A litany is a form of poetry that repeats and repeats, repeats and circles. I’ve been trying to make friends with it lately, both through reading and writing. Here’s a little annotation essay of mine on some of Joy Harjo’s litanies:

Exploring the Litany: Poetry by Joy Harjo

After reading Joy Harjo’s How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems: 1975-2001, I realized that I slightly regretted not choosing to read a single collection of Harjo’s poetry for this annotation, rather than a selected-poems volume, because the three poems that I had the strongest reaction to were all taken from a single one of Harjo’s books, She Had Some Horses. This is, of course, a signal that I need to find that book and read it in its entirety. And there were plenty of other lovely poems elsewhere in the compilation, so my time reading the whole volume was not at all wasted. Then I noticed another similarity between my three favorite poems-all three were heavy on repetition. Two of the poems, “Remember,” and “I Give You Back,” are both litanies, although the latter may be more accurately termed a modified litany. The third poem, “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window,” I wouldn’t call a litany, but rather a story told in a non-linear manner, with the use of circling and repetition. I want to focus here on the litany form, but keeping in mind that the way a litany makes use of repetition could be used in any sort of poem, to some degree.

A litany is more than just a list of repeated words and phrases; it is a form of repetition in which each new line increases a poem’s tension until the meaning and emotion of the poem reach a climax. Then the reader is released, feeling changed by the experience. Take the poem “Remember,” for instance. Already, with just the title, the reader’s emotions are engaged. Remembering is something we all do. Sometimes we fear to remember and sometimes we fear not to remember. The title puts the word in a form of a command, and this command is carried through the entire poem. The reader is instructed to remember whether or not she wants to. The poem is also framed by this word-it stands alone as the title, and it stands alone on the last line of the poem. Within this frame is the list of all that Joy Harjo wants her readers to remember. The list begins with a personal tone: “Remember the sky you were born under” and “Remember your birth, how your mother struggled/ to give you form and breath.” By the end, the ideas have expanded to the universal: “Remember you are all people and all people/ are you. / Remember you are this universe and this/ universe is you.” And perhaps one of the things that made this poem particularly memorable to me was the fact that it ended with the idea of language, and I love language. Joy Harjo says, “Remember the dance language is, that life is. / Remember.” And I do. I try to remember everything the poem has told me to remember, and I definitely remember the poem itself.

The other litany poem by Harjo that I wanted to explore, “I Give You Back,” also deals with something that all people experience, but this time it is fear rather than memory. This, of course, gives the poem a darker tone. And I think the darkness and heaviness of its subject matter is perhaps the reason that Harjo chose to modify the repeated phrases throughout the poem. Each place in the poem where there is a change gives the reader a chance to take a breath, to step back for a second, and then square her shoulders to go forward. The first repeated phrase of the poem is “I release you.” “I release you, my beautiful and terrible/ fear.” The phrase then changes briefly to “I give you back,” then returns to “I release you.” The first half of the poem concludes with “I release you” repeated four times.

Next, there is an eight-line stanza where each line begins with the phrase “I am not afraid.” This feels like a natural change; it is logical that someone who has released her fear would not be afraid. The last line of this stanza, “I am not afraid to be loved.” is followed by a space break, and then the isolated line, “to be loved, to be loved, fear.” This line returns the reader’s attention to the fact that the poem is not just about the speaker, but it is about the speaker directly addressing her fear as a character, someone or something very close to her, her “beloved and hated twin.”

After this come three stanzas that bring the poem to its powerful conclusion. The use of repeated phrases to begin lines becomes less important in this part of the poem, but there are several instances of repeated sentence structures. And there is one use of repetition towards the end of the poem that I found especially poignant: “You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice/ my belly, or in my heart my heart/ my heart my heart.” The obsessive, punctuation-less repetition here shows clearly how emotional the speaker’s voice has become by the end of this poem.

