Garden of Verse: Poems Bloom in the Spring

            April is a poetic month, not merely because in the USA it's officially "National Poetry Month," a designation intended I think to give libraries and other institutions an excuse to hold poetry programs. It's also because April is the month referenced in the first line of "The Canterbury Tales," which itself is often regarded as the first great poem in the English language (though composed in the somewhat foreign looking Middle English). It's a month of beginnings.

            April also famously appears at the start of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," often thought of as the first great poem in the 20th century modernist school of literature. When Eliot wrote "April is the cruelest month," it made sense to anyone living in the northern hemisphere, because we know it's the month when our pent-up desire for balmy spring weather is cruelly, and repeatedly, thwarted by April's regression to nasty days like today (high of 38 degrees, cold rain all day).

            But Eliot was actually going for a different point. It's hope itself that's cruel -- to those who have given up on life.

            The poets who contributed to the April issue of the online literary magazine Verse-Virtual have manifestly not given up. In fact they have given us some of their best in the many pages of this packed journal.

            I'd like to point out some examples. Uche Ogbuji's "At Work in the Foothills" considers the contrasting pulls of work and pleasure on a working vacation:

I should be uphill,
Should be on the downhill rush
Where pow hints at slush.
I'm trapped with my commerce mates
Wise to the profits of spring.
            The apt phrase "Wise to the profits of spring" sets up the very nicely composed conclusion:

Upon livelihood
Comes the why where life is good
Which calls through the churn
So I'm impatient to turn
My back on the marketplace.

            Joe Mills's poem "Standing Before Shelves of Cookbooks" turns the enduring question of what to make for dinner into a meditation on a recipe for a good life, drawing on themes already raised in the poem:

...and I will murmur a kind of prayer: May you recognize the wheel
of your days.  May your faith
and friendships be flavored
with tears  May you find love
like a lever and a place to stand
together.  May you have a life as
satisfying as a good Italian dish.

The poem left me with the thought  that love is after all a place to stand.

In Luis Neer's poem "so he really did like me after all," he recalls a high school teacher who edited his list of classroom topics by erasing the name Walt Whitman:

and with one swipe of his hand
erased
America's World Poet
from the list.

  
          I too think Walt Whitman is America's World Poet and am surprised that more of the world (particularly more of America) doesn't appear to know it. 

            Kenneth Pobo wrote two 'owl' poems. The first one treats an owl blind in one eye, ending superbly: "I catch her eye./ She stares me down." 

            In the other he describes a woman's laugh "as if several owls had gotten loose,/ all hooting at once." Another woman visits her in a hospital and wonders what's happened to that laugh: "She thinks she hears it, sobs,/ starts laughing herself,/ freeing the owls."

            In Ed Werstein's "Anthony's Hands," I particularly loved the imagery and line breaks in these sentences that describe those hands:

While exploring
they offer up acorns, bottle caps
and other found things for identification.
Clenched tightly,
arms rigid,
they are prelude to a scream.

William Trowbridge wrote a poem titled "Stark Weather," beginning with a quote from the long-ago Plains state mass murderer Charles Starkweather. It's a haunting name. It's like a whole poem in a name.

Andrea Potos's poems about Greece come with photo illustrations. They made me want to visit Greece.

Frederick Pollack wrote a  poem about Weldon Kees, a poet I read some years ago and liked his severe, quiet voice. I like the part in this poem where Pollack writes:

 Since it’s always
about me, I sit, late
one night, on the eve
of her departure, listening, half-
listening, the way one does
where response
is futile, observing the furniture
of a kitchen and life.

C.A. Allen's poems have a quiet, sacred feel, abetted by looking at certain moments from unexpected angles. I particularly liked the phrase "rounding it feels like a secret" in "organ."  He describes a church basement:

there is a thin film of light coming
under a door to my left, around a partition—rounding it feels
like a secret.

Robert Wexelblatt's poem brings us back to April:

Plenty of people die in April, the
elderly not so much holding on to
see one last as not imagining the
cycle will stop one daffodil dawn with
sparrows and forsythia, terminal
patients bent in too much agony for
irony, as if to prove parturition
postulates parting, space cleared, that
in the beloved grandchild the old
kiss both abstract immortality and
particular death.

The poems comes back to that cruelest month at the end, evoking:

dreamy young women finally engaged,
fumbling with cell phones, planning for June,
unmindful of some fatal far-off April.

            All of these poems are easy to find in Verse-Virtual's sensible, handsome layout. Go to http://www.verse-virtual.com/current-poetry.html. You'll find a list of poets' names. Click on the ones you want.

Easter: We Laugh Through Our Tears

            The text at Emmanuel Church in Boston for the Gospel reading came from Mark. The minister in the church I go to on Easter, and (unfortunately) hardly ever else, practices what the study of literature calls textual analysis. The four gospels, of which is Mark is the earliest written, are the primary "canon"books in the Christian or 'New' Testament. I think the word canon was invented to describe what the early church did in saying 'these books are our story' (and we're sticking to it) and some other books arent't. I'm told the term 'canon' comes from the Greek κανών, meaning "rule" or "measuring stick." And so these books somehow "measured up."

