Tennyson in the Spring

A beautiful spring day, sitting out back and looking at the first of the flowers making a daring appearance in the garden, and Alfred Tennyson leading me, page by page, over lovely medieval hills toward Camelot… it was a great afternoon. For this Year of Poetry I pulled an old copy of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King from the shelf, this edition capturing five of the idylls in a neatly bound “Standard English Classics” published a little over a century ago. Heavy and hearty, this volume traces the titular king from “The Coming of Arthur” (“Among the flowers, in May”) through the quest for the grail and nods to Gareth, Lynette, Lancelot, and Elaine, before ending, sensibly, with “The Passing of Arthur.”

Tennyson’s rich verse tells these Arthurian tales without rushing, luxuriating in language and giving the characters the time and space to blossom into the epic personalities they are. In the opening selection, Arthur emerges as the proper king, recognized as heroic and intrinsically powerful, as when he “spake and cheered his Table Round / With large, divine, and comfortable words, / Beyond my tongue to tell thee.” It’s Arthur who brings stability to the realm, Tennyson noting that “a doubtful throne is ice on summer seas.”

Familiar faces fill this opening idyll, including:

…mage Merlin, whose vast wit
And hundred winters are but as the hands
Of loyal vassals toiling for their liege.

“And near him stood the Lady of the Lake,
Who knows a subtler magic than his own—
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful.
She gave the King his huge cross-hilted sword,
Whereby to drive the heathen out: a mist
Of incense curled about her, and her face
Wellnigh was hidden in the minster gloom

And yes, some of us can’t hear the word “samite” without hearing the line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (and that “watery tart”) but here in Tennyson’s verse the grandness of the description is as serious as it is epic.

That’s not to say that everyone trusts the king, who in the second idyll, “Gareth and Lynette,” is considered so otherworldly as to prompt doubt in Gareth’s followers:

“Lord, we have heard from our wise man at home
To Northward, that this King is not the King,
But only changeling out of Fairyland,
Who drave the heathen hence by sorcery
And Merlin’s glamour.” Then the first again,
“Lord, there is no such city anywhere,
But all a vision.”

This mystery clings go Arthur, even as Gareth laughs at the doubt and tells his men that “he had glamour enow / In his own blood, his princedom, youth and hopes, / To plunge old Merlin in the Arabian sea.”

“Camelot, a city of shadowy palaces” isn’t (strictly) in fairyland, though modern readers might consider Tennyson’s Arthurian landscape just as magical, and Gareth’s journey into the castle, masquerading as kitchen help, invites readers to see the scene in all its grandeur. It’s at this entrance that Gareth is told:

…a Fairy King
And Fairy Queens have built the city, son;
They came from out a sacred mountain-cleft
Toward the sunrise, each with harp in hand,
And built it to the music of their harps.
And, as thou sayest, it is enchanted, son,
For there is nothing in it as it seems
Saving the King…

That king is doing kingly things in this idyll, Gareth witnessing the distribution of justice and conversing with his knights. From this Gareth is given license to undergo “the sooty yoke of kitchen-vassalage.” He doesn’t wear that yoke long, just long enough to get a sense of some of the knights from a commoner’s point of view (“Lancelot ever spake him pleasantly, / But Kay the seneschal, who loved him not, / Would hustle and harry him”) and then Gareth is off to knightly duties, like fighting a knight dressed all in black to save a maiden trapped in her castle.

The tropes of chivalry come in waves.

Gareth battles misconception (in a series of scenes with Lynette that rival a Hepburn and Tracy film for banter) and then the knight, who “wears a helmet mounted with a skull, / And bears a skeleton figured on his arms,” winning the day and the hand of Lynette and:

…Nigh upon that hour
When the lone hern forgets his melancholy,
Lets down his other leg, and stretching, dreams
Of goodly supper in the distant pool,
Then turned the noble damsel smiling at him

Goofy, delightful, and so very Tennyson, those lines capture a more intimate side to these grand tales.

There is a bit more to this section, as the poet introduces Lancelot, juxtaposing this grand knight with humble Gareth, and setting him up for his own idyll, “Lancelot and Elaine.”

It’s Elaine who takes center stage in that section of the book, tragically tragic, melodramatically forlorn, romantically doomed Elaine. The opening of the idyll captures the scene:

Elaine the fair, Elaine the loveable,
Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat,
High in her chamber up a tower to the east
Guarded the sacred shield of Lancelot;
Which first she placed where the morning’s earliest ray
Might strike it, and awake her with the gleam;
Then fearing rust or soilure fashioned for it
A case of silk, and braided thereupon
All the devices blazoned on the shield
In their own tinct, and added, of her wit,
A border fantasy of branch and flower,
And yellow-throated nestling in the nest.
Nor rested thus content, but day by day,
Leaving her household and good father, climbed
That eastern tower, and entering barred her door,
Stript off the case, and read the naked shield,
Now guessed a hidden meaning in his arms,
Now made a pretty history to herself
Of every dint a sword had beaten in it,
And every scratch a lance had made upon it,
Conjecturing when and where: this cut is fresh;
That ten years back; this dealt him at Caerlyle;
That at Caerleon; this at Camelot:
And ah God’s mercy, what a stroke was there!
And here a thrust that might have killed, but God
Broke the strong lance, and rolled his enemy down,
And saved him: so she lived in fantasy.

