The Poetry Of Snow

Photo by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

Snow is beautiful, exciting, mysterious and sometimes treacherous. So is curiosity.

One man, Wilson Bentley (1865-1931) saw the beauty of snow, was fascinated by it and became curious about it.  As a young man, he was drawn to the natural world around him on his farm in Vermont.  He loved studying butterflies, leaves, raindrops, spider webs and snowflakes. Especially snowflakes,

Bentley devised a way to connect a microscope and a camera in order to photograph snowflakes. He stood for hours in the Vermont cold winter catching falling flakes and pushing them delicately with a feather onto the microscopic lens.

He photographed 5000 snow crystals this way over the course of his lifetime. Magically, every snowflake that he photographed was unique. He published photos of 2300 of these images in his book Snow Crystals and the Smithsonian Archives houses 500 of his photographs.

Ironically, he died from pneumonia after walking through a blizzard.

I read this story recently in The Washington Post and it reminded me how a curious mind responds to beauty. The intersection of science and art. Bentley’s curious mind appreciated and memorialized the unique beauty of the snowflake. His story inspired me to write this poem. 

                                              Snowfall

                                  Humans in some ways

                                  so alike

                                  predictable,

                                  we share our similarities

                                  hide our dissonances,

                                  alike at first glance

                                  and last chance.

                                  Like falling snow

                                  when examined deeply beneath

                                  our surface sameness---

                                  so different,

                                  as Bentley found

                                  when he captured each snowflake,

                                  memorized its uniqueness

                                  with his camera.

                                  Each of us perfectly unique

                                  as those white hexagons,

                                  when we allow

                                  our truth to fall up

                                  from our

                                  lovely, lonely center.

Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most

Photo by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

Spring in the environs of Washington D.C. ranks high on the list of the world’s most beautiful.

It seems especially so this spring, in part perhaps in contrast to the ugliness of the political antics happening, being reported on and endlessly discussed here.  The contrast is poignant, but not only caused by political chaos.  Exquisite beauty can often stir up feelings of longing and sadness…a sickness of heart, sometimes referred to as spring fever.  Bipolar we become…knocked out by the loveliness of nature…but unsettled because we realize our human nature is so far from the perfection we find there.  We can’t quite capture it in our works of art.  We hope others will be able to feel  the beauty we felt, but know it will be fleeting and somehow changed forever.  We are left with a feeling of not quite getting there, a feeling of loss, a restlessness of spirit.

Shakespeare’s sonnets surely speak to the beauty of nature, but also to that feeling of never quite arriving home.  T.S. Elliot reminds us in his poem “The Wasteland” that “April can be the cruelest month”.  The jazz rendition of those words found in the song “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most “(lyrics by Fran Landesman) expresses so well the ache found in the sweetness of spring.  Listen to Ella Fitzgerald sing these words and feel better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd5VVELfWC8

The Ghost of Christmas Past

Some poetry sticks in our minds. Hopefully, it is good poetry, which is the most memorable.  

I have never forgotten rhyming couplets from my long ago childhood. They would not make the good poetry list, but they come unsummoned  to haunt me around this time of year, when we are susceptible to memories of Christmases past…happy memories, painful ones and some a little weird. ’Tis the season of jolly bells and Scrooge rattling his chains.

The first graders in the Catholic School I attended were part of the annual Christmas pageant. We stood dutifully in our various homemade Christmas-appropriate costumes (shepherds, kings, angels), each holding a letter in front of us. We strung ourselves across the stage spelling out Merry Christmas. The good but rushed nuns made up letter-specific rhyming couplets for us each to recite.  My letter, which I held in front of my tinsel-belted, white sheet angel costume was the Y in Merry.  When my turn came, I recited my couplet from memory, in what I'm sure was a less than angelic voice. “Y is for Yuletide which we keep every year. May Christ be its center as it approaches more near.”

Oh my! The nuns who drilled correct grammar into our young brains every day must have been desperate as the Christmas play approached.  If we had said more near instead of nearer within their earshot, we would have received a firm correction. But there it came…tumbling from my lips without a ripple of disapproval.

