Day Seven - Ocean Of Grass by Edward Hirsch

OCEAN OF GRASS

The ground was holy, but the wind was harsh

and unbroken prairie stretched for hundreds of miles

so that all she could see was an ocean of grass.

Some days she got so lonely she went outside

and nestled among the sheep, for company.

The ground was holy, but the wind was harsh

and prairie fires swept across the plains,

lighting up the country like a vast tinderbox

until all she could see was an ocean of flames.

She went three years without viewing a tree.

When her husband finally took her on a timber run

she called the ground holy and the wind harsh

and got down on her knees and wept inconsolably,

and lived in a sod hut for thirty more years

until the world dissolved in an ocean of grass.

Think of her sometimes when you pace the earth,

our mother, where she was laid to rest.

The ground was holy, but the wind was harsh

for those who drowned in an ocean of grass.

---Edward Hirsch

Lately, I’ve been fond of asking the question ‘What is sacred?’. Each of us is bound to answer this question differently, and on some levels we should. Certainly there will be things that all of us hold dear, but our differences in terms of what we value and place above all else are interesting to explore. The fisherman who holds sacred the still waters of morning when the sun has just woken and begun its rise might not understand why the accountant holds sacred a clean ledger with zero balances, and vice versa. Yes, we hold different things sacred, but we can learn from our differences and better understand others by asking that question about what they hold sacred. Edward Hirsch built a whole poem around that question and a story rolls forth in his modified villanelle Oceans of Grass.

“The ground was holy, but the wind was harsh.” This beginning will serve as one of the key repeating lines in Hirsch’s villanelle rhyme scheme, but it also occupies an important place in the story he tells. The woman in the poem is symbolic of people in general and she identifies her strange, contradictory answer to what she holds sacred. The ground, the earth itself, is holy to her, but an element of that earth, the wind and weather, is destructive. This sets up an inevitable and constant tension that will play out on “unbroken prairie stretched for hundreds of miles,” a disorienting vast landscape that looks like an “ocean of grass.”

I’m fascinated by how Hirsch clips bits and pieces of many storytelling techniques in this poem. He uses a villanelle, a classic poetic form built upon repetition, but modifies it because, I would assume, he places the story above the form. There is not a perfect end rhyming pattern or a middle line rhyming pattern in this poem, but Hirsch’s changes are not glaring because they naturally fit the fable he is telling us. Hirsch also slips in allusions, such as the lonely woman “nestled among the sheep,” that had me vaguely thinking of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, and even The Bible. Beyond biblical and literary allusions, Hirsch organically maintains a reverential tone in the poem toward the earth, the type of respectful mindset that is characterized by early Native Americans. When the woman in the poem “went three years without viewing a tree” I understood how much this affected here, possibly more than other people. When she “got down on her knees and wept inconsolably, / and lived in a sod hut for thirty more years / until the world dissolved in an ocean of grass,” I could feel her loss and I could see the larger picture of what her story means to us today. The woman in this poem and her land of origin might be nameless, but Hirsch cleverly equips the poem with little touches that allows it to connect to many previous, meaningful mediums.

Villanelle’s are known for delivering that final stanza oomph, the masterstroke that stops readers in their tracks and hopefully makes them want to go back and explore the poem again. Hirsch continues this tradition by completely shifting the poem’s focus in its final stanza. Up to this point he’s focused on the woman and her reaction to her “ocean of grass” becoming an “ocean of flames,” but now Hirsch shifts to us, the readers, breaking down that proverbial wall. He instructs us to “Think of her sometimes when you pace the earth, / our mother, where she was laid to rest.” Drawing a line between us and her, Hirsch charts our ancestry for us and forges a connection between her loss and what could potentially become our own loss in the future. Returning to our initial question about what we hold sacred, I’m filled with a bittersweet taste in my mouth by the end of the poem. She “drowned in an ocean of grass,” but this grass was something she held sacred.

Day Six - Live Poetry Readings

LIVE POETRY READINGS

It wasn't until college that I went to my first proper live poetry reading. By graduate school I was seeking them out and going to two, sometimes three, possibly even four readings of poetry and fiction in a week. (Austin has a reputation for being the live music capital of the world, but I would contend that Boston deserves the moniker of live poetry reading capital of the world!) Live poetry readings come in all shapes and sizes, from interactive poetry slams with hooting and hollering to live readings in a library with a stark, reverential silence after the poet clicks her tongue over the final word. Why should you attend poetry readings? Well, if you've never attended one before then you are missing out on a fresh experience worth crossing off your bucket list. Live readings are in the same family as concerts; just as you attend a concert to be amongst a group of like-minded fans waiting to hear the music performed live by the musicians who created it, the audience at a live poetry reading hears the poet deliver his or her words exactly as they positioned themselves in his or her brain before being transferred to the page. I always find that live readings make my creative juices simmer then boil over; I'm left scurrying home with plenty of my own ideas to write about. If you are skeptical about live poetry and thinking that it might be a collection of beret wearing, finger snapping, goateed beatniks...well it might, but more likely you'll encounter folks like you'll find on Poetry Everywhere's fantastic Youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/PoetryEverywherePTV)

