Day One - Video of "Numbers" Mary Cornish

"Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold." --- Anais Nin

Welcome to National Poetry Month 2011! We have a fun journey ahead of us this month with poetry in many forms. For the next thirty days I'll post quotations, web links, movies, and, of course, poems. In this celebration of the written word I hope you'll find one or two pieces that engage you and make a home in your mind, body, and soul. If we allow ourselves to be open to all art (especially poetry), we'll see the ordinary materials in our lives that we pass by everyday revitalized with a curious golden beauty.

The first poem I featured on We Convince By Our Presence three years ago was Numbers by Mary Cornish. I thought it would be fitting to start this year's incarnation of WCBOP with a multimedia version of the same poem. Check out this movie I made and I think you'll see how poetry can blend very nicely with other media forms.

Check it out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNOqNNK0K9k

April is almost upon us...BRING ON THE POETRY!!!

Hi Everyone,

We are only a week away from the start of National Poetry Month. Are you excited? You should be. I hope you'll be checking in with me frequently over the month of April. One thing that you'll notice is that many of my essays will be on the shorter side this year; in fact, they might be single paragraphs. I'm also planning to include a few movies I've made of some favorite poems, both old and new. There's a reason for these changes. With my job and my pursuit of a second graduate degree, time is quite limited. I contemplated placing We Convince By Our Presence on a one year hiatus and coming back refreshed and hopefully with more free time next year. Instead, I opted for briefer essays, but a new feature of some movie versions of favorite poems. A new feature will be posted on the blog daily, with new essays and movies posted every other day.

I look forward to you joining me on a wonderful, month-long journey through some excellent poems.

All the best,

Matt

Happy Holidays!!!

The holiday season is upon us and winter is in full swing here in the Washington D.C. area. For some reason I've had a keen eye towards differences lately. It seems every day that we discover more differences in our world. We find differences in the way we think, learn, celebrate, dance, exercise, compete, and eat. Yes, human beings are strange creatures, but our uniqueness is one of the things to love about us. Even amongst our differences, there is one common thread that I think all people could agree on: peace. We all could use peace in our lives and around the world. As we move toward Christmas, I wanted to wish everyone a joyous and peaceful holiday season (no matter what you personally celebrate!). Here's a brief movie featuring Alfred Lord Tennyson's classic Christmas poem Voices In The Mist. You can also check it out on my youtube channel at:

No tricks, just a little treat...

Yes, we are still months away from National Poetry Month and the start of my fourth year of blogposts, but in the interim I wanted to share something that I thought everyone would enjoy. In a graduate course that I'm currently taking we had an assignment to create a video to use in the classroom. The video I came up with brings to life Gary Soto's poem Oranges, which I wrote about in the first year of this blog. Check this video out! I hope to make more of them to post here (assuming I have time to make them!). Let me know what you think.

Let Evening Come --- Jane Kenyon

LET EVENING COME



Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.


--- Jane Kenyon



Jane Kenyon's Let Evening Come:



A long time ago I settled upon this poem to end the third year of my National Poetry Month Blog. It is the type of poem that you read and cannot forget. The images enter your brain and suddenly the natural world is inside of you. The light, the cricket, the moon, the fox, the wind, the bottle and the oats, and the evening---all of it comes together to deliver a simple truth: there is beauty in this life of ours and even though life will certainly end the beauty will remain with us, just in another form, in the comfort of faith, family, and friends. I read an interview with Jane Kenyon pertaining to this poem. A woman who battled the demons of depression, Kenyon has written some of the most startling and honest verse about the pain and paralysis of mental illness. This poem stands in contrast to her others, working as a harbinger of hope and goodness amidst the many horrors we must endure. As Kenyon said in the aforementioned interview, "How, when there could have been nothing, does it happen that there is love, kindness, and beauty?" I honestly don't know, but thankfully we have poets like Jane Kenyon to explore this question for us.

