April is National Poetry Month

Another April, another National Poetry Month when I get an email every day from Knopf with a poem and some additional info, maybe another poem or two. I've meant to add poems to this blog and have been thinking of other things. So today two Japanese poems and one fragment. Fragment first, the last section of Wallace Stevens'"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird
sat in the cedar-limbs.

From Dogen's "Poems on the Treasury of the Clear Seeing Eye"

Unmoored
In midnight water,
no wave, no wind,
the empty boat
is flooded with moonlight.

And by Li Po, "I Make My Home in the Mountains"

You ask why I live in the mountain forest,
and I smile, and am silent,
and even my soul remains quiet;
it lives in the other world
which no one owns.
The peach trees blossom,
The water flows.

I am reading a book of essays by Jane Hirshfield [from 1997] called Nine Gates, Entering the Mind of Poetry. I'm sure she chose to say "poetry" and not "the poet" although I believe she enters the mind of both. It is very insightful and enlightening, perfect to read this month. It is one of my many serendipitous finds at the Housing Works Thrift Store, apparently once read with occasional little check marks in the margin but no commentary and in pristine condition as if it hadn't been read. For so much satisfaction I paid $3.00 I often find that books come into my hands or to my attention just at the right time.

National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month. For the third year I am on Knopf's list of people to whom they send a poem a day during April. It's lovely to know my email will contain a poem each day. Today I'm going to quote a part of a longish poem by Galway Kinnell that I have recently come across all by myself. The title is When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone. There are eleven thirteen line sections, this is #8.

When one has lived a long time alone,
one likes alike the pig the who brooks no deferrment
of gratification, and porcupine, or thorned pig,
who enters the cellar but not the house itself
because of eating down the cellar stairs on the way up,
and one likes the worm, who by bunching herself together
and expanding rubs her way through the ground.
no less than the butterfly, who totters full of worry
among the day-lilies as they darken,
and more and more one finds one likes
any other species better than one's own,
which has gone amok, making one self-estranged,
when one has lived a long time alone.


This is a crochety older person poem, a bah-humbg poem, a hell in a handbasket attitude. Well said, Mr. K. Far better than I ever could.

But to return briefly to the ongoing -- let's not forget there are ongoing problems. Thanks to my favorite blogging American Buddhist monk stationed in Mongolia, Konchong; is the following link to click which will take you to the English section of a blog by a
Brazilian photographer and journalist in Kathmandu who went to a peaceful protest with a group of nun and reports with some pictures, how Tibetans are being treated in that country which has a most ambivalent attitude, thanks to pressures put on them by the Chinese, who, of coures make up their northern border. If Konchong says Heraldo is worth reading, you better believe it. If you want to check on Konchung, here's
his link
just click.

Poetry month

April is Poetry Month - I'm not sure who so declared but for the last two years I've been on the list of persons (25,000 +/-) who receive via email from Knopf, the elegant publisher, a poem a day the whole month of April. Today's poem, my second, was by Marge Piercy, a nice but not exciting poem. Often other goodies are included. Today, this being the second Passover seder, it included Marge's recipe for egg salad. Unlike any egg salad I ever heard of but maybe after listening to the first hour of a the Haggadah reading and watching your family's usual antics, it's a welcome break. Let's just say it consist only of sliced cucumbers, sliced fennel and sliced hard boiled eggs with an oil and lemon juice dressing. [UGH - maybe it's just my taste} I would prefer the sliced fennel plain, or with a nice mayonaise.

The point is that, yes, I am quilting, really rather furiously, my 21st star quartet is turning into a summer bed quilt and will need either 15 or 20 blocks instead of four. Lot-sa sewing! Picture in the near future.

My first salute to Poetry Month is from the wonderful Polish Nobelist, Wislawa Symborska from "Allegro Ma Non Troppo".

Life, you're beautiful (I say)
you just couldn't get more fecund,
more befrogged and nightingaily
more anthillful or sproutssprouting.
I'm trying to court life's favor,
to get into its good graces,
to anticipate its whims
I'm always the first to bow,
always there when it can see me ...

April also includes Earth Day so I imagine I'll be back to the subject of global warming too. What I'm noticing today is that the great tectonic plates under the Pacific are in a period of great activity. Another quake, another tsumani, thougth mercifully smaller -- unless you're a Solomon Islander. This has nothing to do with global warming, it's the natural shifting and settling and streteching of the body of the earth and we specks on its surface are simply sometimes in the wrong place.