The Good News of What To Do, 5.13.2017

A student asked Soen Nakagawa
During a meditation retreat:

“I am very discouraged. What should I do?”
Soen replied, “Encourage others.

May the sun's warmth continue
May its greatness be known
in its presence and absence
in both its excess and its void

May the rain continue
May its greatness be known
in its presence and absence
in both its abundance and its scantness

The Truly & Exceptionally Ecstasy-Inducing Good News, 4.29.2017

Last September, Brendan, and Jen, friends whom I had in Social Justice class years ago at SLU, told me that he had been diagnosed with malignant metastatic melanoma.  The other day, Jen sent me the following text: “We just found out that Brendan’s full body CT scan done on Tuesday was normal—so no signs of cancer 12 weeks into treatment and 6 months after his surgery!”

after diana di prima

I am full of things beginning

Look at all these names carved in this big old beech tree!

Where the grooves sprout clean shoots

Let it begin

I read the clarity of the sky and her haze

The way it hangs on the trees that bear my name

The milky dust that waits out the blue

Let it begin

The tulips will open!  

Golden Parade

Missouri Sweet

Her Victory

Let it begin

All the trees bear tags that each hold

A variation of the benediction  

In loving memory of our mother

Let it begin

Common witch hazel grows

The grass is ripe

With cardinal conditions

Let it begin

We talk our way down St. Felix Street

Attributes of banners and deer

Coronets at our feet

Let it begin

My son watches the dancers

Being fit for spring’s costumes

The pins are tucked slowly

Let it begin

The Endless Net

Ten years ago, I read Eliot Weinberger’s anthology, World Beat: International Poetry Now (New Directions, 2006). Looking back, I’m grateful, because that volume (re)introduced me to Israeli Aharon Shabtai, Iraqi Dunya Mikhail, and Chilean Nicanor Parra, all of whom I have read over and over since then. I encourage anyone to read Mikhail’s “The War Works Hard,” Shabtai’s “As We Were Marching,” and Parra’s “Seven Voluntary Labors and One Seditious Act.”  In his introduction, Weinberger offers a sobering yet hopeful case for us engaging poets outside the U.S.: “All translation sends the essential message that one’s own culture is not enough, and that the way to avoid intellectual stagnation is to learn from other ways of thinking about, perceiving, luxuriating and despairing in the world. This book appears at a moment when the United States is particularly self-absorbed. Less than a fifth of its citizens have passports; a third of its high school students can find the Pacific Ocean on a world map; its rulers dream without embarrassment of a global empire. Poetry, though not the salvation of the world, presents a small alternate model: an endless net of individual dialogues between writers, and between writers and readers, regardless of governments, nations, and communal identities. Its books are a way out of one’s world and a way into the world at large.” Twenty years ago, I received a doctorate from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. I rarely read theologians these days, and I eagerly take joy and refuge in the poets. Weinberger’s books helped facilitate this shift for me.

Eliot Weinberger

Reading Leads to Writing

1.

Yesterday I was rereading Chilean poet Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarations, which I first read in 2013, and came across this page with my scribbles:

When I moved to Atlanta as a teenager, my mother looked at a home just inside the perimeter that once belonged to Maya Angelou. 

We did not live there. Mom chose instead to move us into a townhouse in Sandy Springs to avoid to traffic on Ashford-Dunwoody. 

I could not pass the house in Dunwoody without thinking of Dr. Angelou-- her work as poet, novelist, activist; her uncredited turn as a dancer in Porgy and Bess; the bliss she found in the glitches of it all. 

Every time we drove by, I wondered what it would have been to have cooked in her kitchen, to have been a teenager within the energy of those walls. 

I have this quote tacked above my desk: 

"Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told, 'I'm with you kid. Let's go.’”