Those last four damning words play out over the next few hundred lines, and while our heroine seems self aware of her own pining and goes out of her way to praise the object of her misguided desire, Elaine’s story tumbles away from her and ends with an odd validation of the forbidden romance between Lancelot and the queen.

Along the way Tennyson provides some gems, as when Guinevere tells her knight what makes him more attractive than Arthur: “He is all fault who hath no fault at all: / For who loves me must have a touch of earth.” 

The story broadens in “The Holy Grail” to include Arthur’s knights doing more than wooing and winning. It’s here that Tennyson embraces the dramatic, giving readers descriptions as wild as:

There rose a hill that none but man could climb,
Scarred with a hundred wintry water-courses—
Storm at the top, and when we gained it, storm
Round us and death; for every moment glanced
His silver arms and gloomed: so quick and thick
The lightnings here and there to left and right
Struck, till the dry old trunks about us, dead,
Yea, rotten with a hundred years of death,
Sprang into fire: and at the base we found
On either hand, as far as eye could see,
A great black swamp and of an evil smell,
Part black, part whitened with the bones of men,
Not to be crost, save that some ancient king
Had built a way, where, linked with many a bridge,
A thousand piers ran into the great Sea.

Sir Galahad and the other knights navigate the challenges put before them, be those lightning or lust, mostly remembering “Arthur’s warning word, / That most of us would follow wandering fires” and waver from the goal of finding the grail. It’s a goal, of course, that they do not achieve, giving Arthur space to ruminate on faith, God, and more.

Idylls of the King ends with “The Passing of Arthur” which Sir Bedivere “First made and latest left of all the knights, / Told, when the man was no more than a voice / In the white winter of his age, to those / With whom he dwelt, new faces, other minds.”

Arthur battles; Arthur falls. Arthur ruminates; Arthur offers advice: “The old order changeth, yielding place to new / And God fulfils himself in many ways.” Arthur is placed on a barge and sails away. Bedivere, our eyes to this great accompt:

…clomb
Even to the highest he could climb, and saw,
Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,
Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King,
Down that long water opening on the deep
Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
From less to less and vanish into light.
And the new sun rose bringing the new year.

Tennyson ends Arthur’s story with a sunrise. The king is dead, long live… 

This volume is just a sampling of the longer Idylls of the King, but sitting on the deck, spring flowers blowing in the May breeze, it felt like the right amount of time to spend galloping along with Arthur and his knights. Poetry creates its own Fairyland and epic verse like this is a nice reminder that storytelling doesn’t only happen in novels or short stories. 

Continuing this Year of Poetry next week with the poetry of Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu in the collection: The Ink Dark Moon

Unbecoming: Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing is a wonderfully weird book. Composed of poems and drawings and mesmerizing prose pieces, this collection feels both spiritual and secular, high minded and bawdy, genuine and artificial, and a host of other delicious contradictions. Some written when Cohen was doing his stint as a monk, others composed later as he smoked a cigarette and embraced the lifestyle of a successful musician, these poems (and other ephemera) are a strange and delightful window into the mind of a creative powerhouse.

Many know Cohen for his music and rightfully so. There was a time not long ago when it seemed like everyone was singing “Hallelujah” (from open mic nights to church, depending on the church) and I’d still hold his final album You Want It Darker up as a masterpiece. Anyone reading Book of Longing could hear Cohen’s voice behind many of the poems, some, like “Never Mind” read like rough drafts of tunes he’ll later record: “The was was lost / The treaty signed / I was not caught / I crossed the line”; others, like “Traveling Light #31” are almost exactly what will manifest later as lyrics on future albums: “I’m traveling light / So Au Revoir / I’ll miss my heart / And my guitar”.

But much of this 2006 collection is not familiar and has musical echoes only so far as Cohen thinks with syncopated sincerity. This happens in the poetic prose that appears in Book of Longing: “Sometimes a spider will descend on its hideous wet thread and threaten my hard-earned disinterest.” It appears too when he’s describing objects as mundane as “a butter dish / that is shaped like a cow” and as metaphysical as god: “You’d have to be a fool / to choose the meek today.”

There are lots of those clever lines in this collection, many self-deprecating, others delivered with the world weary sigh of a man who has lived long: “I’m wanted at the traffic jam”.

Cohen is a lyricist and aware of himself as a poet and a musician. In “You’d Sing Too” he explains:

You’d sing too
if you found yourself
in a place like this
You wouldn’t worry about
whether you were as good
as Ray Charles or Edith Piaf
You’d sing
You’d sing
not for yourself
but to make a self
out of the old food
rotting in the astral bowel
and the loveless thud
of your own breathing
You’d become a singer
faster than it takes
to hate a rival’s charm
and you’d sing, darling
you’d sing too

Cohen does sing too, and for those who know him only from his albums, Cohen’s poetry is a marvelous example of how the written word can convey truths in a different way than music. Here in his Book of Longing, Cohen turns insects into mystics, meditates on the familiar nightingale (in a way that whispered to me that I could do a full year of poetry on this poetic bird), and tells us that “He writes about the small things / which stand for all things.”

