"For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning."

- T. S. Eliot

http://bryanpatricktodd.com

In the Train

Fields beneath a quilt of snow
From which the rocks and stubble sleep
And in the west a shy white star
That shivers as it wakes from deep.

The restless rumble of the train,
The drowsy people in the car,
Steel blue twilight in the world,
And in my heart a timid star.

- Sara Teasdale

"A bouquet of clumsy words: you know the place between sleep and awake when you're still dreaming but it's slowly slipping? I wish we could feel like that more often. I also wish I could click my fingers three times and be transported to anywhere I like. I wish that people didn't always say "just wondering" when you both know there was a real reason behind them asking. And I wish I could get lost in the stars.

Listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door, let's go."

- ee cummings

http://tanamachistudio.com/

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what." - Atticus Finch

- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

"Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - God damn it, you've got to be kind."

- Kurt Vonnegut

Voyage

I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages
and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage:
sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas
and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on

in a novel without a moral but one in which
all the characters who died in the middle chapters
make the sunsets near the book's end more beautiful.

- And someone is spreading a map upon a table,
and someone is hanging a lantern from the stern,
and someone else says, "I'm only sorry
that I forgot my blue parka; It's turning cold."

Sunset like a burning wagon train
Sunrise like a dish of cantaloupe
Clouds like two armies clashing in the sky;
Icebergs and tropical storms,
That's the kind of thing that happens on our ocean voyage -

And in one of the chapters I was blinded by love
And in another, anger made us sick like swallowed glass
and I lay in my bunk and slept for so long,

I forgot about the ocean,
Which all the time was going by, right there, outside my cabin window.

And the sides of the ship were green as money,
              and the water made a sound like memory when we sailed.

Then it was summer. Under the constellation of the swan,
under the constellation of the horse.

At night we consoled ourselves
By discussing the meaning of homesickness.
But there was no home to go to.
There was no getting around the ocean.
We had to go on finding out the story
                                                    by pushing into it -

The sea was no longer a metaphor.
The book was no longer a book.
That was the plot.
That was our marvelous punishment.

- Tony Hoagland

Typography/Hand Lettering/Word Beauty

I didn't pay attention in school - ever. I lived lost in my own head, and spent class time writing notes to my friends, or scribbling song lyrics and quotes and poetry in my notebooks.  I loved this. I still do this, in fact. Look for me in the conference room at work, in the chair with the best view of the Hudson River, the one where the sunlight will spill just right across my open notebook, and there I'll be, actively listening to whatever is going on (because I am a grown up now and apparently I must) but with my hand busy, deep in a doodle session without even noticing. 

But back in school, I noticed that when it came to doodling, most people drew things - stick figures in compromising positions, little friendly houses, flowers, cartoon characters smoking cigarettes, that kind of thing. But when I "doodled" what came out was always words. Bubble letters, fancy scripts, big block print. Shaded in or left open, just stark outlines and white insides. I'd write the same words or phrases over and over again in all different ways and styles. Some of my friend's names had a weird rhythm to their letters, and to this day I write those names over and over again for no reason when my mind wanders. It's completely creepy to wake up after a phone call reverie to find a piece of paper with the same name written on it 25 times, of course. But something in my hand loves to scrawl those letters out, to play with their length and width and shading. 

I used to think this quirk was just me, that I was a big weirdo. I didn't know there was a whole art form around it. Lo, what the internet has brought to me. 

Now, when I do this stuff it essentially looks like no more than a goofy, manic doodle war splattered all over the page. I am physically artless and I know it. But some people make glory! Glory! Like this guy! My freaking god! 

Tell me you don't want to wallpaper your entire house, your whole stinking planet, in this kind of perfect word beauty. Words are already beautiful, of course. Do this to them, and I'm slain. It's done. Game over for this girl. 

Enjoy! 

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice -
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late enough,
and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do-
determined to save
the only life you could save.

- Mary Oliver

Reflections

 

 

http://bradkunkle.com

"...if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, and that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string.

And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery."

- Annie Proulx, The Shipping News 

On Being Not Dead/That Thing

There are people that you know, you just know, that if you met them you'd feel that thing. That subtle click of easy compatability, of moment-by-moment understanding, of eager rhythm, of total yes. People that see the world with the same set of eyes and heart that you do.

These are the kind of people you lock eyes with across a crowded room at a party when something awful or funny or sad just happened in another corner. Right then you look up in embarassment and catch this person's eye, and they know exactly what you're thinking, and you know exactly what they're thinking, and the relief that floods your chest is big and warm. In that moment the world feels a little less like chaos and a little more like art.

