For the third year in a row, I attempted the NaPoWriMo poem-a-day thing. I managed 34 poems, one each day, 22 of which were small stones and the rest longer form poems. I always have mixed feelings about this as it tends to upset my usual inclination to do some revision before posting. Not that there wasn’t revision, just very little. Still, I think I have some things to work with.
In the past, I’ve managed to write a few April poems that I wind up liking, but this year I’m not so sure. I’m just happy that I was able to write every day, something of a small accomplishment in and of itself. For a while now, the past year really, I’ve been trying to find a way back into daily writing and now that sleep and restful nights are becoming more common, I’m finding the time to get back in touch with that part of myself.
As I said a few years ago after napowrimo, the time spent not writing is just as important as the time spent writing and that hasn’t changed, but carving out a little time to write has brought a bit more balance and even clarity to my days. I am the sort of writer who writes regardless of whether or not inspiration strikes, but if I don’t write every day, I won’t be ready when it does.
I’m still trying to make sense of writing and my relationship to it. I suppose I always will, but I do know that sitting and writing something—anything—every day is critically important whether what I write is good or a rambling post like this one.
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Kudos to some of my fellow poem-a-day writers: Deb, Angie and Joseph whose poems I read and greatly enjoyed even if I didn’t comment as much as I should have.
This is a fun book, and light-weight enough to slip easily in a knapsack with the field guides.
I like the idea of it joining the field guides on a birding trip. The review is part of Dave’s amazing annual effort to read and review a poetry book every day during the month of April. I usually wind up buying a few of his picks each year, and this year will be no exception so it’s indeed an honor to have my book included in such fine company. Do go check out the review and be sure to read about some of the other books Dave is reading. Thanks, Dave.
I tried doing this thing of regularly linking to 10 poems, and it rarely got done so I’m downshifting to 5 in the hope that I’ll do this more frequently. Sure it’s fewer poems, but it’s only to serve you better. And, shamelessly, I start off this edition of 5 Poems with one of mine.
“The Grackle” by Pat at Bailey Road: “With outstretched neck / He looks a bit odd / As he searches the skies / For the grackle god.” Wonderful grackle photos there too.
“Playing dodge ball in a super-collider” by Brian Miller: “Poe has a raven, Coleridge an albatross / and i / this parchment sky // where birds turn slow circles searching” Wonderful to find a vulture-inspired poem to follow the grackle one.
“Magpies” by Joseph Harker: “they arrow into the east (which is the future) / where the moon has come up like a wide / plate of marble. It is her face.” I’ve never seen a magpie since they don’t show up here in Texas, but there are a lot of really cool poems about them. This is one of them.
“Respite” by Deb Scott: “a pocket here, a soloist there / an unseen owl makes queries”. Birds and flowers from a spring walk. Great music in this one. Take the time to read it aloud. Deb’s also doing napowrimo so be sure to read some of the other poems she’s writing this crazy month.
First he thought it was the stars, that creaking groan and grind of tired years but with time the tension grew and he realized the problem lay not overhead but underfoot (as problems often do). Some days the gripping stuckness beneath his feet felt tighter and other days it felt looser like someone else’s shoes depending on where he walked and what he ate for breakfast. Out on the plains where the stars rattled so faintly as to be almost inaudible, he located the source of this tension, unzipped the blackland earth and studied the dull gears that moved the gears that made the world go round. He turned a wrench against the machine—so surprisingly simple to adjust, this mechanical universe—and retuned the planet’s motion relative to the earthly key of his own aspirations. That’s the way he explained his good fortune years later as he leaned back in the worn leather chair of his old age, smiling in the knowledge that he was now very close to achieving his lifelong goal of living happily ever after.
Mark Stratton, poet, blogger and author of Tender Mercies, interviewed me about writing, poetry, birds, my new book and other topics:
Without naming it, describe for me your favorite beverage?
My favorite beverage consists of ice cold hydrogen atoms joined in a 2:1 ratio with a crisp pure oxygen atom. This beverage is best served over the solid state form of itself.
I was amazed that I would even like pieces about birds- let alone, ones nobody loves. I mean, I could imagine poems about blue birds and peacocks and the like…but grackles?? Number one, what in heaven’s name is a grackle? To my amazement, I enjoyed each piece. By the third read, I was seeing layers in some of the pieces…wise layers…intriguing layers. I knew this was a keeper.
Dark and Like a Web: Brief Notes On and To the Divine (Broiled Fish & Honeycomb Nanopress, 2011) by Nic Sebastian and edited by Beth Adams has been following me around in my bag and on my phone for several months now. There is a lot of weight in this short collection of 15 poems, and it may not be too much to say I love this book.
Sebastian traces a spiritual path that resonates with me for its recognition of the longing for what is often right in front of us, though unnoticed and forgotten in the action and busyness of life. We wind up seeking something that’s really never very far at all. Sebastian doesn’t attempt to directly define the divine and I like that too. There are more questions than answers here creating an openness and space for the reader to enter and follow along on a shared journey.
