Month: December 2014

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Die Winterreise

Franz Schubert, “Winter Journey”

“Only now in the quiet do you feel the sharp sting
of the worm that lives within you…” ~ Wilhelm Muller

The tears you shed are hot enough
to melt the winter’s ice; the road

you’ve glimpsed through windows,
scything through the countryside,

leads farther away than thought.
What can you bring to nestle

in your two hands to last
this journey— blossom from

the once verdant linden tree?
No, leaf from flame tree, leaf

of palm that burned in the shade
of the equator and cooled

to the shape of a braided fan.
For what does the lover really know

of unrequitement? Tell this
if you can to the butterflies

that ferry their flimsy envelopes
of gold, season after season,

from coast to coast. Tell this
to the cliff swallows that wing

their way back to build mud nests
in the walls of the ruined church.

And tell this to the ones
whose forebears jumped ship

centuries ago where the waters
looked almost emerald and warm—

where they came ashore to forge their own
welcome in an inhospitable land.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Statement of Ecopoetics

red-tailed hawk close-up

red-tailed hawk close-up

An editor asked me for a “statement of ecopoetics” to accompany a poem in an as-yet unpublished anthology. (More on that if/when it becomes a reality.) I’m not normally given to these kinds of academic exercises, but I did in fact have such a statement that I’d written back in 2010, and I initially thought it was good enough to use again, because I still agree with its premise: that poets should add extinction to our roster of the great subjects, right up there with love and death. But it didn’t say anything about the sort of nature poetry I most enjoy reading and trying to write — not to mention what, if anything, might differentiate ecopoetry from traditional English-language nature poetry. So I’ve just come up with the following new statement which, believe it or not, represents me being as concise as possible.

For ecopoetry to become more than a simple re-branding of nature poetry, it must begin with an avoidance of easy pieties and recycled myths. It must be grounded not only in the writer’s felt contact with the non-human world, but also in actual knowledge of that world and its inhabitants and processes. It will share with science a passion for careful observation and discovery and a full awareness of the tentative nature of human understanding. For models, it will look less to Ovid, Wordsworth and Gary Snyder than to Lucretius, John Clare, Kenji Miyazawa and Pattiann Rogers.

Ecopoetry should be humble, recognizing that humans are far from the only makers; other species are also capable of tool-making, habitat-shaping, empathy, deception, and art. Most of all, it should abandon the traditional Western dualistic understanding of nature. The Mandarin Chinese word for nature, ziran, literally means “of-itself thus,” and it’s this sense of a world with its own laws, of beings with their own integrity and trajectories that also lies behind our word wild (a cognate with willed, according to some). Nature poetry may be pastoral, but ecopoetry is always wild.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Faithful

You turned my wailing into dancing;
you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy…

~ Psalm 30

And you slicked the roofs with a shimmer of rain,
and the trunks of trees with the green of lichen.

Even the reeds that bent from the weight
of passing winds lent their sheen to the earth.

Who was I to send up my voice through the hollow,
who was I to run the flag of my sorrows up the pole?

Yesterday brought news of friends’ deaths.
And yesterday couriers left parcels at the door.

Every morning the small brown birds forage in the yard:
their industry steady, with no real expectation of return.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Seasoning

To church in the morning, where the Reader made a boyish young sermon. Home to dinner, and there I took occasion, from the blacknesse of the meat as it came out of the pot, to fall out with my wife and my maid for their sluttery, and so left the table, and went up to read in Mr. Selden till church time, and then my wife and I to church, and there in the pew, with the rest of the company, was Captain Holmes, in his gold-laced suit, at which I was troubled because of the old business which he attempted upon my wife. So with my mind troubled I sat still, but by and by I took occasion from the rain now holding up (it raining when we came into the church) to put my wife in mind of going to the christening (which she was invited to) of N. Osborne’s child, which she did, and so went out of the pew, and my mind was eased. So home after sermon and there came by appointment Dr. T. Pepys, Will. Joyce, and my brother Tom, and supped with me, and very merry they were, and I seemed to be, but I was not pleased at all with their company. So they being gone we went to bed.

