Hope

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 Dori. You can visit her here at Dori Reads.


(Bird and Vine, tapestry fabric by William Morris, 1834-
1896, English textile designer, artist, and writer)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a German Lutheran theologian and pastor, a pacifist who was arrested by the Nazis for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

“The essence of optimism is not its view of the present,” Bonhoeffer wrote while in prison awaiting his execution, “but the fact that it is the inspiration of life and hope when others give in; it enables a man to hold his head high when everything seems to be going wrong; it gives him strength to sustain reverses and yet to claim the future for himself instead of abandoning it to his opponent.”

He was hanged in particularly cruel and painful circumstances on April 9, 1945.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
And never stops — at all —

And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard —
And sore must be the storm —
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm —

I've heard it in the chillest land —
And on the strangest Sea —
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb — of Me.

~ Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), American poet

Ars Poetica

(Fritillary by William Morris, 1834-1896,
English textile designer, artist, and writer)

We now conclude this month's study of ars poetica or the art of poetry, looking at the nature of poetry and the way a poet works.

The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz defined poetry as “a passionate pursuit of the Real.” No science or philosophy “can change the fact that a poet stands before reality that is every day new, miraculously complex, inexhaustible, and tries to enclose as much of it as possible in words.”

A poem “begins in delight,” wrote the American poet Robert Frost. “It inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life — not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.”

ARS POETICA

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown —

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

*

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind —

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

*

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea —

A poem should not mean
But be.

~ Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), American poet

Some Like Poetry

(Tulips, wallpaper design by William Morris, 1834-
1896, English textile designer, artist, and writer)

Is the poet right?

SOME LIKE POETRY

Some –
not all, that is.
Not even the majority of all, but the minority.
Not counting school, where one must,
or the poets themselves,
there’d be maybe two such people in a thousand.

Like –
but one also likes chicken-noodle soup,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one’s point,
one likes to pet a dog.

Poetry –
but what sort of thing is poetry?
Many a shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and hold on to it,
as to a saving banister.

~ Wislawa Szymborska, born 1923, Polish poet

November 3

(Marigold, design by William Morris 1834-1896, English
textile designer, artist, and writer)

A mitzvah is a commandment or profound obligation to perform a meritorious act or good work. There are 613 such mitzvoth. Maimonides (1135-1204), the great medieval Jewish philosopher and Torah scholar, wrote that a man who performed even only one mitzvah was still worthy of salvation, provided he did so not to impress others or to win credit for himself, but for the sake of love and with joy.

And in his Sermon on the Mount, Christ said: “When thou givest alms, do not let thy left hand know what thy right hand is doing, so that thy alms may be given in secret; and thy Father, who sees in secret, will reward thee.”

NOVEMBER 3

Neither yielding to rain
nor yielding to wind
yielding neither to
snow nor to summer heat
with a stout body
like that
without greed
never getting angry
always smiling quietly
eating one and a half pieces of brown rice
and bean paste and a bit of
vegetables a day
in everything
not taking oneself
into account
looking listening understanding well
and not forgetting
living in the shadow of pine trees in a field
in a small
hut thatched with miscanthus
if in the east there’s a
sick child
going and nursing
him
if in the west there is a tired mother
going and for her
carrying
bundles of rice
if in the south
there’s someone
dying
going
and saying
you don’t have to be
afraid
if in the north
there’s a quarrel
or a lawsuit
saying it’s not worth it
stop it
in a drought
shedding tears
in a cold summer
pacing back and forth lost
called
a good-for-nothing
by everyone
neither praised
nor thought a pain
someone
like that
is what I want
to be

~ Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933), Japanese poet, translated by Hiroaki Sato

Why We Must Struggle

(William Morris Stamp Set issued May 2011 by the Royal
Mail of the United Kingdom)

Yesterday, the MacArthur Foundation announced that the poet Kay Ryan has been awarded one of its Fellowships, popularly called a Genius Grant: “Her mode of expression is a disarmingly clear and accessible style, characterized by concision, rhyme, wordplay, and wit.”

Ryan had previously been honored with the appointment of United States Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010.

Why must we struggle? asks the poet.

Anything of worth, including love, demands the best of us.

WHY WE MUST STRUGGLE

If we have not struggled
as hard as we can
at our strongest
how will we sense
the shape of our losses
or know what sustains
us longest or name
what change costs us
saying how strange
it is that one sector
of the self can step in
for another in trouble
how loss activates
a latent double how
we can feed
as upon nectar
upon need?

~ Kay Ryan, born in 1945, American poet

Winter Love

(Awaiting the Train, Bertherville, Quebec by Kathleen
Morris, 1893-1986, Canadian painter)

We now come to the end of January. This month, we’ve been listening in the snow, taking heed of the silence.

Our final poem on this theme proposes that silence signifies more than an absence of sound.

WINTER LOVE

I would like to decorate this silence,
but my house grows only cleaner
and more plain. The glass chimes I hung
over the register ring a little
when the heat goes on.
I waited too long to drink my tea.
It was not hot. It was only warm.

~ Linda Gregg, born 1942, American poet

Gift

(Honeysuckle, by William Morris, 1834-1896,
English textile designer, artist and writer)

GIFT

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

~ Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), Polish poet, essayist and translator, and winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature