Poetry Friday: Best of 2012

This week I got an email from the Academy of American Poets giving the results of the voting on the best poems of the year. I've mentioned before that I get a daily email from the AAP (not the American Academy of Pediatrics), whose site is Poets.org. I didn't vote in these elections, but when I looked at the choices, I was surprised and interested to see that of the ten chosen, five were ones I had particularly liked myself. ( I always save the ones I like best and delete the others from my email.) Considering that voters had about 350 poems to choose from, this seemed a high level of agreement. You can look at the list here of which poems were chosen. There are links to all of them.

I had some trouble deciding which one of them to share with you here, but finally decided on this Rafael Campo poem, entitled "Love Song for Love Songs," for a couple of reasons. First, I've been reading a lot of love poetry this week, drafts from my seventh and eighth graders. I'm touched and amused in about equal measure by their take on romantic love, the pain and embarrassment and ecstasy and misery. At this age, at least in our school, they are mostly talking about crushes and adoration from afar, which is no doubt just as it should be. Still, these emotions are real to them, and I'm glad they can write about them. And secondly, isn't all poetry love poetry in its broadest sense? Poets write about our love for people and places and times and living, and even when they are writing of suffering or of topics that seem to have nothing to do with love, they still remind us of our rootedness in this earth, and of the joy and sorrow of being human. This poem is light and funny (and I enjoyed searching out more of Rafael Campo's poems, and his ironic touch), but it also makes me think of the job of poets, to make the oldest ideas and experiences in the world fresh and new. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes not, but I am so thankful that they (and I, in my own way) keep trying.

Love Song for Love Songs

Rafael Campo

A golden age of love songs and we still
can't get it right. Does your kiss really taste
like butter cream? To me, the moon's bright face
was neither like a pizza pie nor full;
the Beguine began, but my eyelid twitched.
"No more I love you's," someone else assured
us, pouring out her heart, in love (of course)—
what bothers me the most is that high-pitched,
undone whine of "Why am I so alone?"

 Here's the rest.

And here's today's roundup.

Advent

Once November and the daily posting commitment was over, I slipped back into my old ways, especially since my class was ending and I had various projects to finish. Now that's done, and my grading is calling instead. But here are a few seasonal pieces I've read lately that resonated.

This one is from last Christmas, but new to me. Addie Zierman tackles the mandate this time of year to "Put the Christ Back in Christmas," and concludes,

"Incarnation means a lot of things, but one of them is this: the earth is wild with God’s love, his beauty, his presence. One silent night he came and now he is here, and because of that, the world is glowing, lit from within by grace."

Here she tackles some more of those Christmas cliches, and once again, reminds me that "Immanuel means that when you can’t find him, he is finding you."

In this post, Sarah Bessey goes all obstetric on us, because Christmas, after all, is about a birth.

"There is something Godly in the waiting, in the mystery, in the fact that we are a part of it, a partner with it but we are not the author of it. How you know that there is life coming and the anticipation is sometimes exciting and other times exhausting, never-ending. How there is a price that you pay for the love love love."

Go on, read the rest.  

Poetry Friday: Window Seat

Yesterday the poem that came in the Poem-A-Day email from the Academy of American Poets was a remarkable one by a poet I'd never heard of before, Jacqueline Osherow.

Here's part from the middle of this poem, "Window Seat: Providence to New York City."

the window
of my train
might be rolling
out a scroll
of meticulous
ancient Chinese
painting: my heart-
beat down its side
in liquid characters:
no tenses, no
conjunctions, just
emphatic strokes
on paper from
the inner bark
of sandalwood: 

You can read the rest here.

I love the way Osherow has turned the view out of a train window into almost an ekphrastic poem, making me think of exquisitely calligraphied Chinese scrolls.  "My heartbeat down its side in liquid characters" - isn't that beautiful?  I kept thinking about this poem all day.

There are lots more beautiful poems to keep you thinking all day  here at the Poem Farm, which is hosting the Poetry Friday roundup.

Almost Over

NaBloPoMo is almost over, to which I say, yay!

Edwidge Danticat on Disaster

On the occasion of a publication of a new anthology about the 2010 Haitian earthquake, entitled So Spoke the Earth, Edwidge Danticat did this interview. I can't wait to get my copy of this trilingual anthology of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and not just because I am sure Edwidge Danticat's piece will be amazing, but because of the variety of Haitian women represented, and particularly Nathalie Cerin, one of our alumni.

Stuff I Read Lately

I made it through this day, but I am not feeling very cheerful and don't want to write a post wherein I whine and feel sorry for myself, so here are a few pieces I've read and appreciated lately.

It appears that this island, which has appeared on maps as long as anyone can remember, really doesn't exist at all. It has now officially been undiscovered. Best quote:"It just goes to show the oceans are so underexposed. It's actually really shocking that we haven't not found more islands." It makes you wonder. How did that Manhattan-size island get on the maps in the first place?

In the destruction of Hurricane Sandy, these love letters came to light. It's nice to hear about letters coming to light that aren't scandal-filled; these are sweet memories of a courtship in the forties.

This beautiful article explores the metaphor of teaching English as a second language as a picture of faith. The author finds new joy in her native language through teaching it to others and watching them create new ways of speaking; in the same way, her faith becomes new to her as she shares it with people who haven't heard those stories before. It's also a little bit scary:

Letting go of your ownership of the language of faith can be frightening, unmooring. Instead of being the person with the answers, you become a person with questions.

What is hope? This article has some beautiful answers.

And finally, this "prank" which made someone's day. Watch the video and then go to the Improv Everywhere site for more information.

Excuses

I made it all the way to November 26th before missing a day of NaBloPoMo, in which I was supposed to post something on my blog every day of the month.  Last night my plan was to write after putting my son to bed, but as I reached the top of the stairs in the dark, I slammed my bare foot against a trunk in the hallway, and the pain chased my plan out of my head. 

I took ibuprofen right away, and this morning the school nurse said that she doesn't think I broke anything, but still I am experiencing constant reminders today of my clumsiness and also of how much I should be grateful when nothing hurts. 

I could put yesterday's date on this, but that would be cheating.  But please accept my excuses, anyone in the blog world who is paying attention.

Everything

Winter

When my children and I were living in the United States after the earthquake, and my son complained that his lips hurt, I immediately starting worrying about food allergies. It simply didn't occur to me that his lips were chapped, because I'm not used to living in cold weather. I don't worry about chapped lips.

It's getting cold here now. And by cold, I mean that I'm sitting here in my bedroom, the warmest room in the house, in the hottest of part of the afternoon, and I don't have the fan on. On the street, the merchants are now selling jackets so that people can prepare for the coming winter. It's 79 degrees.

This time of year, I don't like taking cold showers. Most of the time, it's not a problem (though I don't linger - I get in, get clean, get out). But it's too chilly right now.

 I've lived in countries that have real winter. I spent four years in England, and I remember sitting on the radiators in the morning in my classroom to warm up, wearing fingerless gloves indoors, having to force myself to get out of bed in the morning because it was so bone-chillingly cold. I spent many years in the States, and have experienced snow days and other such miseries.

And now, this is as cold as I want to get, a Caribbean winter. It's nice, sleeping under a blanket, wearing a light sweater to work, turning off the air conditioner in my classroom when I'm working in there by myself in the afternoon. At the same time, it gets up to 90 degrees most days, and I can go the beach, and I hardly ever wear closed-toed shoes. My skin doesn't get dry and the only coat I own is in the attic in my parents' house. This is just the way I like it.

