Consider this upcoming event...The Universe in Verse

April 25, 2020
4:30 PM EST

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Sparks

Poem 36 (Pandemic Day 44)

Sparks

When I was eight

I lit a coal stove every morning

staring at the sparks jump and 

dance out of flames

as I fanned them with a palm leaf

Mother said they were fairies in exile

turned into diamonds

She knit a crown

to adorn my childhood

When I was eight

I went fishing in a flooded stream

I floated on water

pebbles were my pillows

I looked up at the milky clouds

spreading across the sky

Father said they were angels in exile

turned into waterfalls

He folded a boat 

to bear away my childhood

Wang Ping, Of Flesh & Spirit,Coffee House Press, 1998.

Let's compare most people's experience of reading books of poetry with the experience of going into the water at the lake or the ocean.  I believe that would fall into the category of "dipping their toes in from the dock" or "wading in up to their ankles so they don't get their jeans wet" and not, "let's plunge right in and stay all day."  

Poetry expects a lot from its readers and reading a book of poetry from cover to cover in a single sitting is not our typical approach.  You might feel differently when you pick up Of Flesh & Spirit.   I tend to think of mysteries or thrillers as "intriguing" "compelling" "page-turners"  but I felt that about Wang Ping's poetry.  I couldn't just dip in and pick up a poem.  I needed to know the whole story she was telling of her amazing life told through both poems and anecdotal stories interspersed.  

Wang Ping was born in China in 1957,  just before Mao instituted the "Great Leap Forward" which brought on the deadliest famine in history.  She grew up on a small island in the East China Sea and largely self-taught,  went on to earn degrees including a Ph.D from NY University.  She wrote this book while teaching at Macalester College in St. Paul. Besides poetry, she has written novels and short stories, translates and is a photographer and performance artist.  Her latest book is My Name is Immigrant.

Great Uncle Norvell Fast is Dead

Poem 35 (Pandemic Day 43)

Great Uncle Norvell Fast is Dead

When death won out, Norvell was about 80.

He'd been married a long time to great aunt Kate.

At every family party, after the whiskey

Kate would say that her marriage succeeded

because, each morning, Norvell

would sit on the toilet first, to warm

the seat for her, for great aunt Kate.

Every year, we'd laugh, even though

we thought it was pretty strange.  Every year,

Norvell would notd, sip his drink, and say, 

"I defy anybody to tell me different

It's every small gesture of love 

that matters.  And besides

Kate deserves a warm place to wait

for the everyday coming up of light."

But now Kate, already older than she wants

to be, must also deal with the unbroken chill

of waking.  With the long cool night.

On the same day that Norvell Fast died

so, too, did a friend of mine.  Out west

where the land is supposed to expand,

my friend stared into his thirtieth year,

into the sun he saw buried in the mountains,

and he decided that the next step

was too much, was enough.

So he cut himself away from his legs,

away until blood told him all he thought

he needed to know.  He forgot

two children.  A woman who loved

him.  Forgot about a country 

that would've waited for him.

At some point, memory fails many of us.

Maybe it even failed Norvell Fast.

But I doubt it.  Even in death's face

I expect Norvell refused to claw

at the earth.  More likely, he reached

for a drink, said, "I'm still good looking,

I'm still putting my arms around a remarkable

woman who will never stop calling out my name,

I'm riding the edges of the sky, and

I defy, I defy, I defy."

John Reinhard, Burning the Prairie, New Rivers Press, 1988. (winner of 1987 Minnesota Voices Project)

John was my teacher at the Loft.  He was wise and astute and helped me give a shape and a voice to some nebulous thoughts and emotions through poetry.  That was a special gift.  His books of poetry, as fellow poet Jim Harrison wrote for the back cover..."give us something we knew but never thought of before."  

Uncle Norvell is the kind of old man that you could pass by on any street and never give him a second glance.  Reinhard's poem dresses him up as a gentle hero, the romantic lead in a love story.  Maybe we'll look at the next old man we see and consider the possibilities for heroism that lie just beneath the surface. Perhaps we'll consider it in ourselves.

To His Coy Mistress

Poem 34 (Pandemic Day 42)

To His Coy Mistress

by Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way

Griselda, 1910 by Maxfield Parrish
The model was Susan Lewin, Parrish's lifelong
companion and model. It remain a
mystery if she was more than that.