That feeling is terribly rare. I've learned that when you find it, you should grab it with both fists, no holding back. What's the point of restraint, anyway? Life is so stupidly short and senseless. Moments like that - people like that - sometimes feel like the entire point. They are my navigation in the dark.

If I met the writer of this op-ed piece in the New York Times, I'm sure I'd feel that thing.

Read it here: On Being Not Dead

Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,

   In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

   By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

   Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

But we loved with a love that was more than love—

   I and my Annabel Lee—

With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven

   Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

   My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsmen came

   And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre

   In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,

   Went envying her and me—

Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,

   In this kingdom by the sea)

That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

   Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love

   Of those who were older than we—

   Of many far wiser than we—

And neither the angels in Heaven above

   Nor the demons down under the sea

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

   Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

   In her sepulchre there by the sea—

   In her tomb by the sounding sea.

I take writing classes through an organization called Gotham Writers' Workshop. They held a contest, which I did not enter, for 91 word flash memoirs. This is the winner, highlighted on The Daily Beast's website.

This tiny little snippet of words, of a human life flawlessly encapsulated, makes me so fired up/angry/hater/jealous that you know it's just amazing. Amazing. Find a word that isn't powerful and perfect and right. I dare you.

It's probably unflattering to admit that I get the jealous writer angries, or the jealous singer angries. However, if that is your opinion, shut up. The best work from others inspires you to get your hands dirty, to work harder, to be better, to fucking fight. I love this feeling. It's where I get work done.

I wanna punch something.

"I’ve often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they’re on, why they don’t fall off, how much time they’ve probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. I tried to write it once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck on explaining why we don’t fall off the planet. Gravity is just a word. It doesn’t explain anything. If I could get past gravity, I’d tell them how we reproduce, how long we’ve been here, apparently, and a little bit about evolution. I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It’s also a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it."

 

- Kurt Vonnegut

The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be. Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

"Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on a thousand and one things - childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves - that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers."

- Salman Rushdie

The Fusion Of All That I Love: A Musical Rant.

Last winter, my choir did a whole concert devoted to literary works, mostly poetry, set to classical music.

This is pretty much my peanut butter ice cream on a stupid hot August night, my puppy-snuggle on a rainy day, my arrival in a new city armed with a fresh map and comfy shoes. That is to say, this is my fusion of all that is good and holy and beautiful on the earth.

Yes, this makes me a big, huge mother of a dork but I don't care. I'm pretty sure that if all of our human bodies faded away into the ether one day, and all that was left of each of us was a little dust and grit in the shape of our most precious things, our most pure and holy and relentlessly beloved things, mine would be a wobbly musical note with an exclamation point fused into it. Or something similarly stupid and 14-year-old girlish. Hey, we all have our things, right?

Hearing eight professional hired soloists sing Tarik O'Regan's The Ectasies Above, an arrangement set to the words of Edgar Allan Poe's Israfel, is the kind of moment that makes you realize that music can be so beautiful, so relentless, that it actually feels like you are being attacked. It is somehow physically painful to be so close to such glory - it's the equivalent of auditory sun glare. In moments like that you understand that no matter how capable of a singer you might, on a particularly confident day, fancy yourself to be, you simply will never be magnificent. And this moment is somehow both one of the best and the worst that's ever happened to you.

These singers stand in front of you, four men and four women around 25-35, perfectly ordinary looking with their little cups of Starbucks tea and their music folders and their reasonable shoes. They walk around like regular humans, but clearly they were birthed under a musical star or some other explosive celestial event because there are actual golden violins humming away in their throats. Nothing has ever, ever, been as simple and clear and discordantly beautiful as them singing this song of poetry. In this blazingly clear moment you cannot help but be aware of what you are capable of as a musical person, and what you are not. The envy is so great it boils and cracks, and your self-loathing when you open your own wretched human throat to croak out the background notes is strong enough to knock over the entire cityscape.

But it's also the best moment because at least you get to be in the presence of this magnificence. On stage with it, even. You get to stand right there, on a stage/altar-like thing in New York City, in Greenwich Village, in a dress and sparkly jewelry and pretty shoes. You get to hold up your trusty black choir book and provide some good, solid background notes with a bunch of other talented folks who love it as much as you do. Who, by the way, also feel like big fat talentless lumps around this level of divinity, which makes you all laugh together, which of course makes it better.