Poetry Friday: Pablo Neruda and Coldplay, Together at Last

I like to read and write Odes around Thanksgiving (here's last year's), so for today, the day after Thanksgiving:


Ode to Laziness
by Pablo Neruda
translated by W.S. Merwin

Yesterday it seemed
the ode wouldn't leave the ground.
It was time, it should
at least show a green leaf.
I scratched the earth, 'Get up,
sister ode
- I said to her -
I've promised you,
don't be afraid of me,
I'm not going to chew you up,
ode with four leaves,
ode for four hands,
you'll take tea with me.
Rise,
I'll crown you among the odes,
we'll go out along the shore
of the sea, on a bicycle.'
No use.

Then
high up in the pines
laziness
appeared naked,
I got up in a daze,
half asleep,
on the sand I found
little broken fragments
of oceanic substances,
wood, seaweed, shells,
feathers of sea birds.
I looked for yellow
agates but found none.

The sea
filled the spaces,
wearing away towers,
invading
the coasts of my homeland,
pushing forward
successive catastrophes of foam,
Alone on the sand
a ray opened
a ring of petals.
I saw the silvered petrels
pass, and like black crosses
the cormorants
nailed to the rocks.
I set free
a bee dying in a spider's web,
I put a little stone
in my pocket,
it was smooth, very smooth,
like a bird's egg,
meanwhile on the coast
all afternoon
the sunlight and cloud wrestled.
Sometimes
the cloud was filled
with light
like a topaz,
other times a moist
ray of sunlight fell,
and yellow drops fell after it.

At night
thinking of the duties of my
fugitive ode,
I took off my shoes by the fire,
poured the sand out of them
and almost at once fell
sound asleep.

Somehow the combination of the ocean and yellow and the fugitive ode and the somewhat melancholy mood that is on me today made me think of this song.  I wonder if Coldplay and Pablo Neruda have been combined before.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Thank You

Yesterday, I had the girls in my small group share what they were thankful for, and they listed everything from "my new fish" to "my brother" to "school" to "my own room." I added "chocolate" and "books" and "plenty to eat." Others mentioned family members that they are getting to see more of lately, a place to live, a favorite musical group, Google, music, Facebook, good grades.

I'm thankful for all of the above (except I have no new fish, nor do I have my own room). Probably most of all, I'm thankful for the people God has put in my life. I am loved and supported so much, more than I have any right to expect or hope for. I have a wonderful husband, who puts up with me and loves me in spite of myself; funny, loving children; an extended family spread out over many thousands of miles, but close anyway; and loyal, sympathetic, incredibly high quality friends.

I am blessed, and I know it.  Thank You, God.  

Reading Update

Book #40 of 2012 was Article Five: Compliance is Mandatory, by Kristen Simmons.  Ember lives in a post-apocalyptic United States where the Bill of Rights has been replaced by the Moral Statutes.  As the novel begins, Article Five has just been instituted.  It states that children born out of wedlock will be taken for rehabilitation.  The Federal Bureau of Reformation, the FBR, will take care of making everyone conform.  This is a bit heavy-handed, and Ember is a very annoying heroine, sometimes seeming deliberately obtuse and making baffling choices.  We're told she is close to other characters, but we don't really observe their closeness.  There's plenty of action and suspense, but compared with other books I read for my Adolescent Literature class, this dystopic world isn't believable and the characters aren't compelling.

Book #41 was a needed break from all the YA I had been reading.  I picked up Blessings by Anna Quindlen knowing it would not be full of action, heart-thumping plot twists, and post-apocalyptic drama.  I knew this both because of the title and because I've read Anna Quindlen before.  This is the story of Lydia Blessing, aging in her home, Blessings, and the caretaker she has hired, Skip.  In the first chapter, a baby is left at Blessings, and Skip takes charge of her.  Quindlen tells a beautiful, satisfying story, and there's not a chase scene in sight.  Whew.

With book #42, I was right back to dystopia, but this time it was a real-life, historical dystopia.  This harrowing novel is the story of a family arrested in Lithuania in 1941.  Unfortunately, the title is Between Shades of Grey. Surely the author, Ruta Sepetys, regrets this title choice every single day.  She must get so tired of saying, "No, not that Shades of Grey..."  I had a hard time reading this because it was so terribly sad and hopeless.  Based on many true stories of what the Soviets did to Lithuania, the book never lets up on the horrible nightmares experienced by Lina and her family.  Just to give you an idea, there's a scene in the cattle car while the arrested Lithuanians are heading who knows where, and they find out that Hitler has invaded their country.  They are full of excitement because now things will surely get better.  I groaned aloud.  But I am glad that I persevered and finished the book.  It's very much worth reading.

Book #43 was the long-awaited The Casual Vacancy, the new book by J.K. Rowling, her first since Harry Potter.  This one is most decidedly not for children.  It shows us a whole new Rowling.  Her talent for plot is much more on display because she has a much smaller canvas: a small town instead of a cast of thousands.  There's not a single admirable character here, except maybe the one who dies in the first chapter.  Everyone has sordid secrets.  Who knew Rowling had this in her, I thought as I read, and then I thought of Voldemort, Dolores Umbridge, Dobby at his self-hating, self-punishing worst.  This book is darker than the Dark Lord.  It's brilliantly done and I couldn't put it down, but there's nothing remotely uplifting about it, so be warned.  I think I need to cleanse my palate with another Anna Quindlen book now!

Mitali Perkins on Multicultural Stories

I'm working on a project for my adolescent lit class, and here's some interesting insight from Mitali Perkins that I've discovered in the process.

Pride and Prejudice for 2012

I have written here before about how I am a die-hard Jane Austen fan.  I love her books for their caustic characterizations, but also because they are so very familiar to me, like old friends.  I posted here about how Pride and Prejudice was one of the first books I read after the earthquake, when I started to come out of my inability to concentrate or read much beyond news reports.  A friend commented that that isn't a book, it's a member of the family.  That's right - that is how I felt, too. 

I've also written about how I keep trying to read people's attempts to imitate or spin off from Jane Austen, and how I'm always disappointed, because somehow it never quite works.  And yet I'm very much enjoying The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.  If you're a Jane Austen fan like me, I'd love to know what you think of this multimedia adaptation.  Lizzie Bennet posts two video blogs (vlogs) a week on YouTube, and her sister Lydia also has a video blog (which I like much less).  Some of the characters have Facebook pages and post on Pinterest and Twitter.  (I don't do Pinterest or Twitter.  There aren't enough hours in the day for me to get involved on yet another online time-sucker.  Well, except for LBD, of course.)

My daughter is reading P&P in her English class right now, and also following along with the LBD, and she says she likes the characters much better on LBD.  I know, I know, sacrilege, except that I do see that Jane Austen very much writes people off.  Of course Lizzie is wrong about Darcy, and about Wickham, and she gets straightened out, but nobody ever rethinks Mary, or Mr. Collins, or Lady Catherine.  They are all fairly one-dimensional.  And as my daughter points out, Jane Austen really does "tell" a lot, instead of "showing."  ("She interrupts scenes to inundate you with adjectives," as my daughter puts it.)

You can get started here, where you'll find links to the YouTube channel.  

