The magic of paying attention: Mary Oliver's "A Thousand Mornings"

{photoshop image, The Octopus Garden}

I wrote about my favorite album of the year, Over the Rhine's Meet Me at the Edge of the World, back in September, which became an anchor for my soul this fall: an album I returned to countless times to be reminded of beauty and truth and the way I wanted to live. I also shared a link to an article I loved about their writing process.  In it, I found we shared a few common inspirations, which led me to check out some of the writers they mentioned, including Mary Oliver.  

Oliver's work is rooted in observing nature and cultivating a sense of place and in a quest to feel more grounded and aware, I took to reading her poetry collection A Thousand Mornings one poem at a time each day with my breakfast throughout October and November.  What I found while reading her work was that I began to look at the world around me in a different way.  Even though I live in a city, my eyes were sharpened and my breath deepened as I watched the rhythms of autumn and early winter around me.  I found myself staring at the patterns of leaf veins, and letting falling snow calm me down. 

I came across the image I included above while researching Oliver, and it has become a guide for me in pursuing a watchful spirit and a creative life.  Looking for reasons to be amazed, and living a life filled with wonder--especially when they don't cost a dime--is a game changer. 

Feeling September-ish. Or, how Over the Rhine reinvigorated my life last weekend.

This post switched directions a number of times as I wrote it this morning.  There are just a lot of big ideas swirling in my brain this week about music and art and words.  The short version is that music and lyrics breathe life into us.  If you want to take the long way around, read on.

Perfection, to me, often involves traveling with the right kind of music.  In college, I drove on State Route 73 in southwest Ohio at least three times a week.  Most of the time it was early evening when the light softens or at night--and out there you can see so many stars because Oxford, Ohio is surrounded by farmland.  Since I was in Oxford from September-May, these drives often were accompanied by open windows and the heat on my feet.  And of course, the right kind of playlist.  My car became a sanctuary of sorts that allowed me to have time and space to think by myself and my music--the 5 inch binder of CD options--was what spoke to me.  I'm realizing looking back just how important those moments of listening to music and lyrics was to my mental and emotional health.  Those were the days when music like Over The Rhine and Ryan Adams and Patty Griffin were brand new to me.  I heard Bela Fleck's Big Country for the first time.  The Dixie Chicks threw some attitude into my country music and Nickel Creek pulled me into bluegrass.

Since moving to New York ten years ago, my rhythms with music have changed considerably, mostly because one can't take the subway and look out on farmland at the same time.  Ten falls ago I walked with my tea to the Hudson River at Riverside Park seeking healing from homesickness and took the music that felt like home, namely the OTR's Ohio album.  When I moved downtown my river walks and runs changed me along with Iron and Wine and Sufjan Stevens and of course Drunkard's Prayer.  When I moved to Brooklyn, I commuted by foot and rotated The Head and the Heart, Fleet Foxes, Alicia Keys, Miranda Lambert through the streets of my neighborhood, along with a heavy dose of The Long Surrender.

Last March I moved out of the apartment I lived in by myself into one a stone's throw from work. It took me five months to realize that music wasn't playing in the way it once was.  Luckily, this realization came right before a new school year started, and therefore is helping to set the tone for this new season of my life.  September is essentially my new years, after all.  I was lucky enough to escape to Cape Cod during the four days before school started and poetically, Over the Rhine just released their latest album. I knew that to appreciate it fully I needed to hear it not just while doing dishes in my apartment, but away from the city.  I had just read an article about their writing process and learned that my life-line song on their last album was inspired by one of my favorite poets, Adam Zagajewski.  I also read how one of the new songs was inspired by Anne Lamott.  It all seemed too perfect a way to start a new year of teaching reading and writing--and to be reflective and writerly along the way.

So, I was with kindred music listeners.   We put it on as soon as we got past anything that felt like city life, and my ability to breathe deeply coincided with Karin Berquist's voice and Linford Detweiler's piano and the rapid increase in trees outside my window.  That was when I was reminded of driving on 73 in my home state--where the music and the lyrics hit you right where they need to and your lungs can fill with air again.

So all weekend, on near empty beaches, with coffee and Bailey's, and in a hooded sweatshirt I listened to Meet Me At the Edge of the World and felt whole and at home.

Under the Magnolia.