This moment is the dream you conjured up when you were eleven years old, rocking out to Whitney Houston with your bedroom door securely closed. Back then you sat crossed-legged on the floor, hiding behind your bed, facing the back corner so no one would hear you try to hold the long notes in I Will Always Love You. It's true that back then you imagined you'd be famous one day. Saw yourself on a stage, sparkling and strong under hot lights, singing for an audience of thousands. And of course that never happened.

But at its core, the only thing that sweet childhood dream meant was that you wanted to sing forever. And today, even if you are not magnificent, not luminous and celestial and divine, you are still singing. This is important. Maybe the very most important thing. It's vital to hold onto the things that bring you joy and light.

So, I am not magnificent - which of course I always knew - but this still sort of sucks when you're an art-lover or performer of any kind. But I'm fortunate enough to be around true heavenly talent from time to time. I'm lucky to be a part of things, to be always learning new skills, new facts, new pieces and composers and styles. And in the company of friends who love it, too. I understand now that for me, this is enough. This is all that I need.

Listen here to a recording of The Ecstasies Above, if you have time and an open mind to classical music. (Skip around to minutes 6-8 to hear the best parts, and then again around 10-12, if you must. If you MUST skip the majority, then just listen to minutes 15-17. Yes, it's long. That is the classical way!)

And then. And then! In the very same night, we swung over into music by Eric Whitacre, the most mind-bending composer I've ever sung. We sang his composition The City and the Sea, five settings of poems by e.e. Cummings, one of which is Maggie and Milly and Molly and May. 

The poem is simple and beautiful to begin with, of course. But if you set it to music what you end up with is an April who can't finish the piece because every time she tries to sing the second-to-last stanza she ends up choking back sobs. Listen to this one, which is blessedly short, here.

If you're not into clicking links, my dear audience of three souls, let's do this because I must, I just must:

maggie and milly and molly and may

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles, and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as the world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea.

Most people fall apart over the last stanza, but for me it's the one before it. Lovely to read, gorgeous to listen to in music, impossible to sing if you are weeping, wailing me.

That's it, that's all I have tonight. My enthusiasm this evening has exhausted me. Happy listening, if I've caught your interest.

Reluctance

Out through the fields and the woods
and over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
and looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
and lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
save those that the oak is keeping
to ravel them one by one
and let them go scraping and creeping
out over the crusted snow,
when others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
no longer blown hither and thither;
the last lone aster is gone;
the flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
the heart is still aching to seek,
but the feet question "Whither?"

Ah, when to the heart of man
was it ever less than a treason
to go with the drift of things,
to yield with a grace to reason,
and bow and accept the end
of a love or a season?

I wanted to pick just one or two of these, but lost all sense of composure instead. I'd like to formally thank this week's issue of The-April-Darcy-Sunday-Night-Tumblr-Vortex for helping me find this guy.  

I mean, come on. Just come on. 

"The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear." 

— Stephen King

Peter Pan

I loved this before I had any idea it was paper cutting.

The Promise

In the dream I had when he came back not sick
but whole, and wearing his winter coat,

he looked at me as though he couldn't speak,
as if there were a law against it, a membrane he wouldn't break.

Hi silence was what he could not
not do, like our breathing in this world, like our living,

as we do, in time.
And I told him: I'm reading all this Buddhist stuff,

and listen, we don't die when we die. Death is an event,
a threshold we pass through. We go on and on

and into light forever.
And he looked down, and then back up at me. It was the look we'd pass

across the kitchen table when dad was drunk again and dangerous,
the level look that wants to tell you something,
something important, in a crowded room, and can't.

-Marie Howe

If anyone sent me one of these I would adore them until the end of time.

Meeting Poetry

When I met the Elizabeth Bishop poem One Art I was sixteen years old, slouched in a plastic chair in an overheated classroom. I was wearing an itchy grey wool uniform skirt, rolled up at the waist at least once, and maroon knee socks that were always sliding down into my beloved chunky black platforms.

I was tired, and I was bored. Even for a word-oriented, nerdy-quiet girl like me, this was not the right environment to meet a poem. The teacher handed out the copies, and I skimmed it as he paced the aisles.

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing further, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! My last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

I liked it immediately in a sort of vapid, unclicked way, but then the bell rang. I stuffed it into my backpack and shoved my way out into the hallway, fighting through hoards of bustling noise to my loathsome math class, and that was that. Poem in, poem out. Poem met incorrectly.

When I found it again I was about ten years older. I was feeling quiet that night, wandering through the wilds of the Internet in search of something beautiful to absorb. I happened upon it and read it properly, with thoughtfulness and attention. I read it with an extra decade of life experience under my skin. I'd lost things in my own life by then, so I understood it better.