Sunday Night

Is it just me, or is Sunday evening a melancholy time for other people, too? There's the obvious fact that the weekend is ending, and tomorrow we will be back to school or work or just the normal routine of life.  But it seems that there's more to it than that, a bittersweetness that I feel even when I'm on vacation, that after-Sunday-night-church wistfulness.  As though I could have squeezed more out of the weekend than I did, and now the opportunity is gone for another week.

Today I spent the day in bed, sick, and I'm worrying about whether I will be well enough to teach tomorrow; I'm planning to, but worrying anyway.  That adds to the slightly glum feeling of this evening.

I remember when I was a child, sometimes on Sunday night we would sing people's choices of hymns.  I would carefully choose one, and wave my hand to ask for it, and sometimes I would get called on and sometimes not.  I remember being so little that I had to stand on the pew so that the person in the pulpit would see me.  I remember standing on the stairs after the service, shivering in the dark, while my parents talked to everyone.

I remember in boarding school, the weeks we would have evening chapel, and how we would always sing "Abide With Me," and how I would focus on the words "fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens, Lord, with me abide."  I remember praying that He would abide, and somehow He always did.  I remember stepping out of the little wooden chapel into the night, and the brightness of the stars in those Kenyan highlands, brighter than they have ever been since.  I remember drinking hot cocoa before going back to our dorm.

I remember the cold, lonely rush to the cafeteria in college, after changing into a skirt (at my conservative Christian college we weren't allowed to go to the cafeteria in sweatpants on Sunday night, and sweatpants were what I had inevitably been wearing in the dorm).  I remember looking for a friendly face, someone who would beckon me over and say, "Sit with me!"

Sunday night, an in-between time.  It's not really the weekend any more, and it's not the bustling week yet, but we can't stay up late because we have to get up in the morning.  I'm reminding the kids about backpacks and P.E. clothes, and I'm looking ruefully at tomorrow's schedule and wondering how I will do it all.  I didn't get to choose a hymn tonight.  Fast falls the eventide.  Sit with me, abide with me, while Sunday dies away.

Gary Schmidt on Books and Reading

I love Gary Schmidt's books and he speaks a lot of sense here about reading "controversial" books.

Poetry Friday: Flowers

I just finished reading The Language of Flowers, and even before that I was thinking about flowers. I have a flower poem I've been working on for over a month on my desktop, and a flower post in my mind, but while I lack time to work on these things, here's a flower poem from someone else. I have been using this sonnet for a while with my students, but didn't realize that the author was practically a neighbor, from Guyana. You can get more information about him at the link at the end of the post.

Flowers

I have never learnt the names of flowers.
From beginning, my world has been a place
Of pot-holed streets where thick, sluggish gutters race
In slow time, away from garbage heaps and sewers
Past blanched old houses around which cowers
Stagnant earth. There, scarce green thing grew to chase
The dull-gray squalor of sick dust; no trace
Of plant save few sparse weeds; just these, no flowers.

One day, they cleared a space and made a park
There in the city’s slums; and suddenly
Came stark glory like lightning in the dark,
While perfume and bright petals thundered slowly.
I learnt no names, but hue, shape and scent mark
My mind, even now, with symbols holy.

Dennis Craig

I love the picture this poem paints of flowers in the middle of a dirty city, and how even a tough kid who knew nothing about flowers found them "holy."  I don't know many of their names either - though I'm learning more - but I too love their "stark glory like lightning in the dark."

Photo Credit: Matsu 

Here's more information about Dennis Craig.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Reading Update

All four of the books I'll be reviewing in this post were assignments for my Adolescent Literature class.

Book #36 of 2012 was Chinese Handcuffs, by Chris Crutcher.  This was my least favorite book I read for this course.  Every student had to choose a different novel by Chris Crutcher, well known for writing "problem novels" that are often challenged and that come from his career as a therapist.  I'm sure Crutcher has seen the worst, and this book includes all of it: suicide, sexual abuse, teenage pregnancy, a motorcycle gang, a barroom rape, cruelty to animals.  It really seemed a bit much to me.  I liked some elements, particularly the friendship between the main character and Jennifer, a basketball star to whom he's close but who has a secret that she won't tell him.

Book #37 was  The Silence of Murder, by Dandi Daley Mackall, winner of the Edgar Award.  There's murder, mystery, and courtroom drama here.  The protagonist, Hope, is desperate to prove that her autistic brother, Jeremy, didn't commit the murder he's been accused of.  

Book #38 was Baffling and Bizarre Inventions, by Jim Murphy. Don't buy the Kindle version - the formatting is all wonky and difficult to read. But the content itself is a lot of fun. Using pictures from ads or patent applications, Murphy shows us strange inventions and asks us to guess what they are for. After we guess, we can read a description of the invention and find out its purpose. The book ends with some information on the patent office and a chapter on creativity and what it takes to succeed (basically, never giving up). Every class member had to choose a Jim Murphy book to read; he's written loads of information-packed non-fiction like this one.

Book #39 was Jack Gantos' latest book, the winner of the 2012 Newbery Award, Dead End in Norvelt.  Strange and funny and endearing, this is the story of young Jack, who lives in a planned community called Norvelt (named for Eleanor Roosevelt).  Jack is grounded eternally for obeying his father against his mother's wishes, and is only allowed out to spend time with Miss Volker, the town medical examiner and obituary writer.  Because of her arthritis, she needs Jack's help to type her obituaries, and in the process of helping her he is drawn into the drama of the town.  And why are so many people dropping dead, anyhow?


Coming soon: books #40 - #43.  

Go Look at What Someone Else Made

I'm doing lots of stuff like making a video and writing a book review and researching for a presentation, PLUS grading my students' work and getting ready for a meeting tomorrow.  So you can chat amongst yourselves, or take a look at this wonderful United States of YA map. It includes a YA novel for each of the fifty United States, and there's a link to the project to make a list of a YA novel for each country in the world. Ambitious? You bet!

Being a Student

I've mentioned before that I am taking a class this semester online. I'm getting many reminders of why I stopped at my master's degree, instead of going on for a doctorate and a career as a professor, as I had thought about doing at one point. I love to learn, love to study, and have always been an excellent student. I never did all-nighters or threw papers together. Instead I would start assignments well in advance and research every little homework task as though it were my dissertation. But I found that I didn't much like the driven, competitive me that I was as a graduate student.

Now, more than twenty years since I finished my master's degree (how did that much time go by? I actually had to stop and count because that seemed too big a number), I have discovered that the calmer, more reasonable, less stressed-out person I've become, and whom I'd attributed to growing older and wiser - that person was an illusion. A compulsive gambler may feel cured as long as she stays away from an environment where gambling takes place. But once she's around slot machines, she feels that old temptation. In the same way, get me in the student mode, and I'm just as I always was. If anything, the online setting makes me worse, because working at my own pace to me means that I have to be way ahead, or I feel behind. I could always go post one more time on the discussion board, so therefore I never feel done.

Do you think this is why I sometimes have trouble understanding my students? Mind you, I know that my attitude is no more healthy than that of a student who does everything at the last minute. I was always obsessive about my grades, driving myself and everyone close to me crazy. Although I love to read and learn new things, I rarely would relax enough to just enjoy it. Instead I would fret about whether I was doing enough, and about grades, and about being the best. Even though I have enjoyed the exposure to lots of new books, and answering fascinating questions, and thinking through new ideas, I will be glad when the semester is over and I can stop being an official student for a while. I won't stop learning, but I'll learn in an environment that doesn't turn me into someone I don't particularly like to be.

