Who’s Who

Each Friday we provide the link to the blog that is hosting a celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. At that site you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books.

Enjoy the festivities!

The host this week is Myra. You can visit her here at Gathering Books.


(Lost Time by Annelisse Molini, artist born
1966 in Puerto Rico)

“There is no use in talking as if forgiveness were easy. We all know the old joke, ‘You’ve given up smoking once; I’ve given it up a dozen times.’ In the same way I could say of a certain man, ‘Have I forgiven him for what he did that day? I’ve forgiven him more times than I can count.’ For we find that the work of forgiveness has to be done over and over again.”

~ C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), English writer of essays, poems, and novels, including The Chronicles of Narnia

WHO’S WHO

A shilling life¹ will give you all the facts:
How Father beat him, how he ran away,
What were the struggles of his youth, what acts
Made him the greatest figure of his day:
Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,
Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea:
Some of the last researches even write
Love made him weep his pints like you and me.

With all his honors on, he sighed for one
Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;
Did little jobs about the house with skill
And nothing else; could whistle, would sit still
Or potter round the garden; answered some
Of his long marvelous letters but kept none.

~ W. H. Auden (1907-1973), English-born American poet and essayist

¹shilling life – a short biographical sketch in the tabloid or penny press

Sherbourne Morning

(Postcard of Allan Gardens and Sherbourne Street, 1908,
Toronto, Ontario; found at Chuckman Toronto Nostalgia)

“There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and where kindness . . . is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object — we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. . . . It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms; with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes.”

~ C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), English writer of essays, poems, and novels, including The Chronicles of Narnia, from The Problem of Pain

SHERBOURNE¹ MORNING

I begin to understand the old men, parked on benches
smoking a bit of July, waiting for the early
bottle; the large tears of the passers-by, wrapped
in white cotton, the world bandaged at 7 AM;
when the day goes old, they lean over
and nod into their arms, lovers, one-time carriers
of their separate hearts; their wives, their children
are glass partitions through which they see themselves
crying. Love them, or better yet, imagine a world
without a footstool for the creased and lame; imagine how that
sun above them spins halos for angels gone berserk.

~ Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, born 1949, Italian-born Canadian poet, appointed the second poet laureate of Toronto, 2004-2009

¹Sherbourne – a somewhat run-down street in downtown Toronto

The New Year

(World without Shadows by Maud Lewis, 1903-1970,
Canadian folk artist)

Best wishes for a Happy New Year, dear Readers.

THE NEW YEAR

The Old Year’s gone away
To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
In either shade or sun:
The last year he’d a neighbor’s face,
In this he’s known as none.

All nothing everywhere:
Mists we on mornings see
Have more substance when they’re here
And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
In every cot and hall —
A guest to every heart’s desire,
And now he’s naught at all.

Old papers thrown away,
Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
All things identified;
But times once torn away
No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year’s Day
Left the Old Year lost to all.

~ John Clare (1793-1864), English Romantic poet

Stranger

(Place of Gathering by Frank Stella, born in 1936,
American painter and printmaker)

“The fashion of this world passes away. The very name of nature implies the transitory. Natural loves can hope for eternity only in so far as they have allowed themselves to be taken into the eternity of Charity; have at least allowed the process to begin here on earth, before the night comes when no man can work.”

~ C. S. Lewis, from The Four Loves

STRANGER

When no one listens
To the quiet trees
When no one notices
The sun in the pool.

Where no one feels
The first drop of rain
Or sees the last star

Or hails the first morning
Of a giant world
Where peace begins
And rages end:

One bird sits still
Watching the work of God:
One turning leaf,
Two falling blossoms,
Ten circles upon the pond.

One cloud upon the hillside,
Two shadows in the valley
And the light strikes home.

Now dawn commands the capture
Of the tallest fortune,
The surrender
Of no less marvelous prize!

Closer and clearer
Than any wordy master,
Thou inward Stranger
Whom I have never seen,

Deeper and cleaner
Than the clamorous ocean,
Seize up my silence
Hold me in Thy Hand!

Now act is waste
And suffering undone
Laws become prodigals

Limits are torn down
For envy has no property
And passion is none.

Look, the vast Light stands still
Our cleanest Light is One!

~ Thomas Merton (1915-1968), American Trappist monk, poet, and writer of many books and essays

The Barranong Angel Case

(Mystery of the Street by Umbo, born Otto
Umbehr, 1902-1980, German photographer)

Today we begin to look at charity, or Agape (ah-gah-pay) in Greek and Caritas in Latin. This is the love that C. S. Lewis describes as “all about giving, not getting.” It is not an emotion. “It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.” It is the highest form of love, selfless, unlimited, and voluntary.

