On Two Challenges to Art and Poetry

I've written an article on enjoying art and poetry for a friend's blog called Fragments. Hope you enjoy.

Dear Addie

Dear Addie, young child, don’t be fooled or benighted—
I’ll tell you the truth so you know,
And have in your heart all that schoolishness righted,
And grasp wonder well as you grow.
The breeze doesn’t blow from here to there,
Like a rivulet wand’ring at will;
The earth rolls around underneath all that air,
While the air remains fixed and still.
The trees and rocks, like your music box,
Are the tiny points jutting above;
And, pricking the tines as time unwinds,
They play out the song that we love.
Look up and see each tip-tilted tree
Whooshing as we fly along!
Press your delicate ear to a pine and hear
Its lilting and lovely song:

“Oh we know the way to the break of day,
Where the songbirds will beckon us bide,
But how can we heed, for we dare not delay
The sonata of eventide.
And oh! What delight—for then plays the night
With its blue tinkling grace notes of stars;
And they all invite the moon to ignite
Risoluto the rest of the bars.
The sunsong is long, but it sweetens the wheat,
Which quivers like golden strings.”

And you too my child, when you walk on your feet,
Make the music play wonderful things.

Some video highlights from kayaking the Rogue River in Oregon

Memory

With winter wind come the dusty white fragments,
Borne out of the vacuous alpine chill as falling stars--
Scepters, scintillating shafts and diamonds interlaced,
Entangling, entwined along the pinnacle crags.

I reach my hand slowly into the ethereal blanket
And pour out its weightless sand from an open palm.
Drifting flakes instantly flurry to fill the trough
And round the little mound with renewed softness.

The pines around the ridge grow gray with hoar,
Pointing into the wind with whispering fingers
Too quiet to reveal the secret they all descry
In the distance. Soon they are white, all white.

Through the receding clouds night calls up flightless
Feathers to stretch and catch the morning’s sun
And fling its sparks to set the ice aflame with
Light before they bow finally to its warmth.

Storm and clear, night and day this place receives
Afresh each fine dance of crystal wind upon it;
But here and there in secret places I can discover
The one laid upon the other in gentle anamnesis,

And even when crystal streams have sipped the last drops
From this peak to slake the waking summer swelter,
You and I will spread a blanket upon the ground, and
Lay upon it cheese, and music, and an enduring hour or two.

And beneath that hour I will still find the summers
Of sixth and seventh grade with their campfires and
Milky stars and chilling dips in the lake with the
Other boys whose company swirled around me with contentment.

And beneath those I still stand as a child next to my father,
Saluting for a photograph my mother took, while my brother,
In yellow shirt with Popsicle stains, grins through missing
Teeth, and my tiny sister grins obliviously from a backpack.

Endangered Species

A lot of thought and effort is rightly put into preserving endangered species. We value uncommon animals in large part for their rarity, like gems and most other things in nature. For good reason, we fear losing them altogether.

Not so with words. Did you know that endangered words can be removed from the dictionary? It's like saying to the cute but odd-looking vaquita, "Sorry, you had your day, but hardly anybody knows you exist anymore"--and then wiping the last one off the face of the globe.

Many people are not even aware the vast majority of dictionaries today operate descriptively of word usage, not prescriptively. In other words, the main thing they care about is what words are being used today, plain and simple; and that's ultimately what determines whether you'll find a word in a dictionary.

That's right, dictionaries are not going to prevent words from going extinct. Only you can prevent words from going extinct--by using them. Fortunately, it's easier than ever, since dictionaries can now monitor usage electronically. You don't need to be publishing books. You might just be a humble blogger.

Here's a poem I wrote in honor of endangered words, and sharing a love for them.

Endangered Species

In olden times a courting gent would go

A hunting for a dazzling bird to capture,

Which, gifted to his lady love, would show

His heart’s enthraldom to her cage of rapture.

The rarer bird, the greater gift it made—

Bright, speckled shafts and plumage colors gay.

So why the rarer word that’s seized and said

In lovesick missive falls so flat today?

In blackest depths of lexiconic tomes,

Some species flit and flaunt their feathered grace

That not in centuries have made their homes

In any work considered commonplace.

Their native habitat destroyed, they hide

In dusty warrens carpet beetles chew.

Each dwindling species light and life denied

Will perish without other words to woo.

So let me lowe[i] in limerence[ii] to thee

With logophilian[iii] philter[iv] overflowing,

And if lingual feathers fan philocaly,[v]

Then flock with me, and I will keep on crowing.

[i] To be ardent or passionate; to burn with love, passion, etc.
[ii] The state of being romantically infatuated or obsessed with another person, typically experienced involuntarily and characterized by a strong desire for reciprocation of one's feelings but not primarily for a sexual relationship.
[iii] Logophilia n. Love of words.
[iv] A potion, drug, or (occas.) charm supposed to be capable of exciting sexual attraction or love, esp. towards a particular person; a love potion. Also, more generally: any potion or drug having supposedly magical properties.
[iii] Logophilia n. Love of words.
[v] Love of beauty.

The Normal Day to Day

In an effort to force myself to write creatively with regularity, I've engaged several friends in a weekly poetry challenge in which we write and share a poem each week. I've found the medium useful in expressing thoughts and images that wouldn't otherwise have an easy outlet.

