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My mother is visiting for Thanksgiving. She brought me a pile of letters I'd written to her during college. What fun to read them. You know, I think if I'd met myself, I'd have liked me. Here is a poem I'd enclosed in a letter written Jan. 24, 1981. I must have written it for the poetry class I was taking that J-term (short term we did during the month of January). I reported to my mom that the professors really liked it and said it was sound.
Anyway, here it is:
Open book
The ink begins to run,
Words disappear,
Replaced with the image of a face.
A familiar voice calls me back,
Another sentence --
The letters become lines of a a picture
A place I haven't seen for awhile.
How green our weeping willow
The boughs sweep like a wand,
Changing the leaves to words
They repeat themselves --
The blackness of the ink flows off
The page onto the wall;
A home movie.
Yes, that's us!
The ink drips
Tear drops back onto the page.
_________________ " How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." - Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” -Thich Nhat Hahn
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Saffron wrote:
Open book The ink begins to run,. . . .
Saffron, since the book -- and I think there really was one because your poems are realistic -- is part of the evocative context, would you remember what the book was?
Words on a page (or monitor) make patterns and shapes, often distractingly. In graphology some are called lakes and rivers, perhaps suggestive of willow branches. Does "How green our weeping willow" echo "How Green Was My Valley"? I am especially interested in how environmental suggestion guides imagination.
Joined: Apr 2008 Posts: 2638 Images: 5 Location: Round Hill, VA
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Thomas Hood wrote:
Saffron wrote:
Open book The ink begins to run,. . . .
Saffron, since the book -- and I think there really was one because your poems are realistic -- is part of the evocative context, would you remember what the book was?
Words on a page (or monitor) make patterns and shapes, often distractingly. In graphology some are called lakes and rivers, perhaps suggestive of willow branches. Does "How green our weeping willow" echo "How Green Was My Valley"? I am especially interested in how environmental suggestion guides imagination.
Tom
Tom: Your questions are very interesting. There was a book. I was thinking I must have been studying or reading for a class. However, considering it was written during the J-term, when I was only taking the Poetry Workshop, it must have been something I was reading for my own reasons. The short answer is, no I don't remember what book.
What interested me most is the question of reference. I do like "How Green Was My Valley" and when I read the poem yesterday it brought it to my mind. The funny thing is that at the time I had not yet been exposed to "How Green..." and additionally, it would have been very unlike me to have make such a blatant reference. Somehow I must have done it unconsciously. Maybe I was thinking of "The Corn is Green"; which I love and would have already seen the movie.
I think I often use nature or inspiration from nature in my poetry because I feel so connected, so much apart of the natural world. When I am outside in a natural setting it is as if someone turns up the volume -- as if my senses are set to maximum receptivity.
_________________ " How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." - Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” -Thich Nhat Hahn
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Quote:
saffron: I think I often use nature or inspiration from nature in my poetry because I feel so connected, so much apart of the natural world. When I am outside in a natural setting it is as if someone turns up the volume -- as if my senses are set to maximum receptivity.
Because I am a tree
I will tell it like a tree does
with leaves and branch and trunk and bark
furry and feathered guests too
flecks of moss
roots.
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When I was a kid in Connecticut, I had a hobby of bottle-collecting. I would roam the woods for "dumps" and search through the mostly broken glass for whole bottles and sometimes other objects. These were like treasures. I remember especially the old blueing bottle. In writing this I realized how much I like the word "blue."
FOUND
"Sawyer's Crystal Blueing",
the glass blue-tinted
and blue the sun seen through it.
A moment before unseen,
in a litter of glass,
in a litter of leaves,
buried to its shoulders,
an old blueing bottle
on the pitched bank of a stream.
Those people, years and years back,
had use for blueing,
but none for colored glass.
Spilled from a cart, this remained,
where it lay,
to cast a blue shadow
on an ordinary day.
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DWill: Is the poem new? What does a blueing bottle look like?
I especially like:
where it lay,
to cast a blue shadow
on an ordinary day.
_________________ " How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." - Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” -Thich Nhat Hahn
Joined: Apr 2008 Posts: 2638 Images: 5 Location: Round Hill, VA
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Thomas Hood wrote:
Saffron wrote:
What does a blueing bottle look like?
ebay Sawyer's Crystal Blueing Light Blue Glass Jar
Thanks Tom!
_________________ " How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." - Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” -Thich Nhat Hahn
Joined: Jan 2008 Posts: 3893 Location: Berryville, Virginia
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Saffron wrote:
DWill: Is the poem new? What does a blueing bottle look like?
This is new this morning, though I've had the first 3 lines in my head for years. I'm glad my memory didn't fail me on "Sawyer's Crystal Blueing." With such fact-checkers, I need to watch my step! It must be about 45 years ago that I found that bottle, almost half a century, incredible.
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Re: realiz's visual poetry post
cool.
_________________ "Where can I find a man who has forgotten the words so that I can talk with him?"
-- Chuang-Tzu (c. 200 B.C.E.)
as quoted by Robert A. Burton
Joined: Apr 2008 Posts: 2638 Images: 5 Location: Round Hill, VA
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It does look like waves to me and I grew up 30 miles from the Atlantic Ocean!
_________________ " How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." - Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” -Thich Nhat Hahn
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