I’m doing NaNoWriMo!

I want to publicly pledge to work on my writing more, and not neglect it as I have been doing recently.

Therefore, I here resolve to take myself to the library or out for coffee at least once a week, and to always have a notebook and a pen with me.  Or perhaps I should be pledging to take my notebook out for coffee.

Dear notebook, I promise to fill you with words and scribblings.  I promise not to keep you lonely at the bottom of my purse.  I promise to let you out into the air.

Love, E

Here are some beans that the gnome helped us to grow:

We got a little package in the mail the other day from our friend Andi.  Inside, there was a really, really sweet note, and also a miniature garden gnome.  She said that the gnome made her think of us.  I love it when someone buys a gift just because it made them think of you.  And I also love to send things to people with that same inspiration.  It’s a sign that the person is prominent in your mind.  And it also means that you know them well enough that you know what sort of little things make them smile.  In other words, its a sign of a happy friendship.  Which isn’t to say that you have to buy people presents to have a good friendship.  It’s just nice to know that someone is thinking of you, and its nice to let your friends know that they have a special place in your mind.  Which reminds me that I should try a little harder to write letters to the people I think of on a regular basis.  I even bought a bunch of fun new cards at the Salvation Army the other day.  I enjoy buying greeting cards at thrift stores because you can find really random, funny ones.  I like random funny things.

But anyway, I was posting about the garden gnome.  We gave him a position as the guardian of our bean plants.  And he inspired us to move a snail with a gazing globe on her back from inside to outside, under the nasturtiums.  It looks in the picture like she’s eating some greens.  Those little heart-shaped leaves taste sour, but pleasant.  I used to nibble them myself when I was a kid.  And they get banana-shaped seed pods.

I have not been keeping this blog up to date!  You may have noticed.

Anyway, here’s an annotation I wrote a little while ago about Lisa Jarnot’s book Ring of Fire.  I liked this book enough that I’m planning to buy a copy when the opportunity arises.  Right now I just have it from the school library.

(essay after the jump)

Annotation on Lisa Jarnot’s Ring of Fire

Maybe it’s silly, but I found myself getting really annoyed with one of the blurbs on the back of this book.  I’m going to quote the whole thing, just to get it out in the open air of this white page.  “The remarkable poems in Lisa Jarnot’s Ring of Fire seem to come to us out of some profound, yet distant, sadness.  Rising on wave after wave of near endless iteration, like a linguistic Mandelbrot set, they arrive in the long moment after loss as the signature and enactment of an initiation-the primal collision and redemptive force of breathing between the tensile structure of the poem and the frangible space of living.”  This lengthy sentence was written by someone named Patrick Pritchett, writing for Jacket Magazine.  I had to look up what a Mandelbrot set was, and also the meaning of frangible.  So I learned some new vocabulary.  And there’s something nice about a lengthy sentence when its construction holds together.  But there was just something in me that yearned for much simpler language.  And this promotional blurb on the back of the book just cannot, could never, live up to the pleasure I received from the language within the book.

And it’s Lisa Jarnot, after all, that I’m supposed to be writing about, not jacket filler on the back of a volume of her poetry.  So, let’s start with the opposite end of the book-the front cover, specifically the title.  As someone who is currently working on putting together a collection of poems, I know it does me good to look at how other poets have accomplished this task successfully.  Jarnot’s title is not only attractive, it is also a perfect introduction to her book.  I don’t know whether the poems came first, or the title, but I do know that the image of fire occurs repeatedly throughout the book, from beginning to end.  This repetition creates the “ring” of the book’s title.  A ring is something that circles back to its beginning, something in which the beginning and end come together.

One of the fire poems that I especially liked was “What In Fire Did I, Firelover, Starter of Fires, Love?”  To start with, the title of this poem is absolutely fun to read and to say.  To read it out loud is to become the firelover, starter of fires.  Behind me, two candles burn atop a table.  The poem itself is a rich collection of fire images and stories of fires.  It starts in the space of the speaker’s memory, telling of the many instances of fires, whether small or large, that happen throughout a person’s life.  Fires are a universal human experience.  We could all list specific bonfires from our childhood, specific stoves or candles, a box of matches, a cigarette, perhaps even larger fires (a house, a wildfire) that scarred us, haunt us.  From the personal experience, the poem then moves outward, mentions Prometheus and other tales of fire in story and culture, general uses of fire.  It ends with the image of glass: “the way it starts from broken glass/ reflections, the way it melts sand into useful glass,/ the way it can be used to shape things into glass-shaped/ swans and other birds.”  The glass birds are a lovely way to end the poem.  It is as if the fire is taking flight.

Another lovely ending is the final poem of the book.  Its title, “The Specific Incendiaries of Spring,” brings the idea of fire in a new direction.  It makes me picture plants bursting into flower in the same way that a flame bursts forth.  Within the lines of the poem the image of kerosene is repeated, but so is the image of rain.  I like this experience of a new perception as the last poem in the collection.  Just like the glass birds in the previous poem I mentioned, it creates a sense of movement outward for the final idea, instead of a feeling of firm closure.  It’s the end of the book, but the book is still moving.  And this, again, supports the concept of the ring in the book’s title.  A ring is something that keeps moving, circling and circling.

So, in moving away from this book, even though I might still be spinning around its ring, I am hoping to take with me a lot of inspiration on how to put together a cohesive and successful collection of poetry, one that feels as if it was meant to be a whole.  I think I may have been fearing that too much repetition of an image or idea would become boring quickly.  But from this book I can see that repetition can be embraced.  I can trust my creativity and make it work for me to use repetition as a tool towards expansion of an idea and not just monotony.