One of these thoughts hit me the other day. I'm a fairly deep-feeling person, and I enjoy challenge, novelty, passion, and maybe even a kind of melancholy if I can find a positive use for it. But I also occasionally find myself in one of those intense or discouraging moments having had enough, and struggling to find the end of it. To use the metaphor of boats, it's like feeling seasick without a port anywhere nearby. Or, as I've often heard repeated in the flying community, "It's better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than in the air wishing you were on the ground." 

The thought that hit me was a thankfulness that the "ground" usually comes to me without my necessarily having worked through or resolved whatever issue was rocking my boat. Sometimes the only difference is a night's sleep, even if the circumstances are exactly the same in the morning. We begin another day brushing teeth, making coffee, scrambling eggs. It's all still there, and the world is somehow bigger and more stable than it felt.

Many times I've bemoaned the negative side of this normalizing tendency, how my human nature gradually (sometimes quickly) normalizes something that amazes me or gives me wonder. As David Wilcox observes in Travelling Companion, "I'm sure if we all could sort of...jump and fly through the air we'd be really happy for about, you know, a week. And then we'd be sitting around saying, 'Well, I don't know, everybody can fly, you know, I'm nothing special...'"

But perhaps the automatic relief normalcy offers outweighs the fact that we must fight as if against gravity to maintain the soaring wonder that makes our lives so exciting. I'd never wish my life to be mundane, but for the first time I've come to consciously appreciate that I don't have to beat every storm with my own resources. Sometimes all I have to do is wait a bit.

This is a poem about that:

The Normal Day to Day

Thank God for the normal day to day,
The firm ground beneath the heights we soar,
The plain daylight above our deepest pits,
The pull of gravity that meets our feet in the morning
And makes every next step sure and familiar. 

Thank God that when tragedy blackens the mind,
And loneliness promises to gnaw us every future hour,
They somehow dissipate on the sandy shore of normalcy,
And we need only wring our socks from the tempest
That tore at our tattered souls the night before.

Thank God the wind abates and between every storm
Miles of mild weather stretch out and seem to say,
“Not yet. No more for a while. Now is rest again.”

And though we will grow restless and hunger for adventure,
We shall surely meet it with bravery and strength drawn
From the normal day to day.

Postcards

Several years ago I went for a drive through the rural cornfields of Maryland's eastern shore, looking for nothing but whatever might come along. I came across an antique store that sold, among many other odds and ends, old postcards, many of which had been used.

I don't know how the thousands of postcards ended up there and for sale--perhaps auctioning off the estate of a deceased relative, hoping to liquidate anything of value. Today most would consider reading another's personal correspondence a brazen violation of privacy. We hide it all in deeply encrypted, password-protected, electronic vaults, and heaven knows what will become of it should we pass away.

I feel differently about personal correspondence, at least I like to think I do. Almost four months ago I sailed down the Pacific coast of Baja, California with several friends. Reaching the end of our journey in Cabo San Lucas, a friend and I went up to surf in Todos Santos, and camped out for the night. In the morning my backpack, along with everything in it, had disappeared from my side. The first thing I thought of was my journal and the nine months of daily musings in it, as well as two letters I'd written to friends during the journey but not yet had time to mail.

Oddly, I felt sick at the idea of the loss, not chiefly because my journal was gone, but because nobody was ever likely to read it, in a place where English speakers were relatively few. I imagined it in a trash can somewhere rotting, and just found myself praying it wouldn't be a total waste, that something good would come of it.

I used to think I journal daily for my own benefit, but I began to realize I write for posterity--for the unknown later generations, hopefully mine but perhaps completely unrelated to me. Yes, I write about many intensely personal things, but who am I to clutch them so tightly as my own? An intricate web of circumstance and relationship connects me inextricably to the beautiful, tragic, mysterious world around me.

Several weeks ago an artist from Canada who had a house in Baja contacted me through my photography website and asked if I had lost a journal. Someone left it on a rock in her driveway. I had given up all hope of ever finding the journal again, because I hadn't even put my own name in it, let alone any contact info. But apparently on one of the pages I had affixed a name tag from some special event I had attended, and my name not being a very common one, this woman eventually succeeded in tracking me down.

When I received the package in the mail, she had slipped between the pages an original watercolor of the glorious desert mountains in Mexico she passed by on her long drive back north. I found myself thumbing through the old familiar pages, kind of hoping this stranger had perused some of them, and maybe even resonated with something I wrote. I doubt I will ever meet her, but perhaps that anonymity lends ease to our longing to be known. Perhaps that's why blogs exist at all.

In any case, I felt little compunction looking through the postcards at the antique store in Maryland, and choosing some to take home and muse upon. A Lake Como landscape from a college student to his professor, probably at Dartmouth. Someone's first trip on a ship to Copenhagen. A daughter writing to her mother from a cabin in the mountains, discussing flowers, and worrying about something ailing her father.

I came across this wonderful article about the endangered species of handwriting. Maybe we feel safer and happier with our correspondence locked away in virtual fortresses, though even there rumors buzz over who's being allowed into them and for what reasons. I'm obviously not one to worry too terribly much about my correspondence being read either way. But I like to think about how much we have benefited from yellowed, inky letters and manuscripts, both published and unpublished, famous and obscure.

When I am long gone, I hope a little treasure trove of letters, postcards, journals, ideas, and paintings seeps out through that tangled web of relationships and inspires more of the same among loved ones and strangers.