As the poem starts it is made clear to the audience that this is a poem about the balance of what is coming next and what is happening right now. The conflict between the present and future is fascinating to me: the inherent lineage between what you do now and what you will do next. "Let the light of late afternoon / shine through chinks in the barn" is an opening that serves many purposes. Utilizing a command is a very distinct way to set the poem's tone. In the images, we notice that afternoon is slipping off toward night because it is late, but also we can see it tangibly in how the light is escaping through rough spots in the barn. The metaphor of an aged body of a person who's light---I mean life---is fading is unavoidable. Are we to read something extra into the contrast of the light "moving / up the bales as the sun moves down"?

Kenyon continues the commands, this time advising the cricket to find its call. She compares the cricket to a "woman tak(ing) up her needles / and her yarn." Again we have a comparison that evokes age, but also evokes an earnestness and purposefulness. While knitting might be associated with old woman, the fruits of their labor---hats, scarves, gloves, and other items---serve important purposes to warmth and preservation in cold seasons. The second stanza ends with the first appearance of a refrain that drives the poem and will predictably become the final line of the poem: "let evening come."

We are building to the arrival of evening, just as a well-lived life builds to its end. But the essence isn't in the beginning or the ending, as cliched as it may sound the essence of life is in the living. It is in the dew, but more so in the hoe being used to produce and labor, rather than being "abandoned / in long grass." It is in the stars and moon's "silver horn" because there should be a certain time in all of our lives where night does not signal a stiff ending to our day, but rather a period of discovery and activity. But in this instance, Kenyon uses the stars and the moon as further signals that the close of day is also the close of life's rhythms and essential movements. "Let the fox go back to its sandy den. / Let the wind die down. Let the shed / go black inside. Let evening come." The list is a progression of life, in its many forms, taking natural paths towards closure. Even when closure has occurred in one form, there are other objects and elements of like that remain. Kenyon illustrates this beautifully in the penultimate stanza. For the bottle, useless after its liquid is drunk; for the scoop, useless without a hand to operate it; for the air soon to be expelled from the lungs, these are the items most lonely and prone to loss, still she urges them to "let evening come." But why does Kenyon do this?

Most people are afraid of death, they just choose not to talk about it. I can respect that. Morbid conversations about death are not particularly endearing and even amongst the closest of friends it is a topic that is likely to induce some level of unease and discomfort. What I've come to discover is that while most people are afraid of death, they are more afraid of the unknown and of losing control, the things that death ultimately represents. The unknown is only frightening if you allow your mind and soul to stray from your faith and belief in fellow human beings, in a sublime sense of goodness and balance in the universe, and/or in a higher power. And what is there to fear about losing control, in fact I would argue that we are often at our best when we do not hold total control over a situation. Jane Kenyon's answer and her testament to faith is present in the poem's final stanza: "Let it come, as it will, and don't / be afraid. God does not leave us / comfortless, so let evening come."

There's a certain magic to the fact that many people near death can hold on just long enough to say final goodbyes, as if they have a minuscule amount of control over their mortality, enough to hold out for the little things that are most important to them. Similarly, I find the presages of the gravely ill as to when they will die to be shocking in their accuracy. In our age and experiences we come to know the rhythms of our bodies, just as well as the shortcomings that undo us. We come to see, feel, and hear the world around us, all of it. Some may say we come to know these vital details when all is lost already, when it's far too late for practical use. Jane Kenyon shows us this is not what we should be concerning ourselves with; we should let go and "let evening come" because "God does not leave us / comfortless." I take great comfort in this poem and I hope you do as well.

Nothing Twice - Wislawa Szymborska

Nothing Twice




Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.


----Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak




I first encountered this poem in graduate school when I was studying Eastern European poets, specifically Polish poets. Wislawa Szymborska stood out among her male counterparts. Her talent was unmistakable, but the hopefulness and playfulness in her language was what differentiated her from other poets from Eastern Europe. Nothing Twice is a sterling example of Szymborska's spirit as translated by the equally talented Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak. We know that there is no magic pause button when it comes to life; we can't rewind the good moments and fast forward through the tragedies and atrocities. We live and life is unforgiving, for better or worse. But in its exactness, life has the unique partner of memory. We remember what we did in the past when we encountered a similar situation and hopefully we adjust our behavior and expectations accordingly. Still, memory can be useless, for example when we step outside of our comfort zones to experience new things. There is an exhilaration that comes with the sense of fear you feel when experiencing something new, mostly because you are letting go. Not in control, you rely on the world around you and are open to all it has to offer. In Nothing Twice, Szymborska is urging us onward to days of meaning and worth, rather than days that end leaving us wondering where they went.

