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More on Archimedes: Poem and Reflections

August 22, 2012

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He said: Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.” Some commentators think he also mentioned “a lever long enough” but this seems not to be the case, though he was speaking in connection with the use of levers.

I don’t know how Archimedes pictured the earth that he would be able to move, but I have trouble imagining his lever working on the round and ever-in-motion world we live on.  If it had curved tines like a fork, perhaps, the lever could catch it.  A giant shovel?  And when he lifted it up, where would he put it?

On a Roll

Ancients admired the
untiring sun. Unaware
this solid earth rolls ever
eastward, they charted
elaborate ellipses to
explain shifts caused
by the planet’s tilt.

Circling days spiral
down, spiral up, Europe
chasing Asia, which gets
to morning first every time.

Westward movement,
once search for Asia’s
back door, becomes
drive “into the sunset,”
where civilization has
gone to die.  And still
we praise the dawn.

Of course, Asia only gets to morning first because of the international date line, which was set by those folks in Greenwich, England.  If Japan had set the international clock, would the dateline be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean instead of the Pacific?  One more thought to ponder.

I find even more to ponder in the question of “a place to stand.”  The question of where we stand has been addressed by many scholars in this post-modern era.  The general impression is that no two people stand in the same place; this challenges the possibility of real communication.

Fortunately it’s in our nature to keep trying to communicate. One function of poetry is to connect people across the different places on which we stand.  Another is to explore the metaphors and assumptions that determine the place where each of us stands.  Do any of us have solid ground under our feet?  Physically, we have shifting tectonic plates beneath us and space all around an ever-rolling globe.  It’s up to each of us to find a spiritual view that fits―for us―with that reality.

“’On A Roll” was first published in Lunarosity, a fine ezine which is now defunct.

Archimedes, Aristotle and Earthquakes

August 18, 2012

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I’ve been thinking about the Greeks and their science, as I try to pull together a chapbook of poems on themes related to Archimedes and his lever.  Archimedes is not the only Greek scientist who intrigues me.  Aristotle is one whom I like first for his ideas on rhetoric, still the basis of many classifications on that subject, but also for the ideas described in the middle stanza of the following poem.

The Search for Order

The ancient model,
in polished brass, expressed
proportions undisturbed
by motion.  Harmonic
spheres keep turning.
Had the world such music
there would be no static
on the FM radio.

Aristotle understood:
the world beneath
the moon is set apart
from celestial, perfectly
governed spheres.
We are the spoiled core
of an ideal cosmos,
its worm-eaten pit.

Aristotle stood at
the center.  My universe
runs away at light speed,
while beneath me tectonic
plates shift, collide.
I long for balance: spheres
encircling the stillness
of mere decay.

The idea that the ground beneath our feet is unstable is not new.  I grew up in California, where earthquakes are a fact of life.  I used that as an image in an earlier poem:

Fire At The Center

My mother came home
from a course on personality
with a slip of paper:
“Your dominant emotion
is rage.”  She went on being good
and dull as plowed dirt.
Where is sure footing
when ground shifts?
The San Andreas fault
did not run under the house,
but whether it lay east
or west I could not say.
Which way would the earth tilt?

When she muttered
“Death and transfiguration!”
I heard a danger
no “Damn!” could hold.
The fluid at her core
lay ready, like crayon
melting under an iron,
to stain us both.  Her fire
never broke the surface.

And I?  The astrologer
finds Mars at the nadir,
“fire in the depth of your being.”
Eighteen years we spent
adjacent, distanced
by unacknowledged fire.
It is safer not to ask
where the fault lies.

In this poem, the shifting ground is largely metaphoric.  Although I knew about earthquakes, it was more an idea than experience: I only recall one small quake from my childhood.  I missed the big ones that later toppled the Oakland freeway and broke the walls of my cousins’ home in the mountains.  My awareness of shifting ground was not in the body.

By the time I wrote “The Search for Order” I was in a more unsteady place psychologically, a more mature understanding of grounding and groundlessness.

I decided this was a theme worth exploring further.

“The Search for Order” was published in Bibliophilos, which has published several of my poems on Greek themes.
“Fire at the Center,” first appeared in Metis, August, 1995, and is included in my chapbook, Accidents, described on the Books page.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Ingersoll!

August 11, 2012

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Robert Green Ingersoll was born August 11, 1833, in New York State.  His father was a minister whose calling meant that the family moved frequently to different places.  Robert’s mother died when he was young, leaving two older sisters to “mother” him.