As I read, I felt a lightning bolt thread of connection to the author. I pictured the shape of her spine through a thin white sweater, the way her back must have curved gently over her writing table as she composed each perfect word in its perfect order. For the record: I know nothing about Elizabeth Bishop. But what I see anyway is a woman with hair fading from a bright blond to something darker with age. Fair skin with light freckles, freckles that were probably dark and bold and despaired over the summer she was 12, back when she was only just beginning to learn that special feminine trick of self-judgement in all mirrors. She peers down through glasses, thick and heavy, that she only wears at night. Her black pen is just the right amount of inky as it scratches over thick ivory paper, and her non-writing hand is curled around a cup of steaming tea. She's surrounded by a cloud of quiet concentration, the kind of quiet you have to fight to find in this life. The kind you have to protect.

I believe you meet certain poems, rather than read them. The right poem is something that unfolds over you, something that actually happens to you. It has force and power and weight. It's not just words you trip over, like the magazine articles you flip through at night on your couch, or even the really catchy novel you tear through on an airplane. If you meet a poem correctly - if the temperature is right, and your temperament, and if the poem itself is the absolute correct one - then in the moment of meeting you recognize a friend. The flame of a matching soul reaches out and shakes you awake.

I have fallen into poems so hard that I will remember forever the circumstances in which I met them. I was heartsick with thick, desperate teenaged love when I first collapsed into T.S. Eliot's self-despairing melancholy. I was dreamy and adolescent when Edgar Allan Poe happened to me, reading The Bells aloud to my seventh grade English class and understanding for the first time that words could make music. I was deep in real grief the first time Robert Frost's clear steadiness calmed me.

I am still waiting to meet Emily Dickinson properly, which is becoming annoying in an I-know-I'm-SUPPOSED-to-love-her-but-I-just-don't-give-a-shit kind of way.

Mary Oliver happened to me last summer. I was visiting a little town called Amesbury, Massachusetts, on an early August afternoon, bright and breezy and perfect. I had a few hours to myself and the itch to explore, so off I wandered. The town was tiny, village-like, with colorful houses bunched cheerfully on top of each other. The dueling coffee shops were mom-and-pop and their windows were lined with local art. There was a tiny movie theater. There was a real pet store. It was pretty much small town perfection.

In the middle of their main street I spotted a stone archway between two large brick buildings. It led backwards into a sprawling stone courtyard lined with bright, lush flowers. A tiny stream trickled through the courtyard, a little ghost of the river that once powered this old industrial mill town not so very long ago.

I found a little restaurant in the corner of the courtyard, and sat outside at a picnic table in the sun. I was eating a salad and writing in my journal when a man strolled into the other side of the courtyard, busted out a fiddle, and began to play.

This was incongruous, wondrous. Startling to me in my quiet little salad moment. He played wildly, freely, tapping his feet and bouncing from side to side. He tipped his head to the ladies and winked at the men as they passed, not missing a note. He had dark shaggy hair and was dressed as if he’d just walked out of the 1920's, like he was about to hitch a ride on a train car, hobo style, leaping on and landing with his legs kicked out over the side. He was almost too much, and I absolutely wanted to judge him, but I couldn't. I was too charmed by his music. He was jubilant and triumphant and ridiculous all mixed together, garnished with a shabby top hat.

I finished my lunch and was gathering my things when he switched gears and swung into a slow, plaintive song. I paused to listen and felt my own melancholy rise up in me, an annoying, chronic inner sadness that pops up from time to time uninvited. I didn’t want to allow it into this perfect, weird little moment, so I walked out of the courtyard and left the sad song straining away behind me.

Right outside of the courtyard was a small independent bookshop, dusty and quiet. I drifted towards the poetry section, an odd impulse I hadn’t had since I was a teenager. I looked for Mary Oliver, who I’d heard of and meant to get to know properly. I found a volume of her work, paid my $14.95 and went outside. 

In front of the bookshop was an enormous maple tree. Underneath it ran a stone wall about waist high. I jumped up onto the wall and, with the leaves rustling above me, and the fiddler still playing his faded song over the sounds of cars passing by and the wind blowing, opened the book and read this poem:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down -
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

This is how you meet a poem: with thoughtfulness and attention. I had focus on this bright sunlit afternoon, and time, and quiet solitude. I was idle and blessed. These are the moments you miss in a regular adult life, with its obligations and its schedules and meetings and errands and the endless hum of electric noise invading your quiet.

