How to fall in love with the world & the poems of Jane Kenyon

Look at the world though the eyes of a poet (or an artist).

Kaspa writes: When Fiona and I moved in together we each came trailing cases full of books. We each had some visual art too, and have collected more since, but most of our belongings are paper based and word filled.

A year and a half later I'm still finding poetry on the shelves that I've not read before. A few days ago I pulled a slim volume called Let Evening Come from the bookcase. It was Jane Kenyon's third collection of poems. As I read her poems my daily preoccupations faded away and I felt myself sinking into her world, and it is beautiful.

David Brazier's thesis in Love and its Disapointment is that all art is motivated by love. Not perfect love, perhaps, but love is at the root. Reading Kenyon's work I get a palpable sense of that love, and of its often meloncholic flavour. And the world is melancholic, even as it is beautiful.

Wonderful worship poems - Our Qarrtsiluni issue is now online

Kaspa writes: Earlier in the year Fiona and I had a conversation with Dave Bonta and Beth Adams about the possibility of guest editing an issue of their literary magazine, Qarrtsiluni.

We threw some ideas for themes around and eventually settled upon worship. We wrote a submissions call, and on the 1st August started accepting subs.

During that month we received nearly 300 subs, most of which included several pieces of work. All the subs were of a very high standard - and it was sometimes difficult to choose which pieces of work to include.

We chose 70 of our favorite pieces of work, and they have now started appearing, one per day, on the Qarrtsiluni site.

We're both really pleased with the final selection. Do go and have a look at (and listen to recordings of) the pieces we have chosen, and keep checking back over the next couple of months to see the whole selection. There is some really excellent work coming up.

Click here to visit: Qarrtsiluni, the worship issue.

Podcast: Saved by a Poem

Download mp3 9.5mb

What does it mean to learn a poem by heart?

A couple of weeks ago Fiona and I led a week long course in France, Connecting with others through words and movement. Inspired by our experience running that course and by reading Kim Rosen's book Saved by a Poem, we've been thinking about different ways of working with poetry, and how you can learn about yourself through working with poetry.

You can find out more about Sage Cohen's book Writing The Life Poetic, which Fiona mentions in the podcast, here.

Fiona also reads Esther Morgan's This Morning. Esther's third collection Grace will be available in October. This Morning  won the Bridport prize in 2010.

Writing to help us slow down and see

light of the moon

moves west - flowers' shadows

creep eastward

Buson

Kaspa writes: When I look at the world, I look through a forest of thoughts. Perhaps there is a patch of clear light in the distance, but more often than not what I see is coloured by unconscious judgments. Either that or my mind is so frenetic, bouncing from worries about the future to thoughts of the past, that I don't see anything at all.

Putting pen to paper can help me cut through the forest of thoughts so that I can really see the world.

How words can change you (shake a leg!)

Kaspa writes: I often struggle first thing in the mornings. The part of my brain that wakes up first is an older, animal part, grumpy and unwilling to face the sunlight. I try to have patience with other people's perkiness as I wait for the rest of my brain to wake up.

This morning was a classic example. I woke early, as the sunlight started to creep though the curtains, and spent the next couple of hours drifting in and out of sleep, vaguely unconscious even in the wakeful moments.

Frightened poems and the drunkenness of things being various

Yesterday I went to a charity plant and food fair with Hazel and ate honeycomb ice-cream and watched Erin jump on the bouncy castle.

Then I stayed up late with Jo talking about our ex-boyfriends and our ex-lives and about how we are different now and how we're not.

This morning we had croissants with melted gruyere and mushrooms. Then Catherine came and we sat and ate a brownie on the bench outside and felt the sun on our faces.

In an hour Lynsey will arrive for dinner, after which we'll go and wiggle our hips to salsa music and try to get our feet and arms right at the same time.

Another friend sent me this Snyder poem earlier in the week.

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How Poetry Comes to Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

Gary Snyder

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It feels he sent it to me weeks or even months ago, but it was only on Thursday.

Where are my poems? I can't find them. Maybe they're too frightened to even approach the light. But I suspect instead that I haven't been squinting hard enough into the darkness. The world is too much with me. There isn't enough space. I can't keep up. As I wrote those words, I remembered this old favourite poem, and went to find it. Here it is:

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Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Louise McNeice

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As I continue to write this post, Jarvis Cocker is deejaying on Radio 6 and he is choosing songs just for me. Sweet, sad, incorrigibly plural.

All at once I feel OK with the world again, and with whatever it might bring me. It doesn't matter if my poems come or don't come. It only matters that Synder caught his, and McNeice. It only matters that I sit on the bench and feel the sun on my face. We're all in this crazy and sudden boat together, after all.

Startling three deer

Last night, it was still light when I got home after work for the first time this year.

As I carried my shopping bags around the edge of the house to my little front door, I startled three deer feeding on the expanse of grass near the moat.