The poem concludes with the words, “But come here, fear/ I am alive and you are so afraid/ of dying.” The speaker has moved all the way from releasing her fear to welcoming it back into her arms. But to me it does not feel like the way the poem ends is a betrayal of anything that was proclaimed earlier in the poem. Instead, I believe the speaker has realized that she is not afraid to be afraid, a significant realization. The use of repeated phrases in the litany style allowed Joy Harjo to elevate the emotional level of this poem, and by changing those phrases throughout the poem she allowed the speaker to have an epiphany. Although the poem may not be a true litany, it was my favorite of the two poems I’ve been discussing, and the one that affected me most.

I’ve put this photo I took of a covered bridge here because I’m posting (after the jump) an annotation I wrote about Eleni Sikelianos’s book, The California Poem, and since I’ve never been to California, I did some thinking about what her book would be like translated into Vermont language. Vermont is my home state. And Vermont is very proud of its covered bridges.

The California Poem Annotation: The Delights of Cross-Genre Literature

In The California Poem by Eleni Sikelianos, the use of cross-genre/ multi-genre methods becomes a way for the boundaries of the work to expand beyond the words on the page, beyond the bindings of the book, and beyond the reader’s expectations. There is a feeling of extreme largeness to this book; this largeness is necessary for the book to be true to the largeness (in both size and personality) of its subject, the state of California. Reading The California Poem, I got the feeling that Sikelianos would have included, if it were possible, singing voices broadcast from between her pages, the smell and temperature of a Pacific Ocean breeze, and hands that could reach out to touch or pinch or tickle me. But of course these things aren’t really feasible in a book made of paper and ink, so instead there are words that flow across the pages in a manner that feels kin to Walt Whitman, and these words are supplemented with collages, photographs, reproduced postcards, and line drawings.

And the words themselves are not just in the form of expansive lines scattered across the pages, but also in quotations, charts, footnotes, endnotes. This could be termed scrapbook poetry, I think. Words, this book shows, can be a visual medium as well as a manifestation of language. As Sikelianos herself says about words in one poem, “RISE UP—–phonemes/ cum genomes, let/ language disintegrate, tiny/ technology in the compost heap; gumdrops; I mean/ our species; the ovicidal moonfish slips/ into Sirius, Canis Major-bright my words dive-/ bombing swallows angry at my hair & slip/ new gods// into the sky…” I’m not sure if I could dissect the exact meaning of those lines, but to me they create an impression of language as something organic, alive, and active.

To return to the idea of a scrapbook: I would define a scrapbook as something similar to a collage, a statement of self formed from fragments of both your own and other people’s creations. A scrapbook can draw from both the very personal and from the very public. A love letter next to a newspaper clipping, etc. So, too, with The California Poem. The book addresses both the author’s personal experience of the state of California and the public history and geology of the state. There is a photograph of the author as a child in 1972 and there is a photograph of earthquake damage in 1925. There are quotations from widely varying sources. Perhaps the inclusion of visual art is another sort of quotation. In any case, the effect is to tell the reader that this book doesn’t just have one thing to say-it has layers and layers of things to say. The inclusion of footnotes and endnotes especially supports this layering effect. And layers, of course, add to the book’s feeling of largeness.

I couldn’t help wondering, while reading this book about California, what a sister book about Vermont would be like, in the same style. I’ve never been to California, but I live in and grew up in Vermont, so it helped me in my attempt to understand Sikelianos’s techniques to imagine applying them to my own home and experiences. It seems to me that you have to truly know a place, to love it and to also know exactly what its dirt looks and smells like, to write a poem like this. What would a book-length Vermont poem be like? Just the idea of it half makes me want to write it right now. It would have to be packaged a little differently-a taller, narrower book to match the tall peaked roofs that Vermont houses have to shed snow in the winter.

The word Vermont comes from the French, means green mountains, which are really more like rolling hills. There’s a strong sense of shelter to this landscape. Perhaps the pieces of poetry would have to be smaller. It is not a land of extremes like California. No Death Valley here. Just narrow dirt roads to get lost on. And I don’t know much about the native Americans who lived here before European colonization, the Abenaki. I would have to learn more about them, and also refresh my memory of the revolutionary war history. Samuel de Champlain. Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys. Whereas California has the gold rush, western expansion, a sense of horizon. There’s no connection to the ocean here in Vermont, just Lake Champlain, which is shared with New York. I think there was a campaign a few years ago to register Lake Champlain as one of the great lakes but I really feel that the lake is something else, some other special category of its own. There’s legend of the Champlain monster, “Champ” or “Champie.” In the winter most of it freezes over. And I imagine the winter landscape here in Vermont as having something kin with haiku. The snow as a blank page, and the bare trees as brushstrokes forming characters forming poems. And the people of Vermont are different from the people of California, or at least I’m lead to believe so from movies. Hollywood. Vermonters see themselves as independent. Stoic, resourceful. The importance of privacy. The state motto is “freedom and unity.”