At this time of year this couplet sneaks back into my consciousness at odd moments, along with a vision of myself as a six year old angel. I cheerfully give up any analysis and look to the meaning of the message. Let Christmas and all the other holidays celebrated around this time of year remind us to take ourselves out of the center of things and focus on others.  Don’t worry about getting everything just right.  Give yourself poetic license to move more near to what is meaningful.  Offer as much loving kindness and compassion as you are able to the other people who touch your life.  Merry Christmas.

What Is it About Poetry?

I recently read two articles in the newspaper that touched and amazed me and started me wondering what it is about poetry that makes it powerful. The first story concerned a soldier, who upon killing his enemy decided to go through the dead man’s pockets. I’m not sure what motivated him to do this or what he hoped to find, but what he found shocked and puzzled him.  There on a folded piece of paper was a poem.

The second story was about a mother’s effort to reach her troubled teen-aged daughter who was deeply depressed. Her daughter was acting out her despair in a rebellious way by refusing to wear shoes to school. It came to an ultimatum from the school, shoes or no school. Shoes had become a touch point, a focus of her daughter’s depression. The mother was inspired to use the shoes as a place of connection and hopefully of healing. She began to leave a folded poem in her daughter’s shoe each morning to let her see 

that “people had been in pain before and had struggled to find hope.”  The poets took that pain, that struggle and put those thoughts into the best, sparest words they could.

After some time, the mother noted a change in her daughter…the dark cloud seemed to lift a bit.  At the same time, she found the poems unfolded in her daughter’s pockets.

She was reading them and they were beginning to have an effect. “Poetry knew where hope lived.”

An enemy soldier carrying a poem in his pocket, a troubled teen finding a poem in her shoe every day, reading it and finding hope again. Pretty powerful stuff.  I am not promising you a magic elixir, but it seems there is something about poetry that deeply touches the human heart, gives it comfort and helps it to heal. And perhaps more.

The Limits of Poetry

 

I am reading Edward Hirsch’s “How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry”.  It is his own Ode to poetry…a Hymn of praise…264 pages long.   It is a love letter to the poems that touch his heart, bring meaning to his life arouse his feelings and that enrich and comfort him. 

 

In 2011, Hirsch experienced the sudden loss of his son, Gabriel and found no solace in the poems that once impassioned his heart and quieted his mind. Gabriel, 22 years of age, died

from the club drug GHB that someone gave him at a party. It was a harrowing three days before Hirsch found out what had happened to his son. 

 

Father and son - Blois, France - Kathleen Tyler Conklin

Hirsch stopped reading and writing poetry after this traumatic shock.  But he began to record the memories of his son by talking with friends and relatives, writing them down compulsively and haphazardly.  After a while his outpouring of words began to take the shape of a poem.  It became a 70 page elegy to his son; a book length poem recently published called “Gabriel”.  The New Yorker called it a “masterpiece of sorrow”.

 

The poem is written in three-line stanzas without punctuation…a kind of stream of consciousness, a deluge of memories, love and grief.  Perhaps an effort to etch Gabriel’s spirit on the page...to bring him to life with words. Hirsch admits he put everything he could into his poem, but also had to face what poetry could not do.  His passion had been cooled by this tragedy.  He had a new awareness…that poetry has limits. “It cannot give us back the people we have lost.”

 

And yet, in a sense by writing this astounding elegy, Hirsch has given Gabriel to us.

A Good Bad Poem

Photo of Federal Hill Park by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

An essay by Thomas Vinciguerra in the New York Times Book Review of August 18th critiques the hundred year old poem "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer.

There is ingrained in the subconscious of many Americans the first two lines of Kilmer's poem "I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree."  and they leap readily to our national lips. Most critics (including Vinciguerra) think "Trees"  is a terrible poem and it has been parodied by many.

It wasn't the only poem that Kilmer wrote.  According to Vinciguerra, he wrote several volumes equally simplistic and sappy before he was killed in World War 1 at age 31. Perhaps had he the chance, he would have grown into a better poet.

