Devotions/Beth Kephart Poem

K. and I were talking about anxiety. I told her a story about a time, a few years ago, when the worst of it came over me, and I was saved—nothing else, just this—by the writing of poems. "Devotions" was the first poem in what became a lengthy poem cycle.

Devotions

The hawk came three months after the fox

had taken that one last lubricious

step onto my porch, a day of deer

unclasping the bracelet of themselves

across my lawn. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t been

sleeping well, had not been on the lookout

for the hawk or for the toad, the crow, the snake

the single cricket that pulls a hawk down from the sky.

Nor for an egg; I wasn’t looking for an egg —

the mind fighting the night and at war

with the age I have become, wishing I had learned color

instead of words, but then: This hawk, with that telling

streak of rust for a tail and those four pounds

at least of bird encasing bone and soul, in the morning

in my garden, where it was late in the season and things

had turned to seed and no one, nothing but a bird and I

could guess the garden’s lore. I liked the hawk,

therefore, from the start, and I asked its name,

and it looked straight through me, for my bones

were hollow and my soul was the suggestion of insomnia,

and we were alone, besides, each on the verge of excavating

secrets but choosing to amble instead, from the garden,

across the mud pocks, toward the Japanese maple,

side by side and counting benefactions, the hawk walking

the way hawks walk, and I in devout deliverance of dawn.

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Those Watercolor Journals: A Vlog

Pinkdogwood asked about those watercolored poetry journals of my yesteryear, and so this vlog is for her. (Ironically, given the heat in this house, the video kept changing color as I recorded.)

While searching the too-hot closets for this exhibition A, I found other journals of the not-color-drenched variety. Below is a found poem from an August 2nd, many years ago, when extroverted rhyme still mattered to me in poems.

But before I get to that, there is this: The other day I was reading Maya Ganesan's Apologies to an Apple, a book this lovely eleven-year-old poet had sent to me. Maya's the real thing; she absolutely is. When I look back on what I was writing way back then and look now to what this so intelligent soul writes today—the clear brooked wonder of it, the no-rush-toward-conclusion of it, the simple made large—I see a slice of the future, and the future looks like wisdom unspooled.

This, then, from my own past.

Who shall know this wooden
window box when you are gone?
Shall know it as you do at night,
shall watch, shall wait for pink
to enter through the moon's white light?

Who will care enough to guard
this mottled wall, the mason's hand?
Who will listen and belong
to street sounds, urban moods, to
the swish step skip of jumprope song?

And what will there be when
there cannot be your interludes anymore?
What will stand where two guitars
now balance on the floor?
And what will become of your easle eyes
when at last you shut the door?

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Easy Doesn't Do It: The Madness of My Poetic Method

Okay, sure. I asked my husband to read one of my poems (a task I have learned, through the years, to but rarely impose on the visual artist to whom I'm married) and he said, in a quick green-tinted e-mail: "sounds nice and I have no idea what it means." I asked another friend; he said, "I tried to understand; I couldn't." I asked my son if he might read the poem I'd blogged for him today. He said, "Tomorrow, Mom, I will read it more closely. Today what I can tell is this: You are happy that I am happy, and you've always loved me a lot."

I write poetry in the heat of fever, in the panic of insomnia, in the utterly rare quiet that I sometimes claim between things. I write it to knock language about and to dirty it up, to go wild against convention. I write it to outsize thoughts and to slim them down, to win the undefended war. To find peace: I write poems to find peace, which is, in my world, so cruelly elusive.

But what is poetry? What should poetry be? I am still trying to figure that out. That's why I so enjoyed this week's New Yorker story, "Slang-Whanger," about the long-deceased but still considerable William Hazlitt (by Arthur Krystal). Take a listen to Hazlitt's words, here:

The language of poetry naturally falls within the language of power.... The principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle. It aims at effect, it exists by contrast. It admits of no medium. It is every thing by excess. It rises above the ordinary standard of sufferings and crimes. It presents a dazzling appearance.... Poetry is right-royal. It puts the individual for the species, the one above the infinite many, might before right.

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Life Unpromising?

In the November 3, 2009 New Yorker, Dan Chaisson, whose articles, essays, and poems I'll stop and read anytime, anywhere, reviews Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, a 900-plus page tome edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton.

Reading the review earlier today I felt bereft, somehow, lonely, off course—really, I can't explain it, save to quote for you this paragraph, which foists upon me questions about my own writerly ambitions and constraints and operates as a smack across the mind. Because I write life, whether in memoir, fiction, or poem. I write life. I seek to make life promising.

"Poets live on two tracks: on one, life chugs along in the usual ways. On the other, art, which starts late but soon catches up, has its own landmarks and significant episodes. Interiority isn't mapped by biographical fact; that happens on the other track. And so 'life' is an exceedingly difficult and unpromising subject for art. Bishop aimed for a dispassionate, even eerie objectivity, an effect that was incompatible with autobiographical writing. Lowel, the gifted parodist of persons and manners, found it comparatively easy to turn to his own person and manners, but in doing so he risked giving up the dazzling special effects of his early, Miltonic poems."

Read the whole thing here, for yourself.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/11/03/081103crbo_books_chiasson

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A Poem

A White Flower Blooms in a Red Garden
(Beth Kephart)

When I die:
The bloomed-out pink of a peony nearest my head,
a deer at the edge of the gazebo,
a soprano bird in the near limb
of the river birch,
the river birch peeling.

It will be a day like today begun
with dahlias in the garden,
lisianthus in full crown,
something once said in my head,
sky settled on the tongue
of the bearded iris,

and what you call metaphor
will be just my way of saying God
while the breeze carries by on the smooth stone back
of a common turtle
in the final syllable
of the final hour.

This morning,
in a clump of flowers that has always ripened red,
a white stray with only a zest of that blood color
at its prayerful center.
The end of something.
The near beginning.

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Beginnings

For eight consecutive summers, not so long ago, I had the privilege of hanging out with young writers. Sometimes they came to my house. Sometimes we met in a garden. Sometimes we sat on someone else's porch. We'd read some of my favorite writers out loud, or imagine a room built of shadows, or work together to create a neighborhood of unforgettable characters. We'd write villanelles and pastorals and advertising lines. We'd imagine ourselves to be kites caught in trees. We'd listen to music and write to its mood.

Wherever the writers were, there was light. There was laughter. There was something that I held onto for a very long time.

When I was creating the heroine of my first novel, UNDERCOVER, I was thinking a lot about the young writers I'd met and what they'd taught me. I was thinking, too, about who I had been as a child—how much I'd loved words, and how much I also loved to ice skate. For me, language and movement will always be bound. I think of writing as an act of choreography, just as I think of ice skating as a form of storytelling.

UNDERCOVER has elements of my own life in it, therefore. But it is also inspired by the young writers working today.

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