They Say You Want a Resolution: Sitzfleisch

I usually break my resolutions before January turns his two-faced head in my direction. This year, I'm making only one:

Sit there until you get there.


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"Idiot with a Tripod" (aka, "Man in a Blizzard")

This is absolutely a tone poem: Watch. Listen. Write.




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The Last Goodbye: Ashes to Ashes

Harvey and I talked after his heart attack in October 2005. I’m so glad we did, because his service and his memorial today are full of what he loved, poetry, the earth, and God. Before we scatter his ashes, I’d like to share with you all why he wanted to be cremated. Harvey was always fascinated by the phoenix, that bird that rises from its own ashes to be reborn, stronger, more beautiful, in its fullest glory. It’s a type, he’d say, of Jesus, to be destroyed, then reborn. He looked forward to that rebirth, to that new body. Here’s the poem that spoke so resoundingly to him and to me about cremation. I hope it speaks to all of us.

“Cremation,” Robinson Jeffers

It nearly cancels my fear of death, my dearest said,
When I think of cremation. To rot in the earth
Is a loathsome end, but to roar up in flame—besides, I am used to it,
I have flamed with love or fury so often in my life,
No wonder my body is tired, no wonder it is dying.
We had a great joy of my body. Scatter the ashes.


Harvey also loved the idea of transformation—ink and paper to portrait, clay and heat to sculpture. One of the most beautiful songs he sang at Trace Creek was “Midnight Cry,” and the line “We’ll be quickly changed” was meaningful to him. Here are the verses he wanted read as we scatter his ashes.

1 Corinthians 15:50-58

50 What I am saying, dear brothers and sisters, is that our physical bodies cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. These dying bodies cannot inherit what will last forever. 51 But let me reveal to you a wonderful secret. We will not all die, but we will all be transformed! 52 It will happen in a moment, in the blink of an eye, when the last trumpet is blown. For when the trumpet sounds, those who have died will be raised to live forever. And we who are living will also be transformed. 53 For our dying bodies must be transformed into bodies that will never die; our mortal bodies must be transformed into immortal bodies. 54 Then, when our dying bodies have been transformed into bodies that will never die, this Scripture will be fulfilled:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.
55 O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”

56 For sin is the sting that results in death, and the law gives sin its power. 57 But thank God! He gives us victory over sin and death through our Lord Jesus Christ. 58 So, my dear brothers and sisters, be strong.

Harvey loved all of us here today--Pamela, Daniel, Raleigh, you all--parents, brothers, sister, sisters-in-law, brother-in-law, nieces, nephews. He loved the idea of family, he loved the idea of home, and he loved this farm. Harvey wanted a part of himself to be here with you all forever. Here’s a poem which suggests why.

Leaves of Grass, Section 52, Walt Whitman

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Re-Joycing Notes: The Writer's Almanac

Reading: Gone, Martin Roper; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce; Our Gods Wear Spandex for HUM 211.

Writing: In my head, mainly, the idea of typeset, letter presses.

Thinking about: What makes James Joyce James Joyce?


Oh, Leopold! This is why I'll never be taken seriously as a Joyce scholar. I think of Bugs, not Bloom. The only Bloom for me is Molly, big with seed.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled broadcast....

It was on this day in 1916 that James Joyce published his first novel: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce had tried to write the same story in several forms before. In 1904, he wrote an autobiographical essay, but it was rejected. [He wrote a volume of poems, Chamber Music, and a play, Exiles; now he branches into memoir. There is no suggestion for me that in the single-note poems or in the taking-turns voices of dramatic dialogue we're watching the development of a master of contrapuntes, whose voices in their rounds are dizzying]. When he got the rejection letter, he sat down at his kitchen table and sketched out a plan to expand the essay into a novel, and within a year, he had written 900 pages of a book about a character named Stephen Daedalus, entitled Stephen Hero.

Then he left Ireland, started teaching English for almost no money, and was trying to support his family. [He'd gone to Paris to study medicine, but found the lectures in anatomy and physiology to hard to follow; he had only schoolboy French]. He found it harder and harder to finish his novel. So he decided to write short stories instead, and he wrote a collection called Dubliners. A publisher in London accepted it, but then the publisher asked him to clean up some of his language. He did that, but then the publisher wanted the subject matter changed, then an entire story removed, and finally Joyce refused.

