The Garden of Verse: Facing Short Days and Long, Complicated Memories

            Clela Reed's depiction of "Beech Leaves in Winter" in the December issue of Verse-Virtual, particularly the ones that don't fall off the branches like the leaves from all the other trees, gifts us with a beautiful image: 

golden in sunlight against drab trunks
and empty branches,
          warm clouds layered
through the gray-cold of the forest.

            'Warm clouds' in winter? Anything that makes me feel warm in winter is a little vacation for the mind. This poem has a metaphysical reach beyond the visual one as well, raising the 'unscientific' notion of intention, and leaving us with two beautiful lines I won't spoil by quoting them here. What keeps us warm spiritually, this poem makes me ask, in winter? Maybe it's our ability to respond to phenomena such as the nearly translucent leaves "golden in sunlight" that refuse to let go in winter. 

            A different sort of imagery knocked me out in Joan Mazza's "Never Exaggerate." Handy hyperboles are offered for a range of at-home job performances:

A trillion socks sorted and bundled into sausages lined up in wooded drawers.

And: 

swept up tankers
of lost fur and puppy poop.

But then we come to the piece de resistance:

            I’ve walked to the moon and back behind a vacuum cleaner, to the sun on all those trips to school, my personal Appalachian Trail.

I expect this will have me thinking of other people's "personal" Appalachian Trails. My father probably found his Appalachian Trail driving up and down on the Southern State Parkway and other highways over decades of commuting.

            Did I find mine by typing my way through several New York City telephone books in my decades of newspaper work?

William Greenway's poems brought some tough love to the holiday season. Sharp observations on the season's disjunctions and hypocrisies accompany a newborn's arrival in "Accidents": 

Almost in time for that other birth
(alleged) in this snowy season,
though cotton-bearded shepherds
in bedsheets, bespectacled Magi,
and plywood mangers abound.
The Assisted Living crèche
has real sheep, goats, a mangy
camel, even a homesick llama
to bow to the rubber baby.

          I think we've all seen that kind of plywood manger, and I'm keeping my eyes open for the miracle of the Assisted Living creche. Still, as the poem tells us, the practical magic brought on by timely, or untimely, arrivals in our own day and age confounds and ennobles the world: "However these little deities arrive,/ they change everything,/ mostly lives,..."

         There's another great phrase to take with us on our own seasonal journey: "little deities."

             Michael Newell's poem "Of Scattered Leaves and the Sprawling Self" offers another metaphor drawn from a common activity of the turn of the year: 

I take a walk and watch
the young and old making sense out of chaos
through the use of rake and shovel and bin
into which all the colorful debris is deposited,

I worry about the need for too much order in the universal rush to collect the "colorful debris" and get rid of it as quickly as possible. That debris, those fallen leaves of many shapes and colors, is a kind of gift rather than a species of waste ('yard waste') that we good burghers dispose of in a rush to restore neatness or -- as it appears to me -- blandness to our lives.

            But this poem is too wise to allow the metaphor or raking leaves to support a simplistic point of view. As the poem tells us:

but I find
it more comforting to leave the clutter, the apparent
anarchy of memory intact

...on the way to embracing a complex, often contradictory view of the self. You can't neaten up the picture, sweep away the contradictions. "Do I contradict myself?" as Whitman asked. "Well, then I contradict myself."

            You can read the rest of these poems, and all the others, at http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html

The Garden of Verse: 'You Must Change Your Life'

"You Must Change Your Life: The story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin" by Rachel Corbett, 2016

            To follow the path of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, you must begin in Prague, a worn and provincial place in the last decades of the 19th century, seek him in German fields and cities, in Russia, and of course, principally, in Paris. A modernized Paris, the city that seems to sing of classical beauty as if built by Olympians with time on their hands, but was in fact the vision of Baron Haussman, who urban-renewed it in the mid-19th century for the tyrant Louis Napoleon, an emperor desirous of wide boulevards to banish the return of the barricades.

            Alone in the overpopulated city of struggling masses who  crowded the avenues like a plague of "beatles" and terrified one another with reflections of the grotesqueries they sensed in their own harried existences, the German-speaking poet escapes his room to stalk the streets, but is assaulted beyond the resources of free will by the lurching progress of the a sufferer of St. Vitus's Dance. Hours later he finds himself on a park bench, lost to the world.