Does he have no defenders?  George Orwell defends Kipling's "Mandalay" as a good bad poem writes Vinciguerra, a term that seems applicable to Kilmer's works.  We can all get some enjoyment out of these seemingly trite verses. We remember Kilmer's "Trees" and relate on an emotional level. Though perhaps not moved profoundly, if it makes us once look up from our technological devices to take in the beauty of a tree, it is a poem worth reading and remembering.

Happy Birthday to "Trees".  May you live another hundred years.

Poetry and the Moon

 

Moon over Lower Kimball Lake by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

 

The moon fascinates.  The moon is mysterious.  The moon is rising and as it ascends the horizon tonight, it will look gigantic.  This is an illusion caused by the random coming together when the moon is at its fullest and closest to the earth. It occurs about once in every fourteen full moons acceding to Wikipedia.

 

It happens this year on Sunday, June 23rd at about 7 am, but you don't have to rise bleary-eyed to see it.  It will be plenty plump, Saturday and Sunday nights around 8pm and 9pm, respectively.

 

Many poets have written about the moon.  Shakespeare uses the moon theme often in his writings, most notably in "A Midsummer Night's Dream". Other moon obsessed poets are Wordsworth and Dickinson.

 

You just can't get away from it. The moon is magic. Tonight and tomorrow night it will be super magical. Go take a look. Then, write a poem.  Here's mine.

 

Moon Joy

 

I saw the moon

the other night,

glowing with

the strangest light.

 

It hung suspended low

behind twisted strands,

orange-swaying yo-yo

held by unseen hands.

 

I inhaled its milky vapor

dazzled by this heavenly toy,

reached to touch its misty taper

caught rapturously in moon-joy.

 

 

A Shower Of Poetry

Photo by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

 

April is poetry month.  Poems arrive daily on my computer from Knopf Poem-a-Day.  Poetry readings and panel discussions proliferate.

I am blinded by a burst of candle lights on the cake of the greatest Poet of them all---Shakespeare, whose birthday and brilliance is celebrated this month.

Alas, there is no shower from within.  I have hit a dry patch and struggle like the cherry blossoms to open to the warmth of any creative urge.  All is dormant.

 

But, I am hopeful.  Maybe with the warming days, my creative juices will begin to flow.  Poems will spurt from my throat, my pen, my fingertips---brilliant and well crafted…maybe even a rhyme or two.  They will float from my mind to seed and sprout around me…an array of colorful flowers. I will bloom again. Until then, I soak in the shower of poems that abound, now that April is here.

Note: The Folger Library celebrates Shakespeare's birthday on April 23rd with an open house, many festive, fun activities and a front lawn cutting of a birthday cake…check their website. Also the Library of Congress is offering many poetry events at:  http://www.loc.gov/poetry/events/#apr11

Poetry Gets A Bad Rap

Lost in the poetry of music at the Inaugural Parade - Kathleen Tyler Conklin

Several "Washington Post" writers have given poetry a bad rap in the last week.  One questioned whether Richard Blanco's poem "One Today" was even poetry.  Hank Stuever called it an "essay-like" poem and Alexandri Petri wonders whether poetry is obsolete.

Whew!  I'm pleased it got so much attention…but are they really paying attention? Was its  'poetriness' questioned because it didn't rhyme?  or because it was easily understood?  or because it didn't cause us to "keel over" as movies do according to Petri's column?

Petri claims we no longer need poetry and the playwright Gwydion Suilebhan declares "Poetry is dead." She says that is is blather, nonsense or gibberish. Take that poetry.  And as a final blow she adds "It's zombie poetry."

Well I beg to differ. I am ready to fight for the right of poetry to exist. It is alive and well and living in the hearts and minds of many non-zombie human beings. It is all around us in books, poetry readings (Natasha Tretheway, the poet laureate working and reading at the Library of Congress for one example), poetry workshops, writing groups, and yes even in rap and song lyrics.

It is on TV in the current PBS program "Shakespeare Uncovered" (yes, Shakespeare is a poet) and on radio thanks to Garrison Keillor. Bill Moyers does his part online.

It is all around us and still has power. Petri claims because it gave us the news, it had prestige in the old days. It isn't vital according to her because we have nothing so urgent like the wounds left by World Was I to express.