I think this blog that my friend S and her friend K just started is awesome, so I am going to link to it. It’s all about books. Books are good.  I’m gonna add it to my blogroll too.

Check it out.

What does the “knee-jerk” part of the phrase “knee-jerk liberal refer to?  Or, in other words, what is a liberal like myself supposedly jerking her knees about?

It makes me imagine a form of folk dance with lots of bouncing involved.  And little bands of bells around the ankles to jingle while those knees are doing their thing.

But this is a derogatory term.  So what’s the story?

S read this poem to me earlier this evening and it gave me a fluttery feeling. I don’t get to see the ocean much, so when I do it’s a special time. Most recently, the ocean means writing and creativity to me, because of Port Townsend, Washington, and my Goddard residencies. I get to go again in February. I’ll have these words in my head when I go. And it’s sort of a full-circle thing, too, because I bought this book for S from Copper Canyon Press. From Fort Worden to Vermont back to Fort Worden, with all kinds of poetic flutters and frills in between. From the Puget Sound to the shores of Lake Champlain back to the Puget Sound. Sand in my shoes. Gathering beach glass.

The photograph above is from Coney Island, NY, another place I’ve gazed over saltwater. I’ve never been there in the summer, only in cold weather. L and I gathered shells there.

Here’s the poem I’ve been talking about: From Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions translated by William O’Daly

XLIX

When I see the sea once more

will the sea have seen or not seen me?

Why do the waves ask me

the same questions I ask them?

And why do they strike the rock

with so much wasted passion?

Don’t they get tired of repeating

their declaration to the sand?

They had to cut down a huge old tree that grew in front of the local gay/lesbian/queer/trans/etc. community center, where I am teaching a poetry class. It makes me a little sad every time I walk past there because I used to enjoy seeing the rainbow flag peeking out under the branches. I guess it was a problem, though. The tree was growing right up against the porch. But losing this one big tree has got me thinking about how I’d really like to plant some lovely oak or maple or something in front of our house here, but the yard is so small, there’s probably not really room for one. Maybe a small tree? I could settle for that, probably. A fruit tree? An ornamental tree? And I wonder whether that little pine tree we planted at the last house will survive. One of the hard parts about renting houses is that you have to leave your garden behind when you move.

But, anyway trees: Do you believe that trees can speak to you? Or that a tree can hug you back when you put your arms around it? Sometimes I do almost believe these things, even though I find it difficult to be a believer in general. But I do feel peaceful around trees. It could be just the clean air and the shade or it could be something more.

Book: May Sarton’s collection of poetry A Grain of Mustard Seed. I mentioned this poem, the Invocation to Kali, before, back when I first bought the book. Well, I liked it so much that I ended up writing a whole annotation on it. And my enthusiasm seems to have come through in the essay, because my advisor responded by saying that she didn’t think she liked May Sarton, but now she wanted to get a copy of this book and read it for herself.

Fierce Poetry: May Sarton’s Invocation to Kali

“She comes to purge the altars in her way,

And at her altar we shall have to pray.”

I am beginning my annotation of May Sarton’s poem “The Invocation to Kali” with a quotation from the poem, because the poem itself begins with a quotation from Joseph Campbell’s book The Masks of God, and that quote drew me strongly into the poem when I first read it. Campbell’s words detail the goddess Kali’s existence as a being who is both constantly hungry and constantly giving birth, personifying the cycle of destruction and creation. Sarton has used the idea of this goddess to explore and struggle with the human tendency for amazing violence, specifically the concentration camps during World War II. The poem is composed of five sections, and in each one Sarton has chosen to write in a different poetic form. Both the length of the poem and the formal decisions feel very natural to the poem’s subject matter. It feels as though Sarton has chosen carefully in the creation of each of these sections, making sure that the poem has the time and space to move through its struggle at a natural pace and not be rushed or cramped. Each section’s tone and form feels natural to its content.

I was especially interested in Sarton’s decision to compose the third section of the poem, the one about concentration camps, in the form of a sestina. This is a difficult form, and many of the sestinas I’ve read before have felt forced and awkward. The ones I’ve tried to write myself have certainly been pretty bad! It’s an especially interesting choice for Sarton here, because it’s used in the central section of the poem—both physically and emotionally central. This is where the poem moves into specifics, where Sarton provides an example to support what she’s saying philosophically in the rest of the poem. I think the sestina succeeds here because its subject matter is so baffling and uncomfortable. The repetitive and circling nature of the form mirrors the way the human mind reacts naturally to horrible thoughts. The mind scurries and tries to escape or justify, but the awful images keep coming back. The whole poem is about this same truth—we cannot escape the fact that we do terrible things sometimes. We must come to terms with the existence of Kali, because we can’t have light without darkness.

The final section of the poem was also an interesting formal choice to me. After reading the rest of the poem, I was expecting another piece divided into even stanzas, probably with end-rhymes and standard line-lengths. Instead, the fifth section is composed in free verse. But again, Sarton’s interesting choice works perfectly within this poem. The move to free verse creates a sense of opening at the end, releasing the reader somewhat from the tension of the rest of the poem. This section also feels very much like a prayer, so it gives the feeling of being in a form without being as strictly formal as the rest of the poem. One could also say that this section is formal in the other sense of the word, that it has solemnity and dignity. Its language is elevated, and it is the first time that Kali is addressed directly in the poem: “Kali, be with us. / Violence, destruction, receive our homage.”

Finally, I just want to point out how fabulous this stanza from the first section is. Since it speaks of poetry, I feel that as a poet I have to give this stanza its due respect. I think these words can speak for themselves, therefore I am going to both begin and end this annotation with a quotation.

“I am the cage where poetry

Paces and roars. The beast

is the god. How murder the god?

How live with the terrible god?”