And here's video of part of a live reading just to give you a little taste:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90yxqlVrLP8

Day Five - First Fig - Edna St. Vincent Millay

FIRST FIG

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends⎯

It gives a lovely light!

---Edna St. Vincent Millay

First Fig by Edna St. Vincent Millay

In elementary school I first encountered this brief and beautiful image driven commentary on how we spend our time here on earth. At that point in time, the childhood version of me didn’t necessarily understand all the complex issues contained in this small wonder. The sounds and cadences in the poem were attractive to my ears and my mind struggled to picture how a candle could burn at both ends and still be in a candlestick holder. Oh, how times change! Years later, I read this poem and turn inward yet again, but now I’m overcome by how I’m spending my candle and the light I’m giving off. In a mere four lines Millay layers the poem with enough depth to literally last a lifetime. Millay’s words are a challenge: are you satisfied with the light you’re giving off?

Day Four - Funeral Blues - W.H. Auden

FUNERAL BLUES

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

---W.H. Auden

W.H. Auden's Funeral Blues

I’ve been itching to include this poem since I began We Convince By Our Presence over 3 years ago. I find Auden’s command of language, form, and, most startlingly, his emotions, to be rather spellbinding. Part of me hesitated to include this poem so early in the month, and on the heels of another poem about loss, but I couldn’t wait any longer. Funeral Blues is a tour-de-force poem; hundreds of thousands of people have heard this poem recited at funerals, which is rare territory for a poem. In researching for this brief analysis, I purposely did very little research. No, I did not discover the identity of the deceased loved one in the poem. Nor, did I hear the poem sung by Hedli Anderson or any other sopranos who had the poem put to music for them. And I certainly did not find an early first draft of the poem when it was a more satirical, five stanza mocking of the obituary-esque poems for politicians that had become trendy during Auden’s earlier years. Essentially, the only bit of interesting research I did seek out on this poem was about the title. Auden never formally titled this poem; it was often a numbered poem in his notebooks and only took its title in an edited edition of Auden’s poetry a few years after his death. This is interesting to note because without the title, who’s to say if the poem would be nearly as popular at funerals, and as a result who’s to say if the poem would be known worldwide like it is today.

From the beginning, Auden halts life and isolates readers from normalcy with his listing of stilted disturbances. When the clocks are stopped we are separated from time and when the telephones are cut off our ability to communicate is destroyed. The joy we might receive from music is commanded otherwise with “silence the pianos,” and even the dogs are made quiet “with a juicy bone.” In these images, Auden efficiently conveys a sense of immediate dread. He delivers upon this foreboding with the first stanza’s final line: “Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.”

The second stanza troubled me after many readings of the poem. It seemed to illustrate a rather bizarre attachment to possibly unnecessary details in the wake of tragedy and loss. Who wants airplanes sputtering above writing “He is Dead” in the sky above about their loved one? Why would anyone put “crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves?” And what compels us to remember that the policemen working traffic detail for a funeral are wearing “black cotton gloves?” The easy answer is to look at the poem’s form and tone, then assume that Auden needed help in preserving the poem’s rhyme scheme and abrupt tone that commands life to shift from its daily occurrences to a focused grief. The more probable answer is that Auden keeps his images public because they bring grieving into the domain where others are still living their lives.

The third stanza in Funeral Blues might be W.H. Auden’s ultimate stanza in his vast collection of poetry. After filing numerous requests to stop, cut off, let, and put the world on hold, Auden delivers an emotional pay off that is ruthlessly heart wrenching. Permanent and tied to direction, the geography allusion that begins the stanza illustrates just how much he’s lost. Beyond the physical geography and sense of direction lacking in his life, Auden has also had the purpose and routine of “working week” and the “Sunday rest” stripped from him. With place and purpose taken from him, Auden also notices that his communication (“talk” and “song”) and the possibility of closure or fresh starts (“noon” and “midnight”) are equally destroyed. “I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong,” is the chilling declaration that ends the stanza and leaves readers sharing in the limitless depths of Auden’s loss.