In the absence of noise, and in the company of myself, I read this poem, and felt a friend come out of the shadow dark. I'm sure I would have liked this poem, maybe even loved it, if I'd read it under other circumstances. But I'm equally sure it wouldn't have tattooed itself onto my heart in quite the same way if anything about this moment had been different.

Poem in, poem out. Poem met correctly, and now carried tucked safely within me for the rest of my life. 

(Also - a nifty little title for a future blog! Ah, poem love. What a grand, nerdy habit.)

Skydivers

Summer Time by zhuzhu

You Knew This One Was Coming, Right?

This blog seemed like a good idea at the time. It excited me, it filled me up with possibility and plans and energy. It seemed like a way to force myself to be someone I’ve always wanted to be – productive, on task, organized, efficient. One post a week, ticking off little checkmarks on a list made up of hazy summer weeks. I pictured myself sitting at my desk in the little office nook in my apartment, surrounded by towering stacks of books, a candle lit next to me, writing hard to meet a self-set deadline. I saw a bulletin board above my head, full of little sheets of paper with scribbled essay ideas, contest deadlines, and inspirational quotes for literary heft.

I made a special trip to Office Depot to buy that bulletin board. I carried it home with great pride, two little boxes of shiny red tacks making a happy racket at the bottom of the shopping bag as I strolled. It sits beside me right now on the floor, dusty and still wrapped in plastic, and of course I already lost the tacks.

This writing plan of mine – one post per week – was not even remotely realistic, of course. I could blame my failure on lots of things – my family came to visit. My day job got really intense. I had a head cold last week, and legitimate food poising this week, and oh my god it’s summer and it’s beautiful outside and I have to go to the beach/take a walk/drink sangria outdoors right this very moment!

All of this is absolutely true, and all of this is also absolutely bullshit, and don’t ever listen to me when I try to insist otherwise.  

I have a problem with the depth of space between ambition and reality. This isn’t unique to me, of course. There are far more dreamers on this earth than doers. It’s way easier to think fondly of doing the things you want to do, to sit and dream about them, to chat about them with your friends, than to get down into the dirt and do the freaking work required.

I am awesome at coming up with ideas, and having big plans for the future, and being excitable about life in all ways. I am less good at accomplishing anything in a measurable, steady way. I have always loathed this about myself, and admired people who are action-oriented instead of slovenly. People who say they will do a thing, and then, as if it were really that easy, just walk out into the world and do that very thing. Without worrying about it, or complicating it, or stalling or despairing or overthinking themselves into an exhaustive oblivion. Just simple action. This is amazing. Miraculous. Totally not me.

For the past year or so, I’ve been working hard to change this about myself. And in a real, action-oriented way - not just worrying about it and then following up my panic session with a nice nap.

There were things I didn’t like about myself, and I decided to change them, so I did. I hadn’t been traveling enough, so I unearthed my trusty purple backpack and went to some crazy places, and this simple act of movement was like a great miraculous awakening.

I had spent years turning into a homebody by accident, drifting into some socially nervous, tentative stranger-girl, and this just wouldn’t do. So, I invested in time spent with friends. I made a deliberate choice to drink far too much alcohol, to stay out later and laugh louder and dance stupider, and all of this felt delicious and perfect.  It was like running into a very best friend I lost a long time ago, and realizing, wait a minute, this chick is pretty fun after all, and her hair is certainly not as bad as she thinks it is. It’s better to be around her, or hey, actually BE her, than it is to be the mousy chick at home weeping on her dog over yet another viewing of the movie Pay It Forward on Lifetime.

I listened to the voice that has been commanding me to write for my entire life, signed up for some classes and gave that a whirl for awhile. This may seem like it’s not a big deal, and frankly, it’s such an obvious decision that I feel a little bit stupid. But what can I say? Sometimes we’re stupid enough to not recognize the things that we love the most. At least I am learning.    

I realized one spring morning that I’d lost 50 entire pounds but still loathed my body in such a deep and violent way that it was coloring my entire life. For no reason, on this particular day the weight of this misery became unacceptable, so I decided to no longer accept it. In one swift action-step motion, I hired a personal trainer and begged him to teach me to be strong. He took it one step further and taught me to be fierce, turning me into a girl with calluses on her hands from weight lifting, someone who fights to the death on the gym floor, goofy with laughter and dripping with sweat until she collapses in a gross ponytailed heap. I am more proud of those calluses than of any other physical piece of myself. I laugh and call myself a gym warrior as a joke, but I am not kidding. I am one.