After Disaster

After disasters, people loot and riot, right? Well, apparently not. I was interested to read this blog post about a book that argues otherwise, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster.

"Author Rebecca Solnit takes a close look at disasters including earthquakes, floods, and explosions. She finds tragedy and grief, but something else too, something rarely noticed. During and after these horrific crises there shines from the wreckage something extraordinary.

People rise up as if liberated, regardless of their differences, to act out of deep regard for one another. They improvise, coordinate, create new social ties, and pour themselves into work that has no personal gain other than a sense of meaning. While they do this, they often express strangely transcendent feelings of joy, envisioning a greater and more altruistic community in the making. Even those suffering the most horrific misfortune often turn around to aid others and later remember it as the defining moment of their lives. This is a testament to the human spirit, as if disaster cracks us open to our better selves."

The post details ways people are helping each other in the north-east United States in response to the destruction brought by Hurricane Sandy. In Haiti after the earthquake, it was equally heartening to see the way people took care of each other. In those moments of being "cracked open," people are also often open to deep connections with other people. Many people have commented on the depth of their "earthquake friendships."  But the strain, stress, and lack of sleep can also put people's worst sides on display.  It's not just buildings and livelihoods that are destroyed in a natural disaster; people's relationships and even their very sense of themselves can be, too. 

Solnit apparently draws conclusions about human nature (I haven't read her book). My conclusions about human nature are that people are capable of the most terrible atrocities and the most stunning goodness. I believe both in total depravity and in the indelible image of God on every human being. I think of the words in Prince Caspian: "'You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,' said Aslan. 'And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.'"

Lately I have the sense that all the time, somewhere, people are recovering from a disaster, sleeping wherever there is a space, gathering new belongings to replace the ones that are gone.  Creating new lives, too, the "new normal" everyone kept telling me about after the earthquake.  Cracked open, vulnerable, at their worst and their best.

City Full of Stories

After the Storm, a City Full of Stories. This article from the New York Times follows what happened to an assortment of New Yorkers who have been featured in the Times' regular Character Study column.

I'll Wait

Poetry Friday: Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?

From the first time I heard this song in the TV movie of "Cinderella," I loved it. On one level, I suppose, it's just a silly ditty, but the questions it asks are deeper than that. In addition to the questions that Cinderella and the prince ask each other about whether they are inventing what they see in each other (answer: probably, since you've only known each other for ten minutes), there is the question of what makes us love. Why do we love people, places and things? Is it because of their inherent beauty? Or do we see the beauty in people, places, and things as we grow to love them? Of course, the answer is yes. There's something beautiful that attracts our notice, but as we grow in love, we see more and more that someone who wasn't paying such close attention would miss completely.

Attachment theory tells us that the love between parents and their infants is a sort of dance. Our babies are beautiful, so we coo over them and cuddle them. They respond by being even more adorable, "attachment-promoting behavior," as it's called. We in turn love them even more.

Aren't all loves kind of the same way? In romantic love or friendship, something about us is noticed and appreciated, and we respond by doing more of whatever the other person liked. We reach a point, with people we love, where we don't even see what they look like any more. We just see a face that is familiar and dear. 

C.S. Lewis wrote about friendship:

..."Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other people; by Friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing."

But enough philosophizing...here are three videos of this song, and the lyrics as well. I hope you like it as much as I do.

Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?
by Rodgers and Hammerstein

Do I love you because you're beautiful
Or are you beautiful because I love you?
Am I making believe I see in you
A girl too lovely to be really true?
Do I want you because you're wonderful
Or are you wonderful because I want you?
Are you the sweet invention of lover's dream
Or are you really as beautiful as you seem?

 Am I making believe I see in you
A man too perfect to be really true?
Do I want you because you're wonderful
Or are you wonderful because I want you?
Are you the sweet invention of lover's dream
Or are you really as wonderful as you seem?

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Reading Update

The four books I'll review in this post were all assigned for my Adolescent Literature class.  I've enjoyed taking a class with so much fun reading!

Book #32 for 2012 was Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi.  It's scarily appropriate with its "city-killer" hurricanes, which go up to Category 6.  (These days, in case you aren't a hurricane-watcher, the maximum is 5.)  The book is set in the Gulf Coast region of a future United States, where New Orleans, along with Orleans II, is drowned and replaced by Mississippi Metropolitan (MissMet), which they didn't call Orleans III because "even the most ardent supporters of the drowned city gave up on the spectacularly bad luck enjoyed by places called 'Orleans.'"  Nailer, the protagonist, works salvage on abandoned ships and lives like many teenagers do today in large third-world cities.  He doesn't really know or think about other lives until he and his friend Pima find a rich girl whose fancy boat has been washed ashore during a hurricane.  This dystopic novel is exciting and action-packed, but also full of thought-provoking ideas about whether we are doomed to remain in the world into which we're born.  Here's an interesting interview with Bacigalupi where he talks about writing YA science fiction, whether his books are really dystopias, and how what he writes connects with what's already going on in the world.

Book #33 was not originally written as a YA novel; it was chosen for an Alex Award, given to books written for adults but judged to be especially appealing to teenagers.  It's called Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, and it's the first novel I've ever read that is basically set on the internet.  Wade is a teenager living in 2044, a time when most people spend most of their time on the OASIS, which stands for Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation.  One of the creators of the OASIS has died and left a will in which he gives vague and confusing instructions to find an Easter Egg which he has hidden in the system.  Whoever finds it will inherit his entire estate.  He has filled the hunt with references to his teenage years, the 1980s.  This starts a worldwide craze for studying eighties lore, but when the book opens, nobody has made much progress in finding the egg.  But that is about to change.  Cline obviously had so much fun writing this book that you have to enjoy it too.  I did find myself wondering who, exactly, his target audience was, since there are so many references to the eighties, which I remember very well, thank you very much, but which to my students seem like prehistory.  But this book has sold amazingly and there is even a movie in the works, so it must be understandable even if you never saw War Games and don't know what PacMan is.  You can see  Cline's blog here, and once again, he's having so much fun that it really is endearing, especially if, like me, you like geeks quite a bit.

Book #34 is a new favorite of mine.  I've already shared it with a class, my seventh graders.  It's called Inside Out and Back Again, by Thanhha Lai, and it's the story of Lai's own childhood journey from Saigon in 1975 to Alabama.  Written in incredibly spare and yet evocative free verse, the story makes Saigon and Alabama come alive, as well as the characters, especially Ha, who narrates the book.  She's not always so grateful to be a refugee, and it's not easy for her to adjust to her new life.  As the mother of some earthquake refugees myself, I found myself identifying with Ha's mother!




Book #35 is another one that the author enjoyed writing, The Notorious Benedict Arnold, by Steve Sheinkin.  Sheinkin includes an afterword full of his sources, and writes, "I've been fascinated by Benedict Arnold's story for years and have long wanted to write my own version - I'm convinced it's one of the best action/adventure tales in American history.  In preparation, I compiled an absurdly large collection of books about Arnold, not to mention plays, historical prints, and other Arnold items I probably shouldn't have spent my money on."  C'mon, don't you like Sheinkin already?  He's clearly obsessed by his subject matter.  And his book is really a wonderful biography of Arnold, written like a novel.   Here's Sheinkin's website.

Coming soon: books #36-#39. 

This post is linked to the November 10th Saturday Review of Books.