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Parrish & Poetry: A Gift of Words and Art, Compiled and edited by Laurence S. and Judy goffman Cutler, Pomegranate Art Books, 1995.  [Paintings by Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966) accompanied by classic poems, many were favorites of the artist]

I read this poem for the first time in my Survey of English Literature in college.  It was pretty racy stuff I thought, to be coming out of the 17th century...seduction of a virgin...but couched in such lyrical couplets.  I enjoyed the sly humor; the lavish praise of her beauty and concern for her virtue which quickly changed to, "but we really don't have time for that."  Here was carpe diem at work again.  We could wait, perhaps, but the worms will get us....the grave is not a place for love or lust.  

It came to me that there was some consistency through time in the workings of men and women.  Just the previous weekend I'd had a similar request, but without the couplets.

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam trans. by E. FitzGerald

Poems 29-33  (Pandemic Day 41)

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

XII

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread__and Thou

    Beside me singing in the Wilderness--

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

XIII

Some for the Glories of This World and some

Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come;

   Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,

Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!

XXIII

And we, that now make merry in the Room

They left, and Summer dresses in new bloom,

    Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth

Descend--ourselves to make a Couch---for whom?

XXIV

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,

Before we too into the Dust descend;

    Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie,

Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and--sans End!


XCVI
Yet Ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close!
    The Nightingale that in the Branches sang,
Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows!.

Edward FitzGerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Grosset and Dunlap, no date

My copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is pocket-sized and quite old and worn; because I was a bookseller for a long time, the provenance of many of my books is unknown, but I probably picked it up on "bag day" at some big book sale.

That's not romantic, but I can imagine a much more idyllic beginning for it.  Grosset and Dunlap began as book reprinters or rebinders in 1898.  I would guess from the style and condition that this was an early 20th century printing that some earnest but less than wealthy young man bought to woo his sweetheart on a picnic..."A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou".  That's the catch line of this classic, but what's it all about? 

Omar Khayyam (1048-1133) was a noted Persian mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and poet. "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" (a ruba'i is a four line quatrain specifically Persian, a rubaiyat is a collection of ruba'i) is not a narrative poem but a collection of epigrams or special insights. You could sum up the philosophy espoused in the poem as a directive to "Carpe Diem" or "Seize the Day" accompanied by the virtues of drinking wine. There are regular references to wine, jugs, urns, cups, bowls and grapes.

With that going for it, no wonder  it has become one of the most widely known poems in the world, republished virtually every year from 1879 (the year of FitzGerald's fourth edition) to the present day, and translated into over eighty different languages.

FitzGerald described his work as "transmogrification". To a large extent, the Rubaiyat can be considered original poetry by FitzGerald loosely based on Omar's quatrains rather than a "translation" in the narrow sense. Some critics maintain that the poetic quality of FitzGerald's finished product exceeded that of Khayyám's original quatrains. In other words, Khayyám supplied the lumber, and FitzGerald built the house. 

The concept of "carpe diem" might call to mind the scene in the 1989 movie, Dead Poets Society, where Robin Williams as a teacher at a boys' prep school inspired his students through poetry.  I hadn't seen the movie in the theater, but when it came on television, I was enthralled.  During a commercial break I rushed to my bookshelf and pulled out my old college text, Norton's Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1. (a modest 1,986 page book).  I turned to Robert Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time."  There, next to the famous line, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old time is still a-flying" I had written--Carpe Diem--use time while you can.

Just like that, my 19-year old self had time-traveled 25 years into the future to give me a message, more pertinent than when I'd first penned it, --"seize the day"!  Omar has come down from my neglected poetry shelf  to reinforce it again.

"Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,

Before we too into the Dust descend..."

Read the poem which is in the public domain

A study guide to the poem

Two Poems by Harry Behn

Poems 27 and 28 (Pandemic Day 40)

Evening

Now the drowsy sunshine

Slides far away

Into the happy morning

Of someone else's day.

The Dream 

One night I dreamed

I was lost in a cave,

A cave that was empty 

And dark and cool,

And down into nothing

I dropped a stone

And it fell like a star

Far and alone,

And a sigh arose

The sigh of a wave

Rippling the heart

Of a sunless pool.

And after a while

In my dream I dreamed

I climbed a sky

That was high and steep

And still as a mountain

Without a cave,

As still as water

Without a wave,

And on that hill

Of the sun it seemed

That all sad sounds

In the world fell asleep

Harry Behn, Windy Morning, Harcourt, Brace, 1953.

I have two little volumes of children's poems by Harry Behn written in the late 40's or early 50's; full of generally cheerful, happy poems. They are the kind of poems you might expect would be right for the classrooms and nightstands of the "Leave it To Beaver" generation--my own sometimes idealized generation.  There were many happy traditional-values families like the Cleavers on TV--including Father Knows Best and Ozzie and Harriet among others.  The parents and the children all had well-defined roles within the home and without. The view of children as reflected in literature, too was constrained by the gender and age expectations of the times. They were expected to be happy and sheltered from the unpleasant things in life.

