June 5: Edward Hirsch, "A Partial History Of My Stupidity," Dumbass

A Partial History Of My Stupidity

by:  Edward Hirsch

Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge,

and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,

and got stuck in the car for hours.

Most nights I rushed out into the evening

without paying attention to the trees,

whose names I didn't know,

or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.

I couldn't relinquish my desires

or accept them, and so I strolled along

like a tiger that wanted to spring

but was still afraid of the wildness within.

The iron bars seemed invisible to others,

but I carried a cage around inside me.

I cared too much what other people thought

and made remarks I shouldn't have made.

I was silent when I should have spoken.

Forgive me, philosophers,

I read the Stoics but never understood them.

I felt that I was living the wrong life,

spiritually speaking,

while halfway around the world

thousands of people were being slaughtered,

some of them by my countrymen.

So I walked on—distracted, lost in thought—

and forgot to attend to those who suffered

far away, nearby.

Forgive me, faith, for never having any.

I did not believe in God,

who eluded me.

_________________________

I start out most of my blog posts talking about myself.  I did this.  I did that.  I hate this.  I love that.  That's what blogging is all about--giving your opinion or ideas about something, for better or worse.  I don't think that I'm an expert on anything.  In fact, I think that I'm pretty stupid about a lot of stuff.

For instance, I don't know how to change the oil on my car.  (I can barely get my spare tire out of my trunk.)

I never remember the rhyme scheme of a villanelle, even though I call myself a poet.  That's what Google is for.

I often forget to bring my lunch to work.

I yell at my kids sometimes, even though they're just being kids.

I eat things that aren't good for me, like Cheetos and chocolate milk.

I secretly love watching Impractical Jokers.

I think Richard Brautigan is kind of a genius.

I prefer Adele songs over Beyonce songs.

I don't care for superhero movies.

I like the film Midnight in Paris, even though Woody Allen is probably a sexual predator.

See what I mean?

Saint Marty is a dumbass about a lot of things.

December 3: Praying, Joy Harjo, "Eagle Song"

I have been praying a lot this week.  Sometimes my prayers are for my friend Ray.  Sometimes my prayers are for my kids.  I pray for my car to start in the morning when the temperature is twenty below zero.  I pray for patience.  I pray for strength.

Sometimes my prayers are more amorphous.  They don't have a shape.  One of my favorites is "Help me, help me, help me."  Another of my favorites is "Thank you, thank you, thank you."  Prayer is pretty simple.  It's a conversation.  When I drive to work in the morning, I pretty much talk to God all the way.  I say things like "wow, look at that moon" and "I'm tired" and "I hope this day doesn't suck."  God knows my heart.  He understands all my faults and failings.

Joy Harjo understands about prayer.  Pretty much all poets do, I think.  Every poem is a sacred conversation.  Between the poet and God.  The poet and the reader.  Edward Hirsch says reading a poem is like finding a message in a bottle on the beach.  You read it and somehow are changed.

That's what Joy Harjo does.  She changes the world with words.

That's what Saint Marty tries to do, too.

Eagle Song

by:  Joy Harjo

To pray, you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know that there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear
Can’t know, except in moments
Steadily growing
and in languages that aren’t always sound
But other circles of motion
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River
Circled in blue sky, in wind
Swept our hearts clean with sacred wings
We see you see ourselves
And know that we must take
The utmost care and kindness
In all things
Breathe in knowing we are made of all of this
And breathe, knowing we are truly blessed
because we were born and die soon
within a true circle of motion.
Like eagle, rounding out the morning inside us
We pray that it will be done
In beauty, in beauty

Care to open the bottle with me?

April 27: Old Grendel, Edward Hirsch, "On Love," New Cartoon

"Well, most of the time we were on the Anglo-Saxons.  Beowulf, and old Grendel, and Lord Randal My Son, and all those things.  But we had to read outside books for extra credit once in a while.  I read The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy, and Romeo and Juliet and Julius--"

Holden is really well-read.  At the beginning of The Catcher in the Rye, he's reading Isak Dinesen, but, as he tells a young nun he meets at a diner, he's read Shakespeare and Beowulf, as well.  Holden doesn't shy away from poetry the way most teenage boys would.  Poetry seems to give Holden solace, even pleasure, especially when he's thinking about his brother, Allie.