So Joyce decided to return to his novel. But he didn't like it anymore. He thought it was too conventional. So he started from scratch [the "desk drawer revision"], and he re-titled it A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Joyce had spent nearly 10 years trying to get his fiction published, and then, in 1913, he received two letters — one from a publisher who wanted to reconsider publishing Dubliners, and a second from Ezra Pound, who was looking for new fiction to publish in a magazine. Dubliners was published in 1914, and Pound published a serial version of A Portrait of the Artist. The complete novel came out on this day in 1916, with its famous first line: "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo." [What do you think the WWI-era reader thought of this? I think there's the liberation of rhythm in the lines here that comes to fruition in Ulysses There's also the idea of the fairy tale as mythopoesis?].

The novel ends with Stephen Dedalus as a young man, vowing to leave Ireland and to "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." [Away, come away--Yeats at the end of "The Hosting of the Sidhe"? Obverse of The Answerer, Fragarach, in Irish mythology--a sea sword brought from the other world, and no one can lie with this blade at his throat? And if there's so much Irish reference in Portrait, why did Joyce go to Greece/Homer for Ulysses]?

(Aside: Maybe there's another example of TS Eliot "borrowing?" On page 251, when there's Not this. Not this at all, p. 251. CF Prufrock?).

Old Crow Medicine Show - Wagon Wheel [Official Music Video]

Like the wind and the rain. Like a southbound train.

I'm a heading to Raleigh/Hope to see my baby tomorrow.

My real baby--Raleigh Elizabeth. It's very lonely here with just 2 cats.

"Courage!" Cowardly Lion to Dorothy.

Lady. Lemniscate. Leo.

Inner strength tames outer force.

Screw your courage to the sticking place (Macbeth).

To infinity and beyond. Buzz Lightyear, Toy Story

The Young Widow, Edward K. Johnson

This is perhaps the cover for chapbook #3. The narrative arc (if there is such a thing) is widowhood. I wrote the final poem for it today. The poem is in the comments/footnotes; the "lines" are merely the frame. There are 13 poems and 30 pages of poems. The shortest poem is three lines; the longest, 6 pages. I feel very calm about this collection. It's atypical of how I usually feel when I've finished a draft. I'll send it out in January. The full-length MS is going out after I meet with Nickole in January to discuss our plans. I think this chapbook will be ready to go out in time for the Snowbound series from Tupelo. (Might as well aim high). Five of the poems have already found homes--all but two were written this year, specifically for this project. I'm excited.

Teasers but no spoilers: Here are a few titles from the collection--Widow's Mite: Long Division; A Time is Once Upon Us: The Grimm Haikus; Little Lesson in Ornithology, In Ictu Oculi, Housewifery: An Annotation, Widow's Apologia: Against Revision, and Comings and Goings, Or Doris Holbrook Heads Again for Home. (That's the 6 pager in which I write back to James Dickey's wonderful "Cherrylog Road." Our Doris is a survivor. I miss hearing her voice in my head. She talked to me throughout the fall, and I fell a little in love with her wiseacre).

I think Harvey would be proud. I haven't given up, at least not this week.

5000 Words' Worth (or is it Wordsworth)?

Amy and Daniel.

Dimples!

Startling star.

Raleigh as Reindeer.

Pair-a-dice Pajamas, 15-year-old Rafiki, and Unidentified Woman with No Makeup

"Meditation on the Divine Will," A. Lincoln

The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party — and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true — that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.

_____
Scribbled on a scrap of paper, this was found by one of Lincoln's secretaries at the White House. Not meant for publication, or even for private reading, "Meditation" reveals Lincoln trying to work out his understanding of God, to find surcease and strength in faith.

During this most troublesome of years, I've been working out my own understanding of salvation--in the midst of, in the throes of, grief--with fear and trembling.* I have a responsibility to love--the divine and the human--who are the same, for me, as the Word in the World. I cannot believe that Harvey could be taken from me for no reason, so there must be a reason. If there is a reason, then it is my responsibility and my privilege to ponder it, and while I ponder, to live in love, as though Harvey were still with me. He is inside me, if not beside me. He gave me his love and the ability to love. Isn't this the work of God? To send someone to us to show us love? If there is a Harvey in my life, then isn't there a God who sent him? I have to believe that.

Help me. Thank you.

Faith is an act of will and also a non-act--satori. It's Franny's prayer in Franny and Zooey. It's Seymour's Fat Lady. It's the idea of beauty and God and not-knowing that pervades Salinger. It's the divine grounded in the human. It's the acceptance of paradox. (As poets, don't we strive to be comfortable with not-just-one-answer? Emily Dickinson dwells in possibility; Keats, in negative capability. I should also strive to think outside the box--and the canon. Lincoln writes that a house divided against itself cannot stand. I assert that a house that accepts its division can be an elegant duplex).

