Learning

I've been studying poetry earnestly since sometime last fall, reading as much as I can across a variety of styles and cultures.

I haven't had much formal education in poetry. I remember reading Ted Hughes, Robert Frost, John Donne, and of course Shakespeare in high school. In college I took a course in 18th century American literature which introduced me to Emily Dickinson. At some point I started reading the Austrian poet Erich Fried.

Somehow while in college I managed to get on the editorial board of a literary journal, The Siren, and so for a couple of years I was reading what my classmates were writing (and had a couple of poems published myself).

And then after college I remember frequenting an independent feminist/LGBT library in Washington, D.C. where I found some African-American women poets: Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, and Becky Birtha.

Over the years I've kept a binder of poems I've come across that spoke to me - by poets I've named above, and a hodgepodge of others.

I used to feel limited by my lack of formal literary education, but lately - as I've been filling in the gaps (and the internet is great for this) - I've been grateful. It means all my reading is framed through the questions I have about the poems, and not what anyone thinks I ought to know about them. Most of my questions are very basic: What do I like in this poem? What don't I like? Why? And then, what else might be going on around the circumstances of writing this - historically, culturally, personally? What might this poem be responding to? And always with an eye to my own writing.

I'm lucky also to be in Chicago with the excellent Poetry Foundation just a few blocks from me at work. I've been going to their monthly Library Book Club sessions, which allows me to explore a manuscript in some depth, occasionally to hear from the author in person, and to be among other people who are thinking hard about poetry as well. The first time I went I was so excited to be part of an actual serious discussion about literature I could barely contain myself - so different from any of the book groups I've tried to be part of in the past. After a couple of sessions I can now manage to not be overwhelmed with my enthusiasm. And of course their website is a treasure trove of information.

I know my study is paying off when I can read poems and have a sense of what I might do differently, when I can look at an old poem of mine and see not only its shortcomings but also how I might make it better. And I am beginning to feel that I am developing my own voice.

I do not feel adequate to much of what I want to say, but as I study and write I trust I am becoming more so.

Ever curious, ever learning,
Annie

Recent Readings

Winter comes and along with it a desire to read comic books. Graphic novels, I suppose I could say, since what I'm reading is solidly bound and available in all your finer bookstores and libraries. But really, they're comic books.

Rereading an old classic, the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman:

We have some of the volumes in the original editions,
but I'm filling in our collection with this new reprinting.

And I've discovered what I think will be a new classic, Saga, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples:

He also wrote Y: The Last Man, which we also have. 

The boys are used to plundering The Dude's collection; he has an extensive collection of both the classic and new renditions of familiar characters (Batman, Superman, The X-Men, Legion of Superheros, etc., etc.). I think he's set aside certain volumes he doesn't want them stumbling on. My collection, however, is pretty much only stories I don't want them stumbling on. Of course, D was so intrigued just to see me reading a comic book that I suspect he'll do his damnedest to get his hands on them. Perhaps a locked bookshelf?

It hasn't been all comic books this season, I've had a rich fiction run as well.

I'm continuing in my quest to read everything by Haruki Murakami: After the Quake, Hear the Wind Sing, and Pinball 1973 are the ones I finished this fall and I'm currently reading Kafka on the Shore. I had vaguely been trying to read them in order but I think I've given that up.

I've found a new author whose works I'm so in love with I will probably also try to read them all, poetry and prose: Chris Abani. He's given a couple of TED talks and here is one of them. I then discovered that he's currently teaching at Northwestern University, just north of Chicago in Evanston, which made me think that maybe he'll give some lectures in the city sometime; sure enough, he's speaking at the main library in April and I've already extracted a promise from the family that I can take that day off to go listen and then stand in line for a very long time to have a book signed. The question of course is which book? I own a number of them now and have read Song for Night (a novella) and Sanctificum (poems).

In the middle of my scary movie/book month I also read Ta'Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me. I think this is pretty much required reading for any white person in the United States. That is, of course, if you actually want to be part of making things better in the world rather than just coasting by.

Oh, and I finally finished Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour by Lynne Olson. A fascinating book, lots of information I hadn't been aware of, and despite the seemingly uplifting title, also kind of another indictment of America, in documenting how long it took for America to enter the war, how much we dragged our feet in becoming fully engaged once we did, and then how we behaved with our Allies once it was clear that the war was being won. The individual troops may rightly be called "The Greatest Generation" as they are referred to in this country, but our government, not so much.

Now on to read some more.

Eagerly,
Annie

Hooked

Okay, forget anything I wrote about not continuing with boxing. I went to what I thought would be my last class last night (after taking a week off the week before) and found myself just as in love with it as the first time. And this was after having run seven miles to work that morning...

This time, in addition to the intoxication of the speed/power/form/skill/thinking of the actual exercise, we spent a fair bit of time discussing the different types of boxing and what they focus on. (We ended up skipping a whole jump rope segment to talk about this - thanks to those seven miles earlier I was quite happy to skip that!) The other woman has recently started going to another gym to be able to qualify for amateur fighting, and had a lot of questions/complaints about how things are being done there. Our trainer comes from a professional background so was explaining the difference between the two. Which gave me room to voice the teeny tiny issue of what about this whole hurting people business...

...because, really, what business do I have learning something that's all about hurting someone...

...except for the fact that I really, really love it (and so far, have not hurt anyone).

No answers yet. That's okay. It's enough that there was room for the question. And I have some idea of where to begin looking for other voices.

One of my favorite writers comes to the rescue:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I guess I will just have to fit this into my training somehow, especially as I'd like to start practicing a bit in between classes. Perhaps by becoming stronger and more fit? Well, time will tell.

Excitedly,
Annie

"I Choose Earth"

From Patti Smith's "Just Kids"

     The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.
     I left Mephistopheles, the angels, and the remnants of our handmade world, saying, "I choose Earth."

Grateful for Mercies

A comment from a new reader on my "About Me" page had me rereading that page for the first time in months. Boy, was I surprised about a couple of things.

"I am very good at my job. I am not exactly happy with it."
"And somehow make a name for myself. "

I shouldn't have been, these are attitudes I have actively been trying to change for some time. So it is really a joyful surprise, that I have been blessed enough, through the grace of God, to have had such a change in spirit that my previous words are now foreign to me.

I'd been meaning to write more about the graces I have been receiving this last month, but this isn't really that kind of blog and I don't mean it to be. So instead I will leave the words that I have been meditating on that best describe my process:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God --- what is good and acceptable and perfect.

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourselves more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members of one another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

The letter of Paul to the Romans, chapter 12, verses 1-8.

Painting And Music

"Purely formal characteristics [in painting] exercise the senses as do string quartets, piano concertos, Dixieland. Because of this, the representation I am interested in is of those things only the eye can touch. I think of painting without subject matter as music without words. It affects our innermost being as space, spaces, air."

--- Kenneth Noland

More Inspiration

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."

--- George Eliot

Collecting Resources

From an essay on the works of Willis 'Bing' Davis, artist and community activist:

"For Davis, transforming the world around requires vision... Vision requires the active use of imagination --- the imagination to see value in all things as well as all persons and places. The artist teaches that each individual can develop this perceptual sensitivity through the practice of reclaiming value in discarded resources."

--- Judith Huacuja

"Marking the Past, Shaping the Present: The Art of Willis 'Bing' Davis"