Much of Cohen’s poetry is composed of very short lines and carries the prosody of a popular composer. Read just enough of his work all at once and Leonard Cohen reminds me of a mystical poet from the Romantic age; read too much in one sitting and I’m reminded of Shel Silverstein. 

Which brings me to the pictures.

Book of Longing is filled with pen and ink drawings, often of faces, often biographical, that punctuate the poetry. The whimsy and contrasting gravity of these images feels natural in the book. They too carry Cohen’s voice.

And that voice is clear, intimate, and wise. He chides his readers in “Unbecoming” that: 

It’s unbecoming
to find you
in a place of entertainment
trying to forget
the tiny horror
of the last million years

And then we remind ourselves that in this “place of entertainment” he’s the fellow up front holding the microphone.

It would be easy to quote a slew of Cohen’s poems from this substantial collection, but I’d rather simply encourage my wonderful readers to seek out a copy of this (or Cohen’s Stranger Music) on your own. Like a great album his words are worth savoring first hand.

Continuing this Year of Poetry next week with Tennyson’s Idylls of the King

“…from her awful Pop”: Alfred Noyes

My copy of Alfred Noyes is a two volume set of collected poems inscribed, delightfully, to “Gladys Faber from her awful Pop. Xmas 1917”. I think I like Gladys’ Pop.

And for this Year of Poetry I decided that two volumes is …a lot of Alfred Noyes, so… I opted to pluck a volume from the collected works, Tales of the Mermaid Tavern. It’s a quasihistorical telling of a real place in Elizabethan London, with poems about litr’y patrons including Shakespeare, Raleigh, and others in the “Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen”.

The collection begins with the poet strolling through (his) present day London marveling at the beauty of the light as “the town / Turned to a golden suburb of the clouds.” It’s at this point that he dreams, as so many poets do, and his imagination is transported across time to an earlier age when he heard the “sound / Of clashing wine-cups: then a deep-voiced song” [that] “Made the old timbers of the Mermaid Inn / Shake as a galleon shakes in a gale of wind / When she rolls glorying through the Ocean-sea.” And our adventure at the Mermaid Tavern is afoot.

That adventure begins with Walter Raleigh, “A figure like foot-feathered Mercury, / Tall, straight and splendid as a sunset-cloud. / Clad in a crimson doublet and trunk-hose, / A rapier at his side” who strides into the Mermaid bringing us along for the ride.

Inside the inn Noyes witnesses carousing and “Scraps of ambrosial talk” from Ben Jonson to Kit Marlowe that veer from poetic to punchy, as when a Jonson, well into his cups, sings:

Will Shakespeare’s out like Robin Hood
With his merry men all in green,
To steal a deer in Charlecote wood
Where never a deer was seen.

Jonson articulates his fictional Shakespeare’s exploits (that is Noyes speaks through a fictional Jonson to celebrate a fictional Shakespeare) equating him to a poacher before telling Marlowe that “Will’s Venus and Adonis, Kit, is rare, / A round, sound, full-blown piece of thorough work.”

…and I paused on that marvelous description: “A round, sound, full-blown piece of thorough work.” Was it Noyes’? (Yes.) Jonson’s? (Mmm?) Whatever the case, Noyes’ Jonson’s evaluation continues, describing another writer’s poetry as “moths of verse that shrivel in every taper.”

But Tales of the Mermaid Tavern is more than literary sniping. Noyes runs these Elizabethan writers through a drawing room comedy of sorts, seeming to revel in the humanizing of these luminaries, often with drink, giving each a personality that rings true (at least to those of us who only know them from print, but can imagine Bacon chiding Shakespeare:

“Thy Summer’s Night—eh, Will? Midsummer’s Night?—
That’s a quaint fancy,” Bacon droned anew,
“But—Athens was an error, Will! Not Athens!
Titania knew not Athens! Those wild elves
Of thy Midsummer’s Dream—eh? Midnight’s Dream?—
Are English all. Thy woods, too, smack of England;
They never grew round Athens. Bottom, too,
He is not Greek!”

Arguments over verisimilitude fade with the introduction of a truly dramatic event: the murder of Marlowe. Noyes treats us to the aftermath as Nash bursts into the Mermaid with blood on his shirt. The tavern is filled with “thrashing out / The tragic truth” as the men of letters confront the death of the playwright before Noyes describes writers doing what writers do and: “Then, all along the Cheape, / The ballad-mongers waved their sheets of rhyme”. What follows are “bawdy tales and scraps of balladry” and never does Noyes seem happier than in describing the chaos that ensues.

But “Tales” (plural) are what the title promises and Noyes delivers on this with stories that extend beyond Marlowe’s bloody murder. There was the day when: “Gods, what a hubbub shook our cobwebs out / The day that Chapman, Marston and our Ben / Waited in Newgate for the hangman’s hands” and another when “on an All Souls’ Eve” when an older Ben Jonson sat “in the old oak-chair, / Over the roaring hearth, puffed at his pipe” and heard the story of “a famous queen” and a ghostly ruby ring (appearing, perhaps, on the hand of a sexton fresh from burying the dead).