"Nothing can ever happen twice." The poem begins with this statement, a statement so strong that we can do little more accept it as fact. Deja vu aside, Szymborska is spot on with her initial point and she follows it with this related analysis: "In consequence, the sorry fact is / that we arrive here improvised / and leave without the chance to practice." The tone, at this point, is matter-of-fact and a little disappointed by the merciless nature of life. I'm reminded of a line I've referenced a few times in this blog, even once earlier this month: If only I knew now what I knew back then…It is a great philosophical dilemma—are we meant to only possess essential knowledge after the moment it could have been most useful to us? Who knows, and more importantly is that even the question we should be asking? Without a lively and adventurous spirit we'll lack those experiences anyways, which is why Szymborska takes a different, more humorous approach to drive home the same point as before in the second stanza. "Even if there is no one dumber, / if you're the planet's biggest dunce, / you can't repeat the class in summer: / this course is only offered once." I love how seamless the rhyme scheme and tone weave together to infuse humor into the poem. You can't help but laugh when you read those lines and picture yourself wearing the dunce cap.

The poem begins a shift from the conceptual to the concrete in the third stanza with the mention of specific kisses. Sure, "No day copies yesterday" is a valid and valuable line, but for the line and idea behind it to have the greatest impact an individualized emotion connection needs to be established. By inserting the word "precisely" in front of kisses, Szymborska dares you to flip through your catalogue of kisses and pull out some of those fun, sensual, surprising, and even embarrassing ones. These are the moments that have made you who you are today, because no two were "precisely" alike you begin to see the parallel that she is attempting to convey about days. If the kiss isn't enough, Szymborska presents the example of an "idle tongue" that "mentions your name by accident." Invoking a lost love, the poet is further casting out her nets to yank in the readers by their hearts. The mere accidental mention of her love's name fills her with the beauty of a rose, "all hue and scent." Even when the love is present with her in the next stanza, the poet moves from the wondrous rose to the tireless, painful ticking of the clock. It's a jarring shift, but highly effective in reminding us that time is unrelenting and carries on with the same "precision" that we earlier saw attached to the far more attractive feature of kisses.

In the final two stanzas Szymborska returns to the style and tone that made the beginning of the poem so strong. She supplies a rhetorical question about fear of time, which fits nicely on the heels of the shift of the previous stanza. Szymborska also provides a quasi rhetorical answer: "It's in its nature not to stay: / Today is always gone tomorrow." Yes, that is true, but a large part of me feels I knew that already, in fact I feel like Szymborska told me that already. At this point in the poem, I need a stronger ending; thank goodness there is one stanza left! Up to this point most of the poem has focused on the nature of time and our reaction to it, showing how no two days are the same so we must live them fully. This is a great message, but to reiterate this again would steer the poem into a predictable zone that the poem wouldn't be able to recover from. Instead of cruising, Szymborska opts for the bumpy path and this change-of-direction works like a charm. We are the ones on display in the final stanza, our nature is examined and the ultimate similarity is revealed: just as each day, each moment is different than the next, we, too, possess this same level of uniqueness. I am unlike any other human being who has ever existed, who currently exists, and who will ever exist. When you take this individuality and combine it with the same individuality of days in our lives then you see the pristine opportunities we have before us in pretty much every moment we are alive. It's a shame we waste so many of these moments with the stupid fallacy of operating under what others think of us.

Hatred - Gwendolyn Bennett

HATRED



I shall hate you
Like a dart of singing steel
Shot through still air
At even-tide,
Or solemnly
As pines are sober
When they stand etched
Against the sky.
Hating you shall be a game
Played with cool hands
And slim fingers.
Your heart will yearn
For the lonely splendor
Of the pine tree
While rekindled fires
In my eyes
Shall wound you like swift arrows.
Memory will lay its hands
Upon your breast
And you will understand
My hatred.