Promises, Promises

I was looking back at past posts about President Obama, and I found this link that I shared back in 2008. It's called the Obameter, and it keeps track of the campaign promises that the President has kept, compromised on, broken, or stalled. Twenty percent of the promises are rated "in the works." There's more detail, too, on each individual issue. You can browse the promises in several different ways.

And here's an excerpt from Obama's speech last night:

"It's not small, it's big. It's important. Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions. Each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions as a country, it necessarily stirs passions, stirs up controversy. That won't change after tonight, and it shouldn't. These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty. We can never forget that as we speak people in distant nations are risking their lives right now just for a chance to argue about the issues that matter, the chance to cast their ballots like we did today."

The speech ended like this:

"I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We're not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America."

I hope it's true, and I'm praying for the President in the big job he has ahead of him.

Election Day

I guess we know who Big Bird would vote for.

Voting

Like everyone else, I am very ready for this election season to be over.  It has dragged on as long as I can remember.  Was there ever a time before these men were arguing with each other and everyone I know was arguing too?

But as much as I dislike the polarization we've seen during this election, I can't be cynical about voting.   I think about people around the world who have no voice in their government; I think about the photos of eager first-time voters lining up across the hills in South Africa in 1994; I think about women in the United States who fought for years for the right to vote.

Source: http://qu301southafrica.com

Voting is a privilege, and I hope my American readers will go vote tomorrow.  I sent off my absentee ballot last week.  I admit that it gives me a thrill every single time I vote, even though my first election was -- ahem -- a long time ago.

Sunday Night

The problem with getting an extra hour of sleep last night is darkness coming early, depressingly, this evening. The problem with having two short weeks (hurricane days off, All Saints' Day, All Souls' Day) is that Sunday night comes, and tomorrow morning is Monday, and there's a five-day work week ahead.

Yeah, feeling a little gloomy, since it's dark and Novembery and we haven't had city electricity since yesterday afternoon (not the result of the hurricane, just the way things are). And I'm maybe just a teeny bit sleep-deprived in spite of the extra hour, because our neighbors had an all night bash last night complete with drumming until four AM.

 I'll try to be a bit more uplifting tomorrow.

Amy Wilentz on Sandy

I just recently found out that Amy Wilentz, author of the gorgeously written and controversial The Rainy Season, has a blog. I know I will be reading it regularly, because she writes so wonderfully and apologizes (in the post I'm quoting below) for being so Haiticentric. "I can't help it," she admits. Here she is on Hurricane Sandy. This is just a short excerpt from a much longer post, and she's also provided (in a separate post) the photo she refers to. Click on the link at the end to read the whole thing.  

"So when I look at the picture of a crowded gas station in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, ... I feel that I have been here before; I’ve been in that gas station so many times, only it was always in Haiti, and no one ever cared. In fact, no one really minded: in Haiti, gasoline shortages are habitual, just part of the program of underdevelopment — Haiti can run out of gas nationally because a tanker is delayed. One becomes rather insouciant and even fatalistic about it. It’s perfectly normal to say that you couldn’t get to an appointment because you ran out of gas or because you were delayed at the gas station for hours. Often you borrow someone else’s car that has more gas, if your meeting is really urgent.
And in Haiti, people who are standing in line picking up gas for distant empty cars don’t have those nice handy red gasoline holders to fill up; they have old vegetable oil bottles or dilapidated white buckets. (Did you know some gasoline is pink? I learned that in Haiti.) Also the cars that converged on gas stations in Port-au-Prince or in the provincial towns (in inefficient circles and wedges resembling the pattern at the Brooklyn station above), are not recent models. Suffice it to say that it is not surprising to look down while riding in a Haitian “taxi” and see the roadbed passing beneath your feet as if you were the aptly named Barney Rubble.

Also, by the way, hospitals have always had huge power problems in Haiti, all the time. I loved reading about how Bellevue hospital dealt with Sandy; it was so Haitian — the bucket lines, going up and down stairs on foot, without elevators, rushing oxygen tanks first to one bedside and then the next.  Welcome to the world as it is."

Here's the whole post.

And here's an article from the Atlantic on the hurricane damage in Haiti.

Poetry Friday: Another Hurricane Poem

Amy from The Poem Farm posted this poem, by a Puerto Rican poet, on Facebook this week. It was perfect for us, drying out from the storm, and I hope it doesn't seem frivolous if you're in New Jersey or New York. Believe me, I don't make light of hurricanes, this or any other. The latest statistics show that there were 157 deaths from this storm, and 51 of them were in Haiti. The damage doesn't have such high cost estimates here because people don't start off with as much to lose. All that said, I love this poem, especially the last line, so be sure to click through to read that.

Problems with Hurricanes
by Victor Hernández Cruz

 A campesino looked at the air
And told me:
With hurricanes it's not the wind
or the noise
or the water.
I'll tell you he said:
it's the mangoes, avocados
Green plantains and bananas
flying into town like projectiles.

How would your family feel if they had to tell
The generations that you
got killed by a flying
Banana.

Here's the rest.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

It's November! (Reading Update post)

It's November again, and since I have been a blogging slacker for the last several months (if it weren't for Poetry Friday, I would hardly post anything at all), I decided to try NaBloPoMo again this year.  Apparently this isn't really a thing any more; it's become more of a year-round challenge, and the official website just says something about "the birthday of this project." Never mind!  I will go by the rules I've followed for the last couple of years, which are, simply, to post something, anything, every day of November.

Since my last Reading Update post, I have read sixteen books, so I'm going to split those up over several posts and put one up whenever I have a day when I have nothing else to post.  I have time to do that today because we have All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day off from school. 

So here goes:

I actually read book #28 at the beginning of the summer but had somehow missed it in my blog list.  Ashfall, by Mike Mullin, is the kind of book that gives you nightmares.  In most dystopic novels, there is enough improbability (and part of that is the futuristic setting) that the reader can maintain some distance.  This book, however, is unblinkingly realistic, and set in the present day.  Did you know there is a massive volcano under Yellowstone?  I didn't.  Did you know what kind of results there could be if it were to erupt?  I didn't, but now I do.  Alex is forced to call upon all of his resources to survive the journey to find his parents.  On the way he meets Darla, and their growing dependence on each other is portrayed in an incredibly unsentimental, yet touching way.  You can read the first two chapters for free here, at the author's website, and you can also find previews of the second book, which came out a couple of weeks ago, and which I haven't read yet.  Having experienced an earthquake myself, and being immersed right now, like everyone else, in coverage from Hurricane Sandy, I am very much aware that this world is full of huge forces that are completely beyond our control.  This book reinforced that awareness.  Even so, I do recommend it for the way it draws you in from the first page, its believable characters, and its picture of human beings surviving because they have to, and even with a bit of hope in the midst of all the bleakness.

Book #29 was A Guide to the Birds of East Africa, by Nicholas Drayson. Many reviews have compared this book to Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books. It was reminiscent of those books, and it also reminded me of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, by Helen Simonson.  Like Alexander McCall Smith's books, this one has an African setting that is not riddled with misery (though there are some glimpses of the problems of contemporary Nairobi), and like Helen Simonson's novel, there's a romance (or is there?) between non-youthful characters.  This was as light and amusing as the previous book was dark and terrifying.

Book #30 was another Alan Gregory book, Higher Authority, by Stephen White. Alan Gregory is a clinical psychologist who somehow is around a whole lot of murders. His girlfriend (wife in later books) is a DA, so that explains some of the mayhem that surrounds him, but seriously, he makes psychology seem like a very dangerous profession. Like most of the murder mysteries I read (mostly just Stephen White, P.D. James, and Elizabeth George), I like these books for the character development and relationships. I often forget the details of the murder plot immediately after reading them. This one had the additional interest of its exploration (mostly negative) of Mormonism.