            Somewhere Rilke learns of the concept of einfulung, or "feeling into," which led to the embrace (in English) of "empathy," the state of "losing oneself" in, for instance, works of art.... Perhaps from Lou Andreas-Salome, the Russian radical feminist author and cosmopolitan intellectual -- cultural critic, as we might say today -- who rejected two proposals of marriage from Nietzsche, yet also lived with him and the German philosopher Paul Rhee at the same time; and who later married Carl Andreas, another philosopher, on the condition there be no sex, no children in their alliance, though she never parted from him. She wrote a book called "Jesus the Jew," was a mesmerizing storyteller and, while 14 years older than Rilke, encouraged him in a Bohemian lifestyle (eat vegetarian, wear peasant attire), and changed his name from Renee (the female name imposed on him by a mother who wanted a girl) to Rainer, supposedly more Slavic. The still young poet fell into a "reckless passion" for her. Boris Pasternak, after seeing them together, reported seeing the poet with "his mother or older sister" when Rilke and 'Lou' went to Russia, dropping in on her husband, and laying siege to Tolstoi, increasingly deaf, Christian, and rudely  irritable (a state in which he was exceeded only by his wife; and yet from Tolstoi Rilke came away with the idea of a "book of hours," patterned after the medieval prayer book, for his next book of poems.

            Broke, and deserted by Lou, Rilke was commissioned to write a monograph on the famous and then controversial sculptor Rodin. He moved to Paris and sought an introduction through his wife -- having found time to marry the sculptor Clara Westoff and produce a daughter -- to Rodin, suffering while awaiting an invitate from the master, from the sensation overload of the teeming metropolis, the like of which the world had never seen. Here is a sample of what "You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin" author Rachel Corbett tells us about the struggle to survive in turn-of-the-century Paris." The motors, the speeds," the shapeless unity of the crowds, "crowds of people like beetles," rag pickers,"windows watch him like eyes."

           The invitation, however, eventually came from Rodin, the mentor from whom Rilke sought to learn the secret of how to be true artist. The young Rilke was always seeking a master; from Andreas-Salome, from Tolstoi. In Rodin he finds "compulsive devotion to his craft"; an artist for whom "the whole sky was now but a stone." Rodin, who continually sculpted the human form, "loved hands" more than any other part of the body, and his own were always busy molding clay. From Rodin he learned the life of the artist consisted in "toujours travailler": always working. 

            Corbett's title "You Must Your Change Your Life" appears to refer to Rodin's life-changing advice to the poet Rilke, who believed that some deeper well of inspiration or artistic wisdom had yet open in his own pursuit of his vocation. Similarly, around the same time, Rilke receives a letter seeking advice from Franz Xavier Kappus, a cadet in the military school Rilke had himself once miserably attended. Rilke wrote back, beginning the correspondence that was later published as "Letters to a Young Poet." The advice he passed on to the would-be poet Kappus is presumably the advice he himself had been receiving from Rodin. Again: "Change your Life."

            But in neither case do these words actually appear as a direct statement by either mentor-figure, Rodin or Rilke.

            Nor do we find a clear exposition of what Rodin's famous words of advice, "toujours travailler" -- always working -- actually mean.

            The closest Corbet comes to telling us what these words means to Rilke is "to work is to live without dying." OK, but what does that mean?         

            She also offers this paraphrase of Rilke's thinking on his own art of poetry: "poems are not feelings, they are experiences."   As somebody who writes poems, I like this idea. But, again, when it comes to advice -- either given, or received -- what does it mean?

            In another source, a review on Rilke's still popular "Letters to a Young Poet," the novelist John Banville offers this explanation of the practical effect of Rodin's slogan:  

            "For the sculptor, work was everything: Il faut travailler—toujours travailler was his motto. As for inspiration, Rilke wrote, the mere possibility of it he 'shakes off indulgently and with an ironic smile, suggesting that there is no such thing….' These assertions must have struck Rilke like thunderbolts. Suddenly it was not the emotion or the idea that mattered, but the thing. Rodin was, above all, a maker of things."

            From the first part of this explantion I draw the conclusion: Don't wait for 'inspiration.' Keep working at you do.

            But Rodin's motto developed organically from the nature of his art. He walked around with clay in his hands: modeling, always modeling. He found his 'vision' of the work ('at hand') through his hands. Rilke, by analogy, must keep putting his pen in the inkwell. But there's more to it.  