By late spring I was living with a near-manic intensity, writing hard and working out hard and having fun and sleeping like a bear every single night. I was productive. I was efficient. I was making shit happen.

But the money ran out in June, as tends to happen with money and me, so I had to make different choices. Out went the lovely personal trainer, who was helping me become someone I’d always wanted to be. Out went the writing classes, which were starting to feel as vital as oxygen. These days I can barely afford soup. It became time to stand up for myself alone, without paying anyone to push me forward.

I was worried about self-accountability, which is the polar opposite of my strong suit. I was terrified to backslide into the person I used to be, a girl with great big exciting life plans, with lovely intentions, but an almost magnetic fondness for the couch, and the ability to watch the same sad cable movie twice in one night, because the remote is just too far away and this trough of ice cream is just too fabulous to ever stop eating, ever, and why would a person want to stop, anyway?

It’s almost September now. There’s still a little bit of summer left to go, but the air has shifted cooler, and the dark is drawing closer.  And in a sign that I might (finally) be growing into a real, human adult, I’m glad to see that I didn’t fall apart this season. I did pretty ok, in fact. I didn’t gain back 50 pounds in one summer, which must be what I secretly thought would happen based on the desperate intensity of my fears. I am still working out, hard. I am still spending time with friends and fighting the instinct to hibernate into my couch and wear pajamas at all times, like a second skin.

And although this blog appears to say otherwise, I am still writing. I am writing, writing, writing all of the time. The problem is not in the writing at all, the problem is with sharing what I have written.

I thought that if I stood up and stated, out loud and in public, that I would write once a week and find the balls to share that writing, that I then would. I thought I could will it to true by bellowing it out, under the threat of public humiliation if I failed.

And under that threat of a grand public failure, I really did write more. All of the time, even. But a funny thing happened. In knowing that everything I was writing was meant to be shared, it changed. All my little thoughts and stories and rambles started to drift away from what I am just beginning to realize is my own true sound, into something else. Something light, and careful. Very polite and politically correct. Sexless and joyless and gutless. Neutered, if you will.

 

I realized this on a fundamental level when I reread some of my work and realized I hadn’t cursed once. Whose lexicon was this? Some foreign, polite version of April who says things like “It’s true, I was pretty mad at her,” instead of “I wanted to rip her fucking scalp off and leap around on it, right there on the locker room floor, and then head straight out for a margarita.”

One of my truths: I think, and speak, like a truck driver. It’s the Jersey in me, and honestly, I like it that way. It makes me salty. So there. Fuck off.

It’s hard to write for an audience. It has been said that you must write as if no one will ever read what you have written, that you must write with your right hand as if your left is following just behind with an eraser, and goddamn if that isn’t breathtakingly correct and nearly impossible to do.

So, in a grand fashion, I sit here on this perfect late August evening and say, with a sweep of my arms and a dramatic bow, that I take it all back. I promise you nothing, my dear five readers, absolutely nothing. You will get zero posts per week here, a total black hole of writerly anything.

Until I can write for you with brazen honesty and loads of curses and dragon-like intensity, I will share nothing. Until I am able to sound like myself and still find something worth communicating, I will step back into my dusty little office and just keep working there.

For those that have been supportive, I’m so very thankful. You are my flowers, the sunspots of color in my great green empty field. I want very much to keep my promises and sweet lord believe me, I want even more to keep my pride. But let’s just go ahead and acknowledge total failure when we see it. Otherwise this page will just sit out there in the big quiet internet, haunting me. 

I will keep this blog, though. I’m a big nerd, and blogs are fun, so I’ll pop in and out of it. And since I am completely contrary by nature, in negating my promise to write I may have in fact unclogged my drain and will now finally be able to write.

But that is not a promise. I have learned a valuable lesson here about letting promises run away with you, and I will not unlearn it anytime soon.   

Right now the only thing that matters to me is that I’m sitting at my desk in my office, a candle at my side, writing. Like I said that I would. As I know that I should. Whether I’m writing for you, or for me, or just out of a blind sense of need and simple faith, all that matters is that I’m doing it. There is a quiet white line from my heart to the page, and from the page into your mind, and until I’m able to walk that line with force and dignity I won’t share anything at all.

I’m accountable to no one but my own great wild heart.  

The Palace of Contemplating Departure

You wandered through my life like a backwards wish
when I was ready for deliverance.

I was ready for release
like a pinball in God's mouth
like charanga on Tuesdays
like the summer in Shanghai

when we prayed for a rainstorm
and bartered our shame, then we tore open oranges
with four dirty thumbs.