---Gwendolyn Bennett



Gwendolyn Bennett's Hatred:



With all the poems I've featured that centered on love, you had to expect I would eventually balance them out with a poem or two about something not as pleasant. I don't enjoy turning toward pessimistic and negative topics, but such detours are sometimes refreshing, and other times they are downright necessary. If you're asking why hatred or anger are necessary, then, by all means, let me explain why. Think for a moment of the man who bottles up his anger, never letting even the smallest smidgen of disapproval or disgust seep from his tightly controlled body. Or consider the woman who puts on a happy face every day, even though her daily life is plagued by inequities, degradations, and abuse. Believe me, I could provide you a long list of examples, but that's not what's important. We all face moments that prove how severely unfair life (and the people in our lives) can be. To deny that these moments exist is wrong, just as it is wrong to deny that moments of sheer brilliance and love exist. In fact, a lifetime of denial only clears the way for a monumental, and sometimes deadly, explosion. The raw emotions contained in anger and, yes, hatred are direct relatives to the similarly powerful emotions that accompany love. It goes without saying that love and hate are intertwined, but Gwendolyn Bennett offers today's poem as further proof.

"I shall hate you / Like a dart of singing steel / Shot through still air / At even tide." Never has hatred been more poetic and beautiful than in those initial lines from Gwendolyn Bennett's poem Hatred. Working against our expectations, Bennett eschews our typical ideas about hatred being a snarling, unrefined emotion. Sure, the venom is still present in abundance, but Bennett presents a notion of hatred that is polished and premeditated. The dart she compares her hatred to is made of "singing steel" rather than rugged, rough metal. When the dart is "Shot through still air / At even-tide" the poet has, indirectly, become a calculated sniper with her hatred, aiming and firing away at the "you" character the poem is addressed to. Still, this represents just one incarnation of her hatred; she has more in her repertoire than deadly force. Her hatred will also be doled out "solemnly / As pines are sober / When they stand etched / Against the sky." For some the violent hatred might be the most frightening, but for others this stoic hatred that resolves to grow regardless of the elements around it is far more terrifying. This second hatred is resolved and thought-out in a manner that indicates a change-of-mind is nearly impossible.

Just when I said it was impossible for Bennett to reverse her hatred for the "you" character this poem is addressed to, she threads the needle and draws the first stitch towards forgiveness when she asserts that "Hating you shall be a game / Played with cool hands / And slim fingers." Her joy in hating this person is actually, I believe, a good sign. That she can derive some happiness from this activity is indicative of the depth of her emotional connection with the person…or it's indicative of how horribly she was wronged by the person, which, come to think of it, would be a very bad sign for any chance of forgiveness. This indecisiveness is a nutshell example of why this poem is excellently constructed, and a further example of the poem's brilliance is on display when Bennett reasserts her dominance: "Your heart will yearn / For the lonely splendor / Of the pine tree / While rekindled fires / In my eyes / Shall wound you like swift arrows." She will decide how this hatred will arrive upon him and what brand of hatred it will be. You can bet that Bennett will opt for the most painful and lingering form of hatred.

If you're like me then by this point in the poem you were chomping at the bit to find out what it was that this person did to Bennett. I promise I'm not a gossip hound, but with these tour-de-force descriptions of hatred it's hard not to wonder what generated them. Bennett employs a technique common in come of the best horror and suspense films ever made: she doesn't show us the root of her hatred, instead offering just enough to let our imaginations run ferociously wild. "Memory will lay its hands / Upon your breast / And you will understand / My hatred." These lines essentially say "You know what you did," and while some readers may view this as a cheap ending, I'm not one of those readers. It is a private ending to a very public poem, but by turning inward Bennett opens the poem back up to her audience. We all have ghosts traveling with us from past indiscretions we'd rather forget. These reminders can be suppressed, but they always find a way to break free, whether it is a familiar scent from that moment or a word that was spoken that day. Our present is not immune to our past; if we were wrong, someone still possesses a memory of it, even if you are the one with the memory, even if you are the one unable to forgive…yourself.