            The second part of Banville's explication emphasizes the kind of art Rodin was always working on. As a sculptor he was "a maker of things." From this example Rilke learns to look at things more deeply than he has. He 'gets inside' of them. Rodin sent him to the zoo. Rilke gazed at the panther, and other beasts, by the hour until he came to experience the world as the panther did, to see it through his eyes. The next book of poems he produced consisted of what Rilke called his "thing poems."

            What is also lacking in Corbet's book, intriguing as this book is -- and exactly on a subject that has long interested me -- is any connection between Rodin's advice, the change that it brought about in the poet's s understanding of his own vocation, and Rilke's undisputed masterpiece, written later in life, the "Duino Elegies."

            Rodin, an older man, is understandably out of the picture by this point. After another prolonged crisis of creation, Rilke spends time alone in the Duino castle overlooking the Adriatic Sea. High up on the cliffs he hears a voice in the wind, and then begins to write these famous poems.  

            Banville's essay remedies this omission . Writing of the poet's connection to 'the things of this world,' he tells us that "in the ninth and perhaps greatest of the Duino Elegies [Rilke] asks why we should persist in our humanness, and offers this beautiful answer [in translation]:

"…because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all."

"You Must Change Your Life: The story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin" by Rachel Corbett, 2016

After the Deplorable Fact of It: 'We will always have our poetry"

            Here are some of the reactions to the recent electoral disaster ("democra-cide" is my term for it) I've gathered from poets and writers, especially from the Verse-Virtual poetry community, and from other digital sources:

            "No one can stop me from becoming the most fully human being I am able to become. No one can stop me from believing. No one can force me to become intolerant or unkind to others who do not look like I do, talk like I do, believe like I do. I will not say I am unafraid, but today I will dance, and today I will love, and no one can stop me." -- Laura Kaminski, poet

"We refuse to disappear. We keep our commitments to fairness in front of the legislators who oppose us, lock arms with the ones who are with us, and in the words of Congressman John Lewis, prepare to get ourselves in some good trouble." -- Barbara Kingsolver, author

 "Everybody knows the fight was fixed The poor stay poor, the rich get rich That's how it goes Everybody knows..."

-- lyrics from Leonard Cohen's song "Everybody Knows," offered by poet Neil Creighton

"This is New York. Nothing about who we are changed on Election Day." -- New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio:

"We need more people like de Blasio to stand up and say, 'No. We will not accept. We will not comply.' ... [Others say we should] shut up and ensure a 'smooth transition?  Go fuck yourself." -- SemDem [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/25/1604148/-NYC-Mayor-Teaches-Democrats-How-To-Fight-Trump]

 
"Let's take some comfort in the fact that we still have our values and our community. And we will always have our poetry.  These things will not change." -- Firestone Feinberg, editor of Verse-Virtual, in his notes on the December issue

         While most of the poems appearing in the December 2016 issue of Verse-Virtual were written before Election Day, some of them refer to the results in varying degrees of directness.

             Here is an excerpt from a poem in December's Verse-Virtual by Sonia Greenfield titled "American Parable":

Throw your
rocks at those people, he said.
They are to blame, he said, so stones
flew at people who shared their land,
who kissed the faces of their children,
who raised their flags, who loved
their dogs, but who were different. 

         Anyone reading my poems in the December issue will have not doubt that these were written after the election. I began the poem "The Gift That Keeps on Giving (or: I'm Going to Yoga)" with the intention of writing on the idea of "a gift," a holiday season theme, but you can see for yourself what happened.

Here's an excerpt from the poem: 

I shrink my violets, hide in my trees,
wake in the morning like the last man
in a Twilight Zone episode stunned to find he is here all alone
Be careful not to step on your glasses
on the way to reading Sinclair Lewis's "It can't happen here"
Or that science fiction story
where the rich game hunter goes back in geological time, steps off the path, and changes history so that in his own day the fascist is elected President.

You can read the rest of this poem, and all the others in December's Verse-Virtual at:

http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html

 

The Garden of Moving On: Finding National Inspiration at Eleanor's Val-Kill

             What should we do, as human beings, to respond to the selection of a fool with the temperament of a tinpot dictator and the instincts of a bully for a position of infinite dangers.

