Book #29 was The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker. This retelling of the Iliad shows us that the story is, and always was, a tale of the exploitation and silencing of women. Told from the point of view of Achilles' captive Briseis, this story is a violent one, full of rape and pillage, just like the original. While Natalie Haynes' A Thousand Ships, another retelling I read recently (the link is to my review) focuses more on some of the humor and ridiculousness of the characters' behavior (an approach I share when I'm teaching this story), Barker's vision is altogether darker - and perfectly true to her source material. The Trojan War is a story that can be told in countless versions and still be one of the best stories ever.
Book #30 was Sea Wife, by Amity Gaige. This novel is the story of a couple with children and their attempt to live on a sailboat. There are already problems in this family (as in all families), and the intense setting and circumstances make things both worse and better. I found this a fascinating read.
Book #31 was The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron. I read this over three months with a group that met weekly on Zoom to discuss it. I really recommend doing it that way. This book is quite woo-woo in the style of Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic. (Gilbert is a big Cameron fan.) Nevertheless it also includes a lot of very practical advice on creativity. I'm still writing my Morning Pages, even though the course is finished!
Book #32 was Just Getting Started, by Fiona West. This romance, which is coming out in May, was a sweet, believable story, with likeable characters who grew on me as I read.
I need your help with these. They rest unseen In furniture we know, and plot a changing To grey confusion of the space between. Now, as I sweep it clean, I realize that love is an arranging.
Oh, how true this is, both literally and figuratively! You can read the rest of this spectacular poem here.
This
is the ninth year of the Progressive Poem! See the schedule below to
find where to go for today's line and to see who's participating this
year.
Don't ask me why I had this song open on my desktop, or for how long, but I do quite often have Paul Simon lyrics open. I just love his music, and a big reason is that his lyrics are so memorable. For some reason, this one came to mind a while ago and I looked it up. So after I post it here, I will close the tab.
René And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War
René and Georgette Magritte
With their dog after the war
Returned to their hotel suite
And they unlocked the door
Easily losing their evening clothes
They dance by the light of the moon
To the Penguins
The Moonglows
The Orioles
And The Five Satins
The deep, forbidden music
They’d been longing for
René and Georgette Magritte
With their dog after the war
René and Georgette Magritte
With their dog after the war
Were strolling down Christopher Street
When they stopped in a men’s store
With all the mannequins
Dressed in style
That brought tears to their
Immigrant eyes
Just like The Penguins
The Moonglows
The Orioles
And The Five Satins
The easy stream of laughter
Flowing through the air
René and Georgette Magritte
With their dog après la guerre
Side by side
They fell asleep
Decades gliding by like Indians
Time is cheap
When they wake up they will find
All their personal belongings
Have intertwined
René and Georgette Magritte
With their dog after the war
Were dining with the power elite
And they looked in their bedroom drawer
And what do you think
They have hidden away
In the cabinet cold of their hearts?
The Penguins
The Moonglows
The Orioles
and The Five Satins
For now and ever after
As it was before
René and Georgette Magritte
With their dog
After the war
This year for National Poetry Month, I am doing Spring Cleaning - writing about poetic tabs open on my desktop so that I can then close them and reduce my digital clutter. I have had this tab open on my desktop for almost a year! If you scroll down from the "Bird Mnemonics" part at the top, you'll see that last year's Progressive Poem was in process, and Christie Wyman was adding her line that day!
The reason I kept this was that I was going to return to it. That's the reason I keep all these tabs open. In this case, I was going to go back and write about the bird sounds I hear here in Haiti, doing my own "Bird Mnemonics" poem like Christie's. A year ago, I could hardly recognize any bird sounds. I can now identify more than I could then, but I still have so far to go. And I'm glad for eBird and Merlin, where I can listen to bird sounds, because if I had to rely on these mnemonics I am sure I would never have learned any of the sounds.
I went to my bird book, Birds of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and wrote down the way it describes the calls of some of the birds I see and hear the most, and then I wrote this, starting with two lines borrowed from Christie:
I've had this poem open on my desktop for a while, and it occurred to me recently that Auden might be trying to talk himself into an ability to cope with a situation where he felt rejected. I often use writing this way, trying to convince my heart and brain of something I'm not quite ready to accept. See what you think, and especially in the last stanza:
The More Loving One
W.H. Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime
Though this might take me a little time.