In the end it’s Ben Jonson who outlives his peers, described as “Alone in his old nook; perhaps to hear / The voices of the dead,” It’s Raleigh he meets, however, and Noyes’ opportunity to comment on that dashing fellow who began the first poem when he “swaggered down as if he owned a world / Which had forgotten—did I wake or dream?— / Even his gracious ghost!” and led us into the tavern.

Tales of the Mermaid Tavern was a fun collection and as a postscript I’ll add that I found Noyes’ verse full of the quirky one liners like those that I crib for the titles of the poetry posts I’ve been writing (though as you saw, it was Gladys Farber’s Pop who won the day today). I’ll begin to wrap this up with a collection of these titles that might have been (imagine each before “: Alfred Noyes” at the top of this post). They made me smile anyway.

“Wielding his eel-skin bladder”

“Of players, poets, prentices, mad-cap queens”

“Some imagined insult to the Scots”

I’ll give the final words to Noyes, who near the end of the collection seems to speak for all of us who have spent some time in this cozy establishment:

There as I stood
Under the painted sign, I could have vowed
That I, too, heard the voices of the dead,
The voices of his old companions,
Gathering round him in that lonely room,
Till all the timbers of the Mermaid Inn
Trembled above me with their ghostly song

Thanks, Gladys’ Pop.

Continuing this Year of Poetry next week with Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen

J’Accuse…!

I saw an interview with Salman Rushdie this week in which he discussed his newest book, Knife. In this nonfiction work he describes the attack that cost him his eye, an assault inspired by the fatwa issued more than three decades ago (in response to Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses). As he answered a question about anger, Rushdie said something that resonated with me as a person whose job includes working with lots of very different folks and trying to create and maintain an environment where everyone feels safe, valued, and heard.

Framed within a discussion of issues of censorship and intolerance, Rushdie said: “I think people need to stop having such thin skins. You know, at the moment we’re all very easily offended, and what’s more is we also believe that being offended is sufficient reason for attacking something.”

I thought about that line for quite a while this week as I went about the business of addressing divergent points of view, a big part of my job as a public school principal.

Students are awesome and their passion profound. Sometimes this energy gets channeled into action and often that action is guided by something perceived as justice. Sweet, sweet justice.

I see this happen with regard to policy: at one school where I worked  it was student parking, at another stadium rules at football games, at another where students could eat at lunch. In each of these cases (and a hundred more) some agreed. Some disagreed. Petitions were filed; many of the teenagers (and even more so the preteens) I’ve worked with love petitions. At their best, students organized to have their voice heard and adults listened (and in return students listened to each other and those adults).

In my present community art holds at least as high a place as policy and ideas about censorship, freedom of expression, and more have the potential to lead to heightened emotions. As lively as talk about politics, discussions of art can be rich or poor, and in the end, it seems to me, two things matter most: first, respecting each other as we disagree, and second, remembering what Paul Cézanne said: “Don’t be an art critic, but paint, there lies salvation.” We could argue, or we could get about making art. I’ll choose the latter.

And from time to time folks act out to address another person’s behavior (or perceived behavior). When this happens and someone takes matters into their own hands the result is far, far too often less satisfying than they’d expected. It’s easy to imagine satisfaction for sticking it to someone who seems to have done something egregious, but the reality of sloppy vengeance is often more frustrating than anything else. We may picture our actions as noble, but when we act without all the information or independent of the social contract the result is as ineffective as it is mistaken. We are not batman. This is not a comic book.

So, what then would someone like Rushdie suggest is a better way of doing things?

Later in the interview Rushdie is asked: “Haven’t groups always had a way of policing language or behavior? … Has my perspective changed on it or has the dynamic changed?” To which Rushdie answers: 

I think what’s happened is the temperature has risen. I mean, yes, of course, people have always disagreed and people have always said, you can’t say that; you’ve got to say this. That’s not new. What’s new is volume and the heat. And so what we do about taking down the volume and taking down the heat, that’s the question.

What then, is the answer?

One of my favorite thinkers is Thich Nhat Hanh who wrote (in his book Anger): “Deep listening, compassionate listening is not listening with the purpose of analyzing or even uncovering what has happened in the past. You listen first of all in order to give the other person relief, a chance to speak out, to feel that someone finally understands him or her. Deep listening is the kind of listening that helps us to keep compassion alive while the other speaks, which may be for half an hour or forty-five minutes. During this time you have in mind only one idea, one desire: to listen in order to give the other person the chance to speak out and suffer less. This is your only purpose. Other things like analyzing, understanding the past, can be a by-product of this work. But first of all listen with compassion. Compassion”

That said, turning down the heat and lowering the volume feel tougher to do in practice than in theory. Compassion sounds well and good, but heavens, have you heard what that person did?

So I try to keep in mind words from people wiser than me. 