            We should go on doing the things that make us authentic human beings with the instincts of a caring friend and family member and the ability to think for ourselves.

            And so last weekend we visited Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt's home and little piece of earth on the extensive Roosevelt family Hyde Park, New York property. The large home on the property, occupied by FDR, was "presided over" (as the National Park Service puts it) by Sara Delano Roosevelt, "Franklin’s strong-willed mother" until her death in 1941.  

            In the early 1920s FDR recognized that Eleanor needed some space of her own to entertain (and house) her friends as she wished. He proposed building her a house on a beautiful wooded site where the R's commonly enjoyed picnicking. This plan turned into two buildings, the Stone Cottage and Val-Kill Cottage.

            They put in a swimming pool, mostly for Franklin's benefit. The Val-Kill Cottage began as a shop for Val-Kill Industries, training workers and producing handmade furniture and other crafts. The building served Eleanor's vision of economic development based on social cooperation. Local farmers were taught woodworking skills and helped to set up a business to bring work and income to a rural region where few employment opportunities outside of farming existed.

            After the business lapsed in the Depression 1930s, Eleanor turned the building into her own residence, with comfortable, people-friendly furniture, pictures, a study with her desk, and a crowded dining room where she hosted foreign leaders and neighbors.

            The Stone Cottage served as the home for a couple of Eleanor's close female activist friends, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, who were partners in the cooperative craft business and the vision that it served.

             There are many reasons to visit Vall-Kill, and many kinds of goodness to take from it. The Park Service trumpets that it's the only National Historic Site dedicated to a first lady. But even before you set foot on the site, an important part of the experience is that anyone can go there because of what it is: a National Park site. The place is part of the national experience, part of America, and you and I and everyone else can go there because the government of the United States preserves sites and sources of civic inspirations -- places that show, to use the current phrase, what makes America "great."

            You don't have to go out West and visit the flagships of the National Park system, the famous nature palaces such as Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone, to benefit from the park system. We have plenty of sites on the East Coast, including Acadia National Park in Maine, the Boston harbor islands, the old fort in St. Augustine, Florida, Fort Sumter in Charleston, The Adams National Park in Quincy, the port of New Bedford, the Monuments of the National Mall.

            The second point of particular contemporary relevance is the preservation of a collection of small buildings created for a First Lady explores the importance of women in America's civic life. Women had been voting for only five years when the first stones were laid for Val-Kill. Political change was in the air, even as the somnolent Coolidge and Hoover administrations sleep-walked into National Breakdown.  

            The Park's website puts it this way:

            "In the 1920s, Eleanor Roosevelt joined a group of independent-minded women dedicated to shaping politics and policy.... [They] created jobs, influenced party politics, and advanced social reforms. Val-Kill embodies their pioneering spirit."

             Eleanor was not only the first politically influential First Lady, she was the first American woman to play an important public role in national politics. She addressed national party conventions. After FDR's death Truman appointed her as America's first representative to the United Nations, calling her "First Lady to the world." Candidates nervously knocked on her door, seeking endorsements. The National Park tour tells the story of young candidate John F. Kennedy anxiously visiting the cottage to seek support for his presidential run. Eleanor kept him on the hook until he agreed to take a stronger stand for civil rights.

            One of the place's best photos shows Winston Churchill at the cottage's modest doorstep, wearing a hat and holding a cigar and looking like he's wondering whether he was in the right place. ER turned Val-Kill into the right place for a wide range of people. Visitors such as India's Nehru and Israel's Ben-Gurion came there to talk international politics. Hyde Park neighbors were invited to dinner as well. Her homey, cramped, family-style dining room served heads of state and the local grocer at the same sitting. She had a resourceful, flexible cook, but the place wasn't about fancy dining. The park ranger's tour tells us, "She cared less for what was on the table than for the people sitting around it."

            In another room, her study, Park visitors see the desk where ER worked and wrote her daily newspaper column "My Day." Even when she was not touring a Depression-fighting nation or a new nation overseas, Eleanor had full days. The tour also shows the homey living room, packed with comfortable chairs, its walls decked with photos, paintings and mementos.

            You can also learn more about the Eleanor Roosevelt story though an exhibit in the roomier, handsome interior of the Stone Cottage, titled "Eleanor Roosevelt and Val-Kill: Emergence of a Political Leader."