I tried to think of some other examples of poems where you get the feeling the poet is trying to convince him/herself of something, and I thought of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," one of my favorite poems. And then I thought of this one I wrote recently. I went through The Artist's Way with a group in the first three months of this year, and when in our last meeting we were supposed to share something, I tried to write about an idea that had struck me in the book. Julia Cameron says that we need to cultivate approval of ourselves, rather than waiting for approval from others. I've been thinking about it a lot, and I think I'm making some progress even, but when I tried to write about it, here's what came out:
Approval
I approve of myself Gold star for me A whole stack of presents Under the tree Prizes and accolades Piled in piles Backpats unlimited High fives and smiles.
I don’t need your approval. I’ve got my own. I like my own company. When I’m alone, I’m perfectly happy. All hail to me! I look in the mirror And like what I see.
I can write this stuff Indefinitely. All about how much I like being me. It would be even better If it were true. Sadly it isn’t. I wish I were you.
This
is the ninth year of the Progressive Poem! See the schedule below to
find where to go for today's line and to see who's participating this
year.
In March, Kay McGriff shared this post in which she responded to two poems entitled "I Dream a World." One was by Margaret Noodin and you can read it here. The other was by Langston Hughes, and you can read that one here. You can also watch the wonderful Google Doodle video made in honor of Hughes' 113th birthday below.
Kay wrote her own "I Dream a World" poem, and I kept the tab open because I wanted to try one, too. I soon realized that the challenge was to keep from sounding like a UN manifesto. All of my mentor poems had avoided this fate, but I doubted I would. My first draft certainly had that document-made-by-a-committee feel to it. See what you think of this version:
I Dream a World
by Ruth Hersey
I dream a world of kindness, where the Golden Rule is guide, where everyone has value and knows it deep inside.
I dream a world of safety; no kidnapping or crime, a world where every family sleeps in peaceful time.
I dream a world of justice, where every shade of skin is honored and is cherished and everyone can win.
I dream a world of knowledge, a world of books, not fears, a world of free ideas, a world of listening ears.
I dream a world of plenty, not just for some, but all; a world where none is hungry and health’s for big and small.
I dream a world of beauty, of green grass for each child, a world of music and of art where there is still some wild.
There are so many things I dream: clean water, air, and sea, love for each human being, and birds in every tree.
This
is the ninth year of the Progressive Poem! See the schedule below to
find where to go for today's line and to see who's participating this
year.
The poem goes on to describe all the different paintings that this same face looks out of. I described how my students and I tried to guess what was going on in this mysterious scene. (You can read the whole thing here or at the post I linked above.)
When I listened to the podcast, I learned all about the background of this poem. I was sure I'd never heard it before, and was fascinated. But then when I was writing this post, and I went back to link up with the original time I'd posted the poem, I saw that I had shared a link to what I called "this wonderful analysis" of the poem. When I followed the link I had shared, I got to a site which clearly talks about "Christina's observation of her brother's relationship with Elizabeth Siddal." Huh? Does that mean I had or had not read about Siddal before, and/or known that Christina's brother, the pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had a long and fraught relationship with her? Well, we shall never know, because when one tries to follow those long-ago links, one receives a notice that this is "an adult community" with an age restriction. I assure you that I am well over 18, and also over 21, and likely over whatever age the site has set, but I also assure you that I have no intention of checking it out and I highly doubt there is any analysis of Rossetti's poem to be had there.
So the mystery is: what did I know and when did I know it? I have no idea. But I still enjoyed the podcast about the poem, and Lizzie Siddal, and to the best of my recollection, I never knew any of this stuff before. And when I read the poem next with my eighth graders, I will not tell them about any of it until we have had a discussion about what they imagine is going on, because that is always a great discussion.
Here's the podcast: Not Just a Pretty Face. And now I can close the tab where it appears on my desktop. Spring Cleaning win!
This
is the ninth year of the Progressive Poem! See the schedule below to
find where to go for today's line and to see who's participating this
year.
Have you noticed how many people are writing about birds in their Poetry Friday posts? Last week there were so many! Part of it is the time of year, when the migratory birds are coming back to northern countries from their trips down south (and we down south are sad to see them go). But part of it is that birds are just excellent topics for poetry. I have several anthologies of bird poems, and I like to write bird poems myself. There's something transcendent about birds - I guess it's the whole flying thing.