            Literature studies (where I'm more at home) long ago borrowed the term canon to describe the essential books of a given language's literature tradition. It's not an official list. One scholar's literary canon won't include all the same books as another scholar's.

            But even if, like the Christian church, you have a fixed canon, you can discuss forever how to interpret it, take its meaning, explicate the issues and problems of various texts, argue over why differences exist in the texts -- in the case of the New Testament, for instance, among four accounts of the same event, occasion, or 'story.' Basically, you go on making the story -- making it new; making it live -- from texts that, paradoxically, your religion has established as fixed, forever, and in some sense a truth 'revealed' to humankind by God.  

            When we come to the Easter story, the story of what happened on resurrection morning, we have four 'authorized' versions, each differing in rather significant details Even if there were only one canonical account, we could discuss the meaning of this apparent miracle of resurrection forever. With four, the playing field is stunningly wide.  

           This year, as mentioned, Emmanuel Church picked (and picked on) Mark. It's the shortest by far, as Reverend Pam Werntz told us, of the four accounts: "No fluff." Also the most problematic for any 'easy' understanding of the resurrection. In the other gospel accounts Jesus not only leaves the tomb but appears to the disciples and others in (so to speak) the flesh. Or perhaps appears to appear, if you want to get all metaphysical about it.

            But not in Mark. Nobody sees Jesus after his body is laid in the tomb. The three women who go to the tomb the following morning with oils to prepare the corpse for a proper burial discover a young man dressed in white -- an angel is the usual interpretation -- who tells them that Jesus is not here, but they are to tell the disciples to go to the Galilee region where he will be waiting for them. That's it. End of the Gospel. Here's one translation of the end of Mark's gospel:

"But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing     

            Well, Pam concluded, eventually they must have told someone something. The bigger point, according to the sermon she gave in 2007 is "...it’s important to say on Easter Sunday that resurrection is not resuscitation of a corpse – it is a new kind of life. It’s not the old life back or the old life unnaturally or supernaturally extended. It is some new kind of life where death has no power.  Death has done its worst – it has done its destruction. Death and destruction have no power over resurrected life."
            To repeat, resurrection is a new kind of life. If "death and destruction" have no power over the life you're living -- then fear, force, coercion and suffering can never be the last word. Death be not proud. The death of the body? Yes, coming up, only a matter of time. The death of a resurrected life: won't happen. 
            This isn't a matter of resurrection having the last laugh, but the longest one. The truest one. Pam quotes theologian Jürgen Moltmann: “Easter morning is the Sunrise of the coming of God and the morning of new life and the beginning of the future of the world. The laughter of the universe is God’s delight. It is the universal Easter laughter in heaven and earth.” 
            Pam did not use these same words in her sermon this year, Easter Sunday 2015. Perhaps she was not even making the same point. As noted above, we may start from an authorized canon, but we're the ones who are keeping the story. Both keeping it up and making it up as we go. 
           This year on Easter Sunday Pam spoke of Mark's Gospel as an injunction to find the meaning of the resurrection in going forward: "He is going before you to Galilee," she quoted. She also interpreted the meaning of sacrifice and the suffering of the crucifixion in Jesus' story (and in all human lives) as the need for commitment to ease the suffering of the oppressed and the possibility of redemption through love.
            However you put the question, Rev. Werntz said -- or at least this is what I heard -- "the answer is love." 

[Note: While writing this, the music I listened to included "Searching for Home" from an album called "Living for Eden," "Surrender" from "Peace of Heaven" by Solomon Kael, "Two Souls" by Philip Wesley, "Summer" by Peter Kater, and "Sacred Nature" by Paul Cardall, among many other pieces whose appeal I can't easily characterize, all of which ended up on the same playlist. It's hard to see this as purely coincidence.]

Loosen up, earth. Liven up. Listen up: This is your Inner Spring talking

           The solstice went by without a flicker of local interest. It took until last week, a little rain, a few warmer days, to get the big melt going.

            Suddenly last week, as if the curtain went down and up again for the big scene change, the snow disappeared from the places where I look for first shoots, crocus country and the like.  Twenty-four hours later the day arrived when I could see if the tool shed was accessible, if I would manage to wiggle a rake out of the tangled mass within, see if leaf bags were in residence, and determine what tools could be found.

            Are you ready for some gardening?

            I waited for the cheerleaders to rush out onto the field. The band to play. The network to cut to another commercial.

            It wasn't if I seriously doubted that this moment would arrive some time or another, but some analysts were already pointing to June 1 as the likely final snow disappearance day. That may be true in the White Mountains.