And the forecast said Super
so we chartered a yacht
and we planted a garden on the unbending prow

but the sea said Surrender
with its arms full of salt, and wind shook the seeds
from our shirt coat pockets

so when we washed up on the shoreline of sunlight
near the city of wind
we were broken and thin, like wraiths at the wake.

But you tilted your head up and told me I was wild
so I lifted my life
and I lifted your life

and we wandered through the gate of radiant days
then we married our splendor
in the hall of bright rule.

And I thank you again: you gave madness a chance
and you lassoed the morning
and we met on a Tuesday
in a dance hall in Shanghai
and I left you in a leap year for the coveted shoreline

and you wept like a book when it's pulled from a well.

But you were the one who told me I was wild
and you were the one who wrestled the angel

and I knew when I left you
that courage was a choice
and memory, a spear,
and the x of destination is etched on my iris
and shifts with the seasons-

don't think of the phoenix, think of the mountain. 

But where will I go now, with my tireless wonder?
And when will I again be brave like that?

-Brynn Saito

Adrian Tomine, A.C.

A Love Affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was required to read The Great Gatsby in high school, like approximately every other American human being. I read it begrudgingly, and I didn't like it. What's the point? I remember thinking to myself with a condescending sniff as I sat there in my English class. Who cares about these people and their silly lives? Who cares about this rich guy's obsessive love for Daisy, who sounds kind of flighty and irritating anyway? And what's the big deal about her voice? Boring.

About two years ago I began a mission to read the classics I'd missed, or re-read the ones I had read when I was too young to understand them. I started with this one, and when I say it walloped me what I mean is that F. Scott Fitzgerald himself stood up and punched me repeatedly in the face with his magnificence. I gasped out loud at many sentences, re-reading the same paragraphs over and over as I tried to understand his way of weaving things together. Every single freaking word is perfect and right and the whole thing is just stitched together with a weird atmosphere of party lights and alcoholism and a leaking, desperate sadness.

I read it on an airplane, traveling south. I had a pencil and I underlined the crap out of it, moment after moment, which is a thing I never do to books. I finished it with a bang and immediately started it over again. I know it's fiction, but the atmosphere of the story is so true and visceral I felt like I could reach in and somehow dance my way right into it. That's the magic, to me - knowing that every part of Fitzgerald's imagination was born from his reality. The world he wrote from was real and actual. The events were manufactured, but the world was his true life, and he captured it for me, for everyone, and through some crazy veil of time and chance and typographic trickery I can see it too.

I know everyone knows this book is greatness, of course. I'm just feeling a bit effusive about it on an otherwise inoffensive Saturday, and wanted to share after bumping into this letter he wrote to a young aspiring writer. I want to tattoo it onto my hands.

PS: I know I am behind on real posts. My sincere apologies to the random five people who are reading this. The summer has run away with me, but I'm getting back on track now.

Entertaining a notion, like entertaining a baby cousin or entertaining a pack of hyenas, is a dangerous thing to refuse to do. If you refuse to entertain a baby cousin, the baby cousin may get bored and entertain itself by wandering off and falling down a well. If you refuse to entertain a pack of hyenas, they may become restless and entertain themselves by devouring you. But if you refuse to entertain a notion - which is just a fancy way of saying that you refuse to think about a certain idea - you have to be much braver than someone who  is merely facing some  blood-thirsty animals, or some parents who are upset to find their little darling at the bottom of a well, because nobody knows what an idea will do when it goes off to entertain itself.

-Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid 

Contests, etc.

People: this is really, really difficult. I made a vow to post one piece of writing a week, but nothing I’m working on feels even slightly ready to be out in public. I’d rather slice off my own skin and snack on it than post something I’m not really into, but a promise is a promise, so here we go.

I wrote the piece below when I entered a fiction contest earlier this year. It was for NPR’s This American Life, and the challenge was to write a short story based on the prompt of this beginning sentence:

 She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door.

 I’ve never written a fictional word, ever. Only non-fiction comes out of my tap, for some reason, which is really annoying. Additionally, a friend brought this contest to my attention only about two hours before the midnight deadline, so I also had a massive time crunch on my hands.

 I calmly walked my dog in a light rain (which leaked its way into the story) and had violent internal debates about normal Sunday night bedtimes, and then figured, what the hell. So I locked myself up in my office and made stuff up for awhile, to see what that felt like. In a span of two hours, I wrote my first fiction, and entered my first contest, which felt faintly like crossing an important threshold. I lost, of course. But I still did it, and that felt important, so I’m glad.

