Upon Reading North

 

Upon Reading North*

To say it’s unmagical is not to insult it.

It’s we who qualify and crave without definition.

Only assumptions based on context. Diction.

An entire first reading can be spent looking up meanings.

Magic’s absence then, is merely a possible state.

No stone ships here, nor glinting gravel

where men fell and froze and thawed again.

Only embers and beer cans and rebar lace.

This is Lake Ontario. On a clear day, they say, 

you can see Rochester from here.

Though noisy with gulls, untidy with detritus,

this shore of sea, this coast of bay,

is rest. Under the paling stars of morning

lay your head on the sand. Point north.

The city is behind you now.

Here is Aurora. Early sun turns the inner eye red.

The cascade is waves, each following the last.

The evolution is of your education, your

experience, in which you are the expert.

Thus the world offers itself to your imagination.

Within struggle is wonder, that bulky emotion.

It leaves room for little else.

                                                                    *after Seamus Heaney

A Quote About

 "He was after a joyfulness, a belief in existence in which man's inner light is neither rare nor elite, but godly and common and acknowledged. For that it was necessary to be rooted in the world again."

                                                               Mary Oliver on Walt Whitman                                             

Countered

COUNTERED

An easy climate with all the elements,
earth, air, fire, water.
A desperate system solid as it is human.
Dust is falling where dust has climbed.
The sun is patient, moon calm, 
the sin of knowledge almost innocence.
Love has become goodwill, as grief has, 
as torturing strength has warped to sanity.
Now dustbowl earth completes its nothingness,
every bright image, lark or cardinal,
has dropped its wings, has moulted in disgust.
The lucid mind fumbles to doors and falls.
The crusted eyes tears cannot clarify.
But traveller dust which notices our earth
we totally invite until we die.
Now earth must spin as little as it is
as it has spun before our vast illusion.
Now loves will tumble on dark beds of space.
Loves will tumble now in any case.
But eyes of power, the long mileage to stars
our sleep will dreaden and intensify.
Lovers will love, and all the instant world
will tether joy, creation's sweet pathetic trust,
while our participating marrow
clicks with destroying dust.

Phyllis Webb
The Sea Is Also A Garden
The Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1962

As Those Who Are Too Old

As Those Who Are Too Old

he is inventing me
but I cannot say to him
she is not real
even as he held me
he was destroying me
and creating her
he was puzzled when
I walked away
as fast as those
who are too old to die
he writes her letters
which I intercept
and answer with great care 
and imprecision

Joy Kogawa
Jericho Road
McClelland Stewart, 1977

PS:  I found out today that Joy Kogawa and I share the same birthday - the day and month though not the year. Obvoiusly. She is actually one year older than my father.

She speaks in an interview I watched on line today, of the point in your life of "crossing over". That time, she says, is when you decide to cease becoming a victim. In a great spirit of gentleness, she acknowledges that, of course, there are moments when you are thrown back. However, if you stay stuck in the identity of the victim, and stay focused on how hurt you are, then you are not aware of others' suffering. You are only aware of your own and that is how you can do great harm to others. When you cease to be constantly aware of your own suffering is when you know you are seen and then you can see others.

And so, imprecision. But very great care.

John Ashbery: Jul 28 1927- Sept 3 2017

How do I write an appreciation of John Ashbery? He died this past Sunday at age 90 and was a writer always. I started to say, in my Facebook post about his passing, that his words were often comfort and joy to me until I realized this is a quote from a holiday carol. See how easy it is to fall into maudlin cliche and bad writing?

I first wrote of my discovery of John Ashbery in January 2013 after taking the self guided East Village Poetry Walk in lower Manhatten. As I said then, I was crossing the park with Ashbery's voice in my ear reading Just Walking Around (A Wave, 1984). It was a beautiful neighbourhood park full of families and dogs and a few bench lounging drunks. During what was often a lonely trip to for me, it reminded me of my heart's home.

"But you are too preoccupied
By the secret smudge in the back of your soul
To say much and wander around,
Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting.
Counterproductive..."

A big dog bounded toward me, all smiling legs and tail and I felt the tight spring inside me uncoil a notch. I've listened to and read that poem countless times since that day. I can recite it by heart.