            In the coastal quarters where most of us live, at low elevation, where the serious question was 'where to put the snow,' not where to ski on it, it took remarkably modest drizzles and merely near-normal early spring temps to make the last couple of feet go away. I still have patches in the backyard. Some people still have piles on their curb or behind the driveway or any other place they piled it up, but as of yesterday afternoon I declared the opening of the 'rake off the old leaves and unassorted litter and see what we've got where we're supposed to getting something' season.

            Some crocuses emerged in the skinny green shoot stage once I pulled off a layer of awfully flattened, deliriously wet and refrigerator-cold brown leaves. These produce the smallest of crocus blooms even in the best of times, still I'm hopeful for some color in a day or two. Some other shoots were working their leading edges halfway through a cake of frozen slush behind the boxwood hedge. I removed the slush and got rid of the dead leaves there; the shoots had arrowed through the heart of some of these. But I think these guys want to be tulips, so it will still be weeks before we see any color from them.

            On Saturday, with the sun shining but the wind whipping, I searched out another target area for crocuses closer to the house foundation. Some of these were already opening, but you would never know it because of the mass of dry ornamental grasses (maiden grass) crushed by yards of snow that tented down to the ground, wholly obscuring the blooming site. I don't  know how these little bulbs found the space, air, light or gumption to turn purple (top photo) , but their color was already showing.

            I searched some of the new crocus and tulip plantings in the back garden, too, and found shoots concealed by sticks, stems and leafage in a few close together spots where Sonya and I had planted them last fall. I removed the leaves and other coverings, including a significant brick (as in 'what was that doing there?') .

            Today, Easter, I didn't have much chance to check on their progress. I'm not expecting miracles yet... But one of these days, not too far away, I'm looking forward to some serious color.

           

The Garden of Song: Boston Camerata Crosses 'The Sacred Bridge'

            It's Passover on Friday, and Easter on Sunday. A perfect time to hear the Boston Camerata's "The Sacred Bridge" concert program.

            Many of the works in this program, originally created back in 1982 and performed last Sunday in Cambridge, were produced "by religious minorities within Christian Europe," the Camerata tells us in the program notes. "Yet Jews, Muslims and Christians, though separated and in frequent conflict, were in many ways dependent on each other."

            The concert highlights a lot of musical borrowing along with the communities' shared monotheistic tradition, with its common cultural motifs, characters, and stories to celebrate in song. We hear examples of commonality throughout the program. Jewish worship services gave to the Early Christina church ancient melodies. The sound of Hebrew Psalm recitations survive in Gregorian chant. A Christian wrote down the oldest surviving example of written Jewish music, "The Eulogy of Moses," composed by a monk from the Mediterranean world of Italy and Egypt who converted to Judaism and took the name Obadiah. Jewish minstrels wandered through medieval Europe, among them the outspoken "Matthieu le Juif," who ends a complaint of unrequited love with a curse on a false mistress, asking God to make her so wrinkled that only he will love her. Another, minnesinger (German minstrel) Sueskint, decides to return in old age to "the Old Jewry with long coat and hat."

            Another strand in this rousing and astonishingly rich music are the texts and songs that refer back to Abraham, the patriarch of all three faiths -- that common root whose existence often surprises people today in our divided world. In one tune from a Bosnian folk tradition, a Sephardic community rejoices in the appearance of a star over Abraham's birthplace, an example of popular syncretism (the amalgamation of elements from different cultures). The tune in this Jewish song with a Christian epiphany comes from a traditional Arabic/Ottoman musical mode called hejaz-al-kabir.

            The concert begins with solo voices, then a solo instrument, and builds into lively, soulful, percussive jams involving all the singers and a half dozen instruments.

            The first offering, a verse from The Koran, is chanted by a Moroccan singer with a stirring purity resembling "The Call to Prayer." The words say "We narrate unto thee the story of Moses and the Pharoah." Another setting of verses from the Koran tells of Moses' vision of "Allah" in the burning bush. Two settings of Psalm 114 ("When Israel came forth out of Egypt"...) are sung in Hebrew and Latin.

            "Stories of Abraham," were told in songs from the Koran, from an 18th century Jewish source, from a 13th century German composition, and by a Sephardic community in the Balkans.

            The second half of the concert was devoted to the music of medieval Spain or Andalusia (Moorish Spain), especially the Christina court of Alfonso the Wise where all three communities participated in a relative paradise of tolerance, learning and the arts.

            The Boston Camerata has authored scores of programs since the seventies, but "The Sacred Bridge" is the one most often requested. 

             Last week's participants include current artistic director Anne Azema, a dramatic soprano with a timeless voice, music director emeritus Joe Cohen, who sings and plays the lute, Shira Kammen on the vielle (an early violin with a bow that looks like you could fire an arrow from it), Jesse Lepkoff on flute; truly amazing percussionist Karim Nagi (director of the Sharq Arabic Music Ensemble) who makes a tambourine sound like a full percussion ensemble all by itself, Boujemaa Razgui who chanted the Koranic verses, and Mehmet Sanlikol, both a wonderful singer and lute player.