too exhausting to chase the phantom cheese in the social media maze. I’m tired of being that rat. I have other rats I need to be.
— I’m going to take a page out of the book of 320 Sycamore Studios and challenge you to tip me $1. It’s my 10 year anniversary (there might be a lot of cake photos in the next month in honour of that!) in this space coming up in September. If you’ve enjoyed reading this blog this past year, or these past 10 years, or anywhere in between, consider making a one time one buck tip. If you already subscribed or have made a tip in the past, feel free to ignore this please :) You’ve done your part already and I’m grateful. I know everybody everywhere is asking for the same, but I do think creators oughtn’t feel embarrassed to say that their work is worthy. Anyway, if you’re here, you know where I’m coming from.
— Thanks for reading. May you experience the unbreakable wings of poetry and sunlight this next week.
— Photos taken by me on my Fujifilm Xt4 at my kitchen table. Cake from the Co-op grocery store. Peonies and roses from our garden. Words, also by me except where otherwise noted.