In her introduction, Sebastian writes of being sick for silence and stillness which is where I was when I picked the book up last year.
my days are flocks of starlings
wheeling dark waves
of loud chatter
—”my days are flocks of starlings”
A year ago, I found myself “sick for silence” and set out to get back into my habit of walking and writing small stones, a kind of active meditation or prayer, if you will. Those starlings (well, they’d be grackles down here) can get out of hand… loud and noisy nuisance birds, flying in all directions, crapping on everything. With all that going on, it’s easy to forget to be awed by nature, the trees dropping leaves, the birds on their great journeys, even those starlings. To lose this is to close off an important path toward the divine, to stick with the poet’s usage, which I rather like.
home
because my breath ends
in silver plainchant
and woven silence
in you
—”the names of my breath”
There are other journeys too of course, those not marked by miles. The one called parenthood that we’re on now spirals, at this point anyway, deeper into home. My son who has the past week discovered consonants and repeats them endlessly, delightedly, as if singing the most wonderful song seems to me a gift… something so undeserved and precious as to make us wonder how we didn’t know he was missing during the years before he came. He sings his babbling song, we sing back, he responds with laughter and raspberries.
your step is like a small flame
and a song unfurling
—”antiphony in the hills”
Sebastian’s language and imagery—landscapes that evoke the widest vistas and the narrowest paths—are vibrant. This is a book that takes the reader on 15 journeys, each longer and deeper than the relatively brief poems that contain them. The journeys, of course, are one journey leading back to wholeness.
when I have readied myself
I rise whole from the pool at sunrise
and step into you as onto a straight road
—”when you come to me in the dark of night”
Oddly, or maybe not, this book speaks to me most of the end of journeys in which we may have experienced something of what exists behind nature, community, communion, and silence that can’t really be described or explained. It’s not nothing. It’s not imaginary. And in opening ourselves to it, we can find the recognition, warmth, healing and mystery that fill us up with an awe and wonder the way a woodpecker’s rhythm in the trees, a scorpion’s path along the road, the touch of a loved one or a baby’s laughter do.
In this book I’m reminded of the importance of finally coming home. Whatever that might mean to any given reader.
Or if you have one of them new-fangled e-reader contraptions, it’s available in both Kindle and EPUB format (it looks startlingly nice on the iPad I borrowed on which to test it):
These birds will continue to fly around the internet and automatically take up roost in many other online booksellers over the next few weeks.
I hope you’ll consider ordering a copy. Thanks also to all of you who’ve read and commented on these poems as they’ve appeared on this blog and in various other venues over the past three years.
I saw this video Beth Adams posted at Cassandra Pages a month or so ago and keep coming back to it as I start off on another River of Stones challenge. I began 2011 the same way and resolved to maintain the daily practice for a full year, at least. I made it to August 23 and then… school started, I ran out of ways to say the drought was slowly killing my state, it was too hot and the air too full of smoke and ash to want to go outside. Other things to do, and then, the world just went right on. It started raining (not enough, but it did) the weather cooled, I started sleeping again and then the year was at its end.
For the previous two years I’ve picked some favorite stones and made them into a chapbook to give away, but there wasn’t one for 2011. I just didn’t have time, couldn’t make the time (but mark did and he said his lovely Postmarks chap was partially inspired by my gnarled oaks) and then… I don’t know, I just wound up feeling like I’d let go of something important that I hadn’t meant to let slip and that was the practice of seeing, paying attention, and then recording my observations. I don’t know if it makes me a better writer to do this, I suppose it does, but I do think it makes me a better, or perhaps, more thoughtful person. As I’ve done before here, I paraphrase Pirsig in Motorcycle Maintenance: you are the cycle you’re working on. Writing stones isn’t about the writing, it’s about growing by connecting with a world spinning so fast as to seem out of control.
We have bags of clothes our six-month-old has outgrown. When we went to buy him some new clothes, we were shocked by how small all the three-month-old clothes were. Was he ever really that small? Where did the time go and how on earth did it disappear so quickly. It was only just July.
So, marking time, reflecting on it and slowing it and me down enough to really reside for a few moments in its stream… those are good reasons to start afresh observing and writing stones. As the video above reminds us each year is a collection of days, each kind of the same but passing quickly, sometimes too fast for the eye to take much of it beyond the larger picture. Thus the beauty, the importance, of small stones and the kind of awareness they engender when we set out to really pay attention.
Thanks, Fiona and Kaspa, for the river. I’m eager to dive back in.
I post my stones at my other blog, a gnarled oak. Please stop by and hopefully I’ll make it beyond August 23 this time out.
Birds Nobody Loves: A Book of Vultures & Grackles is available in paperback on Amazon and at my e-store. E-books can be downloaded from the Kindle store, and the iBookstore.
A Place Without a Postcard is available on Amazon.
2007: The Lost Book Club: On Writing — I saved Stephen King’s On Writing, which was referenced in the Lost episode “Every Man for Himself” for the end [...]
I’m thrilled to announce that my first poetry collection Birds Nobody Loves: A Book of Vultures & Grackles is now live.