The next bunch of books were assigned for a class I'm taking in Adolescent Literature.  One of the best things about taking a class or joining a book group is getting introduced to a stack of new authors and titles.  Some of these I wouldn't have chosen myself, but I'm glad I read all of them.  The professor chose many award-winners from the last couple of years.  Book #31 was especially excellent, and I recommend it highly.  It's called  Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom, and Science, by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos.  This is one of those books that made me see the world differently and made connections between disparate elements in my thinking.  There's a major Haiti component to the history of sugar, which explains part of my interest, but I was also fascinated to learn that the history of sugar is the history of slavery and industrialization and revolution.  Because human beings crave sweetness, the world changed.  I see abolitionism in a new light after reading this, as well; yes, abolitionists went without sugar in their tea to urge an end to slavery, but if a new way of producing sugar (from beets) hadn't been developed, would we still have the evils of plantation slavery?  Our craving for sweetness continues unabated.  This book reads like an action-packed novel.  You can see the authors' website here.

Coming soon: books #32 - #35!
This post is linked to the November 3rd Saturday Review of Books.

Poetry Friday: Siblings

School is called off today for the second day as we are pounded by Hurricane Sandy.  She's not hitting us directly, but we are getting an unbelievable amount of rain.  The latest I heard was that nine people have died in Haiti as a result.

I found this poem about hurricanes.  Be sure to click through and read about the others that year - including the most famous one, perhaps ever, Katrina.

Siblings

By Patricia Smith

Hurricanes, 2005

Arlene learned to dance backwards in heels that were too high.

Bret prayed for a shaggy mustache made of mud and hair.

Cindy just couldn’t keep her windy legs together.

Dennis never learned to swim.

Emily whispered her gusts into a thousand skins.

Franklin, farsighted and anxious, bumbled villages.

Gert spat her matronly name against a city’s flat face.

Harvey hurled a wailing child high.

Irene, the baby girl, threw pounding tantrums.

Here's the rest.
And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: The List

I read the poem in this post earlier this week with my eighth graders, and later in the same day saw this blog post linked on Facebook (it's a list of the "Ten books you absolutely must read" and includes such items as "every single book by your favourite author" and "the one that a friend recommends").  Both express my view that people should read what they enjoy.  I have read books before because they were good for me, or because I wanted to be able to say I had read them, and there's nothing inherently wrong with those things, but reading is also a great pleasure, and I want to enjoy it.  I don't believe that there is some list of books everyone should read.  Everyone should read the Bible (because there's so much in it that is so amazing), but other than that, people's lists are, and should be, idiosyncratic.

Here's Naomi Shihab Nye's take on that:

The List
By Naomi Shihab Nye

A man told me he had calculated
the exact number of books
he would be able to read before he died
by figuring the average number
of books he read per month
and his probable earth span,
(averaging how long
his dad and grandpa had lived,
adding on a few years since he
exercised more than they did).
Then he made a list of necessary books,
nonfiction mostly, history, philosophy,
fiction, and poetry from different time periods
so there wouldn’t be large gaps in his mind.
He had given up frivolous reading entirely.
There are only so many days.

Oh, I felt sad to hear such an organized plan.
What about the books that aren’t written yet,
the books his friends might recommend
that aren’t on the list,
the yummy magazine that might fall
into his hand at a silly moment after all?
What about the mystery search
through the delectable library shelves?
I felt the heartbeat of forgotten precious books
calling for his hand.

Here's today's roundup, hosted by the lovely Irene Latham, who is celebrating her new book. Congratulations, Irene! And I'm so sorry I never sent you a couplet for the zoo poem. When you're too busy to write a couplet, you are too busy.

Poetry Friday: About Education

I am too busy these days.  I can tell because I'm not writing, I'm not blogging, and this week I didn't even read the Poetry Friday posts until Thursday evening (and I just skimmed a few).  I'm teaching and taking a class.  My grades are due next Wednesday, too, and teachers need no more information than that. 

Here's a poem for this week.  It seems appropriate.

To David, About His Education

By Howard Nemerov
 

The world is full of mostly invisible things,

And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye,

Or its nose, in a book, to find them out,

Things like the square root of Everest

Or how many times Byron goes into Texas,

Or whether the law of the excluded middle

Applies west of the Rockies. For these

And the like reasons, you have to go to school

And study books and listen to what you are told,

And sometimes try to remember. Though I don’t know

What you will do with the mean annual rainfall

On Plato’s Republic, or the calorie content

Of the Diet of Worms, such things are said to be

Good for you, and you will have to learn them

In order to become one of the grown-ups

Who sees invisible things neither steadily nor whole,

But keeps gravely the grand confusion of the world

Under his hat, which is where it belongs,

And teaches small children to do this in their turn.


Today's roundup is here.

Poetry Friday: October

October where I live brings some slightly cooler weather, but nothing like the drama of autumn in the north.  Here's Paul Laurence Dunbar on October, who is "whole-hearted, happy, careless, free."  Here's to October living this weekend!

October

OCTOBER is the treasurer of the year,
And all the months pay bounty to her
store;
The fields and orchards still their tribute bear,
And fill her brimming coffers more and more.
But she, with youthful lavishness,
Spends all her wealth in gaudy dress,
And decks herself in garments bold
Of scarlet, purple, red, and gold.
She heedeth not how swift the hours fly,
But smiles and sings her happy life along;
She only sees above a shining sky;
She only hears the breezes' voice in song.
Her garments trail the woodlands through,
And gather pearls of early dew
That sparkle, till the roguish Sun
Creeps up and steals them every one.
But what cares she that jewels should be lost,
When all of Nature's bounteous wealth is
hers?
Though princely fortunes may have been their
cost,
Not one regret her calm demeanor stirs.
Whole-hearted, happy, careless, free,
She lives her life out joyously,
Nor cares when Frost stalks o'er her way
And turns her auburn locks to gray.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Earthquake Poem

After the earthquake I wrote here, here and here about hearing my friend Magalie Boyer on the radio, being interviewed on the American Public Media show The Story. Hers was one of the respectful, loving, and deeply sorrowful voices coming out of Haiti in those terrible days, an articulate Haitian woman speaking her sadness about what had happened to her country. 

This week Magalie shared a poem with me that she wrote about the earthquake, and I immediately begged her to let me share it for Poetry Friday. Here it is.


Postmortem
by Magalie Boyer

Some things we lost in the earthquake:

The Ministry of Planification and of External Cooperation and the Ministry of Public Health

The Ministry of Finance and of the Economy and the Palais de Justice

The Primature and the DGI

The National Palace

Canado

Sainte Trinite and Sacre Coeur

The Wesleyan Church of Carrefour-feuilles

Maxo’s records, complete with his new-born picture, from Chancerelle

And Mario, who was 17 and albino

Marie-Lucie, a nursing student, Marie-Lucie and her 98 classmates

The habit of hearing harmony in the city’s cacophony

(As if the ensemble of tap-taps and 4x4s could be a choir!)