After service in the Civil War, which earned him the nickname “Colonel Bob,” Ingersoll became a successful lawyer, first in Peoria, Illinois, later in Washington, DC and then in New York City.  He first came to national attention as a speaker in 1876 when he made the nomination speech for James G. Blaine at the Republican National Convention.  Blaine lost out to Rutherford B. Hayes, but Ingersoll’s fame as a speaker was set.

Although he was involved with some headline trials, and gave many speeches in support of Republican candidates, Ingersoll’s real contribution to society was in his effort to bring reason to bear on the religious doctrines that flourished in his day.  Ingersoll’s father’s faith had been Calvinist, believing in the fallenness of humanity and God’s election of certain persons while condemning others to an eternal hell.  This strict orthodoxy was being challenged by the time Ingersoll began speaking out, as the churches struggled with developments in science, Biblical criticism, and other research.  In spite of the growing questions, an orthodoxy that focused on the hope of heaven and the fear of hell dominated popular thinking in the second half of the nineteenth century.

A lecture called “What Must We Do To Be Saved” was one of Ingersoll’s successful and repeated challenges to orthodox Christianity.  In this lecture, Ingersoll uses a review of the gospels in the New Testament to make his case.

He focuses first on the Gospel of Matthew.  He finds there the beatitudes (“Blessed are the merciful . . .”), the explanation of the Lord’s Prayer (“For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you.”), and several other passages which support the idea that it is right behavior, not belief, that God asks of us.  Given the current state of Biblical criticism, however, he felt free to mark as an interpolation anything that did not fit with this developing picture.

Ingersoll went on to review the Gospel of Mark, where he found one text he found offensive; current Biblical scholarship agrees that it is a late addition.  The King James Version of the Bible includes without question the ending to Mark now seen as a pastiche of later interpretation, which includes the statement: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.”

Dismissing this selection as interpolation, Ingersoll finds Mark and also Luke basically in agreement with Matthew.  He dismisses the whole Gospel of John as written not by those who knew Jesus, but “by the church” and therefore not relevant to his argument.   From this survey Ingersoll concludes that the God of Jesus is merciful to those who show mercy, forgives those who forgive, operates according to the Golden Rule, and would in no circumstances send anyone to everlasting suffering in hell.  He closes the lecture by saying:

The honest man, the good woman, the happy child, have nothing to fear, either in this world or the world to come.
Upon that rock I stand.

“What Must We Do To Be Saved” is one of Ingersoll’s more gentle attacks on orthodoxy.  Sometimes he enlivened it with an introduction on the horrible deeds ascribed to the deity in the Old Testament.  In other lectures he focused on the books of Moses or on the crimes of the church in medieval times.  As he became better known he could expect to fill the largest hall in every city he visited.  He did not always speak on these issues.  People were eager to hear him on topics like Shakespeare, Robert Burns or Lincoln as well.

Ingersoll quickly became a favorite of freethinkers around the country.  He was giving popular credence to their claims and ideas.  After he died in 1899, one follower called Ingersoll “a prophet of the future, the light-bringing herald of the dawn.”  Ingersoll was placed alongside Thomas Paine as a second American freethought hero.

He’s one of my heroes because he did wonderful things with language.  His lectures are fun to read, with their rolling phrases and sly jabs.

For a full description of Ingersoll’s life and lectures, I recommend Frank Smith, Robert G. Ingersoll: A Life (Prometheus, 1990).

Recommendation: Sean Hill’s “Blood Ties and Brown Liquor”

August 8, 2012

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I “discovered” Sean Hill through a poem published in Poetry magazine this past April.  Titled “Bemidji Blues,” it describes snow, shadow, cold and music in the city in which Hill now lives, Bemidji, MN.  The craft of this poem is wonderful―particularly its shape and the way in which he repeats words (in different meanings) as end rhymes―so I went looking for other work by him.

Hill’s first – and so far only – book, Blood Ties and Brown Liquor, (University of Georgia Press, 2008) describes a totally different world, the world in which Hill grew up, the town of Milledgeville, Georgia.  The craft is equally good, involving many different forms, and there are a variety of experiments.  The combination of this craftiness with the serious subject of what it was to be African American in earlier generations, is powerful.

This is the only book of poetry I have read which includes a genealogical chart – of a fictitious family.  Silas Wright and his forebears are a major subject of the book.  However, some of Hill’s actual family are also included, such as his grandmothers and their stories.