I eat out of the pot
his gold-laced suit still
on my mind


Erasure haiku derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 22 December 1661.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Divided loyalties

To White Hall to the Privy Seal, where my Lord Privy Seal did tell us he could seal no more this month, for that he goes thirty miles out of town to keep his Christmas. At which I was glad, but only afeard lest any thing of the King’s should force us to go after him to get a seal in the country.
Thence to Westminster Hall (having by the way drank with Mrs. Sarah and Mrs. Betty at my Lord’s lodgings), and thence taken by some Exchequer men to the Dogg, where, being St. Thomas’s day, by custom they have a general meeting at dinner. There I was and all very merry, and there I spoke to Mr. Falconberge to look whether he could out of Domesday Book, give me any thing concerning the sea, and the dominion thereof; which he says he will look after. Thence taking leave to my brother’s, and there by appointment met with Prior of Brampton who had money to pay me, but desiring some advice he stays till Monday. So by coach home to the office, where I was vexed to see Sir Williams both seem to think so much that I should be a little out of the way, saying that without their Register they were not a Committee, which I took in some dudgeon, and see clearly that I must keep myself at a little distance with them and not crouch, or else I shall never keep myself up even with them. So home and wrote letters by the post. This evening my wife come home from christening Mrs. Hunt’s son, his name John, and a merchant in Mark Lane came along with her, that was her partner. So after my business was done, and read something in Mr. Selden, I went to bed.

white Christmas
the dog desiring both
to be out and in


Erasure haiku derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 21 December 1661.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

When nights are longest

Happy/Merry Yule, Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year, and Epiphany to all our readers from Luisa and me. This videopoem is a joint production of Via Negativa and Moving Poems, my poetry-film site. Via Negativa just celebrated its 11th birthday last Wednesday, and this time of year “when nights are longest” has always seemed full of creative possibilities to me. I also found out yesterday that December 21 (or possibly 22) was the date when, in 1818, John Keats coined the term “negative capability”—”when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”—which I think is more or less the same as what Zen Buddhists call don’t-know mind or beginner’s mind.

So yesterday I found a mysterious, dark but light-filled home move at the Prelinger Archives, selected and arranged some of the images into a composition that made sense to me, emailed the link to Luisa and asked her if she thought she could find a poem in it. Indeed she could! After a little back-and-forth about the title and opening lines last night, she settled on a final form for the text this morning and sent me a terrific reading that she recorded with her mobile phone. I found a Creative Commons-licensed sound recording on SoundCloud through my usual method of clicking on random links and trusting in serendipity: it’s a field recording by Marc Weidenbaum of Phil Kline’s “Unsilent Night” boombox procession passing a certain point in the streets of San Francisco on December 18, 2010.

Here’s the text of the poem.

When nights are longest

by Luisa A. Igloria

In the dark, it takes the eye
a moment to adjust,

but we won’t even feel
the pull of gravity

that slows us down,
nor the drift of the moon

just slightly more
out of reach.

And there is nothing
to do, really, but trim

the flourishes from the roof,
gather the scraps,

burn them to make
more fire. There is

no point asking
if the garden still

needs weeding, if the flowers
will come back, or if the fish

will flash their dangerous
golden charms again

through ice. Come share
a shard of bread: we’ll set

the pot to boil and skim
the fat off the stew.

We’ll feed each other
with no need to speak,

watching our thoughts ignite
like fireflies into their afterlife.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Milonga sentimental

This entry is part 2 of 28 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2014-15

 

Old heart, tired heart
counting this cold morning
the beads that gather on the grass—

Sometimes it’s hard
to keep track of how many
promises you made, fueled by hope

of their full return: each time
felt real, was real— O how you
wanted to empty your draw-

string purse of all
your savings, and spend them
on the greatest love of all.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Night walk

Lay long in bed, and then up, and so to the Wardrobe to dinner, and from thence out with Mr. Moore towards my house, and in our way met with Mr. Swan (my old acquaintance), and we to a tavern, where we had enough of his old simple religious talk, and he is still a coxcomb in these things as he ever was, and tells me he is setting out a book called “The unlawfull use of lawfull things;” but a very simple fellow he is, and so I leave him. So we drank and at last parted, and Mr. Moore and I into Cornhill, it being dark night, and in the street and on the Exchange discoursed about Dominion of the Sea, wherein I am lately so much concerned, and so I home and sat late up reading of Mr. Selden, and so to bed.

tavern talk
full of awful things
the street home


Erasure haiku derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 20 December 1661.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Stealer

Oton Death Mask
Luisa A. Igloria December 20, 2014
(Oton, Iloilo; 1300-1400 A.D.)

They’ve melted and cut
a ribbon of gold

into squares they’ll beat
with mallets to the thinness

of skin— They’ll trim
around the outlines

then lift with pincers to lay
upon the face of the beloved,

pressing upon the mouth
that kissed and doubtless

was kissed warmly in return,
the bridge of the nose

that flared quietly
for the last time

then shut close
in the early dark;

and because the dark
is real now, the two

eyepieces are a blessing—
one over each shaded socket,

medallions hammered to borrow
the sun’s old fire.

*

Melted gold,
thinness of skin,
beloved kissed
quietly then shut
to borrow fire.