I came across this poem this morning while reading one of my favorite blogs.  It was timely because in my graduate class this week we were discussing poetry and I realized how much I had been missing it lately.  There is no other form that can capture so much with so little and, like the nerdy English teacher that I am, it hurts my soul that it is such a misunderstood genre.  I try to teach my students that poetry is one of the most powerful ways to share their voice--it distills the most power and leaves out the unnecessary that clogs so many texts.  

I've been talking with some people lately--and even in my last post--about living thankfully and gratefully, especially for the intangible.  This poem made me stop and think and breathe.  And it makes me want to write.  














Under the Magnolia by Carolyn Miller

I give thanks because I do not have
a great sorrow. My village has not
burned, my child has not died, my body
is not ravaged. I sit here on the ground
lucky, lucky. Somewhere, villages are burning,
somewhere, not too far away, children
are dying; in this great urban park
painstakingly constructed over sand dunes,
people live in the flowering bushes. But
just here, in front of me, is a bride and groom;
here is a child running with
a red ball; another child is rolling on
the grass. All I have to do is to decide
how much fear to let inside my heart
in this fragile, created place, this bowl of grass
surrounded by palms and cypresses and
shaggy-barked cedars and trees
whose names I do not know, long fronds
falling, clusters of lilac fruits depending like
bouquets. All we can do is trust
that we belong here with the flowers: white
iris and Iceland poppies, a blur
of primroses, beds where flowers are
a crowd of color, where they close in the dark,
where the first light finds them starred
with dew. The trees seem to know
what I do not know; even the cultivated grass
understands some chain of being I can only
guess at, whether it is God’s mind, or
the erotic body of the Goddess, or some
abstract kind of love, or
some longing for existence that includes
the fern trees, the new buds of cones on the
conifers, the white butterflies, the skating boys,
the hooked new buds of the magnolia
that look like claws holding on
to life, the curved thick petals of magnolia
in the grass, some gone to rust, some creased,
some streaked, others freckled, others magenta
at the curved stem end, others cracked,
all lined with long veins branching out
to the petal’s edge.

home.

{photo from Anthony Priestas}

There are days when I miss rhythms of home, even though I have lived in New York City for nine years and even though my parents moved out of the house I grew up in six years ago.  I miss when I used to jump in the car before dinner and find a cornfield to watch the sunset.  I miss the way the air smells when I lived in the updraft of the woods and a creek.  I miss drives through the country of southwest Ohio, especially the odd poetry of it being just south of industrial dinosaur bones.  There are some days that I want to cut down the wall leading onto my fire escape and make a porch.  Gah. It can hurt.

So, I thought I would make a round up of my favorite ways that Ohio has inspired song.  I love that even though not everyone who writes about my homestate loves it like I do (though, thank you, thank you Over the Rhine for understanding), but it inspires nonetheless. And, I don't have plans to move back, but there is no where else I wish I was from.

Ohio/Over the Rhine
Bloodbuzz Ohio/The National
Ohio/Damien Jurado
Carry Me Ohio/Sun Kil Moon
Look at Miss Ohio/Gillian Welch
Ohio/The Black Keys
Ohio/honeyhoney
To Ohio/The Low Anthem

{oh, barns}

{the best friends from high school i could ask for}

{this mixes with Brooklyn, right?}

truth.

I'm fractured
In the fall
and I want to go home

from Two by Ryan Adams

The kind of literary spirit I love.

"Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.  But it could blow someone's head off," (59).
from Lit by Mary Karr

Some words. Not mine.

It's all I have to bring to-day
This, and my heart beside,
This, and my heart and all the fields,
And all the meadows wide.

Emily Dickinson, C. 1858

a story about time, and. unapologetically, a story about love.

March was filled with two weekends of packing and moving, a favorite friend in town, the annual trek to Washington, DC with students and no internet at home for the past week. But. I am now moved in and attempting to have a normal-looking life again.

That being said, I've finished some books since I last typed on here: Lost Illusions by Balzac, Special by Bella Bathurst, Until You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson and The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.  I have dreams to backtrack and write about them all in the coming weeks since I've skipped out on my Saturday morning ritual for almost two months.  Hate that. We shall see. I most recently finished The Time Traveler's Wife, so I will start there.