St Mark's Place, NYC January 2013

Ashbery's 1991 book length poem Flow Chart was my near constant companion through 2014. It was with me most Friday nights at my favourite diner where I sat over greasy food and pints reading and reading and sometimes trying to write myself. I marked my favourite passages with bits of torn napkin, copied them into my journal: 

"...dig our heels in and ask the cliff 
to explain itself, and the ferns erupting from its crevices:  I too 
have stood here faceless and seemingly angry for a long time, yet for all that
don't feel it time to intimidate someone, make him or her feel lonesome just 
   because there is
indeed a horizon"

Or this:

"...And will my genuine if respectful indifference militate 
against the neutrality of my performance? Is a conflict of interest shaping up, or
     what?"

Or what, indeed?

Seems to be. Perhaps. You see. If so. I feel that. However...

He used common clauses to link lengthy yet individually simple, phrases into complex and famously "difficult" poetry. 
From The Guardian's obituary:

“I don’t find any direct statements in life,” Ashbery once explained to the Times in London. “My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness comes to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don’t think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation.”

I disagree with the difficult label. His writing to me, is the flow in the Flow Chart. One reads and an impression takes hold. His writing is a mirror to the way an observant mind processes the world. Music, visual imagery, snatches of news and conversation, all spool out to form an idea. It's stated then left there as another takes shape. Perhaps it will be repeated later or perhaps not. Like waves lapping on the shore, climbing and receding, if listened to long enough, the experience of the experience becomes clear to you, even if you you don't understand exactly why.

Well thumbed.

John Ashbery was, of course, incredibly erudite, well read and well traveled.  He was also a professional art critic. He often referenced specific art work and literature in his poems and why wouldn't he? From mention of the opera Orlando Furioso in Soonest Mended (1962), to the painter Parmigianino in Self Portrait in A Convex Mirror (1975), to the Sibelius Quartet in Hotel Lautreamont (2007), it was always done with relevance and without arrogance. I have found that knowing the references is not always necessary to the appreciation of the work, but hey, we live in the world of the internet and it's delightfully easy to look these things up. 

My signed copy of  the Pulitzer Prize winning book - a gift from my Love.

We have the internet to thank as well for access to many recordings of Ashbery reading from his work. He had a pleasant and clear voice and read aloud in my favourite style; straightforward and without unnecessary dramatic emoting. He let the strength of the words carry the piece. I enjoy listening to him while I knit or take transit. I've heard him so often that when I read his poems to myself, it is his voice that I hear in my head.

Yes, I'm a little sad that he's gone but he was ninety years old after all.  He wrote until the end of his long and graceful life so he left us much to enjoy and discover - profound yet simple phrases such as "The inside of stumbling. The way to breath" (Homeless Heart, 2012). His last new collection came out in 2015. Isn't that remarkable? Mostly I suppose I'm sad because no longer can I use 'America's greatest living poet' as answer to the question, 'Who is John Ashbery? '.

"And now that the end is near,
The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there, and mystery and food.
Come see it. Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other"

Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

In the Shadow of a Dream

Imagine being found

on a morning like this

in the fragrance of spring rain

every sense a painful

happiness breathing

on a morning like this

a little lonely a little dazed

eyes still filled

with longing and dreams

To see you walk through

a veil of fog and gates of rain

to meet me this morning

with a glance that says

that I am seen and found

for as long as forever

Ulrikka S. Gernes

A Sudden Sky

Brick Books 2001

Second Verse for Bill

Completion is hard.
In a story or a poem, everyone starts with the understanding that
This is just a piece. A thought. A snapshot.
In a novel they expect an ending.
When you are writing a novel you have to decide
Where to stop. Though there is no ending really. The story
Always goes on. Even after every one of your characters dies,
Someone or something else
Continues.

After the show but before the babies
And long before we knew we could die
suddenly or otherwise,
you kissed me for the second time
under the streetlight by your apartment.
When you pulled away, you were smiling that gap toothed smile
that you never did get fixed.
We would always recognize you, you knew
by the space between your teeth.

Before long and longing and long before social media
could tell me you were gone
there was a streetlight and me on my bike.
Beer happy and twenty-five.
Facing home.
You OK? you asked and meant it.
Oh, don't worry about me. It's downhill from here.
I'll just point
and coast.