For a high minded approach one might cite Marcus Aurelius who wrote: “Say to yourself at the start of the day, I shall meet with meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and unsociable people. They are subject to all these defects because they have no knowledge of good and bad. But I, who have observed the nature of the good, and seen that it is the right; and of the bad, and seen that it is the wrong; and of the wrongdoer himself, and seen that his nature is akin to my own—not because he is of the same blood and seed, but because he shares as I do in mind and thus in a portion of the divine—I, then, can neither be harmed by these people, nor become angry with one who is akin to me, nor can I hate him, for we have come into being to work together, like feet, hands, eyelids, or the two rows of teeth in our upper and lower jaws. To work against one another is therefore contrary to nature; and to be angry with another person and turn away from him is surely to work against him.”

For something more down to earth, Bob Marley: “If you get down and you quarrel everyday / You are saying prayers to the devils, I say.” Positive Vibration, my friends.

It’s okay to be offended …and to refrain from attacks. It’s more than okay to engage in conversation, to keep an open mind, and to really listen, even when what’s being said isn’t our own point of view. Turning down the heat may be easier said than done, but it’s something worth doing. 

This doesn’t mean that we need to lose our points of view or compromise our values, but taking the time, making the investment, to build a community together has the potential to lead to a world that is better for everyone. Will we be offended? Yes. Must we respond with attacks? No.

Instead, how about we make art.

Burning the Cat: W.S. Merwin

There is just so much in The Essential W.S. Merwin. That’s true of the number of poems, the sweep of his style (well, styles since those styles metamorphosize over the years covered in this volume from 1952 to 2017), and the depth of meaning as this epic American poet engages with subject matter that spans the natural world, human nature, and the political events of more than a half century. Oh, and the burning of a cat.

Merwin is well loved for his dedication to nature and to justice and some of his most remembered poems celebrate these parts of life with eloquence and grace. But there is more to Merwin’s collected work than just the big ideas. Merwin’s verse can be intimate, funny, and thought provoking about more than just the grandeur of a forest of horror of a war.

The Essential W.S. Merwin proceeds chronologically, highlighting early translations of Borges and Neruda where Merwin’s awareness of the power of poetry is front and center (as in “To a Minor Poet of the Greek Anthology”) as well as his insight into the sweep of change that makes up a person’s life from “In the childhood of mist my soul winged and wounded” to “the hour of departure” (in Neruda’s “The Song of Despair”.)

But for me at least the magic of Merwin really begins to glow when he uses his own words to bring the language of the sacred to the world he sees. In “Leviathan” he writes of the great whale: “he lies / Like an angel, although a lost angel, / On the waste’s unease”. 

Also on those seas Merwin places Odysseus, who sails and sails “as though he had got nowhere but older”.

And then there is that cat.

I suppose I’d be wise to couch the inclusion of this poem in the context that I share my home with three cats (Sam, Ben, and Maple) and before that had three other cats (Tess, Trout, and Chester, who passed away a couple of years ago at the ages of 19, 20, and 21). So, as I saw the title of Merwin’s 1956 poem, “Burning the Cat”, my first thought was: skip this one. It’s a long book and it won’t matter if you dodge a couple of poems. But I didn’t. And…

“Burning the Cat” is about much more than the title describes. It runs:

In the spring, by the big shuck-pile
Between the bramble-choked brook where the copperheads
Curled in the first sun, and the mud road,
All at once it could no longer be ignored.
The season steamed with an odor for which
There has never been a name, but it shouted above all.
When I went near, the wood-lice were in its eyes
And a nest of beetles in the white fur of its armpit.
I built a fire there by the shuck-pile
But it did no more than pop the beetles
And singe the damp fur, raising a stench
Of burning hair that bit through the sweet day-smell.
Then thinking how time leches after indecency,
Since both grief is indecent and the lack of it,
I went away and fetched newspaper,
And wrapped it in kerosene and put it in
With the garbage on a heaped nest of sticks:
It was harder to burn than the peels of oranges,
Bubbling and spitting, and the reek was like
Rank cooking that drifted with the smoke out
Through the budding woods and clouded the shining dogwood.
But I became stubborn: I would consume it
Though the pyre should take me a day to build
And the flames rise over the house. And hours I fed
That burning, till I was black and streaked with sweat;
And poked it out then, with charred meat still clustering
Thick around the bones. And buried it so
As I should have done in the first place, for
The earth is slow, but deep, and good for hiding;
I would have used it if I had understood
How nine lives can vanish in one flash of a dog’s jaws,
A car or a copperhead, and yet how one small
Death, however reckoned, is hard to dispose of.

Merwin doesn’t limit his ruminations on the end of life to household pets. In “For the Anniversary of My Death” he imagines the day of his own death and unknowingly passing that future anniversary. 

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

Published more than a decade after the cat, the changes in Merwin’s verse are starting to show here. Punctuation recedes, lines shorten, and ideas expand. The core of the poet’s philosophy is there, but as the 50s become the 60s and then the 20th century turns into the 21st, his poetry ages and matures to reflect a better understanding.

I was thankful that in this Year of Poetry I’d placed Merwin after a string of shorter works and that I started reading The Essential W.S. Merwin back during spring break. It was during a couple of rainy afternoons, my dog on my lap, a cup of coffee at my side, that I dove into this volume and allowed myself much more than a week to swim in the waters of Merwin’s verse. Even so, this feels like a book that could command a summer or be a stalwart companion on a long road trip through natural places. The Essential W.S. Merwin invites slow reading and steady reflection, and even with the time I gave it, I know when I pick it up again sometime in the future, and I certainly will once the self imposed time constraints of this yearlong poetry-appreciating enterprise is done, I will find much that I didn’t see when I spent time with it this spring.

So I’ll simply end this little appreciation with a short poem from the early 2000s, “From the Start” that captures, I think, some of the feeling of Merwin as he reflects on a poetic life.

Who did I think was listening
when I wrote down the words
in pencil at the beginning
words for singing
to music I did not know
and people I did not know
would read them and stand to sing them
already knowing them
while they sing they have no name

Many of us are listening and singing along. And for any who don’t know the poetry of W.S. Merwin, I urge you to find his work and spend some time in his world, flying with the wren, stumbling upon the cat, floating with a lost angel on the waste’s unease.

Continuing this Year of Poetry next week with Tales of the Mermaid Tavern by Alfred Noyes

Spectacular! Spectacular!

Mark your calendars now: May 17, 2025 is opening night on our ACMA Spectacular. It’s an event that I’ve written about before, and as for a description, I’m not sure that I can do better than what I offered five years ago at our first Spectacular: 

What if we got everyone together, all the performing arts: theater, dance, jazz, orchestra, vocal music; asked our writers to read their works and filmmakers to screen what they’ve been working on; filled the foyer with visual art, sculpture, and even included some of that in art in the show? What if we made something big, something that showed off every corner of ACMA, from our composers to choreographers, painters, poets, filmmakers and more? It would be, quite simply …spectacular.

The conversation, which ran like a wildfire through our ACMA staff, was prompted by some creative thinking ACMA PTO members who were looking for something other than the traditional auction to support our kids. ACMA has never been conventional, and the idea of doing something that welcomed everyone, adults and families and put the focus squarely on the art just made sense. Beautiful, unconventional, ACMA sense.

So… rather than an evening where the star of the show is a stranger rapidly reciting numbers, this year we’ve given the emceeing to one of our ACMA family, we’ve broken out of the conventionality of of a dinner and series of speeches, and we’ve put together creative acts that the community will be talking about for years to come. More than a parade of items to bid on, this show will be a cavalcade of creativity. Rather than tell folks about what our students do, we’re excited to show them the astounding artistry ACMA artists are capable of. Jaws will drop.

Jaws did drop that first year, and the next, and then the pandemic interrupted things in ways that were decidedly NOT SPECTACULAR. But we righted ourselves and the 2024 edition of this event saw a tule big top, dancing clowns, and more than a little ACMA magic. Folks were excited, particularly our creative folks, and last week I was able to sit down with our theater directors, dance instructors, film teacher, vocal director, and band director and look ahead. It was inspiring.

Me, I’m always a little wowed when I get to spend time with performing artists and to be in a room with these amazing educators and artists was amazing. We talked logistics: should we do a matinee? (Yes! 5/18/25) Should we move the show to May to allow for even more polished performances and even more student art we could sell? (Yes again!) If circus was our theme last year, what should we do in 2025?

We batted around ideas (and while I know Space Cowboys is silly it certainly sounded fun, even if it was NOT the theme we chose) and then, with more immediate agreement than I could have expected we landed on something that made the collective group celebrate. The theater directors immediately had ideas. They mentioned that the painting department had just talked with them about something that would complement the theme. The dance department whooped as their creativity latched onto the theme and ideas burst into their brains. The film teacher offered a catch phrase that garnered applause. I could see the choir director lean over to the band director and whisper something before smiling. 

Now I should mention that we are a school of wild independence . We are divergent thinkers and creative souls. Get five of us into a room and you’ll have seven different opinions. We’re so disparate that our school can’t agree on a mascot …and it’s wonderful. And yet…

Here were some of the most wildly creative people on the planet …agreeing. Laughing. Scheming. Starting to think about ways to collaborate, create, and come together to support our school.

My choir teacher said: this could really unify us. I can see the school getting behind this and it giving us more than just a theme for the Spectacular; it could be something that helps pull us together all year.

You’re wondering what it is, I’d guess. What theme you’ll see on stage and filling the commons for the pre-show that was such a circus last year.

I wouldn’t be much of a pitch man if I told you this early.

Instead, I’ll hint that this theme will be welcome to our writers and illustrators, it will animate our animators and spur our actors to tell stories. It will provide our dancers with inspiration, our poets with a reason to write, and our musicians with a challenge that will bring them delight.

This year the circus theme had me dressed as a French clown to introduce the show. Next year I may have feathers, or… but no, no more hints toward a theme that delighted us and will, I have absolutely no doubt, delight audiences a little more than a year from now.

So if you want to be in that audience, if you want to support art and artists and ACMA, save the date. We’ll have an evening show on Saturday, May 17th and a matinee on Sunday, May 18th and that energy and excitement that animated the performing arts folks last week will spring to the stage and have you saying: “That was SPECTACULAR!”