They paused and looked right at me. I looked back. I said hello and told them they were beautiful. And then - all at once - they leapt lightly into the air and bounded off, spring spring spring. The white fur on their rumps was heart-shaped, and I followed it with my eyes into the depths of the woods. Then I could follow them no further.

Spring. Spring. Spring.

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Looking, Walking, Being

"The World is not something to
look at, it is something to be in."
Mark Rudman

I look and look.
Looking's a way of being: one becomes,
sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.
Walking wherever looking takes one.
The eyes
dig and burrow into the world.
They touch
fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.
World and the past of it,
not only
visible present, solid and shadow
that looks at one looking.
And language? Rhythms
of echo and interruption?
That's
a way of breathing.
breathing to sustain
looking,
walking and looking,
through the world,
in it.

Denise Levertov

On being foolish and full of human passions (and a moist poem)

I attend a group regularly - I can't tell you what kind, because that bit needs to be anonymous. But it is a group of regular people (I'm going all American - 'regular'!) and we meet to share our experiences and listen to each other and learn and love each other.

When it was my turn to speak, my theme was how truly messed up we all are. There's a saying - 'we are all very sick people - it's just lucky that we're sick on different days'. It felt somehow glorious that we were all bumbling along, NO idea most of the time what we are doing. There's a Buddhist term - bombu nature - we are all bombu, we are all foolish beings. We are ordinary and full of passions. Well, I am anyway.

Last night it was a joy to be in the same boat with all the other bombu members of my group. Last night there was so much love in the room that I thought I might go pop.

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Here's a very appropriate (and moist) poem. Love you all too, readers - you're in the boat too.

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My Love For All Things Warm and Breathing

I have seldom loved more than one thing at a time,
yet this morning I feel myself expanding, each
part of me soft and glandular, and under my skin
is room enough now for the loving of many things,
and all of them at once, these students especially,
not only the girl in the yellow sweater, whose
name, Laura Buxton, is somehow the girl herself,
Laura for the coy green mellowing eyes, Buxton
for all the rest, but also the simple girl in blue
on the back row, her mouth sad beyond all reasonable
inducements, and the boy with the weight problem,
his teeth at work even now on his lower lip, and
the grand profusion of hair and nails and hands and
legs and tongues and thighs and fingertips and
wrists and throats, yes, of throats especially,
throats through which passes the breath that joins
the air that enters through these ancient windows,
that exits, that takes with it my own breath, inside
this room just now my love for all things warm and
breathing, that lifts it high to scatter it fine and
enormous into the trees and the grass, into the heat
beneath the earth beneath the stone, into the
boundless lust of all things bound but gathering.


by William Kloefkorn (from Cottonwood County: Poems by William Kloefkorn and Ted Kooser)
Thanks to The Writer's Almanac - do support them, they're fab.

Amsterdam

In the summer my friend Susan accompanied me to Amsterdam so I could do research for my work-in-progress, Joe in Amsterdam.

We had a wonderful time wandering up and down the canals, eating in a funky vegetarian restaurant and drinking lots of good coffee.

What a bonus that Susan happens to be an incredibly talented poet, and that she's commemorated our trip with this elegant poem. Here's her site, where you can read more of her poems - they want you to read them out loud.

And when you're done reading that you can read this post by Terresa at The Chocoate Chip Waffle - one of her pieces on her recent trip to England - she writes so beautifully. Happy Thursday.

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Now

Amsterdam without
you, or you, or even you:

this time it’s easy,
lazy, beautiful, as strong

as coffee, fresh as
red shutters on high windows,

friendly as geraniums
on winking canal water.


Susan Utting

My lips are (mostly) sealed

I thought this might happen.

Most of what is happening here feels too private to share on this blog.

That doesn't just include what's happening to other people, as I thought it would, but also what is happening to me.

There are some things I can tell you about.

Jodo is a tabby who sat on my lap while we were in the training room. Sharry shamelessly accosts people on the stairs and forces them to stroke her by rolling onto her back and patting their hands with her paw. Zen is black and mysterious. Moggy is short for Mogdala.

Eamon made beautiful hot chocolate for everyone last night, with Butlers chocolates dropped into a huge pan of milk. I even got out my second bar of stashed Green and Blacks chocolate (which means I'll need reinforcements before the week is out).

But all the rest needs to stay here at The Buddhist House, between me and my new friends.

It brings to mind when we spoke about confidentiality on our first day here. David suggested that we need to treat people's material in a way that will allow them to continue to have confidence in us. This made a lot of sense to me. We talk to people 'in confidence'. I hadn't even realised the word confidential was so close.

In some ways I share quite openly here, but there are other parts of my life that I will never talk about. Isn't this how it always is? It doesn't mean that you're not my friends too : )

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I also wanted to share this prose poem from The Writer's Almanac with you because I like it so much.


