April is Poetry Month: Day 19

 Woodstock

I came upon a child of God

He was walking along the road

And I asked him, where are you going 

And this he told me

I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm

I'm going to join a rock 'n' roll band

I'm going to camp out on the land

And try an' my soul free

        We are stardust

        We are golden

        And we've got to get ourselves

        Back to the garden

Then can I walk beside you

I have come here to lose the smog

And I feel to be a cog in something turning

Well maybe it is just the time of year

Or maybe it's the time of man

I don't know who I am

But life is for learning

        We are stardust

        We are golden

        And we've got to get ourselves

        Back to the garden

By the time we got to Woodstock

We were half a million strong

And everywhere there was song and celebration

And I dreamed I saw the bombers

Riding shotgun in the sky

And they were turning into butterflies

Above our nation

        We are stardust

        We are golden

        And we've got to get ourselves

        Back to the garden

                            

                            Joni Mitchell, 1969

From: The Norton Introduction to Literature: Shorter Third Edition, Edited by Carl E. Bain, Jerome Beaty, J. Paul Hunter, Norton, 1982.

I didn't keep many of my college textbooks, only a couple of Norton anthologies of literature.  However, I wasn't in college in 1982; I had two small children at that time, so college wasn't a part of daily life. It must have been another addition to my bookstore that didn't sell.  This volume weighs in at 942 pages...and it's the "shorter addition!"  It was satisfying to find song lyrics from Joni Mitchell between the covers.  The poem reflects some of the naive optimism of that time..."bombers turning into butterflies" but the ideals we had back then of peace and simplicity are powerfully stated. It was also satisfying to see that she was able to return to performing at the Newport Folk Festival, 8,660 days after her last performance at the age of 55.  She had suffered a debilitating brain aneurysm that left her unable to walk or talk.  That she was able to relearn the guitar and be able to perform again at the age of 78 is amazing.  This is a woman who has been amazing...stardust and golden...her whole life!

 

April is Poetry Month: Day 18

Starlings

Can you keep it so,

cool tree, making a blue cage

for an obstreperous population?

for a congregation of mediaeval scholars

quarrelling in several languages?

for busybodies marketing

in the bazaar of green leaves?

for clockwork fossils that can't be still even

when the Spring runs down?

No tree, no blue cage can contain

that restlessness. They whirr off

and sow themselves in a scattered handful 

on the grass--and are 

bustling monks

tilling their green precincts.

                            Norman MacCaig

From: Flights of Imagination: An Illustrated Anthology of Bird Poetry, compiled by Mike Mockler, Blandford, 1982.  
    The other day, my phone failed to complete an operating system download and got stuck in a verifying loop, thus requiring a trip to the Apple Store at Rosedale Center.  

    On the way back home, my daughter at the wheel and my granddaughter in the backseat, we found ourselves at a stoplight and had time to watch a "congregation" of starlings bustling around in the grass, seemingly impervious to all the busy human comings and goings on a hectic Saturday in the city.          Starlings are not native to America.  A hundred birds were first brought over and released in Central Park by Shakespeare enthusiasts in the 19th century because they wanted us to have all the birds that he had ever mentioned.  Being adaptable and assertive birds, the offspring of those original immigrants now number around 200 million birds from coast to coast.  You can learn more about them at the Cornell Ornithology Lab website.  Fascinating stuff, at least to me.  I can't begin to tell you how interesting I found this book to be...I didn't expect that reaction.  

    Over a period of about 12 years I operated an online bookstore which I called Ginger Tea Books.  It was never wildly successful, but most years, I generated a small income from it and realized some tax advantages but the actual "raison d'etre" (reason for being) was being able to go out and buy books!  I'm pretty sure this book was acquired in one of those buying trips, but never got sold and finally found a place to nest by all my other poetry books. It's going to now spend some time on the groaningly big stack of books by my bedside along with copies of Living Bird magazine. I support the Cornell Lab with donations and get their beautiful full color periodicals.  The birds of America are so diverse and learning about their habits, lifecycles and migratory adventures is eye-opening.  Our birds are citizens of the planet and their welfare and success is wedded to our own.  I hope you choose to look closer at the lives of birds in your neighborhood and become amazed and motivated to protect and preserve them.  

    Speaking of amazing...check out this video of the "murmurations" of the starlings over Rome.

April is Poetry Month: Day 17

Hawaii, Oct, 2018, J. Doolittle

Wild Nights--Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild Nights should be 

Our luxury!

Futile--the Winds--

To a Heart in port--

Done with the Compass--

Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden--

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor--Tonight--

in Thee!

                        Emily Dickinson

From: Into the Garden: A Wedding Anthology, Poetry and Prose on Love and Marriage, Edited by Robert Hass & Stephen Mitchell,  Harper Perennial, 1993.