She asks, "What now is so urgent that it can be said only in poetry?"  My answer is---whatever has been urgent all these years is still urgent…love, death, war, suffering, joy, nature, connections, confusion, pain, cruelty, beauty, betrayal, loss, happiness.  In other words the human experience.

How better to express it than in poetry? Poetry has the power to focus our minds, express what we feel in distilled language, move our hearts, and to let us take a moment to breathe (as Blanco said in his poem)…breathe in the images of our country, our homes. our roots, our loves.

I thought it was a good poem and a good moment for our nation.

Poetry lovers unite.

Hitting the Books

 It's that wonderful time of year, or at least getting close, when the doors of learning swing open for eager minds. With that in my mind, I'd like to mention two books that deal with the subject of poetry.

The first, "Beautiful and Pointless", I alluded to in my May blog. The author, David Orr, is the poetry critic for the New York Times. He termed his book his "peculiar project". I agree with him in that it is an odd mixture of very analytical, technical moments sprinkled with flights of fancy...i.e humor and lyricism. It is always dense in the sense of richness of thought...albeit at times disjointed.

His chapter headings speak to its content. He addresses the differences and similarities between the personal poem and the political one. He even expresses the idea that poetry can create a change in opinion as it edges toward politics. A powerful idea!

He then launches into a pretty technical analysis of form, but not without creating a category of his own called Resemblance. Curious? I was too.

He then talks about the poet in terms of personal ambition and the need to be in the spotlight or fishbowl.

The best chapter for me was the final chapter "Why Bother?". Why spend time reading or writing poems when we could be doing something else---anything else? I recommend reading Orr's book to find out his take on that. Trust me when I say it won't be simple and it won't be short, but it will hold your attention.

The second book "Unless It Moves The Human Heart" by the distinguished author Roger Rosenblatt records a running dialogue between Roger and his students during one semester of his writing class. It flows like a lively conversation, which it basically is ---with asides from Rosenblatt, the teacher, who distills the craft and inspires the art of writing. It is a small book--- written by a teacher with a large intelligence and a generous, passionate spirit. I wish you all teachers of this caliber as you pass through the swinging doors.

 
 
 
http://davidorr.com/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/21/AR2011012106626.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504367_162-20034367-504367.html

A Weapon Of Words---The Obit of Mr. Njawe

"A word can be a weapon, and I believe that with the word...we can build a better world and make happier people."

The above quote is from the obituary of Mr. Njawe, which appeared in "The Washington Post" several weeks ago.

Mr Njawe was an African journalist who wrote his values with uncommon courage. He was an independent writer, editor, publisher and foremost, a fighter for truth in the written word in a country that punished such open, steadfast dedication to freedom of the press.He started Cameroon's first independent newspaper "The Messenger" in which he wrote openly about government corruption and abuses. He received many death threats and was arrested more than 100 times.

I am in awe of such courage, such fierce dedication to freedom of the press and to the truth as he saw it. The world is surely better for his having lived in it. His death in a car accident at age 53 is a loss for all of us.

His quote goes on "....So why give up while duty still calls? No one will silence me, except the Lord, before I achieve what I consider as a mission in my native country, in Africa and why not, in the world."

His life inspired me to write this poem.



Elegy to Pius Njawe


You were called to

fight

with weapons of words,

aimed over and over,

arrows to truth,

the courage of a

warrior

silenced by death,

while we are still

listening.

Suggestion for a sleepless night

Cant' sleep? Do what a friend of mine does. Read poetry. I am not implying that poetry is so boring that it will put you to sleep. But it can be soothing, especially if read aloud---which may mean moving to another room. But the sounds and rhythms can be as calming as deep breathing. Keep an anthology by the bedside. I recommend "Americans' Favorite Poems" edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz.

Beautiful images can quiet a busy mind. Haiku is a garden of beautiful images. One that I re-read often is "The Essential Haiku" edited by Robert Hass.

Of course, there are also many poems that can sprout in your ear buds and are the next best thing to having someone read to you. And we all love being read to sleep.