Beyond this Point: Rita Dove

It is an absolute delight to read poetry by Rita Dove under a sunny spring sky. That happened to me this week and for that I am infinitely thankful. 

The book in question was Museum, filled with facets of history as told through objects in a museum: a fish skeleton in a stone, an ant in amber, Nestor’s bathtub (well, maybe not exactly Nestor’s), and more. Dove describes “two bronze jugs worth more / than a family pays in taxes / for the privilege to stay / alive, a year, together…” and grounds this collection as a place where history’s stories are told.

But Dove’s history is populated by more than objects; music fills Museum from zithers to a mouth harp (that “scares away the bees”) to the “throb and yearn” of viols. It’s here that “even the mistakes / sound like jazz”.

And despite this quality of a curated collection, Museum thrums with the humanity that animates Dove’s poetry, where one might be “in love / and in debt” or the intrigue of the left-handed cellist.

The collection feels autobiographical as it shifts into the third of four sections and Dove introduces her father as a character striding somewhere between those specifics objects and details of the opening sections and the fourth and final section that looks forward to “the Nuclear Age”. It’s here that Dove’s care in crafting the order the poems are presented feels most apparent and here that the intimacy of family shines the brightest, as when she describes a Christmas and one of her father’s attempts at carpentry when “He’s failed, and / in oak.”

In her fashion, Dove mixes concrete examples and poetic flights, sometimes painting a picture realistic enough to make her readers wince (or grin) and other times enigmatic or almost magical. In “Primer for the Nuclear Age” she writes:

At the edge of the mariner’s
map is written: “Beyond
this point lie Monsters.”

Someone left the light on
in the pantry – there’s
a skull in there on the shelf

that talks. Blue eyes
in the air, blue as
an idiot’s. Any fear, any

memory will do; and if you’ve
got a heart at all, someday
it will kill you.

There is much packed into those dozen lines, particularly as they’re informed by the three sections that have come before. And Dove, whose verse always inspires reflection, leaves her readers looking inward and out, forward and back, and encourages us to slow down and pay attention, does just that in this poem that references the past (with that “mariner’s map”), touches on hearth and home (in that kitchen pantry), and offers a warning to all of us.

Here in the US April is National Poetry Month and to everyone still reading this modest post I’d encourage you to find a book of verse, Rita Dove would be a good choice, and find a place to read, preferably outside under a spring sun.

Continuing this Year of Poetry next week with The Essential WS Merwin

Spring (or something like it)

Sure, rain is going to come. I know that. We all know that. It’s Oregon and we’re Oregonians. 

We’ve seen this before. The string of sunny days that send everyone to Bi-Mart for flowers that they’ll plant in the garden bed just before the next frost, that happens every year. Ah, optimism. 

But it’s so sunny. And almost warm. 

And it has been raining for so very long.

It was sunny this weekend and into the start of the week. The daffodils, those early harbingers of spring, were in full display and more trees than not were showing blossoms, and those blossoms were so pink and so white against the bright blue sky. 

It was a weekend to get yard work done, to mow the lawn, to talk about what summer would be like. And yes, I know that rain is coming, and yes, the temperatures will be in the 30s at night, and yes… 

But it was so sunny. 

And the world feels different, better, as the ice of winter begins to crack and we all can look around and see the potential of trips to the lake, needing to put up the umbrella for shade on the deck, and walking the dog without having to have a towel by the front door when we get back.

Spring in Oregon, in all its fits and starts, is beautiful. 

For those of us who choose to live above the 45th parallel the change in seasons marks an important part of the year. And as an educator, particularly one who has enjoyed a week away from school for spring break, the sense of hope and renewal, energy and optimism, is real. I see it in the eyes of the students and of the teachers too. All of us find it easier to believe that all will be well. Hope springs eternal, as Pope told us those centuries ago.

So as I revel in this sunny day, tempered by the forecast for showers later in the week, I’ll simply say that this is a time to breathe deep of the spring air, spend as much time outside as possible, look up at the rain and smile, turn our faces to the sun and experience joy.

Pablo Neruda said it with politics in mind, but I read his line thinking now of winter: “You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming”. Thank heavens for that. 

We all need spring in our lives and hope and that urge to run out and buy flowers to plant in our yards.

The Important Bones of Birds: Jo McDougall

Jo McDougall begins her collection The Undiscvoered Room with the line: “I don’t like writing about the dead” and then she spends great stretches of the rest of the book doing just that. McDougall is a contemporary southern poet whose clear verse shines a bright, if sometimes strikingly bright, light on the intimate feelings of people who remind me a lot of folks I know.

McDougall does a great job of capturing both the struggle and range of emotions that come with everyday life. In “Bringing in the Sheaves” she describes her father, a farmer, who would “throw his hat into the threshing machine / with the final shock of rice / from the final field” the poet capturing an act both ceremonial and very human, then adding emotional punch with the lines: “That one moment of the year / he was jubilant”. That juxtaposition of jubilance and hard work continues throughout The Undiscovered Room, as does the tension between small joys and hard times.

In “Ceremony” that small joy is a man’s cat, as over two pages we see him soften toward this beast after his wife leaves him, beginning with him accepting “her tentative paw” and ending with him lifting “her onto the bed beside him.” It’s a little story, but one in which readers can see grief and hope and kindness.