Anyway, I promised to post something, so here you go. To see the real winner, click here.

*********

 She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door. Once the decision was made she felt like there had never been a time when she was unsure. She strode forward with purpose, slipping on her sandals and grabbing her keys, little sparks of light beginning to roll through her veins.

Because she was not the kind of girl who remembered to think about umbrellas, or other useful things, she was unprepared for the thundering downpour that met her at the front door. It was 1 a.m., and he lived three blocks away. She paused, considering, but then laughed and ran for it through the icy spring rain, jumping over puddles filled with dropped blossoms. She slowed as she neared his building, one in a row of shabby little brownstones just like hers, crumbly and perfect. A thin ribbon of yellow light shone from around the basement curtains where he lived. She loved to peer out that window when they were hanging out, watching movies or eating Chinese food, watching people’s feet and little dogs stroll by.

Without allowing herself to think or to breathe, she rapped on his door.  The lock’s tumblers clicked over and there he was, hair crazy with sleep, wearing sweatpants and thick woolen socks. She had always loved his feet in socks.   

“What are you doing here?” he asked, bewildered, glancing at his watch. He did not open the door wide enough to invite her in. She felt a wall of panic slam into her from wherever it had been hiding.

“I finished it. Your book, I mean.”

He stared at her blankly. Her hands started to shake.

“I went to the store and got a copy right away. I read it straight through. It was so beautiful.”

He smiled then, and his shoulders dropped a bit as he leaned against the doorframe.

“You came out here this late, in the storm, to tell me you liked my book?”

“I know,” she laughed, too loud. “This is silly. But it’s your first one, and I know how much it meant to you, is all. So…here I am. Congratulations.”

She looked up at him, aching, while an inner voice berated her for punking out, again. In her head she was saucy, bold, - vivacious, even. That inner brave girl would just shove that damn door open and launch her sopping, messy body into his arms, just push him right up against the wall and show him what he meant to her.  Showing was better than talking anyway, she reasoned, stalling. It would save time and cut down on confusion. She commanded her body to do this one simple thing, but her actual self, the one she was stuck with, just couldn’t seem to get there.

He was looking at her strangely now. The longer she stood the more aware she became of her soaked pajamas, her wild ridiculousness. She saw herself as if from above, small and wet and pathetic.  

“Well, that’s it I guess,” she said, looking down at her feet. “Sorry to wake you. I’m just…I’m just so happy for you.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I really appreciate it. I’ll see you at work tomorrow. It’s my turn to bring the coffee.”

“Ok. Great. See you in the morning.”

She forced a bright smile and then walked away, the garden gate clanging shut behind her. After a few steps she paused, turned back to see if he was watching her go. But his door was closed, dark and tight. A sob rose up in her throat with so much force it actually hurt, but she fought hard and swallowed it.

In his book, she thought for a moment she’d seen her own face: the beautiful heroine, trapped forever with only one book to keep her company while she waited for rescue, longing for someone who could tell her a new story. For one glittering moment, she’d felt the flash of her own spirit in those pages, heard her own laugh echoing up from the binding. That flicker of recognition gave her the courage to finally make it to his door, rain and all, but no further. She just couldn’t get there.

She slipped off her sandals and walked home barefoot on dark city streets, water rushing past her ankles and down the heaving drains.

No Big Deal, Just a NYT Review...

Today my choir, the West Village Chorale, was reviewed in the music section of the New York Times.    We had no idea that we would be reviewed - or, if perhaps anyone among us suspected that we might be, they had the decency to keep it to themselves so we wouldn't all panic.

It's unusual for an amateur choir to be reviewed at all, let alone with such positivity, so this is an almost unimaginable honor. Read the review here. 

If you're a performer of any kind, perhaps you know this feeling - when all of the nervousness fades away, and the show changes from something careful, and perhaps tentative, into something deeply joyous and confident and smooth. Every once in a great while something just clicks into place, and feels both flawless and infinite, and you reach a level higher than you realized you were capable of.

This unusual scenario happened to us last night, even though we were exhausted, and it was an almost unbearably hot, sweaty, endless kind of day. When you're pretty much depleted and sweat is actually dripping down your back and you're squashed like sardines under hot lights for hours, it's hard to produce anything decent, let alone "proficient". But if the NYT says we did, then hey, that's enough for me.

The fact that I am able to be a part of this is astonishing, and wondrous, and a blessing.

On Turning Ten - Billy Collins

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light—
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.