I started out reading this because I wanted a quick, engaging read for spring break.  Many evenings were spent reading well into the morning. Henry is a time traveler who is not able to control when or where he goes.  In his twenties, after he meets Clare, his wife, he begins to travel back to her childhood.  Therefore, Clare always has memories of Henry, but Henry does not have memories of her until after they have met in real time, but is able to go back to other times of their lives with the perspective from the future (and yes, despite my Lost-watching, time travel is a difficult concept to wrap my mind around.)  Time and love are the two major themes I considered while reading.

Time is a funny thing that I can't stop thinking about lately, especially the relationship between time and self. When Henry visits from the future, young Clare isn't the same as the Clare in his present. When he meets 18-year-old Clare, he misses the depth that is the 33-year-old Clare. It is interesting to think about how time changes us and how it happens without us necessarily realizing it until we step out of it.  The core of me is the same, but I have changed so much in the nearly seven years I've lived in New York.  Though I can't plot out the exact moments that changed me, it is interesting to track our own stories of becoming...and to realize that I don't want to go back to my 23 year old self, as uneasy as I am to turn 30 this year.

I find myself always skeptical and sometimes cynical of saccharin literary love stories.  Because of the popularity of this book, I carried this attitude into my reading, but as it turns out, Henry and Clare's love story was beautiful in its complexity and imperfections and passion.

Time travel worked as a metaphor: in the present time Clare and Henry face incredible loss and it wears on their marriage.  Henry though, is able to revisit the times in their relationship when poetry was personified and was able to remember why love is worth fighting for.  I think that this concept is often lost on many of my own generation: things get difficult and the overriding belief is that it's easier to quit than to work through it--be it a relationship, a job, a dream. Remembering the good and true can completely change one's perspective.

What impressed me the most--or maybe what I connected to the most--about Niffenegger's book was her incorporation of poetry into the most emotionally charged moments.  I am a firm believer that poetry can encapsulate any moment better than prose or conversation or dialogue.  I am most often drawn to modern  and post modern poetry, but I was completely wrapped up in the verses from Homer's "The Odyssey" that Niffeneger leaves the reader with:

Now from his breast into his eyes the ache
of longing mounted, and he wept at last,
his dear wife, clear and faithful in his arms,
longed for as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer
spent in rough water where his ship went down
under Poseidon's blows, gale winds and tons of sea. 
Few men can keep alive through a big surf
to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches
in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind:
and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband,
her white arms round him pressed as though forever.
(translated by Robert Fitzgerald)


I could write about this excerpt from the Odyssey and draw comparison's about travel, difficult journey's and hardship, but I will spare you (unless you want to come over to the new apartment for a book talk, please do). But in a rare moment in which I will not apologize for waxing romantic, or in the back of my mind judge myself for being saccharin (because its not a good idea to mock the Beautiful) I will say this:  the idea of having a person as a metaphor for home, the idea that through all of the hardships there is someone who will fight for you and wait for you, someone who cares about where you are and who you are and whose eyes will light up the minute that they see you, that is a beautiful thing.

Finally beginning to feel at home.

Let us look for secret things
somewhere in the world,
on the blue shore of silence
or where the storm has passed,
rampaging like a train.
-Pablo Neruda, from "Forget About Me"


It's funny how life changes affect your ordinary rhythms of life. I started selling my furniture on craigslist in mid February, and since then I have felt like a bit of a nomad. As much as I think I would sometimes like to be a wandering traveler, the truth is that the concept of home is one of my anchors in life: whether it is the house I grew up in and its Bradford Pear trees and hill in the front, or my family's weekend rituals Saturday eggs and toast and newspaper reading, or my need to have a space carved out in my apartment that reminds me of the things I love and who I am.

It took me a full two years of living in New York City to feel ready to commit to it as home; to stop thinking about where I was going to be the next year and to let some of my newer roots reach out and grasp onto life here.  The trouble is that I'm living in my 5th apartment in New York, my second in Brooklyn.  Each time I've moved, I have attempted to make my new space feel like home as quickly as possible, my current studio is no different. Today is the first weekend morning where I have sat down to engage in my old rhythms that make me feel at home: making tea, listening to good music, reading and writing.  It's funny how it makes me feel like a person again and how these small little things finally make me feel at home.

I wrote about this nearly a month ago: looking forward to when I would be able to start the rhythms that keep me sane anew.  This week I made it to Prospect Park a few times in the evening to "look for the secret things in the world," as Neruda would say, to find the things that move my heart.   Because sometimes it feels like a storm has passed and nothing of beauty avails, but. When I open my eyes and breathe and look for the secret things, I find them. And breathe deeply.

because everyone needs some pablo neruda, even if you think you don't. his poems are good for the winter soul.