And kindness is something needed in the greater world McDougall describes, a world filled with funerals and death, and described in terms both poetic and beautiful (a house is “austere as an antler” and once in church “The preacher lays down words / like cutlery on a table”).

McDougall’s poetry articulates the loss of parents and a child, sometimes with graceful stanzas and sometimes with the raw emotion of words laid out on the page, individual monuments to grief, as in “Notes on the Death of a Child” which is composed of only a dozen carefully chosen words that take the reader from “Insult” through “Bone bruise” and end with “Death’s stinger left / in the roof of my mouth.”

Death does loom large in this collection, “chain-smoking like a braggart” as McDougall describes it. But Death is not the hero of the book or a force that is definitive of the human experience. The Undiscovered Room, despite some of its subject matter, is a book that left me with hope.

One poem that captured that spirit of perseverance and an optimism of sorts is “In Due Time” which chronicles another cat as it recovers from a vet removing its “infected molars” and leaving “him to his bliss.” McDougall tells her readers that the cat will nap and eat and return to its yard, and she ends the poem with the reassurance that he “will find his old self / as the vet has promised, / although no longer able to break / the important bones of birds.”

We should all be so lucky.

Continuing this Year of Poetry next week with Museum by Rita Dove

Everything

Not everything is for everyone. 

Just this week at our little school our robotics team spoke at lunch, telling the students about their success at the state tournament and driving their amazing robot around the commons. They invited peers to join their team if they wanted to really dive into the world of robotics, or join their club if they were interested and just wanted to dip their toe into the pool. It was amazing, but at an art school not for everyone.

Our creative writers presented later in the week, sharing an upcoming writing festival we’re hosting after school in April and offering the chance to submit poems and short stories to the contest. You could see eyes light up as they spoke. Not everyone’s eyes, but some, and I could tell that this year’s festival will be great for the students interested in writing.

Later in the week our choirs performed with such beauty and grace that if you closed your eyes you would have thought you were in heaven. They sang to a fabulous audience made up of folks who wanted to hear a vocal performance and that crowd even helped to put away chairs at the end of the evening to save the night custodians some work. It was a great night, but not for everyone; some prefer rock and roll.

Within the past month our dance department hosted a huge dance festival with dancers from Oregon, Washington, California, and groups from as far away as Texas and Florida. It was a huge undertaking and as the principal I was proud to hear how welcoming our students were to visiting dancers. For these students it was three whirlwind days of lots of work and fun; other students didn’t even really know it was going on. And that’s okay.

A week later we hosted our “Spectacular”, a variety show that saw dance, instrumental music, spoken word, and more take to the main stage in a production that lived up to its name. Well performed and fabulous in its production values, this was our biggest fundraiser of the year and showcased lots of our departments. We filled the theater with wild applause, but not everyone in our world attended. Some prefer their entertainment on a smaller scale.

And for them… a show of a very different flavor, our monthly Open Mic Night happened last week. It also included dance, instrumental music, spoken word, and more, but in a more informal way, on our commons stage, and free to anyone who wanted to come and cheer on the performers. If you like your entertainment well polished and professionally presented, this might not be for you. (Though those of us who go every month laugh a lot and fill the room with love.)

As the principal, I get to go to all of these events, which means one day I might find myself watching our production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, a play with a neuro diverse protagonist that begins with a dead dog center stage impaled by a pitchfork. An image and a subject matter and a show that is not for everyone. But for some, that show will be the highlight of the performing year.

Another night I was at an author talk by a graphic artist who shared her work and the story of her creative process to a crowd of visual artists and young writers. Not everyone in our school was interested, but for those who were …it was magic.

Not long after that our theater department performed Footloose, a show about (among other things) seeing others’ points of view and allowing art to heal the world. (Yes, and dancing!) The audiences loved it, though I know not everyone in our school community wanted to hear it for the boy. That’s fine. Wait another minute and likely there will be something that does appeal to you. And maybe another that doesn’t. And that is just fine too.

Because while I like to see all of the shows, I know that for my budding existentialist hearing an Hallelujah chorus at the choir concert is not for them …though they’d likely be very happy at the student-author night when our young writers read their work (so many post apocalyptic zombie stories). LAIKA Night and The Pinwheel Writing Festival draw different audiences, with some overlap of course; Night Night Roger Roger and the video game tournament and Cosplay Night each appeal to different people, but what all have in common is that for some people each event is the perfect fit.

Our district says that a big part of our mission is that we “embrace, honor and celebrate our differences — race, color, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity and language.” Doing that means celebrating people and perspectives that are different than those we grew up with. 

I love being able to attend this wide range of events even as I know that some prefer one thing over another or know that a particular event is just not for them. This understanding is important as we seek to “embrace, honor, and celebrate” everyone. Something might not be to our taste or world view, but that same thing might be exactly what will make a positive difference for someone else. Creating a space where Hallelujah and zombies and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime can all exist side by side helps to create a better world, or at least a better corner of one. 

Not everything is for everyone. And that’s okay.