So did children actually like Behn's poems?  I'm not certain.  I am not blown away by his verse, but I'd have to say that I really like these little books--I like their size, their clean design, the font style and size and the small enigmatic one color pictures that the author created to accompany his poems.  Books have an aesthetic of their own, outside of their content or of the reputation of their author.  They can give pleasure just by being held or gazed at; a pleasure that ebooks are challenged to match.  Sometimes you can actually judge a book by its cover!

But let's speak of the author.  Harry Behn (1898-1973) is not a well-known literary figure, but a surprisingly interesting character. Born near Prescott, AZ,(he named one of his son's Prescott) he attended Stanford and graduated from Harvard in 1922.  He went to Sweden for a year on a fellowship.  Shortly after returning from Sweden he went to work in the relatively new field of screenwriting in Hollywood.  Later he taught creative writing at the University of AZ, created their radio bureau (writing scripts for radio shows); established the University of AZ Press, as well as the Phoenix Little Theater and was vice-president of the Tucson Regional Plan.  He wrote 21 books for children, winning Graphics Arts awards for 3 of them.  He seemed to have many talents and used them all in pursuit of his dreams.

For Strong Women by Marge Piercy

Poem 26 (Pandemic Day 39)

For Strong Women

A strong woman is a woman who is straining
A strong woman is a woman standing
on tiptoe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing “Boris Godunov.”
A strong woman is a woman at work
cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,
and while she shovels, she talks about
how she doesn’t mind crying, it opens
the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up
develops the stomach muscles, and
she goes on shoveling with tears

 in her nose.

A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren’t you feminine, 

why aren’t you dead?

A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you’re so strong.

A strong woman is a woman bleeding
inside. A strong woman is a woman making
herself strong every morning while her teeth
loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,
a tooth, midwives used to say, and now
every battle a scar. A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

Marge Piercy, The Moon is Always Female,  Alfred A Knopf, 1997.

To be a woman is to be many things, but quite often it involves being misunderstood, undervalued and overworked.  Sometimes the misunderstanding is almost enticing; as it is when"Old Blue Eyes" is saying it---

"I'm supposed to have a Ph.D. on the subject of women. But the truth is I've flunked more often than not. I'm very fond of women; I admire them. But, like all men, I don't understand them." Frank Sinatra (1915-1998)

But it's also demeaning and removed from reality--

Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)--I tried (unsuccessfully thus far) to track down the source of this quote, since Shaw was an enlightened man and a supporter of women's rights.  He may not have personally felt that way, but it was a widely accepted social view.  (A well-articulated article about the "proper" place for men and women in politics from a 1903 article in Atlantic Monthly is a window into this point of view-https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1903/09/why-women-do-not-wish-the-suffrage/306616/) 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), a writer, lecturer and social reformer drily and with wit summed up the undervalued and overworked concept when she said,  "The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses."

The perceptions of women's roles in economics, politics and society have evolved and expanded in my lifetime, but there currently seem to be forces determined to diminish and contract those advances.  It truly does seem that "a woman's work is never done."

Still, whether or not they were recognized for their strength, most of us have needed the women in our lives to be there for us in one way or another and they usually came through for us.  I think of my mother as an example of the women in this poem.  She contracted rheumatic fever at age 8 and languished in bed for a year, needing to relearn how to walk; this had a lifelong impact on her health and strength.  I'm picturing her now as that small child confined to bed and adding to this picture for the first time in my mind, my grandmother's experience.  Grandma was  already 28 when she married Grandpa in Skeitz, Germany and they immigrated to America in 1911 along with their 4 children (a 5th was on the way), when my mother was 3 years old(she was the 3rd child).  By the time of Mom's illness about 1916, there were 8 children under 12 years old, and 3 more yet to come.  Grandma had her last child at age 46. I tremble to think of the unending work and effort she had to expend every day.

From that example of perseverance, my mom faced her own challenges; widowhood with 2 small children at age 32 and needing to find a way to survive through the Depression and WWII which sent 4 of her brothers to war.  She was both strong and weak, independent-minded, but sometimes purposefully helpless and dependent (traits probably acquired in her sickbed). Sometimes she put on her rags of martyrdom and complained.

 "Oh," she'd say, "you'll never know how I suffered..." 

"So, tell me already," I would think to myself.

But the sum of her was joyous and generous and loving and was she was loved in return.  My friends and so many others always spoke of her with outright affection.  She had a disarming way of turning strangers into friends. The coffee pot was always on and something tasty cooling on the counter. She's been gone almost 30 years; but of course, not really.  I'm starting to see her everytime I look in the mirror...

Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other.