A series of six poems titled “b. Nov. 14, 1926: Grandmother poems” appears to draw on actual remembered stories.  Here is one of them:

#1: Ernest and the Plowing Bull

On the farm we growed cotton for sale and corn
greens potatoes peas sweet potatoes and okra to eat―
three milk cows a mule and chickens for eggs and meat.
I had two brothers, in 1921, ’22 and ’26 we was born.
Phineas the oldest Ernest next and I was the baby.
Lived with my mother and father, Inez and Charlie―we called
her Nin―and grandmother and grandfather, Eva and Sam.  Y’all’d
liked Ma Eva. She and Nin they’d go out for the cows and bring em
up to the house so we’d have milk fresh from the teat.
Ernest had a bull.  He broke him to the plow.  Bull named Pete.
He would plow and Ernest could even ride him.
They’d tromp through the yard―Ernest on top―looking to get cool
walk down to the pond and wade into that green brown pool.

I find the contrast of the sonnet form, with full rhyme scheme, the diction and the homey story-telling makes a great combination.  Only a few of the poems have such precise structure, but all combine skill in the form chosen with rich narrative.

One poem which is widely available on the internet, with good reason, is this short poem about Silas Wright learning to write his name.  It is balanced by a poem later in the book about the widowed Silas actually fishing and remembering his wife.

Silas Wright at Age Seven 1914

Silas Wright follows a fish’s wriggle
In the shallows between reeds. He scribes the
Line in his tablet—as much pride in that line
As a man in his son. He almost giggles—
Still he goes on. The next letters come easy.
With this he’ll have more than a mark to bind.
Rambling across the page again and again
In messy rows on it flows until he
Goes a little off the page’s edge. He smiles.
He’s surprised to hear when his mouth opens—
That’s mine.

Silas Fishing 1967

That heron yonder’s
a good fisherman―
patient―will wade
and wait.  But it ain’t
a good day for fishing―
neither of us having
no luck―just minnows
nibbling my bait.
There he goes―up and off
to another pond I suppose―
trailing those long legs, flapping
slow and steady.  I cried and cried
the day Mama died.  And it hurt
me deep when my wife . . . when
Devorah passed.  But I didn’t
shed a tear.  Been near ten years
and here they come
like the drops from
that heron’s feet.

There are many other characters in this book, vividly and gently presented.  They are a delight to know.  But Hill will not let the reader be too comfortable.  He starts the book with a reminder of how much was not right with this world in a brief preview poem titled “Southampton County, Virginia Aubade1831,” which refers to Nat Turner’s insurrection:

Some whites don’t rise with the sun
having departed in the night,
man woman and child, leaving behind none.
The sigh of a broadax mingled
with cricket and frog song.
The mockingbird greets the morning
with many tongues.

I highly recommend this book and will watch for new work by Sean Hill.

Worship: a Poem

July 28, 2012

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This poem begins as a literal description, which can also be taken as metaphor.  The end is meant to include all who participate in the dance of life.

Worship

The floor is cold as barefoot
dancers take their stations,
red-ribboned for Pentecost,
the church’s birthday.

Be there! the teacher cried
at each new step.  Her students
stretch to get there.  The need to be
on the right foot, in the right place
pushes them past balance.
Cross front, cross back,
they coil into the grapevine,
a twisting line of ordinary saints.

Light through windows splashes
mottled rainbows round us.
That we are right
where God wants us,
there is no proof.

This poem was first published in Christian Century, May 27, 1992.

Trying too hard to be “right” is something I struggled with for many years.  It so often backfires as we “push past balance.”  Dance has helped me keep, or regain, my balance.  Sacred dance fits in many other traditions besides Christian.  Go to http://www.sacreddanceguild.org to learn more.

Dance This Poem!

July 25, 2012

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The Sacred Dance Guild holds its biennial Festival in Holland, Michigan this week.  In honor of this event, I am posting a poem I had published back in 1984 in alive now!, a small devotional magazine.  The poem was later danced at the ordination of a friend.

The Proper Turning

The proper turning
from the world to God
is a conspicuous somersault
half joyful leap, half fall.
Power tumbles, selfish
interests spill, desires
turn upside down,
a very public mess.

Laughter dances round.
Is it delight or scorn?
No matter to the acrobat
who’s newly joined the troupe―
the company of artists
who proclaim the names of God.

At the time of writing, I had no idea how many names of God there are: the number is beyond counting.  Dance, movement, gesture, can convey some of them in ways no words can.