How do you follow a stanza like that? Auden proceeds by giving away the world that he previously commanded to stop and grieve along with him. “Stars are not wanted now” and Auden believes it wise to “pack up the moon, dismantle the sun.” The physical world must be “poured away” and “swept up” because “nothing now can ever come to any good.” The final stanza caps the poem by driving home the concept of cleaning up the world when that person who’s gone was your whole world.

Day Three - Why Poetry Matters? Pleasure v.s. Purpose

This year I'm trying something new on We Convince By Our Presence. Every few days I'll take a break from presenting new poems and essays to share an interesting (and hopefully thought-provoking) question relating to poetry. Starting us off, here's a question I've raised before and continues to be worthy of discussion: Why does poetry matter?

Here are two starkly different arguments for why poetry matters:

"But why should anyone but a poet care about the problems of American poetry? What possible relevance does this archaic art form have to contemporary society? In a better world, poetry would need no justification beyond the sheer splendor of its own existence. As Wallace Stevens once observed, 'The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man's happiness.' Children know this essential truth when they ask to hear their favorite nursery rhymes again and again. Aesthetic pleasure needs no justification, because a life without such pleasure is one not worth living." --- Dana Gioia

"A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep." --- Salman Rushdie

Dana Gioia argues for the sheer pleasure of poetry. He cites children who clamor for their favorite nursery rhymes and the happiness we feel listening to beautiful words. Salman Rushdie takes a more purposeful approach. Rushdie believes that poet's have a responsibility to keep the world around them just and vigilantly aware of notable conflicts and threats. Both of these writers are correct in their assessments, but I think that's the beauty of poetry: it is an all-encompassing art form that allows the silly and the serious to exist together, peacefully, in the same world of poetry.

Day Two - The Peace That So Lovingly Descends - Noelle Kocot

THE PEACE THAT SO LOVINGLY DESCENDS

"You" have transformed into "my loss."

The nettles in your vanished hair

Restore the absolute truth

Of warring animals without a haven.

I know, I'm as pathetic as a railroad

Without tracks. In June, I eat

The lonesome berries from the branches.

What can I say, except the forecast

Never changes. I sleep without you,

And the letters that you sent

Are now faded into failed lessons

Of an animal that's found a home. This.

---Noelle Kocot

The Peace That So Lovingly Descends by Noelle Kocot

Rarely do I come away satisfied from a poem that disorients me, fills me with a bitter longing, and wraps me in the tattered remains of grief. Noelle Kocot’s The Peace That So Lovingly Descends has a tongue-in-cheek title that ironically juxtaposes with a poem that presents the domestication of tormented loss. I can’t put my finger on it, but something about this poem reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art. Kocot, who slips in a line from Bishop as an epigraph to another of her poems, might like this comparison. Yes, both poems focus on loss, but after that blatant similarity there’s little else I can concretely produce to link the two poems together. Even so, I feel an evolutionary poetic link between them, almost as if the emotional realm of loss is prone to modernity on the surface just like everything else, but it’s core principles remain the same.

So why is this poem a new favorite of mine? An easy answer would be the simile “I’m as pathetic as a railroad / Without tracks.” That is a magnificent piece of writing and upon closer examination of some of Kocot’s other poems, she is a master craftswoman of similes and metaphors. But it’s just a single simile? Okay, okay, I hear you and I understand you want more. Notice the usage of quotation marks in the first line of the poem. Kocot takes a risk to use the equivalent of “air quotes” to smash the readers upside the head with a crucial point: a loved one is gone. And as if that isn’t enough, Kocot’s speaker has felt the effects of overwhelming grief, reverting to a state of primordial savagery. We read of “warring animals without a haven” and when she recalls letters the loved and lost one sent they are “failed lessons / Of an animal that’s found a home.” Heck, she even admits “I eat / The lonesome berries from the branches.”

Upon second thought, there is a key difference between the speaker in Kocot’s poem and the speaker in Bishop’s One Art. Kocot’s speaker has resigned herself to being “pathetic as a railroad / Without tracks.” She knows that “the forecast / Never changes” and the home she’s made for herself in her grief and longing is confirmed by the lonely surrender of a one word final line: “This.” The brief glimpse of life presented in the poem is hers, she doesn’t need coaxing to accept it. This is the point of divergence with One Art, because Bishop’s speaker is guarded and doesn’t mention the lost loved one until her final stanza. It’s in this final stanza that she must urge herself onward: “It’s evident / the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” Whereas Kocot’s speaker has accepted her loss in a far from lovingly descending state of peace, Bishop’s speaker is at odds with herself and the bravado required to brush off the loss of true love as mere skill to be mastered. In both cases, we as readers, are fortunate to have poetry that stretches loss far beyond railroads without tracks.

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