Our casual relationship with rank misery

The ability to match our tears to our grief

Jacmel’s invincibility

The mask of sufficiency

The fig leaf of society


 Here is today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Elizabeth Alexander 2

I'm back with Elizabeth Alexander today, after finishing listening to the podcast I linked to last week. Again, I enjoyed learning more about Alexander than that she was the poet who read a poem at Obama's inauguration. I loved so many of the things that Alexander had to say, and the poems that she read, that I had to feature her once more. Here she is on poetry as a poor people's art:

"So but I think poetry — you know, what I also like to continue what a number of writers — Lucille Clifton, Wanda Coleman — they've talked about poetry as an art form that is a poor peoples' art form, which is to say you don't need — you can't write a novel without a lot of time to yourself. They don't get written any other way. But I love how these women talk about how you can snatch time to make a poem. That doesn't mean that they aren't hard to make, but it means that they are like grass or flowers coming up in the sidewalk cracks. Wanda Coleman says, 'I can start a poem if I'm waiting on line. Poor people spend a lot of time waiting on line. I couldn't write a novel waiting on line, but I could start a poem waiting on line.' Lucille Clifton says, 'The best conditions for me to write poetry are at the kitchen table, one kid's got the measles, another two kids are smacking each other. You know, life is going on around me.' And not only is that the stuff of the poems, but also that she can snatch little tiny snippets of space for the poems. She had six children and she was very, very funny. She said, 'Why do you think my poems are so short?' Because that's what results when you're grabbing time like that. But, I mean, they are incredibly, powerfully meditative, amazing, amazing poems. So I think that there's a way that poetry — you don't make any money from writing it and you don't need any money to make it."

I liked this quote because I have been feeling lately as though I don't have time for poetry - for any of my own writing, really. Of course I'm teaching poems to my students, but I'm also grading their work and taking an online graduate class, and that doesn't leave much time for thinking and creating. But I need to "snatch little tiny snippets of space" more often. Later she talks about writing with a newborn:

"You just realize like, well, if you're gonna do it, just do it. Don't even think about doing it. Don't talk about doing it. Just do it. So actually, it was with my first child and nursing in the middle of the night and being, of course, so tired, but also wonderfully unguarded. I found that actually being that tired was fantastic for my poetry because I had no filters. You know, I'd have the baby in one arm and it would be three in the morning and I'd write some things down on any scrap of paper. I just grabbed the time I had."

Speaking of birth, here's the beginning of Alexander's poem "Neonatology."

Neonatology

 by Elizabeth Alexander

Giving birth is like jazz, something from silence,
then all of it. Long, elegant boats,
blood-boiling sunshine, human cargo, a handmade kite —

Postpartum.
No longer a celebrity, pregnant lady, expectant.
It has happened; you are here...

Here's the rest.


And with the combination of poverty and birth, I have to share this post too, written by my friend Beth McHoul. Yes, giving birth is like jazz, in all its improvisation and beauty and joy, but for too many women around the world, giving birth is terribly dangerous. Here's a poem I wrote about a scene I witnessed in Port-au-Prince right after the US election when Obama became president.

 November 7, 2008, Port-au-Prince

The Friday after the US election
 We were driving home on Delmas
And I saw a little family:
A man carrying a newborn with infinite gentleness
And a woman walking slowly behind him.
She had the doughy belly of recent childbirth.
My body felt that familiar soreness as I watched her.

Some women are pushed to the curb In a wheelchair
After the hardest work they'll ever do
And then helped carefully into a car
With a car seat awaiting the floppy-headed baby
And driven by a husband who tries to avoid every bump in the road.
This one walked home
With a towel tied around her waist
To hide any evidence of postpartum bleeding.

I wondered as we passed if she had named her baby Obama?
I wondered what his life would be like
With such a strong mother
And with a father who carried him home
With so much love and pride.

 by Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


Alexander says about poetry,

"I think that one of the great things about poetry, and many black women poets have written about this, that human beings have always made song. Communities, tribes, peoples, have always told each other the story of who they are in song."

This week, Elizabeth Alexander and Beth McHoul and Haiti have me thinking about poetry and song, birth and death, life and loss.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Elizabeth Alexander

Yesterday I started listening to a podcast featuring Elizabeth Alexander (you can find the podcast here), and I heard her read her poem "Ars Poetica #100:I Believe." When I went to her website to look for the text, I also found another that I liked even better. It's called "African Leave-Taking Disorder." I grew up in Africa and have witnessed this "disorder" many times, and even developed it myself. Far from being a disorder, it's a wonderful feature of the deep, satisfying relationships that people have with each other in traditional African culture, where hurry is not valued, and people matter more than things or events.

The poem begins like this:

Ars Poetica #28: African Leave-Taking Disorder

The talk is good. The two friends linger
at the door. Urban crickets sing with them.

There is no after the supper and talk.
The talk is good. These two friends linger

at the door, half in, half out, ‘til one
decides to walk the other home. And so

they walk, more talk, the new doorstep, the
nightgowned wife who shakes her head and smiles

from the bedroom window as the men talk
in love and the crickets sing along.

You can read the rest here.

The only Elizabeth Alexander poem I had ever heard or read before this podcast was her inaugural poem, "Praise Song for the Day". When Obama was inaugurated, I searched out all the poems that have been read at inaugurations (there aren't many) and read them with my eighth graders. After listening to the lovely conversation in the podcast (I'm still not finished; I'm listening to the one that's an hour and a half long, and I just can't ride the exercise bike that long), I am sure I am going to be seeking out more of her work.

Here's today's roundup.

Have a great weekend. Here's hoping you develop "African leave-taking disorder," and spend some time in deep, satisfying conversation.

Poetry Friday: The Sciences Sing a Lullabye

Last week I posted a poem my son shared with me; this week it's one from my daughter.

The Sciences Sing a Lullabye

by Albert Goldbarth

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you're tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They'll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Here's the rest.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

More After the Storm

“I put the baby under a table, and we tried to go under the bed, but there was water coming up from the floor,” said Ms. Millien, 35. “In past storms we could stand in the corners where the leaks are not too bad to stay dry, but with this storm there were no corners, there was no escape.”

from this New York Times article.

It's been a week since Isaac paid us a visit. I spent most of last Saturday sleeping, since I had spent most of Friday night awake. Our aftermath, as I wrote in an earlier post, involved cleaning up fallen branches and dealing with electrical and internet outages. We still don't have electricity back properly, though it's been on for five minutes here and there. Our neighborhood is full of the sounds of many generators. Anyone who can afford it here owns a generator, since power cuts are so common even when no storm has passed through. Our generator is running now, and it's loud and smelly, and I am so thankful for it.

But I never had to put a baby under a table, and I never had to stand in the corner to stay dry, and although it felt like the windows might blow out, I never thought my roof would blow off. And I don't live in a tent. And I know every single minute that the world isn't fair, and that I am outrageously privileged.

Poetry Friday: The Castle-Builder

My son showed me this poem, in a book we have called The Children's Own Longfellow. It seems appropriate in a week full of never-ending work.

The Castle-Builder
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A gentle boy, with soft and silken locks,
A dreamy boy, with brown and tender eyes,
A castle-builder, with his wooden blocks,
And towers that touch imaginary skies.

A fearless rider on his father's knee,
An eager listener unto stories told
At the Round Table of the nursery,
Of heroes and adventures manifold.

There will be other towers for thee to build;
There will be other steeds for thee to ride;
There will be other legends, and all filled
With greater marvels and more glorified.

Build on, and make thy castles high and fair,
Rising and reaching upward to the skies;
Listen to voices in the upper air,
Nor lose thy simple faith in mysteries.

Here is the roundup for today.