Emily probably wrote this passionate poem when she was about 28 or 29 years old.  She never married and lived reclusively, but had a rich inner life.  The authors feature this poem in their introduction and I'm going to share their interpretation.

"I've just recently realized why this poem is so mysterious and beautiful to me.  When you first read it, you get the impression that the speaker in the poem is throwing out the charts to navigate by the freedom of her feelings in the open sea.  But it isn't so.  She has thrown them out because she is in port, in safe harbor.  And that, I saw, is what we want from each other most intimately: wildness and safety, or a magical space that includes both.  That is what is mean to row in Eden.  Dickinson herself came to believe, I think, that the dream wedding was only possible in a passionate mind, which is to say in a poem.  I don't think she thought you could have both in the real world.  It's my experience that you can have both, not all of the time but some of the time and that this possibility depends on the other more durable things that love means.  And the root of these is trust." 

April is Poetry Month: Day 16

 Future Ark

Imagine a world where humans would 

    Do their best for the planet's good:

Water pure and forests fair--

No pollution to kill the air.

Can we change our ways much faster

And avoid complete disaster?

For without space to live in peace

The animals will soon decrease

Then disappear without a trace--

Could robot creatures take their place?

There isn't time to wait and see...

The microchip can't make a tree.

James Marsh

From: Bizarre Birds & Beasts, written and illustrated by James Marsh, Dial, 1991.  The illustrations may be stronger than the verses, with their vibrant colors and rich and quirky details, but the poems are short and catchy and together create a book that is a joy to spend time with.  I'd like to frame each and every illustration.  The selected poem is the last one in the book and has a message we've been hearing for years and have failed to act on.  Fifty percent of our world's animal species could become extinct within this century without action.  Think of that....50%!  We continue to worry about how expensive gasoline is, how we can continue to live our comfortable lives without inconvenience and species are struggling to survive, from pole to pole, across all the oceans and the continents.  Their beauty, diversity and value to our planet disappearing.  We must do more to protect our wondrous planet!  

April is Poetry Month: Day 15

Open Secrets 

Because you are beautiful I will have to tell you a number

    of my secrets

(What does anyone hid anything for except to have

    it found?)

I have concealed from you too long the fact that space

    is curved,

That I have invented the night the better to see you by 

    that

If I seem upset at times it is because of the way you walk,

    leaning into the wind.

That most of my secrets are doors that open onto other 

    secrets--

(Vistas of fields and beaches and columns stretching on

    forever),

That even these words are secrets with turquoise doors

    in them,

Opening out to one side or the other, letting you glimpse

    for two seconds

Herds of speaking horses, temples full of starfish

    Clandestine moons,

And as you walk, leaning into wind, into the terrible landscape

    of your own beauty,

These secrets are my gifts to you, these signs that lead you

    to my door.

                                    --Gwendolyn MacEwen (1941-1987)

Reykjavik, Iceland, 5/2022, photo image J. Doolittle

A poem is a peculiar, particular thing; often compact (the depth of a novel in the space of a page).
Every word chosen JUST-BECAUSE- no other word could quite say it as clearly or deeply.  The line breaks, the punctuation, Capitalization (or not), the way the words and lines sit on the page--all of those things can enlarge the poem, convey the meaning, expression the emotion, dictate the cadence.  A poem is the essence of gestalt, a thing greater than the sum of all its parts.  

For example, this poem on my Facebook post looks different and may not "sound" the same when you read it (even in your silent reading mode), so check out how it looks and reads on my blog and see what you think.

Writing a poem about love is a common undertaking (Roses are red...etc.)and yet an enormous challenge to capture "the bright elusive butterfly of love."  Poets and non-poets alike have nevertheless continued to try.  All too often the poems we read represent only one side of the equation; women poets have been underrepresented in anthologies on this subject. Of course, men can write beautifully about love.  I cite Robert Browning: 

Escape me? 

Never--

Beloved!

While I am I, and you are you,

    So long as the world contains us both... 

 

But don't we also need to hear his beloved, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's response?

How do I love you? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

Jill Hollis has attempted to rectify that shortcoming in Love's Witness: Five Centuries of Love Poetry by Women, Carroll & Graf, 1993.  She mingles the bitter and the sweet and introduces us to women writers we are sure to have missed in our English classes.  

The poem I've shared, with its beautiful images of doors and secrets and of our longings for someone to open those doors and discover our wonders was so appealing. It became even more intriguing when I learned a little about the author, a Canadian poet, Gwendolyn MacEwen, who grew up quickly,  died tragically, but lived richly and fully in her 46 years on earth.  