Help me. Thank you.


* A note on word origin--to decipher: One of my favorite words is katergazomai--to work out, to render, to result in. I have worked out mathematical equations with my son and tangles in my daughter's waist-length curls. I have wrought children into this world, a happy marriage, a few poems. I result in this: Age 53, alone, with pretty good hair, pretty good skin, and, after some crises, pretty good physical and mental balance. Didn't everything that I endured as a child and teenager--physical, emotional, sexual--result in the person I am now? Didn't it all work out for love? Didn't the black-outs of stroke and the darkness of widow's weeds act as chiaroscuro for who I am now--darkness enhancing light (art), lightness enhancing depth (music)? Don't I work through them, and doesn't something bigger than me work through them, as well? What has God wrought through me? And what should I render through writing?

Poetics: The Invisible Moustache of Raoul Dufy

This is a seminal memory from my childhood. I have never forgotten it: They looked and they looked, and they began to see.

As we say here in Mayfield, Merry Christmas, y'all, and to all a good night and a better morning.

In Memoriam, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

L.

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.

Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.

_______

Making Christmas...not bright, not in a Nightmare Before Christmas way, but making it a time of presents for those present and reflection on those passed from me (my best friend, my Mammaw, my sister, my sweetheart), and owning up to a future of loneliness.

Next week is fast approaching, when I scatter Harvey's ashes. As I travel to his family farm, the place we met, the places we lived and loved, and a special garden, I remember Harvey's wish to not be underground but of the ground. He wanted to be in many places at once, so I'm doing my best to honor that wish. He wanted me to move forward without him after the New Year, which I cannot promise to honor. I may not talk about him as much, which in a way would be a relief.

There are poems that I'm going to recite for him: "Cremation," by Jeffers and the last section of Leaves of Grass at the ceremony with family; "A Birthday" by Merwin and one of my own poems privately at the places I visit alone. Send good thoughts my way next week.

I disagree with the cliche: It should read What doesn't kill us does kill something in us.

The Darkest Evening of the Year

Brought me to and brought to me a solstice service, in memory of the ones we lost this year. For me, my beloved, my lover and my friend. For Raleigh and Daniel, their father and best playmate. For the art world, a consummate portraitist and sculptor extraordinaire. For over 300 G/T students in Kentucky, their coconspirator and best teacher. Sweetheart, we miss you. We honor your memory. Your candle burned the brightest on this, the darkest day of the year.

Remember these readings: John 1 (word) , Genesis 1 (light) , Exodus 13 (pillar of cloud, pillar of fire--theophany!), Isaiah 60 (radiance), Luke 1 (magnification).

My friends Donnie and Monte played magnificently. The music was such a soul solace, the darkness of the chapel and darkness outside made my own darkness less lonely, and the stained glass bleeding in the candlelight was another form of tears. Everything helped. It was such a relief to sit in the shadows, in silence, where tears weren't something that shameful but something that cauterizes and heals.

I watched the moon turn blood-red this morning, and I remember that among the bloodstone's properties is the ability to open locked doors. I look for doors to open, and I ask for courage.

(PS I know that I am not a good person when I review these verses and wonder why they never read this verse from Isaiah 60: A multitude of camels shall cover you. That doesn't sound like a blessing to me. It's kind of like the mournful, beautiful Rivers-of-Zion psalm that ends with dashing your enemies' skulls against rocks).
___________
Another light in the darkness: I was also nudged to find my chapbook, A Walk Through the Memory Palace on a Year's Best list! (The link is above).

"A Walk Through the Memory Palace, by Pamela Johnson Parker, Phoenicia Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-0978174965.

Artful and precise in their construction, these poems won Johnson Parker the Chapbook Prize from qaartsiluni, a small press doing some of the most innovative issues on the web (and, in the interest of full disclosure, a publisher of some of my own work.) I include the Memory Palace here because I believe it will please those who favor poems that catalogue, parse, and sliver the human experience in ways that reflect like shards of glass. While I prefer poetry that is more accessible and wholistically illuminative, I couldn’t help but admire this poet’s skill. I know why it was chosen, and I think it’s important to all writers to examine carefully that which challenges as well as pleases."

What a lovely review! I like that my poems sliver the human experience. (Maybe Angelina can play me in the action movie).

If you'd like to read and/or listen to some of these parsing poems (Parseltongue?), go here:

Memorypalace.walk.com



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Lunar Eclipse

This is a little flash fiction piece of mine, which I particularly like.
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Not Your Average Christmas Song

Corrs & Bono "When the Stars Go Blue"

Perfection.