After the Storm

I've lived in Port-au-Prince for sixteen years, and Isaac is the worst storm I have ever experienced. There have been many storms that have done more damage to the country as a whole, but never any that battered Port-au-Prince quite this savagely. My husband and I were awake almost all night on Friday as the gusts of wind grew stronger and stronger. It wasn't as bad as an earthquake, but it was still pretty bad.

On Saturday my husband and kids cleaned up fallen branches from our courtyard and we eyed our solar panels dubiously; they didn't look good, but there wasn't any sun, so we couldn't check on whether they were working.

On Sunday afternoon we had a little bit of sun, enough to find out that the solar panels were still working. We also went over to our school campus to get online, since our internet at home is still down. I talked to the man who cleans my classroom, who was moonlighting as a gate guard. I told him that we were surprised by how bad the storm was, and he agreed that he was, too. I said, "They always say hurricanes are coming, and it's never anything," and he nodded. He said it was the worst he'd ever lived through, too.

I asked him how he and his family had fared and he said they were fine, but their roof blew off. They went next door and spent the rest of the night with their neighbors, and then in the morning he bought a tarp, which will serve as a roof until he can get his replaced. I asked if any other school employees had had damage to their homes. He said he only knew of one, who hadn't had a roof to start with, just a tarp. And of course, his tarp blew away. There may be others, he said. He'll find out when they come to work on Monday.

Before the earthquake I didn't even know the Kreyol word for tarp, prela, but now it's very much a part of my vocabulary. Many people continue to live under tarps or tents, two and half years after goudou goudou shook our city. There was money donated to help our employees, and all of their residences were surveyed; those who had earthquake damage received money for repairs. I don't know if the employee still living under a tarp chose to use the money for something else which he needed more, or if he lost his roof since then, or if he just feels safer sleeping under a lightweight tarp after seeing how many people were crushed under concrete roofs on January 12th, 2010.

You'd have to be a lot dumber than I am to miss the the contrast between the post-hurricane concerns at my house and those of my janitor. While I fret about internet access and solar panels, he drapes his home, containing all his possessions, with a tarp, and prays that this hurricane season won't bring any more unpleasant surprises.

Poetry Friday: Storm

Today, since Tropical Storm (formerly Hurricane) Isaac is bearing down on us, I will link you to my friend Robbie's poem about storms, and this one in particular. Here it is.

Today's Poetry Friday roundup is here.

Poetry Friday: An Ancient Gesture

An Ancient Gesture

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
Penelope did this too.
And more than once: you can't keep weaving all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;
And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you don't know where, for years.
Suddenly you burst into tears;
There is simply nothing else to do.

And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,
In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.
But only as a gesture,—a gesture which implied
To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.
He learned it from Penelope...
Penelope, who really cried.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

You can find a poem I wrote about Penelope here.

And here is today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: The Junior High School Band Concert

This poem makes me laugh and cringe a little as I get ready for my middle schoolers to descend on my classroom on Monday. What a wonderful, terrible time of life those early teens are. I wouldn't go there again for any money myself, but I get to experience it vicariously every year through my students.

The Junior High School Band Concert
by David Wagoner

When our semi-conductor
Raised his baton, we sat there
Gaping at Marche Militaire,
Our mouth-opening number.
It seemed faintly familiar
(We'd rehearsed it all that winter),
But we attacked in such a blur,
No army anywhere
On its stomach or all fours
Could have squeezed through our crossfire.

I played cornet, seventh chair,
Out of seven, my embouchure
A glorified Bronx cheer
Through that three-keyed keyhole stopper
And neighborhood window-slammer
Where mildew fought for air
At every exhausted corner,
My fingering still unsure
After scaling it for a year
Except on the spit-valve lever.

Here's the rest, and you can also hear the author reading the poem at that link.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Saturday

I got home to Haiti yesterday. Don't ask me how it's going for another week or two, please. Then I hope to have something good to say. In the meantime, working on fixing and setting up and getting going on a new school year.

Here's yesterday's Poetry Friday roundup.

Haiti Earthquake Survivor Lovely Avelus Finally Meets her Saviours

by Catherine Porter

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI—Some mysteries are like religion. They linger, forever out of reach, promising only possibility and puzzle. Others are like calculus problems, requiring investigation and pencil scribbling before proffering concrete answers.

There are many mysteries about the story of Lovely Avelus and the earthquake that cleaved this country 21/2 years ago. How did her little 2-year-old body, so small and bird-boned, survive the weight of two stories of concrete without even a scratch? How then did she survive there, trapped for six days without food or water or someone to buoy her little spirit with songs of hope and solace?

Here's the rest of the article.

What is Saving Your Life Right Now?

I never even heard of a synchroblog before last week, and now I'm participating in my second. Sarah Bessey wrote:

"I wrote a little post, late in the afternoon yesterday, in the stolen 30 minutes between my real-work for Mercy Ministries and the time when I had to head home to make supper. Just one of those quick, say-it-hot kind of posts, everything I was feeling and thinking condensed in a few paragraphs, it took about 20 minutes, and then I walked away. The crux of the post was a question that I lifted from Barbara Brown Taylor’s book 'Leaving Church' which I had recently re-read: 'What is saving your life right now?'. . . Write your own post on your own blog, answering the question: What is saving your life right now? Write it quick, don’t overthink it, just spill it all out, it can be pictures if you want, whatever. If you’ve already written one, feel free to link that up, too."

So here goes...what's saving my life right now?

I got this piece of wisdom in my fortune cookie yesterday:



I don't like change very much. I'm about to change countries, after a summer break in the US that went lightning-fast. I'm not ready. There were so many things I was going to accomplish, books I was going to read, words I was going to write, thoughts I was going to take the time to think. I don't want to be back in the whirlwind of school again, not yet.

And then there are some other changes ahead. My teaching schedule is going to change completely this year, after about six years of a similar way of doing things, with a new setup which I'm not entirely sure about. I'm going to have new classes to teach, plus I'm going to be taking a class online, with all the time-sucking and technological frustrations that entails.

And yet it's OK. One of the good things about being...my age...is that I'm finally learning a thing or two. One of them is that God is with me, and we'll get through this. It doesn't do a lot of good for me to become anxious, and more and more often, these days, I just don't. I'm getting better - not perfect yet - at taking my life one day at a time. Because as Jesus put it, each day has enough troubles of its own.

It's not dramatic, but not worrying is saving my life right now.

Poetry Friday: Olympics

So I was searching for something sporty to post today, in honor of the Olympics, and I found this from December 2010, explaining about how there would be a poetry wall in the Olympic Village. I did some more research and found this site, Winning Words Poetry. It turns out there's not one but many poetry walls.

Did everyone know this but me?

Here's the archive of poems from the site. You can search by sport or themes.

Here's a poem I found in the archive. This one isn't so much in celebration of sports but of London itself, shining during the Games which begin tomorrow.



Upon Westminster Bridge

Sept. 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

William Wordsworth


It may be still in the morning, but there's going to be plenty of activity the rest of the time! I love this picture, though, of that deep calm before the day begins.

The roundup is here today.

Edwidge Danticat on Art

This is a great interview Tavis Smiley did with Edwidge Danticat about her book Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. She explains why art is both a necessity and a luxury.

"Art is another way, besides breathing, that we let people know we are alive."

Poetry Friday

I was out all day today having fun, and I have nothing for Poetry Friday. But fortunately lots of other people posted. So go enjoy what they wrote!