Although the somersault in this poem could be metaphorical, actual movement in worship is a wonderful thing.  The Sacred Dance Guild gave me an excuse to dance again after no lessons since I was a teenager.  Most of the people I’ve met who dance in church are free spirits, liberated, as if keeping their bodies limber did the same for their minds.

Dance also proved to be a good balance for my writing.  Most writers have some physical work or hobby or habit to balance all the sitting and head work.  I recommend dance if you’d like to try something new; sacred dance is for all ages, genders and levels of ability.

www.sacreddanceguild.org

Haiku, “Rules,” and a Recommendation

July 21, 2012

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Haiku, that Japanese form which took hold in English about 50 years ago and has continued to be of interest to many, is a great example of the role of “rules” in poetry.

I particularly like a haiku posted recently on the blog, Five Reflections:

soft subtle mantra
hoes the garden of the mind
new poem blossoms

I was delighted by the contrast between the mantra described as “soft subtle” and the hardness of a hoe.  But then my inner critic sounded alarms:  “the ____ of the ____” the critic complained.  “Couldn’t he have avoided at least one of those empty words?”

I keep my critic busy checking my own work for unnecessary cases of “the” and “of the.”  But was he (or is my inner critic a she?) right to complain in this case?

There are two schools of thought about haiku, those who insist on a 5-7-5 syllable structure and those who argue for shorter, tighter lines.  The 5-7-5 imitates the Japanese form.  But the second party asserts that those Japanese “syllables” are not all words, some are signals of other kinds, so the 5-7-5 structure is a poor substitute.

The Haiku Society of America takes no official position on this question.  Their definition a haiku reads: A haiku is a short poem that uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition.  I have noticed, however, that the winners in their annual contests are more often of the shorter style.

I had a workshop with a person of the “shorter is better” school.  He ruthlessly cut down my already short attempts.  I was persuaded that he knew what he was talking about.

Now, I’m not so sure.  “the garden of the mind” has a gentle flow to it that appeals to me.

On the other hand, does this haiku fulfill the Haiku Society’s definition that it “convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season”?  “The garden of the mind” is completely metaphor.  No actual garden, no hoe.  What should I make of this?

My favorite of the haiku I have so far seen on Five Reflections is this one:

sea smoke illusion
ancient seafarer ghost ship
grandpa’s story time

What I like best about this poem is the turn in the last line: the misty sea scene is suddenly transposed to an indoor scene, warm and cozy, where “grandpa” tells his story.  I didn’t even notice at first that this poem has nary a “the” nor an “of.”  This poet knows what he is doing, which further confirms my suspicion that sometimes those “lesser” words are the right ones for the flow and mood of the poem.

In summary, the following, sometimes contradictory, “rules” are apparently made to be broken by skillful haiku writers:
“Always use a three line construction of 5-7-5 syllables.”
“Don’t waste syllables on lesser words like “the.”
“Start with or focus on nature.”
As one who finds haiku challenging to write, I’ll take these “rules” as suggestions, refusing to be bound by them.

To read more at Five Reflections, click on the link in the blogroll in the column to the right of this post.  Enjoy!

 

 

Recommendation: Sandra Kohler’s “Improbable Music”

July 7, 2012

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In the beginning of the poem, “White,” Sandra Kohler writes

I go around half the time thinking I have
a fatal illness, and I do: life.

In Improbable Music, Kohler observes this condition minutely.  It is the illness of dealing with the dying of others.  It is the effort of trying to grasp and hold on to the ever shifting self.

The world presented in this book is the world many of her readers live in: the complicated world where family relationships occupy most of our time and energy. As keenly as she observes the moods of these relationships, Kohler observes the shifting backdrop of nature: sky, trees, birds.

The first section of the book focuses on extended family relationships; the fourth and final section pairs with this, focusing on the intimacy of a long marriage.  The third section acknowledges the impact of the larger world on the domestic, picturing families caught in major crises of our time: Bosnia, Palestine, Sierra Leone.

Heron in Flight

The second section is in some ways my favorite; it focuses on the natural world, but with a delightful twist in the character of Heraclitus the heron.  Kohler admits that she may be giving this name to more than one heron.  She writes in “Herons Present and Absent”:

The river without
herons: a diminished
thing, lifeless,
dispirited.
They are my wild
swans, my muse
of absence.

And later in the same poem she returns to uncertainties about the self:

Is it the herons
that have returned
or my ability
to see them?