But I am starting to write that Vermont book right now, which isn’t necessary. What I meant to say was that looking at my own state as if it were the main character of a book-length poem helped me to understand Eleni Sikelianos’s undertaking. The California Poem is something quite impressive and enjoyable to read, all the more so because of all the directions it draws its material from.

Sometimes the character descriptions are my favorite parts of novels.  They often seem more vibrant to me than other parts of the same book.  Is this because the author puts in extra effort when describing a character?  To me they just seem great fun to write.

Here are a couple recent ones that I enjoyed.  They amused me.  Both are from The Dancing Druids by Gladys Mitchell.  It’s my current bathroom-reading mystery novel, obtained from the free discards rack at the library.

“Laura was as bold as a lion, but was as superstitious as a warlock.  She was full of dark fancies drowned in primordial deeps.  She also believed, with healthy, female instinct, that dangerous and delicate missions were less unpleasant in the daylight than in the dark.  With respect to the house itself, she was torn between a frantic desire to visit it and an equally strong determination not to go anywhere near its boundaries.  She was, in fact, like a child who both dreads and longs for a ghost-story just at bedtime.  The thrill would be worth it, the aftermath definitely not.  In other words, although Laura was both practical and hard-headed, and although she was brisk, jimp, and daring in all that she undertook, she was also the prey of an inherited belief in the legends, spectres and bogies of a Highland ancestry.  It was one of the many reasons for her adherence to Mrs. Bradley, who was legend, spectre, and bogie all in one, for she felt, without realizing it, that the greater demon kept the lesser demons at bay.”

I had to look up “jimp.”  It’s apparently a Scottish term that means slender or scant or neat or elegant.  Perhaps also archaic usage, since the novel was published in 1948.

And then there’s this description a little later in the book of Mrs. Bradley herself:

“Mrs. Bradley cordially agreed.  She herself looked very far from appetizing in a sage-green costume and a bright red blouse, an heirloom brooch of vast proportions whose only virtue was that it did at least conceal some of the blouse, stout shoes with crepe rubber soles, knitted stockings, and a rakish diamond clip on the side of her shining black hair.”

Doesn’t that seem a bit of fun to have written?  If I ever write a novel myself….

Where do ideas for poems come from?  For me, it’s almost always something very small.  An image, a phrase, a brief moment in a conversation–I call them seeds.  It’s when I feel an opening inside my head, a fascination, a connection, the potential for growth.  Then I try to save that feeling, to sort of incubate it in my head until I’m ready to plant it, I guess.  Sometimes nothing ever comes from these seeds, of course.  But sometimes it does.  Yes.

So, the other day I was visiting my parents at the house where I grew up, and I happened to notice the name of a road near their house: “Crow Hill.”  This name has been common knowledge to me since I was a kid, but I never really thought about it as an image.  A hill.  With crows.  Yes, there really is a hill there.  The road goes up quite steeply.  I don’t know about the history of the crows, though.  Crows are fairly common birds, aren’t they?  Maybe they used to congregate there.  Maybe someone with the last name Crow used to live there.  Who knows.  My grandfather used to feed dog food to the crows near his house.

Whatever this history, though, I have this image jiggling in my head now.  A jumping-bean seed?  There’s a swirling of the words, my childhood, my grandfather, black birds, a road, harsh cries, landscape.

So perhaps a poem will come.  Perhaps it’s even now putting forth roots, underground where I can’t see it.

I got this from S’s blog on myspace. I don’t really use myspace anymore, so I’ve exported it here because I was interested enough to want to fill it out.