THE BARRANONG ANGEL CASE

You see that bench in front of Meagher’s store?
That’s where the angel landed.
What? An angel?
Yes. It was just near smoko¹ time on a sale day.
Town was quite full. He called us all together.
And was he obeyed?
Oh yes. He got a hearing.
Made his announcement, blessed us and took off
Again, straight up.
He had most glorious wings . . .
What happened then?
There were some tasks he’d set us
Or rather that sort of followed from his message.
And were they carried out?
At first we meant to,
But after a while, when there had been some talk
Most came to think he’d been a bit, well, haughty,
A bit overdone, with those flourishes of wings
And that plummy² accent.
Lot of the women liked that.
But the men who’d knelt, off their own bat, mind you,
They were specially crook³ on him, as I remember.

Did he come again?
Oh yes. The message was important.
The second time, he hired the church hall,
Spoke most politely, called us all by name.
Any result?
Not much. At first we liked him.
But, after all, he’d singled out the Catholics.
It was their hall. And another thing resented
By different ones, he hadn’t charged admission.
We weren’t all paupers, and any man or angel
With so little regard for local pride, or money,
Ends up distrusted.

Did he give up then?
Oh no. The third time round
He thought he had our measure. Came by car,
Took a room at Morgan’s, didn't say a word
About his message for the first two days
And after that, dropped hints. Quite clever ones.
He made sure, too, that he spoke to all the Baptists.
I’ll bet that worked.
You reckon? Not that I saw.
We didn’t like him pandering to our ways
For a start. Some called it mockery, straight out.
He was an angel, after all. And then
There was the way he kept on coming back
Hustling the people.
And when all’s said and done
He was a stranger. And he talked religion.

Did he keep on trying?
No. Gave us away.
Would it have helped if he’d settled in the district?
Don’t think so, mate. If you follow me, he was
Too keen altogether. He’d have harped on that damn message
All the time — or if he’d stopped, well then
He’d have been despised because he’d given in, like.
He’d just got off on the wrong foot from the start
And you can’t fix that up.

But what — Oh Hell! — what if he’d been, say, born here?
Well, that sort of thing’s a bit above an angel,
Or a bit below. And he’d grow up too well known.
Who’d pay any heed to a neighbor’s boy, I ask you,
Specially if he came out with messages?
Besides, what he told us had to do with love
And people here,
They don’t think that’s quite — manly.

~ Les A. Murray, born 1938, Australian poet and critic

¹smoko – a break from work (Australian slang)
²plummy – rich in tone (informal British)
³crook on – abusive, hostile to (Australian slang)

Love Song

Each Friday we provide the link to the blogger who is hosting a weekly celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. There you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books. It’s also a great way to explore the internet.

Enjoy the festivities!

Today’s host is Doraine Bennett. You can visit her here.



(Untitled eighteenth-century English woodcut)

Since June we have been looking at love, first at Storge, or affection, and then Philia, or friendship. Today we start our study of “love poems,” verses concerned with Eros, or romance.

“By Eros,” writes C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves, “I mean of course that state which we call ‘being in love’; or, if you prefer, that kind of love which lovers are ‘in’.”

LOVE SONG

Where would my home like to be?
My home is tiny,
Moves constantly,
Takes along my heart in captivity,
Makes me joyful, makes me blue;
My home is you.

~ Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), the German-Swiss novelist, poet, and painter

Since Hanna Moved Away

(Apple Picking, watercolor by Winslow Homer, 1836-1910,
American artist)

It’s a new month.
    
In the next few days, we finish our exploration of Philia or friendship. Then, for the rest of August, we look at poems about Eros or the kind of love which lovers are “in,” as C. S. Lewis described it.

SINCE HANNA MOVED AWAY

The tires on my bike are flat.
The sky is grouchy gray.
At least it sure feels like that
Since Hanna moved away.

Chocolate ice cream tastes like prunes.
December’s come to stay.
They’ve taken back the Mays and Junes
Since Hanna moved away.

Flowers smell like halibut.
Velvet feels like hay.
Every handsome dog’s a mutt
Since Hanna moved away.

Nothing’s fun to laugh about.
Nothing’s fun to play.
They call me, but I won’t come out
Since Hanna moved away.

~ Judith Viorst, born 1931, American writer, journalist, and poet

Nature Notes: Dandelions

(Tares, woodblock print by Gustave Baumann, 1881-1971,
German-born American artist and puppeteer)

Friendship, that “luminous, tranquil, rational world of relationships freely chosen,” is a gift.

“I have no duty,” writes C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves, “to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadows of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

NATURE NOTES: DANDELIONS

Incorrigible, brash,
They brightened the cinder path of my childhood.
Unsubtle, the opposite of primroses,
But, unlike primroses, capable
Of growing anywhere, railway track, pierhead,
Like our extrovert friends who never
Make us fall in love, yet fill
The primroseless roseless gaps.

~ Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), Irish poet

The Listeners

(The Reading Girl by Meyer von Bremen,
1813-1886, German painter)

“I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz.” ~ C. S. Lewis, English writer of essays, poems, and novels, including The Chronicles of Narnia

THE LISTENERS

“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveler,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveler’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
“Is there anybody there?” he said.
But no one descended to the Traveler;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his gray eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveler’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head: —
“Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,” he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

~ Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), English writer, most famous for his ghost stories and children’s poetry

Crying, My Little One

(Mother and Child by Diego Rivera, 1886-1957,
Mexican painter and muralist)

“The maternal instinct . . . is a Gift-love, but one that needs to give; therefore needs to be needed. But the proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift. We feed children in order that they may soon be able to feed themselves; we teach them in order that they may soon not need our teaching. Thus a heavy task is laid upon this Gift-love. It must work towards its own abdication. We must aim at making ourselves superfluous. The hour when we can say ‘They need me no longer’ should be our reward. But the instinct, simply in its own nature, has no power to fulfill this law. The instinct desires the good of its object, but not simply; only the good it can itself give. A much higher love — a love which desires the good of the object as such, from whatever source that good comes — must step in and help or tame the instinct before it can make the abdication”. ~ C. S. Lewis, from his book The Four Loves

CRYING, MY LITTLE ONE

Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?
Fall asleep, pretty one, warm on my shoulder:
I must tramp on through the winter night dreary,
While the snow falls on me colder and colder.

You are my one, and I have not another;
Sleep soft, my darling, my trouble and treasure;
Sleep warm and soft in the arms of your mother,
Dreaming of pretty things, dreaming of pleasure.

~ Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), English poet

A Guest

(Oxen Team, Winter by Maud Lewis,
1903-1970, Canadian painter)

Maud Lewis was a folk artist much like Grandma Moses (for her work, see the “index of the authors and artists” in the column to the right). She was a true amateur, a painter with a great joy in her art but no formal training and no connection to the artistic community. She and her husband, an itinerant fish peddler, were quite poor. Their home was a tiny house, barely 13 by 13 feet, in rural Nova Scotia, with a sleeping loft upstairs and no modern amenities like electricity. But it was very colorful, for she painted almost every surface, inside and out, with pictures of birds and flowers, including the door and windows and stove and walls.

She was born with many physical handicaps. “When I first met Maud Lewis, I was a child. When I first met Maud Lewis, I thought she was a witch. Maud was then a little old woman, as little as I was and her hands were twisted and her back was bent like a hunchback’s. Her shoulders were tilted and her bright eyes glittered,” wrote a neighbor of hers years later.

She was a prolific painter of the life outdoors she saw from her perch by a window. Maud Lewis was also popular, as were her paintings.

A GUEST

My woods belong to woodcock and to deer;
For them, it is an accident I am here.

If, for the plump raccoon, I represent
An ash can that was surely heaven-sent,

The bright-eyed mask, the clever little paws
Obey not mine, but someone else’s laws.

The young buck takes me in with a long glance
That says that I, not he, am here by chance.

And they all go their ways, as I must do,
Up through the green and down again to snow,

No one of us responsible or near,
But each himself and in the singular.

When we do meet, I am the one to stare
As if an angel had me by the hair,

As I am flooded by some ancient bliss
Before all I possess and can’t possess.

So when a stranger knocks hard at the door,
He cannot know what I am startled for —

To see before me an unfurry face,
A creature like myself in this wild place.

Our wilderness gets wilder every day
And we intend to keep the tamed at bay.

~ May Sarton (1912-1995), American poet, and writer of novels and memoirs

That's Amore, a post script

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.”

Those are the opening words to A Grief Observed, the journal that English writer C. S. Lewis kept after the death of his wife.

“At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says.”

Grief does feel like fear. And despair. And anger, even at God.

FOR JANE: WITH ALL THE LOVE I HAD, WHICH WAS NOT ENOUGH:

I pick up the skirt,
I pick up the sparkling beads
in black,
this thing that moved once
around flesh,
and I call God a liar,
I say anything that moved
like that
or knew
my name
could never die
in the common verity of dying,
and I pick
up her lovely
dress,
all her loveliness gone,
and I speak to all the gods,
Jewish gods, Christ-gods,
chips of blinking things,
idols, pills, bread,
fathoms, risks,
knowledgeable surrender,
rats in the gravy of two gone quite mad
without a chance,
hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,
I lean upon this,
I lean on all of this
and I know
her dress upon my arm
but
they will not
give her back to me.

~ Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), American poet and writer of novels and short stories

(A thank you note to Joan Moses, a reader of this blog, for pointing us to this poem.)