April is Poetry Month: Day 14

Little Girl as Earthquake Lit by Stars

She is embarrassed by the steadiness

Photo image created by Jean Doolittle
original 9/2015, Greenport, NY

of adult life.  Don't they know,

she wonders, there's a wind

beneath the ground too.

that birds soar through the roots.

When she was three she wanted 

to be a field of yellow grass.

At four she was determined 

she would grow up to be gravity.

Now though she wants to be

an earthquake.  What unsettles us.

She will stop us from ever standing

still too long.  A pacemaker,

like Uncle Jack's but this one

for the heart of the earth.

Sometimes she dreams of meeting

the perfect boy, one with hair

like sawdust, one who will grow

to be a star.  Not one of those greasy guys

in those movies her mother watches

in the afternoon, but

that real light that shines

across dark miles, something

measured only on its own terms,

by intensity and speed of flight.

Imagine as she does what a girl

as earthquake and boy as star could do

together.  As if we might love

our own light enough to curl within it,

to fall towards ground that trembles

in anticipation of our landing.  As if

light and earth could join and move

beneath us, jolt us into dance.

Imagine as she does what it is

to grow up and become rain or river,

symphony orchestra or garden, or one tree that stays

very tall no matter how far away from it 

you go no matter how high you climb.

                                --John Reinhard

From: The Kiss of Pages Turning, The Loft Literary Center, 1998.

"Life begins at 40" is often associated with a book written by Walter Pitkin in 1934 and has become something of an axiom in the 20th and 21st centuries.  People in previous centuries weren't saying that because the average lifespan was so much shorter in the past; there usually wasn't much life left after 40.  In our lifetimes, however, modern medical advances and decreases in infant mortality gave more and more people the opportunity to add other chapters to their lives in the years after establishing careers and childbearing and childrearing.  The "mid-life crisis" was born along with that opportunity.  If you had more life, what would you do with it?

I remember feeling somewhat overwhelmed with life's responsibilities at that time, sensing that I should have had more figured out and put into place by then and since I did not, just wanting to get away from it all.  I had even picked out a place to disappear to...White River Junction, Vermont.  Having never been to Vermont, I had no real idea of what it would be like there; just that Vermont was far away and seemed quiet, pastoral and the leaves would be beautiful in the fall. 

I never packed up and went to Vermont and I don't think my family ever knew how seriously I was considering it.  Instead I did do sometimes for myself outside of my home.  I signed up for writing classes at the Loft.  One of those classes was poetry writing with John Reinhard.  The other aspiring poets in the class were enthusiastic and very talented and we continued to meet and critique each other's work long after the class was over.  Several have published their poems in books and poetry anthologies...talented, indeed.

John is a great teacher and an outstanding poet.  A few years after my class with him, he was one of the winners of the 1998 McKnight Arts Fellowships for Writers and his work was published in this anthology that I'm featuring, along with some other powerhouse Minnesota writers you may have heard of: Leslie Adrienne Miller (poet, collage artist and professor at St. Thomas) David Mura (Japanese-American poet, non-fiction writer, playwright and performance artist), Kate DiCamillo, Newbery Award winning children's writer) and William Kent Krueger (best-selling mystery writer, known for the Cork O'Connor series). 

I love the imagery of this poem and I remember that John told us about it origins; I only wish I remembered the story he told, but somehow I find myself singing "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" when I read it.

April is Poetry Month: Day 13

 Cat on a Night of Snow

Cat, if you go outdoors you must walk in the snow.

You will come back with little white shoes on your feet,

little white shoes of snow that have heels of sleet.

Stay by the fire, my Cat.  Lie still, do not go.

See how the flames are leaping and hissing low.

I will bring you a saucer of milk like a marguerite,

so white and so smooth, so spherical and so sweet--

stay with me, Cat.  Outdoors the wild winds blow.

Outdoors, the wild winds blow, Mistress, and dark is the night,

strange voices cry in the trees, intoning strange lore,

and more than cats move, lit by our eyes' green light,

on silent feet where the meadow grasses hang hoar--

Mistress, there are portents abroad of magic and might,

and things that are yet to be done. Open the door!

                                                            --Elizabeth Coatsworth

From: Winter Poems, selected by Barbara Rogasky, Illustrated byTrina Schart Hyman, Scholastic, 1994.

Why on earth should I share a winter poem in April?  Well, this is Minnesota.  A week ago we had piles of snow and winter seemed intent on lingering on forever.  Then we had tropical temperatures, the snow disappeared and the leaves prepared to burst forth.  What could next week bring?  

I picked this poem because we have a cat like "Cat" who loves to experience the weather regardless of what it is.  I like the push and pull in this poem between the warmth and comfort of hearth and home and the mystery and magic of the night in the outdoors.  Now that there is at least the hope of spring coming back day after day, I want to say, like the Cat...Open the door!