This link to Little Willow's blog, Bildungsroman, has been open on my desktop since January, when I read it and was captivated by the idea that words are birds. Francisco X. Alarcón's poem starts like this:
words
are birds
that arrive
with books
and spring
You can follow the link above to read the whole poem (or you could find it here). I think my favorite stanza is:
some words
are familiar
like canaries
others are exotic
like the quetzal bird
Here's a photo I took recently of birds on wires; I was trying to take a picture of that kite off to the top right, but as you can see, that didn't quite work. I thought about the words being birds, and then about the birds being words, and then the birds having a conversation, and I wondered what they were saying to each other up there.
Bird Conversation
All we birds up on this wire Watch the kite go by, Scoff at how the kite’s desire Is thwarted in the sky.
Since it’s guided by a string, It can’t go where it chooses. In a contest with us birds The poor kite always loses.
Oh, we see the kite is free, It’s escaped its owner. Borne along now by the wind, It’s a joyful loner.
But we can foresee its fate: When the wind stops blowing, That poor kite will fall to earth While we birds keep going.
Yes, it’s good to be a bird Up here so complacent. That kite flies for now, it’s true, But it’s just bird-adjacent.
Who would want to be a kite, Subject to whims and weathers? We are glad that we are birds With iridescent feathers.
Ruth Hersey
This
is the ninth year of the Progressive Poem! See the schedule below to
find where to go for today's line and to see who's participating this
year.
I'm reposting my review of Pillars, by Rachel Pieh Jones, now that the book is actually out. I read an ARC back in February, and now you can read it too. After the review, you'll find last night's book launch, livestreamed on YouTube. Rachel was there from Djibouti, and we also heard from Abdi Nor Iftin, the Somali-American author who wrote the foreword, and amazing author Barbara Brown Taylor. Along with the moderator, Annie Metcalf, they talked about the book and the issues it raises and took questions from the audience, and Rachel even gave a short reading from the book.
Book #8 of 2021 was Pillars: How Muslim Friends Led Me Closer to Jesus, by Rachel Pieh Jones. Rachel's last book, Stronger Than Death,
was terrific, and that link is to my enthusiastic review. It's a
biography of Annalena Tonelli, an Italian humanitarian who fought TB in
the Horn of Africa and was killed right after Rachel herself moved to
Africa. Here's the first line of that book: "On October 5, 2003, in a
country that didn't exist, Annalena Tonelli performed routine checks on
tuberculosis patients."
In my review of Stronger than Death,
I commented that I loved how Rachel brought in her own story into
Annalena's. That personal connection was, for me, a highlight of the
book. So I was really happy to read this new one, where Rachel explores
her personal experiences in Somalia and Djibouti even more. The book is
organized around the five pillars of Islam, Shahadah (Confession of
Faith), Salat (Prayer), Zakat (Almsgiving), Ramadan (Fasting), and Hajj
(Pilgrimage). Basing her descriptions on extensive reading but also on
many years of experience living surrounded by Muslims, she explains how
these practices affect people's lives, and how she has learned from them
in ways that have deepened her own Christian faith.
What
I love most about this book is Rachel's refusal to accept easy answers.
She and her family have been through many difficulties in their time in
Africa, but they have also made Djibouti home, after being suddenly
evacuated from Somalia. Rachel's love for her adopted homeland and its
people shines through, but she doesn't gloss over how challenging life
is there, either. And she rejects clichés at every turn.
Here are some tastes:
"Before
leaving the United States, ten months earlier, I had flippantly
remarked that the safest place for a Christian was in the center of
God's will, how it was better to move across the planet to a potentially
hostile location than to spend three days in the belly of a whale. . . .
Later I would understand God's will as an inherently unsafe place to
be. It hadn't been safe for Jesus; it led him straight to torture and
death. God never promised safety, no matter how I craved it."
"I
tried to have a garden in Somaliland, which is how I did just about
everything there - a whole lot of effort and tears, and two beans and a
miniature cucumber to show for it. On my knees in that sad little
garden, my fingers caked with the earth of a place I was trying to
transform into hoe, was where I figured out what a disaster life in the
Horn of Africa was going to be and where I realized what a massive
mistake I had made. . . . I wanted it to display metaphors of faith and
spiritual life - and I didn't mean metaphors of failure, weeds, and
fruitlessness. I wanted beauty and miracles, nourishment and one seed
dying to produce a harvest. I wanted to bite into a fresh green bean and
delight in what I had nurtured into being. I wanted it to come through
my own fingertips, out of this thorny, rock-strewn soil, and I wanted
success the first time I tried. Instead, my garden was an utter
failure."