“This short survey is to encourage readers, writers, and poets to share a few simple things about ourselves. There are only twelve questions, and none of them have to do with eye color, sexual preferences, or high school crushes. Please read, answer, and repost. We might learn something from each other.”

1. Three authors that have inspired or influenced my writing are:
It’s so hard to pick just three! Um…Lorine Niedecker, Elizabeth Bishop, A.S. Byatt

2. The hardest part of the writing process for me is:
Making the transition from an amazing idea in my head to the limits of my words on paper.

3. One book I have always intended to read, but I haven’t yet is:
J was talking about some classics recently and I jotted them down to add to my reading list. They’re books I’ve heard of repeatedly, so I guess that could be defined as “always intended to read.” I trust J’s judgement, anyway. The books he listed were: Madame Bovary, Silas Marner, and Moll Flanders.

4. (True or False) I sometimes read non-fiction for pleasure.
True. I read a great book about dirt recently. And I need to get that book about female pirates back from A sometime. I don’t read nonfiction as often as I read fiction and poetry, but I will pick it up if the subject seems interesting and the book seems well-written.

5. (True or False) I came from a family that read a lot.
Very true. My mom read aloud to us at bedtime, and I’ve loved reading aloud ever since. And reading in general.

6. My favorite movie adaptation of a book is:
It would be totally cliche of me to say the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, but that one is rather good. I also really loved Brokeback Mountain. And the movie version of Orlando.

7. The most boring book I ever read all the way through is:
A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes. I’ve had two teachers urge me to read that book, and then when I finally did it just bored and irritated me. I mean, the alphabetical arrangement is sort of interesting, but not interesting enough to sustain the entire book. And the content just sounded like a bunch of whining to me.

8. Poetry is:
essential language.

9. My favorite place to read is:
curled up somewhere nest-like with lots of blankets on top of me. Or on the toilet.

10. The funniest thing I have read recently is:
I’m reading a silly mystery book about monks right now, and it’s pretty entertaining, funny. I especially liked the scene with the drunken Santa Claus.

11. The most mind challenging thing I have read recently is:
Lyn Hejinian’s My Life.
12. When I stop by my local library the librarians must think:
Nothing drastic, probably. I don’t think I stand out from the other library patrons. I had a happy moment with one librarian when she expressed pleasure that my overdue fines were from books and not from movies. That was fun.

And that’s the end of the quiz!

Here’s another annotation.  This one’s on Lyn Hejinian’s book My Life.  As you will gather if you read on, I was kinda baffled by this book, and it took me a long time to get through it even though it’s rather small as a physical object.  In the end I decided that I didn’t feel confident enough to write something essay-ish and academic about it, but I thought I could manage to approach it creatively, so I tried to imitate the style without exactly understanding what I was doing.  It seemed to be an appropriate way to express the jumble of my thoughts, though, and maybe I’ve developed a slightly higher level of understanding in the process.

Click to read the annotation:

An Annotation on Lyn Hejinian’s My Life in the Style of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life

smell of black rubber

The snow was so white that it made my teeth feel quite yellow.  Standing in a warehouse.  Smell of black rubber.  Leaning on a stack of winter tires.  Reading a small white book.  The way words taste like the room you’re in.  Reading a storybook with a small child.  Pointing to the pictures.  Carried in a pocket for months.  The struggle to understand someone else’s personal language when your own language intrudes and questions every word.  A mother spreads her children around her.  Gratitude.  Patience.  My new black boots like winter tires for my feet.  There’s a sort of dusty halitosis to the room, as if it were an old man with no one to care for him, all the people too busy to sweep or vacuum.  And yet this waiting, nothing else to do but read the little white book, my attention forced on it so that the memory of reading is quite vivid, although my memory of what I read dissipates quickly.  My pink ankles, burned by the deep snow, desperate for dry socks.  There are products arranged on the shelves, faded and jumbled, and it seems that no one ever buys them.  Here I am in a pile of words.  The effort of searching for meaning, the related effort to hold on to a thread and free it from a tangle.  Shifting from foot to foot.  If you’re a mother and you need to change your infant’s diaper, you just do it on the floor, quickly and efficiently.  Need is met.  What wizardry is this?  Later we hide that sort of thing.  I keep thinking that I’m just about to be flooded with the light and energy of understanding.  Just around the corner.

faced with a lack of imagination

Perhaps I am leaving a few blonde hairs on the blue cloth of the train seat, in return for the chocolate stains the seat is leaving on my canvas pants.  Do you know which side to sit on, he asks, to see the view of the river? Clanging and tapping.  At what point am I justified in building a brick wall?  A large white bird.  I’m going today to spend some time with a friend.  On Coney Island we suddenly stepped into open space.  It was too cold, but refreshing.  She asks a lot of questions.  Perhaps the book just jumbles the order of the sentences, just as the mind is a jumbled landscape.  I record the words of the graffiti in my little notebook to use later in poetry.  Faced with the limits of my imagination, I must travel in order to fill my mind with new images.  She was startled to come downstairs and see me sitting on the couch where I’d been awake all night.  There is a paper taped to the wall in the guest bedroom for keeping a list of adjectives describing the noises made by the ancient heating pipes.  Hissing and struggling.  I read the first chapter out loud.  It is often justified to question the genre of things like this.  For a long time we walked in the wrong direction, thinking that the yarn shoppe would be on the next block.  Wind off the ocean.  A construction site hidden behind a plywood wall.  She said she understood why the book was confusing to me.  Was it poetry?  But if so, I was fooled by the shape on the page.  Frequently we found ourselves on trains.  A stranger will speak to you and it will be an awkward moment.  The employee of the bookstore who said he never reads.  Loose boards on the boardwalk.  She said she though she’d be exhausted by all that stream of consciousness stuff. My legs are tired, but I have to keep walking.

thinking in circles

I must admit that I’m irritated by one of the repeated phrases, “a pause, a rose, something on paper.”  On the couch, three crocheted blankets and a cat on my lap.  The wheeled cart of free books in the lobby of the library.  I have a task to do, and I feel like it’s taken me years.  Thinking becomes hazy and circular.  A blue quilted bag with many pockets inside.  A white book small enough to fit in a pocket.  My birthday.  She’s caught up with me now, and maybe it’s better that way.  Imitation is how I deal with confusion.  I still haven’t figured out the significance of that repetition.  All I wanted was a new friend.  Should I be counting sentences, digging in the upturned earth for a key?  The ethics of writing a phone number on a slippery scrap of paper.  The idea: to cheat and make this into a creative writing assignment-an annotation on, in the style of.  Too many sweet delicious white chocolate balls in one sitting.  It seems a foreign language that I failed to learn how to speak.  They say that if you watch television it helps.  I could have just asked her what she thought, I suppose, but I didn’t.  Instead developing strategies for becoming a grand wizard on a computer game.  Just the one idea.  Theory of the importance of each sentence, like poetry.  Each word.  In the end, I have little patience with puzzles.  A sea bird just skimming along the top of the waves.  Isolation.  I have to pursue my one idea because it’s all I have.  Traveling again soon.  Even if I never reach the cold, wise depths.  Eat more salt.  Walk in black boots until my feet hurt.  Hands crouched at the edge of the keyboard.

An annotation on Italo Calvino, a nifty Italian writer, and how he made me think about why I write:

One small scene in all its glory   

            Italo Calvino’s story, “The Call of the Water,” stretches a single moment out into the extremes of its possibilities.  A basic written description of one moment would contain only the actions of its characters.  A fuller description would add some scenery, adjectives applied to the surroundings or to the characters, perhaps a bit about the characters’ feelings.  To extend this, next would come some history and/or the thoughts and memories of each character.  These are the things that Italo Calvino includes in his story, to the extreme, and this is how Calvino creates the amazing richness of “The Call of the Water.”  The only action in this story is the character standing in the shower and turning on the water.  We don’t see him waking up and walking to the bathroom.  We don’t see him washing his hair and body, rinsing himself, turning off the water, wrapping up in a towel, etc.  But his thoughts are enough, and Calvino explores them in so much detail that more action is totally unnecessary.  The moment of turning on the water becomes a meditation on everything that makes that moment possible—the pipes and plumbing, the source of the water, water itself.  Calvino doesn’t rush the thoughts of his character, but instead slows them down so that the reader can explore and appreciate a thought process that, in real life, would flash through a person’s mind in a second and then be gone.