Holden would appreciate poet Edward Hirsch.  Hirsch doesn't shy away from the forms and traditions of poetry.  Harold Bloom described him as "fresh, canonical, and necessary," a poet who embraces both lyricism and form.  His book, On Love, includes villanelle and pantoum, meditations on love in the voices of diverse writers (Gertrude Stein and and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to name a couple).  Hirsch approaches the subject of love like a linguistic anatomist--dissecting art and music and mythology and religion--to find the bone and muscle of this emotion.

The book opens with a meditation on the origin of love in a child, the need to escape ancestral grief in order to experience a future of hope and choice:

The Poet at Seven

He could be any seven-year old on the lawn,
holding a baseball in his hand, ready to throw.
He has the middle-class innocence of an American,

except for his blunt features and dark skin
that mark him as a Palestinian or a Jew,
his forehead furrowed like a question,

his concentration camp eyes, nervous, grim,
and too intense.  He has the typical
blood of the exile, the refugee, the victim.

Look at him, looking at the catcher for a sign--
so violent and competitive, so unexceptional,
except for an ancestral lamentation,

a shadowy, grief-stricken need for freedom
laboring to express itself through him.

This is a poem about the love of ancestor, or origin, expressed in the features, the collective unconscious, of a small boy.  He is a part of something larger that he can't define, yet feels in his body like oxygen or sugar.  It's nurturing and necessary.

The first section of the book is filled with personal reflections of love like this.  Lessons learned from childhood to adulthood, love of mother to love of wife.  The second section of On Love contains poems of dramatic monologue, Hirsch taking on the persona of many famous poets and writers, all of them examining some facet of love.  The "Prologue" to this section explains,

I woke up to voices speaking of love,
always leading me forward, leading me on,
taking me from the bedroom to the study
in the early morning or late at night,
emanations that seemed to come from night
itself, from leaves opening in the study
where many lives flow together as one
life, my own, these ventures in love.

What follows is a patchwork of love, each poem titled for the speaker/poet.  Taking on the voice of D. H. Lawrence, Hirsch provides this brief history of love:

After the sweet red wine and the dry lecture,
"The History of Love in Western Imagination"
(history is loveless without imagination)
we could not abide another listless lecture

and so we slipped into the castle library
and pushed highbacked chairs against a door
that refused to lock (so jam the door!)
and knelt to each other in the library.

I confess my fear of patrolling watchmen;
you seemed courageous and sure, as always:
I have learned to adore you myriad ways
of taking us back into man and woman...

And when we lay naked among the books,
the book shelves enclosed a sacred garden
for Adam and Eve safely restored to Eden,
ourselves immersed in a paradise of books.

Edward Hirsch gives readers a Eden of poems in On Love, each one a fractal, infinitely reflective of the patterns of love between man, woman, child, parent, descendant, ancestor, reader, writer, supplicant, and God.

Saint Marty loves On Love.

Confessions of Saint Marty

April 21: Unearthly Visitor, Sister's Birthday, New Cartoon

The curtains of his bed were drawn aside.  Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed.  The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them:  as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.

I really love this description of the appearance of the Ghost of Christmas Past.  Not because of the way the spirit actually manifests itself, coming to Scrooge at his bedside in the middle of the night.  The thought of some "unearthly visitor" suddenly staring down on me while I'm sleeping kind of scares the crap out of me.  No, it's Dickens' little appearance at the end of the paragraph, standing at our elbows like some extra Christmas phantom.

Whenever I write a poem or essay or story or blog post, it's a little part of myself that I'm sending out into the world.  Think about it.  Wherever you are reading this right now--sitting on the toilet, surfing the Net naked in bed, sipping a Diet Coke on the beach, sneaking a look at your desk at work--I'm right there with you, sharing the experience.  Depending on what you're doing, that may be comforting or embarassing.

The poet Edward Hirsch once compared writing a poem to scribbling a note on a piece of paper, stuffing the note in a bottle, and throwing the bottle into the ocean.  Eventually, that bottle washes up on some shore, and a stranger comes along, opens it up, and reads the note.  Any writer who says s/he doesn't think about that stranger is a liar.  All writers want to be read.  Just ask J. K. Rowling or Stephen King.  (Of course, they both could publish their grocery lists, and people would buy them.)

Today is my sister's birthday.  I forgot about it until this morning.  For some reason, I thought it was next week.  You, kind stranger on the beach, should have reminded me to get a card and a gift.  It's your fault.  The next time my sister's birthday rolls around, send me an e-mail reminder.  We will be having a party for her tonight.  By that time, I will have purchased something to commemorate her birth.

From now on, Saint Marty is going to blame his disciples for his mistakes.  After all, saints don't make mistakes.

Confessions of Saint Marty