Here, There, Everywhere by Pablo Neruda
(Senor Neruda, un dia voy poder leer tu poesia en espanol. 
                                      Mucho amor, Kristen) 

Now the earth is spinning round me,
dizzying me,
like metal at the sound of bells.

Now I have all I have loved
within my little universe,
the starred order of wavs,
the sudden disorder of stones.
Far off, a city in rags
calling me, poor siren,
so that my heart can never, no,
scorn its weight of obligation,
and I with sky and poems
in the light of all I love,
poised here, swithering,
raising the cup of my song.

Oh dawn, breaking out of
the shadow and the moon in the sea,
I always come back to your burning salt.
It is your solitude always which moves me
and, back once more, I don't know who I am.
I touch the hard sand, I look at the sky,
I walk without knowing where I'm going
until out of the night
indescribable flowers rise and fall;
in the salty air
of the coast the stars quiver.

Wandering love, I come back
with this heart both fresh and wearied,
belonging to water and sand,
to the dry spaces of the foreshore,
to the white war of the foam.

Sometimes prose needs line breaks, needs to be read slowly, so that one's heart can feel the weight of the words and break a little, if it must.

"Well,
that's how thick 
I am, 
I never knew how 
to want 
what everyone wants.  
I only 
thought 
to look for a home, some place 
to be taken in. 
Handing over a crumpled heart, 
seeing it dropped 
in the wastepaper basket
every 
time." 


(written as prose on page 473, The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver)

Sometimes someone else's words say it all and it is best to say nothing else.

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

A clarification for the poetry you (maybe) read on this blog.

Yesterday the 8th graders had a poetry slam to celebrate the collections they published and all the life changing reading experiences they had (ha. I wish) during our unit. It really was one of my favorite moments of this year so far, though. 14 year olds willing to share their writing in front of 90 other students, and 90 other students willing to listen.

Teaching poetry is my metaphorical spring. I love finding ways to reveal just how life giving and refreshing reading it can be, and all of the opportunities for creative expression and freedom in writing it. One of my teaching goals for the year has been to write along with my students, which is hilarious because my students are precious enough to think that everything I write is amazing. I am obsessed with revision. I try to arm students with strategies and encourage experimentation. As I was trying to model what experimentation looks like, I ended up learning a lot about myself as a poet.

One, I like powerfully descriptive language in prose, but I don't like to overdo it in poetry. I've found that the poetry I am most excited about writing is when I try to capture a single moment in words and simultaneously give the reader a picture of what was happening while conveying its emotional weight. I tend to do this mostly through steam of conscious-style writing paired with meaningful line breaks. I love how one single image can speak volumes beyond itself.

So as I was experimenting with my own work in front of my class, I found I didn't like a lot of the revisions I was making when I was intentionally trying to include poetic devices. Granted, my rewrites were way better than the deliberately bad poems I started with, but they did not seem to have my voice and identity in them. For this reason, I didn't "publish" a collection with them, because despite my best efforts and seeming "good" revisions, I felt like a fraud.

This caused me to take a look at the poetry that I have written, and then feel compelled to explain it. Two of the most influential poets in my life are Pablo Neruda and Jack Kerouac. Neruda's use of language--even in translation--is musical without music, deeply beautiful at once transcendent and cascading and I always imagine someone who is talking with such deep passion that he forgets to breathe. (please read for an example. or google Sonnet 17.) Kerouac's western haikus are the pared down version: "Above all a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella." He was able to get "the rendering of a subject's essence, and the shimmering, ephemeral nature of its fleeting existence," (Weinreich):

Frozen
in a birdbath,
a leaf.

My hope in my own poetry is to work toward combining these two styles; to try to convey the weight of a nuanced image and the way my heart can just drop to the ground, but in the good kind of heartbreak. I'm not sure that I felt I had to write this to justify my writing style to you, but more as a means to process through who I am hoping to become as a writer?

To close in another's words, an excerpt from anArs Poetica that I found recently. It seems to almost perfectly describe the art of capturing of a fleeting moment that becomes timeless and heavy:

Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish


A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

*

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

*

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean
But be.