            This piece was especially interesting to me because I’ve written a lot of poetry lately that focuses on small things, a moment or an object.  Or maybe not “lately.”  Maybe I’ve always done that, and I’m only thinking about it more lately.  Anyway, I find it very interesting to hold a moment, an image, or an item in my mind and contemplate its deeper meaning.  Every moment has causes and effects, every object has a history, every image has the potential to bring forth emotion.  But I find it really difficult to do what Italo Calvino has done with this story about water.  The temptation to over-describe is very strong, as is the desire to abbreviate.  Because the human mind jumps from thought to thought so quickly, I imagine that it took Calvino a lot of attention, not to mention creative skill, to organize this thought process into words and elegantly-constructed sentences.

            At the beginning of the story, Calvino’s character says, in reference to the act of turning on the shower, “I am perfectly aware that this gesture I’m performing to start my day is a decisive and solemn act, one that puts me in touch with both culture and nature together, with thousands of years of human civilization, and with the birth pains of those geological eras that gave our planet its shape.”  What I find amazing about this sentence is the way it could be applied to any gesture, really.  It is up to the writer to discover and describe how and why an action connects to culture, nature, and civilization, but the possibilities are there, always.  It was Calvino’s awareness of this truth that allowed him to write this story.  The act of writing itself is surely a “decisive and solemn act, one that puts [Calvino] in touch with both culture and nature together,” etc.  And Calvino’s use of the word “solemn” in this sentence, at the beginning of the story, indicates that this piece of writing takes itself seriously, and will not shy from any effort needed to fulfill its potential.

            One aspect of this piece of writing that adds a lot to its success is the way that Calvino creates tension, even though there is so little action.  This is why I am inclined to call the piece a story, and not just an essay or a meditation.  The tension comes from the fact that the speaker in the story turns on the tap in the first sentence, but it isn’t until the last paragraph, a few pages later, that water comes flowing out of the shower head.  The title “the Call of the Water” supports this tension.  Reaching out and turning the knob to the left, as the story’s character does in the first sentence, is a way of calling for water, calling to the water and asking it to come through the pipe.  The story then consists of the moment of waiting for that call to be answered.  Any kind of waiting inherently contains tension, and Calvino takes advantage of this fact and magnifies it by slowing down time and focusing the narrator’s attention obsessively on that water he’s waiting for: “But before a drop appears at each hole in the shower head to lengthen in a still uncertain dribble then suddenly swell all together in concentric circles of vibrant jets, I have to wait a whole second, a second of uncertainty during which there’s no way of knowing whether the world still contains any water…”

            There’s so much detail in the world—every scrap of color, light, shadow, pattern, and texture creating the richness of this room I’m sitting in, each object with its own story of how it got to look and feel the way it does, and how it got to be sitting exactly where it’s sitting, not to mention the living things in the room—black cat sleeping on a pillow next to me, black dog barking at some noise outside and eyeing me at the same time because she knows she’s not supposed to be barking, and what is it out there that she’s barking at?  And my own thoughts constantly racing and jumbling through my mind, and how my toes feel a little cold, and the music that I’m listening to, the woman singing it, her voice, the lyrics that I can’t quite understand because she has an Irish accent, the history of Celtic music, or the history of folk music, plus the clicking sound of my fingers on the keyboard, and the manufacture of this computer, the people who designed it and the sources of all its many small parts, and the people who assembled it, the electricity that’s flowing into it right now through wires in the wall that connect to wires strung from the house to a poll outside and more wires waving in the wind all down the street.  The electricity is very similar to the water in Italo Calvino’s story.  I could go on and on about coal and nuclear power plants and about how the weather man predicted high winds that might knock tree branches onto the power lines and how that would plunge my house into darkness because it’s winter now and it gets dark very early.  But I won’t go on and on forever, because there’s no way to record every single tiny detail about the world, or even about this one room.  And yet, if us writer’s don’t at least attempt to record it all, who will?  There are important things in those small details.  Italo Calvino has shown that to be true in “The Call of the Water.”  And so I go on writing, because there are always more little moments that deserve to be remembered.