Anniversary

She says he isn't as funny as he used to be. About fifty percent asfunny, maybe less. He thinks, but doesn't say, no, it's you, you'redepressed, you don't find anyone funny anymore. She thinks, butdoesn't say, I've always been depressed. I've never found anyonefunny—except you, once.

Jason Whitmarsh, from Tomorrow's Living Room

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Enjoy your Wednesdays. I can hear the bell ringing downstairs.

I want to make a BIGGER blogsplash

After finding nearly forty blogs who want to participate in my Blogsplash, I thought that 100 was a bit of a rubbish target (especially as it isn't happening until March 1st 2010).

I'm teetering between having a quite sensible target of 500 blogs, and a slightly ridiculous one of 1000. The latter would mean finding 200 new blogs every month (50 a week) who would be wiling to take part and blog the first day of Ruth's diary on the same day.

What do you think, people? Any cunning ideas about how I could make this happen? I'm not a big twitterer but I have got a mini-link thingy bit.ly/14jvqV which takes you to the Blogsplash invite page if you can tweet it...

Here are some lovely people who have already helped... Red Bird, Angie, Juxtabook, Jessica, The Plumber's Wife, and Clare and Vivenne have posts lined up... don't you just love the blogging community?

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There's a new interview up at 100 Readers - meet Dasha (cool super-power, Dasha).

Look at this puddy-tat.

It's been a while since I posted a poem, so here's one of my favourites from one of my favourite poets - Jane Hirschfield. Do buy her marvellous books - After is a good one to start with.

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It Was Like This: You Were Happy

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent – what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness –
between you, there is nothing to forgive –
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

Jane Hirschfield

Loafing and cold mushy peas

Note to self: when lovely boyfriend makes lovely homemade mushy peas to go with our fish and chips and tartare sauce, wash the saucepan up after the meal rather than leaving it til the morning.

Cold solidified mushy peas are not the best way to start the day.

I'm off to the big smoke today to have lunch with some old friends. In a turkish restaurant, yum. I hope you have wonderful Fridays, whatever you have planned.

Here's to a nice bit of loafing - I hope you can find the time.

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Loafing

I looked into the room a moment ago,
and this is what I saw –
my chair in its place by the window,
the book turned facedown on the table.
And on the sill, the cigarette
left burning in its ashtray.
Malingerer! my uncle yelled at me
so long ago. He was right.
I’ve set aside time today,
same as every day,
for doing nothing at all.


Raymond Carver

A difficult week, and beauty

This afternoon I watched 'Heima' by Sigur Ros.

Sigur Ros are an icelandic band who make exquisite, ethereal music. This film follows them around their homeland (the meaning of heima) as they put on a series of free concerts as a way of giving something back.

As I'd expected, it is a stunning film. Whatever the camera focusses on - children's faces, wide open Icelandic landscapes, green mould on the wall of an abandoned fish factory - the shots seem perfect. It was as if the camera is loving everything it sees, and this makes it beautiful.

There are snippets of interviews with the band, including the lead singer Jónsi Birgisson. He is a skinny bloke with slightly crooked teeth, and he looks beautiful too. Give me this variety of beauty over the airbrushed covers of Vogue any day. Look around you right now. Can you see the beauty out of your window? In your room? In your mirror?

I've had a difficult week, but even this has the potential to be transformed by the eye of the beholder. Difficult weeks can also be ones where you learn a great deal about yourself, and start to build certain kinds of strength. We can find beauty in suffering if we persevere, gently, with patience.

I'm feeling grateful for Sigur Ros, and for the people around me, and for many other things. Including this poem - one of the first I formed a proper relationship with, when I was fourteen. Here's to beauty (clink).

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Beauty

What does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph--
"Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one." Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening when it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through a window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale;
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unanswering to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.

Edward Thomas

Chocolate chip waffles and scrumptious words

I just had to share this scrumptious post about quotes with you before I skip off towards the weekend.

It's from Terresa Wellborn's Chocolate Chip Waffle blog, which I love. And while we're on the subject of quotes, my very favourite quote blog is whiskey river, from which I will reprint this poem by Stephen Dunn.

There - a lazy Friday blog consisting entirely of other people's ingredients. Thank you Terresa, thank you whiskey.

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Choosing to Think of It

Today, ten thousand people will die
and their small replacements will bring joy
and this will make sense to someoner
emoved from any sense of loss.
I, too, will die a little and carry on,
doing some paperwork, driving myself
home. The sky is simply overcast,
nothing is any less than it was
yesterday or the day before. In short,
there's no reason or every reason
why I'm choosing to think of this now.
The short-lived holiness
true lovers know, making them unaccountable
except to spirit and themselves - suddenly
I want to be that insufferable and selfish,
that sharpened and tuned.
I'm going to think of what it means
to be an animal crossing a highway,
to be a human without a useful prayer
setting off on one of those journeys
we humans take. I don't expect anything
to change. I just want to be filled up
a little more with what exists,
tipped toward the laughter which understands
I'm nothing and all there is.
By evening, the promised storm
will arrive. A few in small boats
will be taken by surprise.
There will be survivors, and even they will die.