"I used to take Jesus' words, 'You will
always have the poor with you,' as something vague. Somewhere, out in
the wide world, there will always be poor people. Once I knew poor,
hungry, homeless people, and struggled to know how to respond, I saw the
words as a threat. You will always have the burden of figuring out how
to deal with the poor, and you will always fail in your response. Then, I
grasped his words as a call. ...My Somali friends, had they read Jesus'
statement, may have seen it as a promise. There would always be
opportunity to give, there would never be the risk of living with
unabashed greed."
If these passages find you reaching
for a highlighter, you will love this book. I recommend it if you want
to know more about Islam, but also if you are interested in life as an
expat in general, particularly in countries with few resources. I
recommend it if you are interested in thinking more about Christianity,
and about how people can have relationships with others who believe very
differently from themselves. It's deep, heartbreaking, and beautifully
written. It's based in profound relationships with friends Rachel
clearly loves, relationships she doesn't try to pretend aren't sometimes
awkward and difficult.
Today's post isn't really from tabs I had open on my desktop; in fact, I had to open more tabs in its creation. Typical! I generally do open more tabs faster than I close the ones already open.
When I was doing my daffodil begging (see this post for that tale), a friend sent me some forsythia instead; this was the same friend who didn't want to sneak into her neighbors' yards to take pictures of their flowers - go figure!
Photo Credit: Joy Dupree
Perfect, I thought, I'll post some forsythia poems! The first one I thought of was "Naming of Parts," by Henry Reed. Imagine my surprise when I looked it up and learned it isn't forsythia at all in that poem, but japonica! All they have in common, that I can see, is that their names are the same number of syllables, with the emphasis in the same place, and that they both bloom in early spring. Both facts are important to this poem. I think the most common adjective used online to describe this poem is "much-anthologized." Certainly I read it in school, at a time when I had no idea what either japonica or forsythia looked like (see the photos - forsythia above, japonica below).
Photo Source: gardenbeast.com
In the poem, there's a jarring juxtaposition between a training session in weapon use for soldiers (today they're learning the parts of a gun) and the japonica blooming out of control. The poem starts this way:
Naming of Parts
by Henry Reed
Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday
we had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,
So after finding out that my first forsythia poem wasn't even about forsythia, I found a couple of actual forsythia poems to share. The first one is "Forsythia," by Billy Collins, and the second, "Finally the Forsythia," by Virginia Shreve.
Forsythia
by Billy Collins
It caught my eye a while ago, lit up
against the gloom of woods
in the corner of a wide field,
the pulsing color of caution.
And now that I have spent a little time
on this stone wall watching its fire
flare out of the earth
I begin to think about the long chronicle of forsythia,...
Here's the rest. You'll have to click through to the second part of it in this facsimile of the Poetry magazine spread it appeared in back in 1995. I love how Billy Collins, in his inimitable fashion, explores the associations forsythia has in his mind. The poem ends this way:
as I feel the syllables of yellow form in my mouth
and hear the sound of yellow fill the morning air.
This year for National Poetry Month, I'm doing some Spring Cleaning on my desktop, writing about poetic links open on my desktop, so I can close them and reduce my digital clutter!
Recently someone shared a new poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, a slice of her life that is also a slice of mine. She's writing about the past year, and how we've adjusted our lives to the pandemic. Here's part of it:
And there were so many more poems to read!
Countless friends to listen to.
We didn’t have to be in the same room—
the great modern magic.
Everywhere together now.
Even scared together now
from all points of the globe
which lessened it somehow.
Hopeful together too, exchanging
winks in the dark, the little lights blinking.
from "Every day as a wide field, every page," by Naomi Shihab Nye.
I've been privileged to live in three of the world's great cities (Nairobi, Port-au-Prince and Asunción, Paraguay) as well as spending time in many others (including nine weeks in Paris as a college student). I just moved to a new city: Kampala, Uganda. I've also lived in smaller towns in three countries. In all of those places there have been difficult days, but I've never found a city or town yet where God is not, and I don't anticipate finding one in the future, either. The name of my blog comes from the song "Love is Always There," by Carolyn Arends.