Radishes

I have had my share of black moods
and feeling blue; I have seen red
until flames licked the hems of sweaters;
but today - eternal return of the not same! -
my head became a radish
planted by banter
and watered by wry asides.
You could lay me on a plate
and frugally dine; I'd like to be
so consumed; but better still
was the sweet surprise (our roots tell truths)
of another radish swelling by my side.
With two deep secrets spilling themselves,
with these red faces, the wonderful garden grows.

Rachel Wetzsteon
Sakura Park
Persea Books, 2006

George Street Diner at Dusk

"The waitress turns on the lights: it is barely two o'clock, but the sky is black, she no longer has enough light to sew by. A soft glow; people are in their houses, they have probably turned on their lights too. They read, they look out of the window at the sky. For them ... it's different. They have grown older in another way. They live in the midst of legacies and presents, and each piece of furniture is a souvenir. Clocks, medallions, portraits, shells, paper-weights, screens, shawls. They have cupboards full of bottles, material, old clothes, newspapers; they have kept everything. The past is a property-owner's luxury.  

 Where should I keep mine? You can't put your past in your pocket..."

Jean-Paul Sartre
Nausea, 1938 

As the Mist Leaves No Scar

As the mist leaves no scar

On the dark green hill,

So my body leaves no scar

On you, nor ever will.

When wind and hawk encounter,

What remains to keep?

So you and I encounter,

Then turn, then fall to sleep.

As many nights endure

Without a moon or star, 

So will we endure

When one is gone and far.

Leonard Cohen

The Spice-Box of Earth 

1961

Homeless Heart

Homeless Heart

When I think of finishing the work, when I think of the finished work, a great sadness overtakes me, a sadness paradoxically like joy. The circumstances of doing put away, the being of it takes possession, like a tenant in a rented house. Where are you now, homeless heart? Caught in a hinge, or secreted behind drywall, like your nameless predecessors now that they have been given names? Best not to dwell on our situation, but to dwell in it is deeply refreshing. Like a sideboard covered with decanters and fruit. As a box kite is to a kite. The inside of stumbling. The way to breath. The caricature on the blackboard.

John Ashbery, Quick Question

ecco Harper Collins, 2012

Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!

Ha ha! I cannot stay true. How can one possibly do so when the internet dangles such delights? Surfing blogs while bored I found that Thea Coleman, aka, Baby Cocktails is having her Fall KAL. So not only is this pattern called Jameson, my favourite whiskey, but it's also on sale for the KAL. I just happen to have a bag of aran weight Fiddlesticks in my stash that's just itching to make luscious, intriging, cables. So I had to buy the pattern and cast on right away! I just had to. I always was a flighty thing. 

Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow! 

Faithless am I save to love's self alone. 

Were you not lovely I would leave you now: 

After the feet of beauty fly my own. 

Were you not still my hunger's rarest food, 

And water ever to my wildest thirst, 

I would desert you — think not but I would! — 

And seek another as I sought you first. 

But you are mobile as the veering air, 

And all your charms more changeful than the tide, 

Wherefore to be inconstant is no care: 

I have but to continue at your side. 

So wanton, light and false, my love, are you, 

I am most faithless when I most am true. 

Edna St. Vincent Millay

About A House

Words from: Gwendolyn McEwen's House, Breakfast for Barbarians
& Theaster Gates program notes How To Build A House Museum

I live in a room. A high room in the sky. Home but not a house. I am recently obsessed with the ground & why I am not on it - physically or metaphorically.

Contradictions

15.

You who think I find words for everything,
and you for whom I write this,
how can I show you what I'm barely
coming into possession of, invisible luggage
of more than fifty years, looking at first
glance like everyone else's, turning up
at the airport carousel
and the waiting for it, knowing what nobody
would steal must eventually come round -
feeling obsessed, peculiar, longing?


Adrienne Rich
Contradictions: Tracking Poems
Your Native Land, Your Life, 1986

Triolet

Confide in the darkness that inspires
Like death. Breath whitens the winter panes.
In streets below your window, fallen wires
Confide in the darkness that inspires.
Night is vital. Void desires
Return to soil like dead-end lanes.
Confide in the darkness that inspires
Like death. Breath whitens the winter panes.

Steven Heighton
Exile The Literary Quarterly  
Vol 18, 1994

Page 57

If I photograph half empty bars, I may become a poet.

   "But where, woman wailing above your station, is it you want to go to, get to, accomplish, communicate? Can't you be amply satisfied with such pain, such babies, such balancing? 
   No. No. There's a blood-flecked urge to go even a step further.
   Above the laughter, above the miseries, above the clatter of glasses and the cries of children, I hear a voice saying: Isn't there some statement you'd like to make? Anything noted while alive? Anything felt, seen, heard, done? You are here. You're having your turn. Isn't there something you know and nobody else does? What if nobody listens? Is it all to be wasted? All blasted? What about the pricey pain?  What about those people. They sit outside this story, but give it its shape. If it has a shape. What about all the words that were said and all the words that were never said?"

Elizabeth Smart
The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals
Paladin Grafton Books, 1991
original publisher, Jonathan Cape Ltd, Great Britain 1978

The Tao Of Physics

In the vast spaces of the subatomic world where
Matter has a     tendency     to exist
The lord of Life is breathing in and out,
Creating and destroying the universe
With each wave of his breath.

And my lord Siva dances in the city streets,
His body a fierce illusion of flesh, of energy,
The particles of light cast off from his hair
Invade the mighty night, the relative night, this dream.

Here where events have a    tendency    to occur
My chair and all its myriad inner worlds
Whirl around in the carousel of space; I hurl
Breathless poems against my lord Death, send these
Words, these words
Careening into the beautiful darkness.


Gwendolym MacEwen
Afterworlds, 1987

My Morning At the Library

I was really happy to find this colour plate of Vanessa Bell's portrait of Strachey.
I had previously only seen it reproduced in black and white. 

Let me not know the wherefore and the how.

     No question let me ask, no answer find;

I deeper taste the blessed here and now

     Bereft of speculation, with eyes blind.

What need to seek or see?

It is enough to be.

In absolute quiescence let me rest,

     From all the world, from mine own self, apart;

I closer hold the illimitable best,

     Still as the final silence, with calm heart,

What need to strive or move?

It is enough to love.

                                  Lytton Strachey, 1931

                                  A Critical Biography Vol II, p.691

"Parenthetical" or "Poetry and A Pint"

So, if I hadn't mentioned it before, I had been internet dating on and off for the past couple of years. This is how I miraculously met the fellow I wrote about (around?) in this post. Now, be aware that I went on many, many first dates. I choose not to be that person who blogs about all the awful people out there. I actually found that most of them were not really awful but just real people, struggling, passing or failing, with at least the guts to try. One must approach these things with compassion, don't you think? I don't know if it's typical or not - the finding of a loved one through modern cyber dating. I'm just so darned pleased that it happened to me!

Another wonderful thing happened. I made a new friend!. I went on a couple of dates early last summer with a poet. He's a lovely, intelligent, graceful man but we just didn't click romantically. We've managed to keep in touch though. I took him to a theatre piece and he's introduced me to his world. Who knew Toronto had such a vibrant reading scene? 

There's a poetry zine called, (parenthetical): the zine, which is published by a young couple with enormous energy, love of the written word,  and good humour. It's fantastic! They call their enterprise Words on Pages. In conjunction with the journal, they also produce a reading series called Words on Stages, a bi-monthly event at a local bar. I've attended twice now as the guest of my friend. The Daughter has come with me. How amazing to listen to the open mic and featured readers. These are (mostly) young people who just love language and the way it sounds.The way it builds an idea. The way it creates a community of listeners and of readers. This is exciting stuff. And I feel welcome when I'm there. Being an audience member is to be an active participant. Oxford defines audience as "The people giving attention to something". Right?

Give attention to something.

To read my friend, R. Kolewe's latest poem and many other delightful pieces, click here.

From a Flow Chart

                                                                                           Here

a moral dilemma socks one; is it better to remain single, conscious of the many

overlapping half-lives that with luck add up to one, or should

we be planted at many listening posts ready to radio vital information back to  

     whoever

stands at the long bar? And will my genuine if respectful indifference militate

against the neutrality of my performance? Is a conflict of interest shaping up, or

     what?"

Flow Chart by John Ashbery

The Noonday Press, 1998 paperback edition, p. 100