Stephen Dunn

A gift for you this Friday

Can you spare ten minutes? If not, then five?

Go and make yourself a cup of tea.

Get comfy. Click here. Read the poem slowly. Read it out loud if no-one is listening.


Now listen to Garrison Keillor read it out in his unctuous voice. The poem is just after three minutes into the audio.

Sip your tea. Feel your feet on the ground. Imagine the nuzzling.

Aaaaaahhhhhh.

Friday poem, and here's to Michael

It's strange when celebrities die. We think we know them, and maybe we do a bit - as far as it is possible to know anyone without stepping into their skins.

I'm sad for any losses, and especially sad for the unfulfilled, the parts where the light never shined. We never know what choices we ourselves would make if we'd lived someone else's life. So here's to Michael. And to Farrah, and to all the others.

Happy weekend x

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Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer

We turned into the drive,
and gravel flew up from the tires
like sparks from a fire. So much
to be done – the unpacking, the mail
and papers… the grass needed mowing…
We climbed stiffly out of the car.
The shut-off engine ticked as it cooled.

And then we noticed the pear tree,
the limbs so heavy with fruit
they nearly touched the ground.
We went out to the meadow; our steps
made black holes in the grass;
and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.

Jane Kenyon

Childhood summer

Through the slow shadows
the cows approach, warm
evening mothers, that rather
stay than go. Their eyes
are great flowers, their bodies
are full of grass. Almost plants
they are, groping their way home
on gently walking roots.

It was summer. Summer.


Gosta Agren

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One of my favourite poems. You have to say it out loud - roll the words around in your mouth like cud.

You can buy poems by the Finnish poet Agren here. I'm going to look for mine later - it's on a bookshelf somewhere - and take it out into the sunshine.

Any ideas for an equivalent to the hands-together-little-bow gesture in English? I'd like to find a way of signing off my blog posts. In gassho / namaste ; )

A coconut candle, woolly mammoths and keeping your feet on the ground

I haven't been writing regularly since before Christmas. 'Writing regularly' is writing four or five mornings a week, for an hour or more. Little and often is the only way for me to get the work done.

This has been because of a combination of personal stuff and The Letters coming out - the blog tour kept me pretty busy, and becoming a 'proper publisher author' (whatever that means) can mess with your head a little.

I'm getting back to it this week, accompanied by a sweet-smelling coconut candle. For me, working on something current is the best way of keeping my feet on the ground. It helps with rejection and all the difficult bits of being a writer, and it also helps with the good stuff - praise, excitement - which can be just as destabilising. If not more. I'm looking forward to spending time with my character Joe again.

Another gift from Sage's beautiful book has been the url to sign up for daily emails from The Writer's Almanac with that lovely man Garrison Keillor. A free poem delivered to your inbox every day! Here is yesterdays - another reminder for us to remember our place in the world. You can sign up for the emails here.

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Mammoth

Returning the refilled feeder to its hanger on the tree,
I am followed, and from my first step out the door
to the careful slipping of the loop of twine over the hook's tang
made to understand – as he darts within inches of my eyes –
that this hummingbird, while he may not despise me,
finds my human dawdling not simply unacceptable but offensive,
a lumbering no less appalling than the moonscape of my face
and its billion plumbable pores. Even the vast tidal wash
of my infernal, slow-witted breathing disgusts him. Therefore he loops
so swiftly around me I can hardly blink, and when I tell him he is
beautiful, he hears only the two ton roar of a woolly mammoth
as it thrashes in a bog, at the edges of which, this time of year,
the red, sweet flowers he loves most of all still thrive.

by Robert Wrigley

(from Earthly Meditations. © Penguin, 2006)

Back to bed (as suggested by Raymond Carver)

I don't need to leave the house until 3pm today, and so I have decided to go back to bed. Unfortunately I don't have a tree bed (aren't they beautiful?) but mine will do.

I've brought tea (earl grey of course), A Book Of Silence, my laptop, a cat, this article about fear by Ezra Bayda, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, my journal, a view of the melting snow, and Bagpuss.

What more could anyone need?

If I'm not careful, I'll start feeling guilty. It's daytime, and a weekday. I'm not ill. If I waver, I'll read Carver's marvellous poem again.

What can you give yourself (give yourself over to) today?

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Rain

Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

Raymond Carver

Thank you Marie Howe

A poem for you by a favourite poet of mine, just because.

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

Marie Howe

(from her collection of the same name - buy it!)