Some poems are written in short lines like those quoted above.  Others have longer lines with complex syntax.  Most of the poems are long, many in sections, which allows plenty of time for exploring the shifting self.  One of the shorter poems, “The Cup,” captures uncertainty, ambivalence and shift:

This morning, the last of the year, I use my old cup.
The cup that is always there.  Ten days from the solstice:
ten, twelve minutes more light?  Not even that?  I don’t
know.  Cold, I am wrapped in my Guatemalan blanket.
The cold is solid, settled.  My son calls me a sore loser.
That’s it exactly: I ache with losing him.  The cup of losses.
A glitch in my side, an ache, the slow stitchery of a wound
healing or opening.  I’m suspended, detached, unused.
The cup of waiting and the cup of sighs.  How this moment
will be remembered or forgotten depends upon the fact
of morning, on the ice on the creek, on the thin layer of
cloud that screens the horizon’s uniform desolation.
The cup of loneliness and the cup of longing for solitude.
We dream what belongs to the night but the day wakes
echoes of old wars, scarred shadows of scathing blows.
The cup of insecure anxious needing to matter, impress
the self on the world.  In the face of failure, isolation, loss,
we utter variations on a singular theme: I, I, I.  We don’t
want to believe this of our life, though it is ratified by
the minutes of increased light burning on the partially
frozen stream.  The cup of ego, the cup of emptiness.

Every claim to an “I” is a variation; every cup contains a piece of the self.  The weather seems to echo the self, but does not.  Even the night’s dreams and the day’s shadows cannot be sorted out.  Kohler digs deeply into the flux that underlies every claim of identity and offers no answers.  The reading satisfies as the songs of a fellow traveler.  This is not a quick read, but a book to take one’s time with.

A Poem for July 4

July 4, 2012

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Parade Float, 2012

For many years we have celebrated July 4 at our extended family’s summer cottage in Maine. After the small town parade in the morning, we go home to prepare our potluck dish and gather with acquaintances in the afternoon for a party.  Seeing people we haven’t seen for a year can be complicated, producing the sensations in this poem:

 

Hail, Festival Day!

First the parade: old
cars, fire engines,
floats carry costumed
neighbors.  Then
the party: annual
acquaintance makes
conversation hard.
Even the names slip
from these not quite
strangers: is this
the grandmother who
reported two weddings,
or the mother whose
child had cancer?
An interior parade
imprints names,
connections: she’s
Mary’s daughter, he’s
Frank’s houseguest.
Is Joan the artist
or the realtor?
Brain tires with
body: oil of politeness
cannot loosen stiff
ligaments, strained
from standing
so long at attention.

What Use Is Metaphor?

June 30, 2012

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I believe we think in metaphor.  I’m sure I do.  All the dead metaphors lying around suggest this: melting pot, wall of separation, war on drugs, information superhighway, to mention just a few.  Many people, unfortunately, discount metaphor and this limits their thinking.

If we think in metaphor, this would be the way we think about deity, about religion.  It was reading the work of the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides which first made me aware of this.  He asserts that we can only talk about God by analogy.  If we say God is good, we are only saying that this attribute of God is in some way analogous to the qualities we admire in a person we call good.  It makes sense that, if we are creatures, our Creator is beyond our understanding.  Our ideas can at best be vague approximations.

The problem is that modern popular language dismisses metaphor because it is not “true” by which is meant that it is not factual.  The reduction of “truth” to “fact” is unfortunate, because it easily constricts reason to “thinking about facts.”

Beginning in the mid-19th century, those who wanted to gain public attention for new religious ideas presented them in scientific language: the mediums of spiritualism tried to present their work as science; Mary Baker Eddy not only called her belief system “Christian Science,” her basic text is The Science of Health With Key to the Scriptures.  Similarly Madame Blavatsky presented her ideas, to which she gave the name Theosophy, as science.

In our time the dominant popular world view limits the reading of sacred texts because if the only truth is fact, then scripture must be either factual or false.

Fortunately one can escape this trap and think more broadly.  One can read one’s sacred text as human interpretation.  One can recognize that all language about God has to be metaphoric (including such terms as “Father” for God),.  But those who do read their scriptures in this broad way find themselves on one side of a very large gap between two kinds of believers.  And those who take their sacred text literally have the strength of popular scientific thinking on their side.

Some people who are raised in a literal belief system abandon it to find other levels of awareness through other traditions.  Those other levels inform all religions, including the one the former believer has left, knowing only the version diminished by reductive language.

I choose to stay in my tradition and explore its alternative meanings.  This is hard to explain to both literal believers and non-believers.  It is probably wiser to hint at it in poetry than to write explanations.

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